During an economic crisis, it’s hard to maintain the level of cultural awareness you’d like to have. You can check in with our resident cultural expert, but that’s no substitute for checking out Boston’s museums and music halls for yourself.

But when your job is on the line and you’ve only got 20 bucks until payday, it’s more affordable to stay in and watch Law and Order reruns. Until now.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has announced that 4,000 tickets to more than 45 shows will be made available to concertgoers under the age of 40 for the low, low price of $20 each.

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The movement to bring Edgar Allan Poe back into Boston literary circles is so quintessentially annoyingly provincially us that I almost support it on ironic grounds. But I can not.

Certainly I am with Poe’s thrashing of the snobbish tendencies of the transcendalists (today’s Central Square coffee-shop philosophers), but I just don’t see the point of Boston claiming yet another thing that is not rightly our own. Shall we also put a hypodermic in the Common to honor 21st Century best-seller Jose Canseco because he hung out with Roger Clemens at Fenway for a couple of years? (more…)

On Friday night, we headed to Symphony Hall to catch Chris Botti and the Boston Pops. The trumpeter, who attributes his success to “practice, practice, practice, and being friends with Sting,” brought out the British superstar, Boston boys John Mayer and Steven Tyler, and a slew of other big-name musicians for a concert that will be aired on PBS for its March 2009 pledge drive.

It was a great time, with middle-aged men reduced to acting like  fanboys when Tyler took the stage. After the jump, we review the highlights, and one very serious lowlight.

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As if the Longfellow Bridge didn’t have enough problems already. Department of Conservation and Recreation officials report that the span’s decorative trim, which had been sitting in a lumberyard while the bridge is under repair, has gone missing.

The 2,347 linear feet of cast iron, which is worth $10,000 if it’s sold for scrap, is just the most recent high-profile loss. Let’s review some other thefts and losses that hurt local pocketbooks almost as much as they do our civic dignity.

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On Elm Street in Somerville, 39-year-old entrepreneur Johnny Monsarrat’s newest scheme is a public oasis for contemplation and counsel. He calls it “Cross into the Abyss.”

Resembling a quirky science fair project, it’s an interactive advice center where visitors can anonymously seek Monsarrat’s guidance. A novice at life counseling, Monsarrat is also the founder and CEO of Hard Data Factory, a Somerville-based company launched in 2006 that sells event listings and competitive information to businesses. He dreamed up this philosophy garden as a way of sharing his belief that people must actively create their own happiness—a notion that helped him shed 125 lbs. and ditch distressing relationships.

The project is rooted in overcoming fear. Fear, Monsarrat says, keeps people from changing their lives and moving forward. And in his garden he invites us to confront and conquer it. In three weeks, the garden has drawn 90 people to his yard. That’s 90 secrets, confessions and fears and 90 minutes per day that Monsarrat spends responding to notes like, “What is my life work, my soul’s purpose?”; “What age will I die at?”; and “I have court and do not know if I’m going to prison.” He vows encouragement and empathy in three days. His idea is as strange as it is wonderful. (more…)

What does it take to play a Yeshiva student turned hip-hop connoisseur/rapper in a short film? Well, it helps if, like Nosson Zand, you’re already Hasidic, and also a rapper. Zand, whose real first name is Nathan, recently picked up the Best Actor in a Short Film award at the Boston International Film Festival for essentially portraying himself in the “Song of David.”

The 26-year old Brookline-native raps, acts, and keeps kosher in real life. He first experienced hip-hop at age 12, developing a passion that withstood his conversion to Orthodox Judaism.

In the film, Zand portrays a teenager studying to become a rabbi. When the young student discovers his love for hip-hop he’s forced to come to terms with his conflicting passions. (Yeah, we know. Yet another Jewish boy meets hip-hop, falls in love with aforesaid music, and must decide between becoming a rabbi and Lil Wayne). (more…)

Being a columnist, I’ve learned to cope with a steady diet of futility and disappointment. But I can’t recall feeling such a keen sense of defeat as I did yesterday afternoon, when I got word of the line-up for this years abhorrent Pops Fourth of July extravaganza. I’ve written about this before, and consider Keith Lockhart an enemy of music (not to mention an increasingly creepy looking man whose propensity for black slacks and billowy red shirts suggest a cross between an IT professional and a movie theater usher).

Still, today’s news took me off guard. Something deep (and probably stupid) within me hoped that the column I wrote last year would have knocked something loose, caused someone with the Pops to take a moment away from rigging this years’ patriotism/horror-show, and think, “You know, he’s right, we are cheapening our city, our selves, our nation, the troops, the children, civil rights, decency, decorum, taste etc. etc.”

Not so. Witness, ladies and gentlemen, the headliner for this year’s show: RASCAL FLATTS. (more…)

We heard recently that director Brian De Palma, he of Scarface and The Untouchables fame, had signed on to direct a movie based on the notorious Boston Strangler murders of the early 1960s. We were elated because we assumed (incorrectly) that it would be based on Sebastian Junger’s 2006 book, A Death in Belmont, a great read but one which Casey Sherman nevertheless savagely critiques in an article for us.

Instead, the script was adapted from Susan Kelly’s little-known book, The Boston Stranglers: The Public Conviction of Albert DeSalvo and the True Story of Eleven Shocking Murders. This one exhaustively detailed the 11 heinous murders, most of which involved molesting the women and strangling them with their own stockings. The book also chronicled the aftermath of Albert DeSalvo’s confession, trial, and murder. (more…)

News broke yesterday that 28 teenagers responsible for wreaking drunken havoc on Robert Frost’s summer abode in Vermont finally received their punishment. They are to attend a couple of classes with Middlebury College professor Jay Parini, a Frost scholar and biographer, on the “redemptive power of poetry.”

But, what you didn’t know is that the great New England bard might have partied with the kids who trashed his place. We just exchanged emails with Parini. Frost, it seems, liked a stiff drink on occasion. (more…)

I’ll be the first to admit I know next to nothing about art, yet I still insist on visiting museums several times a year, so my opinions, if not valuable, may not be entirely worthless. With that said, the Anish Kapoor exhibit, which opened last night at the ICA, is the best art experience I have had in years.

Even without an art vocabulary, it’s next to impossible to describe, so I apologize in advance. According to the ICA, “Kapoor’s sculpture seems to disappear, dissolve, levitate, or extend beyond a space the viewer can perceive.” Which seems accurate. (more…)