Books

Arts Commentary: What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Cultural Dialogue

March 31, 2011
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An exchange about what meaningful online conversation about the arts and humanities entails. What kind of cultural dialogue would best serve the purpose of the Mass Cultural Council? To focus on the creativity of artists? Or to encourage critical thinking?

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Theater Commentary: Tennessee Williams — Putting What is Inexpressible in Life into Words

March 25, 2011
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I asked Davis Robinson, artistic director of the Beau Jest Moving Theatre, to share his thoughts on the 100th anniversary (March 26th) of the birth of playwright Tennessee Williams.

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Theater Commentary: Tennessee Williams at 100 — A Few Personal Thoughts

March 24, 2011
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Director and woman as I am, I would love to see A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, even The Rose Tattoo, cast with all men. Then I would push some courageous director to attempt to prove on stage that Williams’s final plays are not the work of a declining talent, but…

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Book Review: Time, Beautiful and Cruel — The Story of Composer George Russell

March 23, 2011
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In the best of all possible worlds, Duncan Heining’s biography will be the cornerstone of the edifice that time will erect to the memory of George Russell and his gift to music. Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. In some ways, because of the vagaries of the book business, it’s up…

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Poetry Review: Valerio Magrelli’s “Vanishing Points”

March 19, 2011
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Magrelli’s is a reserved, critical intelligence, and his poems do not issue from a position of knowledge, but rather from a doubt that stands, and dances, slowly on a profound respect for ambiguity.

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Coming Attractions in Jazz: Late March 2011

March 18, 2011
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UpdatedA celebratory month: Pianist Nando Michelin honors one of his native Uruguay’s greatest poets, a legendary Ethiopian vocalist rejoins the Either/Orchestra, a stellar Jazz Piano Summit comes to Connecticut, and much, much more.

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Book Review: Exploring “The Memory of Love” in postwar Sierra Leone

March 17, 2011
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In her second novel, Aminatta Forna gives us a moving story of the toll that the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone has taken and is still taking, years after it supposedly ended.

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Book Review: The Greatest Horror Novel of the 20th Century

March 16, 2011
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German author Ernst Weiss’s nightmarish vision of science gone mad in his 1931 novel Georg Letham is not rote Freudian; it is firmly in the social critique/ apocalyptic Darwinian mode.

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Theater Review: Prometheus Bound — Bound for Glory (Revised 1X)

March 14, 2011
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Bare chested and sweating up a storm, singer Gavin Creel as Prometheus makes for a rock rebel with lots of snarly attitude, defying Zeus’s tyranny by flexing his abs.

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Fuse Theater/Book Review: An Inspiring Defense Of Why Theater is Necessary

March 12, 2011
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In The Necessity of Theater, author Paul Woodruff makes way for wisdom as theater’s final gift. In his view, theater’s wisdom lies in its use of the mask, and that mask is the sine qua non of meaning. The mask must conceal, if only to reveal.   The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching…

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