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Food Muse: A WRAP FOR A RAJ — Scenes From The Life Of The Dosa

June 13, 2011
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In India, dosas are cooked on a griddle in the street, as well as in restaurants and homes. As street food goes, the dosa gets high marks. It’s not junk, and it tastes great. The Dosa Factory in Central Square, subtitled “Indian Street Food,” is a hole-in-the-wall–not for an evening of food and talk. But that’s not what street food is. It’s a quick fix, and for these purposes, it’s about as good as it gets.

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Book Review: Roberto Bolaño —The Critic as Bomb Thrower

June 11, 2011
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This is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.

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Theater Reviews: Broadway —The Importance of Being Earnest and Jerusalem

June 5, 2011
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Two New York stage productions offer sterling examples of going maximalist in an increasingly minimalist age

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Movie Review: An Immensely Rewarding “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”

May 29, 2011
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By Harvey Blume The beauty and power of Chauvet’s art, at once primal and sophisticated, tempers director Verner Herzog’s passion for Homo Sapiens bashing. We do, after all, belong to the very same species as those cave painters. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Directed by Werner Herzog. At various New England cinemas. It was with some…

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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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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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Visual Arts: Cleaning the Eighth Wonder of the World

May 10, 2011
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Before we hit the ground, I reversed my attitude and became a fan of the restoration of the Dutch royal palace on Dam Square, Amsterdam. I could not fault the decisions that had been taken.

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Short Fuse Commentary/Review: A Social Problem

May 4, 2011
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I feel like such a nag, but someone ought to be able to point out a 300 lb gorilla in the room when it knuckle walks, glowers and pounds the walls. I will be that very nag and shortly name the ape accordingly. Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the…

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Movie Feature: Making Music for the “It” Girl

April 23, 2011
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It is really very much of its time and place, its particular moment in history. The social revolution of the 20s, the new freedoms for “modern” women, the flapper phenomenon, and the challenges to the class structure in urban 20th century America are among the issues in this 1927 silent comedy. By Bill Marx The…

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Book Review: A Cinematic Russian Winter (Updated)

April 21, 2011
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Russian Winter is part mystery and part love story, drawing on the (overly) familiar tropes of each: the missing jewels, the deceived lovers, and so on. The material is not original, but it is workable and proffers plenty of Hollywood glamor. Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay. Harper Perennial, 496 pages, $14.99. By Nora Delany It…

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