Commentary

Visual Arts Commentary: The Telling Anonymity of Political Street Art

January 12, 2015
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Highlighting the identity of artists is essential in art world journalism, but it appears to be unimportant when reporting on the artistic contributions to political street demonstrations.

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Arts Commentary: On Michel Houellebecq, Islamophobia, and “Charlie Hebdo”

January 12, 2015
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It is unlikely that those who turned automatic fire on the staff of Charlie Hebdon ever read Michel Houellebecq.

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Theater Commentary: On The Firing Of Theater J’s Ari Roth

January 7, 2015
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The Theater J debacle points to the difficulties Jewish theater faces within the Jewish community.

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Arts Commentary: The View from Free — 2014 Edition

January 2, 2015
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The exploitation of the free labor of artists may finally have hit a critical mass in 2014, generating enough publicity to make observers righteously angry.

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Book Commentary: Dreiser’s “The Titan” Turns 100 — America’s “Downton Abbey”

December 31, 2014
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Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan is not the greatest novel about American business, but it is still among the best, an honorable runner-up that turned 100 this year.

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Music Commentary: Notable Classical Performances of 2014

December 24, 2014
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It’s fun to recall what’s been played locally since January and be reminded just how rich the greater Boston area’s classical music scene really is.

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Theater Commentary: Is a Five-Year-Old Tony Kushner Play Too Challenging For Boston?

December 20, 2014
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The only Boston-based companies that have the means to stage an epic on this scale will shy away from the content while those adventurous enough to handle its iconoclasm lack the means.

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Jazz Remembrance: You Don’t Know Jack—From Glasgow to New York

November 2, 2014
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“With Cream I and Ginger could play free jazz as a rhythm section, while Eric played the Ornette Coleman role. However, we didn’t tell Eric that!”

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Music Commentary: “I’ve neither seen nor heard it, but I don’t like it. (And neither should you.)”: “The Death of Klinghoffer” Meets the Know-Nothing Protest

October 23, 2014
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What we seem to have here is one of the glories of our democracy in action: the blind leading the oblivious; aping distortions and downright falsehoods about the opera.

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Book Commentary: Patrick Modiano — An Oddly Elliptical Choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature

October 23, 2014
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Patrick Modiano’s simple sentences pull one in; the nostalgia of loss and pain of youth and the hunt for a vague, romantic Other are easy to relate to.

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