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Vin Jensen

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  • 36 Righteous Word

    A Serial Killer's Hit List

    By: Ien Nivens - Mar 29th, 2014

    In a haters-gonna-hate world shared by the likes of Fred Phelps and a host of jihadist suicide bombers, we are obliged to grant credence to the central motif of a thriller pitting radical fundamentalist beliefs—one Jewish, the other Christian—against one another.

  • Awakening by Martin Case and Joseph Brogan Music

    A Shamanic Journey Across the Sonic Landscape

    By: Ien Nivens - Nov 15th, 2013

    No coincidence that the sexier, more adulterated human voice of the saxophone takes the lead in the urban groove and neon sizzle of “Dance” and again in “Re-entry.” It is our connection to the dark, after all, that haunts us and, strange to say, fortifies us for a return to the light of common day.

  • A Brief History: A Great Collection of Dance Songs Music

    Unabashed Shamanism by Composer Martin Case

    By: Ien Nivens - Feb 01st, 2013

    Martin Case employs the rhetoric of shamanism unabashedly. He often plays the role of trickster in his bait-and-switch style of composition, setting up a sense of expectation that he fulfills, time and again, with an apparent non-sequitur—answering a question, as it were, with another question. He has composed for companies and choreographers as varied as Boston Ballet, Prometheus Dance, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre,the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Samantha Cameron, Liz Bermann and Min Tzu Li.

  • Sam Amidon at Alt Cabaret Music

    Indy Rock at Mass MoCA

    By: Ien Nivens - Nov 20th, 2011

    Mass MoCA's B-10 is an intimate stage in a tall room, and Amidon flooded it with good-natured whimsy and the haunting voice of a gen-something folk balladeer in full command of his instruments, his idioms and the philosophical logic of the non-sequitur.

  • The Torah Codes Word

    Dan Brown Meets the Shekinah

    By: Ien Nivens - May 23rd, 2011

    Is the Bible—that is to say, are the first five books of it—prophetically encoded? The implications that arise from such a question ought to (although they won’t; we all know they won’t) provoke far more widespread spiritual introspection and serious religious debate than the argument over whether Jesus of Nazareth lived to a ripe old age in the South of France, making babies with Mary Magdalene. Ezra Barany's homage to Dan Brown opens us to speculations on subjects as diverse, and as intimately related, as the availability of free energy from the fabric of space-time and the nature of the divine feminine.

  • Small Press Publisher Takes Advantage of Literary Pirates Word

    Son of Ereubus Goes Viral

    By: Rhemalda - Jan 28th, 2011

    Rhemalda Publishing had to make a choice--use valuable resources to take up a fight against pirates or find a way to use it to its advantage. Rhemalda Publishing and Author J.S. Chancellor teamed up by posting a request on Chancellor’s Facebook fan page for readers who had downloaded the book illegally to consider posting a review of the book online.

  • Son of Ereubus Word

    Book One of the Guardians of Legend Trilogy

    By: Ien Nivens - Sep 30th, 2010

    Debut novelist J. S. Chancellor manages the patterning of light-within-dark, the flickering back and forth between warring tendencies--like a street magician dancing a black-and-silver coin across the backs of her fingers.

  • Cinders Word

    Happily Ever After Isn't As Long As You Think

    By: J. S. Chancellor - Sep 02nd, 2010

    Argyle’s Cinderella, while playful in some areas, humorous in others, is haunting in its elegance and simplicity. The prose itself is pitch perfect for the narrative, to the point where as a reader you forget that you’re reading. It’s presented like the glass slipper that it is: beautiful, translucent, and full of unexpected magic.

  • Interview with Dan Bosley Opinion

    Candidate for Sheriff of Berkshire County

    By: Vin Jensen - Aug 26th, 2010

    "My message has to be more complicated... The job of the Sherrif is not a law enforcement job. The Sheriff is responsible for the care, custody and condition of inmates. You can take a broad or a narrow interpretation of that, but either one is public safety, not law enforcement. The Sheriff does not go out busting perps, he doesn’t go on stakeouts. The perception is that he’s Wyatt Earp or James Arness in the Wild West. That’s what people think, but that’s not what the job is."

  • The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff Word

    An Eerie, Translucent Brand of Magic

    By: Ien Nivens - Jul 29th, 2010

    Yovanoff substitutes one world for another, surely, but in doing so she restores an original and ancient mystery to our dealings with life and death and the daily transactions we make with both, until the layered world she shows us becomes, once again--as it always was--the real one, living side by side or just a sidelong glance across the surface of the one we've been collectively pretending--all of us, all along--to be whole and plausible and independent of our dark imaginings.

  • Bethel Woods, Celtic Woman and a Dancing Cat Music

    A Woodstock Pilgrimage

    By: Ien Nivens - Jul 26th, 2010

    “Collecting Woodstock” is an immersive work-in-progress. Less a collection of artifacts than of information, the multimedia exhibit documents a decade of civil discontent with the sights and sounds of celebration and anihilation, ascension and assassination, idealism and disillusionment. Nothing much has been sanitized, except inasmuch as time has distanced us from the immediate conditions of psychedelic squalor that characterized a generation and that necessarily prevailed when “we were half a million strong” and gathered in a field some 15 acres square.

  • Richie Havens at Mass MoCA Music

    A Winter Lion on a Summer's Eve

    By: Ien Nivens - Jul 03rd, 2010

    An often perplexed, if forgiving, crowd seemed relieved when he and his accompanist, Walter Parks (whom Havens never mentioned, whose presence he never acknowledged) negotiated their way back to coherence in the language of music. Richie Havens’ artistry has mellowed but not lost much of its power and none, really, of its sweetness. His rhythms drive like a locomotive through the mists and downpours of yesteryear, spanning a generation and, as it were, a continent, undergirded all the while with a steady and persistent optimism that charms even as it meanders, disengaged, from song to song.

  • Roomful of Teeth Music

    Mass MoCA's Club B-10

    By: Ien Nivens - Jun 22nd, 2010

    Roomful of Teeth is an ambitious work-in-progress with the stated intent of bringing the full range of human vocal potential to bear upon the aesthetic experience. Friday’s performance at Mass MoCA showcased works by Caleb Burhans, Caroline Shaw, Eric Dudley, William Brittelle, Judd Greenstein, Rinde Eckert and Avery Griffin. The play of a cappella sound waves against bone, tooth, beam and brick in a high-ceilinged, sold-out room pulsed with energies that seemed unearthly but were firmly rooted in the human.

  • The Dust of 100 Dogs Word

    A. S. King's 17th Century Orphan Turned Pirate

    By: Ien Nivens - Jun 18th, 2010

    A. S. King scatters the lessons of ownership, abandonment, the pack instinct and fending for oneself across the lifetimes of three centuries in her coming-of-age novel of piracy, disenfranchisement and the feminine. King stitches some rather provocative questions about ownership, loyalty and femininity all through the deceptively simple patterns of her novel.