Andanh.com

This summer we've had two big, high-quality films with plots blatantly built around the use of marijuana: The Wackness and Pineapple Express. We've also got Barney Frank making a show of trying to legalize possession of the stuff. At this point in our culture, pot smoking seems on a par with downloading illegally from the internet—it's just another choice we have, an activity so widespread and familiar to young and old that its shock potential offers little more than a knowing wink.

These days, mainstream audiences can easily laugh at and accept characters like Pineapple Expresses' Saul Silver (James Franco), a bone-headed weed dealer starved for real friendship, and Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a process server who gets high all day on the job. Basically, this is a mixture of buddy movie, a Cheech and Chong-like stoner romp and an action flick. At the outset, Dale is snobbish about socializing with his lowlife drug dealer Saul, but they smoke some super weed and Dale relents. He quickly unloads all his deepest personal misgivings about himself—he feels like an "ass-turd" dealing with his high school-aged girlfriend, and so on. Pot has provided the two with a bonding experience, and it continues to bind them together, for better or worse, throughout the rest of the film. Not long after that scene, Dale witnesses a murder by the local druglord and a cop, leading to him and his newfound dealer friend having to run for their lives from a wide assortment of baddies. Eventually, the rambling story leads to a showdown at an old abandoned underground military drug testing facility with lots of gunplay and explosions.

That's the bulk of the plot, but writers Rogen, Evan Goldberg and the ubiquitous Judd Apatow have crammed this thing full of insane rapid-fire dialogue; weed-related sight gags, crazy chases and kitchen-sink fight scenes. Director David Gordon Green follows a workman-like approach, keeping the focus on the action and the interplay, with little in the way of establishing shots. Indeed, Pineapple Express could be happening anywhere, although the cops do wear the uniform of Clark County, the same fictional place where Superbad took place.

The film would have failed if it were only an excuse to have a bunch of wild action scenes, but Rogen and company have taken on the difficult task of making you care about these characters, heavily satirizing their glaring faults while at the same time digging deep to show their human interior. The biggest concern becomes not whether our heroes will survive murderous gangsters, but whether they will decide that their friendship is based on anything more than just drugs. The interplay between Rogen as the (relatively) straight man and Franco as the drug-addled foil is witty and nuanced, and Franco proves a natural as he delivers a constant stream of nonsensical stoned out lines like "you've let the monkey out of the bottle."

The film's strong center makes up for some of the more peripheral problems, like the hackneyed choice of portraying some of the thugs as sensitive closet homosexuals. Here all the bad guys, including Gary Cole as the kingpin, Rosie Perez as a tough corrupt cop, and a large group of Asians playing rival gang members are mostly one-dimensional, broadly comic characters (although Perez, the only strong female lead, squeezes some substance out of her role through sheer willpower). Because of this, the threat to Dale and Saul never feels as real or intense as it might have.

But those are small gripes, and the laughs are huge throughout, so while Pineapple Express might not always be completely convincing or original, it sure as hell is a good time.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

RATED | R

OPENS | 8.6.08 AT REGAL FENWAY STADIUM, AMC LOEWS BOSTON COMMON, AMC LOEWS HARVARD SQ., AMC CHESTNUT HILL, SOMERVILLE THEATRE

Luísa Matsushita, better known as Lovefoxxx, is not impressed with the designers on this season's Project Runway. And as a former fashion assistant, illustrator and front woman of Brazilian band CSS (short for Cansei de Ser Sexy, which is Portuguese for "tired of being sexy," a Beyoncé Knowles quip) she knows a thing or two. Known for her wild jumpsuits and boldly colorful vintage duds, Matsushita bemoans the lack of creativity and spark in this season's schematic. "I feel like Blayne"—the blonde tanorexic pixie—"is trying to be the new 'fierce'"—referring to last year's winner, wonder kid Christian. "And he is not fierce. And I hate the biker chick"—the creepy Stella B. Zotis, who resembles a junkie Raggedy Ann doll. "I'm just not impressed."

Normally, such a criticism would hardly matter, especially to a bunch of moderately successful boutique owners and established designers. But perhaps Project Runway's contestants should take heed. After all, Matsushita and the rest of CSS (bassist Adriano Cintra, Luiza Sá on keys, Ana Rezende on guitar and keys, Carolina Parra on guitar, and new drummer Jon Harper. "We all are loving it, and it sounds much better.") are at the forefront of the indie/electro scene, a place steeped in the world of young and fresh fashion. And as any young designer knows, those are the people they need to be impressing.

For now though, CSS are so busy that they are lucky to squeeze in reruns.

Back in the States for a slew of shows that include their belated Lollapalooza debut (they were slated to play last year, but poor management, or "a ball of mess," resulted in bad scheduling, and they were forced to miss the festival) and their Boston pit stop. By the middle of the month, they are back across the pond and will continue to tour until December, when Matsushita says they are getting a much deserved five-day break. "The band is a priority," she says. "We all love it, but sometimes it's hard and there's not too much time for ourselves." The recently engaged singer (to Simon Taylor-Davis from Klaxons) doesn't even have time for wedding plans. Asked if she would do a big white wedding, she laughs. "I would never do something like that! Right now, Simon and I are too crazy to have something big like that. We're always in hotels."

Besides, the focus is on Donkey, CSS' terrific sophomore release, which is decidedly more polished and straightforward than its predecessor. "With the first album," she says, "we were just making songs with thousands and thousands of layers. But we were like, fuck it, we won't be playing them live anyway." She makes time for personal projects when she can. "I want to learn to speak Japanese properly," says half-Japanese Matsushita, cheerily adding, "It's very important to have little missions on tour. Very important. Otherwise, you go a bit crazy." CSS

WITH THE GO TEAM!

SATURDAY 8.09.08

THE ROXY

279 TREMONT ST., BOSTON

617.338.7699

7PM/18+/$22 ADV, $25 DOS

BURIED IN LEATHER | WE ARE GONE (TEENAGE HEART)

Thrash & roll quintet Buried in Leather take no prisoners on We Are Gone, as they rip through eight songs in 20 minutes flat. "Beautiful Scars" was handcrafted by a human motorcycle, and the runaway stomp of "Cold" makes you want to call the cops. The eponymous track is clearly their theme song, however—a dual-fueled Frankenstein's monster in which you can practically hear the amps sweating. The next show is Saturday at Church. Throw yourself into the pit: "Guns up! Let's do this ..."

Singer/guitarist Aviv Rubinstien formed Pray for Polanski in 2005 out of the remains of his old high school band, B&D Confusion, which was a side project of Sexy Randal & The Pharaoh Wizards—a better-in-memory cover band that I in fact played in, and whose entire touring life consisted of two high school talent shows and the eighth birthday party of a now-scarred child named Abbott. At 17, Rubinstien could never quite reach the boozy heights of Bon Scott's hyena cry for our AC/DC covers, but in PFP, he seems to have finally found the sound that suits him, which, strangely enough, is no permanent sound at all.

"We play whatever song comes our way," says Rubinstien. "We don't have a defined sound. What happens is, I get obsessed with a certain genre, and I want to write a song that way." Those songs, now collected on their first album, The Ghost and Bones, have a range filled with twangs of rockabilly-by-way-of-a-Detroit-garage to slicker tracks that show off a more pop, hook-driven sensibility. The style changes almost as rapidly as the band's membership, which, by Aviv's count, has included nine people (before its current five): The group now boasts a trumpet player, a bassist, a drummer (currently at NASA, building a satellite) and the band's other vocalist, Anne Warnock.

"I had few voices to look up to in the alternative scene, but I sure did learn how to be angsty," she says. Aviv credits Warnock's powerful voice and its believably angsty screams with inspiring him to write the duets that are now a major staple of the band's live shows. "We did have an epiphany once after a particularly good practice, though," says Warnock, "when we dubbed ourselves 'diner rock.' We would love to be found in the back corner of a rusty old jukebox in a lonely rest stop diner."

Before hitting the studio in the fall, the band will head out on their first tour in August—an eight-city jaunt to the Midwest and back in a newly purchased van with 180,000 miles on it. They'll surely find a lot of diners along the way.

[Pray for Polanski with Fancy Me Dead. 8.6.08 at O'Brien's Pub, 3 Harvard Ave., Allston. 617.782.6245. 9pm/21+/$7. greatscottboston.com/obriens, myspace.com/prayforpolanski]

GENRE | TEARS OF ESTROGEN

VERDICT | FUMBLING TOWARDS THE TOILET

RELEASE | 8.5.08

LABEL | SONY LEGACY

SARAHMCLACHLAN.COM

Let's celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Queen of Lilith's landmark album by soaking in a jasmine-infused tub with eight skrillion candles burning while we weep to "your love is better than ice cream." THIS SHIT MAKES ME WANT TO COMMIT AN UNSPEAKABLE ACT OF VIOLENCE.

MISANTHROPE SEEKS . . . MISANTHROPE So, do Alex and Vivian get what they want?

As the retro guitar music twangs and the overwritten voiceover of the lovelorn, nebbishy hero backs black-and-white images of Los Angeles (filling in for Manhattan), one has a hard time forgiving the baleful effect Woody Allen has had on American independent movies. That, and independent filmmakers’ onanistic insistence on making movies about characters very much like themselves.

Try counting the indie clichés in that premise. But there are lots more to come. Holdridge even slums in the mainstream by sampling a slice of American Pie when Wilson is caught with his pants down paying his respects to a photoshopped porn shot of Jacob’s live-in girlfriend, Min (Katy Luong). That plot thread does introduce a note of kinky sexual intrigue that might have been followed up by, say, David O. Russell. Especially since Jacob, as played by the gangly, sweet but hapless McGuire, would have been a more appealing protagonist. (McNairy comes off as Steve Buscemi’s less talented younger brother.)

But Holdridge is committed to following Wilson through his self-pitying, self-conscious New Year’s adventure. He finds his own Annie Hall (or is it Julie Delpy in Before Sunset?) when Vivian (Sara Simmonds) responds to his ad, setting up a rendezvous and giving him about 10 minutes to sell himself before she moves on to the next name on her list. Although foul-mouthed, abusive, and utterly unappealing, Vivian is not the tough cookie she pretends to be . . .

FORGET THE MORAL LESSONS These boys just wanna have fun.

Judd Apatow brand comedies may deliver the most unbounded hilarity to be found on the screen these days, but too often they lack the courage of their own bad taste and anti-social attitudes. Wouldn’t Knocked Up have been a better movie if Seth Rogen’s character had refused to grow up? If, instead of dumping his doper pals for the dubious pleasures of bourgeois maturity, he had hung on to them and their dream world of slovenly hedonism, pop-culture joking, and a potentially moneymaking “Fleshofthestars.com” Web site? But no, the movie had to wither into a promotion for motherhood and male responsibility and make $150 million.

Not for lack of trying, however, because for a while the story unfolds like a Jobian assault on Dale and Saul and their deviant lifestyles. After a hard day of wearing disguises and delivering subpoenas to more-respectable members of society, Dale drops by Saul’s apartment, where the stoned and lonely loser offers him an exclusive on the killer weed of the title. Through plot convolutions only a cannabis-afflicted mind could conceive, Dale then witnesses a murder pulled off by Ted (Gary Cole), a local drug kingpin, and Carol (Rosie Perez), a crooked cop. Spotted by the killers, Dale and Saul must flee, pursued by Ted’s henchmen and beleaguered by increasingly brutal, and hilarious, acts of violence.

SÃO PAULO ROCK CITY? “It’s our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that
every time we come back, nothing’s really changed.”

CSS guitarist Luiza Sá is resting in New York City, on a rare break from her band’s non-stop tour, and reminiscing about the first song they played at their first rehearsal: Madonna’s “Hollywood.” “We met up to rehearse, we were all in the living room, and we’re like, let’s just play something to see how it sounds. And then [CSS vocalist] Lovefoxxx came in wearing a Motörhead T-shirt — I think she was scared that we were going to be all ‘Rock and roll, grrrr!’ — and we turned to her and said, ‘Hey, we just learned Madonna’s “Hollywood,” ’ and she was so happy about it, just ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

Said songs are fun and wacky; they’re also naively naughty. “Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show” is all the more insanely catchy for its nutty use of the English language. “When we did the first album, we didn’t speak English all the time, so we could say a lot of shit and we didn’t realize it. Now, we’re not the same people because we’ve toured a lot, and we speak English all the time, and the new album shows that. The first album we recorded not really even considering that we were going to tour; and then we toured so much that we changed as musicians. This new album is much more organic, much more how we sound live. We’re not being all serious and trying to start a revolution, you know. It’s still us, we’re just a little bit more mature.”

As indie rock extends its colonial gaze eastward, ravishing (in several senses) the musics of the Balkans, Russia, and (increasingly) Southeast Asia and Indonesia for their odd meters, gudoks, and slendro scales, you can’t help feeling that, despite all the gusto and the well-intentioned curiosity, something essential’s getting squandered in the fusion. If much of the fervor over Eastern adventures mounted by bands from Brooklyn seems charitable, meet Alina Simone — who, despite being Ukraine-born and now residing in Brooklyn, considers herself “a Boston person,” having grown up in Medford. On her newest album, Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware (54°40’ or Fight!), she may have discovered the easiest (and most difficult) strategy for preserving the power of music from elsewhere: language.

Those who see the opacity of a foreign language as prohibitive to their enjoyment have probably overdosed on shittily produced Starbucks-ready “world music.” The language barrier is no hazard when it comes to Simone, whose voice (despite an American accent that I can’t detect but that she swears is there when she sings Russian) quivers and hovers around its unfamiliar phonetic terrain while deftly conveying the dark, frustrated emotions of the songs — each one a cover of Siberian-born punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva. Along the way, searing guitars creep, trumpets swoon, moody backdrops unfurl, and scratchy hard-struck acoustics light up each track with arresting immediacy. It’s no act of tourism.

While living in Hoboken, Simone hopped the F-train to Brighton Beach — her first entry into a predominantly Russian community since departing Ukraine at the age of one. “I was in a state of shock,” she says, at seeing signs in Cyrillic and hearing couples conversing in Russian and, especially, the music of the street performers. They weren’t playing the “thinly veiled political songs” Simone had endured from her parents’ hi-fi. (Her father, a Russian ex-pat, fled to the US after his rejection of a KGB recruitment overture — and “flagrantly checking out of books from the library” — landed him on its blacklist.) It was straight-up indie rock, but in Russian, odd in its competing familiarities. The performers invited Simone to Manhattan’s Elbow Room, where a steady stream of Russian rock was carving out a niche. There, she was given a cassette with some Yanka songs.

Eli “Paperboy” Reed seems dubious about my following him for a few hours before and after his five o’clock Lollapalooza show in Chicago’s Grant Park last Sunday. “I’m not doing anything,” he says, looking up from two girls he’s chatting to as I walk up. I dispel his fears that I’m looking to play Rock Band with an up-and-coming R&B star. If he wants, we can just have a quick chat.

Reed says goodbye quickly and we’re off to his band the True Loves’ dressing room. But we’re inside just long enough to compliment the A/C — God’s gift to August — when he observes we’ve only 20 minutes to snag grub from the buffet. We’re up again and moving.

Actually, Eli Reed seems dubious about my being able to write an interesting article about him at all. While I’m eating lunch with him and the True Loves, he keeps asking, “What’s this article about again?”, his eyebrows raised over rectangular, bank-teller glasses that he eschews during performances. It’s no wonder — pretty much anything written on the guy (a) calls him a Jewish kid from Massachusetts or (b) compares him with any number of soul legends from the ’60s or (c) calls him a Jewish (!) kid (!!) from Massachusetts who likes gospel music (!!R.U.F’NKIDDING?!?!). Yet according to Eli, the Dutch have US writers beat with the compact headline: “Courageous Jew Guy Knows What To Do With Jesus Music.”

“So, what’s this article about again?” I tell him I’ve been thinking about Monterey Pop, the difference between . . .

“Otis! And I’m gonna be Otis! Say this [hands up and swooping for emphasis]: ‘ELI REED SAYS HE’S BETTER THAN OTIS!’ Say that, put that in the article.” The band and I giggle, and for a second I zone out thinking about Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival singing “I’ve Been Loving You.” Shot on 16mm, D.A. Pennebaker’s famous footage of the performance catches Otis from the back during part of this song, the 25-year-old (six months from death) bending and swaying, his body fighting against (reaching out to?) an insistent spotlight that cuts his silhouette and overtakes the frame, blinding the viewer.

“I mean, obviously, Monterey was important because it was the moment that all these boundaries came down.” Musical boundaries, Eli means, the moment when the folk festivals and the rock festivals and the country festivals and the soul festivals and whatever genre we’re putting Ravi Shankar in came together and decided to be one big lollapalooza.

Milli-selling rapgoblin Lil Wayne probably didn’t worry too much about borrowing the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire” for the hook of his track “Playing with Fire.” Hell, it wasn’t even a sample. He hired R&B sublegend Betty Wright to sing it, shuffled some words around, changed the tune a bit, and called it fair. In the grand scheme of hip-hop infringement, it seems like a mere trifle.

But no! A suit has been filed against Mr. W.F. Baby and Universal Records seeking undisclosed damages in return for their reckless theft. Aside from the copyright issue, Wayne had the indecency to use ripped-off Stones lyrics alongside “explicit, sexist, and offensive” language, something of which the Stones would surely never approve. But wait! Before you accuse the Stones of being huge fucking hypocrites, consider this: the senior rockers lost the publishing rights to their entire pre-1970 catalogue decades ago, and they most likely have nothing to do with this lawsuit. (In fact, they just signed a huge contract with Universal.) A far more malevolent force is at work.

I’m guessing Weezy didn’t realize how appropriate the title “Play with Fire” is. In releasing a track that borrowed from classic Stones (however lightly), he not only played with fire, he stirred the wrath of someone whose strongarm tactics over the years have earned him a reputation as one of the most sinister, bellicose volcano gods of the recording industry. ABKCO Music holds the rights to an exceedingly valuable catalogue, one that includes the classic work of the Stones and Sam Cooke plus material by many other eminently reissuable ’60s hitmakers. It’s quite a nest egg, and ABKCO defends it like an angry mother eagle.

ABKCO is the brainchild of Allen Klein, a classic supervillain of the music biz who spent a few years handling the business affairs of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles before bitterly alienating them with self-serving management and ugly dealings. Klein’s first major taste of infringement litigation put him on the wrong side of the courtroom; while he was managing George Harrison, he was involved in the famed “subconscious plagiarism” suit regarding the ex-Beatle’s hit single “My Sweet Lord,” for which Harrison had unintentionally used the tune of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” Bright Tunes, the owner of the “He’s So Fine” publishing rights, had a strong case and stood to make millions.

YOUR PROBLEM “I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Strange hairdos aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find a link between Melvins frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne (a/k/a King Buzzo) and 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. But over the phone from a tour stop in central California, the 44-year-old singer/guitarist loosely paraphrases the Dominican friar in summing up his band’s long, bizarre career: “Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”

That’s true. The more-than-30 full-length albums and EPs the LA-via-Washington band have issued since 1984 defy all attempts to define their style or determine their genre or even say what the bleep is going on. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. The Melvins’ sound is most often reduced to either “stoner rock” or a slow, Sabbathy sludge “that begat grunge.” Both of which it has been, at various points, but such descriptions don’t take into account the forays into menacing ambient/industrial creepiness, thrashy noise punk, trippy psych freakouts, and even something approaching pop, however skewed and darkly humored — experiments that can all pop up on the same album. It’s like watching one of David Lynch’s baffling cinematic sequences: you’re better off just enjoying the strange ride than stopping to try to figure it out.

Which brings us to the band’s new Nude with Boots (Ipecac). The one-two opening punch of “The Kicking Machine” (with its Zeppelin-style boogie rock) and “Billy Fish” (built on a guitar riff very like the one in Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush”) would seem to augur a quasi-conventional outing. But that turns out to be a tease. “Dog Island” writhes in an electronic-dappled tarpit for nearly eight minutes, and the unsettling instrumental “Dies Irae” summons demons quicker than that puzzle box in Hellraiser. The nimble, comparatively speedy “Suicide in Progress” and the title track might be some of the Melvins’ catchier work, but then there’s the soothing “Flush,” which sounds like whales and birds swimming together in ocean depths, and the howling, clattering closer, “It Tastes Better Than the Truth,” which sounds as if it had been recorded during the Spanish Inquisition.

In other words, it’s another killer Melvins album, and another killer Melvins album that’ll probably sell fewer copies in our lifetime than Coldplay move in an hour. “We’ve been far more adventurous than most bands, and paid the price for it as well,” says Buzz. “It’s strange. It’s something that I’m used to, I guess, but you just hafta realize that, you know, I’ve always been right about everything I’ve done in life, and I’m still right. We’ve never been welcomed with open arms, but I don’t care. I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Tana French’s background as an actor has made her value character — which explains the psychological depth of her wonderfully literate crime fiction. In town to read from The Likeness (Viking), the follow-up to her Edgar-winning debut, In the Woods, the Dublin-based author discussed means, motive, and opportunity.

In both your books, backstory plays a major role. Do you think the past determines the future?
I think there is a context in which life takes place. I’m a big believer in crime being shaped by context. Not in any way that people aren’t responsible for their crimes, but an individual’s psychology shapes whatever goes on around them, whether it reaches a moment of violence or not.

Backstory seems important to your protagonists, as well.
In In the Woods, Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight across at the age of 12, and when the book starts, he’s actually doing pretty well. He’s got a career he loves, he’s got a partner and best friend, but when pressure is brought to bear on this crack, it starts to deteriorate — not just his memory but his whole idea of who he is. Cassie [Maddox, Rob’s partner and the protagonist of The Likeness] was orphaned very early, and her life has been creating roots.

To an extent, it seems to me that for people who were interested in these questions of action and consequences, of identity and past and present, it would be natural to become detectives. Because as a detective you’re doing something very much like what mystery writers and mystery readers do. You’re fascinated by the process of discovering answers — not just by the answers themselves, but by the process. There’s an interplay between who they are and what they do, and that works both ways. The strangeness in their pasts comes through in their identities and what they do.

Each of these books has a different protagonist, and the one you're working on now features a colleague of Rob and Cassie, Frank Mackey. Does this mean that each character has only one story?
I know the standard thing is to write a series of books about the same detective. But what I’m interested in are those crucial turning points in people’s lives where you know that whatever you decide in that situation, you’ll never be in the same place again. In the Woods was that for Rob — the decisions he made have shaped the rest of his future, probably not in very healthy ways. The thing is, people only have a certain number of turning points. So I could keep dumping this poor guy into high-stakes, life-changing situations, or I could dilute it and write about less important situations in his life, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I kind of envisioned Rob spending the next couple of years trying to patch himself together. I wasn’t sure he’d have that much of a story. Or I could change the narrator. Cassie is interesting and hadn’t had a chance to tell her story, so I wondered what might happen in her life, what she might be doing next.

THOBA, UTSALE UMNXEBA When he finished his performance, it seemed Hlobo could use a hug.

The South African artist Nicholas Hlobo quietly walked into the hallway at the Institute of Contemporary Art, sat down in a corner on a nest of curry bush, and put on a black headdress or crown that was connected by braided cords to plant-like suction-cup-looking things clinging to the walls. The July 29 performance, Thoba, utsale umnxeba (in Hlobo’s native Xhosa language it means “to lower onself and make a call,” or, as the wall text described it, a “gesture of respect and diplomacy”), was part of his new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “It’s about the idea of communication,” Hlobo says of his act when I telephone the next day. “I was trying to make some sense of the space and the idea of the space, the museum, the gallery, the location of the museum, the culture — the culture is almost foreign to me.”

He sat on the circular nest and fussed for a long while with the hat, adjusting its fit over his dreadlocks, shifting the red tassels on the side, and pulling on his goatee. Then he settled into a long silent sit, seeming to meditate, eyes closed and then open, rocking forward and then sitting upright again, repeat. VIPs arrived for the show’s opening reception, watched him for a while, then wandered into the gallery to see the rest of his art and chat.
The exhibit, “Vula zibhuqe” (which means “to turn a blind eye”), was organized by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel. The 11th in the ICA’s Momentum series, which showcases emerging artists from around the world, it features the props and the costume from Hlobo’s performance, a soft sculpture, and two “drawings” in colored satin ribbons stitched into 10-foot-wide sheets of white paper. Pink scrims, placed over ceiling lights to give the gallery a fleshy feel, make the room seem murky, underwater.

“In my works,” the 32-year-old Johannesburg resident explains, “I celebrate my identity as a South African, a gay man, a Xhosa man, which is my ethnic identity, and I also celebrate my colonial heritage.”

The best piece here is Umphanda ongazaliyo (2008), an 18-foot-long black sack made from old-rubber-tire inner tubes, with pink ribbon stitched along ribs that run from its head to tail. Veins of colored ribbon wander the surface. Pockets and protrusions grow along the sides and the bottom. Metal nozzles sprout from the skin. The whole thing dangles from the ceiling by wires. A tube tail burrows into a gallery wall, with a ring of pink fringe, and emerges on the other side as a large black “orifice” — as the wall text politely describes it.

HAY FEVER Ignorance is Bliss — or maybe it’s the other way around — in Noël Coward’s vintage
piffle.

The drawing room moves outdoors at the Publick Theatre, which fields an al fresco staging of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners, Hay Fever (in rep through September 14), that whips the vintage piffle into a paradoxical froth of lightweight histrionics. Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband, J. Hartley Manners, who penned the hoky Peg o’ My Heart for her. If so, Coward was probably not invited back, for the Blisses of Hay Fever are hardly portrayed as heavenly hosts. In less than 24 hours, the self-absorbed and self-dramatizing quartet of actress mom Judith, novelist dad David, adult son Simon, and 19-year-old daughter Sorrel, each of whom has invited a weekend guest without informing the others, manage to drive their company not only out the door but over the edge.

Described by Sorrel, the sole still impressionable Bliss, as “slapdash,” the bickering and eccentric family unit revolves around Judith, who may for the moment have retired from the stage but can no more retire from drama than she can from breathing. Neither can she be weaned from the adulation beamed across the footlights, so she’s asked athletic young blockhead Sandy Tyrell to spend the weekend making eyes at and declarations to her. David has invited a diffident and somewhat dithering flapper, Jackie Coryton, whom he wishes to study “in domestic surroundings” with an eye toward turning her into fiction. Sorrel’s guest is the dapper, much older “diplomatist” Richard Greatham; Simon’s is a sultry Mrs. Robinson of a London socialite called Myra Arundel, whom his mother accuses of using sex “like a shrimping net.” There is, moreover, only one desirable guest room (the second best is referred to as Little Hell), and the meager staff are under the command of Mom’s former dresser, the lackadaisical Clara, who’s generous with neither tea nor sympathy.

The brief weekend evolves over three acts, which director Diego Arciniegas has trimmed to less than two hours including intermissions. So even though the action consists of little more than petulance, posturing, and the plotting of escape, it’s easy to be charmed and hard to be bored as the Blisses conduct their delicate grandstanding, first disregarding, then swapping, then ensnaring their guests in arbitrarily conjured romantic melodramas that culminate in a reprise of Judith’s own Peg o’ My Heart, a cheesy potboiler called Love’s Whirlwind.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Recipe Reporter is an occasional series reporting on the techniques, ingredients, science and art used to create the best versions of popular dishes.

Want to get on the "eat local" bandwagon, but don't feel like cooking in the dog days of August? I've got two suggestions for you.

"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2"

Inexpensive disposable foil loaf pans offer an easy way to cook and serve these cheese-stuffed grilled peppers. This recipe also works with jalapeno peppers, but some people won't be able to handle the heat (and shoppers are still being warned off...

Few things will ruin a season's worth of expectations faster than dining on fresh-picked fruits or vegetables whose time hasn't come. Or, for that matter, whose time has come and gone.

It's one thing to pick your produce when it's at peak ripeness. It's another to deal with it after bringing it into the kitchen.

Some of us remember the cruisin' '50s, but if you don't, a trip to downtown New Bedford Thursday evening will give you a pretty good idea.

Bob Woodruff hosts "China Inside Out," a "Primetime" (10 p.m., ABC) special about the growing influence of the world's most populous country and dynamic economy.

If you can't create, or cast, characters people love, you might as well fill your shows with characters people love to hate. That appears to be the Bravo formula for the "Real Housewives" series, and it also works overtime for "Million Dollar Listings"...

In comedy, Hollywood has learned that raunch sells.

Douglas Henshall is running out of ways to look shocked no matter what kind of dinosaur is chasing him.