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Movies: Back to the Future, I & II

When I was a kid, I videotaped Back to the Future II off HBO and watched it again and again and again. I had only seen the original movie once, and even then probably missed the opening sequence,...

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Dance: The Music of David Lang Interpreted at the Guggenheim's Works and Process

I saw this show six weeks ago, but haven't yet forgotten my surprise that two pieces of music by the same composer—the so-called laws of nature and forced march by David Lang—could be so different. The...

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Movies: Howl

I have the greatest respect for the intention and ensuing construction of this film: the elucidation of Ginsberg's poem Howl through biography and history, but multiple complaints about its...

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Dance: Voices and Dance within the Americas, at the Guggenheim's Works and...

This night, the Guggenheim presented three short pieces by three different choreographers: one American (though his biography describes Jonah Bokaer as "an international choreographer") and two Cubans,...

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Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Four: Cities of the Plain, by Marcel Proust

I was expecting, since the more recent Modern Library version of this volume is entitled Sodom & Gomorrah rather than the innocuous Cities of the Plain, that this would be the book in which Marcel...

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Movies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight

When The Dark Knight came out and everyone was talking about it, I refused to see it. It was a sequel, and I hadn't seen the first movie. In fact, I had never seen a Batman movie, or any comic book...

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Movies: Primer

Shane Carruth only needed $7,000 and a few years to give us the headache-inducing Primer; perhaps the process gave him a headache as well, because he hasn't given us another film since. Of course,...

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Movies: Burlesque

I'm not ashamed to admit it: I am a girl, and I am thus the target audience for this film. Even if I consider myself an aloof intellectual, too critical for television and bubble-gum pop, there is...

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Movies: Salt

There was a time when I would pay to see Angelina Jolie movies in the theatre, even though I knew they would be awful, just for the privilege of basking in her glow. But Angelina has changed. Her...

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Movies: A Fish Called Wanda

When I was a kid, there were two movies that I was drawn to every time we went to the video store to rent a movie: Sex, Lies, and Videotape, for the promise of titillation behind its cover photo of...

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Movies: Get Low

Get Low is basically a Cohen brothers' film that wasn't made by the Cohen brothers. A cranky old hermit in an old Western town gets the notion into his head that he wants to have a funeral party—now,...

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Movies: Going the Distance

Another airplane movie, Going the Distance was chosen from a selection of forty-something films solely for the reason that, one day when I was volunteering at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, a...

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Movies: Cyrus

I am shallow; I did not enjoy watching this film because I cannot stand John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill. They depress me. They are not funny. They are sad. Looking at them makes me sad. Listening to them...

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Movies: Sex, Lies, & Videotape

As a child, when we went to the video store to rent a movie, I would wander the aisles of VHS boxes and wonder about certain films, like Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I imagined it was very bad, and of...

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Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Five: The Captive, by Marcel Proust

Proust’s “captive” is Albertine, whom he has somehow coerced into moving into his parents' flat with him (while his parents are away; the only person privy to this secret resident is the nosy...

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Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Six: The Fugitive

After finishing Cities of the Plain, alternately titled Sodom and Gomorrah, and finding that Proust had yet to acknowledge his homosexuality, I expected that he would do so in The Fugitive. I imagined...

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Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Seven: Time Regained, by Marcel Proust

It took me eight months, but I have read all of it.Time Regained is a volume very different from Proust's others. First, the narrators steps, for a moment, outside of his interior world of intimate...

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Dance: Alvin Ailey at City Center

Alvin Ailey has long been my favorite dance company. I like to say that when God created man, he created Ailey dancers; certainly, this is humanity achieving its full genetic potential, at least so far...

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Movies: The Mission

My Jesuit high school must have done a far better job of indoctrinating me than I thought at the time, because I found this film incredibly upsetting. Set in 18th Century South America, the story poses...

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Books: Airships, by Barry Hannah

After finishing Proust, I thought that this book of short stories by Southern "writer's writer" Hannah would be a good antidote. And it did its duty in that it was blunt, masculine, and violent. The...

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Books: How It Is, by Samuel Beckett

As an additional antidote to eight months of Proust, I chose Samuel Beckett. There is enough that I want to read that I don't usually reread anything, but I was describing How It Is, which I read for a...

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Movies: Black Swan

I worry about Darren Aronofsky. It seems that each of his movies culminates with the protagonist cutting him or herself apart to relieve whatever endemic psychosickness lurks inside. I worry that some...

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Movies: The Social Network

Not being particularly interested in Facebook (though I have a profile on it), or any form of living life online (despite the blogging—really, I see no discrepancy there), I had no drive to see The...

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Books: Molly, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett

Wary of another series, but hungering for something direct and raw after eight months of Proust’s ornate, insubstantial machinations, I sought my savior in Beckett. Only the desperate go to Beckett for...

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Music: itsnotyouitsme at The Stone on December 2, 2010

itsnotyouitsme comprises Caleb Burhans and Grey McMurray on violin and guitar with lots of wires and electronic doo-dads. This night, they played an hour of ambient chamber music, accompanied by singer...

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