Murder at the Rijksmuseum

James Hoff

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Night­watch­ing (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway Peter Green­away has always been a visually-oriented direc­tor. Orig­i­nally trained as a painter, Green­away metic­u­lously struc­tures the images in his films, reveal­ing a care and atten­tion to the mean­ing of visual com­po­si­tion that is almost unheard of in pop­u­lar cin­ema. Indeed the com­po­si­tions of many of his frames look [...]

A Dutch Treasure Comes To The Met

Michael Busch

The mini-marquee exhibit, which runs through the end of November, offers a blueprint of what to expect from the Met as it moves forward with a new model of recession-special installations—small shows anchored in a prominent work or two, and bolstered by a supporting cast drawn from the museum’s expansive permanent collection. The logic of the move is clear: with a contracting endowment and significantly reduced operating budget, the Met’s recently-appointed director Thomas Campbell decided that looking inward and relying on the occasional munificence of partner institutions was the museum’s most promising tactic to cut costs without sacrificing quality. But concerns challenging the utility of this approach persist, making Vermeer’s Masterpiece the most important trial of Campbell’s young career. Unfortunately, the budget blockbuster falls flat. To be sure, the exhibit betrays hints of limited resources. Including period reproductions of ceramic bowls and tile work, for example, is charming but suggests a quiet desperation to fill space without clear purpose in the absence of relevant content, while the comic book-length catalogue (stapled at the spine) indicates that the Met has abandoned its tradition of producing gorgeously hefty companion pieces to its major exhibits. But this is hardly the problem.

Singing the Body Politic

Alison Powell

Peter Swirski, Ed. I Sing the Body Politic: His­tory as Prophecy in Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture. McGill Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009 One Decem­ber day in 1817, John Keats wrote to his brother the fol­low­ing: “I had not a dis­pute but a dis­qui­si­tion… on var­i­ous sub­jects; sev­eral things dove­tailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what qual­ity went to [...]

Advocate Staff

It is true that Amer­i­can democ­racy has come a very long way in the last two hun­dred and thirty-two years. Before the secret bal­lot, it was not uncom­mon to find one­self threat­ened with bod­ily harm at the polls, and of course, voter fraud, bal­lot rig­ging, and out­right destruc­tion of votes, have all been fre­quent occur­rences through­out [...]

Autonomy!

Ashley Dawson

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi Before the book, a place and time: Berlin, summer, 1990. Or actually, the road to Berlin. I’d spent the last two days on the move, hitchhiking without sleep to get from Amsterdam to Berlin. I was delirious, having spent hours talking to a Dutch businessman who spewed a stream of racist bile about Muslims taking over his country and an even longer time with an Italian truck driver who insisted that he was carrying a large consignment of weapons for the Sicilian mafia.

Lessons in Terror at John Jay

Abe Walker

Marc Sage­man and Charles B. Strozier at an Octo­ber Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism Seminar In the normally-restrained world of aca­d­e­mic dis­course, the 2007 annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion stands out as a break with the dom­i­nant cul­ture of self-abrogation and humil­ity. Dur­ing the course of this meet­ing, a fierce and impas­sioned debate broke out over a pro­posed revi­sion [...]

Rapid HIV Testing Returns to GC December 3^rd

Collette Sosnowy

The Grad­u­ate Cen­ter is an HIV-saavy com­mu­nity, which is evi­denced by the sig­nif­i­cant turnout to the recent con­fi­den­tial Rapid-HIV test­ing event spon­sored by the Well­ness Center-Student Health Ser­vices on Novem­ber 11. In fact, there proved to be such a need for the ser­vice, the Out­reach Team from Ryan-NENA Com­mu­nity Health Cen­ter will be return­ing on Thurs­day, [...]