What's new in movie theaters this week?

A Jackie Robinson biopic. Scary Movie 5 (wish I were kidding).

And, most promisingly, director Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines (pictured), in which Ryan Gosling does his Ryan Gosling thing and Bradley Cooper gives his second sterling performance, or so I have heard. It's at the Roxy and Savoy.

This weekend also brings us a glut of one-time or rare screenings, so take out your calendars:

On Friday, the annual LunaFest, a benefit for Vermont Works for Women and the Breast Cancer Fund, brings a program of nine short films to Burlington. They include narratives, documentaries and animation — all by and about women. This year, one nonfiction selection profiles Georgena Terry, founder of Burlington-based Terry Precision Cycling.

Terry doesn’t live in Vermont, but filmmaker Bess O’Brien does. Catch her speech at the reception.

Speaking of O’Brien, her husband, Jay Craven, will premiere his new movie this week at five locations.

Earlier today, Paste Magazine premiered "When the Lights Go Down," an advance track from the forthcoming solo record by GPN guitarist Scott Tournet. The album, dubbed Ver La Luz, is slated for a May 14 release and boasts some added Vermont flavor with cameos by Waylon Speed's Kelly Ravin and alt-country songwriter Lowell Thompson. Ms. Potter herself reportedly drops by on a duet, one of two songs she co-wrote with Tournet for the record.

As for the song, "Lights" suggests a soft departure from the 1970s-rock-informed material found on Tournet's 2006 solo effort, Everyone You Meet Is Fighting a Hard Battle, and is a far cry from the sludgy blues-rock of his side project Blues & Lasers — let alone standard GPN fare.

Translating the jargon-y press release sent today announcing the premiere, apparently Tournet got sad, then got happy and wrote songs about the experience — I'm guessing while listening to Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips and The Whole Love-era Wilco. If "Lights" is any indication, Ver La Luz — Spanish for "see the light" — will reveal a more introspective and sensitive Tournet than the guitar slinger GPN fans are familiar with.

Here's a link to the track. Ver La Luz drops on Tuesday, May 14. Scott Tournet will play a solo show at Higher Ground in South Burlington on Thursday, May 16, as part of a short tour pimping the record.    

OK, it's true: The only writing I know with the vaguest "military" connection is the Beatles' song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun." My ignorance of the genre may explain, in part, why I'm intrigued by the William E. Colby Military Writers' Symposium, to be held at Norwich University this Wednesday and Thursday.

The other part is the theme: "Coming Home: The Hopes, Fears and Challenges of Veterans Returning From War." Oof.

In the two-day residency, author participants will share their work and "debate the issues of the past and present," according to a Norwich press release. And that seems to include just about everything.

But the writers won't just be talking among themselves. A panel discussion open to the public on Thursday features these authors:

• James Wright, author of Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America's Wars and Those Who Fought Them (New York Times review here);

• David McIntyre, author of Centerline;

• Karl Marlantes, author of the Colby Award-winning Matterhorn and What It's Like to Go to War; 

• Col. Jon Coffin (ret. VTANG), one of just six psychologists in the National Guard system

Other symposium participants include this year's Colby winner, Thomas P. McKenna of Stowe, who wrote Kontum: The Battle to Save South Vietnam; and Myke Cole, author of the action series Shadow Ops and a reservist in the Coast Guard (pictured above).

I left Burlington's New City Galerie last Friday night with a brown paper bag stapled shut. Inside, I was told, I would find a pile of seed balls — clay, compost and flower seeds native to Vermont, all rolled into dainty little truffles. 

The seed balls were part of the exhibit "Ecologies," which features the work of St. Michael's College art professor Brian Collier — Seven Days wrote about him and his big-box-store-birds project in 2011. 

In this show, Collier presents work from "The Highway Expedition," his 115-mile walk along I-74 in Illinois, during which he explored the strange habitat that grows up alongside rushing traffic. In the gallery last Friday, I saw native and nonnative plants pressed and immortalized in dioramas. I thumbed through Collier's journals from the project, packed with photographs of animals and plants thriving in these seemingly forgotten strips of nature.

And then I found his bags of seed balls. When Collier began attempting to encourage the growth of wildlife in underused urban areas, or excessively mowed public lawns, he formed an organization called the Society for a Re-Natural Environment. 

You can learn more about his projects, and buy a hand-welded aluminum seed-ball launcher (pictured), at the SRNE website. And if you're lucky, you'll find some seed balls left at New City Galerie.

I chucked two from the window of a moving car over the weekend, and felt a rush as each landed with a thump in the tall grasses next to the highway.

Photo by Brian Collier.

Last week, Connecticut-based filmmaker Ben Churchill sent me a link to his recently completed documentary, "Toy Place," about the Toy Museum located in the Vermont Antique Mall in Quechee. Now, I had been to the antique mall a number of times and never noticed the museum, right upstairs.

But as it happened, I was in the Upper Valley this past weekend (to see the work-in-progress opera Tesla in New York, which I previewed last week; it was intriguing, as is Jim Jarmusch's hair, but I digress). So, on the way home, my friend and I stopped in to the mall, right on Route 4.

Churchill's video conveys what we saw better than I can in words, so check it out:

At a silent auction featuring handmade scarves, you expect any number of knitted and woven numbers. And that's just what you'll see at SafeArt's benefit this Saturday, April 6, at the Vermont Law School. Even those from "celebrity" donors such as Gov. Peter Shumlin and former governor Madeleine Kunin.

One scarf donation, however, is not exactly a neck-warmer. Pictured here, it's Brookfield-based New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren's version: a fuzzy, full-body scarf on one of his signature hairy creatures. (Here's a story Seven Days did on Koren in 2011.)

Founded by Tracy Penfield in 2000, SafeArt is a nonprofit that uses the expressive arts to address bullying, domestic abuse and sexual assault. Healing and empowering victims of violence is a tall order, but it may as well include comforting clothing — even if on paper.

The silent auction is 5:30 to 8 p.m. at VLS's Chase Center in South Royalton.

For the very first post in our new arts blog, perhaps it's fitting that we direct you to ... the paper! Or, of course, the website.

Whether you're a fan of print or pixels or both, each week we'll post a summary here of what we have to say about music, theater, art, dance, film, books and other cultural entertainments.

So here you go:

In our State of the Arts column, I preview Tesla in New York, showing Friday and Saturday at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. A collaboration of composer Phil Kline (pictured right) and indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch — and a co-commission of the Hop — the work-in-progress performances this weekend offer a peek at roughly half of the opera expected to premiere in late 2014. It's about the life of everyone's favorite mad inventor, Nikola Tesla.

Freelancer Julia Shipley, a poet herself, writes about the Harbor Mountain Press, a small publisher of mostly poetry and based in White River Junction. Owner Peter Money, writes Shipley, "persists with the stability of a mountain, unaffected by the shifting sands of the publishing industry." Harbor Mountain's latest, and 21st, title is A Cage Within, by Cuban poet Wendy Guerra, translated by Dartmouth prof Elizabeth Polli.

Megan James talks with Middlebury College assistant professor of theater Andrew Smith about a new-play festival called "Undressing Cinderella." The provocatively titled fest, performed this week through Saturday, features short theatrical works based upon the classic tale — but the works are focused on any character except Cinderella.

The Independent Television & Film Festival is relocating from Los Angeles to tiny Dover, Vt. this year. Seriously? Yup. Read Margot Harrison's explanation here. That event isn't until September. But this month, you could check out the new Monadnock International Film Festival in Keene, N.H., to fulfill your star-spotting needs.

With sorrow we report on the passing of Bradford "Bear" Ingalls, who died last week at the age of 61. Bear was a beloved stage and TV technician with a long behind-the-scenes career at, among other places, the Flynn Center. His colleagues at VCAM share a memoriam.