The East Village Scene
by Mark Schiebe
Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines.
Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.
Grading Papers Is Hell (But It Doesn’t Have To Be)
by Talia Argondezzi
There’s a certain beautiful, irksome symmetry about writing assignments. Whatever carelessness, vagueness, or still-inchoate pedagogical goals creep into a teacher’s assignment tend to return to her in the form of careless, vague, and poorly executed student essays. Instructors are skilled at finding scapegoats for our students’ awful writing — the failing public school system, our university’s shoddy or spotty […]
Autonomy!
by 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.
Education Uber Alles
by The Editor
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” —Abraham Lincoln The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and unprecedented 32 percent increase in student “fees” (the UC system’s way of getting […]
Murder at the Rijksmuseum
by 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 […]
McCraney’s Mythologies
by Frank Episale
The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney, through Dec. 13th at the Public Theater. At 29 years old, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney has been crowned “a major new voice” by enough critics, directors, dramaturgs, and producers that there is already something of a backlash in the works. The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli recently dismissed McCraney’s success […]
A Dutch Treasure Comes To The Met
by 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.
Who Cares About Wal-Mart?
by Carl Lindskoog
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books, 2009 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press, 2009 Many New Yorkers might wonder what use it is to understand a company like Wal-Mart. After all, with no Wal-Marts in the city […]
Singing the Body Politic
by 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 […]
Lessons in Terror at John Jay
by 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 […]
