Quoting Emily Dickinson, Helen Oyeyemi’s first short story collection, “What is Not Yours is Not Yours,” begins with the epigraph of “open me carefully” and swiftly delves into an exquisite unravelling of storytelling and reality. To great effect, Oyeyemi explores and broaches the boundaries of traditional narrative expectations, balancing fantasy and the surreal over a…
Toward the end of Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir, the detective Dave Bannion suddenly realizes that he has been double-crossed. The widow of a slain policeman reveals that she was complicit in her husband’s murder. In a rage, Bannion pushes her into the mantlepiece and puts his coarse hands around her neck. “With you dead,” he…
Most theatrical performances begin with a short, functional reminder to silence your cellphones and abstain from recording. It’s not really a part of the show itself — it’s a courtesy notice, the kind of thing you throw in more because it’d be bad if you didn’t rather than any positive force toward it. Ram’s Head…
Even before they take a consequential detour, the characters in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film have difficulty making their dreams come true. Al Roberts aspires to play piano at Carnegie Hall, but he has been stuck serenading seedy patrons of the Break o’ Dawn Club for years. His girlfriend, Sue, wants to be a Hollywood…
Meredith Monk’s “Cellular Songs,” which the composer performed with members of her ensemble at Bing Concert Hall this Saturday, is an prolonged meditation on the way we live, from the level of our cells to the level of our social fabric. Monk, a fixture of American classical music for over half a century, has given…
The SHN Orpheum Theatre was poppin’ this past Wednesday, to say the least. The theater was filled with students who sang along to “The Hamilton Mixtape,” danced in the aisles and broke out in thunderous applause before anyone even graced the stage. When a few students walked onstage for simple microphone checks, the crowd went…
Billie Eilish’s “ocean eyes” is tonally ambivalent: It inhabits multiple keys at once, and in so doing captures the complex, conflicting emotional valences that make up our feelings. Tonal ambivalence is not ambiguity, which would mean that the key is unclear. Nor is it tonal flux, which would mean that the key changes continuously. While…
It racks my brain, dear reader, that anyone could resist the lure of a good detective story. There is nothing more exciting to me than a mysterious murder, impossible theft or surreal sighting. There is hardly anything more satisfying than a big reveal, like the unmasking of a criminal, or a hidden past. There is…
