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Portsmouth Halloween Parade, 10/31/07
 

Portsmouth Halloween Parade, 10/31/07
 

Portsmouth Halloween Parade, 10/31/07
 

Portsmouth Halloween Parade, 10/31/07
 

Portsmouth Halloween Parade, 10/31/07

Rosemary, 07-01-09

1502GDD, 07-01-09
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fighting for fish

A new N.H. Seafood brand will help residents purchase local fish. Can it help preserve our local fishing industry?

Travel anywhere on the Seacoast and you’ll see fishing boats along the shore. But where to eat their fresh fish? Good luck with that. About 11 million pounds of fish, including just over 3 million pounds of fin fish, landed on the New Hampshire coast last year, and nearly all of it left the state after being unloaded on the pier.

Like most of us, I didn’t have a clue that our fish are heading down the interstate. But for those who’ve been watching the industry consolidate over the last 30 years, it’s like standing by while trucks full of money disappear down the road. And seeing 400 years of tradition being sold to out-of-staters. And, for some reason, saying “no, thanks” to an affordable supply of fresh healthy food, only to buy it back a few days later and older, at a higher price.

The math doesn’t make sense to a small group of people who have been meeting at Portsmouth City Hall since October working to turn the tide. This week, they’ll launch “NH Seafood Fresh and Local,” a new brand intended to help consumers identify locally landed seafood, species that are both fresh and managed to sustainability.
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news notes

catching up on local news

• The gods seem to be conspiring against local campgrounds this summer. Not only did incessant rain splatter the region at near record levels in June, but the N.H. Legislature has seen fit to impose a 9 percent rooms and meals tax on campsites. Recreational campers and campground owners are not pleased with this development, nor are Republican opponents of the state budget. Never before has the tax, normally imposed on hotels and their restaurants, been expanded to include campsites. The new state budget also increases the rooms and meals tax rate from 8 to 9 percent, delivering an extra blow to the campgrounds now under its purview. The result will likely be higher fees for campers, many of whom are already pinching pennies in these tough times. You might be better off pitching a tent in the backyard of your house—if it hasn’t been foreclosed on.
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death of a pop icon

Michael Jackson and the speed of information

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 25, Michael Jackson’s fame peaked with the sharp spike of fascination that comes moments after the death of a celebrity.

First reporting the story was TMZ.com, the Jerry Springer of entertainment Web sites. While Fox News, CNN and MSNBC were starting to post news of the singer’s collapse, TMZ had already declared Jackson dead. (For the first 40 minutes, CNN listed the singer as suffering “serious cardiac arrest.” Well, yeah. It’s always serious when your heart stops beating.)

The Iran election was knocked from the top of Twitter’s trending topics for the first time in two weeks as millions of users tweeted the news, causing the site to go down repeatedly. Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Media,” posted his usual snark alongside a picture of Jackson, with the caption “Heart attack or cold feet?” referring to the singer’s recent postponement of 50 sold-out shows he was set to perform in London. “We knew something like this would happen!!... We are dubious!!” Hilton wrote, going on to encourage ticket holders to get their money back and accusing the singer of faking to get out of the shows. (Minutes later, when reports of the death started pouring in, Hilton edited his post to simply read that Jackson was suffering a heart attack and his mother was on her way to the hospital.)
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Front Door Politics: From the State House to Your House

piercing the budget

Fairness was in the eye of the beholder at the State House last Wednesday when the N.H. House and Senate grudgingly approved the 2010-11 budget. House Bills 1 and 2 contain the state’s general fund spending and revenue, respectively. Earning few cheers, the legislation has been called everything from a legitimate compromise doing the “least possible harm” to an illegal “dung heap.”

With demand for services up and revenue down, legislators faced a $500 million projected shortfall in the general fund, which comprises about one third of the state’s $11.6 billion biennial budget. The other two thirds come from federal funding, dedicated funds, and a host of one-time monies like the federal stimulus package. Use of short-term dollars is not new in the budget balancing act, but neither is criticism of the technique. Detractors say it fails to address a “structural deficit” that always leaves budget writers with problems.

In its final debates, the budget’s passage was attributed mostly for what it doesn’t do: No casinos will break ground next year, gasoline won’t come with a 15-cent-per-gallon fee, and a capital gains tax has been dodged, for now. Echoing the sentiments of many colleagues, Sen. Jacalyn Cilley (D-Barrington) said she voted for both bills only because “the most onerous taxes and fees” had been cleared from the table.
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South Berwick native Slaid Cleaves brings new CD to his hometown

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South Berwick native Slaid Cleaves brings new CD to his hometown

Everything about singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves’ new album, from the title and cover art to the lyrics and melodies, gushes with pending tragedy. Released in April, “Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away” suggests the infirmity and transience of the fleeting things we take for granted. Cleaves tried to make that theme inhabit every aspect of his record.

“I just learned early on that in order to make an impression on people, in order for people to remember my songs, I had to really strike them in the heart and really move them,” he said. And striking the heart means stoking the tragic.

Cleaves spoke to The Wire by phone while driving to Pittsburgh for the first leg of a tour that will keep him on the road for five months. The tour swings through his hometown of South Berwick, Maine, on Thursday, July 2, kicking off the 10th annual Hot Summer Nights concert series.
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Alan Chase's Jazz Universe

The Tommy Gallant Jazz Festival

One of the Seacoast’s long running cultural events, the Tommy Gallant Jazz Festival will take place on Sunday, July 5, at Prescott Park. The festival runs from noon until 6 p.m. and will once again feature an array of local and regional talent performing over four 75-minute sets. Sorry, fans of vocal jazz—the emphasis of this year’s event is purely on the instrumental side. The list of performers includes Billy Novick’s Blues Syncopators, and saxophonist Fred Haas and guitarist Dave Newsam leading a segment titled the “LA4 Tribute to saxophonist Bud Shank.” Then there’s The Press Room Trio of Ryan Parker, John Lockwood and Les Harris Jr. performing with guests Trent Austin on trumpet and David Wells on saxophone, plus the Seacoast Big Band, directed by Dave Seiler.

The festival celebrates the legacy of the late Tom Gallant, founder and long-time centerpiece of Sunday Jazz at The Press Room in Portsmouth. Gallant, who passed away in 1998, and Dave Seiler helped organize the annual event, initially dubbed the Seacoast Jazz Festival, after the demise of the Portsmouth Jazz Festival in early 1996. Renamed the Tommy Gallant/Seacoast Jazz Festival in 1999, the concert has long been a showcase for local and regional talent with performers of international stature, such as guitarist Howard Alden, vocalist Luciana Souza and trumpeter Bobby Shew, also appearing at the festival.
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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rated PG-13

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most American movie ever. To be more specific, it’s an expensively, maybe even carefully constructed meta-prank about America, pop culture and other topics best left unaddressed by giant talking robots. “Revenge” can only be a goof. That it would make a boatload of money was a given, and with that goal out of the way, director Michael Bay, stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and the rest of the people responsible for this travesty must have had some other endgame in mind. Laughing with and at everything that is great and stupid about modern life in America seems as reasonable an explanation as anything presented in the movie, though that’s damning with faint praise indeed.

Here are the ways in which “Revenge” is the movie that most embodies, celebrates and ridicules America. There’s nothing America loves more than believing in crazy conspiracies, aliens and fake religions. In this case, the ancient predecessors of the Transformers built the pyramids to disguise some sort of giant machine that was supposed to destroy the sun. Except they met some primitive humans and decided not to use the machine (well, except for one evil robot, who was banished someplace and became the “Fallen” referred to in the title). Thousands of years later, people still believe this crazy stuff, particularly John Turturro, reprising his role as a government spook who likes to take his pants off and talk to himself. There’s also a brief detour into Robot Heaven during the bombastic climax. Robot Heaven is full of mist and robot angels and it’s so ridiculous that it can only be a joke. This may sound like nonsense now, but don’t worry—it doesn’t make sense in the movie, either.
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Lady Terminator

108 Sound Studio, 1988
starring: Barbara Anne Constable, Christopher J. Hart and Claudia Angelique Rademaker
written and directed by: H. Tjut Djalil (Jalil Jackson)

the plot: In Indonesia, legend tells of the South Sea Queen, an alluring yet vicious woman who murders her lovers while in the throes of passion. That is, until a young man robs the queen of her hidden source of power (a mystical snake hiding inside her vagina)—an act that causes a tsunami to drag the queen’s seaside castle beneath the waves and condemn her to death. But before she dies, she curses the young man and vows vengeance on his descendants. Hundreds of years later, anthropology student Tania Wilson (Constable) awakens the spirit of the queen while on a deep sea dive. The queen possesses Tania, who becomes an unstoppable killing machine. Her target: pop star Erica (Rademaker), a distant descendant of the young man who caused the queen’s downfall. Tania pursues Erica relentlessly, and Erica’s only hopes are Max McNeil (Hart), a cop charged with protecting her, and her uncle, an old mystic who may know how to defeat the spirit of the South Sea Queen.
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a party with a purpose

Taste of the Nation sets fundraising record in fight to end childhood hunger

When Bill Shore and his wife Debbie founded Share Our Strength in 1984, they knew success would hinge on their steadfast belief that everyone is capable of making a difference in the fight to end childhood hunger. 

Twenty-five years later, people around the nation continue to reaffirm that belief—including the 1,000 guests gathered on the lawn of Strawbery Banke Museum on the evening of June 24. The 15th annual Taste of the Nation Portsmouth raised more than $115,000 for the fight against hunger, a new record.

Chefs from 50-plus local restaurants prepared their finest delicacies, and 25 area brewers and wineries offered beverages. Diners assembled under a gigantic white tent and navigated rows of tables serving everything from Jumpin’ Jay’s raw oysters to The Press Room’s lobster stew to Fresh Local’s hotdog sliders. When everyone was sated, guests hit the dance floor and grooved to live music from Boston’s Soul City.
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Violence

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by Slavoj Žižek
Picador, 272 pages

Trade paperback publisher Picador chose a big personality to anchor “Violence,” the first entry in its “Big Ideas, Small Books” series. Slavoj Žižek is referred to as the “Elvis of Cultural Theory,” and like any good rock star, has a model for a wife. A self-described Marxist Communist, Žižek has run for president in his native Slovenia, written several books that marry sociological theory with pop culture, and continues to teach and lecture all over the world. 

Žižek has been the topic of an eponymous documentary film, and is one of several theorists to appear in “Examined Life,” which recently played at The Music Hall in Portsmouth. One of his most entertaining efforts has been the production of a BBC series, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” in which Žižek discusses and inserts himself into scenes spanning from Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” through David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” Viewers can see him rowing a boat in “The Birds,” reacting to the demon in “The Exorcist,” and refusing to choose the red or blue pill in “The Matrix.”
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creative outlet

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Portsmouth Fabric Company marks 30 years with art show

Sometimes loyal customers of the Portsmouth Fabric Company get stuck in a sort of sewer’s block. Owner Gretchen Rath said they walk through the high aisles of colorful and patterned fabric bolts to the Brick Wall Gallery in the back of the shop to find inspiration.
“They’ve got ideas they need to get out,” Rath said. “It’s just very satisfying to be creative and to know that what you’re doing is not anything anyone else is doing.”

This month, the Portsmouth Fabric Company is hosting a textile art exhibit, sales and charity events to celebrate 30 years of providing sewers with materials to create quilts, garments, home decorations and art.

The Brick Wall Gallery and the upstairs studio will feature a retrospective of works by regional fabric artists who have shown at the company over the past three decades. The exhibit will run through Sunday, July 26.

Artists include master sewers who offer classes in the studio, such as former manager Susan Carlson. Her art quilt, called “Polka Dodo,” is a complex and colorful combination of polka dot fabrics, tulle, and swirling stitches that together form the shape of a bird, bordered by Australian fabrics. She uses shadowing and light catching materials to make a life-like image. Some of the other artists in the show are Susan Forsman, whose quilts look like flower gardens, Dianne Hire, who has an angular, experimental style, and Wren Redmond, who invented a fabric hologram technique. 
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Children’s Museum textile arts exhibit; Clay Hill Farm fairy houses; Portsmouth Athenaeum

Children’s Museum hosts textile arts exhibit

Dover was once known as one of the textile capitals of the nation. The Children’s Museum is revisiting the city’s legacy in Gallery 6 with a summer exhibit called “A Continuous Thread,” on display through Sept. 6.

The new art display complements the museum’s recently completed Cochecosystem exhibit, which shows visitors the natural life on the river as well as its industrial past. In contrast, the museum’s Gallery 6 showcases three fiber artists with a contemporary take on the medium.

The gallery walls are alive with colorful work by weaver and art educator Sarah Haskell; master printmaker on paper and fabric Lisa Grey; and Suzanne Pretty, a founding member of the Tapestry Weavers in New England and two-time Artist Fellowship winner from the N.H. State Council on the Arts.
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the way we were

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Hackmatack Playhouse is perfect for ‘Our Town’

Someone played a piano in the rehearsal barn while people waited for the show to start, sitting on benches under shady trees. Children worked the concession stand offering homemade strawberry shortcake.

The Hackmatack Playhouse in Berwick, Maine, is an old red barn with a faintly dusty smell, antique farming tools and exposed beams. It’s the perfect setting for “Our Town,” a play about the simple life. The first show of the season, it runs Wednesday through Saturday until July 4.

This New England classic drama by Thornton Wilder is set in Grover’s Corners, a composite of several average New Hampshire towns in the Mount Monadnock region during the early 1900s. Through three acts of daily life and death, the play touches on how industrialization and immigration change things, but it really focuses on how some things stay the same.
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rain, rain, go away; kayaking through history

rain, rain, go away

It hardly seemed necessary to check the weather forecast during the month of June. A glance out the window almost invariably indicated that it was rainy, drizzly, cloudy, foggy or a combination of all four.

“We have an abundance of rainfall this month. Everybody knows that. It’s pretty amazing,” said meteorologist Butch Roberts, of the National Weather Service.

As of June 28, 5.15 inches of rain had fallen in Concord during the month of June, and there had been 19 foggy days. Average rainfall for the first 28 days of June is 2.88 inches in Concord—2.27 less than this year. Last year’s rainfall was also above average, with 4.70 inches falling by June 28.

There was even more rain in Portland, Maine, where 8.17 inches had fallen by June 28. That’s more than five inches more than the city’s June average of 3.06 inches. In fact, Portland’s monthly average was surpassed in a single 24-hour period from June 18 to 19, when 3.33 inches poured down. Last year, the city had just 3.63 inches in June.
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Brainscan
 

Mr. Satan in 1989
 

Roadside America
Music
Film
Boing Boing

Larry King "interviews" Paul Krassner

RoboGeisha trailer is awesome, includes weaponized tempura shrimp

Books as planters

   
 
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