Month: February 2013

Book Review: Bringing Nathaniel Hawthorne Home

February 18, 2013
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Unlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist — for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pieties than plummet into sheer nothingness.

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Jazz Review: The Bad Plus Celebrates Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”

February 17, 2013
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Postmodern jazz trio The Bad Plus plays some of the prettiest Stravinsky ever performed.

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Dance Review: The Joy of Swimming Upstream — Emily Johnson’s “Niicugni”

February 16, 2013
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Emily Johnson may be off the mainstream cultural radar, but I guarantee that is going to change, big time.

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Fuse Jazz Review: Terri Lyne Carrington Takes on the “Money Jungle”

February 15, 2013
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No one would say that Terri Lyne Carrington’s versions of Ellington’s pieces are definitive, but they extend the legendary composer’s legacy in a personal and significant way.

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Book Review: Guilty Pleasures? — Rocker Peter Hook Takes Us Inside Joy Division

February 13, 2013
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Peter Hook’s memoir contains no earthshattering revelations, but it does offer a new way (or at least another way) of thinking about the four young men who made up Joy Division.

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Music Interview: In a “Heartbeat”

February 13, 2013
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Heartbeat is an international non-profit organization that is aimed at uniting Israeli and Palestinian musicians, educators and students in order to transform conflict through the power of music.

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Poetry Review: “The Briar Patch” — Crafty Poems, Accomplished and Sly

February 12, 2013
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Poems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.

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Theater Review: A Hauntingly Beautiful “Glass Menagerie”

February 11, 2013
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The luminous physical beauty of the production staged by the American Repertory Theater, coupled with carefully crafted performances by its performers, makes this a Glass Menagerie to be cherished.

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Opera Review: An Uneven “Clemency” at the Boston Lyric Opera Annex

February 9, 2013
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Composer James MacMillan’s musical strategy in this opera is a stylistic patchwork that seems to mean to convey that each character inhabits a different, mutually misunderstood world.

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Short Fuse Interview: Susan Jacoby, Robert Ingersoll, and Keeping the Secular Tradition of American History Alive

February 8, 2013
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Robert Ingersoll is all but unknown in our time. Susan Jacoby sets out to answer why. One answer she proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced by education, broader culture and scientific reason.

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