Television is the opiate of the masses. Surfing channels these days, we see the screen jump from images of skinny models bickering, to bedraggled people on a desert island, to co-eds living together as they have been for the past … Read More
I had never heard a Jonas Brothers song before the first week of this school year. I was throwing a pre-game for Lawnparties, offering Tequila Sunrises and mojitos in the a.m.—the youngest oldest thing Princeton students do. The eclectic and up-to-the-minute iTunes playlist I had made for the occasion had run out, and some roommate of a friend had taken over the computer to keep the mood going. “‘Burnin’ Up’!” someone requested. Probably the new Usher single, I thought, and then a nineteen- or twenty-year-old played me my first Jonas Brothers song. “Don’t they wear chastity rings?” I asked no one.
Most articles on music this summer did not trumpet ambitious musical endeavors but rather the continued floundering of tour and album sales. Like the movie industry, this season was set apart by sequels and unexpected sophomore successes.
It takes an impresario to found a Russian movement. But for a moment’s continued interest in the present, a queer and inexplicable slavophilia must appear to have its dance with history. And now, 15 years after the fall of the … Read More
It’s difficult for me to avoid skepticism when commercials are overly sentimental about their own brands. “It’s time to become better versions of ourselves,” narrates a deep, persuasive and compelling voice which overlays the empty airport powering to life.
Doug Aitken’s installation _Migration (Empire)_, which is on view in front of the University Art Museum until November 14, has two very different faces.
What a supremely difficult task it would be to make Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a theatrical catastrophe given the rich nature of the existentialism, the slap-stick comedy, the downright absurdism. That said, what a trying undertaking it is to … Read More
To say that art in our society has taken on religious connotations is not to say anything shocking or new. Nietzsche presaged this transposition of religious fervor from church to museum as early as 1878 when he wrote in Human, All Too Human that “art raises its head where religions decline.” Nietzsche wrote this, of course, without any knowledge of the film industry that was about to burst onto the Western cultural landscape.
