Sun. May 6

Is it a good or bad thing to have the band Hellogoodbye out there right now? I mean, with the name Hellogoodbye. We all remember the Beatles song, but on the telly these days the "Hello Goodbuy" we see is the series of Target ads which, like most Target ads, is infuriatingly clever as hell. They've take a great song, twisted it arrangement-wise and meaning-wise. Were the Beatles really writing about shopping? At any rate, This quartet, fronted by singer-guitarist Forrest Kline, has made its mark on MTV with its propulsive, chirpy Buggles/Daft Punk songs of burbly bounciness. Their debut album is called "Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!" for some reason. Kline explains "Mostly," the songs are "about my girlfriend or someone who did or didn't used to be my girlfriend. I guess you could say it's the soundtrack to being my girlfriend." Update: He's got a girlfriend. Gotta like the band ethos. Keyboardist Jesse Kurvink explains, "We have always just done whatever we wanted to and whatever was funny to us and so far it's worked out okay, so we'll probably stick to that. No one wants to be famous. Nobody wants to tour forever. We want to do this as  long as we can and then get married to our girlfiends and have puppies and kids and live happily ever after." Join their journey at Avalon Sunday May 6. Starts 6 p.m. with Boys Like Girls and The Hush Sound. Bad news: The show is sold out. Which means you'll have to do the street hustle or make friends with someone who has $18 tickets real soon. Or get friendly with those guys who lurk outside Fenway Park with ducats in hand.

15 Lansdowne St., 617-262-2437 livenation.com

 Sat. May 5

 Mike Daisey does something on stage that everyone else does offstage: He tells stories. But these are not guy-on-a-barstool stories. Daisey, 34, is a pro, a prolific writer and teller of these stories and he’s adept at mixing comedy and tragedy. He’s doing this at the ART’s Zero Arrow Theatre through May 5 in a 90-minute show called “Monopoly!” These are vignettes taken from historical fact, current events and his own life.
    How true are they? “All stories are fiction,” says Daisey, “because you can’t ever put everything into a story, but within that metaphysical framework, yes, I endeavor to make everything truthful.”  How difficult is this to do? “It’s always difficult to do anything on your own,” Daisey says. “There’s no system, no room in American theater as it’s constructed for independent artists. Making your own path, it sounds romantic but it involves a lot of machete work and you can’t see where you’re going. You celebrate when the path works out, but so often it doesn’t. The path leads to a mud hole. (However) it gets easier in that time and momentum are on my side to some degree. During April Daisey had the show "Invicible Summer." Like “Invincible Summer,” says Daisey, “Monopoly!” has "multiple story lines woven together. This one contrasts well with ‘Invincible Sumer,’ which is very heart-driven. ‘Monopoly!’ is slightly more heady, but from the same family of performance, with autobiographical and biographical parts weaving in and out of each other. A lot of it is has to do with monopoly, about corporations that we’ve made as powerful as they are. Corporations aren’t evil, which is what makes them horrifying. They’re totally amoral.”

 Sat. May 5

Honesty being rather important in this line of work, we should say we're friends of Kim Airs - and have been so long before she opened her sexuality boutique, Grand Opening! in Coolidge Corner. (We knew her when she was in academia, but that's all we'll say of those days.) At any rate, Airs (in photo) had a radical idea for a female-oriented sex toy shop and it had a good run. She also produced some local amateur, uh, erotica called "You Oughta Be in Pictures." Last year, Airs left for the west coast. But she's back in town Saturday May 5 and here's what she's got planned for the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
"Well, you know, everyone says they don't know what to make for the 'You Oughta Be in Pictures show - my night of locally made, amateur adult video, so I thought I would throw together some clips of movies that are out there to show them how easy it is to do.  The SmorgasPORN show goes one step further, though... I'm going to have some funny contests happening while the show is going on - best porno soundtrack sounds (because in the old days, they recorded the soundtracks separately which is why the moans just never quite match the mouths of the performers), best scene reenactment - WITH CLOTHES ON! - and a few other things.There will be some running comments by yours truly which will give you some insights in the porno world but also be pretty damn funny because, well, I think most of porno IS!
Most of the videos I am showing are straight oriented, although there's a little here and there of other sexualities as well.  And oh yeah, there's lots of prizes for those brave enough to show their stuff on stage.  Legally, of course!
Tickets are ten bucks each, ya gotta be 18 years old or more, and you can get them right from the Coolidge Corner Theatre website and for more info about the show and to get tickets, just go to this website below. Shows start at midnight.

290 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-734-2500 coolidge.org/node/800

Fri. May 4

 Has there ever been a more tragic heroine than Rosemary, the kept-in-the-dark mother in Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby"? (Well, yes, there has: Shakespeare created a bunch, and more than a few others have as well.) But Ira Levin created Rosemary and Polanski and Mia Farrow - now mostly a child advocate/avid adoptive mum, infamous for having both Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen as ex-hubbys - brought her plight to life. It's all about creating a child whose education in numerology starts and ends with "666," and it's as spooky a tale of deception and evil - trust no one! good life lesson - as you can imagine. It's about duplicitous doctors, Adults in Service of Satan, a hapless actor selling his soul (that is, Rosemary and the baby) for a shot at fame. It's also a great mystery. How does Rosemary unravel the plot against her and her child? When will she see the benign smiles and reassuring pats? All of this niceness in the face of unspeakable horror - you birthed the devil's child - makes for an excruciating good time. We've seen this film several times, and never fail to stop when we're cable surfing and it's on. You can do better than that, though at the Video Underground in Jamaica Plain on Friday May 4 at 8 p.m. This film, made nearly 40 years ago, presented by Karen Brown and her group Cinescare, a group that believees "Horror cinema is the most revealing vulnerable and significant storytelling human civilization has ever invented... Only horror cinema provokes real-world action - be in objection or attraction - onthe part of its audience." Cinescare was launched last Halloween and its objective is present over 80 years of horror movies and examine, with the audience, the narrative, characters and themes for a sociological lens. We're not sure if there's much value doing this for the routine slice-and-dice movies, but we can certainly see them doing a number on "Hostel." "Rosemary's Baby" sounds like the perfect film for a prodcution called "Horror Springs Forth 2007." This is free, and free pizza comes from Bella Luna.

385 Centre St., Jamaica Plain, 617-522-4949 thevideounderground.com cinescare.com

ongoing

Dame Judi Dench pulled off a Best Supporting Actress nod for her performance as the embittered old crow of a schoolteacher she plays in "Notes on a Scandal." And shouldn't she? God, what a delicious character! Dench is Barbara, a repressed, duplicitous, aged lesbian who gleefully snares the younger teacher Sheba, played by Cate Blanchett, in a trap of Blanchett's making. She's a queen of machinations. Sheba, a former punk fan headed toward middle age and mired in a dead-end marriage to an older man, falls for a 15-year-old male student and has more than a few illicit trysts with him. (Yes, the plotline seems ripped from the headlines a la "Law and Order.") When Barbara, a self-described "battle axe," discovers one said tryst, she realizes she's got great material for blackmail. And maybe ... love? Well, Barbara is sharp-tongued, smart and scheming, but rather dim when it comes to courtship. Some of the action she relates in a voice-over - the "notes" she's keeping in her diary. This is an English "Fatal Attraction" without the ... no that would give it away. Let's say, that the only animal that dies is Barbara's cat, Portia. (Barbara's lone redeeming quality is her love for that cat, which she must put down. Sheba's refusal to accompany her on that journey is the spark for the confrontations and conflicts.) The tension is palpable, Philip Glass's music is often bombastic and Hitchcock-ian (Alfred not Robyn), and the relationships - all of them, really - are frayed. It's based on a novel by Zoe Heller and directed by Richard Eyre of "Closer" fame. (Trivia: Both Blanchett and Dench have played Queen Elizabeth in films. Punk connections: Sheba's teenage daughter sports a CBGB t-shirt early on, and Sheba references her those-were-the-days moments with a Siouxsie & the Banshees album photo and their song "Dizzy" plays in the background.) At the West Newton Cinema at 8:50. Tickets: $9.

1296 Washtington St., Newton, 617-964-8074