We’ve all had that experience: freshman fall, standing against the wall in some musty house and tilting your ear towards your conversation partner as they shout over the music. You make sure to soak in every detail — this could be your new bestie. But WOW they really like movies.
There were a few things about my own personal experience watching 1917 — a movie nominated for 10 Academy Awards this year — that were particularly frustrating. The group of 12-year-old boys in the back of the theater talking and laughing at pretty much full volume throughout the movie was one. The fact that my viewing experience was also interrupted midway by an entirely unnecessary and poorly placed intermission was another.
Let’s be honest: Writing a novel is an intense and mentally draining process. To write an ironically utopian novel is, in itself, a difficult task, but to also perform a public book reading less than a month after it’s been published is no small feat. However, on Jan. 23, Chana Porter did just this as she seamlessly read through the beginning of her novel, The Seep, and subsequently held a live Q&A session with audience members at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse.
Virtual Reality is a five-piece rock band composed of vocalist Parker Treadway, guitarist Ronald Salazar, pianist and guitarist Matthew Ost, drummer Paul Vallejo and newly-recruited bassist Mahesh Pitchayan.
This Thanksgiving break, my stuck-on-campus self and a friend who lives half an hour away hopped on the MARC train at our respective stops to reunite in D.C. for an evening we had planned in August — a concert part of BROCKHAMPTON’s Heaven Belongs to You Tour, which was happening on Monday, Nov. 25.
From a young age, Hopkins junior, Dylan Kwang has immersed himself in the arts. Having taken painting and illustration classes all throughout elementary, middle and high school, art is something that has always been an influence in his life.
Over Thanksgiving break, I had the privilege of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Unfortunately, their collection of European painting from the years 1200-1800 are mostly not on display due to ongoing renovations. There was, however, a new and different exhibit I had the opportunity to see, and it was absolutely fascinating.
Located in the heart of the National Mall is the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the two galleries are adjacent and attached to one another, forming a joint museum that focuses on Asian art. Currently on display at the Freer Gallery for the next year is the exhibit “Hokusai: Mad about Painting,” which I went to view over this Thanksgiving break.
I first became familiar with Shirin Neshat during my senior year of high school. Her piece “Rebellious Silence,” a black and white photograph of a woman’s face bisected by a gun barrel and written over with Farsi poetry from her “Women of Allah” series, was a standout work in the Global Contemporary section of the AP Art History exam’s 250 works.
We’ve all grown up with Coldplay. From their saddest songs like “The Scientist” or “Yellow,” to their jubilant hit, “Hymn For the Weekend,” their artistic and instrumental style of music has an almost universal appeal. Not to mention that from their seven studio albums released between 2000 and 2017, they’ve managed to rack up 29 Grammy nominations and six wins.
I’ll just start off this review by saying that there was very little possibility that I was not going to enjoy Knives Out. I’ve been in love with the murder mysteries ever since I stayed up all night reading Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in sixth grade, so a film based around the key motifs of her style — an eccentric detective, an ornate mansion, a web of lies and an overly-complicated murder plot — was almost certainly going to be a hit in my eyes.
Thanksgiving Day was marked by a rare occurrence this year — a Lil Uzi Vert tweet storm. Addressing his long delayed sophomore album Eternal Atake, Uzi began: “I wanna let My Family know… and I say Family because all the fans left a long time ago. Only Family Stays so if you stayed I’m Thankful for U.”
In the promo video for Seth Meyers’ first stand-up special on Netflix (or anywhere, as far as I can tell), he asks a group of children if they’d like to play with a new action figure, “Stand-Up Seth.”
If you’re like me, vague memories of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass and its cinematic iteration wove themselves intermittently throughout your childhood. Although they were less beloved than Harry Potter, less modern than Percy Jackson & the Olympians and less classic than The Chronicles of Narnia, they are perhaps the most timeless and successfully constructed stories of them all (although the 2007 movie adaptation garnered a fair amount of criticism).
Disney was a big part of my childhood. And over time, after releasing sequels to my favorite movies and acquiring film production companies such as Pixar in 2006 and Lucasfilms in 2012, Disney managed to become an even bigger part of my childhood. But building up to the Nov. 12 release of Disney+, a new streaming service for Disney-owned content, I wasn’t that excited.
This past weekend, in conjunction with the two-day jazz symposium at Hopkins, An Die Musik LIVE! presented two jazz luminaries on Saturday night who were pivotal to the free jazz scene in France at the turn of the 1970s.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs hosted the 32nd Annual Culture Show on Friday, Nov. 15. The event featured performances by 14 student groups — from the Gospel Choir’s heavenly harmonies to the Ladybirds’ sharp, graceful dance routines — all of which were centered around the event’s themes of resilience and strength, succinctly summarized by the event’s tag line: “We Rise.”
The University held a free two-day symposium, “Paris/Algiers 1969: Declarations of Freedom by the Black American Avant-Garde,” on Friday, Nov. 15 and Saturday, Nov. 16. The Centre Louis Marin for Interdisciplinary French Studies organized the event with the support of the French Embassy in the United States, and the symposium director was none other than Hopkins Professor and Chair of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Professor Derek Schilling.
As the crowd chanted “Taco Bell! Taco Bell!” five minutes into “Super Art Fight: Thanksgiving Thrashing,” I knew this night was going to be wild. This Thanksgiving edition of the strange collision between wrestling and live art, or “the greatest live art competition in the known universe,” as it calls itself, took place at Ottobar on Friday, Nov. 15.
