"I hear back from friends who are like, 'Have you checked out your video comments? People love you. You change people's lives. . . .' Great. I'm still not going to read 'em, dude. It would affect my head, I know it would, my relationship with my work, and I can't think like that. The minute you take into consideration your audience, you cease to exist. You become a fucking entertainer."

Wait. Isn't that what he is? People do come to his shows to be entertained after all, right? "Is it entertaining, really?" he asks me. "[Fans come] with their eyes shut, palms up in the air facing toward us. They're not sitting down having a fucking lobster. They're there for an emotional, semi-religious experience. They're hoping for absolute transcendence. We're not like other bands — other bands you probably want to go be entertained. Our fans don't show up for that reason at all. We've changed their lives, and we validate them every time they put a record on. I don't think of myself as entertainer whatsoever. I am not an entertainer. I would be a failure, an absolute useless fuck as an entertainer."

WHO: Louis DiBiccari

WHAT: DiBiccari, the chef at Boston's Storyville, and host of the innovative dining challenge series Chef Louie Night, launches a new endeavor on Sunday called CREATE: Six Artists, Six Chefs, One Canvas, at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Six regional artists, including Josh Falk and Emily Lombardo, and Miracle 5 will be paired up with six chefs like Brandon Arms of Garden at the Cellar and Douglas Rodrigues of Clio to collaborate on dishes inspired by the artwork. The idea, DiBiccari says, is to help bridge the gap between fine arts and culinary arts.

Q: What's the actual format of the day look like?

A: Each chef is paired up with an artist. The chef has to come up with a composition based on the subject matter of the artist. For example in the first kitchen at the BCAE, the one that's more exposed, we're going to have these amazing woodworkers !ND!V!DUALS. They create stories – for Bonnaroo one year they did an installation called Lovesick Cafe. The premise was restaurant patrons got pissed off at a chef, they took him out back and immersed him, like cooked the chef. They have this whole installation with tables and chairs and characters, and the illusion is [the chef] is being cooked in there. Jason Cheek, who was at KO Prime, is doing something with food relative to what they did with the installation. Upstairs each room will have a chef and an artist. It's good for the restaurants, a little different, and the artists can sell their work. Taste of the South End and [other similar events] all have a much higher ticket price, but they don't have these other elements... It makes it different from other things restaurants do. The idea is to get the restaurants that Ken and Barbara own, people like that, but let's take the guys they're mentoring, their ace in the whole, sous chef, chef de cuisine, let's highlight them.

Once upon a time, beer didn’t get a ton of respect. But now the masses are more aware of the almost-infinite varieties and styles available, and connoisseurs (the technical term, I believe, is “beer geeks”) have started treating brews the way oenophiles treat wine. Of course, one of the biggest compliments you can pay to a wine is to not drink it — at least, not immediately. And though the average drinker may not realize it, you can age beer, too.
Aging (or “cellaring”) beer is still relatively uncharted territory, says Todd Alström of BeerAdvocate magazine, which hosts its fifth annual American Craft Beer Fest in Boston in June. Brewers have been blending aged beers with fresh ones for centuries, but recent years have seen an increase in interest among some amateur enthusiasts. “It’s like an extra hobby,” says Alström. “A niche within a niche.”