Mysteries, bargains and mysterious bargains abound at Planet Records, off Harvard Square.
The record shop contains all the usual treasures, gems and pop culture apocrypha in its shotgun-style interior, stacked neatly into bins organized by alphabet and genre for easy crate-digging adventures.
If you dig deep enough, though, you’ll stumble upon odd artifacts of intriguing, if uncertain, provenance. Items of various dimensions, securely wrapped in the kind of anonymous brown bagging that used to conceal magazines of ill repute back in the days when lusty perverts (sex-positive spin: “empowered self-gratifiers”) had the gumption to get pornography delivered to their doorstep.
I picked up one of these mystery packages recently. It was a square-shaped item that promised seven 7-inchers for the price of one dollar.
Quick reminder: These are the teeny-tiny records often spun at 45 rotations per minute (hence, sometimes called “45s”), and occasionally needing to be supplemented by a circular piece of plastic (the spindle adapter) if the center hole is the size of a Kennedy half-dollar instead of the pencil-eraser-width common to standard 12-inch LPs.
In the world of video games these kinds of mystery packages are called “loot boxes.” You buy them blind, like a pack of baseball cards, not sure whether you’ll find treasure or trash inside.
Video game companies have come under fire lately for marketing in-game loot boxes, which critics have compared with gambling, to children. But I’m a full-grown adult, and I like my chances at seven 7-inchers for a dollar.
Highlights from my mystery package included: “You’ll Lose a Precious Love” by The Temptations, “Many Tears Ago” by Connie Francis and a few cha-cha-chas from Tito Puente. Not the sort of records I’d spin by myself at home, but I might have the makings for a fine oldies set at Sunday Spins at the Toad.
Open decks, all genres welcome, noon to 4 p.m. Tip your DJ …
Hit this
Sunday: Benches (Sonia, Cambridge)
Benches belies the sunny Southern California aesthetic of their origins to produce alt-rock that is musically and emotionally complex. Their latest EP, “Kill the Lights,” combines the textures and attack of an early Radiohead with the devil-may-care attitude of The Strokes. Thumbing through their tour itinerary, I noticed “Cambridge” pop up a few times. Besides playing Sonia, they’re scheduled to perform in the “Cambridge Room” of various House of Blues locations around the country. There’s a “Cambridge Room” at the Dallas and Cleveland HOB locations, honoring the franchise’s original location in Harvard Square at 96 Winthrop St. San Diego’s Pleasure Pill opens.
Monday: Andrew Victor and Victoria Cardona (Club Passim, Cambridge)
A pair of guitarists share a bill on what’s projected to be a steamy Monday night. Cool off indoors in the subterranean digs of Club Passim. Victor leans folk, Cardona leans jazz with Latin and world influences. The show is part of the Passim Monday Discovery Series, which is sponsored by Nine Athens Music, which is a subsidiary of the marketing, consulting and facilitation company Nine Athens, which is owned by Charles (my friends call me “Chuck”) Honnet, who is vice president on the Club Passim board of directors. Will Chuck be at the show? Suddenly I’m beset by an image of a reptile eating its own tail. Is that you, Goose?
Wednesday: Open Mike Eagle (Middle East, Cambridge)
L.A.’s Open Mike Eagle always tours through the Boston area. The art rapper is originally from Chicago, so there’s no stale Lakers/Celtics beef to honor. And his heady lyrics, accompanied by heady samples, make sense in our local landscape, which often can’t get out of its head. His latest LP, “Neighborhood Gods Unlimited,” which dropped in July, is full of laid-back hip-hop nods to vintage R&B swag and spoken-word dalliances. New York indie rockers Oceanator and local art-hopper Esh & The Isolations make for a motley and magical bill.
Live: Punk rock at Cambridge Community Center
“To youth, who can dream dreams and with courage turn its dream into action.”
So says the inscription for the mural at the Cambridge Community Center, painted by John S. Coles at some point in the 1970s, a far distant past when Americans retained more than trace amounts of optimism in government as a tool for the cultural enrichment of the people. Has that belief gone the way of Big Bird?
The mural pictures a diverse body of young children, crammed joyously along the length of a slide, having a ball on a sunny afternoon. Adults always love to picture children this way: smiling, content, blissfully unaware of the awful choices that adults have made to ruin the world children are about to inherit.
The mural was the last thing you saw last Monday before descending the winding staircase to the basement where the youth were turning dreams into action. Inspirational stuff, except the dream on this particular occasion was a triple stack of bands playing loud, fast, hard punk rock in a room that smelled like a used gym sock. Locals Burning Lord welcomed Square One from New York City and Speedway from all the way from Stockholm for an evening of entertainment with an international pedigree.
The major fallacy that sleeps in the hearts of most adults who fancy themselves proponents of youth culture is that culture is a gift that can be given to youth the way you leave a present underneath a Christmas tree. Hence the preponderance of local arts and cultural opportunities for children that are mediated, to greater and lesser degrees, by the magnanimity of adults, who, unsurprisingly, have very adultlike ideas about the who, what, where, when and why of art.
The truth is that culture can’t be gifted – you’ve got to reach out and make it your own. That’s what the Boston hardcore scene was doing in the basement of the Cambridge Community Center. The center provides some great youth programming, but it also demonstrates the good grace to step out of the way and let youth (and adults) rent its space at affordable rates for whatever they can dream up.
The punk show series in the basement at 5 Callender St., Riverside, creates the kind of safe, sober, all-ages venue space that is vanishingly rare in Cambridge. Even rarer since Ian Simmons (Foundation for Civic Leadership) pulled the plug on the Democracy Center last year, interrupting the roughly two-decade run of DIY shows out of that building. A prosperous community that loves the arts, such as Cambridge, should be gaining, not losing, these spaces.
Let me wonder aloud about the greater goods that could be realized by providing more of these spaces where youth can drive programming and participation doesn’t hinge on cover charges, drink minimums or a boardroom full of adults deciding what sort of cultural enrichment the children will be subjected to next.
Youth have the courage to turn their dreams into action. Hats off to Cambridge Community Center for having the courage to get out the way and let the magic happen.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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