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Music Review: Rhymin’ Simon Faces Mortality

May 28, 2011
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Given these challenging cosmic themes and a nonlinear style, it’s unsurprising that most of Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What lacks vivacity. Still, the album maintains Simon’s reputation as one of the best songwriters in the business. By Michela Smith Paul Simon adores tinkering with words. In the past, lyrics like “when the radical…

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Book Review: An Intriguing but Annoying House of Exile

May 27, 2011
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Ambitious, by turns captivating and exasperating, this sprawling book is like an enormous photomontage—that popular German art form of the 1920s—made up of textual mosaics from newspaper articles, diary entries, letters, novels, or, on occasion, FBI files.

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Arts Interview: Celebrity Series’ Marty Jones Looks Back With Candor

May 26, 2011
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“People often ask what is the biggest change in the arts in Boston over 30 years, and it all has to do with technology. Diminished funding, economic downturns, and 9/11 all changed things. But what’s really driven change is technology.”

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Visual Arts Review: Chihuly’s Magic Glass — Testaments to the Beauty of Vivacity

May 25, 2011
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“Through the Looking Glass” is a glorious celebration of American fine art and a much-needed boost to the MFA’s Americas wing collection. Amid the drab puritanical portraits and the remarkably unremarkable display of colonial dressers, Chihuly’s glassworks are testaments to the beauty of vivacity. Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass. At the Museum of Fine Arts,…

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Book Review: The Pale King– David Foster Wallace Finds the Magnificent in the Mundane

May 24, 2011
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If you haven’t before had the keen pleasure of reading David Foster Wallace, THE PALE KING is a fine gateway drug. Its 550 pages are broken into 50 sections, each digestible on its own without reference to the larger work The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown, 560 pages, $29.99 By Michael de…

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Book Review: A Puzzling Look at the West, Islam, and The Convert

May 21, 2011
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If you are going to write about this very charged subject, the West and Islam, why would you choose as a representative of that great and ancient culture a woman who is stunted emotionally, clearly unreliable, and probably mentally unstable?

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Visual Arts News: Gloucester Writer’s Center Celebrates Birthday

May 15, 2011
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Updated Local artist, curator and arts educator Susan Erony, whose text piece on silk “To Gloucester with Love” is a setting of a Charles Olson poem, gave a model of an arts center talk on the evolution of text as visual art.

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Film Review: Incendies — A Global Tale of Family, Fate, Conflict, and Tragedy

May 15, 2011
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Luckily, there’s plenty to this film besides it’s Middle Eastern setting. INCENDIES focuses primarily on relationships and human drama, while politics form the film’s periphery.

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Theater Review: Edward Albee’s Animal Talk

May 13, 2011
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The Zeitgeist Stage Company production has made me rethink Edward Albee’s HOMELIFE to the extent that the couple, well played by Peter Brown and Christine Power, generate a loving bond that adds some welcome tension (and humor) to the revelations of free-floating anxiety and confusion.

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Visual Arts Review: The Last Gesture Succeeds, Despite Cognitive Slurry

May 13, 2011
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The ostensible theme of the exhibit “The Last Gesture” might be best regarded, then disregarded, as critic Charlie Finch’s attempt to channel his roiling cognitive slurry. The work itself doesn’t need it.

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