Books Is it possible to be saved by the Sex Pistols? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Michael Patrick MacDonald will be reading from Easter Rising, an account of his youth in the Boston punk scene, at Brookline Booksmith. Bostonist had the opportunity to hear him read from the book when he spoke at UMass-Boston, and we say with great emphasis that this is a must-see, not just for those who love......

The Axe in the Attic Human Rights Watch International Film Fest Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 p.m. Remis Auditorium, MFA Tickets: $10 MFA members, seniors & students; $12 others. Tonight, The Axe in the Attic opens the four-day Human Rights Watch International Film Fest at the MFA. This film follows two New Englanders on a post-Katrina road trip to New Orleans, depicting their interactions with evacuees and confronting difficult realizations about the many shortcomings of......

When Bostonist entered Buckaroo's Mercantile, a pop-culture store across the street from T.T. the Bear's and the Middle East in Central Square, stocking stuffers were on our mind. The owner of Buckaroo's Mercantile, Brooks, layers retro images over metal wallets, night lites, light-switch plate covers, and more. Brooks told Bostonist that all of the above items were hot sellers at the Bazaar Bizarre, and you can buy them at the store. You can also choose......

Art House Silent Art Auction Thursday, November 29, 7:00 pm Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, $15 More info The Brattle Theatre is holding its fourth-annual silent art auction so you can do some good for local culture and make your apartment less ugly. Bids start at $35, which is pretty cheap for getting your foot in the door as an art collector. The Brattle has previewed some of the works so you can glance at them ahead......

Too bad that people can't sleep off their turkey comas after Thanksgiving. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in which people are encouraged to shop, shop, shop, drives people out of their comfy homes and into the malls. Black Friday divides the holiday crowd into two--those who are disgusted with the consumer culture and those who are willing to get up at ungodly hours for the best deal. If you aren't feeling the deals, boycott......

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire. LAist continues to cover the......

Iranian Film Festival The Red Card (Carte ghermez) Mahnaz Afzali, 74 minutes, documentary, Persian with subtitles Saturday, November 17, 3:15 pm Remis Auditorium, MFA, Boston $10, Tickets and More Info While Iran's culture seems largely shut off from the United States or represented by the face of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the culture shares two strong similarities with that of America--celebrity worship and an attraction to bizarre crimes. The documentary The Red Card is like the OJ......

5 Funny Females Saturday, November 10--tonight!, 8:00 pm Midway Café, 3496 Washington, Jamaica Plain, $15 Official Site Can't make it to Comics Come Home? Or do you just want to see rising stars who aren't always on Comedy Central 24/7? Five funny females will be performing in Jamaica Plain tonight. The performers include host Susan Alexander, Maggie MacDonald, Erin Judge, Maria Ciampa, and Michelle Buteau. Urban myths and legends have sprung up that women......

John Fulton Reading With Joshua Henkin Brookline Booksmith Tonight, October 22, 7:00 pm Free Fulton's Official Site John Fulton doesn't go for sly pop-culture references or verbal pyrotechnics in his short-story collection The Animal Girl. Instead, he zooms in on the emotions of his older characters who are attempting to find love. With Match.com and eHarmony, dating and romance seem easy and ordinary topics, but Fulton throws obstacles in the paths of his characters, and......

The American Idea First Parish Church Meetinghouse, 3 Church Street, Harvard Square (Corner of Mass. Ave. and Church St.) Friday, October 19th, 7:00 pm, $5 More info There are a lot of things you could do to celebrate your 150th anniversary. For a magazine, publishing a book seems like a good idea: anthologize the best of your magazine writing in a more permanent format so it can be remembered for all time. And that's just......

After all the "enough is enough" blah-dee-blah from the city brass, people on the ground who have to deal with Boston crime every day are doing something about it. Pop Warner football coach Myron Stovell, who was shot in the leg this weekend by a teenage hothead with a gun, didn't let his injury stop him from attending a community meeting on the subject. The meeting included parents and children who were on Stovell's Boston......

Boston Comedy Festival Semi-Finals Friday, October 12, 8:30 p.m. @ Nick's Comedy Stop (100 Warrenton), $15 [Tickets] Boston Comedy Festival Finals (with Lewis Black! woo!) Saturday, October 13, 8:15 p.m., Cutler Majestic Theatre, $45-$65 [Tickets] Look out, kids, the big guns are here--it’s the Boston Comedy Festival semi-finals! And wouldn’t you know, it’s an all-boys’ club (because women aren’t funny, except when they are). Besides a penis, something that everyone on stage shared was......

Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey, last seen basking in praise for his support of public television at the opening of WGBH's new building, isn't getting much applause from the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET). During a House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection hearing, Markey said that BET represented “the lowest common denominator of cheap and tawdry music videos and other questionable programming.” As connoisseurs of lowbrow culture, Bostonist would like to point out......

MIT has gotten a bad rap in the press lately after sodium that may have come from the school burned volunteers cleaning up the Charles. It only got worse when MIT student Star Simpson spaced out, forgot to take off a sweatshirt with a circuit board on it, and freaked out Logan Airport staff. Right after Simpson was arrested and hauled to court, the MIT brass put out a statement calling Simpson's actions "reckless." That......

--Tom Finneran of WRKO tried to join the Britney Spears VMA Performance Conversation. His input, which he probably thought was witty and snappy, left everyone just feeling uncomfortable. He declared that he would have given Spears a "black eye" and a "dope slap" if she kept him waiting just as she did her dancers during rehearsal. Yes, that's the way to tame those women who can't keep their clothes on, Mr. Finneran - just......

Got the feeling, power steering, Pistons popping, aint no stopping now! Panama, panama Panama, panama Now that the movie Superbad has revived Van Halen's song "Panama," it might be appropriate for Mayor Menino to upload the track to his iPod for his upcoming trip to Central America. The Mayor has managed to finagle his way into a trip with Carlos Gutierrez, the nation's secretary of commerce, to explore business opportunities in the region. He will......

Steve Almond's (Not that You Asked) will be sold in bookstores starting today. He will be reading at Brookline Booksmith on Thursday, September 13, at 7:00 pm. Almond spoke with Bostonist right after Karl Rove resigned, so we caught him when he really raging against The Man. He resigned from Boston College when BC invited Condoleezza Rice to speak at their commencement, so he didn't mince words when it came to Rove or any other......

Peter Yarrow will be at the Brattle Theatre Saturday, August 18, at 12 noon. The event is free and is presented by the The Harvard Coop Author Series and Passim Folk Music & Cultural Center. Tickets can be picked up at the Harvard Coop's first-floor information desk. Folk musician Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, & Mary is releasing a children's book version of their famous song "Puff, the Magic Dragon." The book features dazzling......

William Gibson will read on Sunday, August 19, at 6:00 pm at the Brattle Theatre. The event is sponsored by Harvard Book Store, and are on sale at the book store now for $5. William Gibson, Cyberspace's Big Daddy, has spawned a new book. Spook Country has already earned a rave review from BoingBoing. Cory Doctorow sums up the book as a "story of a cadre of spies, artists, and losers who collide in the......

Tom Brady has been named the best-dressed man in the world,* he had a birthday, he's back on the field, and his supermodel girlfriend is on the cover of Vanity Fair. But we have one big question – when's the baby arriving? We heard rumors that Bridget Moynihan was going to pop the Brady Baby back on July 20, but Brady's offspring hasn't arrived yet. The Track Girls are getting impatient and reported that Moynihan......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

Kerouac's On the Road scroll will be on display at Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park from Friday, June 15, to September 14. The opening celebration will be on Friday, June 15, from 6 to 9 pm at Boott Cotton Mills Museum. Lit buffs, counter-culture aficionados, and the last remaining beatniks will have the chance to view a sacred scroll - the original manuscript for Jack Kerouac's On the Road. While writing......

This year will be the first ever wine event at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A Spring Serata (serata is Italian for "evening" but sounds way fancier in Italian than English) will take place on June 7th at the ISGM. They're setting up tasting stations all over the museum for the grassy, floral, and mineral wines – don't ask us what that means, ask them: A Spring Serata also puts a unique, creative twist on......

Many great cities across these lands of ours are excited and happy to boast when they have one arts festival ready to go for its citizens and visitors. But Boston? An arts festival? That's too easy. What we do is plan a whole slew of 'em and work them all into the same weekend. Take THAT, other so-called culture centers! Bostonist will be telling you over the next couple of days about some of the......

--Universal Hub spotted a few brief lines in the Transcript's police and fire log: "A West Roxbury woman reported to police that her neighbor, who accused her dog of soiling his lawn, threw dog feces on her lawn. A harassment report was filed." One can only imagine the years of simmering resentment as poop appeared on the neighbor's yard. Whether or not this woman's dog was the source of the poop, it's easy to see......

Blades of Glory fills a specific comedy niche - the nuts 'n' butts genre. There's nut jokes, butt jokes, and body-part jokes galore. Despite the emphasis on the pratfall and the gross-out joke, Will Ferrell and Jon Heder's brand of physical comedy pulls the sloppy script up a few notches. Even though all sports have been satirized to death, figure skating truly deserves mockery. As Chazz Michael Michaels, a male Tonya Harding, Will Ferrell resembles......

We can't make fun of Senate President Robert Travaglini, lovingly known as "T-Vag," anymore. T-Vag (not to be confused with "T-Weed" of I Love New York fame) has announced that he's leaving that he is leaving the guv'mint for a higher-paying job. $90,000 dollars a year wasn't enough for him, so he's moving on to bigger and better things. The Globe says T-Vag will launch "a lobbying company that would help clients navigate the political......

The Namesake will screen at the Brattle at 7pm tonight, Thursday, March 15. Tickets are free, but you have to pick them up at the Brattle. The Namesake is a movie with a powerful pedigree. Mira Nair, who was behind the brilliant Monsoon Wedding, is the director, and the script is based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel. One of the stars, actor Kal Penn, is also looking to break out of his Harold and Kumar......

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's? Bostonist dug deep to uncover Barack Obama's unpaid parking tickets, their Governor's latest ethical lapse, and a plagarizing sports writer. Chicagoist had everything in twos: two views on having the Olympics, losing two members of their Super Bowl team, and two music festivals. DCist put their noses in legal books as......

Marilyn Johnson will read from The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries tomorrow, Tuesday, March 6, at Harvard Book Store, 6:30 pm. You may have asked yourself how papers get obituaries published so fast. Easy. They write 'em in advance. A whole army of journalists are posted on a death watch of sorts, waiting for the moment to release the words that sum up the lives of the recently......