Layers

WORCESTER -- "Afterburn," Willie Cole's one-man show of recent work at the Worcester Art Museum, is smart, often sharply witty, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but the dense layers of meaning within it can get in the art's way. The show swims in symbols of African and African-American culture, but much of it is doing the backstroke. Cole's art would have been hot 12 or 15 years ago, when many nonwhite, female, and gay artists were passionately using their work to express and find power in the parts of their identities that had long been oppressed.

Heather McGill layers pattern upon pattern. In her works on paper and wall sculptures at Ellen Miller Gallery, there's paisley and wood grain; there's the giddy glimmer of sparkly automotive paint. McGill deploys them masterfully, in eye-popping colors. Her patterns, materials, colors, and formats often have gender connotations, but in layering and cutting them up, the artist makes something more complex. For "Thruster Cluster," she airbrushed bright, summery plaids onto paper, then laser-cut and glued them back together to create clown faces.

It is something of a shock to look at the liner notes for the National’s fifth album and see the long list of instrumental contributors. Somehow this crowd of nearly two dozen — including the core quintet and everyone from French horn players to flutists — managed to make an album full of layers that feels incredibly spacious and a worthy successor to 2007’s critically lauded “Boxer.’’ Matt Berninger’s lugubrious, big-screen baritone, the...

Serves 4 Veda Ferlazzo Clark of Scituate sent The Recipe Box Project this cabbage, rice, and tomato casserole. "When I was in junior high and high school (40 years ago!), I often had dinner at my best friend, Ann Evans's home. Her mom, Jean, invented this recipe and served it as the main course with salad. I made it before I sent it to you, and it was as good as I remembered. " 2  cups water   Salt, to taste  1  cup long-grain white rice (basmati adds a toasty aroma)

Consolation By Michael Redhill Little, Brown , 340 pp., $24.99 Autumn dusk is "a failing in the West. " And here is the bleak rigor of Toronto's interminable winters: "It was really February -- that month of wet lungs and bird-choking fog -- that November's desolation looked forward to. They were bookends, these two months, one buried in a dead year that said abandon hope , and the other in a fresh one that said what hope ...

ON A wooded hillside near us is a small spring, a shimmer of clear water rising from steep banks. The water is cool and pure: deer drink there, wild turkeys, woodchucks - anyone can. Us. The water comes from the aquifer, an underground network of veins and pores, underlain by layers of hard rock. Rainwater seeps down into it, through filtering layers of soil. Later the water rises, into springs and lakes. Nature has always provided us with clean water; we have to have it. Our bodies are more than 70 percent water, and we need it more than light for life.

By Matt Byrne, Town Correspondent The 20 tracks on "Adieu or Die" are as much an ode to the Beach Boys' musical genius as it is to their melodies, which Will C. cleverly reinterprets and masks below layers of his own creation. "The goal of this project is to rework Beach Boys selections and give them a new, unexpected aesthetic," the 24-year-old Davis Square resident said. "I want it to be a means for many to prick up their ears about an all-too-often overlooked larger body of work from one of music's most interesting groups.

Vera Wang was going for sensual in her fall styles presented Tuesday at New York Fashion Week, and she succeeded. Suggestive, sheer champagne-colored layers covered many of the models, showing nothing the audience shouldn't see — or did they? "A sensual silhouette — long, narrow, leggy — extending from a high neckline, caught at peplumed hips," Wang said in her notes left for the editors, stylists and retailers who, after six days of previews, are starting to see this strong, sultry muse emerge for next season.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA released yesterday the first color photographs taken by the rover Opportunity of layers of Martian rock that could have been formed by water. "Some of the detail you can see in here is pretty phenomenal," said Jim Bell, lead scientist for the panoramic camera on the rover, while displaying several of the photos at a news conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The horizontally striped and fractured slabs of bedrock are just a short drive from where the six-wheeled robot sits atop its lander.

It is no pillow-top mattress, but an international team announced yesterday new evidence of Stone Age bedding. At a sandstone rock shelter called Sibudu that sits high on a cliff above the uThongathi River in South Africa, a group including Boston University scientists analyzed the fossilized remains of what appear to be 77,000-year old floor coverings likely used for sleeping or working. The half-inch thick remains are made up of sedges, rushes, or grasses, with a thin layer of the broad leaves of river-wild quince, a species with aromatic leaves that may have helped keep...

SUNRISE, Fla. - Coach Claude Julien, his squad mired in a season-long, three-game losing streak, had an unwritten checklist of corrections in mind headed into Thursday night's loss to the Panthers that stretched the skid to four: ■Better starts. The Bruins have given up the first goal in seven straight games, 10 of the last 11, including last night. Julien had been talking for days, if not weeks, about showing more urgency, better giddyup from the first drop of the puck. ■Smarter defensive play.

By Matt Byrne, Town Correspondent The 20 tracks on "Adieu or Die" are as much an ode to the Beach Boys' musical genius as it is to their melodies, which Will C. cleverly reinterprets and masks below layers of his own creation. "The goal of this project is to rework Beach Boys selections and give them a new, unexpected aesthetic," the 24-year-old Davis Square resident said. "I want it to be a means for many to prick up their ears about an all-too-often overlooked larger body of work from one of music's most interesting groups.

ON A wooded hillside near us is a small spring, a shimmer of clear water rising from steep banks. The water is cool and pure: deer drink there, wild turkeys, woodchucks - anyone can. Us. The water comes from the aquifer, an underground network of veins and pores, underlain by layers of hard rock. Rainwater seeps down into it, through filtering layers of soil. Later the water rises, into springs and lakes. Nature has always provided us with clean water; we have to have it. Our bodies are more than 70 percent water, and we need it more than light for...

Vera Wang was going for sensual in her fall styles presented Tuesday at New York Fashion Week, and she succeeded. Suggestive, sheer champagne-colored layers covered many of the models, showing nothing the audience shouldn't see — or did they? "A sensual silhouette — long, narrow, leggy — extending from a high neckline, caught at peplumed hips," Wang said in her notes left for the editors, stylists and retailers who, after six days of previews, are starting to see this strong, sultry muse emerge for next season.

Serves 8 To keep the dip from becoming watery, let the salsa drain in a strainer set over a bowl for 1 hour in the refrigerator. 2 cans (15 ounces each) red or black beans (or one of each), drained 1 bunch radishes, sliced 2 scallions, finely chopped 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley Salt and pepper, to taste 2 tablespoons oil 6 ounces (1 1/2 cups) shredded light cheddar 2 cups fresh salsa, drained for 1 hour 1 teaspoon sriracha or other hot chili sauce 1 pound Greek yogurt, stirred well 1/2 cup...

THE ARTICLE "Firefighters push home sprinklers: But developers say added costs too high" (Metro, Dec. 14) reports opponents as saying that sprinklers have not been proven to be more effective in saving lives than smoke detectors. That is simply not true. One of the most important arguments for fire sprinklers is simple: They save lives. There is no doubt that smoke alarms have played an important role in saving lives from fire. However, smoke alarms may not provide enough protection for the three groups at highest risk of dying in a fire — young children, older...

From the beginning of the opening number, "Bells," it was clear that the members of the British quartet Electrelane had little use for the crowd standing in front of them at the Middle East Sunday night. Leader Verity Susman pushed her hair out of her face and mumbled a few pleasantries to her devout followers, but those were quickly followed by a sonic wall that rarely moved the remainder of the night. In near darkness, Susman, playing keyboard, guitar, and even saxophone, defined the show with precipitous mood swings.

Folk Sharon Van Etten Because I Was In Love Language of Stone ESSENTIAL "Tornado" On her heartbreaking debut, Sharon Van Etten makes a strong case that sometimes the quietest storm is the most devastating of all. "Because I Was in Love" introduces the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter as a lonely heart who stays up into the wee hours obsessing over what went wrong, a bottle of red slowly going down. Van Etten accompanies herself mostly on acoustic guitar, with the occasional electric and organ adding to the late-night aesthetic, and she submerges her...

It is no pillow-top mattress, but an international team announced yesterday new evidence of Stone Age bedding. At a sandstone rock shelter called Sibudu that sits high on a cliff above the uThongathi River in South Africa, a group including Boston University scientists analyzed the fossilized remains of what appear to be 77,000-year old floor coverings likely used for sleeping or working. The half-inch thick remains are made up of sedges, rushes, or grasses, with a thin layer of the broad leaves of river-wild quince, a species with aromatic leaves that may have helped keep mosquitoes away.

CAMBRIDGE - "Parfait" is a kind of layered dessert. It's also the French word for "perfect. " It would be hard to call any concert of music perfect, but the one - titled "Parfait" - that Radius Ensemble presented at Longy School of Music on Saturday was layered and both savory and sweet, a toothsome end to any evening. The concert also had a cinematic theme (dessert and a movie?), beginning with Jan Bach's "Music for a Low-Budget Epic" (2001) and ending with Michael Gandolfi's "Resonance Frames" (2003)