Hype is a funny thing. It can build anticipation for something, and it can also turn people against it. Uniquely, in the case of Modern Warfare 3, it’s done both.  The Call of Duty series is known as one of the 800 LB gorillas of the gaming universe and is guaranteed to sell a ton of copies each time a new game releases, and Modern Warfare 3 was everywhere. At the same time, its annual release frequency, combined with the soap opera like events that ousted former Infinity Ward (the studio behind the Modern Warfare games) heads Jason West and Vince Zampella have led to some calling the series stale (in not as polite words).

After all of the hype, all of the smack talk and all of bickering, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is more than worth the hype. Yes, the engine is beginning to show its age and yes – there are some hiccups; hell you can even make the argument that this has all been done before, but this is what it boils down too — Modern Warfare 3 is a mechanically sound, fun and fluid shooter that does a lot more right than it does wrong.  Detractors or not, with its much more streamlined campaign and remarkable online play, Modern Warfare 3 is the best Call of Duty yet.

For the last ten years, the world has been gripped by fear and Modern Warfare 3 is the realization of those fears. Picking up directly after the events of Modern Warfare 2, the world has erupted into full scale warfare. Captain Price and his squad are wanted men as they chase down Makarov, the man who ignited this global conflict.  It’s a campaign that will bring you from a war torn Wall Street to the streets of Paris and everywhere in between. Just like in previous games, the story shifts from character to character, location to location, even nationality to nationality, but Infinity Ward has done a great job making this a much more focused endeavor than in years past. In games like Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 it was easy to forget where you were, what you were doing and just why you were doing it, but Modern Warfare 3 rarely loses sight of its goal, and why it’s telling the story that it is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all that interesting.

What results is a passable story that serves as a reason to visit some extremely large fire fights.  From the previously mentioned Wall Street mission to a tense mission in the London subway and even a battle aboard the Russian President’s hijacked plane, Infinity Ward and Activision know their audience.  There’s no shortage of Michael Bay style testosterone fueled moments, and they’re incredibly fun thanks to the game’s tight controls, remarkable pacing and fine tuned tweaked mechanics that feel just about as good as they ever have. I was a bit surprised at just how dumb some of the enemy AI is. I may have an unarmed vehicle firing rockets into each and every one of your fellow troops, but sure, just run on out with them, showing total disregard for your personal safety. This happens much more often than you’d think, and it seems like the developers chose this to ensure that the game keeps its high octane level throughout the experience, but it’s a highly noticeable flaw.

Regardless, Modern Warfare 3 is easily the best looking Call of Duty to date. Running at a buttery smooth 60 FPS, Modern Warfare 3 handles the majority of its frantic action and over the top spectacle with little to no damage via lag or other issues that usually effect games like this. Infinity Ward must also be commended for how they used impressive animations and these large set pieces to create a truly engaging experience.  It may not compare to the visuals produced by the Frostbite engine in Battlefield 3, but the burning buildings and full scale firefights are done well enough to keep you interested and keep move the story along.

Let’s be honest though; the good majority of you aren’t here for the single player, you’re going to get the game and dive right into the multiplayer, and thankfully, its easily the best the series has offered. Of course, the core mechanics remain the same as it has in previous games, but Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer suite is a much more streamlined and persistent experience than those that came before it.  Each of the sixteen new maps are worth checking out, and the constant progression feels immensely rewarding.

Killstreaks and perks have been reworked to be more beneficial to players of all different skill levels. Yes, you can of course still unlock rewards by racking up kills, but there are now support packages that allow those who aren’t as skilled as the others. This goes a great length in making the suite more accessible for newer users, who can then go in and get as addicted as the rest of us are. Its really a great new feature that encourages cohesive teamwork between all squad members.

Also new to the experience in Modern Warfare 3 are weapon perks. Where before you would unlock weapons by leveling up, Modern Warfare 3 adds a new level of depth to the mix with the ability to level up each weapon, adding a whole new level up depth and customization to the experience. You could change the kickback, the amount of ammo it holds or a slew of other options. This means one player using the same weapon may have a completely different strategy and experience than the next. It’s a great addition and should add tons of extra hours to an already deep experience.

Special Ops also makes it return and should serve as a distraction when players want a break from the online multiplayer suite. The challenges in Special Ops are interesting enough, from disarming a bomb to taking over a plane, there’s a lot of replayability here, and even more so when you add in the new survival mode. Survival doesn’t offer anything truly innovative, as it’s pretty much the zombie mode without the undead, but it does serve as a cool new way to get together with your friends, and since it can be played offline, it’s also a great way to learn the multiplayer maps.

The Blast Factor: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is an incredibly solid shooting experience. The campaign and the engine behind it may show its age at certain points in the game, but they are few and far between. The story is much more focused, the weapons have more weight and the stellar multiplayer suite has been fine tuned and tweaked. A game like Modern Warfare 3 will always have its detractors, but it’s their loss, they’re missing one hell of an experience.

There aren’t many people who can reference, with utter sincerity, “the good thing that came out of falling off a cliff.” Jane Wiedlin, the pixie-ish guitarist for New Wave chart-toppers The Go-Go’s, is one of them.

The silver lining she’s referring to is the fact that last year, a knee injury she suffered after, yes, literally falling off of a cliff while hiking forced the cancellation of what was supposed to be a farewell tour for the band.

A year later, the tour has been rescheduled — and rechristened. The farewell theme has been nixed. Instead, the “Ladies Gone Wild” tour, which kicked off May 27 in Las Vegas, is in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Go-Go’s chart-topping debut record, “Beauty and the Beat.” To coincide with the outing, special editions of the album (which spawned the hits “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat”) were released in May, including a hot pink vinyl version. In August, the band will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“(After) taking a year off, when we re-launched the tour, we decided … we’re really not sure that it’s a farewell tour,” Wiedlin told Blast. “Having time to think about it, we decided we didn’t want to be so finite in our plans. It’s best to leave an open door when it comes to The Go-Go’s, because things come up that we want to do, and projects that we’d like to do together. So it just seemed better not to break up yet.”

Meaning that The Go-Go’s won’t become part of the club of artists who embark on a series of seemingly endless “farewell” tours?

“I really don’t want to be one of those bands,” Wiedlin says emphatically, emitting a girlish cackle. “That’s not me as a person. I try and do what I say and say what I mean, and I think that it’s a good policy for the band as well.”

When Wiedlin chatted with Blast in April from her home in Los Angeles, she and drummer Gina Schock, who are neighbors, were planning to start rehearsals the next day (“rocking out in my basement,” as she described it). Wiedlin, for one, spoke with the infectious exuberance of someone looking forward to a summer road trip with her best girlfriends. Fans can expect to hear the band’s biggest hits, as well as some cover songs and potentially even some new material, she said.

“Thirty years ago, if you had told me we would be doing (this anniversary tour) today, I would have laughed in your face,” she admitted. “It just seems incredible that we’re still together and that people still want to see us and people still love those songs. It’s very flattering and heartening to know.”

“I love the record still,” she added. “I think the songs hold up after all those years, and although the sound quality sounds kind of silly to me in retrospect, I think that the actual songwriting is still strong, and the way the songs sound live is very strong.”

Formed in Los Angeles in 1978, The GoGo’s have sold more than 7 million albums to date, and hits like “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “Vacation” are still radio staples. Though this run is sometimes mischaracterized as a “reunion” tour, in fact, the band has been “reunited” for more than 20 years, Wiedlin pointed out.

“Even though we don’t do The Go-Go’s 24/7 anymore, we still consider ourselves to have been back together since the fall of 1990,” she explained. “I think we’ve played every year since 1994 except for last year. … We just don’t play year-round.”

But to say that this tour will be a bit tamer for the ladies, all of whom are now in their 50s, than the dates in their heyday would be an understatement. The members have spoken openly about their hard-partying lifestyles back in the day.

“Unfortunately, we’re getting older and it’s harder on the body,” Wiedlin said. “But mentally, once we go over the songs a few times, most of them just come right back right to your brain, because we’ve been doing them for so many years.”

“For sure there’s gonna be a whole lot less partying going on, because three of The Go-Go’s are completely sober, and two of us are not literally sober, but a lot calmer than we were 30 years ago,” she said, laughing. “Probably slightly more dignified but not a lot, because basically we’re all a bunch of clowns at heart. So we will still be goofy. … The thing about The Go-Go’s is, of course, it is a business, but it’s also super fun and it doesn’t take drugs and alcohol and cigarettes to make it fun.”

It’s easy to cynically write off bands from decades past trotting out their classics on tour every few years as mere money-making schemes, but one gets the sense that for The Go-Go’s, it’s more than that. What’s perhaps most remarkable is that the quintet — Wiedlin, Schock, singer Belinda Carlisle, bassist Kathy Valentine and guitarist Charlotte Caffey — have all managed to stay friends through the years.

“It’s the longest relationship any of us have ever been in,” Wiedlin noted. “We definitely have our ups and downs, just like any relationship, but the bottom line is, when the five of us come together and we play music, it’s something magical that we feel, and obviously other people feel it too, because they come and see us play. That’s the only way I can explain it. It makes all the sort of bad times worth it, because it’s so great and fun when we get to play together.”

“I think as you get older, it’s natural to become more introspective,” she added. “And certainly knowing that it’s the 30-year anniversary of our groundbreaking record definitely makes all of us think about it more. There’s a lot of acknowledgement going on between the five band members as well. A lot of like, ‘I love you. I’m so happy we’re doing this.’ There’s a lot of sentiment going on. I don’t know if it’s the 30-year thing, or if it’s just that we’re getting older, but that’s the state of affairs in Go-Go land.”

The Go-Go’s, who let their instruments speak for themselves rather than relying on elaborate costumes and stage sets, stand in sharp contrast to the most notable modern female icons — i.e. hyper-sexualized artists like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. While expressing admiration for the fact that Perry and Lady Gaga both write their own material, Wiedlin said she’s surprised there aren’t more all-female rock bands around today.

“When (we found success) 30 years ago, I thought it would just bust the doors wide open and you would see just as many girl musicians as you would guys,” she reflected. “But it hasn’t really happened that way. I mean, it’s changing a little bit obviously, but I mean, I don’t really know of any, like, girl bands. Everyone gets on my case when I say that, because of course there are some. … I just think it’s weird that it hasn’t changed more.”

Aside from smashing barriers, one would be hard-pressed to find evidence that The Go-Go’s have even gotten the recognition they deserve in breaking into the boys’ club of rock ‘n’ roll, despite their place in history as the first all-female group who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to have a #1 album.

“We don’t really seem to get a lot of acknowledgement or credit for that … and it is a fact,” Wiedlin said. “I feel like a jerk even bringing it up, but I guess somebody has to.”

Case in point? The band was inexplicably left out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s recent “Women in Rock” exhibit, which opened in May.

“It’s just kind of baffling,” Wiedlin said. “Because we love the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and we would love to be in that exhibit.” (Representatives from The Rock Hall have said the organization tried to get in touch with the band and was unable to.)

“I’ll say (what) I said 30 years ago and I believe it’s still true,” she added — and there’s that cackle again. “The Go-Go’s are like Twinkies. Everyone loves them, but nobody wants to admit it.”

The guitarist, who admits she lives in “a bubble” when it comes to new music (“I’ll hear a song that came out in the early ‘90s and be like, “Oh, this is great. What’s this new artist?” Or it’ll be The Strokes or The Killers or The White Stripes or something. I’m really behind. I’m ashamed to admit it.”), nonetheless remarked about how much the industry has changed since The Go-Go’s got their start.

“The (current) music business is much harder,” she said. “It’s gotten bigger and smaller at the same time, because it’s much harder to be a successful musician, but there sure are a lot more bands and musicians out there. But I don’t see that anyone’s really making money. I mean, it seems like there’s like four people making money.”

“They seem to have to work so hard,” she went on. “I remember back in the day when we were popular, I felt like we were working every second of the day. But nowadays, people seem to do so much more. … Everything is just so much bigger now, and I don’t think I know how they do it. It looks exhausting.”

Just before we hang up, Wiedlin interrupts me for one final endearing add-on.

“Feel free to edit me if I sound like an idiot. I just don’t want to come off as, like, this bitter old lady or anything, ‘cause I’m not,” she said (which is pretty funny, because with her distinctive high-pitched voice, I don’t think Wiedlin could sound bitter, or old, if she tried). “I’m really happy and grateful for everything.”

Coming from someone who can find the bright side of falling off a cliff, it’s impossible not to believe her.

The Go-Go’s are scheduled to play the Bank of America Pavilion on June 9, with the B-52s. For complete tour dates, visit www.gogos.com.

I’m not a Halo guy. At least, I’m not anymore. While I lined up for the first three games, somewhere between the end of Halo 3 and the beginning of ODST; I just got burned out on the series. Still though, there was something about Halo: Reach that intrigued me. Maybe it was the space battles, maybe it was the fact that this is series creators Bungie’s final game in the series before they start their 10 year, multi-platform deal with Activision. Who knows what it was — I just knew that Halo: Reach was something I had to at least experience.

Good thing I did. In a word, Halo: Reach is simply breathtaking. It’s not only everything a fan of the Halo series could want, it’s everything that makes shooters what they are. What’s more; Reach is simply the best Halo game to be released yet, somehow Bungie manages to craft a much larger and epic story that still manages to create a strong lasting emotional connection. Between the beefed up campaign and the surefire multiplayer suite — Halo: Reach is the ultimate Halo experience.

The meat of Halo: Reach is in the game’s campaign mode. Much like ODST before it, series protagonist Master Chief is nowhere to be found. Instead, players assume the role of a Spartan-III soldier, known simply as Noble Six as he’s been reassigned to the Noble Team. His welcome isn’t a warm one though as the team meets their newest member with a bit hostility — seeing as the previous noble member sacrificed his own life against the Covenant (those are the bad guys for those not in the know). Awkward much? Very.

Reach is easily the most well thought out of the Halo series and features some amazing character development. I’ll admit that in previous Halo games, I would shoot my AI controlled comrades if I needed any ammo, but in Reach, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yes, you’re going to become attached to your squad mates, be them fellow members of Noble team or simply UNSC soldiers. Being so attached to those around you has an obvious impact on how you play through the game’s story. Reach is undoubtedly the best Halo game in terms of story (read: it’s the easiest to follow). There’s a large section of gamers who play Halo yet never even try the single player, Reach could change that.

Another equally impressive aspect of Reach is just how detailed everything is. While Bungie has never been a slouch in the visual department, everything seems much crisper and much more focused. Take for instance one particular section of the game that features Noble Team attempting to defend a city from the attacking covenant forces. From the fleeing citizens, to the covenant; whose ships and soldiers are shooting at literally everything that moves, there’s a lot going on here at once and reach handles everything exceptionally well.  The same can be said for how the game processes the plethora of customization options found within Halo: Reach. While these options, including customized armor and gadgets may not do much (let’s be honest, as much as the game says they’ll help, they’re purely cosmetic) — it’s great to see how fluidly they’re handled.

Long after players have finished Reach’s single player campaign –  long after all of the daily and weekly challenges are finished, the game’s legacy will be written, of course by the game’s multiplayer suite.  Reach features everything you’d expect from a Halo multiplayer experience, but adds to it everywhere that matters. Whether you’re playing co-op with a friend, or taking on…ahem..noobs in one of the game’s competitive modes, you’re sure to sink a ton of time in to the suite. Be advised though, if you were part of the much publicized multiplayer beta that was released earlier this year, there have been a few tweaks that may catch you off guard, namely in the headhunter and firefight modes, but none of them make a huge difference, and most gamers won’t even know what’s changed.

Undoubtedly, the game’s biggest time suck will be in the much improved Forge mode. Simply put, Forge is a virtual playground for Halo fans, where they take an empty map and build whatever they can dream up; it’s like Little Big Planet – except you know, with guns and grenade launchers and stuff. In Reach, Bungie has given players the biggest map ever and far more tools to create. The coolest part of Reach’s Forge mode though is definitely the ability to create with other players and create the ultimate Halo experience.

The Blast Factor: Sure, the game has its problems, like a few quirky AI stumbles and the fact that if you want to get anywhere in the game’s vehicle levels, you’re going to have to drive rather than shoot, but these are all minor gripes. Halo: Reach is an incredible experience. It’s almost as if Bungie is outdoing themselves as a challenge to whatever studio Microsoft puts in charge of the next iteration of the series. Halo: Reach is not only the best title in the franchise to date, it’s easily one of the finest Xbox 360 titles to date.

Can a movie grant you the same sensory experience as a live-action theater performance?

Can a THX sound system compare to listening to an orchestra as it accompanies your viewing of a movie? 

The "movie" we are referring to is not so much a night out at the cinema; it’s a mixing of mediums.

The film “Louis” is a silent film that chronicles the journey a young Louis Armstrong follows as he searches and finds his coronet, as a child in the streets of New Orleans. Though its performers silently act the film, it speaks volumes.  Thanks mainly, to its incredible acting, but also to the live orchestra, which accompanied the movie at each of its showings in the 5-city tour.  Blast had the pleasure of speaking with one of the actresses in the film, Shanti Lowry.

BLAST: LOUIS is an experience unlike anything I’ve ever heard of before.  How do you feel audiences will receive the film?

SHANTI LOWRY: The film seems to have gotten really warm reviews.  People who didn’t know what to expect say they really loved the presentation and the story.  As far as it being a silent film, audiences have said that the story and the acting is done in such a way that you don’t even notice that there isn’t a dialogue.  You can actually hear what the characters are saying through the story.

BLAST: You play a character named Grace in the film.  Can you tell us a little about her?

SL: My character Grace is a continuation on my character in the accompanying film “Bolden!,” which is going to be released in 2011.  She is a seamstress who, out of necessity, finds herself working in a bordello as a prostitute, trying to support her infant daughter.  Her paths cross with Louis, and her life is impacted greatly by him and his music.

BLAST: You say “Louis” is an accompanying piece to “Bolden!” Explain.

SL: Yes, “Louis” is a more light-hearted story about the young Louis Armstrong, and “Bolden!” is a more dramatic piece about the life of Charles "Buddy" Bolden, who played an extraordinary influence on Louis Armstrong.

BLAST: You are an accomplished dancer.  Do you think your background in that art form helped your performance in this film,  since you had to portray Grace’s emotions without using dialogue?

SL: I didn’t really feel like I needed to overact the part of Grace just because I didn’t have the luxury of speaking in the film. I didn’t think I needed to interpret her emotion onscreen by flailing and gyrating for the scene. Grace is so intense. You really feel her character presence in both films.

“Louis” premiered in five cities for its opening tour: Chicago, Detroit, Washington D.C., New York, and Philadelphia.  It will begin a West Coast tour and a European tour early next year.  For those of us who live in the Northeast, “Bolden!” will be released in select theaters in 2011. 

Shanti Lowry can also be seen in new episodes of “The Game” on BET.

SEATTLE — Valve has running a hands-off demo of the co-op play for Portal 2 during the Penny Arcade Expo.

The Game features two robots, an orange one and a blue one, that Glados has given a set of missions too. The game still plays with the expected commentary, where Glados will say things like "make you wish you could die," after one of the Robots gets "killed.”

The Portal colors were modified slightly, so that it makes it easier to tell which player shot which side of which portal. One portal is red and yellow, and the other is blue and purple. They also added a new “ping” tool. The developers noticed that even when the two players are in the same room telling each other what to do would be tricky, especially with how tricky some of Portal’s puzzles can be. The tool points a marker where you want the other player to place a portal. This helps coordinating, where you can tell the other side what you need them to do.

The co-op missions will be about twice the length of the original portal game. They will be the same length as the single player missions.

They then showed off some of the new puzzle devices in the game. There is a laser, which can be redirected with light cubes, but they require extra caution in the co-op mode that you don’t accidentally use it on the other player. There is a light platform that the robots can walk across, and like all other objects in the game, the new ones will move through the portals. They showed off one of the ways that two players will be needed in the new game, by having the light path going over the acid from one player’s portal, than needing to change the direction to go down another hallway. If the first player moved their portal, the path they are standing on would disappear, and both robots would fall into the acid.

They showed another co-op solution in making more practical a move that was previously a fun stunt to pull in the game. It had been fun to shoot a portal on the ceiling and the floor, so that the player falls from infinitely gaining speed to terminal velocity. In the original one, this, while still being a fun move, wasn’t very practical since the screen moves so fast that it’s near impossible to redirect the upper portal anywhere useful. With two players though, one player starts falling through the other player’s portals, and then they redirect the output to a desired location, shooting the falling player out at maximum velocity, without requiring a huge cliff.

They also added more comic relief to the game. The two robots can wave at each other, and even hug. It’s very funny to watch one of them "forget" to hit a switch, killing the other, and then offer a hug in apology. Though in a non-demo situation, I’m not sure how often either move would be used.

The video ended with a demonstration of the new features of the game, and the two robots preparing to begin their task. I’m looking forward to this when it’s released on Feb 9, 2011, on the Xbox 360, PC, Mac and PlayStation 3.

GALVESTON, Texas — This island in the Gulf of Mexico has been host to pirate and pioneer alike, and has withstood Mother Nature’s awesome attempts at returning the surfaced sandbar to the sea floor, and let legends lie. The city of Galveston, Texas is part haunted house and tourist hide-away.

The possession of Galveston as the jewel of the Gulf has continually evolved since its original Native American inhabitants, to a short lived colonized life in Spanish hands, just shy of two hundred years ago, and passed into Mexican ownership and established as a port-town, which lead, eventually, to serving the Texas Navy and earning her honorary Miss Texas banner as the Republic’s capital. This constant changing of the guard lends the island and city of Galveston to have a European swagger, as well as a pleasant nostalgia and continues its tradition as a vacation destination for many since the late 1800s. What makes Galveston a must-see destination now, however, is the chance that this old gal may not survive another hurricane.

The famous Strand and bayou-breezy atmosphere of the shops and wide Victorian streets make Galveston an ideal weekend get-away. Fly into Houston, and drive down the causeway an hour for a quiet, seemingly secluded weekend. However, every weekend the lazy coastal town erupts in the late spring and summer in festivals, concerts, and historical tours — Texans and tourist alike flock to soak in the sun and surf. Many camp on the beaches, but there are plenty of historic dive-motels and chain hotels to house the not-so-hippy.

The Strand offers a Victorian styled shopping gallery, along what was once a main thoroughfare, and often the giant cruise ships are docked in the background, waiting to take aboard its next wash of adventurers, dwarfing the port around them. Galveston has a high number of historical buildings on the National register, and you can find many tours to take a step back into coastal Texas as a new frontier.

Being so near Mexico there is a variety of homespun taco-huts to satisfy the Tex-Mex and cold cerveza you’re craving, and the Strand has a few excellent ice cream and candy shops. There is a variety of well-known chain restaurants; Landry’s Seafood calls the area home, with the shrimp-rich waters of the Gulf, and they have built up enclaves of themed restaurants in the Fisherman’s Wharf-image, like the more well-known Joe’s Crabshack.

After stuffing your face, waddle out onto a spot on Galveston’s 32 miles of beach. The shallow waters surrounding the island make an ideal location for swimming, surfing, kite surfing, and fishing. The waters warm up the most in the fall, so if you are in the mood for a swim or if the weather isn’t cooperating, visit the local water park, one of the world’s best,Schlitterbahn Galveston Island Waterpark is a 26-acre oasis featuring the world’s first indoor/outdoor 70,000 square-foot heated-convertible park.

On the Texas-side of the island is Moody Gardens, which you will have noticed on the drive in, as three gleaming-glass pyramids. Each pyramid is a different approach to science–the Discovery, Aquarium and Rainforest environments allow interaction at its best. The complex also has a Golf Resort, Hotel and Spa, and 3-D IMAX theater.

Galveston Island is small in size, but has a huge personality to make up for it. History buffs and beach blanket bunnies will feel at home while under the warm glow of the Texas sunshine.

Ask Emmanuel Ayvas how he would describe his band and suddenly the articulate front man is at a loss for words.

"I don’t know. We are not easy to categorize,” he finally says.

It might be hard to categorize Emmanuel and the Fear because they have 11 band members.

That’s right, 11.

Ranging from Ayvas, the lead singer to David Nelson the trombone player, Emmanuel and the Fear is not your grandfather’s rock band. If Sufjan Stevens and Beethoven made a love child, it might just be Emmanuel and the Fear.

The fact that you can’t quite put this New York rock band in a box is something the band enjoys and even came up with their name because of it. The band’s name came from a theme the lead singer found a lot in his writing. "It’s centered on fear and how to handle fear in our lives. Also, I liked the fact that it didn’t brand us. It leaves room for the imagination," said lead singer.

In March the band released Listen, the 19-track album that continues to receive rave reviews. The lead singer describes the sound as "dreamscape" like and says that the album is very visual.

"I think there is a very clear story being told,” Ayvas said. Many artists have a set pattern on how they create their music; either music first or lyrics. Emmanuel and the Fear are neither. "I like to write the lyrics and the music at the same time. We want to create music that provokes an emotion. The lyrics are very important."

One of the songs off the album was featured in the ABC Family series “Huge.”

"It was weird for me," he said. "I watched the show and the words of my song lined up with the story of the show. I’m flattered that they believe our song evokes what they are trying to evoke."

The band has also been featured on Fearless TV and the new ABC aired Jimmy Lloyd’s Songwriter Showcase. Also, as the band gains more recognition, they also receive more acclaim. Earlier this spring the band was named BMI’s Band of the Month.

Currently, the NYC rockers are on tour. Touring with eleven bands members may seem like a recipe for disaster but Ayvas believes the band is a perfect mesh of personalities for life on the road.

"We are lucky we are with really cool people," he said. "Touring with so many people sometimes isn’t easy after breathing each other’s air for months. So far it has been a lot of fun."

Some of the favorite places for the band to perform thus far have been Amsterdam and Germany. In Germany, the band went on for three encores. "It kind of strange,” he admitted.

"Hopefully we are still touring as much as possible," said Ayvas. Ultimately the band hopes to be "on the map throughout the world.”

(Media credit/Joel Meinholz for Blast)

MIAMI — “I don’t date, I’m too awesome to commit to someone.” Tina White giggles when I ask if she’s seeing someone. “Also, it’s just tacky,” she adds, with her infectious, bubbly flair.

Tina White is the latest addition to the South Beach social roster to hit the nightclub scene. But, unlike her counterparts, socialites who tend to park themselves at a table in a nightclub, sipping vodka Redbulls with an air of arrogance and a holier then thou attitude, Tina is anything but dull and pretentious. She initially struck my interest after I kept hearing her distinct, yet rather fitting name, over the past couple of weeks. I was curious to finally meet the girl who was having multiple parties held in her honor in clubs like Rokbar and Coco De Ville.

Her choice in attire alone would set her apart from others. Dressed in cowboy boots, mini jean skirt and a white undershirt, she toys with her appearance, staying in character on this exceptionally brutal Miami summer day. It’s refreshing to have someone like White join nightclub scene. The usual night crawling patrons of South Beach tend to take themselves too seriously at times, as if being out and about and taking multiple Patron shots are a chore. White plays up the fact that she, herself, at times can be tacky as well.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ms. Tina White on one particularly unbearable hot and humid mid-afternoon June day, the kind of day that Miami summers are notorious for. I arrive early, and in typical South Beach time, White arrives 15 minutes late. She’s quick to apologize and then goes on to say how she had a ridiculously late night the night before — such a late night that White confessed she had contemplated rescheduling our initial meeting.

White takes a deep breath in and settles into one of the wicker chairs in The Standard Hotel lobby. As she begins to play with her long blond hair, I glance around the almost vacant lobby, and see that the few people scattered about on lap tops, or reading the news paper have all taken notice of Ms. Tina White’s entrance. She’s hard to miss after the way she strutted into the somber lobby.

White starts off the conversation by informing me that she just recently got back from two weeks in Bali and is already planning her “Welcome Back” party at Rokbar.

“Must be nice,” I add and politely inquire exactly how she’s able to bankroll this rather luxurious lifestyle. White states that her profession is solely “being awesome. Being your friend, and maybe making you blond.” I cock my head to the side as I listen to her explanation of her self-employment, and wonder if she puts that on her W-9 forms. White’s quick to catch on that “being awesome” doesn’t really answer my question or pay for a first class ticket to Bali and clears it up that she earned her money the old fashion American way: by way of a lawsuit.

White goes on to tell me that she thanks her carefree nomadic lifestyle to a tragic slip and fall at The Cheesecake Factory. It’s hard to keep a straight face when she talks. Her valley girl dialect, and demeanor makes her all the more interesting and exactly what got people talking in the first place.

(Media credit/Joel Meinholz for Blast)

“What? They have a really good salad there!” She smirks with her big green eyes defending her choice in cuisine. White’s outlandish, attention getting outfit can’t detract from her delicate facial features. She plays on the fact that she’s the ultimate blonde and has no shame saying she admires Paris Hilton. But unlike her idol, White does not have the traditional pedigree of a socialite party girl, as her money came quickly. Despite that minor difference, she’s quickly on her way to branding herself, taking a page straight from the foolproof formula of being the ultimate socialite. With such an entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of buzz going around about her, investors are naturally taking notice on her budding popularity. White has a perfume coming out hopefully by the end of summer appropriately called Scentimasea. The next step of the natural progression in the evolution of a socialite is to release a club song. Not surprisingly, White already is planning studio time to record and then release the ultimate club anthem. I assume the only thing that won’t follow, in contrast to other successful peers before her, is the sex tape.

White’s a character she created to be carefree, and over the top. In this day and age of over night celebrity, it’s evident that White’s in on the joke the whole time and seeing just how far she can take it.

“Things just happen to me cause I’m happy.” White says coyly as she reacts to the sudden influx of the success of her popularity and increasing career opportunities. It’s this particular attitude that has become the “Tina White” mentality in which she hopes others can adopt.

White was born and raised on South Beach and is quick to tell me that she’ll always represent the Beach, no matter where she goes. She currently resides in the Flamingo apartment complex, in the center tower. A perfect fit for White since that particular complex is known as a non-stop party for singles, the equivalent of a college dormitory that caters to the single scene on South Beach, with a bar located inside the lagoon-like pool. The Flamingo is the perfect place for White to live, as she had told me earlier that she vows to perpetually stay single. White reveals that she was born on Valentine’s Day, and that she “loves everyone and everything’ and intends to remain twenty-two years old until she’s ready to hang up her blond wig and boots.

“So Tina White ages?” I ask, slightly confused, making sure I heard her correctly about never growing another year older or wiser.

“Only indirectly,” she somewhat clarifies. It’s details like these that only adds to White’s cartoonish image, and puts her in “The Simpson’s” category of never getting older. A joke amongst South Beach residents is that a majority of them suffer from The Peter Pan Syndrome, where no one ever grows up in this youth obsessed society.

In contrast to her appearance, White’s background is rather tame. She’s a hundred percent American and used to be an Evangelist Christian, but as she puts it, “that didn’t work out for me.” Now she finds herself religiously hosting “moving” parties held in her honor, which aren’t just limited to South Beach anymore. Like her relationship status, she’s never committed to a particular club. Friends and fans have to follow her on Facebook and twitter to find out the next venue she’ll be at.

Hint: White now has her sights set on a Downtown club/lounge “Vagabond’ which is notorious for being a hipster safe haven. She’s aiming to host Saturday night parties there, appropriately called “Tine White Pageant.”

“Glitz , glamour, the works,” she adds.

The goals for her are simple: Her party nights are to encourage others to “Let go, have fun, and leave your egos at the door.” It’s the concept behind “Tina can be anyone.”

In a place where people tend to take themselves too seriously when they go out, Tina is selling a good time: she shows up to the festivities armed with blond wigs and boas to throw around like Mardi Gras beads on anybody who happens to sit down at her booth. In order to befriend Tina, all that is required is for that person ‘to be nice.’ Listening to her, I wouldn’t be surprised if she considered her good deeds as philanthropic work.

White’s cartoonish image of over the top American Pride and blond ambition only adds to her appeal, making it almost trendy to be trashy in a completely humble and appealing way. She’s a more than welcome addition to the nightlife scene.

As the interview winds down, I notice out of the corner of my eye a gentleman making his way over to us, not surprising since he’s been eying White for the past 45 minutes. He promptly sits next to White and spills over into her chair. “Is this some sort of casting call?” he asks, only addressing White, oblivious to the fact that he’s interrupting.

White casually shakes her head no, and begins playing with her hair, without ever making eye contact to the slender gentlemen. He’s presumably in his mid-forties and dressed in a white tank top and bright board shorts. He introduces himself as Mark, and tells her that he is an artist on the Beach. After a slightly cold reception from us, Mark takes off, but not before handing out his business cards. As he makes his way through the lobby door, White’s friend, who accompanied her on the interview, asks Mark how he would describe Tina. Mark turns around, looks at White one more time, and quickly replies, “inspirational.”

A rather unique and perfect description for the blond party princess making her distinct mark on the Beach.

Pop stars come and go. Some stay and will forever be remembered in the history of pop culture. Others fade as quickly as a shooting star. Emmalyn Anderson (artist name: Emmalyn) hopes to be one of those that are remembered.

With the release of her first single Love Letter, which is available on iTunes, Anderson is understandably thrilled.

"It’s awesome. I’m really excited," Anderson said.

The Falmouth native penned her recent single on real life experiences. "I was in a relationship with this guy and I realized I needed a break from him. I planned on going back to him but then I met someone else. So the song is me writing a love letter to him being like you broke my heart but I’m over it.”

Most of the songs Anderson writes are based on experiences she has faced.

"Its how I get my emotions out. It’s a release for me," she said. "It’s nice knowing people can relate to my songs and have been through similar situations."

Anderson is a fan of matching an upbeat tune with deep and sometimes even sad lyrics. "I don’t want people to be brought down by the lyrics. I want people to have fun with it," she said.

The same goes for Love Letter. "The lyrics in this song are very important to me," said Anderson. "Every word was written with strong emotion, yet the beat matched with it was added to give it an uplifting and fun vibe. I want to give people a reason to dance!"

When Anderson isn’t writing songs for herself, she is busy creating hits for Canadian pop artist Dustin Disco. Writing songs for another artist is a different experience in itself.

"You don’t know whether they will like it or not," Anderson said. "They might love it or hate it. You just have to learn not to take it personally."

Along with being a singer/songwriter, Anderson has another gun in her arsenal; acting. The budding actress has a minor role in Mission Park. The superhero adventure movie was a fun experience for Anderson. "It was fun filming. It was all green screens. My manager (Lindsey Vinson) and I were in it together so that was fun," said Anderson.

Mission Park premiered on August 25, it was Anderson’s first time seeing herself on the big screen and walking a red carpet.

"Having the paparazzi go crazy on us, seeing the movie all put together, watching my name roll through on the credits-it may sound strange but I felt completely like this is where I’m meant to be," said Anderson.

The aspect about acting that she loves the most is how the craft always help bring her mood up. "If you have to smile on camera, then you smile and that sort of makes you feel better," said Anderson. However, if the soon to be 21-year-old had to choose between acting and music, music would win that battle. "Acting is a lot of fun and something I want to do on the side but I think I have a stronger path in music," said Anderson.

That path in music began as a child for Anderson. "I was in chorus in 6th and grade and throughout high school. I loved it. Singing has been a blessing in my life," said Anderson. In the fall, Anderson will be returning to Lasell College for her senior year. She is majoring in communications. Juggling a budding singing career and school might be daunting to some however; Anderson is quite calm about the situation. "I don’t really have a game plan on how to balance the two. Whatever happens happens. At least I will have a degree," said Anderson.

Ask Anderson where she sees herself in five years, and her answer is honest. "I don’t really know where I’ll be," said Anderson. "You can’t predict it. It’s all up in the air. You just have to throw something up and see what lands."

As they prepare to release their ninth studio album, “Something for the Rest of Us,” it would be understandable if multi-platinum crowd-pleasers the Goo Goo Dolls were feeling a little blas© about their music career. But even after 24 years, four Grammy nominations, 13 top 10 songs and more than 10 million albums sold, that’s not the case.

From the first notes of raucous album opener "Sweetest Lie," it’s clear that the band isn’t holding back on its latest effort.

Bassist and founding member Robby Takac recently chatted with Blast about the Goo Goo Dolls’ evolution after more than two decades of recording together, their perspective on the new record and approach as they move forward in a changing industry.

News of yet another new record might leave fans wondering how "Something for the Rest of Us" differs from the group’s previous efforts.

"I’ve had to answer that question a lot of times over the past 20 years," Takac said. "And I guess the only thing I can narrow it down to is, it’s made by a band that’s been together for four more years. … It never gets easier. Whenever you sincerely want to do a better job than you did the last time, you know it’s not going to be easy, because you have to go places and you have to reach plateaus that you haven’t been to before. … Musically and topically, we’re just looking around us to see what kind of things we can bring into this to keep it interesting and to keep it moving forward."

To that end, Takac explained, the record draws heavily from the newsworthy events of recent years.

"We try to stick to things that are relevant around us, because we come from a school that pretty much wears their hearts on their sleeves," he explained. "I think the political landscape is part of it. I think the social landscape is part of it. I think the technological landscape is part of it. Technology is moving a lot faster than people … can keep up with. … It’s interesting to just watch people try to assimilate those things into their life."

As far as the title (which came courtesy of singer Johnny Rzeznick), Takac said the band was trying to tap into a perceived sense of camaraderie among the proverbial "little guys."

"As we were writing this record, I think one of the things we were looking at is sort of (being able to channel) that frustration that people are feeling," he explained. "People look for something to grab onto, to kind of let them know that they’re not the only people feeling that way. … From my point of view, (it means) there’s an awful lot of people who make the decisions for the rest of us. And I think the tables have turned. I think there’s a hell of a lot more of the rest of us than there are of those who are controlling everything. And I think that group of people really needs to have their voice heard."

Though the album wasn’t released until August 31^st (preceded by first single "Home," which began radio rotation in June), the band found itself in the difficult position of premiering new songs throughout shows over the summer, Takac said, and finding that fans already were familiar with the songs — clearly through less than legal means.

"I know those people didn’t pay for those songs, and it (bums) me out that a thing that we used to get paid for … is no longer for sale, is pretty much free now," he acknowledged. "We have to figure out, okay, how do we exist, then?"

Their record label’s solution was to intervene and have the bootlegs taken down, a tactic that Takac seems to view as less than forward-thinking.

"That is a fight that you don’t want to have," he said, laughing. "And they learned that really quickly, like within three or four days. You don’t want to have that fight, man. It’s like, this is the way it works now. And, if you’re going to dig your heels in the dirt and say, ‘You’re stealing my music, therefore I’m not going to deal with you,’ then you’re not going to have any bands anymore. It’s just the way the world is."

"You have to morph with that," he added. "You have to figure out what your place is in that music industry. It’s not about changing anything. You’re not going to change what goes on. … For a band that’s been around for as long as we have, it’s just something that you’re going to need to understand and embrace. … Some of the companies are going to figure it out and they’re going to make it work, and some of them aren’t."

For a band that started in the 1980s, Takac (the only member of the trio who keeps an active personal Twitter account) said it’s been a bumpy road adjusting to the changing responsibilities bands face in the modern age.

"It used to be, a band would make their record, and the band’s job was to, A, write great songs; B, make a great record; C, go out there and perform those (songs) for people, and your job was pretty much done at that point. There’s a whole other component now that involves technology. And if your band, and if (the) people who surround you don’t understand the importance of that technology, you’re going to get left in the dust these days. "

"We’re a lucky band," he went on. "I mean, we’ve got 13 songs that have hit the top 10 that people come to see us play. So, we can go play shows. We know we can do that. So, how do we make up the rest of it? … How do we figure out how to maintain what we do, keep our band and still make you feel that (connection)? That’s a huge process."

While it’s undeniable that songs like "Black Balloon" and the ubiquitous "Iris" have propelled the Goo Goo Dolls to the megastar status that allows them such luxuries, one gets the sense that Takac thinks of it as a double-edged sword.

"With a band like us, there’s a (divide) between things that we’d like to try, things that we’d like to work into what we do, and things that are appropriate for what we do," Takac said. "And I guess that all (factors into) how your band … moves forward. I don’t think you’re ever going to hear a Goo Goo Dolls hip-hop CD, you know? But I do know that the fact that hip-hop has made its way into our lives over the years, you know, that there’s components of it that we’ve borrowed."

Fans will be hard-pressed to find any traces of hip-hop on "Something for the Rest of Us," which sticks to the tried and true Goo Goo Dolls formula of anthemic pop/rock. Rzeznick’s lyrics, which tend to be generic, are sung in such soaring hooks that it doesn’t really matter what he’s saying. The man has perfected the art of writing an arena-ready chorus.

On the technical side, the band enlisted help from people like Butch Vig (of Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins fame) for this record. In terms of production, Takac said, the band draws much of its inspiration from U2 albums ("There’s something about the way those records sound, it’s just crazy good," he gushed), although he was reluctant to name specific artists from whom the band draws musical influence.

"People are always a little surprised, I guess, when I talk about music I like," said Takac, who runs a small record label as a side project. "I’ve been signing Japanese girl rock bands, J-rock bands. So, the majority of my time right now is spent listening to Japanese girls screaming over indie rock music."

"I’m not going to drag you into that world right now," he added with a chuckle.

So, aside from running record labels, how do the band members spend their time between records?

"It’s usually a couple very, very short vacations, a couple of extended nervous breakdowns, a bunch of rehearsals, a good chunk of not speaking to each other," he said, laughing. "You know, all of the excitement and chaos that makes for a good miniseries. And then we pull our act together and realize that all the quibbling really doesn’t matter and we need to get this record out."

As what started out as a hobby has evolved into a career, it’s clear that Takac and his bandmates are poised to adapt in order to sustain their momentum within a changing industry.

"I think our mindset’s a lot different. When our band started, there wasn’t an awful lot to do. You know, we weren’t competing with the Internet and video games and all this other stuff that’s out there. We had … cable and record players. … There’s a lot of instant gratification that happens right now. If you’re on the Internet and you’re reading something you don’t like, you know, you can just (close the window). You can change a remote. You have 200 channels. You (have) satellite radio, or you’re listening to one of the 4,000 records you have stored on your telephone. It’s like, all these options are out there for you.

"If our band were to come around right now, I don’t think we would have necessarily the patience to do what we did," he added. "We didn’t know what was out there, so we weren’t that depressed that we didn’t have it. Because, you know, we had to learn everything out of the back of a van, you know, and on the end of a pay phone. … We weren’t really looking for that success. We were just looking to be as badass as we could possibly be. And that’s what motivated us."

Though no one would probably characterize the Goo Goo Dolls as "badass" these days, Takac, for his, seems relieved that the band has a bit of success to ride on, and doesn’t envy artists who are just getting their start in this new era.

"It’s always a crapshoot," Takac said. "You’ve just got to do what you love to do and make it happen. To be able to do it for a job is amazing. But if you don’t, the ultimate reward is just having done something well."

SAN DIEGO — The landscape of television serials is somewhat of a tight rope act. Between the strains of competitive time slot schedules, and pilot series pick ups, even the most critically acclaimed series can be dropped unexpectedly. NBC’s series, "Chuck" has managed to weather all the trappings of cancellation with its witty dialogue, fun cast of characters, and cult like following from both viewers and critics alike.

As season three wrapped up in May, the sobering finale left plenty of questions up in the air. One of them being the fate of Buy More (a parody of the Best Buy electronics store) and its tech support crew (the Nerd Herd). Vik Sahay plays Nerd Herd Lester Patel, a techie who specializes in Apple products. Lester’s storylines generally bring the more humorous side of the series between cage fights with his best friend Jeff to collaborating on their band conveniently named: Jeffster.

Blast recently sat down with Vik Sahay to talk about his work on "Chuck" and what it means to play a diverse character like Lester Patel during his visit to the San Diego Comic-Con 2010.

BLAST: Right now the Buy More is no more. And we love Lester–

VIK SAHAY: Do we?

BLAST: We do! (laughs) If you were hypothetically, in your opinion, envision your character coming back into the game, how would it happen?

VS: I think, this all hypothetical, and this is just me imagining it. I think Lester should come back into the game as a true, dark, and evil rival to Chuck. I think he should get recruited by The Ring, and planted back in to that world as a counterspy.

BLAST: No one would expect that, I think.

VS: Yeah, and he’s already got this thing about him where he doesn’t like Chuck. So I think he would be easily convinced and we could really bring out that dark side.

BLAST: There’s the music of Jeffster (Lester’s band with best friend Jeff,) they’re huge amongst fans of the show. There’s as much a cult following for them as much as the show.

VS: Really? Is that true?

BLAST: Actually, apart from fans of the show itself (who love Chuck and the spy world,) we got a lot of comments about Jeffster.

VS: That’s amazing.

BLAST: Did you ever expect the Jeffster moments to be as popular and go this far?

VS: No, not at all. I mean my goal was to get through the singing, but it was important for me…for Jeffster to be an extension of what Lester was (on the show.) I think maybe, it’s connecting (with fans) in a way because he’s such a train wreck. This is his outlet for his rage and anger; he sings the way he does because of that…he gets to pour all that madness into (Jeffster.) So it’s interesting to use Jeffster through the character of Lester in that way.

BLAST: So what about Lester in love? Anything romantic for him?

VS: Well, he’s on the lamb as it stands (right now.) So maybe out there…either his root chakra will open up (and we’ll see that evil side;) or his heart chakra…(laughs) I think what he wants most out of life is unconditional love. He’s a broken boy, so the way he goes about it is that he’s like a rattlesnake…but I wonder what would happen, and what that woman would be — who would love him.

BLAST: Lester plays in shades of grey on the show, he’s a complicated character.

VS: Yeah, I think one of the things I try and put out there about him is that he’s very complex; his emotions. It’s not just bad, good, bad, good…I think if what he wants is unconditional love, then who he is the scorpion…in the scorpion and the frog fable. He’s like please get me across this river, to the frog on the lily pad; (the frog) is like "no…you’re going to bite me." And (the scorpion) is like "no I promise." He can be very sweet. Then halfway through he (the scorpion) bites…and when you ask him why, (the scorpion) says, "Because it’s in my nature." So that’s how I see (Lester) as the scorpion, but it’s complicated.

BLAST: It’s also interesting that for Lester he comes from such a diverse background. How did you feel about the script and the Lester character when you first got the script? As an Asian actor, you’ve most likely have been offered a wide range of roles.

VS: What I loved about it is that the character is undefined; his name is Lester…so there was no forethought in casting. I think when I was cast they (didn’t consider it.) They were colorblind about it, which is great! Then they put part of his background in it…being Indian even though they’ve written some Jewish stuff which I love! I love it; I have no problem playing Indian or anything like that at all. I like it, I like exploring it; it’s actually good for me as an actor to think to my roots and connect that way.

I like that he’s (Lester) isn’t overly sweet, or obviously nerdy. I like that he kind of has that wild side.

BLAST: The Asian community can at times be sensitive to the way they’re represented onscreen, were there ever moments when you’ve gotten a script and felt uncomfortable about the direction?

VS: On the show "Chuck" it’s never been really a concern. There’s nothing that’s been on where I’ve said no. In fact, I am trying to; I want to add elements about his ethnicities (Indian and Jewish) to the show. Obviously, I’d be most protective of the Indian side of Lester. (The show) has played up his Jewish side, and they use it to their own discretion.

BLAST: Maybe they’ll bring it (his Indian side) up more?

VS: I hope so too. I want to explore that more. I don’t want to do anything that’s facile or thin. As long as it’s a full character that’s there? I’m very happy to play his ethnicity.

Fans of the series can find Vik Sahay along with castmates: Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Adam Baldwin, Joshua Gomez, Sarah Lancaster, Irving Bartowski, Ryan McPartlin, Mark Christopher Lawrence, Scott Krinsky, and Julia Ling return this fall at the usual Monday 8/7C on NBC with its fourth season premiere September 20th .

Justin’s other women. Frank’s ex girlfriend. Kasey’s tattoo. Craig M’s ridiculously coiffed hair.

ABC’s "The Bachelorette" Season 6 was full of memorable moments and memorable catch phrases; "I will guard and protect your heart" just might be the next great pick-up line…or not.

Jonathan Novack, affectionately known on the show as The Weatherman, hasn’t had enough of the reality TV drama. He’s cast on ABC’s new show "Bachelor Pad," in which former "Bachelor" and "Bachelorette" contestants we loved and loved to hate come together to fight for love and money. Novack talks to "Blast" about the season’s scandals,  what he really thought about Ali, and if he regrets being a tattletale.

BLAST: Why did you decide to go on "The Bachelorette"?

JONATHAN NOVACK: A good friend of mine nominated me over a year ago.  I wasn’t sure if it’d be a good move in terms of my career [as a weatherman], but it was an experience that could possibly lead to me meeting my wife.  And the things we got to do, the dates we went on…I feel fortunate to have had that opportunity.

BLAST: If you could describe your experience on “The Bachelorette” as a weather-related event, what would it be?

JN: It was the perfect storm of drama, dating, alcohol…and tanning.

BLAST: Did you actually like Ali? Or did you feel that you had to like her? Do you think that some guys just want to stay to win the game, or do you think that everyone there actually liked her enough to marry her by the end of it?

JN: I really did like her.  I think most of the guys did.  I think some of the emotions were heightened for a lot of us because of the nature of the show and the awesome dates. I’m sure there were a few guys who weren’t into her and still stuck around.  But overall everyone seemed pretty sincere.  If I was already having feelings after a few weeks, then I’m sure the guys who were there for the long haul had strong emotions brewing by the end.

BLAST: When you were kicked off, how did you feel? Were you really that invested in forming a relationship with Ali?

JN: I was definitely hurt.  The experience is so intense, you really can’t anticipate how attached you get and how quickly it happens. The dates are bigger than life, there’s a competition factor with the other guys and watching them go out with her, and Ali was simply a really great girl.  So yeah, it was tough to walk away.

BLAST: Do you think you can really find love on reality TV?

JN: I do.  Think about it like this: Out of all the "Bachelor" and "Bachelorette" shows,  there’s been success, meaning marriage, 10 percent of the time.  If someone told you that you had a 10 percent chance of finding your husband or wife in the next three months, that’d be pretty damn good considering we spend years looking.  So yeah, I think in one strange sense, it’s actually more likely.

BLAST: What did you think about Justin and Frank’s “other women in their lives” situations? Did you have any clue that they were as scummy as they were?

JN: Justin is a huge scumbag.  I had no idea that he was the way he was.  I’m usually good about those things, so it was a surprise for me to find out — I just missed it.  I actually gave him the benefit of the doubt the whole time I was there.  But he was clearly there for his [wrestling] career.

As for Frank, it’s not as clear-cut.  I mean, he seemed like a very emotional and sincere guy.  I thought it was strange that he just immediately jumped back into a relationship with his ex, who he had broken up with however many months ago.  I would have thought they’d have to work some stuff out first.  But at the same time, he wasn’t cheating on two girls like Justin was.  And it’s possible that he was just emotionally confused.  I got to know him pretty well and I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.

BLAST: Was Craig M as much of a d-bag in person as he seemed on TV? What was with that hair?

JN: He was a pretty big jerk, but his hair was very polite.  If we could’ve kept just his hair around, things would have been okay.  Craig M actually started trouble with other people in the house, like Justin and Jesse B.  He tried to bait Jesse B into a fist fight for two hours one night, and producers had to keep pulling him away.  That’s when I said someone needs to speak up about this guy.  Would you want him dating your daughter?

BLAST: Do you regret being somewhat of a “tattletale” on the show?

JN: I don’t see it as being a tattletale.  I see it as respecting Ali’s wishes that the guys have her back.  There were a few other guys in the house that I didn’t like, but I didn’t go say anything to Ali because I don’t just talk trash about people like that.  I saw Craig M as a legitimate problem in the house, and potentially one for Ali.  I was just looking out for her.

BLAST: Why did you decide to go on another reality show?

JN: I needed a good tan.  And $250,000!

BLAST: You aren’t a weatherman anymore. Why not? What are your upcoming plans? Are you still living in Texas?

JN: I finished up my contract at my old TV station in Houston in May.  I’ve been doing some stand up comedy, and I’m opening up at the Laff Spot in Houston on August 12-15.  I’m moving to Los Angeles at the end of August, and I’ll be doing auditions out there for TV.  I’m kind of like a free agent right now.
BLAST: If you were asked to be the next Bachelor, would you? Would you go on your own reality show like “The Weatherman’s Flood of Love” or something if you were asked to?

JN: Damn, you stole my idea; I’ll have to think of a new title.  If they asked me to be the next Bachelor I’d probably say yes.  Are there any petitions out there?

Kina Grannis has come a long way from her days as winner of the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest in 2008. Since then, she has not stopped using social media sites like YouTube to propel her work. As an independent artist Kina’s album, Stairwells, debuted on the Billboard 200 when it was released. Meanwhile, her single, "Valentine" has received more than 2 million views on YouTube.

She started playing the guitar at 15. At the University of Southern California, she was selected by Thornton School of Music to produce a six-song EP during her sophomore year, and “Sincerely Me” was released in 2005. Grannis now plays in front of sold out crowds in New York and has toured throughout North America. Her songs have been featured on ABC’s General Hospital and MTV’s College Life. Stairwells strongly showcases her sweet voice with melancholy tones, filled with hope.

She recently performed songs from Stairwells at Berklee College’s Red Room in Caf© 939. Blast was fortunate to speak with her about everything leading to her career up to this point and her album.

BLAST: You have an interesting ethnic background (Japanese, English, Irish, French, Dutch, Welsh, and Scottish). Does this affect you as an artist or your writing?

KINA GRANNIS: I’m not sure that it affects the words so much because I’m just going through life feeling and thinking just like anyone else. In the industry, it definitely has played a role because you connect with different people in many ways. I’m kind of this in between weird thing, so finding that connection can be harder. I’ve always been proud of my heritage and I definitely feel ownership over both sides. I think it’s just a part of me that I grew up with and I carry along with me.

BLAST: How has your writing changed after you graduated college?

KG: I don’t know that it did not necessarily change now that I’m done. Ever since I’ve been writing, I have slowly been growing and learning how to do it better and honing in on my craft so to speak. I guess what I’ve really gotten better at since then is not being as afraid to write about the things that really scare me or are really personal. It’s easy to write about ambiguous things. To really open up and bare it all can be really hard to do, but that’s when you get the most meaningful songs. So, trying to get better at that is a little hard.

BLAST: Do you feel your education prepared you for your music career?

KG: Well, I studied social sciences and psychology, which I studied because I just find people very interesting. I had originally thought I would study music theory or music industry. Once I started studying those, I realized I wanted to do that but I did not want to learn it. I guess my college education has helped to prepare me in that in trained me to learn how to think and problem solve and be competent.

BLAST: What do you plan on doing with your degree in social science?

KG: I loved my college experience. It was great and I thought my classes were incredibly interesting but deep down I knew that I could never picture myself doing anything other than singing and sharing my music with the world. As long as I’m able to do that I will continue to do that.

BLAST: How has your life changed since releasing Stairwells?

KG: Everything’s been amplified so much! The fan’s support – they are just amazing and they have been there with me the whole way. Being able to tour the country and meet all these amazing people has been an amazing experience. I came from a place where I would play in my hometown and hope that 20 people came, to now, where I can go across the country and 550 people come to my New York show. It’s just been an amazing transition.

BLAST: Winning the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest helped you to become known to the public. Do you think there are any negative effects of winning that contest?

KG: None that are too negative to outweigh the positives. The only negatives were that for a while people are going to call me "the Doritos girl" or "the super bowl girl" and things like that but I’m just a musician. At the same time, they launched my career and gave me the opportunity to do it full time. Whatever nicknames come along, I am fine with.

BLAST: What made you decide to stay an independent artist since you were offered a record label with Interscope Records after winning the Crash the Super Bowl contest?

KG: It was an interesting decision but when I finally met with the label, I was ready to go. I had an album written and I was ready to give it to everyone. Their plan was a slower one where they would have me be developed and write with a bunch of different song writers. I couldn’t give up these songs that meant so much to me and give up my creative freedom like that; it didn’t feel right. Especially having the amazing online support, I knew that if I go out by myself, I’m still going to have people who believe in me and supporting me in my decision.

BLAST: I read that you shipped your own merchandise, booked you own shows, and other tasks that normally a record deal would manage. Do you continue doing this and when did you find the time to write?

KG: I did, right until I released Stairwells. Thank goodness or else I would have died! I started doing it probably two and a half years ago. I had my three old CD’s and it was a fun way for me to really connect with people and thank them. I’d write little thank you notes in every CD, put some stickers in, and  hand-write the thing. It was really fun for me and I was sad to give it up; but at the same time, it was like, well, you can postage things for five hours or you can pick up your guitar and be a musician again.

BLAST: I’ve also read that you taught yourself how to play the guitar. How hard was learning?

KG: I don’t remember it being too hard. I was so excited and wanted to do it so badly that I kind of locked myself in my room and did it, I played day after day after day. It’s kind of a blur in my mind, I don’t really remember. I’m sure I struggled but I do remember my fingers hurting a lot.

BLAST: What motivated your decision to allow free downloads of your single "Valentine"?

KG: Valentine was the first song that was getting out for the album. I wanted as many people to hear it as possible and have them give it to their friends and family and put it out in the world. At that point, my album was going to come out and people could buy it but I wanted to let people know that here’s this little gift from me, please take it and give it to everyone.

BLAST: You post cover songs on your Youtube channel. Why did you decide not to use any on Stairwells?

KG: This was a really important album in that it was my first legitimate whole album I was putting out by myself. I wanted it to be all songs that I had written and meant a lot to me. While I love doing covers and they are all great songs, they are not my words and my emotions and it was not the right time for that but it’s something that I’m open to.

BLAST: What is the significance of the title Stairwells since it isn’t a song on your album?

KG: When I was in college, I had already started playing guitar and singing and songwriting but I was still very shy. At that point, I had this huge desire to be writing and singing but I didn’t necessarily want to be doing it in front of anyone or disturb the peace. So I found myself retreating to random stairwells and my dorm and lecture halls and I would just sit there and play for hours. The stairwells were the place where I grew into an artist and I just wanted to pay it tribute.

BLAST: I’ve read you’re an avid supporter of cancer research. Is there a personal significance for supporting this cause?

KG: Yes, my mother was actually diagnosed with Polycythemia Vera about maybe 10 years ago at this point. Obviously it’s something that is really important anyways but when that happened, it really hit home. It’s such a scary and unfair thing and I like to fight it as much as I can.

BLAST: Is she well now?

KG: She is OK. It’s under control right now.

BLAST: I’m glad to hear that.

KG: Thank you.

BLAST: Now that you’re album is out, what can we expect next from you?

KG: I’ve got another tour coming up in the fall on the west coast and a little tour date next summer. Other than that, I’m going to try to get back in the writing process again because I’ve been in release mode for so long.

BLAST: We want to congratulate you again with your tour and your performance today because you were really amazing.

KG: Thank you. Thank you so much!

CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, we incorrectly stated the year that Kina Grannis won the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest. She won it in 2008.

CORRECTION: Because of a reporting error, Polycythemia Vera was spelled incorrectly.

Mario Lopez, host of “Extra,” was at this year’s Health and Fitness Expo at the Hynes Convention Center promoting healthy living through his new book “Extra Lean.”

Along with Lopez, the expo featured Shawn Thornton from the Boston Bruins, Krista White — winner of America’s Next Top Model — Teddy Bruschi from the New England Patriots and other well-known celebrities. People crowded the entire first floor of the expo, which was divided into sections: health screenings, cooking demonstrations, a dancing stage, food samples, and fitness activities.

Upon entering the Expo, Mario was on stage cooking a recipe from his book. I waited for him in the Celsius section which featured the Fitness Age Challenge, a computerized fitness assessment program to learn one’s real "fitness age". Mario is the spokesperson for Celsius and is promoting their new summer campaign the "Ultimate Workout Challenge". I spoke with him about his new book Extra Lean, how he stays fit, and he told me what it was like to be on Dancing With the Stars.

BLAST: What inspired you to write fitness and health books?

MARIO LOPEZ: I love the health and wellness industry, and as I’ve gotten older, the things that I’ve learned and applied in my own life I want to share with others. I hope that what I’ve written helps change lives.

BLAST: In your book Extra Lean, you say you live extra lean. What does this philosophy mean to you?

ML: Extra lean is a philosophy and approach toward food in general. It means living healthy in all aspects of life, beginning with how we embrace and enjoy food. It is not a diet book, but a food book with principles that I believe in and live daily. I want to help people because it is a scary thing to manage weight when you do not know what to do. The three things I want people to remember are to eat carbs, protein, and fat at every meal. I want them to eat frequently throughout the day and practice portion control. The dedication to one’s health through food will allow so many other areas of life to come alive; from relationships to the economy, disease prevention and longevity. It all starts at the table.

BLAST: Through your book, how can one live their life according to this philosophy?

ML: The way to live the philosophy is to renew your mind when it comes to food. A true paradigm shift needs to occur. Because it’s not about what you can’t eat, but it’s about putting food to work in your favor, helping you feel and perform at your best.

BLAST: My favorite aspect of your book is your seven day meal plan (Seven Windows of Opportunity), which includes muffins, a tropical smoothie, fresh tomato pita pizza, and chicken enchiladas. I love how your meal plan does not deprive people of what they want to eat. What is the most important aspect you want readers to remember?

ML: The book breaks it down and explains the principles, but it keeps you motivated because the results will come quick. It’s amazing when you cut calories how much weight you lose. I encourage people to have a cheat meal every week like pizza because you are still living extra lean. When it comes to the seven windows of opportunity, the most important aspect is to treat your body like a small blaze. You don’t throw a huge log on a fire and hope it burns efficiently. No, you steadily and methodically put small quick-burning kindling on the flame. Our metabolism works the same way. Don’t worry if you don’t eat seven times, per se. Just make sure you’re constantly eating and allowing your inner fire to burn.

BLAST: What is the best way to practice making healthy choices in unlikely places?

ML: Once you incorporate the philosophy of living extra lean you can make those choices really easy. Eating out you should avoid anything fried and stick with grilled chicken, salmon, or pork. Almonds, bananas, and peanut butter are good for snacks and can be found in any convenient and grocery store. You learn to become aware of what you’re eating.

BLAST: What are your favorite meals to eat that help you stay fit?

ML: Some of my favorites are sweet potatoes, salmon, and chicken, but I still love Mom’s enchiladas (her recipe inspired my healthy chicken enchiladas in Extra Lean). That’s the important thing though, I’m too big a fan of food to exclude things I love. The key is to learn how to incorporate those foods into your lifestyle. I’ll never give up Mexican food and I’ll always stay in shape— so the two can go hand-in-hand. Also, drinking Celsius during the day helps me burn calories when I’m not working out and keeps me energetic throughout the day.

BLAST: When did you start using Celsius and how is it different from other energy drinks on the market?

ML: I started drinking Celsius a couple of years ago just because I had tried every energy drink out there. I like how it tastes; that’s the first thing that attracted me. Celsius has no sugar, no carbs, and low sodium. I like that it helps you burn calories it gives you a nice kick before you work out. Plus, it comes in other good flavors.

BLAST: Why is fitness so important to you?

ML: Well, fitness is a top priority in my life and has been for a while. I’m the Boys and Girls Club of America national ambassador of fitness and the governor and presidents counselor of physical fitness. It’s become a passion of mine.

BLAST: Do you have any workouts that you like?

ML: I like to mix it up, keep the muscles guessing. I like boxing a lot and dancing.

BLAST: Growing up did you have weight issues?

ML: "When I was a little kid I did. Obesity is prominently featured in my family. I wanted to help my family first and be an inspiration. Next I went through to my community and with the platform of my own show I can now help and inspire people on a national level."

BLAST: You wrestled in high school. Did this help overcome your weight issues?

ML: Oh, absolutely. I grew up wrestling and also did dance. Being active in wrestling not only helped me lose weight and build muscle, but I think those days helped me form my foundation for my passion for fitness and competition. Just being active is always important. As I’m getting older, I learn to eat and drink right. I don’t drink sodas either.

BLAST: How did it feel to be competing with Emmit Smith on Dancing With the Stars?

ML: Emmit was great. From the football field to the dance floor, Emmit is a true champion. I was honored to compete with him. Everyone on the cast was great. I will never forget the experience.

BLAST: As host of Extra and America’s Best Dance Crew while acting, where do you find time to work out?

ML: It might sound cliche, but I get it in when I can fit it in. If I know my afternoon and evening are jam-packed, I’ll make sure to train before work. Basically, not training is not an option. Living a healthy lifestyle sometimes takes strategic planning. If you are serious about training and changing your body, you will find the time.

BLAST: Will you continue writing health and fitness books?

ML: Absolutely. Health and fitness will always be a big part of my life and career. I hope to continue doing my part to help America become a healthier, fitter nation.

Jeffrey Lewis performing with The Bundles in Machester, U.K. on May 17. (Media credit/Man Alive! via Flickr)

NEW YORK — Jeffrey Lewis is sitting in a double-parked 1991 Nissan Pathfinder on South Eighth Street in Williamsburg on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s in low 80s as he’s flipping through pencil marked 11×17 pages.

In the car’s dusty interior, a black sketchbook and a small pouch of pens and pencils are on the back seat. A used scratch ticket is on the passenger side floor and coins and old receipts are scatted around the dashboard. The air conditioner is off but Lewis looks comfortable in his black Brooklyn Anti-Folk Festival t-shirt and blue Levis with worn out knees. A red number four pencil rests on his right ear, the tip poking out of his thinning shaggy brown hair.

The Pathfinder has been Lewis’ office recently, at least for a few hours on Tuesdays and Fridays when New Yorkers play a giant game of musical cars as the city’s streets are cleaned. The pages may be part of the eighth and latest issue of Fuff, Lewis’ self-published comic book series, but the 34-year-old artist and musician isn’t happy with them yet. Lewis has been working on the issue since last June and hopes to finish this summer.

"It could be done this week if I just hunkered down," he says.

Lewis has more pressing responsibilities: Working out transportation and housing issues before going on tour with his new group, The Bundles, on May 15 throughout the U.K., and with his brother Jack in Israel beginning May 22. By the end of the month, Lewis will be at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, Spain.

The last nine years have been busy as Lewis transitioned from playing coffee houses and small venues to touring around the U.S. as an opener for acts like Dr. Dog, and as a headliner in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Music became a source of income for Lewis around 2001 when his first album came out on Rough Trade Records, and more gigs were booked.

In 2009, Lewis released his fourth album, "‘Em Are I," and he was asked to write a series of articles and a comic strip on songwriting for The New York Times. This year, he recorded a series of "illustrated songs" – tunes that Lewis sings while holding posters of related drawings — for the History Channel on topics like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Peloponnesian War.

Living on money saved from touring over the past four years, Lewis spent this spring in Williamsburg resting drawing before touring this summer.

"I’ve been doing more artwork and a bit less music," Lewis says, "and also I sort of feel like I’m in between albums in a weird way. I don’t really know what the next album is going to be."

Dates are scheduled. He just wants to get it done. And for that, he probably needs to go to Maine.

–

Lewis grew up in a Manhattan tenement apartment on East Ninth Street between First and Second avenues. His mother, Wendy, is an English teacher. Joe, his father, was a New York City firefighter until an injury in the early sixties. Lewis’ father receives a small pension check every month, Lewis says, and lives "a very hippy lifestyle." His father "always sort of had one little hustle or another," Lewis says, "anything to avoiding working full time."

Before Jeffrey and his brother Jack were born, the Lewis’ bought land about thirty miles north of Augusta, Maine where the family later spent a few months every summer sleeping in a trailer.

Jeffrey didn’t play sports. He sketched on the floor of his room and included drawings in school projects. Horror novels by John Bellairs were Lewis’ favorite books and he bought comics at magazine stands in Saint Mark’s Square. Marvel’s Rom issue seven was the first comic he really liked.

He played piano as a teenager, learning chords and basic theory, but was always more interested in drawing and comics. At the State University of New York at Purchase, Lewis’ thesis for his Literature major was a critical analysis of the comic, The Watchmen. For two years after graduating in 1997, Lewis traveled, began writing punk and garage-tinged folk songs, and finished his first professional comics.

–

(Media credit/Dale Harvey via Flickr)

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Lewis flips though a sketchbook. This is his 24th. The others sit on a shelf in his third floor Williamsburg apartment, where Lou Reed album covers and a poster of Rom are d©cor.

"I finally put them all in order and I realized how much I slowed down. In the past few years I’ve been filling up about one sketchbook a year, whereas before I started touring I was filling up about three sketchbooks a year," Lewis says.

Drawing does not get done on tour.

He can’t work in a car and needs to be alone to concentrate. Still, Lewis brings his current sketchbook every time he goes on the road. Each book begins with a drawing of Lewis and his favorite comic book character Rom, has a list of songs and a page marking when the book was started. The first page of the book he is holding now has Lewis and Rom surrounded by overwhelmingly cute dogs under a title drawn in the style of a 1950′s horror comic.

His work isn’t exactly mainstream fare. One comic is based on his father’s exaggerated story about a cross-country trip in a 1959 Plymouth Fury that was ripped apart by bears. Another was named, “Reflections on Tomorrow Thus a Yesterday Flower Shall Doom." Now he’s working on a coming-of-age story with adolescent superheroes experiencing the growing pains of everyday middle-schoolers. On one half-sketched page, Lewis shows a shy superhero boy that feels ostracized by his schoolmates, goes home and masturbates in the bathroom.

His comics are sold in a handful of stores around the U.S. Lewis says he rarely sees any money from retail sales. and the comics are sold at every show he plays. But the they not only take up more physical space in cars than CDs, comics make much less profit.

After looking over the 24 sketchbooks this spring, Lewis says he realized his drawing skills hit a peak in the late 1990s as his music career was beginning. To get over it, Lewis says, he will have to spend more time drawing.

He flips to pages where he recently copied panels from some of his favorite comics, like Eight Ball and The Watchmen.

"William Faulkner apparently would retype and retype the entire novel of The Great Gatsby just to know what it felt like to write a great novel. I thought that was a funny idea and, just for kind of a joke, I thought I would see what that would be like with comic book pages," he says.

–

At about 1:15 p.m., Lewis puts his key into the ignition.

"It’s about that time," he says. The engine whines. It won’t start. He glances at the dashboard and tries again. The ignition clicks and the Pathfinder is alive. After the car is parked in its usual place across the street, Lewis decides to walk down Broadway for pizza.

The used Pathfinder was purchased two years ago for touring the U.S. When home from tour, Lewis moves the car back and forth across the street twice a week and drives to Maine during the summer to concentrate on drawing. He’s put about 70,000 miles on the odometer.

He first went to Maine to work on his comics in 1997, just after college. After a few months, he finished the 40-page "Tao Jones," his first comic. He hated going there as a teenager. "I always just wanted to come back to New York immediately, but then once I realized that it was a really good spot for working on my comic books I started spending a lot more time up there," he says. Lewis built a small one-room cabin with no electricity and plumbing where he sleeps and works.

Before the Pathfinder, he would take a bus from Manhattan to Boston’s South Station, and hop another bus to Augusta. Then Lewis hitchhiked the thirty-mile stretch to his family’s property.

"I’m probably going to go when I get back from this next tour, but I haven’t gone for a whole summer for a long time, cause its just harder now that, you know, with tour stuff, if I have a girlfriend, or, you know, anything that just makes it impossible to disappear for three months or four months at a time," he says.

Each every trip is more or less the same. He packs a few shirts, pairs of socks and underwear, an acoustic guitar and his art supplies. Arriving at the cabin, Lewis cleans up, throws a few dead mice away, and gets to work.

He writes a script and outlines basic page layouts and then draws characters and scenes in his sketchbook. Once he knows the basic plot and panel flow, Lewis begins to sketch lightly on 11” x 17” card stock. Figures and backgrounds emerge in 3h and 4b pencil marks. He doesn’t know where it’s going yet.

As graphite is layered on, Lewis makes choices. Words and the page borders are the first elements to get painted with a size six watercolor brush. Each panel is finished with strokes of black Windsor & Newton ink and details in Micron pen. The finished page is scanned, converted into a .tiff file and sent electronically to a printer in Texas. Soon boxes arrive at his Williamsburg apartment with 3,000 copies.

–

Lewis is sitting in Sabrina’s Pizza Restaurant on Broadway. He’s serious about pizza. In a Times article, Lewis said the best "political" song he ever wrote was about price increases in New York pizza joints ("Sal’s Pizza Has Sold Out to the Yuppie Scum").

Customers sit at some of the tables, only casually glancing at Lewis at most. He is not Jeffrey Lewis the musician or comic book artist here. He’s just eating a regular slice of cheese.

"I always just wanted to do comics. That’s, like, what I feel I’ve wanted to do my whole life," Lewis says after he finished the slice, "Its just that very, very few people make any money at that, it’s a very esoteric form of entertainment to make a living at."

He never planned on making a living as a musician. Despite the pressures and dual roles he’s playing, Lewis says there is improvement in each comic he produces.

"I would like to think I’m not too old to actually to end up as a comic artist after all but you know at a certain point anybody who’s playing baseball sort of realizes, like, oh I’ll never make it to the major leagues, you know, I’m at such and such an age," Lewis says, pausing. "I don’t know if art is like that ‘cause you really can get better and better at it the more you do it."

OXFORD, Maine — Adam Browning celebrated his birthday and a homecoming of sorts at the Nateva Music and Camping Festival on Saturday.

Browning, of Muncie, N.Y., turned 22 down the street from where he was born.

As the Grateful Dead were about to end their last set at the Oxford Plains Speedway in 1988, Diane Shatz gave birth to Adam at 11:59 p.m.

"It must’ve been ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ that did it," his father Phil Browning told the Advertiser Democrat of Norway, Maine, referring to the last two songs of the night that were playing as Adam was born.

"He decided he wanted to hear the music," Shatz said in the 1988 article.

On Friday near the entrance to the festival on the Oxford County Fairgrounds, Browning, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, was carrying two 20 pound bags of ice from a nearby supermarket.

"Its almost a religious experience, it’s the first time I’ve been here since 1988 and I definitely don’t remember that," Browning said.

His father bought him the ticket and he is attending the festival with his girlfriend and several friends.

Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, former members of the Grateful Dead, are scheduled to headline the festival’s line up on Sunday with their band Further. The Grateful Dead, and its various post-Jerry Garcia incarnations, have not played in Oxford since 1988.

"I’ve seen Further a couple times and they’ve been amazing so I hope they put on as good of a show if not better," Browning said.

Adam said he is still in contact with Edna Olmstead, an Oxford woman that delivered him. On Saturday the two reunited around noon.

"I haven’t seen him since that day 22 years ago," Olmstead said in a telephone interview as she was about to leave to pick up Browning and his girlfriend.

"They want to get away from that scene and refresh themselves for a bit," she said

While 22 years have passed since Browning was born at the concert and any members of the Grateful Dead have performed here, Browning said that he doesn’t think the scene is all that much different from what his parents experienced.

"Everybody’s peaceful here, everybody gets along. I don’t think its changed nearly as much as anyone thinks it has," he said.

SAN DIEGO — There is a small patch of green known as the “Park in the Park” that exists near San Diego’s Petco Park, where the city’s baseball team usually plays to a cheering crowd. Park in the Park is a designated area for attendees who want to catch a game without breaking their wallets; it’s a picturesque space with a wonderful city view. And during Saturday night’s lunar eclipse, San Diegans lined up to celebrate the upcoming movie "Twilight Saga: Eclipse," which hits theaters nationwide on Wednesday, June 30th.

San Diego is one of several cities (see our coverage in Phoenix and Denver) chosen nationwide to host Summit Entertainment’s "Twilight Night." It’s free event that includes a double feature of the first two movies ("Twilight" and "New Moon"), guest appearances from the cast, live music, and exclusive sneak peeks of "Twilight Saga: Eclipse."

Whether you’re a fan or not of Stephanie Meyer’s explosive vampiric series, there is little doubt as to the significant impact its followers have in pop culture right now. An event such as "Twilight Night" is proof positive the franchise is not slowing down any time soon. In San Diego, fans camped out the previous night just for the chance of being inches closer to a Cullen or to support the Quileute werewolf tribe known as "The Wolf Pack."

The Park closed its iron gates off to the public after reaching maximum capacity in less than an hour. Several families who arrived late stood (literally) on the outside looking in. Some pleaded by explaining, "I left work hours early for this…" or "I won’t get too close." Children cried; parents threw tantrums, but all were rejected admission.

Usually a fanaticism left for rock stars and concert tours, "Twilight" is one of the few pop phenomenons which continues to bring in droves of people and cause hysterics. Proper planning at events like "Twilight Night" is crucial in maintaining safe crowd control and ensuring a good time. The organization at Park in the Park from all parties involved was great, and easily could have turned into mayhem without their efforts. As for the fans, their energy added to the electric atmosphere as they waited for the cast appearances. Many walked around proudly in black shirts with the words "Twilight Saga: Eclipse" written across their chests in the trademark "Twilight" font face. Whispers and sighs from many of the younger fans could be heard as they debated over their favorite characters. Some even took it a step further and wore the "bite mark" prosthetics which showed more than the classic two, small dotted marks of a vampire; it looked as you would expect a real bite to appear: bloody, fleshy, and slightly gory.

Hosting the event was Jenna Busch from Moviefone and Quddus best known for his previous work in MTV’s "Total Request Live (TRL)." Fans even cheered them on as they set up for their live event, showing their love isn’t just left for the stars of the films. Local San Diego band War Stories set off festivities playing a live set to a frenzied crowd which could be heard easily within several city blocks, perking the curiosity of many locals who stepped over to the gates to catch a glimpse. The music of War Stories is reminiscent of band Interpol but with the lead singer, Evan Robinson, blasting out amazing vocals it feels as if he were channeling Michael Hutchence from INXS. Their song "Insecure Boyfriend" was a highlight, and judging by the audience reaction they’ve got themselves a whole slew of new fans.

As War Stories’ performance came to an end, the focus quickly shifted to the main stage area where Busch prepared to go live on air. Meanwhile Quddus connected with several select attendees whose questions were sent to Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

It was worth the wait as members of the cast made their way onto the red carpet, and fans reacted with a swirl of ardent screams. Edi Gathegi (vampire Laurent) was originally schedule to appear but could not attend at the last minute. In his place was the lovely Christian Serratos, who plays Forks’ human resident, Angela Weber. Joining her was none other than Dr. Carlisle Cullen himself: Peter Facinelli.

Serratos wore her long brown hair in a simple braid. Dressed in a white strapless gown, she looked exquisite despite the chilly weather.

Peter Facinelli followed shortly afterwards sporting a dark ‘do, a change from Dr. Cullen’s trademark blonde hair. He dressed casually in dark denim and leather jacket while carrying a smile for all the fans. When Facinelli was asked about making it to San Diego, the crowd burst into screams, and the actor couldn’t help but note the audience attendance was as enthusiastic as the "Twilight: Eclipse" LA premiere days ago.

As soon as their time on camera was finished, both Serratos and Facinelli took an extended amount of time to sign autographs, and chat briefly with some of the people at the front. It’s the cast’s patience and respect for fans that makes the film so successful. There was even a moment were Facinelli held a baby, making him appear more like a politician than actor.

Yet the most dramatic turn was about to unfold as a sudden stillness spread through the crowd, and a stretcher was brought in by some medics. Although it’s uncertain exactly the cause for the situation, it appeared one of the fans may have passed out while Facinelli came by to sign autographs. After the situation was resolved, and no serious injury caused, the crowd returned to its excited state, proving again that nothing holds back a good time at a "Twilight" event.

"Twilight Saga: Eclipse" will be the last film of the year as the final installment "Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn" won’t start production until 2011.

"Eclipse" hits theaters and IMAX June 30.

DENVER — Last night hundreds of Twilight fans gathered at Sloan’s Lake Park in Denver for Twilight Night, a special celebration in honor of the upcoming movie, “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” and the evening’s lunar eclipse.

The event featured a screening of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, along with special appearances by two supporting cast members, Booboo Stewart and Tinsel Korey. The two play Seth Clearwater and Emily, members of the Quileute tribe and the Wolf Pack, the werewolves of Twilight.

(Don’t miss Blast’s “Twilight Night” coverage in Phoenix and San Diego)

Fans of all ages showed up at the park as early as 4:00 to show their excitement for Eclipse. Groups of teenagers and families with young children huddled under umbrellas in the pouring rain. They clutched dog-eared copies of Stephenie Meyer’s novels, along with water bottles, cell phones, magazines, posters, jewelry, T-shirts, and notebooks all emblazoned with the Twilight logo.

One large group of fans from Lakewood, Jefferson, and Creyton high schools started chanting "We want the Wolf Pack!" The girls were decked out in Team Jacob shirts and soaked to the skin. Tanya Castillo, age 13, said of the group’s love for Bella’s werewolf friend: "He’s so sweet and he takes his time for Bella. Plus his abs. Plus, he’s loyal… but also his abs."

Not all the fans were rooting for Twilight’s hunky werewolf. Team Edward had a strong presence as well. Denver woman Kandy Coleman, staying dry under a Twilight umbrella, had a compelling reason to support Edward. "He’s a good example for every man from age eight to eighteen of what makes a good mate," said Coleman.

Three lucky eighth graders from Littleton, Colorado won VIP passes from a Vitamin Water promotion to an advance screening of Eclipse on Tuesday. Sophie Iannac, Laura Wagner, and Emily Redmon won the passes because of the amount of "Twilight bling" they wore to Twilight Night: T-shirts, buttons, jewelry, and even shoes.

Margareto Costello, 23, who was visiting friends in Denver, identified herself as "not a fan." When asked why she thought the books had become so popular, Costello said, "Because literacy rates are going down and it’s quite easy to read." The New Jersey native was one of the few in the crowd who weren’t there for the love of Twilight.

Around 7:30, the rain stopped, the sun came out over the lake, and hundreds of fans screamed happily as Korey and Stewart finally arrived. The pair made their way along the barrier, signing autographs and taking pictures with fans. Stewart ran along the crowd, slapping high-fives, before greeting a group of fans who won the privilege of going "backstage" to meet the two Twilight cast members.

Korey and Stewart got on stage to say a few words over screaming support from the crowd. The two members of the Wolf Pack expressed their excitement for the premiere of Eclipse and their appreciation for the fans.

The giant screen lit up, and the opening narration of New Moon began to play, breathless fans mouthing along with the words.

“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” opens nation-wide on Wednesday, June 30.

It’s difficult to pigeonhole London-based quartet Mumford & Sons, and that in itself is the crux of their appeal. Frontman (and group namesake) Marcus Mumford’s singing style is distinctly British, both in his self-deprecating lyrics and the accent with which he pronounces them, but the words are sung over foot-stomping chord arrangements that draw heavily from more typically American styles like country and folk.

The group’s members themselves don’t have a concrete description of their music — just don’t call them a bluegrass band.

"Because we’ve got a banjo in our band, a lot of people think, right, they’re a bluegrass band," Mumford said in a recent interview with Blast. "But we definitely don’t claim to be (one), because firstly, none of us are good enough musicians to call ourselves a bluegrass band."

"Our country is immersed in Americanized culture. … The most popular films are all American made, and the same with a lot of music," he went on. "When we were growing up, those influences were very present in the sort of cultural tapestry that made up what we lived in. … "(But) I wouldn’t say (our influences are) exclusively American music. British pop, like The Kinks and The Beatles, we look up to them just as much as we look up to any of the American songwriters that we love. So we’re a real hybrid blend, I suppose, of different types of music."

The recipe appears to be working. After releasing their debut album "Sigh No More" in the UK last October and in the U.S. in February, the band (Mumford, "Country" Winston Marshall, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane — all multi-instrumentalists) recently concluded a headlining U.S. tour and left a trail of buzz in their wake. Their single "Little Lion Man" has also made a dent in American alternative radio playlists, and they’re slated to team up with one of their idols, Ray Davies, on the Kinks’ singer’s collaboration album later this year.

Just three years ago, the future musicians of Mumford & Sons were all unknown fixtures on the London music scene whose paths crossed in the summer of 2007. By that fall, they were rehearsing together as a group, but unsure as to what kind of sound they were trying to hone.

"All four of us came from slightly different angles, musically," Mumford said. "Ben and I played in a jazz band together. At the end of school, I got really into country music. … Ted was playing a lot of blues. He’s a blues guitarist, really, by trade, but had also picked up a double bass. And Winston had been teaching himself the banjo and got really into some bluegrass music."

They decided to just mix everything together and chose the band name in order to evoke an old-timey British family business. Other acts soon began to take notice.

"How we became a band, really, was just through other bands inviting us along for the sake of fun, really, and just saying, ‘Come and play some gigs with us,’" Mumford explained. "That’s why we really take our live gigs very seriously, and we take what bands we tour with very seriously. Because a gig can be an entire experience from start to finish, not just like a focus on one band."

Supporting them on their American tour earlier this year was Australian outfit The Middle East, but the "pay it forward" approach extends beyond touring. Wanting to retain artistic control of their material, they self-produced three EPs and formed their own label to release "Sigh No More" independently. Mumford said they’re "definitely" interested in signing other acts.

"Not so much taking them under our wing so that we can have any kind of ownership, but more just, like, we were given so many steps up along the way when we first started as a band that we love the communal aspect of it, the community aspect of the music that we play. Musically speaking, a lot of the styles of the music that we love, like jazz and folk and blues, are very communal. They’re very based on relationships and that’s what inspires a lot of the music — not just kind of locking yourself away in a room and, you know, cranking out lots of different types of sounds and a song is made. The songs that we make are a result of rubbing off or being rubbed off on by lots of other people."

Relationships aside, Mumford & Sons’ evident business savvy probably won’t hurt their trajectory, either.

"No one quite knows what’s happening to the music industry. It’s kind of a changing world," Mumford said candidly. "We like the idea of being owners of (our music), and being in control of it, and having approval over everything, so that, in 10 years’ time, any mistakes we make along the way, we can say they were our mistakes. They weren’t mistakes made by people on behalf of us. That’s a distinction that is quite helpful for our mentality. I mean, it puts slightly more pressure on us … but we kind of like the idea of doing it more in that way, and then to team up with people who are really good at their jobs in other areas.

"Being in control and owning the record, at the end of the day, makes you the team captains," he added. "We have quite a large team now of people and record labels. Worldwide, we have a mix of major and independent record labels that we work with. They’re just really great people, and we got to pick them all. We got to pick our best team, which was really great. We’ve had some wonderful advice and some wonderful help. … We’re very, very lucky in that way."

NEW YORK — "And now this child with rusty knees / and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream / and asks me for the words to build her mother again."

Patricia Smith’s voice reverberates through the narrow, dimly lit room in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe, a charming French restaurant in Greenwich Village that tonight is transformed into a hub of poetry. The evening begins with an open mic reading in which a series of poets deliver works varying in caliber and style. Whispers and the clanking of silverware can occasionally be heard throughout the room. But when Smith takes the stage, the audience is captivated, sucked into the vortex of her poetry, drawn in by the power of her words and performance. "Can you teach me to write a poem about my mother? / I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead, / can you teach me to remember my mama? / A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole / has admitted that her mother is gone."

Smith begins every reading with these verses about how poetry helped 6th grader Nicole process her mother’s death. Tonight is no exception, even though she considered devoting her brief 20-minute reading exclusively to newer pieces. She doesn’t feel grounded if she opens with another work because this poem is her manifesto; it is a bold declaration of what poetry can do for others and, of course, what it has done for her.

As the winner of the most prestigious awards in the spoken and written word, Smith has also done a lot for poetry. In her early career, she was crowned the National Poetry Slam champion four times, and her spoken word roots continue to be evident in her heartfelt poetry readings. Later, she garnered the coveted Pushcart Prize for the best literature published by small publishing houses, the very first Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the poetry category, a National Poetry Series award, and a National Book Award nomination.

But for Smith, poetry is not an esoteric pastime to be used as a backstage pass into elite inner circles. She believes in the profound power of language, and she shares her poems because she knows there are people like Nicole who are waiting to hear them, who need to find a way to come to terms with something intensely personal. "You will always find at least one person in every audience who is there for a reason," Smith says. "And it might be a line that’s inconsequential in a poem of yours that will get them to sit up and go, ‘You know, I’ve felt that way; I just didn’t know there was a way to express it.’" In this moment of connection between speaker and listener, these audience members realize "they have a second throat that they’re not using," Smith says. "Poetry is a responsibility and not just an art…You are responsible for how your words are going to reach other people…You need to know that they will have an effect."

This audience connection is so important to Smith that she makes a point to present her new poems to live audiences as soon as possible. The audience’s response and emotional tenor guide her revision process. For example, audiences often have very strong reactions to selections from Blood Dazzler, her book of poems about Hurricane Katrina. She explains, "If I see somebody who’s a little jumpy when I’m doing the [Blood Dazzler] poems, I think, ‘That might be someone from New Orleans; that might be somebody with something to teach me.’ So you can never put a period at the end of the last line of a poem and think, ‘That’s it; I’ve got it; I’ve done it.’ It’s got to be a conversation." The interchange between audience and poet doesn’t even need to include words. "You can actually feel whether or not a poem is working," Smith says.

Smith’s dynamic relationship with her audiences is one of the reasons her poetry appeals to such a wide array of people. She has shared her work everywhere from hole-in-the-wall Chicago bars and a train platform in Berlin to Carnegie Hall and Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival. People from every walk of life—age, race, class, sexual orientation, educational background—gather together to hear her and possibly discover the words they’ve been waiting for.

The Birth of Slam Poetry

The first audience Smith captivated with her poetry was a community of spoken word poets from her hometown of Chicago. Their brand of poetry was imbued with the sound and the fury of language, and they loved the feel of well-crafted, rhythmic words in their mouths. The excitement of their performances escalated when they instituted poetic duels known as poetry slams. In these competitions, a handful of poets deliver poems of three minutes or less. Audience members are selected to judge the poems and eliminate about half the poets each round. After three rounds, the last poet standing is the winner. The amateur judging process means that audience connection is the lifeblood of slam poetry.

As a journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times in the 1980s, Smith discovered slam poetry when she reported on the city’s first Turf Poetry Festival, little knowing that she was destined to become a defining figure of the movement. She gave her first performance during an open mic night at the Green Mill, the cocktail lounge that hosts the famous Uptown Poetry Slam. Her thrilling performances and moving narrative poems quickly won her the respect and admiration of Chicago’s slam community.

In the beginning days of slam, Smith says, "we had no idea, really, what was going on. It just felt really good and a social circle was building up around it. We were all very nurturing and supportive." The poets thought carefully about each others’ work and offered suggestions for perfecting a phrase or rearranging lines for maximum impact. But, says Smith, "it wasn’t just poetry that connected us…We know each other on a deeper level than just, ‘Hi, what’s your sign?’ If there’s something bugging me, I’m more likely to turn to a member of that community than I am to my own family, just because they know more about me in a deeper way. I’ve said things in poems that I haven’t said to a lot of people."

One member of this close-knit artistic group, Michael Brown, eventually became her husband. The pair of sizzling slammers moved to Boston in 1990 and brought the spoken word revolution with them. Initially, Boston was wary of the unpredictability and competitiveness of slam. "Chicago was pretty much ready to try anything," remembers Smith. "When I came to Boston, it was like backtracking…We just had to change our expectations and get people excited about things we were already doing."

Smith and Brown initially introduced slam at the Stone Soup poetry reading, which was then meeting at T. T. the Bear’s Place in Central Square. However, "the staunch Stone Soup readers…didn’t trust where the performance was going," says Smith. They had spent a long time gathering an audience of traditional poetry readers and weren’t prepared for what Smith calls the "crapshoot" of slam performances. She acknowledges that some slam performers "continue to be clowns year after year because they think that they’ve learned what poetry is and how to push buttons." For these performers, the slam is all about finagling laughter, groans, and applause during their three minutes in the limelight. Many of the highly educated Stone Soup crowd were appalled by these types of poets and consequently believed that slam poetry had very little of the linguistic value found in conventional, printed poems.

However, plenty of slam poets—including Smith—were just as entranced by the written word as any Stone Soup writer. Their performances were so thrilling precisely because they had spent hours laboring over their poems, granting life to their beautiful creations through the birth pangs of thoughtful writing, editing, and preparation. One of Smith’s greatest contributions to slam poetry was that her well-crafted verse legitimized the movement in the minds of the literati who were open enough to listen. Her words cut through the "page versus stage" debate and demonstrated that good poetry can succeed in both arenas.

Though the Stone Soup readers rejected slam poetry, Smith knew she could find some Bostonians who would share her passion for it. And she was right: Boston eventually became one of the first cities to adopt slam outside of its Chicago birthplace. When she and Brown moved the slam to a bookstore called the BookCellar, large crowds began to flock to the competitions. In fact, there were so many people crowded on the stairs inside and trying to listen from outside that, for the first time in Boston, poetry became a safety hazard. Slam soon found a permanent home at the Cantab Lounge and, a few years later, spread to the Lizard Lounge as well. "The slam—if you give it air—will work exactly the way it’s supposed to work," Smith says. Fanned into flame by the frigid air of Boston, slam soon became a national phenomenon.

At the forefront of this exploding movement, Smith was quite a rising star herself. She won the individual title at the very first National Poetry Slam championship in 1990, and she went on to reclaim her crown three more times in 1991, 1993 and 1995. One of the pieces she performed in the 1996 championship, "Undertaker," was turned into a five-minute independent film that won awards at the Sundance and San Francisco Film Festivals. She also appeared in the documentary Slamnation, which chronicled the 1996 championship. In this film, many competing poets spoke of Smith with a mixture of reverence and fear, all agreeing that she could be the downfall of their respective slam teams. She was not just the most successful slammer to date; she had become a legend.

Burning the Landscape

While Smith’s career as a slam poet was taking off, her day job was writing columns for the Boston Globe. She had almost as many fans of her journalism as of her poetry. No matter which genre she employed, Smith painted the full humanity of her subjects, and her readers were touched by these authentic portraits.

In 1998, Smith’s incisive stories earned her a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. And that’s when the ugly truth came out: Smith had fabricated sources and quotes in some of her columns for the Globe, violating the first rule of journalism ethics. One of the most notorious made-up sources was a cancer patient whom Smith claimed went by her middle name, Claire. The centerpiece of a column about a new cancer treatment, Claire is portrayed as a formerly optimistic person turned somewhat morbid and gruff by what she calls "the ogre" of cancer. In Smith’s farewell column, she said that she had fabricated characters like Claire "to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point."

But while her journalist’s voice and eye often enriched her poems, her poet’s imagination never should have entered the fact-filled world of reporting.

To her credit, Smith admits that her actions cannot be justified by her lack of time, by her drive to succeed or by her desire to produce a shining column every week. She wrote that these hollow excuses "point to the cursed fallibility of human beings, our tendency to spit in the face of common sense." Some of Smith’s colleagues and readers relished the downfall of a heroine while others felt betrayed, disillusioned and disappointed. But many recognized that despite her ability to stir readers’ thoughts and emotions, Smith was only a human being, just like those she wrote about so poignantly.

Smith’s life quickly spiraled downhill. She lost her job at the Globe, as well as her American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and Pulitzer nomination. At the same time, both her health and her marriage fell apart.

But like an arsonist phoenix rising from the ashes of her own making, Smith refused to let these events defeat her. Not knowing where else to go, Smith returned to Chicago and to her last remaining source of strength—slam poetry. She gave what many consider the most memorable performance of her life at the Chicago Cultural Center in front of the community she had always been real with, the one group that would not turn aside because of her professional sin and her personal despair. To thunderous applause and a standing ovation, Smith laid bare her soul.

Almost a dozen years later, Smith says people still remark on that reading. The audience had initially gathered out of curiosity, wondering what Smith would say after suffering through public demonization and private hell. As her words washed over them, they were deeply moved by the gritty emotion, heartache and triumph. These were words they had been waiting for, words that suggested hope and redemption against all odds.

While Smith says that "it was very important for me to be in that place at that time," it wasn’t until the National Poetry Slam, which took place a few months later in Austin, Texas, that she fully recognized how this group of people could be her saving grace. "That’s when I realized that the poetry community is a really unwavering community," she says. "They had kind of pulled me out [of my depression] because I wasn’t talking to anybody. They really just closed ranks, and that was very, very helpful for me."

The poetry community was the lone encouraging voice in the cacophony of opinions about what the Globe incident would mean for Smith and for her career. Smith recalls people asking her what she would do with her life now that she could no longer write. "The world [was] telling me who I was supposed to be," she recalls. "It’s like, nudge nudge, hint hint hint. And you don’t take the hint, so the easiest thing to do is to burn the whole landscape clean and start over."

Fortunately, when Smith burned the landscape of the journalism career she had built for over two decades, she was not bereft of all avenues for writing. In fact, these events allowed her to focus all her energy on writing and sharing poetry, which she says is "exactly what I should have been doing all along. I’m finding great rewards in it. It’s giving me some personal movement; it’s giving me a way to translate my own life without looking to outside people to legitimize me." While the loyalty of the slam community was immensely helpful for Smith, it was pure, unadulterated poetry that enabled her to find strength in herself. She says, "It was a real revelation to realize that I could find solace in poetry when I needed it, that not only was there a community that I could turn to, but that whenever I’m searching for answers, I feel like I have the power to find them myself and that’s in the writing." It’s not always an audience member who needs to hear a poem; sometimes a poem contains the words the author herself needs most.

Smith’s missteps at the Globe actually helped her to stumble onto the path toward becoming the writer she is today. She says, "I’m not thrilled with how I got there, but to tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t change anything."

Reluctant Hosannas

The many naysayers who thought Smith’s writing career had screeched to a permanent halt clearly did not have their fingers on the pulse of poetry. Before the events at the Globe, she had already published three books of poems, and her work had appeared in literary journals such as The Paris Review and TriQuarterly. But the applause from critics grew increasingly louder as she continued to pour her heart into her poetry. Teahouse of the Almighty, the first book of poetry she published in over a decade, became a 2005 National Poetry Series winner, and Blood Dazzler was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

But regardless of the censure or praise her work receives, Smith will always find in poetry a source of personal strength. It’s not about concrete achievements—putting a period at the end of a line, winning a slam or racking up poetry awards. Rather, it is an important exploration, a process, a journey. As Smith says, "It’s not reaching a goal that matters; it’s [the process of] getting to the goal…When you reach what you think is the goal, you look up and say, ‘Well, damned if there’s not more road there.’" This is a road a poet must walk for herself. According to Smith, "Poetry becomes the way you move your own life forward."

Nevertheless, poetry is also about others. In her poetic manifesto dedicated to 6th grader Nicole, Smith proclaims the weighty responsibility poets have: "Angry, jubilant, weeping poets— / we are all / saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight." While finding her own answers through writing, Smith’s words also help people process emotions they thought were too deep and complex to express. Her poems lend a voice to those who are often overlooked or forgotten and plumb the varied human experiences that tragic news headlines cannot fully communicate.

In the low lights of the Cornelia Street Cafe, dozens of people listen closely to the forgotten voices buried beneath the torrents of Hurricane Katrina’s flood. Smith introduces "34," the first poem she wrote for Blood Dazzler: "The story [about Katrina] that pushed at me the most was the story of the 34 nursing home residents who were left behind to die. So what I tried to do is turn the clock back just a few seconds and give each one of those 34 people just a minute of their voice back."

After the reading, Jackie Sheeler, webmaster of poetz.com and one of the hosts of the Cornelia Street reading, stops by Smith’s table to tell her privately how much she loves the book: "I normally don’t just sit and read a book of poems that isn’t an anthology because it’s too much of just one voice. But I couldn’t put Blood Dazzler down because it’s filled with voices." The book is replete with the nuanced voices of victims and villains alike, tracing the common thread of humanity that binds us all together despite our differences.

In the midst of her literary success, Smith’s goal remains the same as when she first started out as a slam poet: she writes so that both she and her audience can heal and connect, remember and understand. Words have the power to change lives; in different ways, they saved both Smith and Nicole. Fully convinced of poetry’s profound purpose, Smith concludes her poetic manifesto with an exhortation to her fellow writers: "So poets, / as we pick up our pens, / as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones— / remember Nicole. / She knows that we are here now, / and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. / And she is waiting. / And she / is / waiting. / And she waits."

CAMBRIDGE — Both Nona Marie Invie and Marshall LaCount have a distinctive and unassuming vocal style that’s fascinating in the context of their great music. This pair forms the core of the band Dark Dark Dark. Like many of their fans across North America and Europe, the first time I head them play, I immediately wanted, even felt I needed, more.

Jonathan Kaiser (The Blackthorns, Painted Saints), Todd Chandler (who created the movie "Flood" with Dark Dark Dark and the band Fall Harbor), Walt McClements (Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?, Panorama Jazz Band), and Brett Bullion (Tarton) are other gifted musicians that are part of the Dark Dark Dark line up, each joining the band on the road or in the studio at various times while others veer off on different projects. This band is rooted in the surprisingly cool Minneapolis music scene, but they also have deep connections to New Orleans and New York.

They’re frequently on tour, and I caught up with them recently as they performed in Cambridge at the Lizard Lounge to promote their new six-song EP "Bright Bright Bright" (available from Supply and Demand Music). Compared to their previous release, "Snow Magic," this new collection of songs is more optimistic in its themes and more sophisticated, maybe even serious, in its melodies. Both demonstrate that Dark Dark Dark has a beautiful and original sound.

Describing their sound more specifically is difficult and feels a bit like slapping a cheap label on something precious which really has no name. Their record company has called them a "chamber-folk sextet." That’s okay, but it doesn’t wholly encapsulate them (nor is the group always six in number). Some listeners fixate on their frequent use of accordion-driven melodies and see them as a hip, alternative take on Eastern European music. As exemplified by "Snow Magic," the band could have made this particular characteristic their hallmark and rode it to success. But like many genuine artists, they are eager to try new things rather than repeat the old.

Listening to both these releases, one might notice the subtle and not-so-subtle syncopation that pops up in fun and delightful places. This characteristic connects them to jazz, but also to a wide variety of other styles, from medieval choral music to reggae and ska. Does it seem like the more I describe their music the less you’re able to imagine it? Then check out their MySpace page or brightbrightbright.com instead; both provide means to hear their music, for free, with your own ears.

Into the dark

It was a sunny afternoon in Cambridge as Dark Dark Dark did sound check for their Lizard Lounge gig that night. Nona and Marshall remembered me from a meeting at the Whitehaus artist co-op in Jamaica Plain a few years previous. I had heard them play there on a Friday night and spent Saturday trying unsuccessfully to remember their music that had so impressed me the previous evening. Sunday morning, they visited me in my dreams so that I awoke at noon with full memory of their songs in my head. It was an experience that has forever raised the bar on what I’m able to term "haunting melodies."

Seeing them again, after a couple years of listening to "Snow Magic" and a few weeks of hearing "Bright Bright Bright" before its release, I was eager to express my appreciation. Yet awkwardly, among my first words were an admission that "Bright Bright Bright" didn’t immediately sweep me off my feet the same way "Snow Magic" had. But I explained that it drew me in more deeply each time I listened. It’s melodies, like many things complex and magnificent, can’t be fully appreciated until one has time to experience them.

On first play, I liked it a lot. By my third listen, I loved it. Its dainty syncopation charmed me and even made me chuckle. After I’d described my journey into affection and some understanding of "Bright Bright Bright," Nona and Marshall, with characteristic reserve, looked at me just a little bit funny. Then they looked at each other, they smiled a bit, and Marshall said quietly, "Wow, a reviewer who actually listens to our music!"

Both Nona and Marshall have somewhat soft-spoken, introspective demeanor. To even casual questions, they tend to pause thoughtfully before responding, but that might be a lit bit of a Minnesota thing. Nona told me that she "usually makes Marshall handle the interviews," and something in her voice hinted that it’s a responsibility he doesn’t exactly relish either. Their slight trepidation about the media is surprising since music reviewers seem to adore them. Nevertheless, the press is a weird animal, and Nona and Marshall have the perception to recognize that.

With their fans they are less guarded. Their fans are enthusiastic and far-spread. At their Lizard Lounge gig in Cambridge, people came from at least as far away as Northampton, and they were delighted to do it. Other fans, having seen them at AS220 in Providence the night before, drove north the next day to catch their show again. Perhaps recognizing me as a fan of what they do rather than a mere observer, Marshall, Nona, Mark, Todd, and Walt seemed to grow more comfortable with showing me their off-stage ideas and feelings. After sound check, we went to a local taqueria and started a conversation that lasted, off and on, all night.

Getting to where they are

Starting with a report on the tour that brought them back to Greater Boston, Marshall said, "Nothing weird has happened. It’s been totally great. The worst thing that happened was three days of downpour and dangerous driving. And a leaky van. The top seam of the windshield was leaking and filling up the cup holders with water. That’s not that dramatic or calamitous."

A question about the first music they remember owning lightened everyone’s mood. Todd’s first records were J. Guiles "Freeze Frame" and Ozzy Osbourne "Diary of a Madman." Marshall put down his veggie burrito and informed us his were the soundtracks to the movies "La Bomba" and "Top Gun" on cassette. Nona peered over her thick glasses, seemed to suppress a smile, and told us her’s was "Funky Divas" by En Vogue. Walt said his first record was "Come and Feel the Lemonheads" and  Rush’s “Chronicles,” his first cassette.

Marshall recalled, "I remember my mom doing the laundry while I was listening to Dr. Dre really loud in the next room and thinking, ‘I wonder if my mom thinks this is weird.’”

Todd said he listened to that type of music, too, but added, "None of the references were anything I could actually relate to."

Nona and Marshall first became friends in Minneapolis. Then, according to him, "pretty fast we started playing something of Nona’s old songs." Not long after, "both of us were without jobs, and running out of options, and becoming closer friends, and just decided to actually travel and make gas money playing. Within two weeks of being Dark Dark Dark we were on tour."

Soon someone mentioned the accordion, and when asked about its role in the band’s image, Todd explained. "It often seems like we get placed with bands of a certain genre because they feel we fit in because we have accordions."

The accordion isn’t featured on every song, but both Nona and Walt play the instrument. Describing how she first came to play, Nona said she simply "moved in with someone who had one, and I just picked it up and started playing." It must have helped that Nona had first learned the piano. Indeed, several of the Dark Dark Dark members are multi-instrumentalists. Marshall plays piano, banjo, and clarinet. Besides accordion, Walt plays the trumpet. As part of Dark Dark Dark, Mark plays drums and Todd plays bass.

Accordions, horns, certain beats — these things tie the work of Dark Dark Dark to some types of ethnic music, but Marshall says he’s a bit tired of people focusing on the Eastern European nature of their sounds "…because it’s clearly not. It’s okay to talk about that as an influence, along with jazz and folk and tons of contemporary minimalist composers. There’s so many influences that it’s a bore to write them all down." When asked if it was fair to note that along this spectrum, "Snow Magic" was more klezmer-y than "Bright Bright Bright," Marshall agreed, saying, "Definitely. But as far as just calling it that, or calling it any other one of these music types? It’s not true about our music and it’s not respecting the tradition."

He further insists that it’s more than a matter of lumping or splitting when one talks about labeling the music of Dark Dark Dark as Eastern European or as anything else. "It’s more with us that we have so many other influences that it feels very strange to us.  And we hold in high regard so many other different kinds of artists that it doesn’t feel very true to us." He added, "Klezmer and Eastern European music was the first music we learned to play our instruments on, before we started writing ourselves. So that’s what we grew out of, but calling it Eastern European music in any way is cheating."

Previously, Marshall described some of the songs on Snow Magic as "waltzes." When asked if there were tracks on "Bright Bright Bright" that would properly be called waltzes, he thought for a moment and said, "I believe so. But the one-two-three, oom-pa-pa is not so clear any more. And I guess we no longer really think of them that way because we are doing some three against four things and they’re not so blatantly waltz-y."

Nona says people notice how "Bright Bright Bright" has moved their sound in new directions. "Someone did a review," she said, "and it was interesting.  They did still say ‘Eastern European,’ but then they said it was ‘piano driven’ and they had some other adjectives. I mean, it’s true that’s a part of my life and my experience. And when I was learning the accordion, I did listen to a lot of Eastern European music. So it’s there still." Nona described a review that said something like "moving from Eastern European to something jazzy" and added, "I think I like that."

The first, and title, track on "Bright Bright Bright" is indeed driven, slowly and exquisitely, by a piano. On the second track, "The Hand," accordions kick in with gusto, but their flavor is more gumbo than borscht. Hearing how the sound of these accordions, and a lyric about lights across the water, made me think of Louisiana bayous, Nona said, "Ah cool… that’s great. New Orleans has been a really big part of my life so my time there hopefully comes out in my music. But I actually wrote that song in New York. Half of it I wrote in upstate New York, and I think I finished it in New Orleans."

Marshall said that Walter, who is from New Orleans "is a big influence on us. He’s in the band and he’s an influence on us and his other bands. And the Dixieland and the jazz happening in New Orleans is an influence on us. And I think when Walter’s playing it’s even a little more clear than when Nona’s playing. But it’s definitely there."

"Walter plays jazz music in New Orleans," said Nona. "But I don’t know anything about jazz. I listen to New Orleans jazz and I love it. It’s part of our experimenting with writing music and not trying to write in a certain genre. Not trying to categorize ourselves in a certain way leaves us open to exploring."

Creating Bright Bright Bright

"Wild Goose Chase," the last song on "Bright Bright Bright," is a cover of an Elephant Micah song. Of the rest, Marshall explained, "Nona wrote four out of five of those." Marshall wrote "Make Time," the third song on the EP. It starts with nervous, rolling drums that are soon joined by Marshall’s voice sounding a bit creepy and British. Then, after a change, it becomes a joyous melody that both builds and floats pleasantly in one place in a way that might also be thought of as a Dark Dark Dark trademark.

Explaining their creative process, Marshall said, "Generally if Nona writes something, or if I write something, the other gets a chance to edit, or give feedback. But the primary writer is often Nona, and I get to be the editor, especially in language. And the whole band is involved with arranging the music."

Nona described, "Usually I just get an idea, somehow, and think about it for a long time. Then I sit at the piano and sort of work it out, somehow. I don’t know how it happens. It seems a little different each time." She reads and writes music and says "I write lyrics down right away or I forget them… I think usually I get ideas for lyrics first then I come up with the music. I guess I’ve done it both ways."

As for the themes of the songs on “Bright Bright Bright,” Nona says "if it is about romantic love, I tried to explore different aspects, more complicated aspects of those relationships. And some of them aren’t necessarily about romantic love either." She said "it all comes from personal experience," but I asked how specifically that applies, citing the record’s fifth song, "The Flood," that has a nice little image of someone in the park wearing their collar up. Thinking, she squinted, then explained. "Some of that song was really literal. The first half was really literal and the second half was more interpretive."

"Bright Bright Bright" was recorded at Sacred Heart Studios in a former church overlooking Lake Superior. Minneapolis producer Tom Herbers, known for his work with groups such as WHY?, engineered, produced and mixed the EP on analog equipment from start to finish. Nona says, "I think it just sounds a lot better. I think it sounds beautiful. When you record digitally, you’re trying to recreate the beautiful sounds of analog music and when its possible to do analog it just feels better." She added, "I don’t know that much about recording, and I know it can be easier to do things digitally, but for us to just play all in a room, and to have it recorded right onto the tape, like in two takes or something like that, it was amazing to me."

Still, they are a small group of people, and Marshall explained that "the choir" (actually the band itself) was done on a separate track. Nona recalled, "I think there were a couple of cello overdubs, and the clarinet was tracked separately than the rest because Marshall plays it and sings. But most of it was done at once, and it was really great to perform live together because we were able to feed off each others’ energy a lot more. It felt like it was a more holistic experience when we were all in the same room, playing at the same time, instead of wearing headphones and listening to a click track, which is how it can also be done, but it felt more warm and real this way."

Musing about her preference for analog recording, Nona said, "I don’t know if all the advances in technology are that great for listening to music. People just downloading music and listening to it on iPods is such a difference than taking a record and sitting down with it in your living room with a record player. You give it more attention than when you just plug in your iPod on the subway."

Summing up how "Bright Bright Bright" relates to their previous work, Marshall said simply and playfully, "It’s better. We got better!"

Nona said, "I feel like it explores different emotions and different experiences." I agree with both of  them. In its substance, "Bright Bright Bright" has an encouraging relationship to their previous work. It’s built on the same confident foundation, but it towers in good new directions. Their music has some very simple layers and some very complex ones. Their songs, both the slow ones and the faster ones, aren’t just interesting or well-crafted; they’re genuinely catchy.

The fans and the experience

Dark Dark Dark has some deeply devoted fans. According to Nona, "A kid asked me to marry him in Bloomington, Indiana… I said I’m not interested in marriage. That was pretty weird. I guess it was funny… maybe the funniest thing a fan has said to me."

They also have fans abroad, and have played to appreciative crowds in France and Italy. Marshall described, "They were separate trips. It was amazing. We were floating around in the Venice canals in boats that we had built, and pretty much treated like we had the key to the city."

When asked how their European audiences were different, maybe less or more reserved, Marshall said, "Actually it varies. Even the difference between last night and tonight is what you’re talking about a little bit, just because of the way things are set up, and the sound is, and so on." He said their previous night’s gig at AS220 was "louder overall. There were two hundred people there, and we were the last band." He compared that to this particular visit to Lizard Lounge, saying the latter was "more acoustic sounding… it’s a pretty dramatic difference."

Speaking with affection for the band’s followers, Marshall said, "we have a couple fans who have mailed us packages in different cities, or have sent us messages. Quite often, it turns out that some of those might be on different sides of the country. But they end up meeting on the Internet because they’re both talking to us, like say through MySpace. They’ll both comment to us, and realize that they’re both commenting, and end up being friends in the end around us. Some of those people are pretty intense. They’re all really sweet, but sometimes really intense."

Marshall laughed when asked, "What don’t you like to be asked by media?" and reiterated, "Simply saying ‘what are your influences?’ is a strange question because it makes us list bands. And then, I guess, people start putting us in a hole. Whatever that comparison is, it will get used over and over again, and we try to be real careful about that."

Nona agreed and said she’s often asked, "What don’t you want to be categorized as?" or "What bands do you sound like?" I didn’t guess that Dark Dark Dark could get a bad review, but according to Nona, "I think someone said once that they didn’t like my voice. I think people have preferences. They just don’t like accordion, so they’re not gonna like it. They just don’t like us, so they’re not going to like it." More often, Nona said, "I feel like people really get us and get what we’re trying to do."

Looking ahead

Dark Dark Dark, again working with Tom Herbers, have a new album due in the fall. Marshall says, "All the recording sessions are theoretically done, and it’s even rough mixed. But we’re taking a bit more time listening to rough mixes to decide if we’re on the right track… I think that with this album, we certainly didn’t repeat ourselves and I hope we can continue growing and developing in interesting ways and not start making the record that sells and getting into an artistic habit because it worked the previous time… We’ve found that formula, but I don’t want to find that formula and stick to it. But that’s a long-distance fear — what happens to my favorite musicians."

Looking into the future, Marshall says, "I hope we can honor all of our friends and fans without getting too inaccessible in terms of venues and prices and stuff. We try to be careful of that, but even now its a little hard to balance… We have so many fans that are close friends. I’m grateful because it’s kind of a huge number. And we also want to reach out to new audiences and not scare off the old ones."

Part of me would like to see Dark Dark Dark become rich and famous as soon as possible so that more people would be exposed to their wonderful music. But fame and fortune might bring them little happiness if it meant sacrificing artistic integrity or alienating longtime fans. Instead, it seems, their career — like their beautiful songs themselves — will continue to grow and build at its own pace, interesting twists and turns not excluded.

If Dark Dark Dark’s upcoming record reflects the same sensitivity and intelligence as "Snow Magic" and "Bright Bright Bright," they’ll be growing in the right direction indeed.

Media credit/Danny Hammontree via Flickr

Along this particular stretch of road, it’s possible to see not only houses with unapologetic displays of wealth — huge mansions with enormous boats docked behind them — but also grim realities: clusters of colorful tents located only feet away from the rugged waters break. The contrast in the living situation of those two groups could not be clearer.

At first glance, these tents appear to be a campground for families: a campground, it is, but for families, it’s definitely not. The inhabitants of these tents are sex offenders, forced to live under the bridge ever since 2006. When a law was passed by the City of Miami, forbidding any sex offender and predators who has served time to live anywhere within a 2,500 foot radius of any establishment that children congregate, i.e. schools and parks.

In a crowded, cramped area such as Miami Beach, places which satisfy those requirements are few and far between, resulting in ‘Tent City,’ as the area has come to be called — the only solution as to where these unwanted individuals can legally live.

In the four years since the law was approved, the number of sex offenders facing the problem of where to live legally has only increased. This small community of tents that has sprung up under the shadow of the Julia Tuttle Causeway has multiplied to the point that the area resembles a small town with faulty generators, rudimentary plumbing, and dogs and cats kept as pets by the residents. Everyone seems to have an opinion as to this sad and tragic situation, but no one seems to have a permanent and acceptable solution.

Clearly, the nature of the convicts’ crimes makes the issue a sensitive one. Some Miamians are of the opinion that this is what the sex offenders deserve (they have to live miserable lives to pay for their crimes) while others have a different view, that putting them there is inhumane, they have been punished enough and it is time that they be integrated back into society. The criminals may not be sympathetic figures, but casting them to the side of the road, living in tents under a bridge, is also not a solution. It’s only a matter of time before this band-aid fix leads to an infection. The authorities are fully aware what is going on in ‘Tent City’ but, as there is no other option, they tolerate it.

It was Florida’s correctional authorities that put the offenders there in the first place. After it was discovered that there was no other option for registered sex offenders who claim Miami Dade County as their home to live legally, given the 2,500-foot radius clause,  officials began assigning released inmates to the base of the bridge.

Housing criminals guilty of similar crimes amongst each other in a kind of ‘leper colony,’ some say, will only create a hostile and dangerous environment, one that will make crime amongst themselves and towards visitors more likely. The law is one that forces individuals with mental illnesses to live together, unsupervised, in the most unsanitary and precarious condition. There must be a better way of reintegrating sex offenders back into society other then having them live in an environment that surely will hasten the deterioration of their mental health.

Not only are registered sex offenders and predators living amongst themselves, but now homeless drug addicts have allegedly sought refuge in this legal campground.

Now, a new bill is about to be presented to Florida Governor Charlie Crist that would make life for sex offenders and predators more difficult. The bill, intended to create a ‘circle of safety’ for children, would forbid those kinds of individuals from loitering within 300 feet of places where children naturally congregate: parks, schools and playgrounds, etc. The bill states that any convicted sex offender who is caught breaking that law would be charged with a first degree misdemeanor, in addition to spending up to a year in jail. A separate part of the bill would forbid sex offenders and predators from wearing costumes to attract children, such as dressing like Santa Claus.

Back to Tent City:

Tent cities are temporary housing facilities, often set up by homeless people or protestors informally, or officially by state governments or military organizations to house refugees, evacuees or soldiers. An example of this would be the tent cities that formed after natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti. But even Wikipedia states that ‘for sanitary reasons, military tent cities place toilet, shower and laundry facilities at least 50 feet from living quarters.’

Miami’s tent city lacks all of the above. Perhaps that is the case because placing facilities 50 feet away from the tents would violate the terms of their probation. Miami’s ‘Tent City’ also violates numerous fire codes. Under normal conditions, tents are set up in groups of 1o or so, as a precaution to prevent the rapid spread of fire.

The constant noise of traffic flying by; unpredictable, sudden and harsh afternoon showers; extreme heat; intolerable humidity; and unsanitary conditions, all those make Tent City a difficult, if not impossible, environment in which to live. This presumably would make released inmates more prone to breaking the conditions of their probation since it would throw them back into prison — a place that looks like the Four Seasons Hotel compared to Tent City. In prison, housing is guaranteed, along with electricity, beds and meals.

There has been ample media coverage of Tent City, and rightly so, since the day it was founded. Countless images of spray painted signs of ‘We R not monsters,’ among other statements, have become a blemish on the Julia Tuttle Causeway’s otherwise picture perfect, camera ready face. The inhabitants, according to media reports, range from teens who recently turned 18 who had consensual relations with younger teens all the way up to the extreme violent predators, rapist, and child molesters. But everyone there bears the scarlet letter of sex offender.

At any given time, Tent City houses between 60 and 70 sex offenders and predators, but it’s not uncommon for the number to peak to almost 200. Some fear ‘Tent City’ will, in time, become a breeding ground for its inhabitants, a volatile situation that will eventually cause turmoil amongst their own community. The individuals there are competing for scarce resources, including food, water and space. Other concerns are that the living conditions there are completely unsanitary, with trash thrown aside and left to decay (not unlike the inhabitants themselves). Or worse, that these sex offenders will eventually leave city officials no other choice but to force them back into the general population.

Amazingly enough, no one from the City of Miami seems in any hurry to do much about this controversial situation, since some of the sex offenders have the address of ‘Under Julia Tuttle Causeway’ as their permanent residence on their government issued drivers’ licenses. Mail is delivered to them there, at their ‘home.’

A significant impediment for politicians concerning the situation of Tent City is the fear and apprehension of tackling such a sensitive and overwhelmingly controversial topic. Whatever a politician may decide as to the solution to ‘Tent City’, well, passions regarding it are such that it has the potential to sway voters at election time.

Recently, officials have made feeble attempts to try and shut down Tent City. These attempts generally came after news of the locale being plagued by a series of predicable health and sanitation problems. But, as with a majority of laws that have been passed, those usually are implemented at a painfully slow place.

In mid-January, Miami Dade County Commission passed a new law stating that sex offenders find residency other than in Tent City. The Code Enforcement Department — the same department that fines residents of Miami Beach for noise infractions, parking violations, illegal construction and the like — recently put up warning signs at the makeshift camp, threatening evacuation if tenants fail to clean up their trash, and tear down illegally built ‘homes’. But as of March, the tents still remained.

A lawsuit filed by the City of Miami and American Civil Liberties Union concerning Tent City could eventually determine its fate. The case could either lead the camp to being either 100 percent legal, or close it for good. As of April 2010, Tent City was declared to be illegal. A new law states that “sex offenders are still prohibited from to live at least 2,500 feet away from schools and parks, but now they are eligible to find residency at least 1,000 feet from other places kids are at: such as day care centers.” Naturally, this ruling was met with mixed reactions. Jose Smith, Miami Beach’s City Attorney, expressed his disappointment with the passing of this law and stated that this only ‘watered down’ the strict rules that were once enforced.

Recently, officials from the City of Miami Dade County’s Homeless Trust placed all homeless sex offenders in more permanent housing. They decided to close down Tent City and move the residents to a motel, courtesy of taxpayers, along with footing the bill for signing leases up to six months. But that idea didn’t work out. Other guests of that establishment complained at having such unsavory people staying nearby. The manager evicted them, with the result that, within days, some sex offenders now roam the streets freely. Any attempt to go back to their former living quarters would result in immediate arrested on the grounds of ‘trespassing.’

As of late April, all signs of Tent City had vanished — that is, with the exception of its inhabitants, who are now scattered around Miami.

“White Crosses,” the latest offering from Florida punk quartet Against Me!, finds singer Tom Gabel on the cusp of turning 30, exploring the awkward and sometimes painful in-between of his youthful punk roots and more moderate (though not politically so) adulthood.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the first single, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist.” Gabel muses, “Do you remember / When you were young and wanted to set the world on fire? / I was a teenage anarchist, but the politics were too convenient.”

Like their major label debut, 2007′s “New Wave,” “White Crosses” (out June 8 ) features anthemic, power chord-driven sing-alongs delivered with a healthy dose of attitude. The tightly-wound record clocks in at just over 35 minutes, and once again at the helm is veteran producer Butch Vig, whose fingerprints are all over the densely mixed 10-song collection. The recent addition of The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay as a touring member of the band should flesh out the tunes nicely on their tour dates this summer. And George Rebelo, formerly of Hot Water Music, proves himself to be a worthy substitute for longtime drummer Warren Oakes, who left the band about a year ago under less than amicable conditions.

Gabel may have relocated with his wife and infant daughter from the Florida college town music scene of Gainesville to the sleepy beach town of St. Augustine, but it’s clear that his political punk roots haven’t been completely overshadowed by his recent domestication. The album’s title, he’s said, was inspired by the “Cemetery of the Innocents,” a memorial to aborted fetuses, which the singer passed every day while writing the album in St. Augustine, Florida. In the corresponding song, he sneers, “White crosses on the church lawn / I wanna smash them all.”

But, perhaps owing to the regime change between their previous records and this one, some of the political posturing on “White Crosses” feels anachronistic. While earlier releases deftly skewered political figures like Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, Gabel now resorts to name-checking … Robert McNamara?

The strongest songs on “White Crosses” come when Gabel adopts a more reflective, older-and-wiser tone, as on standout track “Because of the Shame,” set at the funeral of, presumably, an ex-girlfriend.

On the country-tinged (yes, you read that right) “Ache With Me,” he wonders, “Do you share the same sense of defeat? / Have you realized all the things you’ll never be? / Ideals turn to resentment / Open minds close up with cynicism.” By the song’s conclusion, he’s acquiesced to the notion that “You may not find all that you’re after / In the end, I hope it doesn’t matter.”

While some songs, like “Rapid Decompression,” feel passionate yet formulaic, others, like album closer “Bamboo Bones,” find the band branching out in new directions both lyrically and musically. The album ends with Gabel, his identity crisis seemingly resolved or at least dismissed, looking toward the future rather than the past, sounding almost hopeful as he repeats, “What God doesn’t give to you / You’ve got to go and get for yourself.”

Against Me! is on tour with Silversun Pickups. For Blast readers, they play Orlando at Hard Rock Cafe on June 15 and Brooklyn, at Williamsburg Waterfront on June 25.

On their third album, "American Slang," bluesy punk outfit The Gaslight Anthem are still trying their damnedest to pry off Bruce Springsteen’s King of the Working Class crown. The Boss himself is a fan of the group, having invited them to share the stage with him on more than one occasion.

Though the band members — singer/guitarist Brian Fallon, guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine, and drummer Benny Horowitz — all hail from New Jersey, Fallon recently relocated to decidedly less blue collar Brooklyn. He’s apparently not worried about the move damaging his Jersey cred; about half the songs reference New York City by name.

"American Slang," out June 15, is a perfectly decent album, though it does lose a bit of steam in the second half and falls short of the band’s previous offering, 2008′s "The ’59 Sound." The songs are catchy, nostalgic hybrids of punk rock and Americana, and as musicians, the band members have clearly matured since their last record, employing more sophisticated guitar riffs and song structures here. The title track and first single is the record’s finest, but other standout tracks include the raucous anthem "Stay Lucky" and slow-burning, moving album closer "We Did It When We Were Young."

But while Fallon delivers all his lines with what seems to be genuine earnestness, there’s a nagging feeling that his approach to songwriting is less personal in nature and more WWSD? (What Would Springsteen Do?). The characters in songs like "The Queen of Lower Chelsea" feel at best forgettable and at worst clich©.

Fallon also continues his sycophantic habit of dropping blatant allusions to his musical idols ("Mama never told me there’d be days like these"), a trait I suppose could be seen as either grating or endearing. Personally, I tend toward the former and would appreciate a little more subtlety.

They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in The Gaslight Anthem’s case, a little inspired originality might not hurt, either.

Gaslight Anthem plays New York June 15 at Irving Plaza with Tim Barry and Rival Schools and Boston August 2 at House of Blues.

The itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini is keeping its place in backs of closets and bottoms of drawers this summer season as the 1950s Hollywood glamor becomes the style investment. The full-coverage, high-waisted, "sturdier" bathing suit is a must have as this year’s top beach look. It democratizes beauty, looking chic and flirty on any body type or any woman.

The flattering fifties silhouette encompasses high-waisted bottoms, skirted-briefs or halter neck types, or as one-pieces, which are great to accentuate the length of legs. Body types that are heavy about the waist and thighs should go with simpler styles, rather than giddy frills or lace, while those who are shorter should co with high-leg cut styles.

This season, designs are mad for fifties inspired designs, such as classical polka-dots or gingham prints in reds, blacks or whites. Ruffles, frills and fringes in subtle touches are coquettish and add to the feminine hour-glass form the bathing suits emphasize.

But the style is wide-ranging: from simply cut and demure, to single block bold colors, or delicate prints. The Marilyn Monroe look is catching eyes and starting trends because gone are the days when women felt the need to look sexy in something skimpy. Women today are sexy; and they are savvy, too. They are jet-setting, company-owning, ambitious and fearless. Why attract with skin, when smarts are just as alluring? The figure of the fifties-style bathing suit is a stunning and powerful statement, while the prints, the details, the embellishments (and of course, a smile), add only charm.

The retro look may be a throw-back to your mother or grandmother’s beach bunny days, but this season’s twists and turns on the style have it completely updated for the modern-day Gidget. All she needs is a set of pearls around her neck and a bottle of sunscreen.

Students in fashion design schools around the Boston area are already ahead of everyone else in catching onto this trend. From MassArt, come three graduating seniors: Janet Khuu, Alex Palmisanoa, and Rain Delisle.

Janet Khuu

Janet Khuu describes the fifties-style bathing suits as "cute, fun, form-fitting." She constructed the bathing suit over a series of days, taking inspirations from Lolita. The red and lime-green apple-print dress is a lower-cut leg one-piece, with frills at the bottom, a large bow tied across the front. She was attracted to the close-fitting and full-coverage style because of her own personal philosophy of mixing and matching.

Currently at MassArt, the future for Khuu is unclear, "but I don want to sell my designs and someday own my own boutique," she said. Her muses include anime, Asian and British-punk fashions from designers like Anne Sui, h.Naoto, Vivienee Westwood, and Rei Kawakubo (who she would someday like to work with).

In her own designs, Khuu utilizes a lot of cottons, wools, and lace, again, mixing and matching and just having "fun with it."

Her answer to how she finds the fashion industry? "Busy, but not as bad as people make it to be."

Alex Palmisanoa

Alex Palmisanoa tends to like the more retro-looking. Her favorite models include celebrities like Gwen Stefani or Marilyn Monroe types who have the classic blonde bombshell beauty. So the Hollywood glamour look which is hitting the beaches this summer was a perfect match for this designer’s style.

"The shapes and colors are really cute and just a lot of fun," Palmisanoa described the current trend. "It can be a flattering look for a lot of women, as a lot of us are on the curvy side. I also think that women like to bring a little fantasy into their lives."

The bathing suit is a red and black one-piece with leopard print accents (a print which is popular this season, especially over in Europe). "I thought the colors and the leopard pattern would be great for a more vixen-looking pin up," the designer said.

The bathing suit took two to three weeks of construction. Lining up the color-blocking became a challenge for Palmisanoa because "the smallest mistake could really interfere with its symmetry." The bust area also took the most construction as Palmisanoa tried to place where the bra cups would lie and how to shape the neckline correctly.

In her usual fashion designs, Palmisanoa is attracted to denim and wools because of their versatility, drawing much of her inspiration from fine art and historical costumes. She has interned in several Boston-area costume shops, including the Boston Ballet, CostumeWorks, Inc., Plimoth Plantation, as well as working as an assistant for the production of Voyeurs de Venus at the BCA, TJX, and Elie Tahari in New York.

Rain Delisle

"It’s titled When I was your age…" designer Rain Delisle said, describing her 50s-inspired bathing suit, "Because I want it to feel like a memory from the past by a woman who still lives today, but is made for a modern woman."

The wine and gold lycra suit has a detachable skirt "which makes it feel a little more modern," and is worn with a hand-dyed, vintage lace cover-up.

The piece took a week of construction: from original design to fabric shopping to finished product. It was inspired by fifties nostalgia, but also of the retrospective of women then and where they are now. The pin-up style initially got Delisle interested in fashion when she was younger. "The pin-up woman is fearless and totally comfortable with herself. She expresses herself through fashion," the designer said, "and isn’t that the kind of woman any designer would want to dress?"

The style is coming back, because in Delisle’s opinion, it has a sense of playfulness and humor that has been lacking in the fashion industry lately. The retro-style bathing suit uses a variety of rusching, paneling, and longer lines with lower-cut legs to be universally flattering. It’s an easy adoptable look to fit as a key in any wardrobe.

In her own fashions, Delisle is attracted to voluminous shapes, curved lines, asymmetrical closures, pattern-mixing, and brass hardware. She’s attracted to fabrics like thin wale corduroy and playing with the directions of stripes, plaids and cotton velveteen. Denims and twills make for heavier-weight fabrics, but Delisle also likes to use leather if it is recycled from another garment.

She draws from muses like photographs of bands and women from the sixties and seventies. "Everyone had such a definite sense of personal style then," the designer noted, especially in menswear.

Reconstruction and recycling is also motivates the designer, who likes to take new twists on vintage-inspired ideas. "I like to take something old and irrelevant and change it to make it new and relevant again. I think that’s an important factor in design today."

Fashion and music are huge to Delisle, who loves designers like Postlapsaria, Stormcloud brings Rainbows and I’m Your Present (who do handmade and recycled/upcylced pieces), Walter Van Beirendonk, Christian Joy and musicians from the Gorillaz to Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head to the Velvet Underground.

She had interned with Christian Joy last summer in Brooklyn, making stage costumes for Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. "Seeing Karen performing on stage wearing what you worked on and saw in the process of being designed and handmade was the most indescribable and rewarding experience." The intern is what led her to be interested in independent fashion and one-of-the-kind, handmade clothing. She wants to combine her first two loves: music and fashion, together, dressing musicians and performers.

Sammi Yang

For Lasell College fashion designer, Sammi Yang, the fifties-cut bathing exudes elegance and class. As she mentioned, "delicate details are particularly what attracts when I’m designing." She typically uses chiffon and cotton fabric, fragile laces and beads, and classic, cute buttons.

Yang did not always think she would be a designer, although she always dreamed of doing something in the fashion industry. "I didn’t realize that I like designing and creating fashion until I set foot in Lasell."

Yang is originally from China and may go back when she graduates in four years. "Shanghai is said to be the most fashionable city in China. Most fashion brands are scoped out there."

To create the fifties-styled swimsuit, she created the pattern baised on the Maillot sloper. She spent only two days making the tailored black and white suit with gold button detail "because my schedule is really tight!"

She channeled inspiration from Vera Wang and the classic little black dress, as well as the fifties idea of detachable straps. "I think the fifties pin-up style is very sexy and classic style in my eyes." She envisioned, "the pin-up vintage girl in some caf© in a 1950′s movie," much in tune with icons like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face or Jean-Luc Godard.

In Yang’s opinion, the bathing suit shape accentuates the body to show their curves in a more flattering light. More and more designers chose this style, Yang points out, because it fits the more natural and normal shapely body instead of an idealistically skinny one.

"Fashion is attitude and class," Yang said, "so I think the style will come back."

CAMBRIDGE — “MythBusters,” a show in which the hosts use scientific experimentation to investigate everything from common assumptions to weird urban legends, is one of the most popular programs on the Discovery Channel. It’s filmed in and around San Francisco, but “MythBusters” frontmen Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage came to Cambridge recently to receive the Harvard Humanism Award. Blast asked them what happens behind the scenes of their popular show and how they’ve produced seven years of explosive television without killing anyone.

Each of these guys has an interesting past. Jamie earned a degree in Russian language and experimented with various careers before hunkering down into the special effects business and becoming the owner of M5 Industries, the effects company where much of “MythBusters” takes place. Adam’s dad worked on Sesame Street, giving him a bridge into the world of puppetry and models, but he was also a child actor who played Mr. Whipple’s stockboy in one of the popular “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” television commercials. Adam also appeared as a drowning teen in the 1985 Billy Joel video for “You’re Only Human.”

One of Jamie and Adam most notable early collaborations was as the creators of Blendo, a robotic tiny terror with spinning blades and an inverted wok for a shell. Powered by a lawnmower engine, Blendo mowed through its opponents on the TV show “Robot Wars.” With the ability to slice into the arena walls as well as its opponents, plus a tendency to hurl parts of its dismembered foes into the audience at high speeds, Blendo was twice withdrawn and awarded the title of “co-champion” after being deemed to dangerous for competition.

The creation of this infamous mechanical menace, designed by Jamie and wired by Adam, demonstrates some of the same qualities that make “MythBusters” successful. Jamie and Adam have considerable technical skills honed through decades of “hands on” experience building things that never existed before.

They also have flair for the dramatic, although drama is something Jamie likes to downplay. He’s the one with the beret and the walrus-y mustache that almost conceals his serious mouth. Jamie has a calm, no non-sense attitude, and a tendency to grumble at anything he considers silly or unnecessary, but his eyes twinkle and dance when he’s amused at the success (or failure) of some endeavor. Adam, the redhead, has an effusively cheerful personality. Their different personas work well together on screen, and their mutual respect is evident.

BLAST: Jamie, how did M5 Industries come into being? How did that lead to you working in front of the camera on “MythBusters?”

JAMIE HYNEMAN: I had run a local model shop for a production company called Colossal Pictures, and at one point they had to downsize and just gave me the shop, hoping I would take it and run with it, which I did. They remained one of my best clients for some years. My colorful history caught the attention of a film production company that Discovery contracts with, and when they had the idea to do a show on urban legends they approached me. I called Adam, who used to work for me, because I thought between the two of us we might be able to pull it off. The rest is history.

BLAST: Adam, you had an unusual childhood. How did it lead you into your current career?

ADAM SAVAGE: It’s funny actually. I think it started out as two different parts of my interest because I grew up building things, I grew up making things. I was always encouraged to do that. My father was an artist and a sculptor. But by the time I was fifteen I had decided that I wanted to be an actor. So my parents put that opportunity in front of me. And I did some auditions in New York, and I did some commercials. But by the time I was, I guess probably nineteen, I had passed on that in favor of doing stuff with my hands — graphic design, assistant animation in New York, and then eventually working in theater in San Francisco, and film special effects. Then MythBusters came along and it was the perfect marriage of two things, performance and special effects.

BLAST: When you were a kid, did your interest in “hands on” science ever get you in trouble with parents or teachers? And just how big of an explosion was it?

AS: No actually, although I enjoyed setting fires, and almost burnt down our entire summer complex. That was about the worst that ever happened. That was the worst it ever got.

JH: I was a problematic kid, to be sure. I left home when I was 14 and hitchhiked all over the country. But science, explosions, and the stuff we are known for now was not part of the story then. I just have a wide range of interests, and the more pyrotechnic ones ended up being part of the chemistry of what works for the show. They are something we only really came to be intimate with when we started doing MythBusters.

BLAST: Dangerous experiments are exciting to watch, but your concern for safety is obvious as well. Who most often puts the limits on what you do on MythBusters — the production company, your insurance company, or someone else?

JH: Adam and I are the main ones that put limits on what we do. It is in our best interest to remain intact, and while we have acquired quite a few scars on the show, that is about as far as it has gone to date. We have safety oversight from a consultant who did safety consulting for “Fear Factor” and “Jackass”, and he interfaces with the insurance company. But for the most part, the stuff we do does not fit within stunt work or other similar categories. It is very hands on science and experimentation. At this point we are by far our own best experts.

AS: Really at this point it’s very rare that we come up with a story or a way of doing a story that the insurance company says “absolutely not, you can’t do it that way,” because we’ve already thought a lot of their objections.

BLAST: Has there ever been something which you flat out refused to do for the show, perhaps before the camera even started rolling?

JH: Those would be things that I find distasteful, more than dangerous or difficult things. Production in the early days thought it would make for good TV if Adam and I were fighting/having conflicts with each other, so they would encourage us to do that or even try to spin us up against each other. We eventually just put a stop to it. Disagreements that are constructive are fine, but to create conflict as entertainment is in my opinion trashy television, and we have far more interesting things to put out there. The only other things I object to are subjective; production also likes to put us in awkward or goofy situations, undignified ones, which Adam is often OK with, me, not so much.

AS: At one point we were doing this story about tasers. And there was an ongoing discussion about whether or not one of us would get tasered. And after really carefully looking at the research, it was obviously going to be me who was going to get tasered. The question was whether or not I would agree to do it, and then the insurance would take a look at whether they felt comfortable with me doing it. And I took a long look at it and decided I didn’t want to do it.

BLAST: Can you think of a particular moment that really scared the bejeebus out of you?

JH: Well, in general I don’t like heights, but it is more that I am just automatically very uncomfortable there. I do what I have to do; it’s my job. Often the things we do are risky, and I have to say I have gotten quite used to that being the case. For my own safety and that of others on the team I try to remain as flat calm as possible to make sure I don’t miss something that would end up with someone getting hurt. If I was actually “scared”, I would likely be less on the ball. The only one I was really very concerned about my safety in was recent. The episode has not aired yet so I can’t tell very much about it, but I was out in 180 mph+ winds, and while I was tethered, I could tell by the way things around me were behaving that if something let go I would be like something on the end of a whip, and the crack might break my back. The force of the wind I was in was so intense that I knew I had no chance of competing with it. I would be like a rag doll.

BLAST: Is there a myth you’d love to test but the necessary experiment just seems too risky?

AS: There’s this great story out there about a liquid oxygen truck that spills on a highway, and the liquid oxygen ends up turning the entire highway into a bomb and blowing a whole section of road to smithereens. And we did enough investigation into liquid oxygen to discover it’s one of the most terrifying things in the world. Because under the right conditions, obviously, it can make things burn energetically. But it can also turn things like a greasy rag into a high explosive, and I’m really not exaggerating that. On top of that, it’s totally unpredictable. So when we looked at the unpredictability of it, we realized we were ending up with a myth that was either incredibly dangerous or nothing would happen, and the likelihood of either was equal. So the likelihood of ending up with an episode that was safe was very mild.

JH: The thing is that pure oxygen is invisible, yet has the potential of making all sorts of things explosive. Using the amount required to replicate that situation means that you have to consider what would happen if it drifted. What if it went, say, to a running automobile some distance away? The whole auto could explode. Scary.

BLAST: Does the element of danger in your work ever freak out your wives? Have they ever “vetoed” an experiment?

JH: Yes, and no. For the most part she does not know what I am doing until after it’s done, and even if she did, there should be nothing to be concerned about because if we thought it was unsafe, we wouldn’t be doing it. Again, Adam and I are for the most part alone in this — we are often the only ones that really know what the risks are. Our safety oversight, the insurance company, everybody else, is looking at categories and saying stuff like “you are riding at high speed on a motorcycle, so wear a helmet”, and so on. Sure, we’ll do that. But who is the expert about tons of liquid oxygen dumped out on the ground? We are, and we are the only ones we trust.

AS: My wife has never vetoed anything because she trusts my judgment as to what I’m doing. But there are times when I’ve casually described what I’m doing to do and she’s asked for “a little more clarification, please, because that sounds really spooky.”

BLAST: What is the most surprising or implausible myth you’ve ever confirmed?

JH: We are constantly surprised, and many of the stories we take on are implausible. Quantify that? I’d put it this way, we are focused on the process. We dig into something, and it is what it is. We try not to have preconceptions, and are not really that concerned about whether something is true or not so much as whether we have processed the topic diligently. Having done this a lot, we know that in many cases even the silliest stories have an element of truth in them, so one needs to have an open mind to get to the heart of the matter.

AS: We just did one that’s going to air in a couple months called “Waterslide Wipeout.” There’s a YouTube video of a guy riding this long, long waterslide and then flying an impossibly long way through the air. I don’t want to spoil it, but basically we tested that myth as best we could. We had some preconceptions before we went in and we were completely surprised by the results we got out.

BLAST: As recipients of the Harvard Humanism Award, you’ll be in a select group that includes Salman Rushdie, Joss Whedon and Greg Graffin, the front man of the band Bad Religion. Please say a little about why think the students chose you for the award.

AS: It’s hard for me to look into their heads, but given what I’ve read about the award it seems that were being singled out for really demonstrating a level of critical thinking I think is wanting in the rest of the world. One of the things about the show is that what you see is really pretty much what you get. The progression of experiments often mirrors the series of discussions that Jamie and I, and our crew, had going in and discussing the story.

JH: What we do on MythBusters promotes methodical rational, critical thought. It is as simple as that. The episodes we do manifest the benefit of this approach to all sorts of things around us. It shows how easy, even fun it is to deal with the world in this way, and so one does not need to rely on some supernatural entity for things that one does not immediately understand. It also implies that one should not take things that are accepted practice as being the right way to do things, but rather to take on the responsibility for yourself to figure things out, or work with others to do so. Self responsibility is a big, big thing as far as being able to maintain ethical behavior, and so in that sense we are promoting by example ethical behavior, and therefore I can understand this choice.

BLAST: Would you like to mention any upcoming projects, either in front of the camera or behind the scenes?

JH: As surprising as it seems, we are still finding plenty of fresh material to work with. Some of the best work we have done is recent, so keep watching. As far as behind the scenes, I would note that I personally have been doing a fair amount of work for the military in developing new forms of armor specifically aimed at reducing the harm cause by explosives. We use explosives and weapons with a certain amount of glee on the show, and I am concerned that we may seem to be glorifying them. We find them interesting, like many other things, but don’t in any way want to seem like we are encouraging irresponsible use of them. So I’m hoping that my work will mitigate harm from such things and show that just because we use them on the show does not mean we are cavalier about such things. So far our tests are showing a fair amount of success, hopefully we will be saving some lives.

Interview was condensed and edited.

As we wave goodbye to those April showers and look forward to Summer, many locals will be searching for that perfect beach spot. True, there are many obvious choices for beach getaways-think Cape Cod, the Vineyard…and a few other beaches close enough to Boston.

Beaches such as Singing Beach, Manchester By the Sea (Listen to the sand. No, really. Do it!), Scusset Beach in Sandwich, Coffin’s Beach in Gloucester (We hear there is a pizza place that delivers to the beach. Reason for excitement), and yes, Revere Beach (Some call it a breath of fresh air, others used to less urban beach areas disagree) all get dropped into the list of ‘beach recommendations in the Boston area’ when searching through sites such as Yelp.

Many of us have fond memories of beaches we’ve visited growing up, or beaches we’ve traveled to with friends. But why not mix it up? Whether you’re a New Englander at heart, or staying in the area for school, there are plenty of ocean spots to check out.

On the lookout for some locations that may be off the path, Blast went out in search sunny spots, interesting environments, and local treats. Here are just a few to spark your interest:

Block Island, R.I.

A hop, skip, and jump off of Rhode Island sits Block Island, a tranquil and free spirited area nestled in the Atlantic. A ride on a ferry brings you to this beautiful and quaint island, full of free beaches, bed and breakfasts, lighthouses, and areas to for biking. Formed by glaciers 10,000 years ago, the island features beaches of warm and clear water, wildlife preserves and more. The Nature Conservancy has said to have named this gem “One of the 12 last great places in the Western Hemisphere.” For a place to eat, check out Mohegan Cafe Water‎. Word on the street is good food, good brews, and even vegetarian options!

Fore more information on Block Island check out http://www.blockislandinfo.com/.

Odiorne Point State Park, Rye, N.H.

The Seacoast Science Center (www.seacoastsciencecenter.org) boasts Odiorne Point as one of the most beautiful natural settings along New Hampshire’s 18-mile coastline. It is listed as the largest undeveloped stretch of land along the coast by the New Hampshire State Parks and contains several different types of habitats, old military bunkers, and bike paths. The Seacoast Science Center also holds exhibits, and cross country skiing is even listed by the park for the winter. If you’re a bird watcher get ready! Odiorne point is seen as a bird watching hot spot for the many types of species seen there, but don’t get too preoccupied with those binoculars there…the seagulls have been known to steel lunch from under your nose.

Rockport

About an hour’s drive North of Boston, Rockport offers access to the ocean and events throughout the season. Rockport’s beaches range from quiet to bustling, but beware of limited parking.

If you are in the mood for some music, don’t forget the Rockport Chamber Music Festival for some Wagner, Haydn, or Beethoven. Or if you are into some of the later stuff, the music of John Cage and Charles Ives will be featured June 18. And don’t forget the Rockport Acoustic Music Festival in August!

For some java in a cozy atmosphere, try local coffee shop the Bean and Leaf Caf©, which includes an ocean view and various espresso drinks. Or stop in to Helmut’s Strudel Shop! Both are located in Bearksin Neck of Rockport Harbor. And, because you know you will want some after spending the day at the beach, local ice cream stand (properly named The Ice Cream Store) is also located in this area, and has many happy Yelpers praising the sweet treats available there.

For more information on specific beaches, events, and more, go to Rockport’s website, http://www.rockportusa.com/.

Crane’s beach in Ipswich

Coastal dunes, sun, and the North Shore’s largest pitch pine forest. In addition, this beach is a popular site for a threatened bird-the piping plover-which had been hunted to near extinction in the 19th century. Nature lovers are sure to love Crane’s Beach!

Richard T. Crane purchased the land in 1910 that eventually became the foundation for the Crane Estate. Over generations the family has bought more land for conservation of Crane Beach and Castle Neck.

For sites to see one may visit the Great House on Castle. Miles of trails along the dunes are popular among visitors for walking. Many reviewers claim this beach to have extremely soft sand and warm water as well, and great for families. Picnics are recommended!

Castle Island

Castle Island is great for swimming, fishing and having a picnic. The South Boston beach has attracted visitors for years for these reasons. Connected to the mainland since the 1930s, Castle Island is the former site of a fort built in 1643, making it the oldest fortified military site in British North America.

On top of its historical significance, many enjoy the beach each year for the waves and to relax with loved ones.

Amanda Zayas of Canton, had only good things to say about the sunny spot, and got engaged there over the summer.

"I would have to say that Castle Island is the perfect family destination for summer time in Boston. I have been there many times (even for a family reunion!) and seen children on the swings, teenagers in the water, and families grilling up burgers and hot dogs during the warm afternoons,” Zayas said. “Castle Island is truly an amazing place" she said, adding, "Try and get there early, though, because parking does get a little crazy later on in the afternoon!"

If you’re still unsure of where to park your folding chair for a sit on the sand, more Massachusetts beaches can be found on http://www.visit-massachusetts.com/. If you’re feeling adventurous, visit http://www.visitnewengland.com/ for beaches in the surrounding area—Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and more!

The a reason why everything happens and there is a reason why bands like The Fire and Reason are put together.

These guys are electric on stage. They give you so much energy and provide great music stemming from rock, electronica and dance.

I was able to check them out at “Great Scott” in Allston on Tuesday, and they rocked the house. Bella Saona, the singer of the group, brought some of the audience members on stage to experience their music which you don’t see most musicians do.

Overall, I felt the show was a great success and I hope to see more of them in the future

Blast first met up with TFAR in 2007. They were one of the first bands we profiled.

My faith in the Boston music scene was aggrandized ever so slightly on Sunday after seeing a matinee show at the Middle East Upstairs headlined by Art Decade, with whom I talked last weekend, and fellow Berklee bands The Dirty Dishes, Southern Belle, and Shapes and Numbers.

After hearing a lot of buzz about Art Decade’s incorporation of a stringed quartet in their live show, I was intrigued to say the least. The quartet and power trio didn’t interact like two separate entities, as one would naturally expect, but rather like one body, sounding symphonic at times. Art Decade’s set was a classically driven indie rock performance, in not only the wide variety of texture the quartet brings, but in the music itself. The songwriting screams that of a classically trained musician. While at times this sounds belabored and obvious, for the most part it works, creating complexity and at times, chaos, out of even the simplest of parts.

Guitarist/vocalist Ben Talmi played equal parts frontman and conductor, delivering an energetic performance while leading the quartet, while bassist Binod Singh Jr. shredded through all the registers of his instrument, free to noodle a bit more with the bass’ older cousin, the cello, holding down the low end.

The other standouts of the day were Southern Belle, who played an engrossing set of dynamic-shifting electro/experimental pop. The group’s tight guitar work and magnetic pre-recorded loops might have turned the room into a dance party had it not been 2:30 in the afternoon. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what this band does in the coming months.

Shapes and Numbers opened the show, playing a lights out cover of seminal Boston classic, "Where Is My Mind?" Whenever you here a Pixies cover in the Hub, it’s a good day.

When the members of San Antonio trio Girl in a Coma were discussing which songs to include on their new series of cover song EPs, they knew they wanted to focus on music that had a significant influence on their tastes. But the Smiths tune that is their namesake was never an option — it would have been too "cheesy," bassist Jenn Alva told Blast in a recent interview.

"I think we talked about (recording a version of ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’) years ago," said Alva, 29. "We were joking about it. In the process room, I started doing the bass line. Then we were like, no, no."

Songs by Elvis and Jeff Buckley were also tossed around, but ultimately the girls — Alva, and sisters Nina and Phanie Diaz, who handle lead vocal and drum duties respectively — decided on seven tracks from artists they grew up listening to, including hits from The Beatles ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps"), Patsy Cline ("Walkin’ After Midnight") and Joy Division ("Transmission").

"We have so many influences," Alva explained. "What we chose is kind of a collection of all of our influences, and just a wide spectrum of time periods (and) different types of music. And plus, the big thing too was, what can we take and then make it ours too? So, a lot of questions came into what we were choosing and, you know, how are we going to execute it? And we were left with these, which we’re happy about."

The songs appear on three EPs, collectively titled "Adventures in Coverland," whose release dates are staggered throughout the month of April. Together, the three 7" records comprise a board game — a concept Alva designed as the group was trying to think of ways to combat illegal file-sharing of their music. (The songs will also be available digitally.)

"It was just like, how the hell are we going to get people to buy a goddamn record, like without downloading it? What’s going to make them want to have something in their hands?," she said. "It’s really cool. It’s not, like, the funnest board game. It’s not like Monopoly. But it’s a good idea."

Girl in a Coma officially formed on Thanksgiving Day in 2000, borne out of a friendship between Alva and Phanie Diaz, who bonded over a shared love of Nirvana records and The Smiths’ "Louder Than Bombs" in junior high. They eventually recruited Phanie’s sister Nina, seven years their junior, to join as lead vocalist. But there was never any of the annoyance that one might expect from having a little sister tagging along, according to Alva.

"Phanie and I are still very much immature," she admitted. "Sometimes Nina’s a lot more mature than we are. The only time we thought about it is when we would go on tour and it’d be like, ‘She can’t come in until she sings.’ You know, she couldn’t go into the bars and stuff. That’s the only time we’d be like, fuck."

Alva, who lives with the Diaz’s parents and Nina, says sibling rivalry hardly ever comes into play and that the vibe in the group is more like all three are related.

"We’ve known each other so long," she said. "You know, we’re all sisters. So we all fight and we make up in like 10 minutes. Like, ‘Well, sorry. Ok. Move on.’ I think that’s one of the great benefits of us being so close is, you know, we fight but we get over it real quick."

With a diverse range of influences including Bjork, Smashing Pumpkins, Selena and ‘90s riot grrl acts like Bikini Kill to Selena, the band has cultivated a post-punk sound over the past decade. And even though they stop short of recording cover versions of his songs, they have shared the stage with their hero, Morrissey, who invited them to be his opening act for tour dates in the U.S. and Europe in 2007.

"That was great," gushed Alva, who characterized the tour as a learning experience. "It was just perfect, because we needed to do a big tour like that and to work with somebody that, you know, has influenced us, but to treat it more like, this is a business. We (were) representing our music. We’re going to come in and see how many of his fans can like us. I mean, that’s what you do as an opening act. It was just a great experience. … Being the opening act is fun. You know, it’s good to do the big one and get the big one out of the way, so that anything else that comes, it’s like, ‘Cool. We got it. We’ll do it.’"

They’ve also shared stages with Tegan & Sara, The Pogues and Social Distortion.

Currently, the members of Girl in a Coma are in the midst of two back-to-back tours — first with British indie rockers The Wedding Present and then with Australian singer Sia starting next week — that will take them across the country and back again. After being approached by both artists, they agreed to compromise and do half of each tour, Alva said.

"We were going to do the whole tour with (The Wedding Present), and then Sia came around," Alva explained. "We met her at the Michigan Womyn’s Fest. We actually woke her up. We had a really early sound check. It’s outdoors and everybody’s camping and stuff. It’s really cool. And they wanted us to come, like, at 8 and do our sound check. So we got there … and we did our sound check and then we got offstage. And (Sia) and a friend came up to us and they’re like, ‘Wow, that was really good. You woke us up, but we’re not really mad about it.’ … So, we kept in touch and she invited us to do her tour, so basically we asked both groups, would it be OK if (we did them both)."

Signed to Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records label, Girl in a Coma embodies the same girl power mentality of their mentor.

"I want to invite as many girls out there to start a group. I think the more we have, the better," Alva said. "I feel like a lot are popping up. … We’re meeting all-girl groups. It’s really cool. It would really be awesome if there just was this explosion. You know, you might as well."

Girl in a Coma tour dates:

4/20            Vancouver, BC                         The Biltmore Cabaret*

4/21            Seattle, WA                        The Crocodile Caf©*

4/22            Portland, OR                        Doug Fir*

4/25            Chicago, IL                        Vic Theatre**

4/26            Detroit, MI                        St. Andrews Hall**

4/30            Montreal, QC                        Club Soda**

5/1            Boston House of Blues**

5/2            Philadelphia, PA                        Theatre of the Living Arts**

5/4            Washington, DC                        9:30 Club**

5/5            Northampton            Pearl Street Ballroom**

5/6            New York, NY                        Terminal 5**

5/7            Richmond, VA                        The National**

5/15            Houston, TX                        Fitzgeralds

5/22            Austin, TX                        Pachanga Fest — Fiesta Gardens

5/28            San Antonio, TX                        Josabi’s Helotes

*w/ The Wedding Present

** w/ Sia

MIAMI — Spring is already here and with that, new beginnings. What better time than now to launch Blast Magazine’s latest endeavor: Blast Miami.

Despite the fact that Miami is located at the southern part of this the pistol shaped state, there is more to this city then its’ well-known affiliation with crime, drugs, and political screw-ups.

As history shows, Miami is no stranger to being at the epicenter for news and political issues, but it also holds many more opportunities.

This city of around three million inhabitants, is quickly gaining respectable recognition as a major player in the art world and amongst other things- a breeding ground for emerging new talent. It has become a place for pioneers in the music, art, news, film, dining world, etc.

And with that, Blast Miami fully intends to show that other side of the city, by bringing attention all of these events.

Blast Miami will portray the city from a more local point of view, rather then the picture post card of South Beach’s famed ‘Ocean Drive.’ Our goals are to cover the latest events pertaining to Miami without ever losing its authenticity.

We’ll put a spot light on Miami’s Petri dish of creativity, along with up to date and current information on upcoming events. Additionally, Blast Miami will focus on Miami’s diversity buffet of culture, a unique place consisting of people from all over the world.

With that said: Welcome to Miami, Blast.

Sarah Palin, former Alaska Governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, addresses the Tea Party Express rally on the Common. (Steve Klise/Berkeley Beacon)

The Big Apple Circus is set up in Government Center, but the elephants and tumblers were merely a sideshow to the political theatrics unfolding on Boston Common today. The Tea Party Express rolled into town today, bringing throngs of anti-tax, anti-big government Massachusetts residents out of the cracks and crevices of the bluest state in the Union.

At center stage Wednesday was one Sarah Palin, the half-term former governor of Alaska who has recently become the public face and mouthpiece of the Tea Party Movement, which began during the 2008 election largely perceived as a radical fringe movement just angry at government in general — party notwithstanding. Today, given the fact that Palin, a Republican, is its spokeswoman, it’s safe to say the Tea Partiers have moved more in the direction of mainstream conservatism.

Palin took the stage at around 10:30 a.m. in front of an energetic crowd of sign-waving spectators. One day before tax returns are due, Palin immediately spoke out against the tax system, of course singling out what she believes are unfair tax burdens on Americans and their children.

"Americans now spend 100 days out of the year working for government before we even start working for ourselves," she said. "Goldberg just wrote that we are now headed toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money our government has, now it’s our government deciding how much money the people can have. That’s backwards, and we’re going to turn that around."

Many in the crowd waved small Gadsden Flags from 1775 which read, "Don’t Tread on Me," insinuating that the government treads on Americans with unfair taxes and expensive legislation. Palin singled out both the record-setting budget approved by the Obama administration earlier this year and, of course, health care reform.

"They’re obviously digging us into a deeper, darker hole, and that is insane," she said, "with their record-busting $3.8 trillion federal budget and their trillion-dollar-plus Obamacare scheme that they have rammed through, which is the mother of all unfunded mandates."

Palin’s speech left little doubt why she is one of the only energizing conservatives in America, and why whispers of presidential candidacy for the Alaskan grow louder every day. Wednesday, she gave those in the crowd what they came to hear — hard-nosed political rhetoric softened by her trademark small-town colloquial wit. She even worked a "drill, baby, drill!" into the speech, though strangely, she made no mention of President Obama’s move last month to expand off-shore drilling for oil.

The rally on the Common was an unlikely meeting place for politically engaged Massachusetts residents of all stripes. After a Socialist counter-protester and a Tea Party member exchanged heated remarks following Palin’s speech, two women nearby — one a young, left-leaning counter-protester and the other older and conservative — began a more civil dialogue about the role of government in providing jobs to all Americans.

"I don’t think socialism is the best solution," said Jean Michalozski, who drove into Boston from Holbrook.

The younger woman replied, "Well, we’re not there yet."

"Yeah, but we’re going there," Michalozski said. "That’s the next step. Government is taking over so many things."

"I think she’s very respectful, but she’s misled," Michalozski said. "I hope that at some point, she’ll see the light."

What is Michalozski’s ideal scenario for America?

"It would be the type of country we had when Reagan was in office," she said. "The less government, the better. I believe the government has major jobs defending us, but I don’t think they need to be in our homes."

"The more they tax us, the less strong the individual is. If they took care of only the essential things they are supposed to take care of, people would have more money to do charitable works."

Her conversation partner, of course, thinks that when social services are left primarily to individuals, the neediest Americans fall through the cracks. Therein lies the principle debate between the two most vocal political camps in a bitterly divided country: the size and role of the federal government. Michalozski said she would most likely vote for Sarah Palin in 2012.

"I think that she’s honest and down-to-earth, and likeable, but a key reason why I would vote for her is because she believes, as I do, in less government," Michalozski said.

Surprisingly, perhaps, similarly fierce but civil conversations could be heard all over the Common following the event. Though several shouting sessions broke out that quickly drew crowds and cameras, no violence was reported from Wednesday’s event.

Many in attendance simply appeared to be there for the show, walking over on their lunch break or snapping photos of the media-magnet Tea Party Express.

The Boston Common has long served as a neutral venue for protest and proselytizing from groups of all types. Regardless of one’s take on the political ideas of the Tea Party Movement, the right to dissent, as well as to free speech, was practiced en masse Wednesday. But as the Tea Party Express steams its way across America in 2010 in preparation for the fall mid-term elections, a central question remains: Will these rallies be enough to give conservatives a common voice that is loud enough to be heard at the polls in November?

Time will tell. For now, let’s all sit back, relax and enjoy the circus.

"I have a big mouth, so watch out." This is Justin Furstenfeld’s warning to me at the beginning of our conversation. Furstenfeld is the lead singer of Blue October, a band with known hits such as "Calling You" and "Black Orchid." His warning proves true, as throughout our discussion, he elaborates on such subjects as depression, divorce, and broken promises.

Blue October, Furstenfeld’s brainchild, had its beginnings under a different name. He started a band in high school called Last Wish. But the chemistry in the group was off — they all accused Furstenfeld of being too dramatic. "So I fired them," he said. Naturally.

Furstenfeld eventually formed Blue October as an outlet for his diagnosed depression. "I wanted to do something positive with the negativity," Furstenfeld said. He describes Blue October’s music as "bipolar art rock; up and down, all over the place." The content of the music isn’t something meant for dinner conversation. "I like to bring shit up that people don’t like to talk about so we can get it out in the open — the elephant in the room."

Furstenfeld did just that during our conversation — he talked about his love for "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer and his disdain for her representation. Rumors circulated last year that Blue October, who toured with Meyer, would have a song on one of the Twilight soundtracks. But it never came to pass, and the reasons behind it remained a mystery.

"Me and Stephenie Meyer are great friends," Furstenfeld said. "I hate her camp, but I love her. Stephenie Meyer had the balls to take me to dinner…she said, ‘I wanna put your songs in my movies…’ and I was like, ‘Wow. That’s my dream — let’s do it.’ First movie comes out, no song. Second movie comes out, no song. Her management was like, ‘Everything we told you was a lie.’"

The other elephant in the room that Furstenfeld wanted to talk about was his highly publicized breakdown and tour cancellation last year. After not seeing his daughter, Blue ("I didn’t name her after the band"), for three months, Furstenfeld blacked out in an airport and had to be hospitalized. "They don’t like it when people go crazy in airports," he said.

After recuperating, Furstenfeld is ready to go back on the road again with the Pick Up the Phone Tour. Blue October, in conjunction with To Write Love On Her Arms and Postsecret, are touring to spread suicide awareness. He’s got his mind set on his daughter and on is own mental health. "Believe in the Lord. That’s what my mom says. Trust in God."

Be sure to catch Blue October along with Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Stars of Track and Field at the House of Blues this Wednesday, April 14.

Ch© Salazar and Andrew Abbott consider themselves to be adventurers. Instead of training for the Boston marathon or mountain climbing in New Hampshire on the weekends, 23-year-old Dorchester native, Salazar, and 22-year-old transplant from Maryland, Abbott, Yelp their way to restaurants in Boston. Their Mt. Everest: blood sausage, tripe, heart and live squid.

Chronicling their adventures on their blog, the two are self-dubbed the Boston Gastronauts. And there is nothing they won’t try, at least once.

"We’re going to do durian, but there’s a lot of apprehension about durian," Salazar said, describing durian as a spiky Asian fruit that tastes like raw onions and feet, but smells sweet. After trying a durian milkshake, Abbott said he was not terribly apprehensive, but didn’t appear disappointed when Salazar explained it wasn’t in season yet.

Most of the gastronomical escapades Salazar and Abbott find themselves a part of grow from similar experiences of trying a particular food and wanting to go further. The group began after Salazar suggested they try a stuffed sandwich with sides like onion rings and mozzarella sticks and French fries inside the sandwich.

"You feel like dying after eating it," Abbott said. Salazar laughed agreeing that the sandwich was quite an experience. Devouring a stuffed sandwich peeked an interest in Salazar and Abbott to try other unusual foods.

"Ch© brought up Yelp," Abbott said. "It spun and spun and spun and we formed a blog about it."

The first post on the blog, created on March 8, delved into an encounter with frog legs. Since that first post, Salazar and Abbott have devoted one post a week to recreate and explain their gastronomical adventures. Salazar spends most of his posts recreating the history and culture behind the food, while Abbott describes the flavors, cost, and his personal opinion of the dishes.

"What I seem to be finding is that eating these foods is not just weird endlessly or seen as strange throughout time in American culture," Salazar said. "But it (finding the food strange) is a relatively recent phenomenon."

Both Salazar and Abbott experienced a draw towards strange food from a young age. Abbott’s father loved liver and onions, gizzards, and sardines straight from the can. His mother began cooking as a result of his father’s affinity to cuisine she was not fond of, creating a catering business. Abbott recalled a strange attraction to his father’s unusual food choices.

"10-year-old me was confounded by these things but wanting to try them anyway," Abbot said.

Salazar’s parents were also caterers. Salazar admits to being less adventurous as a young child, but finding a new interest in strange foods at 11 and 12 years old.

"We’d go to Asian butcher shops and there would be the tripe in the thing or chicken feet and it would be fascinating for when you when you’re 11, 12, 13 to kind of see these things," Salazar said. "I think that was the seed that got planted."

The seed of strange food interest spread beyond Salazar and Abbott since the blog’s inception. Salazar said they are getting requests from friends who want to join them on their gastronomical adventures, and the blog is being linked to other blogs. The two appeared uninterested to the response of their site, quickly shifting focus to the next food adrenaline rush. They are adventurers after all.

"We want to go on a city safari and snag a squirrel," Abbott said. Abbott’s uncle became a Big Brother in Boston, and, according to Abbott, the boy his uncle spent time with constantly spoke of city squirrel stew. Abbott and Salazar hope to recreate this urban legend and actually give squirrel meat a try.

In all of the hype and excitement, Salazar remains focused on finding the history behind the dishes they try and hope to try. "When I’m writing, my imaginary opposition to what makes this food strange is McDonald’s so it sort of becomes ethnic food, but like we were talking about before somebody’s ethnic food is someone else’s ethnicity," Salazar said.

Ethnicity brings the Boston Gastronauts to places like Somerville and Chinatown, eating blood sausage in a Polish restaurant and beef heart and tripe in a small Peruvian place in Union Square. Salazar and Abbott agree the Greater Boston area is a great place to ingest the unusual.

"In any big city there is just so much going on and so many different cultures intermingling," Abbott said. "I went on a cross-country trip with my friends and found that there are people living out there who wouldn’t have this opportunity to eat these foods."

Another plus of living in a big city for the gastronauts is a never-ending supply of restaurants with creations and recreations of the unusual food they strive to taste.

"Last week I wasn’t a big fan of everything we ate, but I’d be willing to try it again prepared differently," Abbott said.

The adventures have just begun for these two men. A trip to Central Square where a friend told Salazar about a restaurant that serves blood is on the agenda, and durian season is sure to arrive any day.

"We’re going to find a lot of things on this journey that is going to be a little shocking," Abbott said. "When I was searching for information on blood sausage I found a link to a place that had dog blood sausage. I just got the impression that this dog didn’t donate it willingly, and they didn’t give it a cookie afterword of anything."

It seems as if it is nearly impossible to walk down the street and not see someone wearing either camouflage or a military inspired article of clothing lately, especially around a rock venue on any given night. This type of dress is not a new concept, but military inspired clothing has become so mainstream that it is quite possible to call it a trend. It is no longer designed strictly for our soldiers in the service, but for people to wear as a way to make a fashion statement.

There may be many reasons why military inspired clothing is becoming so popular, but one reason that stands out is the music industry. One band in particular that is contributing to the influence of military attire is the Street Dogs.

Based in Boston, the Street Dogs are a true punk band. They were originally formed in 2002 by front man Mike McColgan (ex-member of the Dropkick Murphys) and Johnny Rioux. McColgan and Rioux originally started the Street Dogs as something to have fun with and stay busy. But with the 2003 release of Savin Hill, the Street Dogs realized that what was once just for fun was taken very seriously by their fans. After the release of their debut album, the Street Dogs decided it was best to add to their lineup. With a fuller band, the Street Dogs were finally ready to take to the streets, touring the United States. The band currently consists of Mike McColgan as lead vocals, Johnny Rioux as bassist, Paul Rucker as drummer, and Tobe Bean III and Marcus Hollar as guitarists.

What makes the Street Dogs so different from other bands is their ability to incorporate ska, street punk, and Irish punk into a unique, yet distinct, sound.

The Street Dogs’ third album, Fading American Dream, dropped on October 24, 2006. It was the band’s most political album to date. Not only are the lyrics on Fading American Dream war related, their merchandise is inspired by the war and military as well.

The Street Dogs aren’t one of those bands that sing about politics to try and be punk rock. Having spent five years as a firefighter, two years in Iraq (as part of an artillery crew during the first Persian Gulf War), and six years in the reserves, McColgan actually has a justified stance behind his political viewpoints.

The main logo for Street Dogs is the insignia for a private and for a brigadier general. The Street Dogs’ logo can be found on nearly all of their merchandise, including their CDs, t-shirts, and wristbands. Other military inspired designs that can be found on Street Dogs’ apparel include the American Eagle, a hand grenade, an AK47, skulls, a coat of arms and the United States Capitol.

"We actually try to steer away from using guns," said Bean, in an interview with Blast. "When we start designing new merch we throw out a bunch of ideas based on lyrics, songs, and our message as a band. From there we try to pick the boldest and strongest designs and the ones that most represent our band and what we are trying to say."

But the band clearly has a fashion sense that’s military-issue.

"We draw from that for a number of reasons,” Bean said. “Obviously our stance on soldiers is one. I personally like the military look live because it reminds me and hopefully others that there are still kids overseas fighting in an ugly war that seems to have no point. It also gives us a more unified look as a band. Also, when you’re on the road, Army-Navy stores are a great place to rummage through and pick up some cheap clothes.”

The band decided to have the majority of their merchandise designed with military themes because "simple and bold logos just look great on shirts, so we try to use those whenever possible. A lot of our other designs are tied in with song titles and content," Bean explained.

The band didn’t think they would be influencing fashion trends by putting out an album like Fading American Dream and by selling their merchandise.

"I really would never think of us as a trend-setting band when it comes to clothes,” Bean said. “But then again the Clash, who is one of our biggest influences, had a tremendous impact on the way punks dressed back in the seventies.”

The question remains: Are the Street Dogs trying to get a point across by having military themed merchandise and if so what is the point they’re trying to make?

"We are always trying to get a point across, whether it’s workers’ rights, the lost soldier overseas that is far away from his family, or just the social injustice that is heavily present in our country today," Bean said.

In a sense, the merchandise is also a way to express the band’s thoughts and feelings towards the wars. However, Bean suggested that, "One listen to Fading American Dream and you know where we stand on the war. We do support our troops, though, and would love to see them home safe and as soon as possible."

Bean explained that Fading American Dream is "a social commentary of what is going on in our country and world today. Times are bad. We are in the middle of an ugly and undefined war and losing innocent lives every day. We are sitting under the largest U.S. deficit of all time. Jobs are disappearing daily." That’s the kind of stuff that can be found on the album.

Although the rest of the band doesn’t have a military background like McColgan, they are still very passionate when it comes to their political views.

"We are a unit,” Bean said. “A machine behind a mouthpiece that we believe in and will back up any time.”

Bean believes that the heart of the Street Dogs is "five guys who believe in what we are doing and love playing music for anyone who will listen."

Last month, the Street Dogs began recording their fifth studio album. It is the band’s follow-up to their 2008 State of Grace which was their first album with Hellcat Records. The latest album will feature Rioux as producer and Rick Barton (original guitarist for the Dropkick Murphys) as co-producer. The Street Dogs will be recording at the Blasting Room, an infamous punk rock studio built by members of All, Black Flag, and Descendents, in Fort, Collins, Colo.

The Street Dogs have been headlining tours in the US and UK. They have been performing with bands like Anti-Flag, The Offspring, Reverend Horton Heat and Alkaline Trio.

On March 10, the Street Dogs released their single, “War After the War,” exclusively on iTunes. All of the proceeds for that song will be donated to Homes for Our Troops, an organization that builds specially adapted homes for severely injured veterans at no cost to them.

If you’re looking for the latest Street Dogs merchandise, look for an El Battalion t-shirt, in which the skeleton of a soldier is dressed in full uniform, holding a flag, and a rifle. Another design is the Final Transmission t-shirt, the front bears the band’s name as well as a battlefield cross. The back of the t-shirt features some of the lyrics and the title Final Transmission (one of the single’s from Fading American Dream). The band’s logo is located on the back of the t-shirt as well as the sleeve. There is also a War After the War poster (all of the proceeds will benefit Homes for Our Troops) that features a soldier in uniform carrying his rucksack.

Media credit/Erin Yunes/Abbott Imaging

Listen to the White Rose’s "Take Back your Mind," and you might not know the lead is a 21-year-old from Berklee College of Music, until you get past the Grace Slick vocals and the intricate, driving blues-rock guitar, and listen to the vocals on "Drive."

Yes, she’s talking about being a recent college grad, flailing around for a job in one of the worst recessions the country’s ever seen.

Is it a new theme? No. But coming from someone who, herself, is wondering where she’s going to go after she’s done with Berklee, it resonates much more than Jay-Z rapping about money problems.

Hearing "Drive" is unique for a 20-something: immediately you know Heather Rose, lead guitar, vocals and band leader, knows what you’re going through — because she’s there too. "It’s funny," she said laughing over the phone. "Poking fun at this whole situation — I’m all about, if something sucks, laugh at it."

While Rose doesn’t see herself in the in-crowd of Boston’s rock scene, with its harsh rock and jangly pop, she said her music does fit in to a larger aspect of the city’s tapestry: its youth. Boston is a young, young city, with many residents who stick around for four years, tops.

"One way my music does fit in with Boston is it’s targeted at young adults,” she said. “It’s hard, life is hard, and we’re all figuring it out at the same time."

The White Roses leader has been recording since she was in high school in San Francisco, experience she continues to draw on as her career gets off the ground.

Rose grew up with music, listening to the Doors, Rolling Stone, Pink Floyd, the classics. She discovered Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane in college. Since her first record, she said, she’s made two albums since, and each time she learns something.

So where did it start? On the streets, at open mics, wherever. In a telephone interview, she told me she and her friend Emily, the first White Roses lineup, "performed every week at this open mic, we played the streets a lot, and at the end of high school we put an album together."

"We were very young when we made it," she said. "I was 17 when I made my first record. It’s not my best work, but I had a lot of fun doing it."

She’s watched herself grow up in her music, and called it a revealing experience. "It’s a good and a bad thing, watching an artist develop into the person they are."

Will retrospection continue after college? Maybe, she said. Her latest record is very much forward-looking, wondering about her place in the "new economy," something Rose freely admitted she’d have a different perspective. "Most of the songs were written in my naive state," Rose said self-effacing, "being a young adult, trying to figure my life out. Maybe I’ll look back and say, huh, I didn’t have to worry so much."

After a collective breakdown brought them to the brink of breakup in late 2007, Canadian quintet You Say Party! We Say Die! are staging a triumphant return with their third album, "XXXX," which was released in the United States in February. Already, 2010 has included two quasi-hometown performances at the Vancouver Olympics, an appearance at Austin’s SXSW festival, and their first U.S. shows with a full lineup since 2006, when O’Shea was banned from the country due to visa problems the band encountered at the border.

Shortly after the group kicked off a brief U.S. tour on the West Coast earlier this month, Blast spoke with frontwoman Becky Ninkovic, who said she and her bandmates were able to channel any negative energy that remained into the songs that comprise "XXXX."

"I think when you go through difficult times with people, it can really bring you closer together, and just establish a lot more trust and faith in each other. It definitely did that for us," she said emphatically.

The group formed in 2003 when most of the members were in their early 20s, according to Ninkovic. Drummer Devon Clifford and guitarist Derek Adam are childhood best friends and attended the same high school as Ninkovic and keyboardist Krista Loewen, but the true connection came from the band members all being fixtures on the local music scene in Abbotsford, a suburb of Vancouver. Their (oft-abbreviated as YSP! WSD!) name is taken from the title of one of their first songs, which would frequently turn into a back-and-forth chant with audience members in the group’s early days, when they were still nameless and most of their gigs consisted of casual performances at friends’ apartments.

"We really liked the idea of just getting to participate with the crowd … (to) create a feeling of us all being in it together instead of just being performers separate from the audience," she explained. "We just wanted it to be like a fun party. We were just playing in our hometown, little house parties and stuff, so it was more about just creating a fun atmosphere than anything."

Though Ninkovic maintains YSP! WSD! never had aspirations to play beyond those hometown shows, the success of their first two albums — 2005′s "Hit the Floor" and 2007′s "Lose All Time" — has led them down a different path.

It was during a grueling 16-week fall/winter 2007 tour of Canada and Europe that the tension that was building within the group came to a head. Afterwards, the band took some much-needed time off to re-evaluate, Ninkovic said.

"I think some of us definitely felt like that was gonna be the end," she admitted. "I know for me, I was definitely at the bottom, and unable to see how we could continue. But, fortunately, some of us were able to see how it could work. … And then, eventually, I began to see a lot more light and hope and future."

"There was a lot of recovery time needed after that tour, and through that process, I think we really discovered a new love for ourselves, each other, and the music, and just what we were in together," she added. "That was really what pulled us together. When we started writing, it just naturally began to come out in the songwriting process. So, we could all feel it, and we just kind of loved the magic that was happening, and just really wanted to capture that. (Producer) Howard (Redekopp) was amazing at being able to really tap into that energy."

The songs on "XXXX" contain elements of everything from blues to disco, but Ninkovic says the band, more so than on its previous records, was honing in on a sound that echoed 1980s New Wave and punk and early ‘90s dance in particular. She credits Redekopp, whose previous producing credits include fellow Canucks The New Pornographers and Tegan & Sara, for bringing their sonic vision to fruition.

"(Redekopp) really understood that aesthetic that we all love so much," she gushed. "We had so much more time to really focus on this album. We really had a lot of time to connect with Howard and just communicate all of our hopes and dreams for how we wanted it to sound, and really take the time to really give each song what it needed. In that way, it just became more of an accomplishment for us."

The album’s leadoff track in particular, "There is Xxxx (Within My Heart)," bears a striking resemblance to the 1993 dance hit "Show Me Love" by Robin S. Ninkovic readily acknowledged the similarity, but says it was entirely unintentional. She laughingly recalled her jaw dropping when Adam played her the Robin S. track in comparison to her own.

"My hope for that song was that it would kind of play on, like, dance mix ‘90s," she said, laughing. "I kind of had that era in the back of my mind, writing that song. I really wanted it to kind of have that feel to it. And when he found the song later, like after we’d already recorded it and everything, I was like, oh my God, amazing. It’s finally happened. I knew one of these days there’d be some subconscious leaking coming out."

As for the "X" motif in the title of the album itself and several songs, it was Ninkovic herself who came up with it, when she was creating artwork for the group’s first EP in 2004.

"I cut out these four paper Xs that I glued onto the artwork," she recalled. "At that time, I remember thinking L-O-V-E, X-X-X-X. And … when this album was coming together, there was this very obvious energy of love coming through. We were really wanting to honor that, but in a way that wasn’t going to be too blatantly obvious or clich©, as many sentiments to do with love often come across sounding. We were talking about it, and I remembered about the four Xs and how it was like my little secret code for love. And everybody really felt a connection with that."

YSP! WSD!’s renewed harmony and mutual respect also came through in the writing process, according to Ninkovic.

"We each write our own individual parts, but … we’ve been learning in the last year or so to try to kind of honor each other’s ideas and vision, and to be more flexible with each other," she said. "It’s always a learning process. And I think we definitely found that for this album. I think we just had a lot more openness towards each other, just in our own personal relationships, just in our hearts towards each other. So, coming into the writing room with that attitude just made the creative process so much more liberating."

Call it a comeback; call it a fresh start. Whatever the terminology, it’s clear that You Say Party! We Say Die! are embracing a new philosophy of dwelling on the future rather than the past.

"It feels really good to be back, and we worked so hard to get here," she said. "We’re very happy."

YSP! WSD! tour dates:

March 23                        Charlotte, NC                        Snug Harbour

March 24                        Baltimore, MD            Ottobar

March 26                        New York, NY            Knitting Factory

March 27                        Boston, MA                        TT the Bears

March 29                        New York, NY            Piano’s

March 30                        Detroit, MI                        Pike Room

March 31                        Chicago, IL                        Empty Bottle

The inherent problem with a highly stylized arena show is making it feel immersive for an audience. Between the lighting, visuals, cues, lasers and, in the case of this show, confetti-filled eyeball balloons, it can be easy for artists to forget that the audience is even there. The Devon, England-based trio Muse, however, pulled off the difficult task at their concert at the TD Bank Garden on Saturday night, March 6th.

Los Angeles’s Silversun Pickups opened the show in support of their second LP, "Swoon." The band’s distortion-heavy indie rock played well to an impatient yet upbeat crowd, particularly the closing, "Lazy Eye," with a building tension and subsequent release complimented by keyboardist/sampler Joe Lester’s textural additions that got the crowd rocking, rolling, and ready for the main act.

The eyeball balloons popped to douse the audience in red and white confetti; the lasers bathed them in neon green pinpoints and Muse wowed them with an electric performance that was equal parts musicianship and theatrics.

The general sentiment from an audience whenever they attend an arena rock concert is, "I know you play a nearly identical show every other night, but I spent a significant portion of my last paycheck to be here; at least try to make it feel special." Forever a fan-centric band, the trio of guitarist/pianist/vocalist Matthew Bellamy, bassist/backup vocalist Christopher Wolstenholme, and drummer Dominic Howard delivered on that request. The band fed off the crowd’s energy throughout the concert. They made a concerted effort to play to those audience members seated behind the stage, and Bellamy interrupted the middle of "Plug in Baby" to laugh at a portly gentleman who had been flipped upside down while trying to crowd surf. The band created a synergy and a unique personal connection with the audience.

The extravagant stage setup did justice to the space-rock genre Muse is sometimes classified in. The main features of the show were the three menacing, futuristic pillars reaching from stage to ceiling on which the band, or in some cases, individual members, were raised and lowered. These pillars doubled as video monitors, displaying stunning visuals, the band, and the pit throughout the show. Bellamy also sang from four mics — one in front, two on auxiliary platforms on either side of the stage, and one in the back of the stage facing the seats behind, giving the audience different perspectives of the performance. The lasers, balloons, choreographed lighting, rotating drum kit and colored CO2 spouting from the stage were all nice touches, as was the especially cool piano that lit up in accordance with the corresponding keys Bellamy played in the Queen-inspired "United States of Eurasia" and the poppy, though overstated, "Feeling Good."

The band rattled through a setlist featuring both popular tunes like "Supermassive Black Hole," as made famous by it’s inclusion in the “Twilight” soundtrack (the tween girls made their presence known during the song) and "Knights of Cydonia," the legendary Guitar Hero song, to deep cuts like the melancholy instrumental "Nishe." Highlights included harrowing visuals and a loud audience sing-along during another fan favorite, "Time Is Running Out," while lowlights included both theatrical and technical difficulties. The screen obscuring Howard in the beginning of the show didn’t drop in time with the other two bandmembers, creating a comical scenario reminiscent of the pod scene in “This Is Spinal Tap,” and Bellamy’s guitar cut in and out during "New Born," causing him to exchange it for a new one mid-song. These snafus were more than made up for by the sheer talent of the band (Bellamy’s solo right after switching guitars was a thing of beauty, as was Wolstenholme and Howard’s rhythm section jam) and their adoring audience didn’t seem to mind.

The trio favored extended riffs and jams in absence of the normal rock star chitchat, adding something new to songs most of audience has heard many times before. Muse is so comfortable with where they are musically that are willing to let the show do the talking, a refreshing trait in an arena rock show.

Despite the thousands of dollars of equipment backing them, Muse managed to make the show feel human and real — during that show, they were totally the audience’s, and they received an enthusiastic response from the Garden, culminating in Howard exclaiming, "You guys fucking rock," near the end of the evening.

Muse rocked like I thought no band that was on a “Twilight” soundtrack could. The show wasn’t really that — it was more a spectacle in which the theatrics matched the grandiosity of Muse’s music. If you haven’t gotten to do so, see this band live, even if you’re not a huge fan. This is the Queen of our generation and they are creating an amazing live experience unlike any other touring act today.

Ludacris is a Grammy-winning Georgia-based Southern hip hop artist with over 17 million records sold in the United States and 24 million records sold worldwide. He has been in several movies and TV shows as well. His hosting of the show "Sprite Step Off" has dynamically inspired and enabled young people across the country to aim high and achieve more through scholarships and community service.

Luda is currently opening for the Black Eyed Peas on their international tour, and they were in Boston this Friday. Blast got a chance to chat with the star about what he has been up to lately.

BLAST: Your new album "Battle of the Sexes" was supposed to be released on March 16, but it’s now going to be released on the 9th. Why did you push to the earlier date?

LUDACRIS: Because of the anticipation.

BLAST: It took you a long time, a whole year, to make this album. What would you say is the central message of the album?

L: It is to get a male and a female perspective on the album. That’s how the record is, talking about women talking. The record is talking to women and the women are talking back to me!

BLAST: You’ve said that your single "Hey Ho" is kind of like a follow-up to the song from your first album, "Ho." Would you say your view of women has changed over the years?

L: On the record, I’m saying that ho is a ho. I am not necessarily calling woman a ho. I’m saying that if a man sleeps around, then he would be a ho also. So, the view has never changed. If everyone wanna take it as if I was just talking about women. But it’s a double standard, basically. You know what I’m saying? It’s a double standard of how people say if a man sleeps around, they would be considered a player but when a woman does the exact same thing, they would be considered a ho. That’s not right. So, I stand up and take up for the women.

BLAST: You donated your private jet to support Haiti. Can you tell me your thought that put you into the action?

L: Oh, because a lot of commercial airlines couldn’t fly into Haiti… and they needed medical supplies as soon as possible. So you know, that was the best way to make something happen. Of all the things that they needed, I understood they needed that more than anything.

BLAST: I just heard that you will be in "The Fast and the Furious 5." Is that true?

L: Ah, yeah.

BLAST: What is it like to be touring with the Black Eyed Peas?

L: I really like the songs of the Black Eyed Peas. It’s really a fun, energetic show and I think that combining both of our fan bases together is a great thing.

BLAST: After the tour, what’s the next thing on your agenda?

L: Hopefully, shooting the Fast and the Furious movie.

BLAST: How did the "Sprite Step Off" finale go?

L: You have to wait and see next Sunday. I can’t give you anything yet but I definitely tell you it’s a surprise.

BLAST: Was it amazing?

L: It was a very good competition. Very competitive.

BLAST: So I won’t ask you who won and got the scholarship then.

L: Exactly. But on the Internet right now, if you wanna cheat… it says who won.

“Guinness: It’s good for you!” was the advertising motto of the world’s most popular stout for a good part of the 20th century. As a 13-year old drinking my first pint of it in a Dublin pub, I came up with my own slogans. “Drink this stuff from the River Liffey, and you’ll be sick, in a jiffy” was one. “It’s foaming head kills bugs dead” was another. But soon I learned not only to love this stuff (an event that occurred before the very pint I was mocking was half-gone) but I came to favor this style of beer in general.

Once you go black you can’t go back, and for me there was no returning to the canned piss water that is most of the beer sold in the United States. Lagers, even really good ones, remain my least favorite beers. There are lots of ales that are delicious, but my heart belongs to porter specifically. Stout, porter, beer, ale — what does it all mean? Pour me a pint and I’ll tell you.

Ah, good. Well, first I’m obligated to say that like most systems of nomenclature, there are some inconsistencies and vagaries. But I still feel confident — and more confident with every sip — that I can give you the suss on these basic terms.

Beer

It’s all beer, so don’t let anyone convince you that a certain brand “is an ale (or whatever) and not a beer.” You don’t have to take a swing at them, just don’t believe it. According to Michael Jackson (an Englishman who is as famous in the beer world as the identically-named King of Pop was in the music world), six centuries ago there was a distinction, briefly, but it’s long gone.

Dark beers get their color from malt, germinated grains that resemble bean sprouts one finds in a salad. The malt is cooked before it’s added to the brewing process. For lighter beers, care is taken to avoid carbonization that will add pigment to the finished product. For darker beers, the idea is to toast the malt so that a dark color — and more importantly a deep, dark flavor — is the final result.

There are three principle types of beers — lager, lambic, and ale — and one can’t always tell which is which by looking at it. One can’t always tell by taste either, although maybe the English Michael Jackson and other experts at that level are able to.

Lager

With few exceptions, when a beer is brewed so that all the gross vomity-looking yeast that gets thrown away sinks to the bottom, that’s a lager. Of the three principle types of beer, lager is the youngest. Developed in Austria and Bavaria in the mid 1800s, it soon became the lifeblood of the whole German beer culture of gigantic steins and the Reinheitsgebot laws that had already been laid down centuries before.

Pilsner is one of the first distinct types of lagers developed; Heineken is an example of it, as is the Chinese beer Tsingtao. Bock, a sometimes-dark lager that has managed to grow testes, is still another. So are the “American-style lagers” I previously compared to diluted urine. In fact, lager is the most popular beer in the world.

To my own pallet, Asian lagers such as Singha (Thailand), Kirin, Suntory (both from Japan) and Tsingtao taste better (i.e. less bad) than other non-Bock lagers. I have no explanation for that nor expectation that your own taste buds will agree; try them yourself.

Lambic

Another type of beer is lambic. Except for a very few adventurous microbrewers elsewhere, lambic is a peculiar creation that only comes from certain regions in Belgium.

Rather than relying upon added yeast, lambic is a result of the untamed yeast molds and bacteria that are already found on the barley and wheat used to make it. It has a fruity taste reminiscent of wine or hard cider, and many lambics are so loaded with raspberries or other fruits that they fall into the category of “Belgian fruit beers.”

When I first staggered out of a drinkery in Brussels full of this tasty sweet but un-beer-like stuff, I thought all Belgian fruit beers were lambics. Only recently I learned plenty of Belgian fruit beers are actually ales, the type of beer most germane to discussion of Guinness and its swarthy kin.

Ale

Remember that putridness that sinks to the bottom when lager is brewed? When brewing ale, that yucky gunk floats at the top. Premium beers associated with Trappist monks in Belgium, such as the Chimay brands, are ales. So are barley wines, potent potables that substitute grains for grapes. Bitters are a pale ale overloaded with hops, while other ales, such as the various brands of “India Pale Ale” very popular with hobby brewers, aren’t hella different from certain lagers.

Ales, compared to lagers, more often have a dark color and flavor. Bass Ale is a darn good beer, and Smithwick’s (a similar beverage from Ireland) is even better. Newcastle Brown Ale is tasty, but none of these dark ales compares to Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale — divine nectar I tend to think is overpriced until it hits my tongue and reminds me otherwise.

Porter

Even though I’m beer savvy, I can’t taste the line where dark ales end and porters begin, and I suspect any division imposed between them is arbitrary. What is definitely true is that many or most of the darkest, malty-est, most flava-ful ales are classified as porters, the story of which will bring us back to Dublin via London.

Supposedly, the term “porter” takes its name from the people who drank it the most, the porters (i.e. dockworkers, teamsters) who lifted cargo off ships and carried to it locations around London like two-legged mules. Maybe, but always be suspicious of this type of etymology; even when these explanations appear in writing around the same time as the coinage, as they’re often what scholars politely call “fanciful” (and what most folks just call “fake”).

So never mind where the term “porter” came from, just know it’s a particular dark beer that seems to have appeared in London around 1700, give or take a generation. It was almost immediately popular not just because it’s delicious, but because it had a better shelf life. Other beers around at the time were shipped to pubs while they were only half-brewed. This meant that as soon as they finished becoming beer, they could be consumed before they spoiled.

Not so porter. It could finish brewing at the brewery and then be bottled up for consumption whenever. It was easy to make in large quantities, and booze-wise it was strong stuff too. Soon people where getting rich from brewing it and even more were getting rich in spirit from drinking it.

Some distinct types of porters have been identified. “Baltic porter” is a high-proof porter from the neighborhood of Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia. This stuff is a great example of why beer nomenclature is so slippery. Not only do some folks consider the traditional Baltic porter to be a stout, most Baltic porter nowadays is brewed with the sludge at the bottom. That actually makes it a lager if one accepts the technical definition.

Porter was also brewed in the American Colonies before the Revolutionary War, and “Pennsylvania porter” is a representative of this New World beer. But it’s an extra-hefty style of porter, discussed next, that’s the best known example.

Stout

There’s wide (but not universal) agreement that all stouts are porters, but not all porters are stouts. The debate about this is neither lively nor interesting, so let’s just skip it and look at the history instead.

The 18th century popularity of porter spawned variants. Some beer drinkers who favored the dark and yummy porters weren’t afraid of too much of a good thing, and increasingly darker and yummier porters grew in popularity. These roasty-good beers were dubbed with names like “double porter” or “stout porter.” That second term, when shorted, gives us “stout.”

In “Finnegan’s Wake,” the cheerily macabre 19th century Irish tune that inspired James Joyce’s eponymous Dublin epic, we’re told that Tim Finnegan is laid in his casket with a bottle of porter at his feet. “Guinness Extra Stout” was known as “Guinness Extra Superior Porter” until about the same time as this song was composed. Accordingly, there’s little reason not to think it was this same quintessentially Dublin drink that lay at the foot of poor Tim’s coffin.

The idea that “Guinness is good for you” (fearr de thº Guinness for those who “have Irish” ) wasn’t just a successful ad slogan. The company based it on some pretty shady “market research” in the 1920s in which people were asked how they felt after drinking it. Big surprise: they said they felt good. People took the idea literally and it was consumed in great quantities by nursing mothers and those with failing health. Eventually more modern sensibilities (and governmental regulations on advertising) took hold.

Guinness is the most famous Irish stout, but it’s not the only one. Its two traditional rivals, Murphy’s and Beamish, are both from Cork (Ireland’s “second city”). When I lived there doors away from the Murphy’s brewery, the smell of it and other beers brewed on-site assailed my nose as soon as I’d step out my door. The gaseous byproducts of the brewing process have an unmistakably distinct sweet scent. The odor can be nauseating, especially full on, but it’s also something I came to enjoy and, eventually, miss. In Cork City, the drinking of Guinness rather than one of the native stouts is a slightly traitorous act even though many locals themselves have actually switched to foreign-born lagers — such as Heineken and Budweiser — that are made in the same local breweries.

Some think these two Corkonian stouts are less bitter than Guinness, and Murphy’s based an ad campaign around this idea, but I’m not so sure. All three are a complex symphony of smoky tastes both bitter and sweet infused by the malting process. In describing what the non-visual senses perceive, people often fall back on comparisons. When discussing stouts, Irish and otherwise, “coffee” and “chocolate” are often mentioned, but this is more metaphor than similarity. Again, taste for yourself.

Besides these brown beers from the Emerald Island, there are stouts from elsewhere in the world. As said, the previously-mentioned “Baltic porter” is considered a stout by some and it’s similar in style to the “Imperial stouts” associated with Russia. Both share a high alcohol content that helps them survive the winters of Northern Europe without freezing.

“Milk stout” or “cream stout” is made with lactose, a sugar extracted from milk, and is sometimes called “sweet stout” for the resultant effect. “Oatmeal stout” is made from… can you guess? “Oyster stouts” hail from a bygone era when shellfish were a popular pub grub. Sometimes the name just implies it’s to be enjoyed with oysters, but in many cases those same mollusks are part of the brewing process. What does that taste like? I don’t know and I don’t want to know.

“Chocolate stout” and “coffee stout” are typically just terms referring to particularly dark and aromatic stouts. Less often, it means a tiny amount of that ingredient is part of the brew process. That, and especially the bit about the oysters, makes me see the sense of the German beer laws.

Drinking it

The proper pouring of certain beers, especially Guinness, is considered essential by many. In its most dramatic expressing, the act of drawing a good point takes on the ritual of a Japanese tea ceremony. I wouldn’t say you can completely ruin a beer by pouring it wrong. I do think the texture of the beer can suffer, especially during the initial sips, and you only get one chance to make a first impression.

But it’s beyond debate that a decent beer deserves a glass. Beer from a bottle is acceptable if you’re trying to play beach volleyball at the same time as you drink, or if you’re underage and drinking on the roof of someone’s garage, but there aren’t many other situations that justify it.

Beers, especially good beers like some of those I mentioned, have multiple layers of flavor that kick in at different times. A taste of a well-crafted beer is like a firework that rises to the air in a trail of green, explodes red, explodes blue, dances around, explodes gold, and then surprises you with a shower of orange after you thought the show was over.

This party in your mouth can take place because your taste buds aren’t evenly distributed. The guys who taste sweet cluster in one place while the guys who taste sour hang out in another, and so on. Drinking beer from a bottle is like listening to music with the bass turned all the way off or having sex with a condom. Why do it if there’s no good reason?

Summary

Beer is beer. What different styles are called is sometimes a matter of debate. When gunk sinks to the bottom during brewing it’s lager, and if it floats to the top it’s ale. Certain dark ales are known as porters, and the darkest and creamiest porters are called stouts. Don’t drink from a bottle. Guinness is good for you.