James Mercer and company, in all their mustachioed, dressed-down glory, forewent glitzy stage lights and instrumental improvisation to deliver a clean set list of tunes spanning the years since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World nestled into the ears of tune-hungry hipsters. They gave us “Australia,” they gave us “Sea Legs.” They gave us “The Past and Pending,” which was the song we really wanted to hear. And let me tell you, there was something just utterly adorable about watching a room full of all-agers sing along to the descending line of “la la la’s” in “Saint Simon.”

In addition to a handful of new songs in the works, the band played a few cover songs—by the Beach Boys and Neil Young—but really blew our fuse when they played the Beta Band’s “Dry the Rain.” I mean, don’t get us wrong, the oldies are a force to be reckoned with, but watching one of our favorite bands cover another favorite band’s music makes us wring our hands with glee. We looked around the theater, singing along unabashedly, and noticed that no one else even seemed to know, or care, that we were listening to something rad here.

So we thank the Shins for playing a delightful smattering of everything we wanted to hear, not blasting our eardrums out of our skulls, and satisfying our appetite for that special brand of endearing rock show.

—Anne Vickman

Though the New Yorkers never actually did this, during the final rounds of negotiations between the Times Company and the Globe’s largest union (Totten’s guild), New York negotiators presented their union adversaries with the completed notice and threatened to file it if the talks failed to reach a resolution. They never did, as Totten and the union agreed to bring management’s last, best offer before their members.

They’ll vote on the proposal June 8. Totten has warned his members that, in the meantime, the Times Company may file the WARN notice just to scare them into voting for the company’s proposal.

Which brings us to the point of this post: according to New York Times Company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, it seems the WARN notice will not be made official. Yet.

She wrote in an email to me: “We were very pleased to reach agreements with six of our seven unions and are hopeful that they and the Guild will vote favorably on the proposals we have in front of them. Assuming that happens, there would be no reason to file a WARN notice. ”

Reading between the passive aggressive lines, it seems we shouldn’t expect to see any closing notices filed before June 8. But if the Guild vote goes down, all bets are off.

A little further up the road, Adam Sandler began filming a major Hollywood film.

The flick-once rumored to be called Lake House, then Lakefront and now Grown Ups-started filming at Southboro’s Pilgrim Church and Old Burial Ground at 7 this morning. The idea of Massachusetts as a Hollywood mecca is nothing new (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past filmed at the Wayside Inn just a couple towns over), but this is big news for a small town like Southboro, population 8,337.

I know. I grew up there.

No sooner had I updated my Twitter account with the news that I’d be reporting about the movie than I received an excited tweet from Palmer Morse, a 15-year-old Southboro high-schooler. “I live in Southboro, everyone here is sooo sooo excited for next weekend. Hoping to be cast as an extra,” he gushed. Upon further investigation, I found out that the Sandler hype was all the rage at Algonquin Regional High School. Apparently, one of Morse’s friends has been cast as an extra and may be considered for a bigger role. This is clearly the hottest news in town since it was rumored that Meg Ryan might move here 10 years ago.

“Nothing big has ever happened in Southboro,” says Ashley Locke, who works at the Dunkin Donuts on Cordaville Road. So far no cast members have stopped in for coffee, but a co-worker mentioned that they’d give it out for free. (Hint hint, Mr. Sandler.)

This morning, there was little sign of the picturesque New England church in the center of town. Where an open, spring-green hill should have been, there were traffic cones, fences, police cars and plenty of ominous black SUVs. It looked more like Pilgrim Church was on lock down after a bomb threat than a movie set. As I drove by with the steering wheel in one hand and a camera in the other, the disapproving stare of a police officer prevented me from catching a glimpse of Chris Rock, Kevin James, Salma Hayek, or any of the other stars (including Rob Schneider, David Spade, Maya Rudolph, Maria Bello, and Norm McDonald).

But last week production members stopped by for lunch at Mauro’s Village Cafe (read: picturesque New England diner) where David Ball works as manager. The crew didn’t have much to share, but that didn’t stop others from hammering Ball for details.

“The girls at the bank said, ‘Will you call us if anyone comes in?’” Ball says. “I said, ‘What are you going to do, shut down the bank?’ They said, ‘No, we’ll come down one at a time.’”

Crew members have been spotted other places, too: At Mauro’s convenience store to pick up cigarettes, and at the English Garden Florist, where they wiped out the supply of white and yellow roses.

Locals can stop by to watch the production, providing they are quiet and stand by the flag pole in front of the church. Before the cast went on lunch break at 1 p.m., a crowd of about 50 had gathered to watch. One traffic cop reported that he saw cast members as they drove in this morning. They were friendly and offered autographs.

At Phaidra Nail Salon on Main Street, there had been no sightings of Salma Hayek–yet. “I’ll run up to her and tell her we have a great nail place here,” says Randi Chen, who was getting a manicure. “It’s great exposure for the town, but it adds a little inconvenience for traffic issues.”

The town, which will reportedly be receiving $20,000 in addition to the $25,000 that is going to Pilgrim Church, has taken filming very seriously. A film production map and schedule was distributed to all local businesses. The parking lot of Woodward School, which serves Southboro’s second and third graders, was hijacked by the production to house an ungodly amount of trailers. Filming will last all this week, and is expected to add about 800 people to the population.

In a town where building a Wendy’s was a huge scandal due to the potential disruption of its picturesque New England image, it’s interesting Southboro has agreed to such a large production and possible traffic problems. Or maybe not. The filming of Grown Ups is more of an affirmation than anything else.

“Maybe they’re going to come in here and I’ll have my 30 seconds of fame,” says Sergio Nascimento, an employee at Southboro House of Pizza.

The book, for which Larsen reportedly received a $900,000 advance (a typical first-time novelist would get less than 50 grand), follows a 12-year-old cartographer from a Montana ranch to a Smithsonian awards ceremony in Washington, DC.

Here’s the draw: the pages are filled with maps, diagrams, and notes in the margins, which often reveal more about the character than the text itself. So, why maps? “I think a good map is like a good story,” Larsen says.

Larsen begins his tour stop tonight at Brookline Booksmith at 7 p.m. and spoke to Eva Medoff about growing up in Cambridge, his influences, and whether his novel would work as a book on tape.

Boston Daily: You grew up in Cambridge. When did you decide you wanted to be a writer and did your upbringing our your surroundings have anything to do with that?

Reif Larsen: Most definitely. In some ways I’ve always been a writer, even if I wouldn’t vocalize it as such, because from an early age I was writing stories. I went to Shady Hill School in Cambridge which really encouraged you to be very creative, even if it was at the cost of some grammar. They encouraged alternate spelling, all that. It took me a while to kind of come around and embrace being a writer, I’ve always been a little suspicious of it in terms of that cultural image of the writer sitting alone and shunning the world kind of thing. Both of my parents are visual artists. Some of their creative process rubbed off on me for sure.

BD: As a first time novelist, what were your expectations for this book originally?

RL: Oh, very low. When you rely on yourself as a writer you don’t think of it in terms of how it’s going to support you. My parents always said, “Don’t become an artist. There’s no money in the art world. You’ll never be able to support yourself and it’s always too much work.”

So I asked them, why are they artists? And they said, “Well, we couldn’t do anything else.” It’s kind of the same thing for me. With this book, there were many stages when I was like, “What am I doing?” When I sent it out for publication, I really cast very low expectations. I hoped it would get published, obviously, and I hoped that the person who published it would see it for the strange book that it was. And I just wanted to write another book.

BD: Did your parents have any influence on your decision to use all the pictures and the notes in the margins in the book?

RL: Maybe. Of course everything is related. When I set out to write this book, I had this notion that it would be a field guide of sorts, but I never set off to write an illustrated novel. The illustrations came out of the character and the demands of the story. Originally I was going to hire someone to do the illustrations, but even though I had no artistic training, I think my parents’ professions kind of rubbed off on me. So I took the plunge and started doing it myself.

BD: There’s actually some spirited debate on Boston.com about whether this is children’s literature or adult literature. Who would you say the audience is?

RL: I don’t think there’s a question, this is for adults. They clearly haven’t read the book. It’s funny that a book with images, immediately in our culture, people assume, “Oh, that’s for kids.” I think younger people can certainly read this and get a lot out of it.

The audience that I intended it for was me, I’m 29-years-old, and I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s for adults. As much as anything, it’s really not about a 12 year old. It’s about how the world of adults reacts to a young person with talent.

BD: How did you come up with the book originally and the idea of the 12-year-old protagonist?

RL: Like everything in fiction, at least for me, I came to it by sort of a circuitous route. I knew I wanted to write about cowboys. I knew I wanted to attack that through the backdoor and throw in the son of a cowboy. Originally the character was 57-years-old, and a drunk in a Parisian prison narrating his childhood, you know, kind of remorsefully form his cell block. And that wasn’t necessarily working, so I made a shift at some point, I decided, oh, hang on, the character’s not 57 but actually 12-years-old and on a ranch.

BD: Do you think that there are parallels from your own life in this? I read somewhere that you are a Zen Buddhist, do you think that had any influence on this?

RL: As a writer I don’t think we necessarily seek out to lay a certain world view purposefully, but one arises to the surface for sure. T.S. has this sneaky feeling that we’re born with an entire map of the world inside our heads, and that we spend most of our lives trying to figure out how to access that map. It’s kind of embedded in our subconscious. I think that has links to this sort of Eastern idea that we are born complete in ourselves and that we just need to realize our completeness.

BD: Where did this notion of maps come in? How did you decide to include that in the book?

RL: I got to the end of the book and I realized something’s really missing. I realized we needed to see T.S.’s maps, because this was where he was actually most comfortable. I found that the reveals the maps, diagrams and annotated side text create is where he sets his comfort path and makes moves that he wouldn’t actually make in the main text. I’ve always loved maps. I think a good map is like a good story. Once I started including that, I felt like a whole world was opened up to me in some ways.

BD: In today’s society, with the all the visual bombardment from the media, advertisements and television, is this some sort of way to compete by making books more visual?

RL: I think there is interesting territory for novelists to explore the use of image and the dialogue between image and text in books. We’re at a very interesting sort of fork in the road or transition point in the publishing industry, where everyone’s crying out that things are going to go electronic and e-book. I think that there is something very important, at least for me, about the artifact of the book.

Books as objects—there’s a reason we hold and we read and we fill our homes with them. It would be cool if there was sort of a counter-movement just as we’re putting everything on e-books and flattening everything that we’re also starting to look more at the design of the book, and how, physically, human beings interact with the book and the space on the page.

BD: Going along with that, what do you think it would be like to listen to your book on tape?

RL: That was one of the questions that we kind of wondered about at Penguin. Right now the technology doesn’t seem to be there, at least. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like and how it would feel for the reader without potentially making their car crash as they’re moving from the main text to the sidebar. The reading experience of this is really tied to following those arrows into the margins, so I’m not sure how you would recreate that orally. But I’m sure there is a way, I just haven’t thought of it.

BD: Is there a reason why you’re starting off this tour in Boston?

RL: Well I have roots there. Maybe that’s where it all began. I’m so excited to come back to Boston and start the U.S. tour there. It gives me a really good feeling.

BD: What up next for you? Do you have any projects in the works?

RL: I just started a new book. I’m right in the beginning phases of it, but it’s kind of a Balkan, Congo international mystery with puppets. It’s interesting, it’s a totally different project. Probably no illustrations, but it might have strings coming out of the book.

–EVA MEDOFF

Hear Reif Larsen read from his novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet tonight at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith.

Atlanta’s Family Force 5, a Christian “crunk” band was the epitome of said pie: a spectacle of matching outfits, stripped beats, rap hop screams, and fits of acrobatics. Think the Jonas Brothers if they regurgitated multiple highlights of genres past and screeched a lot more.

The spectacle was only intensified when the boys actually introduced themselves—as Crouton, Chap Stique, Phatty, Xanadu, and Slow Glow Activatur.  Lyric commands to get “Super duper sonic, baby” sent us into fits of giggles. Slow Glow wore a pair of black Hulk hands, while Xanadu did some interpretive dancing, and took a seven-foot jump off of stage equipment.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Beantown. But we are all entitled to moments of homesickness, which is why we were pumped to see Boulder, Colorado’s 3OH!3 headlining the tour.

These guys have come a long way since playing university-sponsored skateboard rail jams; a platinum record and several tours later, the duo is now backed by a live band and playing live shows at major venues with rabid frequency. We are hoping the newfound fame and glory haven’t changed their sense of humor or frenetic performances, full of sweet dance moves onstage and fits of fist pumping from the crowd.

As if on cue, the lights went down and hundreds of fans thrust the signature 3OH!3 hand symbol into the air as Nat Motte and Sean Foreman came onstage and proceeded to belt out “Punk Bitch” and jump around in unison.

So how does the major label-backed couple’s gig compare to the days of yore? From what we could suss out, the songs remain the same, while the crowd is what has changed. We recall early performances in Denver’s finest dive bars, surrounded by tattoos, wallet chains, and Pabst pints. The current spectacle before us, however, belied our memories.

Hordes of teenage girls roamed the venue, decked out in a merch vendor’s dream of all things 3OH!3. Those without the urge to buy (the minority) simply went with less—t-shirts and tank tops became modified sports bras and bikini tops, dragging one another around by the hand, while Red Bull and water were clearly the chosen beverages of the evening.

We spent the entire time pining for “Neatfreak 47,” which they never played, and “Choke Chain,” which they finally did, and we shouted along shamelessly. We may have had a few (ten) years on the crowd around us, but we have to admit that it felt damn good to holler like a teenager.

—Anne Vickman

Graduating senior Joey Sheridan says he’s confused about the decision but not particularly upset. “I didn’t know that it [swine flu] was that bad that we have to do this in the Boston area,” says the Business Marketing major. “I guess they have to take precautions.” He adds, “Maybe we can do ceremonial bows or fist pumps to replace the handshakes.”

Takuo Urushihara, a Communication, Production and Theater double major is a little less understanding. “I think everyone is overreacting,” he says. “If it’s that bad and that contagious, why have graduation at all?”

The Globe reports that approximately 16,000 people will attend the undergraduate ceremony at TD Banknorth Garden and that 5,000 will attend the graduate commencement at Matthews Arena.

The email stresses that these steps are not intended to “diminish the excitement of this occasion.” Not to worry, the email explains there will be ample hand sanitizer available and that sick students should stay home.

While we’re at it, why not have all the undergraduates and their relatives wear surgical face masks, too? It might make the commencement speaker difficult to hear, but it’s sure to be memorable.

This front-page piece is a model of armchair reporting, suspiciously similar to Lynn’s ItemLive.com article, “Lynn Bet Boat Goes Broke.” We didn’t see a single additional factoid not appearing in ItemLive’s story, which ran yesterday. The Globe appears to have simply conducted a second interview with James Cowdell, the same source used by ItemLive, for a couple of slightly different quotes. It’s even more of a shame because this is a story ripe with potential for investigative reporting.

Around midnight last October the SS Horizon’s Edge, a “Las Vegas Style Casino” cruise ship, sailed away from its pier in Lynn Harbor and never returned. A note left on the door declared simply that the ship had departed. After five years of twice-a-day sailing, charging rates of $27 per person on weekdays and $37 on weekends, the 500-passenger-capacity ship vanished overnight.

During the past few months, Horizon’s Edge has managed to accrue a sizable tab. Horizon’s Edge Casino Cruises, LLC now owes $15,000 for three months worth of pier rent to Economic Development & Industrial Corporation (EDIC), $2,383.61 to Lynn Water & Sewer, and up tp $200,000 in a lawsuit for damages to the dock. Not anticipating any forthcoming money, the city of Lynn placed a $65,644.47 lien on the cruise ship in March.

On April 27 the company filed for bankruptcy, claiming its assets are worth less than $50,000 and its liabilities are upwards of $500,000. One of the original partners at the casino, David Zion, is also a partner at Patriot Properties, Inc. in Lynn. The 24-year-old appraisal company employs over 50 people and serves more than 185 clients nationwide.

Attorney Jeffrey A. Kitaeff of North Andover told the Lynn paper that Zion is cooperating in the bankruptcy filing process. However, neither of them has said where the boat is harbored or if they will pay their fees.

ItemLive reports that Kitaeff previously offered the city “a ticket booth in exchange for the back rent, which only infuriated city officials.”

Maybe it’s too much to expect the Globe to track down the 186-foot cruise ship, but they could at least have talked with former employees and looked into the company’s finances. You know, use the telephone or Internet and do some reporting.

But, hey, who are we to talk. Even better than investigative reporting, our list of the top five reasons why the Horizon’s Edge made for the, er, horizon:

5. Afraid gambling was going to be legalized in Mass.

4. Invested heavily with Bernie Madoff.

3. Crew hit on 17 and lost a bundle.

2. Philip Markoff stopped playing there.

1. Captured by Somalia pirates.

A similar scenario is playing out at a Lawrence school, but this time it’s the administrator that’s in trouble.

The Associated Press via the Herald is bringing wide attention to The Eagle Tribune’s story on Oliver School Principal Beth Gannon in Lawrence. The story reports that Gannon allegedly hawked a self-published, racy romance novel during functions at the grades one-through-eight school.

The furor stems from both the book’s contents and Gannon’s apparent violation of ethics law prohibiting personal gain from a professional position.

As far as the allegedly “pornographic” contents of the book, it can’t be any racier than other romance novel populating the shelves at Borders. The essence of romance novels are the titillating sex scenes. The plots are generally fluff crafted around the elicit love affairs (um, not that we’ve read any of them or anything). There’s also no allegations, as of yet, that Gannon was pitching the book to children.

The second charge is more serious. The teacher, who originally complained, Margaret “Peggy” Lynch, told The Eagle-Tribune that, “Gannon announced at a faculty meeting that she had a book being published.” Simply announcing a book sounds relatively harmless. But the teachers union implies more, claiming that Gannon is “urging teachers during faculty meetings to buy the $13.95 paperback Crazy Fortunes.” This could be worse for Gannon. It’s still unclear if she was just mentioning it in passing or had a booth set up in the back of the room hawking copies for $13.95.

What tilts the scale away from Gannon is the non-existent literary content of the book. Granted, romance novels aren’t striving for dense, rich material (see above) but they should at least be readable. The few pages of Crazy Fortune accessible via amazon.com were narrated almost entirely via monologue (yes, spoken, not internal). There were drug and alcohol references (the protagonist, Lila, was blackout drunk) but most of the references were about how her love interest, Jake, failed out of school because of drinking and smoking weed.

“‘I needed to stop the pot along time ago. When you said I was killing the few brain cells I had to start with, it wasn’t an in insult it was reality.’ Jake just shook his head and moved his hand from stroking her hair, to gently rubbing circles on her bare arm.” [sic]

The drug references were less the problem than Gannon’s writing style. We’re thinking she should have passed the manuscript to one of her English teachers before submitting it to iUniverse for publishing. A lesson on copy editing and Strunk and White’s grammatical fundamentals are in order for Gannon. Perhaps she was shooting for “authentic” dialogue, but c’mon! “The realization hit Jake like a sledgehammer…”

The teachers union is considering taking a vote of no-confidence on Gannon at its May 6 meeting, according to reports. Lamentable writing style notwithstanding, we hope Gannon gets off with a slap on the wrist. It’s a bad time to be an unemployed principal.

Speaking of which, judging from the Herald’s front-page picture and accompanying story, it appears the influenza struck the “churlish booth jockeys” collecting tolls on the Pike about two years before the outbreak in Mexico. The disease appears to have mutated the pictured toll collector into Wolverine (ed. Product placement for X-Men Origins: Wolverine?).

In another Herald article, “Lowell pair feared first Mass. swine flu victims” the Herald reports on the risk of the flu touching down in Boston:

“As health officals sought to reassure the public, they also braced for the inevitability of swine flu touching down in Boston. ‘I suspect there is a little bit more swine influenza right now than we are aware of, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see cases in Boston,’ predicted Dr. Anita Barry, director of the city’s infectious disease bureau.”

And yet there are no reported cases in New England.

Despite that, today’s Globe carried six stories on the flu and featured a suspicious video of Umass-Dartmouth students. From watching the Globe video on mute and not reading the article (today’s Globe also confirmed that no one reads the paper anymore), it appears that these students are preparing to hunt down swine flu victims, should any turn up as the living dead.

Armed with Nerf toy guns, the students are apparently searching for victims to shoot with, er, foam. It may look lame now, but just like Dumbledore’s Army in Harry Potter, we’ll be begging for their protection when the World Health Organization raises the alert level from Phase 4 to Phase 6. Phase 6 is more commonly known as “Soil Your Pants in Fear.”

For everyone really in the mood for some good scaremongering, forget traditional media—new media is on the job. Tune in to Google Earth to see cute pink and purple markers notating suspected and confirmed cases or check out HealthMap.org’s tweet compilation. These tweets are guaranteed to have you washing your hands more than Macbeth.

Though the outbreak is deadly in Mexico, current symptoms in the U.S. include fever, coughing, joint aches, severe headache, and possible vomiting and diarrhea. Oddly enough these are the same side effects as my restless legs syndrome medication. But I’m trying not to panic.

Undeterred, Boston Newspaper Guild President Daniel Totten boasted the Globe’s 137 year existence, nearly deafening the crowd as he sang the praises of the “HUMAN BEINGS who bring you the Boston Globe.” City Council President Michael Ross received some of the loudest cheers, as he declared the Globe a Boston institution. “We would fight just as hard to save the Red Sox, the Boston Common, or the golden dome,” Ross said.

Those in attendance would certainly agree. Eddie Beck of Quincy brought his three daughters to hear Totten speak. He’s been reading the Globe for 40 years, and well, Totten is his daughter’s godfather. Dory-Anna Waxman, a city councilor from Portland, ME, traveled all the way to support her husband, a Globe advertising salesman. Her connection to the paper goes way back: Her grandfather was a sportswriter back in the 1920’s.

And for Brenda Brenon, a stay-at-home mom from Concord, losing the Globe would be a tragedy. “If we turn to bloggers to get our news instead of real journalists, I’d hate to see where we are in a couple of years,” she lamented to a blog reporter.
Other highlights included Globe reporter Brian Mooney, who delivered a speech with the refrain, “Hey, that’s not fair; Shame on them,” directed at the New York Times Company. As Mooney cited example upon example of bonuses for Times execs, who are demanding $20 million from the union, the crowd broke into chants of “SHAME ON THEM.”

Despite some impassioned speeches from reporter Bella English and Bob Haynes of the AFL-CIO, the bottom line is there’s not much people can do. There were some calls to email the Times and sign the union petition, posted on its website.

Features Copy Editor Tim Flynn put it best: “If you had told me that the Globe was going out of business when I was 12 years old, I would have thought the streets would be filled with people. But times are different. There aren’t quite as many people as I would have hoped.”

The kids clearly had no idea what it was all about, but had a good time playing with the signs.

–EVA MEDOFF