Rhode Island Feeds

James Watkins's old-fashioned ghost story
After 10 years battling supernatural creatures, you'd think Harry Potter would be better equipped to deal with the paranormal pests he faces in James Watkins's old-fashioned ghost story.

Superpowered teens
Poor Andrew (Dane DeHaan) has more problems than any movie teenager deserves.

Wotta guy
The flags are at half-mast at Casa Diablo on the passing of the wonderful former Vo Dilun governor, J. Joseph Garrahy.

The flags are at half-mast at Casa Diablo on the passing of the wonderful former Vo Dilun governor, J. Joseph Garrahy.

P&J had the pleasure, at times, of working with and for Joe over the years — and tweaking him a bit in this space. We recall, with particular affection, his hastily assembled trip to the editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal after a piece in the paper described the Biggest Little as a lowly "smudge in the fast lane to Cape Cod."

P&J imagined the former Narragansett Beer salesman packing himself and a few cronies into a limo with a cooler full of 'Gansetts, racing down to the Big Apple, and bursting into the doors of the WSJ so Joe could give them a good piece of his mind.

Largely forgotten among all the tales we've been hearing these past few days is Garrahy's role as an environmental champion, from cleaning up the sludge balls emanating from the Fields Point sewage treatment plant to promoting bond issues to help conserve open space.

But it wasn't just about individual issues with Joe. P&J also saw, on occasion, a steeliness emerge from behind the rimless glasses and avuncular smile when someone tried to push him the wrong direction. He had the resolve and firmness required from the man at the top — and he always made the right decision at crunch time.

P&J remember the last piece of sage advice that Joe gave us, drawn from those deep reserves of humanity, kindness, wisdom, and political savvy: "On short putts, keep your head down until you hear the ball drop in the cup." Thanks for the memories, governor, there isn't a bad one among them.

Read more

Missives
The Big Blue Bug is here.

The Big Blue Bug is here. So are Mr. Lemon and the one-armed Caesar Augustus statue from Brown University. Strewn around the room are a set of uprights from the Hope High football field, smokestacks from the Narragansett Electric Power Station, the yellow sky bridge connecting the Westin to Providence Place, and a Spike's Junkyard Dog truck with a message on its side that reads, "Give Spike a whistle for your next party 861 — MUTT."

They are all here — as postcard pictures, that is — resting on wooden slats that jut out from the walls of a gallery at Brown's Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. And they are all on display together for the first time — a drizzly Friday evening that marks the opening for the Providence Postcard Project.

"I have to say it was a relief to see them come in," says Betsey Biggs, the artist behind the project. "I thought, 'My God, if they all just get taken and none of them come back, I'm kind of in trouble.' "

She is describing the final stages of a process that involved her taking photos of 100 Providence sites; then transferring the images to postcards; printing and pre-stamping 10 copies of each; and distributing them at local libraries with a sign encouraging patrons to take a few, fill them out, and drop them in the mail. It was a perfect partnership between a multi-media artist who describes herself as a "professional wanderer" and Urban Cultural Heritage & Creative Practice, an offshoot of Brown's Office of International Affairs that matches place-based research in Providence with similar projects in Cape Town, Istanbul, and Hong Kong.

"Traditional postcards represent places that are important to institutions," Biggs says. "I wanted these postcards to represent things that were important to people." And so, from a heap of gnarled and twisted scrap metal in South Providence to the Canada Pond Dam near the Pawtucket border, she walked around the city, talking to people, snapping pictures, and constructing what she calls a "love letter" to Providence.

Her images of train tracks, cemeteries, and abandoned movie theaters have a slightly faded tint that makes them hover between past and present. Places like Nick-a-Nee's and the Hot Club are instantly recognizable; though, posted on the walls at the Granoff Center, they somehow feel more important.

Read more

Engineering Dept.
One team turns a glowing tube of epoxy into a prototype for the next generation of lava lamps. Another rewires a Home Depot doorbell to send tweets, rather than ring. A third team wants to use Xbox to create a virtual dance floor.

UNDER ATTACK Hippos beware!

One team turns a glowing tube of epoxy into a prototype for the next generation of lava lamps. Another rewires a Home Depot doorbell to send tweets, rather than ring. A third team wants to use Xbox to create a virtual dance floor.

And so it goes, at Providence's first-ever hardware hackathon, wherein dozens of geeks mash hardware (like a doorbell) and software (Twitter) into all manner of outlandish contraptions.

For this crowd, gathered at tech incubator Betaspring's new headquarters at 95 Chestnut Street, no idea is too strange or far-fetched — not even one man's declaration that he wants to make Providence's iconic Superman building "dance."

Software engineer Matt Gillooly works for Swipely, one of the hotter new startups in Providence. But over the weekend, he finds himself elbow-deep in piles of mini motors, paper clips, and what remains of a plastic toy hippo he has sawed open with a Dremel.

"I'm simultaneously building and destroying. As you can see, there's not much hippo there," Gillooly says, adding: "The hippo surgery was the highlight of the day."

His goal: take the Hasbro game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, and retrofit one of the hippos with a motor that can be remotely controlled by another player through the Internet. The space bar makes the hippo eat. The player can even gloat over his victories by pressing "G," which activates a tiny LED light under his beast. By Sunday morning, the game already has its own Web site, hungrypotamus.com, along with a matching Twitter handle.

Read more

Hilarious high notes
As hilarious as the race for the Republican presidential nomination is, even that is no competition for Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor.

OPERATIC Saunders, Caplin, and DeSisto.

As hilarious as the race for the Republican presidential nomination is, even that is no competition for Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, the nonstop, modern classic knee-slapper that has become a mainstay of theater seasons from the regionals to high school auditoriums.

The current production, directed by Jimmy Calitri at Providence College's Angell Blackfriars Theatre (through February 5) is doing a good job making sure that no funny bones in the audience remain untickled.

The time is 1934, the place a sumptuous hotel suite in Cleveland. Preparations are underway for a gala 10th anniversary celebration for the local opera house, centering around an appearance by star Italian tenor Tito Merelli (Daniel Caplin), known as "Il Stupendo."

"Il Stupido" would be more like it, considering the ensuing mayhem, with many others vying for the title. In time-honored farcical fashion, doors get slammed, identities get mixed, and faces get slapped, as everyone is trying to deceive somebody, which means practically everybody contributes to the confusion.

It all starts, of course, as a love story. Max (Patrick Mark Saunders) wants to marry Maggie (Aubrey Dion), but she has been refusing, wanting first to have "a fling" before she settles down. To make matters worse, her father is Max's boss, Henry Saunders (Jeff DeSisto), the opera company's general manager.

To his credit, Tito is a friendly and helpful fellow, encouraging Max's dream to become a great tenor himself. His amiability, however, extends most generously to his admirers of the opposite sex, of which he has many. Maggie is one; Diana (Marisa Urgo) is another, his soprano in that night's performance; and yet another is Julia (Erin Fusco), a passionately appreciative opera board member. Thrown into the mix is an admiring bellhop (Kevin Lynch) who keeps popping up to audition with a few more notes from an aria.

Read more

Fallout: New Vegas hits the jackpot
You have to wonder why anybody bothers buying new games these days.

IRRESISTIBLE You can't take a step without stumbling upon some intriguing cave, bombed-out building, or rusted vault.

You have to wonder why anybody bothers buying new games these days. When Fallout: New Vegas was released in October 2010, sure, it was a sprawling, thematically rich role-playing game that promised dozens of hours of play.

It was also a buggy mess.

As the months went by, developer Obsidian released the inevitable patches to fix some of the most egregious flaws in the code. They also doled out huge portions of downloadable content, at about 10 bucks a pop. All told, if you'd felt the need to be the first kid on your block to get all the latest Fallout schwag, you'd have been out a 100 bucks. With a little patience, though, you could have gotten the all-inclusive Ultimate Edition for half the price.

Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition includes the gargantuan main game, all four of the downloadable mission packs, and two sets of bonus weapons and armor previously available as paid downloads. Even at the original price point, this is a lot of gaming bang for your buck, but at $50 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and $40 on PC, it starts to feel like you're getting away with something.

Read more

Your files could be forfeit in the government's attack on Megaupload. Can the Entertainment industry take down cyberlockers entirely?
This week, some 50 million users may begin to permanently lose whatever it is that they stored on Megaupload.

This week, some 50 million users may begin to permanently lose whatever it is that they stored on Megaupload, the massively popular cyberlocker site that was shuttered by order of the US Department of Justice. And not because they were infringing on copyright: the DOJ alleges some files on Megaupload were pirated movies, songs, and software, but the site was also home to far more mundane materials, from Web-site backups to family photos.

Nor are the files disappearing because they've been seized by the government. With its assets frozen, Megaupload can't pay the two companies it uses to store its customers' files — and as a result, those companies could begin deleting files as soon as today. If you were among the uploaders, bad news: Megaupload is working on a reprieve, but those files might be gone forever.

Now that an indictment has been handed down in the case, the DOJ asserts the government has no legal right to access the files, much less protect them. Absurd as it sounds, the government can get away with claiming that it has not technically seized the private property of potentially millions of users. It's a boondoggle of Kafkaesque proportions. At the same time, other filesharing sites are running scared, disabling their services before the government comes gunning for them, too.

But this situation isn't new, and it isn't unique. It's part of a pattern that is becoming more and more apparent: what people take to be public platforms turn out to be anything but, and our spaces for free speech are not necessarily so free.

Read more

Hoopleville
Dinner date gone awry.

Freestyle puzzling for all.
Freestyle puzzling for all.

Across
1 "Tsk, tsk"
10 They're to dye for
14 LOLcat-eating-a-cheezburger noise
15 How scripts are read
17 Taking one's sweet time
18 Harry Potter's house elf
19 It's one step up from giga-
20 To some, a "rat with wings"
21 English Channel swimmer Gertrude
24 Creatures that do a waggle dance
26 Title for Italian monks
27 Animal frequently seen as roadkill
28 Late Cars bassist Benjamin ___
29 ___ about (roams)
30 Grammys rival
31 Paid attention to a lecturer, for example
33 Worst Actor winner's prize
37 EPA concern
38 Primus lead Claypool
39 Help breaking into a puzzle
40 Explosive stuff
41 "The Little Mermaid" villain
45 Prefix before duct
46 Night spots
47 Metamorphosis parts
48 Wound (around)
50 Visual jokes
51 One of a box of 13, perhaps
52 Michael's wife, for a while
57 2007 documentary with the tagline "This might hurt a little"
58 Medicine that slows a chemical reaction
59 Like some ground beef
60 Unlikely to change...ever

 

 

 

 

Down
1 Shoe sole curve
2 Holy city?
3 Three-ingredient desserts
4 Egyptian president of the 1970s
5 Barstool dweller
6 Insurance gp.
7 Palindromic woman's name
8 Leather shoe, for short
9 Accident victim helper
10 "Quo ___?"
11 Sleep like ___
12 Devil's advocate phrase
13 It's bigger than family
16 Nighttime soap of the 1980s
20 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner since 1987
22 Unit of light
23 Bubbled up (from)
24 Hogs
25 Cupid's Greek counterpart
29 "Nope, you're wrong!" follow-up
32 Hopping video game character
33 They're strummed with a B and D
34 Baked potato rub
35 Tendency to let things slide
36 Kumquat coat
42 Peter Lorre's role in "Casablanca"
43 American or Foreign follower
44 State
46 Put money behind, as a candidate
49 Suzanne Vega song about child abuse
52 Backtalk
53 Suffix for opal or sal
54 Single stock: abbr.
55 Program with a "Buddy List," for short
56 CEO-to-be's degree

©2012 Jonesin' Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com)

Click to the next page for this week's solution.

Read more

From Ear-pummeling to winter bashing
Last call for Downcity action THURSDAY (the 2nd) with ERIC BLOOM performing at Sidebar Bistro (401.421.7200), while DJ DOX ELLIS spins upstairs at the Salon (pickle back shots! 401.865.6330).

Close your eyes and it's Tuscany
I can't imagine that anyone returning from a visit to Tuscany fails to wax rhapsodic about the cuisine, perhaps as soon as the customs inspection.

LOVELY LIBATIONS The bar at Siena.

I can't imagine that anyone returning from a visit to Tuscany fails to wax rhapsodic about the cuisine, perhaps as soon as the customs inspection. And it's hard to think that the people naming their two restaurants Siena, the town that is the culinary center of the region, would not stand up straighter before doing so, considering the ambition and responsibility.

Chef Anthony Tarro and his co-proprietor and brother Chris are no longer breaking out in beads of sweat; mobs of loyal customers have made their restaurants quite popular. Both have worked for many years in the food industry. Anthony graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design Culinary Arts Program, then Johnson & Wales, rounded off by studying Tuscan cuisine in Bologna.

In 2005 they opened Siena on Federal Hill, undaunted by the competition of countless other Italian restaurants. That must have worked promptly, because two years later came the fancier Siena, which subheads itself a " Cucina-Enoteca," in East Greenwich.

We revisited the latter recently, and the déjà vu was gratifying. There are warm woods, dark orange and other earth colors, including raw sienna and burnt sienna, a visual play on words. The attractive bar area was noisy but inviting, with its fascinating chandelier of suspended glass balls. We were ushered into a quieter room, with acoustic ceiling tiles, that was even more beautifully decorated. We sat with a row of regal decorative plates behind us, each bearing a large crest.

Read more

Impossible to ignore
The stars have aligned and the Rap Gods must be smiling down at Juan Deuce and Falside.

DYNAMIC DUO Juan.The stars have aligned and the Rap Gods must be smiling down at Juan Deuce and Falside. Business is picking up in a big way for this gifted and charismatic tandem, as Strange Famous Records has jumped onboard as the exclusive distributor for the duo's debut EP, The Mechanics ($8.99 for an autographed copy and instant download via strangefamousrecords.com), which was released late last year to high acclaim. I'm all in, and couldn't agree more with the following seal of approval from SFR founder and hometown rhyme hero Sage Francis, who took the time to drop a line earlier this week. Juan Deuce has been added to the big B. Dolan show on February 11 at the PVD Social Club.

Baby-faced producer phenom Falside "the Beatsmith" concocts musty funk montages and stoner-friendly neck-throbbers for Providence lyricist Juan Deuce, who has been dropping quality mixtapes over the past few years (available for free download at juandeuce.com). I was officially hooked following his 2010 mix Juance Upon a Time; from the thumping cuts "Gone" and "Swagg Back" (with frequent collaborator and Fedd Hill associate JahPan) to the old-school memories recited on the summertime classic "Ninety 3," his potential jumped off the page. Falside linked up with the Poorly Drawn People collective a few years back and quickly gained notoriety behind his "seasonal beat tapes" as well as remix and production services with indie-ground rhymers El Da Sensei, Action Bronson, and C-Rayz Walz. Juan and Falside first struck last year with "Hard Luck," and the matchup with video producers Ricky Shabazz & the Boom Bap Boys has led to some memorable clips, including the video for "Guts," the first single off The Mechanics, with Juan and Fal woozily navigating through a night of fucked-up druggery. For a true taste of Juan Deuce's entertaining insanity, I implore you to look up his latest video exposé with Shabazz, a two-minute banger titled "Krill Pill" (produced by local turntablist DJ Mekalek). Deuce exudes charisma in droves and can leave the listener hanging on that punchline, sometimes shrouded in goofball charm. If the outstanding EP tracks "Hey DJ," "Kings," and the appropriately-titled "Frank and Dean" (that's the kind of perfect pairing we're talking about here) are any indication of what's to come from these two, we're in for something special when they wrap up their full-length debut, set for release later this year.

Read more

The language of aesthetics
As China marked the beginning of the Year of the Dragon with lion and dragon dances and fireworks last week, Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology was debuting "Taoist Gods from China: Ceremonial Paintings from the Mien".

FOLKSY VERVE A detail from a banner in “Taoist Gods from China.”As China marked the beginning of the Year of the Dragon with lion and dragon dances and fireworks last week, Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology was debuting "Taoist Gods from China: Ceremonial Paintings from the Mien" (21 Prospect Street, Providence, through summer) as part of Brown's "Year of China" programs, which aim to illuminate the country's past and future. In concert with Brown's project, the RISD Museum is exhibiting "From the Land of the Immortals" (224 Benefit Street, Providence, through April 22), a show of 18th- and 19th-century Chinese Taoist textiles.

Like many faiths, Taoism is, as RISD explains, "concerned with both the position of humanity in the cosmos and the attainment of longevity and immortality, physical or otherwise." The RISD and Brown shows are small, one-room introductions to their topics that provide brief intros to Taoism that will leave the uninitiated somewhat bewildered. Instead, we're mainly invited engage the paintings and textiles in the language of aesthetics.

But, wow, what aesthetics. In "From the Land of the Immortals," RISD curator Kate Irvin and associate professor Paola Dematte (with help from Dematte's students) have assembled dazzling priests' robes that deploy cosmic motifs to symbolize how, in ritual, the priest is believed to become an axis of the universe.

Read more

BMG Rights (2012)
Getting a boost with songs from their 2009 debut, Fruit , featured in iPod and Heineken ads, and getting handpicked as concert openers by a then-still-functioning Amy Winehouse in their native Copenhagen, the Asteroids Galaxy Tour rode a lucky streak out of the gate.

Anti- (2012)
With Be the Void , their sonically raw sixth album, these Philly psych-pop oddballs have pulled a fussy, self-conscious about-face, indulging in their weirdest ideas in years.

Arbutus (2012)
The debut record from Grimes, an alias of the Montreal-based Boucher, kicks off the peculiarity parade by presenting song titles steeped in cutesy affectation.

4AD (2012)
Unlike a few of his early '90s Seattle contemporaries who made tons of money, erstwhile Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan has not died, put out shitty records, or made a self-deprecating cameo on Portlandia.

Top Dawg Entertainment (2012)
Without much that can be considered "structure" in terms of the verse-chorus-verse standard, Q confidently wobbles through an album's worth of jaded bangers.

Astralwerks (2012)
It was inevitable that Air would one day be asked to soundtrack a colorized version of an iconic 1902 silent French film about moon exploration, right? There's the French thing, the moon thing, the kitsch-cool factor.