Posts
Is it a sign of the times? On October 5, the New York Sun updated yet another art authentication controversy that’s been simmering since earlier this year. Like the better known Pollock Matter Affair (see past posts in Fuse Flash and Anonymous Sources), this one involves a filmmaker, art work that may or may not…
Read MoreBen Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Reviewed by J. R. Carroll During an interview in Japan in 1966, John Coltrane was asked what he would like to be in ten years. Coltrane replied, “I would like to be a saint.” Lewis Porter, author of the definitive study John Coltrane:…
Read MoreThe Harvard Crimson has waded into the treacherous controversies swirling around the “Pollock Matters” exhibition currently on view at Boston College’s McMullen Museum (see previous posts here in “Anonymous Sources.”)
Read MoreWho cares how the chairs are arranged or even who sits on them on the deck of the Titanic-“Globe”? As the popularity of online publications and blogs grows, the “Globe”’s tepid cultural coverage has become increasingly superfluous.
Read Moreby Bill Marx The schizophrenia is instructive if somewhat dizzying. At the Calderwood Pavilion, the Huntington Theatre Company kicks off its season with “The Atheist,” a cynical exercise in scatological anti-heroism about a sleazy reporter who blackmails his way to fame. On its main stage at the Boston University Theater the HTC wallows in PG…
Read MoreCould a longstanding debate over copyright law add yet another dimension to the long-running Pollock Matter Affair? There are signs it might, though the media haven’t yet understood just how broad the implications might be.
Read MoreBy Bill Marx The Atheist by Ronan Noone. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, through September 30, 2007. Machiavellian monsters aren’t what they used to be in the theater. The gloriously godless creeps that memorably rampage their way through the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Shaw and Brecht scale the dizzying…
Read MoreBy David Hartley Believe it or not, cans and screwtops are not only back, but they are chic. For the past few decades, drinking beer out of a can has been for the slightly louche among us, the thin tin package of choice for undiscriminating guzzlers at football stadiums and frat-houses. But now the lowly…
Read MoreA hard-surfing reader called our attention recently to a piece in the on-line journal, The Hub Review. The piece, “Why all the love for the ‘Matter Pollocks’?” reports on the on-going controversy covered in some previous “Anonymous Sources” posts on The Arts Fuse.
Read More
Theater Commentary: The Story of O
The weakness of the play is so shockingly transparent –- the love birds spend most of the play orating their (occasionally) steamy letters to the audience –- that the explanation must be that Brand Shakespeare has struck again: companies figure that anything about the Bard will draw a crowd. by Bill Marx I wanted to…
Read More