Month: August 2008

Music Review: Patricia Barber’s `The Cole Porter Mix’

August 24, 2008
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by J.R. Carroll “Singer/songwriter” is not a description often applied to jazz musicians, and generally with good reason: Jazz instrumentalists have demonstrated again and again that as wordsmiths they are, well, outstanding instrumentalists. At best, the typically after-the-fact lyrics strive uneasily for either social uplift or hipster knowingness; at worst, they are just embarrassingly lame.…

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Book Commentary: New Zealand’s Janet Frame — Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

August 15, 2008
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by Bill Marx Posthumous publication of a book by a great but grievously neglected writer gives posterity a chance to either rectify its mistake or compound it. The recent appearance in the “New Yorker” of a previously unpublished Janet Frame short story, which was deemed to be “too painful” for print in 1954, has generated…

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Short Fuse: The Art of Chess in Chinatown Park

August 13, 2008
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By Harvey Blume Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess…

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