Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

JP Comics & Games
David Levy

So your mayorship is basically up for grabs?
I took a new job this year, so I have less disposable income than I used to. About two months ago, I stopped buying comics.

Welcome to "Meet the Mayor," a segment in which we interview local Foursquare Mayors in their natural habitats.

Commonwealth Chiropractic
Kaitlin Maud

So, why does your back hurt?
I was in a car accident a year ago.

Shouldn't that be plenty of time to recover?
This is why I started going to a chiropractor.

If an afternoon perfecting the art of Medieval Carpentry sounds to you like time well spent, you should probably be at the seventh-annual Boston Skillshare at MIT this weekend. Run by an entirely-volunteer organizing collective, the two-day event features workshops ranging from the somewhat esoteric (“Wild Carrot as a Natural Method of Contraception,” “Making Milk out of Nuts and Seeds,” or “Spoon Carving”) to the practical (the simply-titled “Time Management”).

Common Art, a weekly faith-based open studios, provides poor and homeless folks space and materials to make art. Each week between 10 am and 2 pm on Wednesday, these artists gather at the studio space in Emmanuel Church in Boston. The time serves as a reprieve for its participants: a chance to concentrate fully on a drawing, an acrylic or perhaps a puppet construction.

Before Bono made himself king -- or at least crowned himself rock and roll's official ambassador to the Universe -- the most internationally influential rock star, on a policy level at least, was Lou Reed. If there'd been a Secretary of State for 20th-century "alternative" rock, it woulda been Lou, since the Velvet Underground, as everyone knew, had helped topple Communism in the Czech Republic, where they seemed to have held a cultural sway that was vastly out of proportion to what they held such cultural backwaters as, say, the United States.