Sense and memoryBecause it hails from Lebanon and speaks a tongue other than English, Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut obviously will be classified as a foreign film. But I would offer the following as a more useful point of reference: From Being John Malkovich to The Blair Witch Project and beyond, the past year has been […]
Culture
Posted inMusic
Well-kept secrets
It was with good reason that bass Thomas Woodman, as the villainous governor Pizarro in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, jumped back a few feet when Dinah Bryant, as Fidelio/Leonore, cried out Tôd’t erst sein Weib! (First kill his wife). Bryant packs quite a wallop with an enormous voice that belies her diminutive frame. In fact, strong, […]
Posted inArt
Spirit and light
We had all kinds of tiring hoopla surrounding the end of the year–the century, the “millennium”–but hang on, folks, it’s not over yet. Now we get a round of “new” and “fresh.” I’m not saying this is such a bad thing, just that I’ll be glad when we get to some less portentous days on […]
Posted inArt
Leaving Itta Bena
There’s getting to be a serious home shortage in this country. I’m not talking about houses, I’m talking about where you’re from. The megamall culture is gobbling up towns and countryside, spitting out chain stores, making every place like every place else. Southern culture has always been based on the idea of home, the notion […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Cultural leftovers
As you would hope of a movie so drolly titled, Chris Smith’s American Movie is a hoot and a half. And that figurative half is something that we don’t often encounter in movies that probe the lives of real-life Americans for their comic potential: a portion of true insight, tempered with both sympathy and modest […]
Posted inArt
Trying to tell you something
In his introduction to The Yellow Shoe Poets, an anthology of poets published by Louisiana State University Press since 1964, George Garrett claims that the second half of the century has seen “a virtual uprising, a revolution in poetry, the likes of which has not been seen since the final decade of the rule and […]
Posted inMusic
Anarchy in the Piedmont
If you were to asked where the coolest, funkiest place to live in the Triangle was, Wake Forest, the quaint, tree-lined home of the conservative Southeastern Theological Seminary, probably wouldn’t be the first town to come to mind. But if you took a walk down one of those tree-lined streets, on a cold, rainy Sunday, […]