Opinion
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Boston Rocker Ric Ocasek at 75
With Ben Orr Founded The Cars
By: - Sep 16th, 2019The counterculture in Boston geared up in the summer of 1968. The music scene, WBCN, and alternative media were well established when The Cars emerged with a self titled album in 1978. They went on to record a string of hits breaking up a decade later. After kicking around with a variety of folk/ rock configurations Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr established a mega group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. Orr died in 2000 and Ocasek died yesterday at 75. They were an integral part of a golden age of Boston rock.
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The Irish Troubles
An Overview in the Arts
By: - Jul 19th, 2019A particular period of Irish history has been the focus of several recent remarkable works of art: two books, one an experimental novel, and the other journalistic nonfiction, plus a much-praised Broadway drama. All of them won multiple awards. I’ll also add a 2008 film to this list of artistic works. They all commemorate the years of the Troubles, that period of history of Northern Ireland in which more than 3500 people died or were disappeared.
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Mugar's Theory of Zombie Abstraction
An Update and Controversy
By: - Jun 24th, 2019When I first wrote about Zombie abstraction in December 2013 several months before the concept achieved notoriety in Walter Robinson's now famous essay on Zombie Formalism, I got a blowback in a comment on my Zombie blog from artist Craig Stockwell.
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Berkshire Mountains Faerie Festival June 15
Bowe Field, 371 Old Columbia Rd., Adams, MA
By: - Jun 14th, 2019In the shadow of mystical Mt Greylock there will be a gathering of elves and wizzards for the fourth annual Berkshire Mountains Faerie Festival. The event, which is fun for kids of all ages, will occur on Saturday, June 15, 2019, 10 am – 10 pm at Bowe Field, 371 Old Columbia Rd., Adams, MA.
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MFA Addresses Recent Incident of Racism
An Open Letter from Director Matthew Teitelbaum
By: - Jun 03rd, 2019A group of 26 middle-school students with chaperones from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy visited the MFA on May 16, 2019. They were on a self-guided visit. Before leaving the Museum, the group filed a complaint with Member and Visitor Services that they were met with racism and verbal abuse from visitors and staff during the visit. In an open letter to the MFA Community its director Matthew Teitelbaum details the museum's response and plan of action.
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Experiments at the NY Opera Festival
A.M. Homes Writes Her First LIbretto
By: - Jun 03rd, 2019Experiments in Opera was co-founded in Brooklyn in 2010 by composers Aaron Siegel, Matthew Welch and Jason Cady. They contributed Chunky in Heat to the New York Opera Festival. It was a wild, wacky and moving work.
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Albright-Knox Art Gallery Plans AK360
Buffalo’s Great Museum Gets Even Better
By: - May 15th, 2019Founded in 1862 as Buffalo Fine Arts Academy today Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery is regarded as one of America's foremost small, regional museums. Its first building opened in 1906. In 1962 a wing was added and a new 30,000 square foot structure will begin construction at the end of this year. It will double space for the permanent collection and special exhibitions.
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Summer at MASS MoCA
Complete Schedule of Exhibitions, Festivals, and Events
By: - Apr 28th, 2019On May 25, come for MASS MoCA’s 20th birthday blowout that spreads across the museum campus to encompass new exhibitions, art-infused versions of your favorite games, live music by performers from both near and far, great food, and a world of fun. The day’s events kick off with An Afternoon of Conversation & Song with Annie Lennox at 4pm, a rare solo-acoustic performance to benefit the Annie Lennox Foundation (as well as MASS MoCA’s Fund for New Music).
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You Me and Art: Artists in the 21st Century
A Book of Interviews by Marta Gynp
By: - Apr 27th, 2019A book of interviews by Dutch art historian Marta Gynp "You Me and Art: Artists in the 21st Century" is lively, eclectic and informative. Of the twenty individuals she interacts with some are well known and others less so. In several instances what artists had to say about their work changed how I respond to it. In an engaging and familiar manner she was able to get behind the facade to probe intimate thoughts and insecurities. That approach reveals a humanistic view of how work evolves from studios to galleries and museums.
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An Important New Sondheim Overture
Lisa Yuen Narrates Tale of International Intrigue at Lyric Theater
By: - Apr 26th, 2019Lisa Yuen returns to Boston's Lyric Stage performing multiple, male roles in Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures. If you are familiar with the musical expect to see a fresh and accessible revival by director Spiro Veloudos. The production runs from May 10 through June 18.
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ONE Festival at Opera Omaha
Philip Glass, Ellen Reid and Charles Gounod Featured
By: - Apr 21st, 2019The ONE Festival of Opera Omaha celebrated its 2nd anniversary this year. It has already become a must visit for opera lovers throughout the world. The productions here are first rate. Bringing in James Darrah, who is a director of choice for many of the best young composers, has excited opera fans. This year did not disappoint.
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MFA Director Matthew Teitelbaum
Embracing Modern and Contemporary Art
By: - Apr 20th, 2019Since the 1960s and Perry T. Rathbone I have interviewed every director of the Museum of Fine Arts. Sitting recently with Matthew Teitelbaum was refreshingly different. We were renewing a relationship that started in 1989 when he was a curator for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1993 he returned home to become senior curator at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He became director there before coming to the MFA in 2015 as its eleventh director. While in the thick of staff changes and policy strategies he invites us to evaluate progress over the next five years.
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Ellen Reid Wins Pulitzer for Prism
Composer's Generosity of Spirit and Notes
By: - Apr 16th, 2019Ellen Reid has been a hot item this year. Four venues in Los Angeles commissioned work from her. Now Prism, a Beth Morrison production, has won the Pulitzer prize for music. We wandered her soundscape in Omaha created for her by Opera Omaha at the Josyln Art Museum. Distinguishing composing notes from the listener's experience, Reid brings new sounds to an audience.
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Verb Is the Word
Rediscovering Boston’s Late 1960s Counter Culture
By: - Apr 13th, 2019In 2017 San Fransicso celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. By 1968 the torch of the counterculture, with a radical twist, was passed to Boston. Cops and feds cracked heads when hippies and radicals protested in Boston and Cambridge. Just as in 1776, there were shots heard round the world. There has been no such celebration in Boston. In feisty increments there is ever increased interest and attention to a forgotten era. You can see it at The Verb Hotel, in the new film WBCN; The American Revolution, and books like Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.
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Brian Coleman’s Buy Me Boston
A Picture Book of Local Ads and Flyers
By: - Feb 20th, 2019Brian Coleman has published several successful books on hip-hop. The latest of which is a picture book “Buy Me Boston: Local Ads and Flyers, 1960s – 1980s, Volume 1.” It is compiled from thousands of scans of pages of vintage publications.
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Stones Busted Enroute to Boston Garden
What Really Happened That Night
By: - Feb 07th, 2019During a 1972 tour the Stones connecting from Toronto got diverted to Warwick, Rhode Island. Waiting for a limo to Boston Garden Keith clocked a photographer who got too close. Cops busted him as well as Mick who chimed in. After hours of delay Mayor Kevin White told 14,000 fans that the Stones were busted but "I got them out." That's not really true. The Stones went on stage at 1 AM for one of the great concerts in Boston rock history. Decades later attorney Martin Kaplan relates what really happened that night.
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Carnegie Hall Presents Song Studio
Renee Fleming Gives Us The Song
By: - Jan 27th, 2019Renee Fleming has gone for the jugular in addressing the problem of song’s survival. How do singers communicate with an audience so people want to come and hear them? Her SongStudio took place in the Resnick Education Wing of Carnegie Hall.
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Janis Joplin at Harvard Stadium
In 1970 Bad Luck Came in Threes
By: - Jan 27th, 2019In 1970 I was hired to cover jazz and rock for the daily Boston Herald Traveler. To my dismay soon I was writing obituaries. It started with Al Wilson (July 4, 1943 – September 3, 1970) of the blues band Canned Heat. Then Jimi Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970). Not long after Janis Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970). That was the class of 1970 with an average age of 27-28. A year later we lost Jim Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971).
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American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford
Closed Since 1989 Now Up in Smoke
By: - Jan 27th, 2019In 1955 with funding from select patrons The American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut was launched. It was the third major Shakespeare festival conflated with the name Stratford, the home of the Bard. Initially there was less competition in the region for its season of summer and student oriented productions. Relying on a few with deep pockets the company failed to seek a broad base of support for its 1600 seat venue and lavish productions. When founding donors died in the 1970s decline set in with the company ceasing operations in 1989. The property was abandoned and decrepit when recently it went up in smoke.
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Sophisticaled Giant Dexter Gordon
Insightful Bio of Tenor Titan by Maxine Gordon
By: - Jan 15th, 2019Dexter Gordon (February 27, 1923 – April 25, 1990) with Billy Ecskstine bandmates, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, was an innovator of bop during the 1940s. There is evidence of his early playing on Dial and Savoy, three minute, 78 rpm recordings. Through addiction and incarceration his career languished in the 1950s. From 1962 to 1976 he lived primarily in Copenhagen. With his wife and manager Maxine, the author of a detailed biography, he staged a comback in 1976. That was capped by an Oscar nominated performance in the Bertrand Tavernier film Round Midnight (Warner Bros, 1986).
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Maui-Wowie with Charles Laquidara
Former WBCN DJ Retired to Paradise
By: - Jan 12th, 2019From 1968 to 2000, first on WBCN and then for the last five years with WZLX, Charles Laquidara was one of the most beloved, outspoken, and controversial DJ’s during a golden era of counter culture in Boston. At his prime he was one of America's most influential, top rated DJ's. We dicussed his unique career during two lengthy calls to his home in Maui.
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Talking About Brecht in Chicago
Meeting of Modern Language Association
By: - Jan 06th, 2019I discovered Brecht many decades ago, when I was just becoming a theater lover. I’m not sure I had ever heard of Bertolt Brecht when I saw what has become one of my favorite plays—The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui—at the renowned Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It was 1968 (I had to look that up), one of the first years of the Guthrie’s existence.
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Golden Parachute for Van Shields
Soft Landing for Berkshire Museum Director
By: - Dec 09th, 2018Recent IRS filing reveals that when former Berkshire Museum director, Van Shields, abruptly departed he was given $92,000 in two payments. The second is due in January. There are also figures for the costly legal battles that resulted in selling 22 works of art to raise $53.25 million. From July 1 to Dec. 31, 2017, the museum incurred $1.6 million in legal costs. In April it paid off the full $1,852,426 outstanding balance on a $2 million line of credit.
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Boston Boy by Nat Hentoff
A Memoir by a Radical Journalist and Jazz Critic
By: - Dec 04th, 2018Nathan Irving “Nat’ Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) passed at 91 some time ago. Why then, in the waning moments of 2018, write a review of a book written some 32 years ago? Reading a memoir by a legendary radical journalist and jazz critic resonated with my own memories of growing up as a Boston Boy.
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A Broadway Holiday
Thumbnails of Six Shows
By: - Nov 22nd, 2018Holiday season is prime time for Broadway. Here is a tip sheet of six shows we saw during a recent week on the Great White Way.
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