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Book Review: “Divine Images” — William Blake’s Imagination as Mankind’s Saving Grace

July 6, 2021
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The author’s aim is to render William Blake’s complex vision understandable to novices. It is a lucid effort, though the book presents a disappointingly conventional overview of the artist’s achievement.

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Visual Arts Review: Virgil Abloh Is Bringing in the Outside at the ICA

July 6, 2021
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“Figures of Speech” is a kind of aesthetic/political injection: its messages are put across by pieces that seamlessly blend a number of genres, including sculpture, music, graphics, and film.

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Classical Album Review: “Americans” — Bernstein, Ives, Barber, and Crawford

July 6, 2021
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Americans is a winningly-programmed, strongly-realized effort.

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Album Review: Juan Cirerol’s “Punk Feeling” — Mexicali’s Poet of Poverty Returns

July 5, 2021
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Jaun Cirerol has been accused of idealizing desperation. He disagrees. “I am well-anchored,” he responds.

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Arts Remembrance: Pianist-Composer Frederic Rzewski

July 5, 2021
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I consider composer Frederick Rzewski the most profound and persistent explorer of how to address injustice through the use of sophisticated compositional tools.

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Film Review: “Summer of Soul” — A Classic Concert Resurrected

July 4, 2021
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Summer of Soul is two hours of rapturous entertainment and pointed political commentary — neither of which has gone out of style 52 years later.

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Film Review: This Year’s Tribeca Film Festival Documentaries — From Leonardo da Vinci to Rick James

July 4, 2021
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The Tribeca Film Festival wrapped last week — here’s a selection of the most promising documentaries on view.

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Jazz Album Review: John McLaughlin’s “Liberation Time” — Driven by the Spirit

July 4, 2021
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To my ears, veteran guitarist John McLaughlin is both a jazz and a rock player, and more besides.

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Author Interview: Fred Waitzkin on “Strange Love”

July 2, 2021
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One reason Fred Waitzkin’s work, outside of Searching for Bobby Fischer, is not as well known as it might be is that it doesn’t respect time-honored boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.

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Television Review: Bo Burnham’s “Inside” — A Hall of Mirrors

June 30, 2021
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Bo Burnham deserves kudos for calling himself out on his own bullshit. But that doesn’t absolve him of seriously confronting the problem of excessive self-consciousness, especially nowadays.

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