It’s always a gamble to see a band that hasn’t been popular in years. Will the concert be a desperate shot at reviving the nostalgia of old fans, or will it be able to engage new listeners too? I wondered this on my way to Echo & The Bunnymen’s show in Northampton last week.
Posts published in “Arts and Culture”
Despite the chill, a crowd of students gathered together last Thursday night to watch the annual “Celebration” ceremony on Wilson’s steps. This was the event’s 27th year and included performances by individual students, several Quad houses and a variety of acapella and student organizations.
“Suspiria” is bad. “Suspiria” is a mess. “Suspiria” is a movie set in 1977 Berlin that’s about both a psychotherapist mourning his wife and about an American Mennonite girl who gets admitted into a prestigious dance academy that turns out to run by a coven of witches. “Suspiria” tries to do many things and does none of them well. But this and its other technical problems are the least of its flaws. In fact its greatest flaw — no, its greatest sin — lies in what it tries to seem like it’s saying and what it instead is actually saying.
“You can do anything with my legacy, but never make me boring.” The legendary singer and frontman of Queen, Freddie Mercury, was quoted as saying this before his tragic death from AIDS-related causes in 1991. This writer believes that even the most aggressive attempt to make Freddie Mercury’s story boring would be impossible. “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a biographical movie about Queen — is entertaining, but beneath its flashy surface, it is as hollow and clichéd as Mercury was complex and revolutionary. The film’s fun yet disappointing result can be attributed to a number of factors: pre-production limbo, cast changes, director replacements and questionable narrative choices regarding the singer’s sexuality. All of this culminates in an ultimately forgettable movie. But this movie is about Freddie Mercury — how is that possible?
Meet Serena: she regularly gets kicked out of movie theatres, snaps at coworkers in her microbiology lab and corrects the grammar of her date mid-hookup. In her opinion, the fewer people she has to fake kindness towards, the better. But after taking a critique of a colleague too far, she must undergo sensitivity training if she wants to keep her job.
Students and their parents took refuge from last Saturday’s rain to enjoy performances by a variety of Smith’s ensemble groups in John M. Greene Hall. “Montage” is sponsored by the Smith music department, and this year’s theme centered around royalty, which came through both in the music and the names of the artists chosen to cover.
The beginning of “mid90s” is comprised of sudden images cut together. Skateboards, still on the ground, are scattered with a force. A hallway where an older brother pounces on the younger one, pelting him with his fists. And the younger brother — the thirteen year-old boy we will come to know as Stevie — looks in the mirror and pokes at his bruised chest, then punches it, groaning with the pain.
Upon opening the doors to the exhibit, you immediately lock eyes with a pale woman in a turquoise robe who looks out from her ornate frame with a small smile. She is one of the few in the gallery who will actually make eye contact with you; the rest of the women gaze demurely at things out of sight as if they are wishing for something their gilded world cannot give them.
“Concinnitas” was a term used by 15th-century scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti to describe beauty in architecture, which he believed existed when — and only when — parts of a building cohered to a harmonizing whole. It was also used to name The Concinnitas Portfolio, to which Professor Pau Atela responded in his Re(Creations) and MathStudio. Both the portfolio and Atela’s work will be displayed at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass until Dec. 9.
I have a complicated relationship with the word “slam.” Every time I hear the word qualifying some literary event — a poetry reading or a storytelling event — I feel my stomach lurch, as though I caught a whiff of some food that once gave me torrential runs. Not that I only have bad experiences with slams, not at all. But for every poem I’ve heard that revelled in the snap of a word as it rolled off the tongue, for every story I listened to that sparked against the speaker’s animated telling, there were five, ten, fifteen others that made me cringe back into my seat.