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by Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when…
Read MoreArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.
Read MoreJust over a month ago, conventional wisdom had it that the long-running Pollock Matter Affair, one of the most contentious art controversies in living memory (see past posts in Arts Fuse and Anonymous Sources), had finally ground to a halt. Oops. As predicted in The Arts Fuse in November, the debate has found some more…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages) It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I…
Read Moreby Bill Marx What particularly disappointed Boston Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy about the Huntington Theatre Company’s recent production of David Rabe’s Streamers was that it lacked the emotional impact of the 1976 staging of the script. She found it “painful because that earlier production clearly resonated with its audiences as a powerful antiwar statement,…
Read MoreBy J. R. Carroll This review/commentary will focus on Coltrane’s recordings with the Miles Davis Quintet for Columbia (in October 1955 and June and September 1956) and Prestige (in November 1955 and May and October 1956), as well as a variety of sideman dates and nominally leaderless sessions, many of which have recently been reissued…
Read MoreBy William Webster New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ recent positive review of a concert featuring the compositions of Steve Reich at New York’s Carnegie Hall made me look forward to the presentation of the same program at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music late last month. Reich has garnered considerable attention and respect as…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Stephen Sondheim has written the music and lyrics of at least a half dozen of the twentieth century’s greatest works for the musical theater. One of them is – to provide its full title – Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It has now been turned into a movie, which…
Read MoreDeath, starvation, futility, revolution, exploitation — no wonder The Weavers is never produced in the land of plenty.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb The operas of Lee Hoiby don’t come around often, but the best known of his seven stage works is Summer and Smoke, based on the play by Tennessee Williams. I still vividly remember the 1952 New York production of the play, which put off-Broadway firmly on the map and elevated the late…
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Arts Commentary: Rich in Creativity — But Nothing Else