In the age of COVID-19, Arts Fuse critics have come up with a guide to film, dance, visual art, theater, and music — mostly available by streaming — for the coming weeks. More offerings will be added as they come in.
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Latest in Visual Arts
Book Review: “¡Printing the Revolution! — The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now”
There’s a looseness, a jagged brio that gives the images in ¡Printing the Revolution! a visual bang — a kind of primal pop.
Latest in Music
Jazz CD Review: Jim Waller Big Band — “Bucket List”
This is one of the best traditional big band records you’ll hear this year, or maybe this decade.
Latest in Dance
Dance Review: “Postcards from the Front” — A Pandemic Time Capsule
The 51-minute piece represents a digital time capsule. It comprises 16 short episodes — reflections in movement of lives caught inside the pandemic — crafted by dance-maker collaborators.
Latest in Television
Television Review: “Exterminate All the Brutes” — A Familiar, and Partial, History Lesson
As an introduction to the progress of colonization and the horrors that white people have inflicted on BIPOC, Exterminate All the Brutes achieves its admirable mission.
Latest Podcast
Short Fuse Podcast #38: Cultural Concierge — Jesse Kornbluth’s Lens on the Oscars
Pop a bowl of popcorn, pour coke over a tall glass of ice, and listen to author and screenwriter Jesse Kornbluth’s irreverent, amusing take on the Oscars.
Latest in Books
Book Review: “Cheese, Wine, and Bread” — On the Menu, Confession and Fermentation
The current rage for inserting the personal/confessional in everything from cookbooks to literary criticism can go too far.
Latest in Theater
Theater Review: “Play On! Othello” — A Painful and Invigorating Update
You need to hear this play. Especially if you are white and already “know” Othello. Listen again (and again) and prepare to question old assumptions.
Latest in Film
April Short Fuses – Materia Critica
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Latest in Food
Book Review: “Jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch” — Nosh Nirvana?
Jake Cohen is “modern” in that he takes a contemporary approach at spreading the gospel; he is an expert at using social media.
Read the Latest
Theater Review: “Mud Season Mystery: The Lodger” — The Game’s Afoot, On Zoom
Director Jess Chayes has done all that is humanly possible to stage a lively live production under Zoom constraints.
Short Fuse Podcast #37: Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, Talks about “Grief and Grievance”
Podcast host Elizabeth Howard talks to the curator who helped conceived of the powerful exhibition “Grief and Grievance,” in which Black artists bear witness to decades of their own challenging experiences.
Classical Album Review: “French Music for the Stage”
There’s much to enjoy here and admire, both in the performances and the selections on hand, which hardly dwell on the usual suspects or limit themselves too narrowly.
Book Review: John Edgar Wideman — Masterful Stories that Bear the Weight of Reality
A singular muscularity infuses these short stories, a confidence that astonishes.
Music Interview: Guitarist and Singer-Songwriter Richard Thompson on His Memoir, “Beeswing”
“I really thought that I could sustain a life in music, but perhaps I’d end up in Las Vegas backing Tom Jones or something.”