Category: Arts & Culture
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Ego and the Enemy: A Q&A with M-Dot
Photo: Syben Vanoverberghe M-Dot doesn’t have time for arrogant, boastful rappers. The Revere native puts in too many hours on the stage, in the booth, and behind mixing boards to worry about someone else’s self-aggrandizing bars. He’d rather prove it with hard work. It’s not easy, though. As the title of his new album, “egO…
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“Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman: A Book Review
Neil Gaiman respects the old gods, and that’s why he’s the proper man to write their tales. Gaiman did not just read tales that modern men have written to decipher the old god’s realities. He went back and studied the original translations of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and the verses of the Poetic Edda, which…
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Friendship, Love, and Loyalty: Brennan, Dropkick Murphys continue to be Rebels With a Cause
Photo: Dustin Winter 2016 was a busy year for Boston’s favorite sons, the Dropkick Murphys, and in 2017, they will reap the benefits of their hard work. While their new 9th studio effort, 11 Short Stories of Pain and Glory, was recorded in Tornillo, Texas—a small town comprised of just over 1,500 people just outside…
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“Do Not Resist”—A Movie About the Militarization of Our Police Force
As I write this, the outcome of the election is unknown. Many people will be happy; many people will be upset. The fact that our country could be so divided has brought about a police force that is now being gifted with weapons of war that are no longer being used in the Middle East.…
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Bob Dylan Spoke for Me in the Refugee Camp
Photo: Xavier Badosa If you want to change the world, all you need is a guitar, some courage and a voice that could cut the still night air. Bob Dylan’s naked words in songs like “Masters of War” were close to that reality. As they left his lips in 1963 and drifted in the wind pushed by…
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“Darktown” by Thomas Mullen: A Book Review
Atria Books—An Imprint of Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 “I must tell you, it was not easy for me to raise my right hand and say, ‘I, Willard Strickland, a Negro, do solemnly swear to perform the duties of a Negro policeman’—Officer Willard Strickland, Atlanta Police Department,…
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Michael Patrick MacDonald: Families of All Souls “Are all Dealing with Heroin”
(Photo: Bill Brett) When Michael Patrick MacDonald walks down ‘methadone mile’ he sees a familiar story among the addicts and panhandlers. “Most people down there come from places like I come from,” MacDonald said. Places of “poverty” and “trauma.” MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony housing projects during the height of the cocaine epidemic…
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Penn State Professor Hopes to Add Voices Through Homeless Narratives
Penn State Professor Joshua D. Phillips opened his latest book, “Homeless: Narratives from the Streets,” with a Mother Teresa quote, “Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.” Phillips’ book, which served as his graduate dissertation from Southern Illinois University, is taken from spending 2012…
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Dark Matter by Blake Crouch: A Book Review
Crown Publishers, an Imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.crownpublishing.com “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened.”—T.S. Eliot…
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Prophets of Rage: “Elite Taskforce of Revolutionary Musicians” Take on Homelessness
By Ronald Dudley and Eric Falquero Courtesy of Street Sense / INSP.ngo. To say that Prophets of Rage is political doesn’t quite cover it. When reporters or pundits—from ABC to Bill Maher to Rolling Stone—call this combination of musicians from Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy a “supergroup,” guitarist Tom Morello is…