The strange intersection of poetry and symphony
With a new term comes more exciting concerts! This week was a combined performance of selections from Mozart’s “Gran Partita” (Serenade No. 10 in B-flat for winds) and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14.
Novel set at MIT is more than black and white
While I probably exist in the same realm of reality you occupy, Mei exists in the world of American Panda, the brainchild of MIT graduate Gloria Chao. American Panda, at first glance, is just a standard bildungsroman with a few reader-attracting tweaks: its protagonist’s main quest is to find a compromise between her parent’s goals for her future and her own, with a side battle that is Surviving MIT. But American Panda is not exactly that.
2018 Oscar nominated animated shorts
If you have five to ten minutes to spare, I would recommend taking a look at these shorts, even if it’s just to admire the way they are made.
Timeless yet nostalgic, Destroyer does not disappoint.
Bejar, along with the half dozen other members of Destroyer performed at The Sinclair near Harvard Square. Much like the opening lines of “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” from the latest album Ken, the group’s performance featured wonderfully colorful and evocative phrases that complemented each other with a surprising and wonderful strangeness.
The customer’s always right
This is the second part of my episode-by-episode review and analysis of the new Channel 4 television show Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. This week’s episode was called “Autofac”, based on the short story of the same name.
Freedom from the chains of your heart
'Bilal: A New Breed of Hero' addresses various concerns about pre-Islamic Makkah, without even explicitly addressing the religion throughout the entire movie.
Rostam hasn’t lost‘em
It was nice to be in a theater seat, not jostling for a view of the stage, able to lean back and soak in the untroubled vibrations of Rostam’s creations. There was something very special about being able to hear tunes I know and love performed live, but not feeling pressured to shout along, or cheer louder than anybody else.
‘Let X equal the cold’
With a previous run on Broadway, a Best Play Tony Award, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a movie adaptation, this run of Proof has some very strong antecedents to live up to.
Genre film making at its finest
The annual Sundance Film Festival featured a Midnight Program, highlighting two indie films: 'Mandy' and 'Hereditary'.
Step aside, Shakespeare, Dame Christie’s here
While clear in retrospect, the conclusion was monstrously difficult to guess, even with evidence as given (not salty about being wrong at all…).
The subconscious of the Cold War era – revived
While not particularly true of its print counterpart, the modernizations provided an interesting, fresh interpretation of the 54-year-old story. The devil, here, was in the details.
Love is not always butterflies
So McGarry’s “jazz love letter” is far from one-dimensional, but it is hopeful. Some types [of love] are good, some types are dangerous, and some types are both. They’re all love. And it’s important not to forget about that feeling.
A night at the Cantab
A woman scribbles rapidly into her old, worn-out notebook in the dim light of the bar. There’s a world buzzing around her, but the only things she sees in her peripheral vision are the dark colors of the counter and the clear bubbles in her drink. She’s focused on her writing, finding words for the feelings pulsing through her.
Love done right
Life is Strange: Before the Storm is, to put it simply, one of those games you will never forget. Never have I so strongly felt adoration, fury, sadness, sympathy, and amusement within a single playthrough...
The first contemporary dystopian series that didn’t make me cringe!
Red Rising is a well-written, original, and not too cliche dystopian novel with prose and story complexity that far exceeds The Hunger Games, but it is definitely less sophisticated than A Song of Ice and Fire.
True jazz pizzazz
The Great Nostalgist begins with a deep, rolling groove under the fairly mystical title “Adult Joe.” The nine songs that follow have similarly wistful names, from “Theme for Gloomy Bear” to “Truant” to “Emotional Baggage Carousel.”
“Shall I compare thee to a mummer’s play?”
Imagine a William Shakespeare (George Olesky) who isn’t quite as eloquent as his plethora of plays would imply. At the beginning of Shakespeare in Love, this is the version of Will we get: writer’s block, broke, and losing his faith in his own career as a playwright and a poet.
‘Hostiles’ is a brutal, if unfeeling, portrayal of the Western Frontier
In what begins with a lurch but slows to a crawl, director and writer Scott Cooper’s film ‘Hostiles’ has us wishing for dynamic dialogue and a more succinct and surprising script.
Second novel by Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian’, falls short of expectations
The book has overarching themes of class and plot devices typical in a story where there are haves and have nots. There’s an interesting amount of detail about how the moon colony would function from an engineering perspective, which immediately engaged me.
‘What kind of frigging person bashes in their friend’s knee?’
Two-time national champion Harding was infamous in the early 90s for her association with the knee-smashing of her biggest skating competitor, Olympic medalist Nancy Kerrigan.