Arts

Arts

Adapting to Ourselves: Williamstown Film Festival Celebrates 15 Years

The Great Chicken Wing HuntBy Nichole DupontHe remembers the first year like it was yesterday. A few indie films sprinkled in with funny shorts and a documentary or two, the distinct feeling that this could be a “thing." Now, Steve Lawson — veteran director of the Williamstown Film Festival — cannot

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Arts

Zip: Two Boots Brings Bawdiness to Bard With Filthy Gorgeous Burlesque

By Robert Warren You can pull all the stops out ‘till they call the cops out, Grind your behind till you're banned. But you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get a hand! -- Miss Mazeppa, from the Sondheim/Styne musical Gypsy “It’s high time we

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Arts

Books: "Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley" A Vicarious Pleasure

By Dan Shaw The imaginary line that divides Connecticut's Litchfield County from New York's Columbia, Dutchess and Putnam Counties became very real to Jane Garmey as she researched and wrote her beautiful new coffee table book, Private Gardens of the Hudson Valley. "When I began

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Arts

The Rising Son of Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints at Vassar

By Robert Burke Warren Throughout time and across the globe, cultures rise, fall, and evolve with one constant: storytelling. While some stories die with their tellers, others are durable and mutable enough to claim immortality. Westerners often cite Shakespeare and epic poet Homer as masters, yet our culture overlooks the

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Arts

Review: "Clybourne Park" at Barrington Stage

There's a new word -- "authentrification" -- that developers in New York City are using to justify renovating buildings that once served low-income communities and turning them into "authentic" hangouts for free-spending hipsters. Is this awesome or awful? The vicissitudes of gentrification are at

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Arts

Yes We Cannes: The FilmColumbia Festival In Chatham

By Scott Baldinger Chatham’s charming Main Street seems to be in a quiescent stage these days, with a noticeable reduction of retail and pedestrian activity on its handful of blocks. (Thankfully, The Blue Plate, Yianni's, the Thompson Giroux  Gallery, American Pie, The Chatham Bookstore, The Main Street

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Arts

Fellowship of the Five-String: Béla Fleck NY Banjo Summit at the Mahaiwe

By Robert Burke Warren The ongoing saga of the banjo is uniquely American: enslaved Africans bring a deceptively humble instrument from their homeland, whites appropriate and Victorianize it, the burgeoning multi-ethnic folk culture seizes it, mid-20th-century protestors wield it, and, finally, an urban kid – Béla Fleck –hears it on the

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Arts

A Palace of Memory: Anselm Kiefer Invades MASS MoCA

Kiefer's "Velimir Chlebnikov," series at MASS MoCA; all photos courtesy of the Hall Art FoundationBy Nichole Dupont There is nothing lighthearted about an Anselm Kiefer exhibit. The literal weight of his medium — lead, concrete, dirt — can be felt and seen in the near-monumental scale of his

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Arts

A New Spotlight For the Independents: The Beacon Independent Film Festival

By Robert Burke Warren An old musician temporarily outwits the Grim Reaper and gets an extra decade of life, during which he nurtures his community; a mom n’ pop cryonics operation promises immortality and thrives, despite the scoffing of scientists; a middle-aged mother struggles to save her prescription pill-addicted daughter,

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Arts

"Love Where You Live" - Hammertown's Mantra Is Now A Book, Too

By Dan Shaw If grown-up life is really high school all over again and again, then the Rural Intelligence region finally has a yearbook thanks to Joan Osofsky of Hammertown: Love Where You Live: At Home in the Country, a coffee-table design tome published by Rizzoli that features 18 country

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Arts

Happening on the Hudson: Lit Lions and Pop Provocateurs at Basilica Soundscape

By Robert Burke Warren “Anything can happen here," says Melissa Auf der Maur, former Smashing Pumpkins/Hole bassist, and rising Upstate arts maven.  “This place is a shape shifter, a beast." She’s speaking of Basilica Hudson, the multi-purpose venue she and her filmmaker husband, Tony Stone, opened

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Arts

Frenemies, A Love/Hate Story: "Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah" at Barrington Stage

Photos by Kevin SpragueBy Jeremy D. Goodwin With friends like this, who needs enemies? The simplest reference to famed literary frenemies F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway conjures a sense of Jazz Age glamour, a romantic notion of novelists as pop stars, living off the largesse of their rich friends

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