Month: April 2013
There was probably no better summing up of Woodstock Nation than the lines, “Sometimes, I feel, like a motherless child/A long ways from my home.”
Read MoreA movie critic can’t help but tie the Boston Marathon tragedies to the cinema, and so John Frankenheimer’s “Black Sunday” (1977) obviously flashes to mind.
Read MoreIf I suffered half as much from the thought that most art has been lost as I suffer every day from the recollection of departed family and friends, I would be in a mental hospital. In this sense, I found myself resisting the message of “The Melancholy Art,” to the point that I felt that the book was laying a guilt trip on me.
Read MorePart of what made “The Dream Merchant” so compelling, and at times, harrowing, a read for me are its themes: love, loss, rags and riches, to be sure, but also the theme of aging, and associated loss of power and possibility.
Read MoreJames Longenbach’s ear for the nuances of diction, tone, stress, and the material aspects of poetry is so good, and his grasp of context and biography so assured, one wonders why the essays so often tie themselves into semantic and logical knots.
Read MoreIn her groundbreaking study, Tufts University professor Alisha Rankin essentially revises the history of medicine by showing that women, presumed to be marginal in the development early modern medicine, were actually major players.
Read More“She Kills Monsters” provides a constant stream of creative, amusing, and outrageous moments.
Read MoreTen Freedom Summers is a masterful, supple series of compositions that has the gravitas of a major work that also, from time to time, it swings dramatically.
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Cultural Commentary: Why is Boston’s Arts Coverage So Bland?
According to our docile mainstream media, Boston enjoys a perpetual Renaissance — the merchandise in the cultural window is always worth buying. And that predictability makes for very boring journalism.
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