Month: May 2010
By J. R. Carroll June brings a cupful of world jazz. [Updated: See Mose Allison item below] Photo by Daniel Sheehan While the eyes of the sporting world may be on the stadiums of South Africa, there will be plenty of international flavor here in New England this month. Brazilian born but now Seattle-based, pianist/composer/arranger…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Summer has never been a time for theaters taking chances and the sluggish economy only encourages the hot weather drift to safety. But there’s some funky activity around the margins as well as encouraging news about Shakespeare & Company’s finances. Also, the Gloucester Stage Company has forsaken last year’s geriatric lineup and…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb June 4: The Old West Organ Society presents Yuko Hayashi in an organ recital celebrating the 40th anniversary of the C. B. Fisk organ. Old West Church, 131 Cambridge Street, Boston, 7 p.m.
Read MoreWalt Whitman is an exuberant poet, and fellow versifier C. K. Williams is exuberant about Whitman in this wonderfully perceptive introduction to his poetry. On Whitman (Writers on Writers) by C. K. Williams. Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 Reviewed by Anthony Wallace On Whitman is a meditation on the life and work of the…
Read MoreThere are dozens of excellent books about the Alcotts, Emersons, Thoreau, and Hawthorne but reading them can’t beat actually walking through the places where the people actually lived. By Helen Epstein “We are all going to be made perfect,” wrote ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott in June of 1843, “This day we left Concord in the…
Read MoreCritic Paul Berman’s problem with the arts plays too significant a role in his work to be written off as but the tin ear of an historian and social thinker with weightier matters on his mind; his misreading of the arts is a fulcrum of his social thinking. The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul…
Read MoreReviewed By Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Pops, celebrating its 125th anniversary, is devoting its third week of programs (May 18-22) to “American Heroes”—both living and dead. The most newsworthy feature is a new cantata entitled “The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers.” Pops conductor Keith Lockhart addressed brief remarks to the audience…
Read MoreI have contributed a piece to The Public Humanist, a Mass Humanities blog posted on The Valley Advocate. It is a review of Martha C. Nussbaum’s new book (Not for Profit) , which argues that the arts and humanities are under threat because educational institutions, frightened by economic hard times, are moving toward a more…
Read MoreBy Gary Schwartz On February 21, 2007, I had the honor of delivering the Third Annual Lecture of the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute. My subject was “Rembrandt’s paper trail,” but that is not the subject of this column. What keeps coming to mind is an exchange…
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