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Book Review: Of Spongy Minds and Award-Winning Books

November 26, 2010
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Call it anarchistic boorishness, an artist chomping on the hand that feeds him. But at least Thomas Bernhard is honest about why he welcomes awards — he wants the money, especially because the amounts, given European largess to its culture-makers, are considerable. My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard. Translated from the German by Carol…

Judicial Review #3: Gish Jen’s World and Town [Updated2x]

November 23, 2010
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Gish Jen’s novel about New England small-town life in the new millennium, “World and Town,” has just come out in a paperback. We greeted the hardback edition of the book with a Judicial Review, a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. It is a good time to highlight the innovative approach again. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community—making power of interactivity.

Visual Arts Feature: Spotlight on Scaasi — Revisiting an American Couturier

November 19, 2010
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This exhibit is ideal for the budding designer to come and admire dresses with structured tulle, unique hems, bias cut silk, pounds of beads, sequins, and rhinestones, weaved organza and mink accents. Scaasi: American Couturier at the Loring Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA until June 19, 2011. By Megan Trombino It…

Dance Feature: The Compassionate God — Basil Twist Reimagines Petrushka

November 10, 2010
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Ultimately, Basil Twist’s Petrushka is a meditation on the tension between the animate and inanimate, a story that lets a puppet explain what it’s like to be a puppet, a fable that argues that to be alive is to recognize causality and suffering—and that the ability to suffer is paradoxically a precious gift. Basil Twist’s…

Short Film Reviews: A Focus on The Boston Jewish Film Festival [2x Updated]

November 10, 2010
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And so I go, Jewish and glad to be, theatre director—maybe between gigs, old enough to believe that movies are best on the big screen among other (quiet) viewers and that you don’t have to be Jewish to love good Jewish movies. By Joann Green Breuer The danger of speaking critically of any ethnic art…

Culture Vulture in London: An Overcrowded Jewish Nest

November 8, 2010
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Tribes makes us privy to the dynamics of a twenty-first-century, secular, Jewish family in a series of fast-paced scenes that leave few holds barred. The parents—middle-class, middle-aged, hyper-verbal intellectuals—are trying to cope with the fact that their three adult children have returned to inhabit the nest. By Helen Epstein. When I first wrote London friends…

Classical Music Review: Cantata Singers

November 8, 2010
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Laudably, the Cantata Singers music director David Hoose, now in his 28th year at the helm, has chosen to bring forward works not often played, of which there were two on this month’s program. Three other composers were also represented during the evening. By Caldwell Titcomb. In the first major concert by the Cantata Singers…

Opera Review: ‘Tosca’

November 6, 2010
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The Boston Lyric Opera’s current production, adapted from the Scottish Opera, is updated, but this does no real damage. The three locales are properly preserved. And the three principal characters—opera diva Floria Tosca, her lover Mario Cavaradossi, and the lusting and villainous Baron Scarpia—hit their mark solidly. By Caldwell Titcomb. Some years ago the noted…

Short Fuse: Drac Attack, or Why Vampirism Won’t Go Away

November 6, 2010
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Oddly, not everyone is concerned with vampires. A friend tells me he finds them overdone, ornate, weighed down with baroque bells and whistles. His vote goes to zombies. I reply that zombies are one-trick monsters. They don’t even suck, only bite. That, he says, is what he likes about them; they are stripped down, perfect…

Theater Commentary: Two Tons Dropped on A Delicate Balance

November 4, 2010
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Years (or would that be decades?) ago, editors had the self-respect to be embarrassed by critical incompetence, perhaps because there was the assumption that knowledgeable people were reading the paper. Those discriminating readers are long gone from the marginalized arts section of The Boston Globe . . . By Bill Marx I haven’t seen the…

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