Life

Celestial positioning system

DAVID SIPRESS — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:50:37 GMT

Reality check

Recession survival tips

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:19:34 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Once the pills kicked in . . .

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:18:55 GMT

Succe$$

Hot love

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:57:52 GMT

Taste the flames inside Boston's secret world of fire artists
For once, a scantily clad goth woman swinging chains of neon-orange fireballs over her head isn’t doing so because I’ve pissed her off.

For once, a scantily clad goth woman swinging chains of neon-orange fireballs over her head isn’t doing so because I’ve pissed her off. Instead, this neo-renaissance nymph is gracefully snakelike, smiling and shimmying like a modern day Gypsy Rose Lee — only with globes circling her head like flaming Milky Way moons. This act, seemingly reckless and so dependent on her mastery of the physics of circular motion, is actually a very delicate dance.

The fiery orbs on her chains are known as “fire poi”; the woman, Dominique Immora (her stage name), is a “fire spinner.” She’s just one of several performance artists who are lighting the Boston-area dance world on . . . um . . . yeeeah.

Of the four elements of nature, fire is by far the sexiest, druggiest, and rock-and-rolliest. After all, Hendrix didn’t climax his performance at Monterey by dousing his guitar with water. Fire has danger appeal, and, here in Massachusetts, an air of forbidden fruit, thanks to our infamously Puritanical blue laws, which prohibit almost anything that involves an open flame, short of a cookout. This buzz-kill legislation would seemingly put a damper on Dominique and her fireballs, but it hasn’t fazed her or the tenacious coterie of locals who, while pussyfooting elvishly in secret nooks around Greater Boston, are slowly preparing the fire arts for their moment in the spotlight.

Quest for fire
Why are people so obsessed with fire, anyway? From Prometheus to Lucifer to Smokey Bear (“Smokey the Bear” is, surprisingly, incorrect. Who knew?), our most notorious mythological characters and feared eternal punishments are associated with blazes of glory or damnation. Our heroes fight it, our mavericks play with it. It’s in our bellies, under our asses.

A high-school history teacher of mine once told our class that the Huns, ignorant to the concept of cooking, used to sit on their meat to warm it, creating a primitive, smelly tartar of sorts. I don’t know if that’s true, but surely we’d still be attempting to warm up the fruits of yesterday’s kill by shoving it under our freezing haunches were it not for the magical cooking properties of fire.

Indeed, perhaps our cat-in-a-shiny-thing-factory infatuation with all things ablaze comes from biological inherence. After all, fire is our friend. We need it for heat, for light, for transforming sinewy animal flesh into savory, juicy hunks of culinary glory (duh, Huns). Fire fueled technology booms, gave us more effective weapons, and allowed us to see the people we were killing with those weapons after the sun had set. And, of course, without soft candlelight, mustachioed creepers with beer bellies and only a general geographic clutch on the lady button wouldn’t have a shot at getting laid. Without fire, the world would be a colder, darker, hornier place.

Old trickster

IAN SANDS — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:30:50 GMT

At age 78, able-bodied Alan Abel’s life is still one big joke
On New Year’s Day 1980, telegrams sent from Utah arrived at the New York Times and the Daily News announcing that 50-year-old media hoaxter Alan Abel had suffered a heart attack at a ski resort near Orem, Utah. He left behind a wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Jennifer.

HOAX-US POCUS: Alan Abel posing as Jim Rogers, founder of a group that sought to abolish breast-feeding, calling it incestuous and responsible for many of society’s ills

On New Year’s Day 1980, telegrams sent from Utah arrived at the New York Times and the Daily News announcing that 50-year-old media hoaxter Alan Abel had suffered a heart attack at a ski resort near Orem, Utah. He left behind a wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Jennifer.

It seemed like a tragedy, to be sure.

In the obituary published the next day, the Times wrote, “Mr. Abel . . . made a point in his work of challenging the obvious and uttering the outrageous.”

News of Abel’s fate sparked an outpouring of tribute. Mourners sent more than 100 letters to his old house in Westport, Connecticut, bemoaning the loss; several dozen orders for flower arrangements were placed with a florist.

Only thing was, Abel wasn’t dead.

He’d been holed up at a friend’s apartment in New York City.

The whole thing started when, during negotiations with a movie studio for rights to his life story, he overheard two lawyers in an elevator saying they should wait until the prankster died, then “buy the rights for peanuts from his estate.” So Abel decided to oblige them.

A few days after the obits ran, a second flock of telegrams went out to the press reading, REPORTS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN GROSSLY EXAGGERATED. THERE WILL BE A NEWS CONFERENCE TOMORROW AT 12 NOON AT THE BILTMORE HOTEL.

It would be the first time the Paper of Record would have to retract an obituary.

Modest beginning
Abel, bless his heart, has been pulling shit like that for nearly 50 years. In 1959, he embarked on his first high-profile hoax, a tongue-in-cheek crusade to clothe naked animals “for modesty’s sake” under the banner of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), a stunt that landed him and SINA’s “president” (actor/writer/friend Buck Henry) guest appearances to explain their position in character on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and the Today Show. The campaign was an attempt to poke fun at the professional moralists of the ’50s, do-gooders who were, according to a write-up on Abel’s Web site, “busy censoring bikini-clad women, outspoken books and films, and classic statues.”

Since the SINA gag, Abel has baited media into covering a fictitious Jewish grandmother’s presidential campaign (1964); his very own “Omar’s School for Beggars” (1975), which he says was “a satirical commentary on the rise of unemployment and homelessness in America”; a sham wedding he threw for former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and a WASP (1979); and a campaign to ban breast-feeding (2000).

Going medieval

DAVID SIPRESS — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:38:09 GMT

Reality check

The Crappy Monster Squad

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:24:51 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Zen Arcade

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:35:57 GMT

Succe$$

Therapy lubricant

DAVID SIPRESS — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:35:01 GMT

Reality check

Scars & stripes

JULIA RAPPAPORT — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:47:36 GMT

American vets discover that their military uniforms — like their service — look better on paper
“Dude, that shit right there? That’s Iraq.”

PAPER VICTORY: At Combat Paper workshops, veterans cut up old military uniforms, then transform the pieces into paper pulp and works of art.

“Dude, that shit right there? That’s Iraq.”

Aaron Hughes, tall, lanky, and blond, held a handful of sand — the stuff that poured out when, with one rip, the 26-year-old veteran split his standard-issue camouflage shorts at the seam. “One year, three months, and seven days. I was stationed in Kuwait and drove a truck back and forth to Iraq,” he says at a workshop on Martha’s Vineyard, tearing his shorts into thin strips. “It’s a long time.” Hughes last touched those shorts when he stepped off the plane from Iraq in 2004.

Hughes, a Chicago native, is one of a growing number of veterans from Boston to Los Angeles who are taking their uniforms out of the closet — seizing the buttons off their Navy blues, ripping their undershirts, and shredding their Army fatigues. Then, in workshops across the country, such as the one in the Vineyard, the vets mix the government-issue rags with water and beat the fibers down to pulp. At the end of the day, the uniforms are reborn as an artistic form of paper. They call it Combat Paper.

“I have a love/hate relationship with my deployment,” says Hughes. “I speak against the war, but I still miss my cot. I only had two uniforms and I wore them every day. It was a security blanket. When you’re cold, you wrap yourself in your shirt. You use it as your pillow. But it’s also a uniform, a symbol of oppression, power, control, and obedience. To turn it into something else is liberating.”

DIY therapy
Drew Cameron, a Vermont-based Iraq War vet who started the controversial Combat Paper project in May 2007, also describes the healing that comes when a veteran takes apart his or her uniform and gives it new life as “a liberating act. It’s deconstruction in a literal and metaphorical way. We are deconstructing memories and experiences while at the same time cutting up, taking apart, and remaking our uniforms.”

It is a healing process independent of psychologists and psychiatrists, a deliberate move since the Veterans Administration benefits offered to returning vets often do not include proper therapy. “It’s a purposeful activity that is self-initiated in a group,” says Sharan Schwartzberg, professor of occupational therapy at Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “The activity is transformative and it has symbols. . . . It can be so supportive.”

John McCain's economic philosophy

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:09:51 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Boston after dark

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:56:54 GMT

Succe$$

Photos: Boston Fashion Week 2008

JOHN NIKOLAI — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:39:03 GMT

Lingerie on the runway and more
Photos from the La Perla's fashion show, and YourBeautyIndustry.com Launch Party and Fashion Show, at Boston's Fashion Week 2008.

La Perla Fashion Show - InterContinental Boston
Photos by John Nikolai

Sarah Palin is your Old Testament

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:48:53 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Freeze

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:35:10 GMT

Succe$$

Senior moments

DAVID SIPRESS — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:27:14 GMT

Reality check

Fallopian follies

KARA BASKIN — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:38:51 GMT

While celebrity sages salivate over Hollywood babies, Beltway pundits are spinning the latest wave of ovarian escapades. Have girls really gone wild?
Speculating on celebrity baby “bumps” is Hollywood blood sport.

Speculating on celebrity baby “bumps” is Hollywood blood sport. Ashlee, Nicole, the much-maligned Jamie Lynn Spears — all were outed by the press before they could even register for Diaper Genies. (A moment of silence for Lisa Marie Presley, who appeared on the cover of a tabloid looking like Wilfred Brimley in a muumuu and subsequently admitted to carrying twins.) Now, thanks to Sarah Palin’s impregnated teenage daughter, Bristol, trashy baby fever has come to the nation’s capital — a place where, until recently, sex had its proper place: under Oval Office desks and in airport-bathroom stalls. But suddenly, babies have become a campaign-trail tool, like George W. Bush’s cowboy act or Bill Clinton’s saxophone. Will it work?

I hope not — it’s a pretty thin MO for someone with as much diplomatic experience as, I don’t know, me. In searching for a vice-president, John McCain sought someone with no knowledge of Iraq, social views befitting a Victorian mixer, and a vagina. I can just picture the crusty Arizona senator sending his minions scampering to find a nice lady politician, someone those pesky women voters could get enthusiastic about after all that Hillary Clinton hullabaloo. If this election is going to be about change, the blustering ex-POW can play with the best of them. “Hey, Obama, you might be black — but I’ve got a girl on my team! And from Alaska, too!” Who cares if she’s a lightweight with as much foreign-policy expertise as Tom Arnold? McCain needed a strident hockey mom as the antidote to Hillary Clinton’s power pantsuits and Obama’s rousing rhetoric. Can you really blame the old geezer?

Too bad Bristol’s fickle fallopian tubes are likely to be her mother’s undoing. You don’t get to campaign as a family-values, pro-woman candidate who also opposes abortion and sex education — because those stances do more for unplanned pregnancy than cheap wine and Barry White. And you can’t exactly sing the praises of abstinence education when your own 17-year-old daughter is a waddling testament to its impotence.

Palin’s handlers would have you believe that she’s just itching to become a grandma. Her office released this statement, which would throw a diabetic into convulsions: “Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby, and even prouder to become grandparents.”

Night of the living geeks

NEELY STEINBERG — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:30:54 GMT

Romancing the nerds
I’ve never dated a geek. Nor have I ever envisioned myself doing so.

JUST ONE OF THE CROWD: Our correspondent dons complimentary geek specs for a photo-op with James.

I’ve never dated a geek. Nor have I ever envisioned myself doing so. I grew up playing sports; in college, I was a party girl. I know the basics of using a computer, but the only thing C++ means to me is that it’s almost a B-minus. Granted, I do have a couple things in common with geeks — like my affinity for video games and my obsession with Star Wars — but, as Master Yoda might say, a romantic connection that does not necessarily make. Lately, though, I’ve been expanding my horizons, which is how I ended up at Central Square’s Pandemonium Books this past Saturday attending Sweet on Geeks singles night.

Sweet on Geeks (sweetongeeks.com) is the brainchild of Joyce Dales, her husband, and her brother, all self-described geeks, who started the dating Web site geared toward the typically dateless, in 2006.

“We actually came up with the idea when my husband and I were joking that we needed a space just for geeks for my brother to find a wife,” says an ebullient Dales. Her company now also hosts singles nights across the nation.

I showed up prepared to stand out like a sore thumb. I dressed to the nines; my hair perfection; my makeup flawless. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of dating, it’s that you can’t (and shouldn’t) deny being your true self. Turns out it’s a dating tenet that geeks embrace as well.

The first person I met was called Hecht. He was a tall, lanky fellow, dressed in full army fatigues, and had recently returned from Iraq. Hecht was exceedingly friendly and candid. He talked a lot about geek life and attempted to “break down some of the lingo” for me. While he was completely proud of his geek status, he did vent his frustration about being labeled. “It’s unfair,” he said, “because you get stigmatized a lot.”

Then there was James, a sweet, gentle guy in a black shirt, black kilt, and Tevas, who is pursuing his Master’s in information technology; Joseph, a portly photographer who described himself as “a different kind of geeky”; the suit-wearing Gregory, a computer consultant who had once repaired Hawk missiles in Korea; and Kat, an affable woman with a Dr. Who symbol tattooed on her arm.

The night’s festivities included speed dating, raffles — prizes included Star Trek action figures, a Yoda stuffed animal, and the like — and lots of board games, such as Agricola, which, I was informed, is the most popular game on boardgamegeeks.com.

Stock photos for McCain

MATT BORS — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:12:14 GMT

Idiot box

Is this local?

DAVID SIPRESS — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:04:37 GMT

Reality check