“Stud Life” was one of three opening films (May 3 at Cambridge’s Brattle Theater) for the 2013 Boston LGBT Film Festival.

In one of her podcasts, the handsome butch JJ places two dildos in front of the camera. One is playfully multi-colored, nearly disguising the fact that it is an artificial cock, and the other is black with an angry red head and strong veins on the shaft. While JJ can’t get her head around the one with a spectrum of crayon colors, she also cannot understand why black dildos seem to only come in size gigantic. “Short and wide” would work better.

Marx. Capitalism. Racism. Cockroaches. All were fair game when Walter Mosley, the beloved and versatile American master of fiction, and China Miéville, one of Britain’s leading writers of “New Weird” fiction, shared the podium at the recent Distinguished Writers Series event at Wellesley College. While they come from different generations, countries, and literary approaches, both are literary “bad boys.” Their shared radical attitude towards society provided a firm common ground for the event.

We saw your boobs, and your boobs, and your boobs, Seth MacFarlane sang – his teeth so white and his privilege so resplendent – embracing among these opportunities to peek at the breasts of actresses scenes of violence and rape, such as Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry or Jody Foster in The Accused. I had spent a lot of time cutting up onions and peppers and apples and pickles for my potato salad – I had even ironed my cloth napkins, in preparation for the arrival of my Oscars posse, a group of less than a half dozen who have been watching the Academy Awards together for years and years. I didn’t vacuum the carpets and re-arrange the furniture in order to have some straight white male play out his problems in my living room.

A dreamer (Leos Carax) wakes up and walks over to the wall. His prosthetic finger is a metal key that unlocks a wall covering. He enters the balcony of a movie theater. Below him in the orchestra an audience of unmoving spectres are watching a film. It’s a scene reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, which also begins with a machine (the movie camera on a tripod) and a view of the audience—but here the machine is the filmmaker’s metallic finger; the apparatus of cinema is invisible.

The Underground Railway Theater is presenting “The Mountaintop” at the Central Square Theater until February 3, 2013. Directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian and written by Katori Hall, the play takes place in Martin Luther King Jr’s Memphis room at the Lorraine Motel in the hours after his 9:30pm speech in support of the striking sanitation workers on April 3, 1968, and his murder at 6:01pm the next day. He departed in that speech from his text to say these spookily prophetic words:

“And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

The exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, should disabuse anyone who clings to the notion that art in museums is removed from the real world. “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics of the 1980s” is a visual history of the decade roughly sandwiched between the election of Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It showcases almost 100 international artists who were engaged in confronting the issues of their time, including the pervasive influence of the mass media's incessant sales pitches and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The paintings, photographs, sculptures and textiles on display through March 3 depict the very different ways that artists interpreted the period. Some, like the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, represented by a colorful 1983 mixed media canvas entitled “Hollywood Africans,” invented new images. Others, like artist Sherrie Levine, co-opted images by well-known creators. She repurposed an image by an Austrian artist for her chromogenic development print “Untitled (After Egone Schiele).” In doing so, she raised the question about originality in art. Then she answered it by arguing that art cannot be separated from the history of images.

First, there were pop-up toys like Jack-in-the-box. Next came the pop-up shops that temporarily occupy vacant commercial spaces, usually selling crafts and seasonal goods around Christmastime. And, now there are pop-up museums. Locally, the Design Museum Boston is the city’s only pop-up museum and its first museum dedicated exclusively to design.

“Getting There: Design for Travel in the Modern Age,” is Design Museum Boston’s latest pop-up exhibition. It recently debuted in Terminal E at Logan International Airport, where it will be on view for about a year, 24-hours a day, seven days a week. And, it’s free.

Is beauty enough?

Apparently, Josiah McElheny doesn’t think so.

The conceptual artist’s reflective, silver glass objects are beautiful to behold at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, where they are on view through October 14. The mid-career survey of his work, titled “Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite,” includes 21 works, films and photographs as well as a gallery installation of his spectacular glass sculptures “Island Universe.”

Over 300 people attended a Bread and Puppet Theater performance on Sunday at Cambridge Common in Harvard Square. The Glover, Vermont based theater is internationally known for its treatments of social, political and economic themes.

On one of these dog days of summer, treat yourself with a refreshing visit to the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, for a dip into the featured exhibition: Ansel Adams: At The Water’s Edge.
 
Even if you think you know all about Ansel Adams (1902-1984), one of photography’s most familiar and reproduced artists, it’s likely that at least a few of the 100 or so images assembled by Curator of Photography Phillip Prodger will surprise you with something new. That’s because Adams is regarded primarily as a western landscape artist. His images of Yosemite and Big Sur are iconic. But he visited New England several times and the exhibition includes his rarely seen pictures of this region. Except for his home state of California, it’s the only coastline he ever photographed.