Review

Film Review: “A Love Song” — A Marvel of Humanity

August 6, 2022
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Max Walker-Silverman’s first feature, A Love Song, is a character-driven, humanist, and deeply ecological present to someone of my generation.

Book Review: “The Quiet Before”– How Our Conversations Set the Boundaries of Our Thinking

August 6, 2022
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This superb book about adventures in radical thinking is less about tracking incendiary ideas to their obscure sources than about the various media used to ferment and transmit them.

Visual Arts Review: The Supportive Imaginary — Weaves and Grids

August 6, 2022
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Grids come into these woven pieces with a strange humility, disarming us with repurposed materials and precious handiwork, domestic scenes and visionary tales.

World Music Album Review: Bassist Alune Wade’s Brilliant “Sultan” — A Global Patchwork Quilt

August 5, 2022
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Sultan has a solid lock on my year-end best of 2022 list. Let’s make the world a little smaller and make this album a hit.

August Short Fuses – Materia Critica

August 5, 2022
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Visual Arts Review: “Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone” — A Problematic Reevaluation

August 4, 2022
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Are visitors supposed to feel some sort of guilty pleasure if they find Mary Ann Unger’s Across the Bering Strait powerfully mesmeric?

Book Review: “Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” — A Tale of Mobsters and Musicians

August 3, 2022
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Guitarist Eddie Condon quotes a mobster on jazz: “…it’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”

Classical Album Review: Short Can Be Good — Three Splendidly Varied One-Act Operas by Lennox Berkeley

August 3, 2022
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I was pleased to encounter all three compact operas. Lennox Berkeley seems to me more and more an admirable, indeed lovable composer, and a bit of a chameleon. I like him in all his various colors.

Festival Review: 2022 Newport Jazz Festival — A Relaxed Musical Vibe, Communal and Diverse

August 3, 2022
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To some degree, everything fit under the resilient umbrella that the late George Wein raised at the edge of Newport Harbor.

Theater Review: “Grand Horizons” — Divorce Geriatric Style

August 2, 2022
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Grand Horizons at the Gloucester Stage Company is a wild, funny, and sometimes wonderfully touching ride.

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