Arts

Arts

Preview: The 3rd Annual Berkshire International Film Festival

If you play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with Kelley Vickery, it's pretty certain she will win. As the founder and director of the 3rd annual Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF), she's watched almost every one of the actor's 60 films to

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Arts

The Maestro of Bard College

"At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel," Leon Botstein once said.  Leon Botstein has spent the past 33 proving that he's the exception to the rule. As the president of Bard College since 1975, he

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Arts

Books: The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Women of a certain age will recall the famous "click" moment, identified and immortalized in 1971 by Jane O'Reilly in the preview issue of Ms. magazine--that nano-second in which a woman becomes a feminist, invariably as a reaction to a stinging sexist insult.  But perhaps less

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Arts

Bunny and Me

It's rare that the author of a coffee table book on interior design is invited to give readings at public libraries, so it seems noteworthy that Bunny Williams had two readings scheduled at Litchfield County libraries this month.  (If you missed her appearance at the Scoville Memorial Library

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Arts

Revisiting Things Fall Apart: A Fiftieth-Year Retrospective

In 1958 Chinua Achebe, a young African broadcast journalist, published his first novel, Things Fall Apart, a tender portrait of a "strong man" in an Ibo village in Nigeria whose orderly world irreparably unravels when Christian missionaries arrive.  Since its publication, Achebe's novel has sold over

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Arts

Classical Concerts: No Tickets Necessary

We'll never know if it's liberal (arts) guilt that motivates them, but we are grateful that the elite boarding schools and private colleges that dot our region often open their doors to the community for gratis lectures, concerts and exhibits.  This Friday night, April 4 at

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Arts

40 Films in Four Days in Kent

You'd think that a town without a proper movie theater would have a tough time pulling off  a serious film festival, but the arts community of Kent, CT, does not let that inconvenient detail get in its way. "It requires a lot of imagination," says Frank

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Arts

One of a Kind: The Magic of Prints

For the collector, the appeal of prints is their accessibility.  They are, quite simply, more affordable than other unique works of art.   For the artist, printmaking offers an opportunity to experiment and, consequently, often acts as a catalyst for change in his other work. This Saturday the Spencertown Academy launches

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Arts

Opera: Something Old, Something New

Back in 1934, in nearby Hartford, CT, an organization called The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music financed the world premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts, an avant garde opera with music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein.  Performed with an all-black cast at the Hartford

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Arts

One Chimp's Life: A Gripping Tale

You don't have to be an animal lover like the East Chatham author Elizabeth Hess to find her new book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human absorbing.  You don't even have to care much about the merits of the scientific experiment that brought Nim

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Arts

"Mark Twain" Returns for One Night

Hal Holbrook was just 34 years old when he took Broadway by storm (and by surprise) in 1959. "An extraordinary show called 'Mark Twain Tonight!' slipped into the Forty-first Street Theatre last evening. There should have been posters up all over the town to herald its arrival,

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Arts

Photography: Eban, Among Others

If you are going to tell the story of your life, it helps to have had an interesting one.  Gerard Malanga has.  A poet whose work has appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, The Paris Review and The New Yorker, the multi-faceted Malanga is remembered by students of art history as

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