Cash for Warhols

Nothing like a little street art to raise awareness about the Rose Art Museum legal situation. Care of the very excellent Wooster Collective.

A Performer’s Tribute to Teddy Kennedy

Hello again.  I’ve been writing a lot since my last post, but no draft has quite percolated up to postworthy.  One or two of them will soon.  For now, I want to quickly re-post Universal Hub’s video of a man paying tribute to Senator Kennedy as his motorcade passed the Roxbury Crossing station on Mission Hill:

Thanks to UHub for posting this and Steve McCarthy for capturing this moment.  A Boston historian could spill gallons of ink on the imagery and subtext here, but I’d rather let the video speak for itself.

Rest in peace, Teddy.

Back in DC

Sorry for the unannounced hibernation here over the past few weeks.  I was finishing my work, taking a vacation, and moving my life back down to DC for my 2L year.  I don’t have much time to write, but I wanted to post this sign up a little memento from my summer in Cambridge:

“Violators will be towed perfunctorily.”  Only in Cambridge would you see an SAT word on a parking sign.  I’m going to miss the place.

Brookline’s Roadhouse: a nuisance?

The law of nuisance, governing a use of one’s land which causes harm to another’s land, was best described by the Supreme Court in the 1920s: “a nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”  This expression – nuisance being “a pig in the parlor” – has somehow stuck and is in every property textbook, but so rarely is the pig in question literal, much less rubbed in spices and slow cooked, served with a side of cornbread and cole slaw.

But so it is in my former town of Brookline, where, as Beeriety reports today, Washington Square’s Roadhouse has been forced to close its meat smoker after neighbors complained that they did not want their home filled with the awful, awful smell of gourmet slow cooked food.  Losing the smoker has caused the Roadhouse to change its menu entirely.  From Wicked Local:

[Roadhouse owner David Ciccolo] said he’s cut all the smoked items from his menu, and planned to debut a new selection of Creole and Mexican-inspired dishes on Wednesday night. The new menu includes shrimp étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, blackened salmon, gazpacho, and tacos with either catfish, steak or chicken.

“We were forced to make this come together pretty quickly,” Ciccolo said. “Needless to say, we’re all a little bushwhacked.”

I’m sad to see this happen to the Roadhouse.  The place opened right after I left the neighborhood and moved to DC, and I haven’t had a chance to return.  While the new menu sounds great, I can only imagine how good their cooking must have been with the smoker in use.  If they did to BBQ what (Ciccolo-owned) Publick House did to Belgian food and beer, I’m sure we’re all missing out.

I also would add that there’s not a place I’ve lived in the Boston area where my apartment’s odor wouldn’t have been improved by a perpetual, eminating smell of quality BBQ. This includes the two years I spent on Beacon Street near Washington Square.

This is not the first time Ciccolo has had to deal with the town of Brookline.  As Andy Crouch notes in his BeerScribe, the Publick House Provisions store took ages to secure a liquor license so it could sell bottles of the superb craft beers the Publick House has on tap.  He should consider moving to Cambridge: it only took United States Supreme Court intervention to get Grendel’s Den up and running.

Live Nation sells Orpheum, Paradise, and Opera House to unnamed buyer

The Boston Globe reports this morning that three of the largest venues in Boston were just sold to an unnamed buyer: The Orpehum, The Paradise, and The Opera House. Live Nation is still going to handle promotion, and is taking an earnout on the Orpheum for he next five years.

My music industry friends are already buzzing with speculation as to whom the new buyer might be. Until we know it’ll be hard to say exactly what impact this will have on the local scene (but as one of my friends observed, “could it be worse?”). I’ve reached out to a few people I know in management at these venues, and haven’t heard anything back.

Idolator reports that Live Nation is currently looking for a lessee for New York’s Grammercy Theater (probably better known as “the Blender”). Whether this is their method of coping with these troubled economic times, or instead a chance to dodge the ongoing antitrust investigation vis-à-vis the Ticketmaster merger, remains to be seen. While I’m tempted to find deciet in all that this company does, I have to think it’s more about the former. Live Nation’s stock price has fallen from around $17.50/share to about $5/share in the past six months.

Update: The Herald and Globe confirm the buyers to be none other than Don Law and David Mugar. Law has been in the Boston industry since the 60s, first while a student at BU managing The Remains, later as the managing partner of Boston Tea Party (a venue which later moved and changed its name to the Avalon, recently demolished for the new House of Blues), and the chief promoter for Boston Garden concerts in the late 70s and 80s. He’s a fairly polarizing figure in the industry; many credit his heavily profit-driven attitude as one of the major reasons why the concert production industry became so much about the bottom line, at the expense of fan experience. Interesting to see him own the Orpheum again, considering he ran the place under Don Law Entertainment when SFX bought it out, then SFX became part of Clear Channel Entertainment, Don Law became head of the New England division, Clear Channel spun out Live Nation (with “Tea Party Concerts” as a front name for the northeast regional promoter, a tribute to Law’s old company), and now Live Nation is selling this to Boston Opera House Ventures, LLC, a partnership with Mugar and Law. This is like a twisted circle of life coming out of the Boston concert scene.

As for Mugar, he’s probably best known as the CEO of Mugar Enterprises, executive producer of the July 4th celebration in Boston, noted philanthropist, and son of Stephen Mugar (of Star Market and [in your best Leonard Nimoi voice now] The Mugar Omni Theater). Hard to know what his role will be in this operation.

Welcome Back, Folks

After finals effectively destroyed any chance of keeping up with my feeds, I turned on my RSS reader for the first time in a couple weeks. I was met with over 4000 items. There’s no way I’ll be able to give these a full treatment (and to pile these all together makes for pretty scattered reading), but here are a few highlights:

• Perez Hilton responds to a negative ad by the National Organization for Marriage (of the horrible “Gathering Storm” ad fame) by sending them a near-frivolous DMCA Takedown notice. Sorry, Perez: this isn’t cool even when I agree with your message.
• My buddy Greg Whitney is featured in an Emerson student’s profile of Boston’s own Louie (better known as The Tricycle Man). Seeing this made me miss Boston more than anything else during finals week.
  Thanks to Bostonist and Ms. RDP for the scoop.
• Swineophobia hit close to home this week. My Alma Mater Northeastern opted to forgo with handshakes for commencement. I don’t think the Garden counts as a “small confined space” to avoid under VP Biden’s analysis.
• Early reports from the iTunes Music Store’s new variable pricing system are not favorable. Digital Music News reports that revenues are down, and consumers are increasingly leaving iTunes in favor of other alternatives.
• The Boston Globe did a nice profile of Justice Souter’s hometown of Weare, NH. I was a little surprised to find that Justice Souter lives relatively close to my house. He lives a few dozen miles due north of me, straight up Rt. 13 (which turns into NH Rt. 77 in Milford). To help understand his (and to an extent, my) upbringing: equidistant from our towns is Peterborough, NH, best known as the town credited as the inspiration for Grover’s Corners in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I feel a deep affinity for that play, and the towns in the Monadnock region that it celebrates. I have a feeling he does too. While I’ll miss reading Souter’s opinions, I’m sure he’ll enjoy his return to our figurative neighborhood.
• On a related SCOTUS note, Justice Scalia’s opinions on the “privacy right” (which GWU Law Professor Dan Solove characterizes here) were tested when Fordham University Professor asked his legal privacy class to create a dossier on Scalia. Scalia responded with gusto.
• EFF’s Hugh D’Andrade gives the Obama White House partial credit for licensing photos taken by White House photographer Pete Souza under a Creative Commons Attribution license, but suggests the fairly obvious: shouldn’t these, as government works, be in the public domain?
• Japanese designer surgical face masks. Now I’ve seen everything.
• Iron & Wine are (is?) going to release a 2CD/3LP collection of rarities and outtakes called Around The Well on May 19th, spanning the entirety of Sam Beam’s career. This week we have new St. Vincent and Akron/Family for your listening pleasure.
• Wired’s marks for Obama’s first 100 days: Copyright, D; Cyber Security, C; Science, A-; Net Neutrality, B+; Transparency, B-; Privacy, D-. Saddens me to say, but I have to agree on most of these marks. But let’s not forget that he’s getting damn close to an A on virtually everything else.
• Tripod.com co-founder Ethan Zuckerman wrote a lovely and humorous eulogy for Geocities, which officially closed last week.
• Is A&R dead? Music Think Tank poses the question, and the comments are generally in favor of the rarified profession. (I for one still prefer my old sensei Dave’s joke on the subject: “How many A&R guys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. What do you think?”)
• A lot of people complained that the  White House photo op of Air Force One over NYC could easily have been done in a matter of an hour or two on Photoshop. Scott Kelby demonstrated, creating a rather lovely shot that could have saved us over $300,000.
• And for the finale: in March of 2007 WFMU posted 79 versions of Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn.” Using the EchoNest API Paul Lemere was stitched them all together into a 12 minute anthem. I’m very glad I didn’t find this until after finals, as I would have listened to only this, and that probably would have done my brain in. Paul Lemere – A Big Kettle of Echo Nest Popcorn
  

I hope to be back to more regular schedule now that my 1L year is over and the summer has begun. I make my return to Boston tomorrow; can’t wait to see you all. And to my new DC friends: congrats and thanks on a wonderful year, and I hope to see a lot of you up here or down there soon.

Break some hearts, Timberfakes

I wanted to quickly break my exam-week silence to mention that my friend Ryan’s band The Bustin Timberfakes are playing their debut as part of MIT’s Spring Weekend:

I know this band is a dream come true for Ryan, quite literally. He’s been describing the concept of this band to me for over a year and a half. Anyone in Boston tomorrow should consider becoming an “MIT student” for the day and going see this show. This is going to be the best thing to hit MIT since the Time Traveler’s Convention of 2005 (which was awesome). I have a feeling the Timberfakes are going to bring it.

BC student’s electronic devices seized under curious probable cause

(BC, from Flickr user glemak)

Here’s a strange one care of EFF and Universal Hub:

On March 30th a Boston College student had all of his electronic equipment (including his computers, iPod, hard drives, digital camera, and cell phone) seized by BCPD, under allegations that the gadgets are “evidence of a crime or … of criminal activity” and/or “intended for use or … used in the commission of a crime.” The crime appears to be “unlawful access to a computer system” (MGL Ch. 266 § 120F), to wit, creating a fictitious account for a peer at gay dating/hookup site Adam4Adam.com and sending an email to a listserv “outing” that peer, accessing BC records and changing grades, downloading music and movies, and allegedly jailbreaking a cell phone.

As EFF notes, the peculiar thing about this complaint is the way in which the officer attempts to establish probable cause for the warrant. Not only are the allegations primarily coming from one roommate, who recently got into a fight with the suspect, but the “suspicious behavior” the warrant (PDF) cites includes:

• being a computer science major
• working in the school’s IT department
• fixing friends’ laptops
• writing commands from a terminal prompt on a Linux machine

By that level of cause, I think at least four or five of my friends act with sufficient suspicion to warrant seizure of all their electronic devices.

Now it is entirely possible that the suspect here is using a series of ghost devices and networks of computers to trick the BC network into accessing grades or covering up unlawful activity, and if the allegations are true they demonstrate an outright terrible and crass sense of humor, and profoundly poor judgment. But it’s important to look beyond the crime alleged and see how this warrant came to be executed. Generally, we expect law enforcement to come up with a little more PC than just this. (In all fairness, the detective does also note that he was investigated for a previous computer theft, but never charged, and the same witness accusing the suspect here accused the suspect there.) To issue a warrant on only the use of terminal commands and a statement made by a known enemy of the suspect makes virtually all ill-tempered computer geeks ripe for investigation. The one area where the suspect’s IP was accurately traced was the listserv posting of a faux Adam4Adam.com ad. Lucky for the suspect ignorant, homophobic jokes aren’t against the law.

This also makes one wonder if the RIAA will try and get in on the action here. If the informant is to be believed, the suspect probably has a cache of music and movies on his computer. I’m sure the RIAA would love to pressure the Middlesex DA into making a case out of those files. I’ll need an expert in Criminal Procedure to let me know how possible this scenario is. The search warrant is certainly open enough as to suggest it is looking for any and all illegal digital activity. Or perhaps Apple will try and make a criminal case of the jailbroken phones (if it was, in fact, his iPod Touch that was hacked).

For copies of the warrant and other court documents, visit EFF’s case page. EFF is joined by ace tech & IP law firm Fish & Richardson in filing an emergency motion to quash the warrant (PDF), arguing a failure to establish probable cause, that several of the allegedly unlawful actions are in fact lawful, and the seizure of all of his electronic devices constitutes irreperable harm by denying him of his employment (fixing computers) and cutting off his means of communication. This is going to be an interesting case, and I’ll keep posting updates here as I uncover them.

Newbury Comics Turns 31

The rain kept us from having a Sox Opening Day today, but Bostonians have another anniversary to celebrate. Mike Dreese, co-founder of Boston mainstay Newbury Comics, sent this message out to Newbies fans on Facebook:

If there’s one establishment from Boston I truly miss, it’s probably this place right here. Not only is it one of the best places to stock up on records and random kitsch, Newbies is an excellent case study for the rest of the music industry: by diversifying their product line and other brilliant tactical decisions, Newbies today is 28 stores strong, has no outstanding debt, and is still opening new stores. They have a lot to teach the rest of the retail music industry; we’d all be wise to watch and learn.

So as a Bostonian, music industry geek, and record store junkie: thanks, Mike. Here’s an apropos Piebald song for the day (at least the opening line, anyway):

Piebald – King of the Road

Amanda Palmer talks Lexington

Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer posted a cute little writeup on her hometown of Lexington, MA on the AFP Blog. One of the highlights of her writeup was the obligatory mention of the gratuitous number of Dunkin’ Donuts in this neck of the woods. In her town of roughly 30,000 there are six Dunks, which she maps out here.

I can certainly relate; I grew up in the same county, about five or six towns over. In my tiny town of roughly 9,500, we have 2:

It’s interesting that both Lexington and Townsend have roughly one Dunks for every 5,000 people. I wonder if that’s the target saturation ratio for Fred the Baker.