Category: Arts

New Jersey As a Non-Site

As a fourth-generation Jersey girl, I was immediately intrigued by “New Jersey as a Non-Site,” the featured exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum. Signs around campus described it as “art of the avant-garde(n) state.”

by on

Arts on the Edge

I can only feel “settled” into a new semester once I have designed my walking routes in between classes and extracurricular activities. Knowing which paths I will take, which arches I will cross under, and which familiar faces I will pass all remedy the inevitable, stressful shuffle of a new time of the year. I like being able to gauge how much time I must leave myself to get to a class or a meeting on time. But there are two places that I have yet to smoothly integrate into my walking routes: 185 Nassau St. and New South. This is very unsettling.

by on

Collection As Art

Included among the objects displayed in “Myself, I Think We Should Keep Collecting Titles,” the Lewis Center for the Arts’ sharp new exhibition of work by Dean of the Faculty and professor of computer science David Dobkin, are: snow globes, popsicle sticks, water bottle caps, Snapple lids, compact discs, keyboards, mother boards, paper tubes, credit cards, safety rings, fasteners, postcards, and pennies.

by on

Beyond the Pines

Blue Valentine writer and director Derek Cianfrance’s latest film The Place Beyond the Pines is, if anything, a study in what Robert Penn Warren, legendary 1940s author of All the King’s Men, calls “the awful responsibility of Time.” We begin with Ryan Gosling’s character Luke Glanton, a reckless circus-performing motorcyclist. Seemingly out of nowhere, Luke has great responsibility thrust upon him when an old flame from an upstate New York carnival stop steps back into his life with his infant son.

by on

David and David

David Foster Wallace is not here. In the absence of a physical body there is an idea, that of two Davids. It’s brought to life by biographer D.T. Max and author Jeffrey Eugenides, sitting in front of a rapt audience in the James Stewart Theater. The concept of two Davids—the sincere, troubled one and the manipulative, self-aggrandizing one—is one that the real men onstage constantly return to.

by on

Allegory of the Garden

I had already seen the movie in theaters three times. Enjoyment is one word, obsession is another. The first three times, this film had sent me into hysterics, including, but not limited to impassioned weeping, strings of incoherent syllables, and frenzied gesticulation at the screen. In each of my three previous viewings, the usual suspects (“I Dreamed a Dream,” Fantine’s passing, “When Tomorrow Comes”) were to blame, but during this latest screening at the Garden Theater, the floodgates held fast against their onslaught

by on

Gros-Câlin

If you ask me who my favorite writer is, I’ll probably say Albert Camus, because I love his writing and his ideas and also because his name is recognizable and thus me liking him helps construct a certain image of me. But I am less moved by Camus and the Nobel-prize-crowned glory of his rhetoric than by one more obscure author, whose ideas boil down to little more than a grammar of unhappiness: my favorite novelist, Romain Gary.

by on

Eight Feet

“Has a dude ever peed in your vag?” This is the provocative question posed at the beginning of Eight Feet. In this engaging drama-comedy written by Rafi Abrahams ’13 and directed by Rachel Alter ’14, four college students trapped in a basement bedroom during a snowstorm find themselves reconciling this urine-related trauma.

by on

Game of Shows

Starting this week and every Sunday at 9 P.M. the fantastical Game of Thrones will be doing battle with the hip new season of Mad Men. So to which one of the two should you loyally devote your Sunday evenings, and which will you leave by the DVR to pick up on a lazy summer day?

by on

The Good Old Days

A couple weeks ago, legendary shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine released their first album in twenty-two years. The press surrounding the release of m b v was as extensive as any I’ve seen for a musical release in quite a long time. Why? What’s the big deal about this band coming back after so long?

by on

Dark Zeros, Dark Heros

The first time I saw Zero Dark Thirty left me shaken to my core, affected to an extent I rarely experience at the cinema. I was deeply moved by what I saw as a powerful meditation on obsession and revenge … Read More

by on

An Orientalist Fantasy

But the more I thought about this movie, the more I realized it simply gives an illusion of depth. A movie filmed with somewhat unconventional techniques, or featuring naturalistic dialogue and little plot, is automatically assumed to be “artsy” and thus philosophical, by association with the style of the French New Wave.

by on