Arts
HRDC Rocks With the Bard
"Twelfth Night" is transported to a music festival in the HRDC's raucous new production.
How Strange, Hope
I wish there were some crystallizing moment I experienced where a particular melody struck something deep within me, but, to be honest, that’s not the kind of relationship I shared with Explosions in the Sky. Their music speaks to me of moods, of types of afternoons, of the countless nights I spent with nothing but my thoughts and the sparkling melodies of their album “How Strange, Innocence.” During a time when I was struggling to understand who I was and what I was becoming, I heard in that album melancholy and sadness, but also optimism and a tenacious faith in the goodness of the world.
In Praise of Billy Shakespeare
Attempts to establish common ground and teach basic writing skills by forcing students to read about hopelessly contrived topics in courses like “Cross-Cultural Contact Zones” are bound to fail. It would make far more sense to make all students read a canonical author or text and use that as a basis for instruction in discursive writing. Aside from leveling the playing field by providing common material for all students, this might actually lend the course a feeling of purpose.
Making Illegal Art Work
JR, the French street artist who was the topic of my last column, represents one extreme of the street art spectrum. He works with communities, orchestrates planned, large-scale, universally celebrated works, and wins huge cash prizes. On the other side of the spectrum, there are street artists, like Kidult, who work on the fringes of communities or against communities, provoke general revulsion, and get arrested.
Beautiful ‘Señora’ Reaches the Clouds
TEATRO!'s "Nuestra Señora de las Nubes" provides a heartrending yet comic look at life in Latin America. Through its stellar physical acting, the cast manages to communicate the plays universal appeal despite the fact that it is almost entirely in Spanish.
Engineering Students Exhibit Senior Design Projects
Students in Engineering Sciences 100: “Engineering Design Projects” exhibited their senior design concepts in a series of presentations that took place from Tuesday through Friday of last week.
Going on the Record
Private collections fill museums but collecting arts and letters poses unique problems.
Edward Lear Collection at Houghton
Harvard’s Houghton Library, known for housing the institution’s rare books collection, displays Edward Lear’s drawings.
Russian Writer's Block Playlist
From the Arts Board, tips to help get you through that paper. Russia had its first influx of classical music in the Romantic period of the 1800s. Given the tourtured-artist motif that charactarized many Romantic writers and composers, including Tchaikovsky, it seems fitting to turn to the Russian repertoire as a response to crippling writer’s block. The somber and often harrowing moments of the music only add to the sublime, manic joy interspersed throughout the repertoire. The Arts Board hopes you enjoy indulging in Russian classical music while dealing with the the destabilizing mood of writer's block.
This One Time at Camp
The kid blinked, puzzled, swore under his breath, and logged back into Unreal. David logged him back out, and the cycle repeated a couple more times until the kid, muttering something about the “stupid broken computer,” stormed away. David was grinning. “Hey, that computer’s free now.” I didn’t even care about Unreal anymore; what I wanted to know was what the heck had just happened. “How’d you do that?” I sputtered.
Play with Your Food
Who is to say that a Caesar salad requires more lettuce than bread? We could resign ourselves to reproduce the work of strangers, but this challenge to deconstruct can provide inspiration even when we believe a dish to be complete. Descended from Mexican-Italian heritage, I was taught from a young age the proper way to assemble pasta and the appropriate fillings for a taco. But why shouldn’t we do otherwise?
