Arts Fuse Editor
By Chantal Mendes This Sunday the enterprising theater troupe Banana Bag & Bodice brings its distinctively modern adaptation of an ancient classic, Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage, to Oberon in Cambridge, MA. For those of us who missed the recent movie version, Beowulf conjures up sleepy times in early English Literature class. Given…
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is the talk of the town, but does it have anything to say? Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28. Reviewed by Tommy Wallach In two days, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux will publish Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen whose last book, The Corrections,…
Papercut’s mission is to collect, catalog, and make available to the public the widest possible collection of contemporary ‘zines. By Dylan Rose I’m new at this reporting bit and, in an early conversation with my editor about the particular goals and restrictions of the genre, I blundered: I happened to refer to Arts Fuse as…
Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America by Jay Atkinson, Wiley and Sons, 250 pages, $25.95 Reviewed By Nancye Tuttle I’m ready to pack my bag and hit the road. But it isn’t Jack Kerouac’s iconic 1957 novel On the Road that’s fueling my wanderlust. It’s Jay Atkinson’s compelling, new memoir…
By Kate Vander Wiede The Cantab, as the regulars called The Cantab Lounge, is like a quirky not-quite-speakeasy complete with a narrow stairwell leading below street level and smoke-perfumed attendees. This night, bass chords shake the ceiling, courtesy of the band headlining one floor up. Dim lights hardly illuminate the cramped room, which is lined…
The thrilling visuals in this documentary about skydiving get some things right, but the film ends up sensationalizing the sport rather than illuminating it. “Adrenaline Rush: The Science of Risk” at the Museum of Science, IMAX, through January 23, 2010. Reviewed by Kate Vander Wiede I started skydiving for a few reasons. The first was…
Reviewed by William Webster In Boston’s world of classical music, Winsor Music is indeed a gem; its current director and founder (1996) Peggy Pearson, has done an incredible job pursuing the three dimensions of this organization — chamber music concert series, the commission of new works and a community outreach program engaging talented students in…
Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.” Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95. Reviewed by Mark Nolan…
Classical Music Commentary: Boston’s Lost Opportunity — How the BSO Board Chose Charles Munch over Leonard Bernstein