Monday @ Arts at the Armory

Sure, five bucks can buy you a gourmet cupcake (or maybe two!) at any of this city's killer cupcakeries. Know what you can't get? Thousands of cupcakes. Behold the greatest do-good bakesale in all the land: CupcakeCamp, which brings together pro and amateur pastry chefs alike to showcase their cupcakes to the masses. All proceeds benefit Lovin' Spoonfuls, a nonprofit organization that recovers and distributes food to local crisis centers and soup kitchens, so don't be shy. Read more

Monday @ ZuZu

We usually don’t like to go around hyping potential competitors (bad for business and all) but we’re all about Freak Flag, a local free, independent quarterly paper covering all the musical, literary, artistic, and journalistic talent around town. The DIY upstart operation has been diligently working to raise funds to print their first issue and, as such, are hosting a benefit show tonight at ZuZu. Freak Flag Takes Over “Night Of The Living Deadhead”features music by similarly DIY-minded bands Fat History Month and Hyena, interspersed with DJ sets by the Freak Flag folks themselves. Come on out and support your local free alt rags — Freak Flag specifically — at ZuZu. Read more

Monday @ House of Blues

‘90s punk rock is unfortunately destined to go down in the annals of music history with a somewhat sullied reputation, if for no other reason than that it begot mall punk. Thanks a bunch, Green Day! But when the historians who specialize in that sort of thing eventually take a look back, they’ll surely uncover that it wasn’t all pre-emo mush. Take Rancid, for example. Not only did they essentially define a sound with 1995’s And Out Come the Wolves (Epitaph), but they’re still going strong, seemingly bent on erasing the wrongdoings of those that came before. They're at the House of Blues for a two-night stand. Read more

Tuesday @ Sel de la Terre Back Bay

Accept it, beer is just as good at playing nice with fancy food at the dinner table as wine is. To put a cherry on top of that argument, Sel de la Terre's resident beer guru Kevin Mitchell will walk you through this four-course nosh-fest paired with old-world style Mystic Brewery selections. We hear there's Chimay cheese involved. We're in. Read more

Tuesday @ Middlesex Lounge

New York dance label-of-note Death from Above reps it tonight at Petrol’s Third Anniversary Party. The Tuesday night dance party is three whole years old — downright mature for such a tough scene, where new dance nights are born and expire with the frequency of pet goldfish. DFA A&R guy and established DJ Justin Miller and The Juan Maclean swing by to help celebrate the milestone, along with resident DJs James Gerard, Greg Teves, and William John. Read more

Tuesday @ Brookline Booksmith

Okay, so maybe we have a vested interest in the subject, but the topic of Emmy-winner, journalist, filmmaker, and author Rory O’Connor’s new book is relevant enough to have significance for anyone of the Internet generation. The Huffington Post contributor’s book Friends, Followers, And The Future: How Social Media Are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, And Killing Traditional Media (City Lights) is a comprehensive, astute exploration of the effect that the all-encompassing takeover of social media is having on our world. In an age when many people get their news from Twitter or a friend’s Facebook feed, yeah, you could say we’re interested. Read more

Wednesday @ Precinct

Northampton-based slop-rock trio Bunny’s A Swine share a bill with two local bands of note at Precinct tonight. Big Digits should help schlep you over the Wednesday hump/slump with their distinct brand of party-starting sonic antics, with the help of Phoenix 2011 Best Music Poll Roots/Americana winner Banditas. Dudemaster (featuring Hilken Mancini of Shepherdess) rounds out a solid mid-week bill. Read more

Monday @ Museum of Fine Arts

Celebrate Veteran’s Day in style at the MFA’s recently installed Beauty As Duty: Textiles And The Home Front In WWII Britain. Part fashion exhibit, part historical retrospective, the exhibit includes dresses, uniforms, a war-time wedding dress, a vintage British Vogue, photographs, propaganda scarves with war motifs (featuring such party-line prints as a cartoon Adolf Hitler), and more. The exhibit is on display through May 2012 at the Museum of Fine Arts. Read more

Saturday, June 02, 2012 @ Steven Zevitas Gallery

In an age where crazies keep calling for the end of days, perhaps Alex Lukas‘s work is quite timely. Lukas makes large-scale, compellingly dystopic pieces, created from a mixture of water and media on appropriated book pages and heavy paper. His pieces show cities in ruin, half submerged in flood or reduced to various states of rubble. And yet, the works in the young Cambridge-born artist’s exhibit Alex Lukas: Recent Works are strangely beautiful. Read more

Saturday, June 02, 2012 @ Harvard Art Museums

Feininger is best known as a cubist and German Expressionist painter, or a major early-20th-century newspaper cartoonist. This show delves into the artists’ photography archive, now owned by Harvard, to consider his avant-garde experiments with the camera. The rhythmic modern design of a Bauhaus building’s balconies, a double-exposed street scene, a New York rooftop vista, and a street reflected in a store window show his development between the Bauhaus — the famed German art and design school where he took up photography in 1928 — and New York, where he settled permanently in 1937. Read more

Sunday, June 03, 2012 @ Boston Children's Museum

"Oddanimalogist Jef Czekajkids" (an alterego created for this exhibit) worked with local kids to invent weird creatures a/k/a/ Oddanimal, then interpreted them as the art on display in this unique exhibit at the Boston Children's Museum (adults will like it too) that includes fake books, fake records, fake radio programs, and more... all based upon the artist's invented character. Should be odd, all right. Opening party Friday, March 16 at 5:30 pm Read more

Saturday, June 09, 2012 @ Lyric Stage Company of Boston

“Everyone’s a little bit racist” is just one of the guilty truths told in the Tony-winning play Avenue Q. Lyric Stage Company (with help from Brookline’s Puppet Showplace Theater) presents Boston’s staging of the much-lauded play, which stars a cast of puppets and their human counterparts. Avenue Q tells the story of a college grad who moves into a shabby apartment on the titular NY avenue and meets a motley array of puppet friends including “Lucy the Slut” and “Rod the Republican.” Stereotypes have never been fleshed (felted?) out so boldly . . . or so hilariously. Read more

Sunday, June 24, 2012 @ Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts

Who was it that first said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? Shakespeare, or some ancient Greek dude, or someone. Doesn’t matter, because it still rings true. Take runway models for instance. They’re considered — by some standards — the very epitome of beauty . . . and yet when we look at one of them all we want to do is offer a sister a bacon cheeseburger. The dichotomy between the beautiful and the grotesque — and the grey area that so often falls between — is the subject of Pretty Ugly: Deviant Materialism, a new exhibit that uses painting, sculpture, photography, and video to create art both beautiful and hideous, aiming to elicit visceral reactions of attraction and repulsion . . . sometimes simultaneously. Much of the art focuses on the human form, juxtaposing body parts like anuses and tongues to interesting effect. The reception tonight is followed by a performance from Charmaine Wheatley, who’ll serve chocolate casts of her ass to visitors — who are encouraged to get a little dirty with ’em. Read more

Friday, June 29, 2012 @ Fourth Wall Project

From this fall’s excellent — and touching — artistic exploration of the media’s role in urban violence, Anonymous Boston, to their recent Odd Future pop-up shop, the Fourth Wall Project consistently proves their dedication to thinking outside the box. Must be why they were nominated as one of the best art galleries in town in this year’s Phoenix Best poll. They maintain that standard with this latest exhibit Algorhythms, a series of canvas paintings juxtaposing abstract compositions with calligraphy. The compositions are representative of conversations between Bay Area graffiti artist Jurne and Portland designer/illustrator Matt W. Moore. The exhibit opens with a reception on May 18. Read more

Sunday, July 08, 2012 @ MIT List Visual Arts Center

The New Yorker’s photos and videos probe the wonders of the invisible world: a 16th-century scientist who sought to communicate with the dead, a spastic dance meant to ward off the poisons of a tarantula bite, photos left behind by a doomed Arctic expedition, and the occultist Aleister Crowley’s abandoned residence in Sicily (accompanied by the drums from the Rolling Stones’ "Sympathy for the Devil"). Read more

Sunday, July 29, 2012 @ Museum of Fine Arts

Six decades ago, the New Yorker developed his signature cool, urbane, offhand manner in the aforementioned paintings of his wife Ada, as well as art- and literary-world friends, and the landscapes of Maine (where he has long summered). His canvases are like sophisticated bon mots tossed out at a cocktail party. The MFA surveys his printmaking via some 150 prints, cutouts on aluminum, illustrated books, paintings and drawings — including Rush (1971), the artist’s recent gift to the museum: 37 silhouetted oil-paint-on-aluminum portraits that depict New York’s cultural glitterati of the ’60s Read more

Sunday, July 29, 2012 @ TD Garden

Tuesday, August 28, 2012 @ House of Blues

Friday, August 31, 2012 @ Oberon

Booze is a sly mistress. That wicked temptress gets us going and then, all too often, fucks us over. Ain’t that just like a woman? Everyone’s had one of those evenings when they should have called it a night but then went ahead and took that fifth shot of Jack (one of those nights in college, of course. Yeah, college . . . ) and subsequently woke up using the toilet for a pillow. That’s exactly what Bye Bye Liver: The Boston Drinking Play is all about. From the girl who shouldn’t be allowed near tequila to the one-night stand who looked a whole lot better through those beer goggles you were sporting the night before, Bye Bye Liver covers all the hazards of drinking in hilarious detail. Audience members are brought into the participatory performance — engaging in those familiar games of “Never Have I Ever” and the like — which premieres tonight and will be reprised every Friday through the end of August. Read more

Monday, May 27, 2013 @ Peabody Essex Museum

The Boston artist and MassArt teacher is known for her panoramic photos surveying the American landscape — the largest trees of each species across the country; hunters, birds, life along Montana’s Bitterroot River. This small show examines two decades of photos of her family and her childhood home in Novelty, Ohio, for a meditation on youth and aging, home and time Read more