For the fifth consecutive winter, folk duo Susie Burke and David Surette are hosting their Cabin Fever collaborative concert series. Burke and Surette will split the bill on January 30 with siblings Ari and Mia Friedman, a fiddle and cello duo from Boston.

MGM, 1984

Since we did end up with a sequel to “2001,” we should be grateful that it’s “2010,” a smart, engaging bit of sci-fi that focuses more on concrete human needs (namely, survival, but also the need for answers in the face of big questions, both moral and scientific) than questions about the evolution of the mind.

documentary film series begins with 'King Corn'

So, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis have just graduated from college—Yale, no less—and are heading out on the quintessential cross-country road trip. What could possibly break their youthful sense of invincibility and limitless potential? Reversing the motto “if you can’t beat them, join them,” Cheney and Ellis move from Boston to Iowa to grow an acre of subsidized corn from genetically modified seeds and attempt to trace it in the American diet. Their findings, as documented in “King Corn,” showing in Exeter on Friday, raise troubling questions about farming and feeding in America.

The Muddy River Smokehouse is leaving its restaurant location in Eliot, Maine, after eight years, to become the Roundabout Diner and Lounge in the former Bickfords building off the Portsmouth traffic circle. Their barbeque and catering will continue to be offered at the 1950s style retro diner featuring American classics.

comedian Bob Marley discusses Maine accents, his new plow, ice fishing and more as he prepares for a gig in Salisbury

Marley estimates this show will be PG-13, but he does feel obligated to shield his young children from the “Boondock” films, which are replete with violence and vulgar language. His eldest daughter, especially, has become curious to see her dad on the big screen. “She says, ‘You were in movies? I wanna see it!’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”

Invented and installed in 1908, the Rochester Opera House’s auditorium floor raising and leveling mechanism is believed to be the last of its kind remaining in the world. And now the 100-year-old device is working like new. “It was a miserable pleasure to work on,” said repair team member Jay Jordan, who had to slide into a tiny crawlspace under the floor on a skateboard to access a damaged gear, among an array of broken gears, twisted rods and compromised bearings.

collage collection at the Portland Museum of Art

While collage work takes a certain amount of playfulness, invention and improvisation, it also requires control, order and a vision. The full range is on view in “Collage: Piecing It Together.” It includes approximately 25 works from the Portland Museum of Art's own collection and other selected loans from contemporary Maine artists, tracing the history of collage from its introduction in Europe in the early 20th century by artists such as Kurt Schwitters to present day works by Maine artists such as Tom Hall. 

When Mark Anastas was growing up in the 1970s and early ’80s, only a handful of dedicated surfers frequented the waves off Long Sands Beach in York, Maine. That has changed. Anastas estimates the area attracts 15 times as many surfers today as it did a couple of decades ago.

“There’s more surfers now than there ever has been,” said Anastas, who owns Liquid Dreams Surf Shop in York and Ogunquit.

As a York Beach business owner and surfer, Anastas keeps a close eye on issues that affect the beach, including one recent proposal to significantly expand the beach’s surfing zone, and another to dump hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of dredged sand from the Piscataqua River off York’s coast.

Anastas is among those who want to know if the town is prepared to keep beachgoers happy.

opinion

As a community that’s been blessed more than most, it’s fitting that the Seacoast should send Haiti—a community that’s long needed help more than most—a generous outpouring of support, by whatever means we can manage, to help alleviate their suffering as quickly, and enduringly, as possible. Local businesses and non-profits are leading the way, and by getting together face-to-face with your neighbors at a local business, dinner, carwashes and concerts, you are helping to strengthen the social fabric of our community, even as you are helping others.