My Google Calendar of recommended events and happenings around Boston has a new spot on sooz.com. You can also subscribe to it if you use Gmail. The calendar includes my picks for Boston concerts, networking events, tech events and other interesting happenings around town.

It’s an annual tradition for Boston bands to perform Halloween shows covering bands they love or just feel inspired to cover for the night. This year I got some great performances recorded on video: John Powhida and Chris Cote as Robert Palmer, Preacher Roe as The Replacements, The Luxury as Duran Duran and The Lights Out as Phil Collins. You can watch all eight videos in the playlist below or watch each individual Boston Rocks Halloween video on YouTube.

Enjoy watching the videos? Join the Sooz TV fan page on Facebook!

My Free Agent Jungle project took a little break over the summer plus an extra month or two. The monthly Boston networking lunch for freelancers is back with the next event on Thursday, November 19th at Tavern In The Square (Porter Square, Cambridge.) If you work on your own as a freelancer, free agent or consultant in the Boston area, you’re invited to join us. It’s not just for people working in web, tech or social media worlds. People from diverse backgrounds attend the lunch: writers, publicists, architects, technologists, attorneys, graphic designers, marketers, engineers, etc.

Learn more about the lunch on the Free Agent Jungle website. Let me know if you have any questions.

I was an instant fan of Avi & Celia the first time I saw them at the Lizard Lounge a few years ago, sitting in with the always amazing Session Americana. Since then I’ve seen them a few times playing their duo show of sexy, soulful, rock and roll. They’ve stepped things up and are now playing with a full band with a new name: Hey Mama.

The Rock Out Boston Club that Annie Burns and I co-host is meeting up tonight (Tuesday, October 20th) at Cambridge Common at 8pm for drinks and then we’ll head downstairs to the Lizard Lounge for Hey Mama who are playing a Tuesday residency throughout October. Tickets are $7 at the door. It’s a small, cozy club (105 capacity) so getting there early to join us for drinks first is definitely a good idea.

Cambridge Common and the Lizard Lounge are at 1667 Mass Ave, a short walk down Mass Ave from either Harvard Square or Porter Square. Get there early enough and there’s parking behind the restaurant. The 77 and 96 bus will also get you there, too.

If you can’t make it tonight, join The Rock Out Boston Club’s fan page on Facebook and we’ll alert you when the next rock and roll outing happens in November.

iTunes’ Genius is an awesome way to rediscover music you already have but may not have listened to in a while. Yesterday I told it to make a mix based on “Born” by Over The Rhine. The result was a perfect mix for a moody, chilly Sunday afternoon. It includes songs by Over The Rhine, Patty Griffin, Great Northern, Gillian Welch, Calexico & Iron Wine, Nickel Creek, Dar Williams, Ray LaMontagne and Sarah Harmer.

View the mix on iTunes.

When vegan friends were coming over for dinner a couple months ago I wanted to make a dessert that they could eat. The first thing that came to mind was sorbet. I found a simple recipe for coconut sorbet on Epicurious and decided it needed a little rum in it, too (instead of the rum extract that the recipe called for). Recently my roommate Chris suggested I use some of his fresh basil and dark chocolate crisps. This photo is the result!

This is the sort of thing you probably don’t want to make more than a few times a year — and very tiny portions. There’s a lot of fat and sugar in this dessert. The recipe is very simple: one can cream of coconut (not coconut milk!), one cup of ice cold water, one tablespoon rum. I use a stick blender to make sure the consistentcy is smooth. Pour into a 9×9 glass baking dish, cover with plastic wrap and place in the freezer then stir every 30 minutes for three hours. Thanks to the cream of coconut, the sorbet will never entirely freeze so you can keep it in the freezer for a while. But the chances of it lingering for more than a few days are unlikely. Especially for a dessert that was referred to as “sex on a plate” at a recent party.

Speaking of work, for the past six months I’ve been working on a project with Pearson Education as their website project manager on the redesign of their marketing website for MyMathLab, customizable online courses that integrate interactive multimedia instruction with textbook content. My work also included recommending a content management system and hiring a web developer. They selected Drupal as the CMS and hired Andy Milk Interactive for the web development work. And of course, you can now follow MyMathLab on Twitter.

Several months ago Linda Viens clued me into the website for TUTs Adventurers Club. When I first checked out the site, I rolled my eyes. A lot. But Linda is one of my favorite people of all time, so I decided to give the daily email newsletter a chance. It’s definitely a little cheesy at times, but the daily tidbits are awesome. Here’s what it sent me today:

If you could actually stand in someone else’s shoes, Susan, to hear what they hear, see what they see, and feel what they feel, you would honestly wonder what planet they live on, and be totally blown away by how different their “reality” is from yours.

You’d also never, in a million years, be quick to judge again.
Just sayin’
The Universe

The closing of each email is always the same: “Thoughts become things … choose the good ones!”

Check out the Facebook fan page for Linda’s band, Angeline, too!

Photo of plastic green frogs by Thomas Hawke.

Mike has been working on transforming Tech Superpowers Internet Cafe into a digital lounge and they’ll be hosting the second Tuttle event in Boston this Friday, August 7th, 10am-12noon at 252 Newbury Street. If you’re around Boston, I hope you’ll join us! It’s a free event, but RSVP is appreciated.

Unfortunately it’s not all that unique of a story — amazing band gets signed to a big label, releases an album and then gets dropped right as their next album is about to be released. Or in the case of two of my favorite Boston bands in the late 1990s — Talking to Animals and Splashdown — the labels produced each band’s first album but never released them. Not that I’m still bitter or anything.

So to see Bleu release A Watched Pot today (July 14, 2009) is nothing short of inspired and inspiring. Back in 2005 he was all set to share the album with the world but found himself dropped from Aware/Columbia Records along with other artists and employees during a label “reorganization.”

A lot of musicians would understandably have just given up. But Bleu worked to get those songs back from the label so he could eventually release the album elsewhere (Artist Garage/Fontana Distribution). And it’s all finally happening for him today. Amazing and awesome!

A Watched Pot is a gem of pop rock awesomeness — eleven songs of awesomeness to be precise. Read the full tale of how “A Watched Pot” finally came to life on Bleu’s community site.

Listen to A Watched Pot then buy it!

And it doesn’t matter if you can’t get into his music (though I’ll never understand why) — everyone should buy this album to support someone who stayed true to his creative pursuits.

Bleu is sharing his adventure to bring A Watched Pot to life at YouTube, Ning, Facebook and Twitter — the least we could do is give a little something back. Buy A Watched Pot digital downloads at iTunes or Amazon.com. If you buy the album from Newbury Comics website, your CD will be signed by Bleu (while supplies last).

Music video for “Come ‘N Go”

See Bleu in Boston on July 24th

Bleu called Boston home for a while during and after attending Berklee and then he relocated to Los Angeles in June 2006. His Farewell to Boston show included the first time the rock and roll spectacle known as Bang Camaro performed on stage. Here are some of my photos from that night.

He will be back in town to celebrate the release of A Watched Pot on Friday, July 24th at TT The Bear’s Place joined by Hooray for Earth, Air Traffic Controller and another favorite band of mine, Count Zero. Get there early — Count Zero goes on at 9.