Culture Tap and the Street Experience
The walk from the Orange Line Back Bay station, down Clarendon Street, and to the intersection with Tremont Street, is a pleasant one. The street presents itself somewhat like you would expect it to in the North End. It feels old, solid, well-kept and welcoming. The atmosphere is curiously fascinating, marking the place as a distinct piece of Boston, made up of “neighborhoods” and the transitional moments between them. Culture Tap has been situated in a plaza-like wide sidewalk on one of the most delightful streets in Boston.
Casting the spell of a good story
When I sat down to write this review, I wasn’t sure how to begin. Do I expound on how Kvothe, the protagonist of Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, is one of the deepest and truest characters I have ever seen brought to life with words? Do I extol the plots and subplots that naturally and compellingly guide Kvothe through the story?
arts Events SEPT. 13 – SEPT. 19
arts Events SEPT. 13 – SEPT. 19 Friday (9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.) Personal Space Exhibit by Posterlerferguson. Continues through Saturday — Keller Gallery, 7-408 (12:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.) Student Art Loan Program Exhibition. Continues through Sunday — List Visual Arts Center, E15 1st Floor (5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.) Unveiling of Mending Boston Collage — MIT Museum (7:00 p.m. & 10:00 p.m.) LSC Presents Fast & Furious 6 — 26-100 (8:00 p.m. – 10:30 p.m.) The Musical Theater Guild’s Avenue Q — Kresge Little Theater Saturday (7:00 p.m. & 10:00 p.m.) LSC Presents Fast & Furious 6 — 26-100 (8:00 p.m. – 10:30 p.m.) The Musical Theater Guild’s Avenue Q — Kresge Little Theater Sunday (2:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.) MIT Ballroom Dance Club Rumba and Samba Workshops — La Sala, 2nd floor W20 (8:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.) Folk Club Dancing — La Sala, 2nd floor W20 Monday (7:30 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.) MIT Ballroom Dance Club Foxtrot Workshop — Lobdell (7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.) Music and Theater Arts Dept. Presents Singer-Storyteller Norman Kennedy — 14W-111 Tuesday (2:30 p.m.) Campus Art Tour — Meet at Lobby 10 Thursday (4:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.) Opening Reception for Sidewalk City: Mapping the Unmapped — 7-338 Send your arts events to arts@the-tech.mit.edu.
A charming romp through the troubles of adult life
The beloved theme song of the Internet, “The Internet is for Porn,” comes to MIT in the Musical Theater Guild’s production of Avenue Q. With a story about a group of friends with real-life problems, such as closeted homosexuality, porn addiction, and graduating with a liberal arts degree, the show mixes puppets, actors, and even a shadow theater in a hilarious pastiche of Sesame Street for adults.
An ethereal silken globe
The Silk Pavilion is a gauzy hemisphere of sparse silk threads, with apertures arranged in an asymmetric but balanced pattern and many small, dense, circular patches of silk filaments that were spun directly onto it by live silkworms. The scaffold is composed of several panels with irregular patterns of silk thread to support the silk spun by Bombyx mori, the most widely cultivated species of silkworm.
What your MITID can do for you
Your MIT ID can get you free or heavily discounted admission to nearby arts venues. The Council for the Arts at MIT gifts these memberships and discounts as a way to greaten students’ exposure to and appreciation for the arts. The following is a list of the places where you can flash your card. In addition, you can use it to check out museum passes from Hayden Library for guests in town.
Architecture highlights at MIT
Course 4, the Architecture Department at MIT, offers many, varied classes in visual arts, and art and architectural history, many of which fulfill HASS (humanities, art, social science) requirements. These Course 4 classes feature both hands-on experience, as well as historical and literary analysis of art and architecture, and focus more on the experimentalist nature of art. By offering the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, the History of Art and Architecture program, and specialized architecture classes, MIT’s Course 4 allows a range of study on artistic expression and its history.
Experiencing and learning about theater at MIT
Despite their strong penchant for science and engineering, many students come to MIT with extensive previous experience in theater and film. And, while it seems that a school like MIT might be the last place on Earth to find interesting theater classes, the Institute offers various and eclectic courses for students who want to continue exploring their interests in this field, and for students who had no prior exposure to theater and film.
A bloody brilliant sci-fi comedy
The World’s End, directed by Edgar Wright and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, is the third British comedy in the “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy,” along with Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Aside from the creative team and similar themes, each film in the trilogy stands on its own. Shaun of the Dead was a romantic comedy and a zombie horror flick mashup; Hot Fuzz was a cop action comedey; and finally, The World’s End is science fiction, by way of a brilliant and dark comedy about the balance between growing up and fears of conformity.
Classes and opportunities to explore music
It can come as a surprise to learn that MIT has a world-class music department. Many MIT students are involved with music in some capacity. Whether you are interested in performing, taking random classes, a full major/double major/minor, or just attending excellent concerts on campus, MIT is a terrific place to be. Students often find that music offers an ideal counterbalance to a schedule of p-sets and labs.
Studio art at MIT
Studio Art? MIT doesn’t offer studio art classes for credit (except 4.301 Intro to Visual Arts), but the Student Art Association (SAA) offers non-credit classes, including ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Most meet once a week in the evening or over the weekend, in a studio on the fourth floor of the student center, so it’s possible to fit in even a busy academic schedule.
Interview with singer-songwriter Kae Sun
Born and raised in Ghana, Kae Sun moved to Canada when he was just a teen. Entering the music scene as a student in Hamilton was never an intentional decision for him, but that initial spontaneity has evolved into a promising music career, with two full-length albums released and an ongoing tour.
Portrait of the master as a young man
Ip Man, the legendary martial arts master that popularized the wing chun style of kung fu and mentored Bruce Lee as a child, has been the subject of several biopics before. The two directed by Herman Yau, Ip Man: The Legend is Born (2010), didn’t make much noise on this side of the world; its continuation, Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013), will be released next month. The two directed by Wilson Yip, with a serene and solid Donnie Yen in the main role, Ip Man (2010) and Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster (2011), were warmly received by the public and critics alike. With these still warm from the oven, we are presented with yet another take on the life of the master. Written, directed and produced by Wong Kar Wai, The Grandmaster (2013) is an artistic retelling of the already familiar story, with familiar faces in the main roles: Tony Leung (Hero; Lust, Caution; Red Cliff) plays Ip Man, and Ziyi Zhang, (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; House of Flying Daggers; Hero) plays Gong Er, his fierce antagonist and platonic love interest.
Changing what’s possible, in biographic cinema
The first feature-length biopic about Steve Jobs, the iconic entrepreneur of our times, hit the theatres last week. While the movie comes out a year and a half later than the approved Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, it is not, in fact, an adaptation of the book. Director Joshua Michael Stern managed to beat the establishment by releasing his own emotional tribute to the creator of Apple computers, an ingenious movie that strays from your typical boring biopic, both in content and in the manner of presentation. The intense criticism that this movie met recently left me very disappointed, as it was clear that neither the critics nor the audience truly got it; most people seemed to get bogged down disputing the factual accuracy of scenes and individual lines, or the prominence of various characters, while ignoring the artistic merits of the movie itself. This movie is a compelling, thought-provoking drama, full of nuance. Akin to Steve Jobs, it challenges the biopic genre, going further on innovation and originality. Whether you’re a Steve Jobs worshiper or not, an Apple fan or a Linux nerd, this movie is a must see.
This ain’t no District 9
Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 cinematic debut, District 9, took the world by surprise. I, for one, was blow out of my socks by the crispness and realism of the special effects that this young director managed to conjure, and by the originality and the depth — nay, the poetry — of the story he had written. It remains one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time, and I can’t wait for the sequel, District 10. But with Elysium, Blomkamp has committed the same sin of his godfather, Peter Jackson, who followed the triumph of his filmmaking career, The Return of the King, with the painfully vacuous King Kong: letting ego and ambition get in the way of artistic integrity, and failing to see that a story — even one from his own pen — can be cheesy and unworthy of being made into a film.
Potentially Game of the Year
There’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach when I reach the end of a really good book. It’s hard for me to describe it to another person unless they too have felt it before — it’s like emptiness, a dull pain, a longing for the story to continue. It’s a shock to the system, a natural psychological response to having the environment and characters that you’ve immersed yourself in suddenly ripped away. It’s an absolutely horrible sensation and if, in the future, I forbid my children from going to school and decide that they should remain illiterate for all of their days, you won’t have to look further than this paragraph to know my motive.
You know the plot; you’ve seen every twist before
I have a feeling that Robert Luketic, the director of Paranoia, may be feeling a bit paranoid himself lately, after his movie was mauled mercilessly by the critics. You know you are not bound for the Oscars when your Rotten Tomatoes score is lower than that of The Adventures of Pluto Nash. I will grant Luketic this much: there is nothing grotesquely bad about Paranoia. Unfortunately, there is nothing good about it either. And this may be his sin: we were expecting something, a saving grace. When you have Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman in the cast, and build anticipation by — as I heard — multiple postponed release dates, great expectations are created.
From Pineapple Express to…this?
Prince Avalanche was shot in secret, at the request of director David Gordon Green who wanted to return to his roots in independent film after making his last three works with major film studios (Pineapple Express, Your Highness, Eastbound & Down). But, he went too far. Prince Avalanche felt like a graduate film student thesis, with unnecessarily long scenes and increasingly portentous music accompanying events that lead nowhere, or were just arbitrary.
Trite, but scary nonetheless
An old haunted house in a semi-deserted suburban area, squeaky noises in the night, clocks stopping always at the same hour, a naïve and helpless family deciphering tortuous supernatural clues, possessions and exorcisms — you’ve seen it all before. Even if your knowledge of horror movies is limited to the few ones that turned your childhood nights into never-ending states of sleeplessness and convinced you to stick with comedies, you will be able to foresee the outcome of every scene in The Conjuring. Don’t be fooled though, because this movie will have you screaming in your seat, or at least jolting out of the unrelenting anticipation in case you grew inured to the images of unsightly demonic figures.
I’m a business, man
Jay Z once boasted in a particularly memorable line on Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” Clever wordplay aside, he’s right. Besides being the rapper Jay Z (he recently dropped the hyphen), Shawn Carter is the definitive hip-hop mogul, brandishing a resume teeming with his various ventures and positions: head of record label Roc Nation, co-owner of sports bar chain the 40/40 club, co-creator of the Rocawear clothing line, and spokesperson of D’Usse, Bacardi’s new brandy product, just to name a few. This year, he even founded Roc Nation sports, because apparently that’s what you do when you’re the only rapper with a net worth of over $500 million. The man can sell anything — but even with all these other products, he hasn’t forgotten how to sell music. In a historic pre-album deal, Carter sold a million copies of his new modestly-named album, Magna Carta… Holy Grail, to Samsung for sale through an exclusive app. By doing so, Carter prompted the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to rewrite their rules regarding digital sales, and became the first artist ever to have an album go platinum before it even hits the shelves, making what sounds like an unbacked piece of rap braggadocio into a reality. With such pre-release hype, listeners were expecting a truly great album, one that could sit near the top of Jay Z’s massive discography. However, while Carter did deliver a highly enjoyable hip hop album, Magna Carta struggles to live up to the larger-than-life persona Carter takes on.