Archives: Media Room

The Life Alive + Down Under “wellness collaborative” opens March 1, with a second location in the works.

Two local wellness-centric businesses are partnering up.

Life Alive and Down Under School of Yoga are opening a new joint concept together in Harvard Square under the name Life Alive + Down Under. Doors are due to open March 1, according Life Alive CEO Bryan Timko.

“We’re calling it a wellness collaborative,” Timko said. “It’s rooted in the fact that what you eat and how you move influence how you feel. Here, you can get it all in one place.”

You can read the quality of food at a Chinese restaurant by the quality of its bathroom. Every stunning bathroom may indeed bring with it a dinner of mediocre takes on Chinese classics.

Escaping the simultaneously colorful yet dimly lit and overwhelmingly decorated seating area in Harvard Square’s newest restaurant and bar, Wusong Road, one may find refuge in the bathroom, taking time to admire the pristine, patterned tiles on the floor and the playful wallpaper of monkeys drinking vodka. Some sort of arbitrary house music plays above, and a large window tints the bathroom with the purple-blue of nightfall. But despite its spick-and-span bathroom, flashy decor, and beautiful cocktails, Wusong Road’s food failed to dazzle — it was a confusing disappointment. To the dismay of students across campus, the restaurant reaffirms the fear that good Chinese food in Harvard Square remains a faraway pipe dream.

A stream of eager visitors lined up at the Harvard Coop the night of Feb. 16, not to shop for university merchandise, but rather to catch a first glimpse of $35 million worth of art by world-renowned artist Banksy.

To mark the start of its 60-day presentation, “The Art of Banksy,” held an exclusive preview for press and invitees, presented by StarVox Exhibits. The show, which features iconic images such as “Girl with Balloon” and “Flower Thrower,” has drawn from collections across the globe to amass the largest assembly of privately-owned Banksy art yet.

In hindsight, getting ice cream in the middle of a frigid Boston winter may not have been a great idea, but in the name of journalism, we decided to make the trek to the new Ben & Jerry’s located at 35 John F. Kennedy St. We had to dodge street puddles and trudge through black sludge (socks unfortunately not spared), but we eventually made it to our destination.

After typing the phrase “will not reopen following the COVID-19 pandemic” more times that we’d like to acknowledge over the past two years, it feels like a breath of fresh spring air to report that more greater Boston venues are welcoming back live music. Three spaces — Toad, Charlie’s Kitchen, and Atwood’s Tavern — have recently announced their plans to host regular performances again, reawakening the beat of three different Cambridge neighborhoods and joining the likes of The Cantab, Lilypad and elsewhere.

We can’t say that the pandemic is over — but we can say nature is healing. Read the details below, and then mark your calendar accordingly.

Charlie’s Kitchen

Six months after we reported that shows at Charlie’s Kitchen were “off the table” for the foreseeable future, talent agent Daniel Carswell has announced that shows will return to Charlie’s next month. The second floor of the Harvard Square eatery and venue will once again host three-band bills on Monday nights (a.k.a. Carswell’s signature “Mondays Don’t Have To Suck” programming), starting March 21.

A Harvard University shuttle bus was driven up onto the sidewalk and crashed into The Garage Mall near Tasty Burger last night, according to the Harvard Crimson. Authorities have not yet determined why this happened.

An “unauthorized” exhibit of the street artist’s work is now open in Cambridge.

There’s a grand irony to “The Art of Banksy,” a traveling exhibit of original work by the anonymous street artist which is now open in Cambridge.

Banksy’s work is anti- a lot of things: anti-establishment, anti-fascist, and anti-Paris Hilton’s music career, as one famous piece showed. Perhaps most of all, his work is anti-capitalist, both in its message and in its preferred medium: as graffiti freely available to view on streets and building walls instead of in stuffy museum galleries.