INTERVIEW On YouTube, musicianship, and guitars
Andy McKee is one of the best fingerstyle guitarists in America, currently signed onto the Razor & Tie record label. He is famous for achieving over 40 million views on YouTube to date for his signature song, “Drifting.” McKee is currently on the Guitar Masters tour, along with fellow fingerstyle players Antoine Dufour and Stephen Bennett. I sat down with him to chat about the tour, being a guitarist, and life in general.
EXHIBIT REVIEW From time to time
It is quite an ambitious project to create a 24-hour film. More ambitious yet is to create one without main characters, without a plot, and which comprises entirely of scenes involving clocks from other films. Yet that is precisely what Christian Marclay has done — and very effectively, too.
ARTS AROUND TOWN Staying in Boston this weekend?
In celebration of the Red Sox winning the American League in 1912, a distinguished woman attended a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra touting a headband with, “Oh, You Red Sox” splashed across it and caused quite a stir in the media. This is one of many stories, both true and false, about Isabella Stewart Gardner, or “Mrs. Jack.” She did nothing to deny or affirm these claims about her, and is often quoted as saying, “Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”
ARTS AROUND TOWN One City One Story, more than one Scarlet Letter?
This morning I rollerbladed to Harvard to get some breakfast from Darwin’s. Paying the cashier, I noticed a little pamphlet entitled One City One Story: “The Whore’s Child.” My curiosity piqued, I picked it up and began reading it as I waited for my sandwich. I found myself drawn in instantly, and I had thoroughly devoured it by the time I had similarly finished off my sandwich.
Can an elegant book be transformed into an elegant film?
The Hedgehog proves that a film is best enjoyed if you watch it with low expectations at the outset. Admittedly, I read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog this summer and enjoyed it so much that I was convinced that the film adaptation would be an absolute failure. After all, aren’t all movie adaptations of books at least something of a disappointment? Morbid curiosity is what drove me to watch The Hedgehog, and, well, thank goodness for morbid curiosity.
The Hedgehog explores the similarities between three very different Parisians
The Hedgehog is a French-language movie directed by Mona Achache based on the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. In the movie, unlikely encounters develop in the setting of an affluent Parisian neighborhood. The film explores the interactions between Paloma, an 11-year old girl, Renée Michel, an apartment concierge, and Kakuro Ozu, a Japanese man who recently moved to the apartment complex.
MOVIE REVIEW One Day, Dexter met Emma …
Emma and Dexter met for the first time — officially — on the day of their college graduation and got together that night. Almost. They separated the next morning, but their lives were intertwined for the next twenty years. Starring Anne Hathaway as Emma Morley and Jim Sturgess as Dexter Mayhew, One Day is a film adaptation of the New York Times bestseller of the same title by British writer David Nicholls.
BOOK REVIEW On boxes and coming out of them
Slant, the debut novel of MIT graduate Timothy Wang, tells the story of James, a gay Asian MIT undergrad. Immediately our minds start to categorize: He is gay and he is Asian, a double minority. Of course, there is more to a person than his sexuality and his race, yet somehow in the world we live in, we often find ourselves boxed along these broad lines. Add age and beauty (the skin-deep kind), and the world’s judgment on the person is very nearly delivered. This is what Slant deals with. It is not so much a story of coming out, or coming of age, or simply coming (ahem!) as it is a story of coming to terms.
MOVIE REVIEW A nerd-worthy pandemic
Imagine the chilling prospect of a deadly pandemic throwing the entire world into chaos. In Contagion, Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh takes us on a high-pace cinematic experience depicting the emergence of a novel, highly contagious viral pathogen, and mankind’s dramatic struggle to contain the disease and find a cure. Unlike other disaster movies, the science behind Contagion is highly plausible and described in significant detail, often making the movie feel like a documentary — it’s appealing to the typical (nerdy) MIT crowd. Additionally, the movie features a star-studded cast — a key element for closely connecting with the audience and delivering an intense psychological drama. While highly ambitious and far-reaching, Contagion succeeds in being both an original artistic movie and an entertaining thriller.
THEATER REVIEW How was the show, Mrs. Lincoln?
If you are at all familiar with American history, you will know that John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. You might even know that Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield and Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley. But what about those who failed, like John Hinckley, Jr, attempted assassin of President Ronald Regan? Why did they do it?
OPEN-AIR ART Viewer, artist, artist, viewer
Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things cleverly skirts the word “sculpture,” one of those ill-defined “things” that suggests a commercial object just as often as it does an artistic one. This installation, sculptural merely by virtue of the fact that it is three-dimensional, lets us in on the artistic process and blurs the lines between creator and observer. Eleven Heavy Things originally debuted in 2010 in New York’s Union Square Park, and its journey to Los Angeles this summer came in conjunction with the release of July’s latest film project, The Future. Although I have not yet seen the film, this exhibition has certainly whet my appetite for the wacky but strangely candid ideas that emerge from July’s head.
Always the artist
Ravi Coltrane is maybe not for-the-semester music. Sometimes you need a specific cocktail, to regain your dignity, or remember what love feels like, or shake off some encroaching loneliness, if only for 40–60 minutes. Ravi Coltrane isn’t good for that. If I plan on getting work done, I’ll listen to Robert Fripp, or Radiohead. Maybe if I want to feel nostalgic, I’ll listen to Tom Waits or Animal Collective. These are specific cocktails. I enjoy them within a specific context. They are connected to people I know, and places where I’ve drunk them. These songs are the way I dogear the pages of life.
MOVIE REVIEW Harry’s ultimate sacrifice and the fans’ final farewell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 starts right where its predecessor ended and provides an epic finale for the eight-part movie adaptations to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) are seeking the deathly hallows, artifacts that will help them defeat the evil antagonist Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) by allowing them to destroy his horcruxes. The horcruxes are soul stones that grant Voldemort immortality as long as they are intact. At the end of the previous movie, Voldemort had managed to capture one of the three deathly hallows, the incredibly powerful “Elder Wand,” from Albus Dumbledore’s grave, before Harry and his friends could get it. The final Harry Potter movie flows seamlessly from is predecessor by opening with the same scene.
RESTAURANT REVIEW A piece of North Africa in New England
Tucked discreetly beside Creation “N” Hair and Cambridge Auto, its modest black and white sign blending in with the other businesses, Baraka Café doesn’t stand out to the casual observer. But behind the door plastered with Yelp! and Zagat recommendations lies an authentic North African experience, one I would never have heard about without the recommendation of a friend from pika.
MOVIE REVIEW A-meh-rica
When you’re writing a script, conventional movie wisdom tells us that you can’t go wrong with Nazi villains — everybody hates them. And if you make your protagonist Captain America, then you’re practically set … right?
MOVIE REVIEW Conversing with the stars
Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s most recent film. Like many of Allen’s past films, Midnight in Paris tends towards the more philosophical and the atmospheric. The film heavily references many influential figures in literature and draws a contrast between a modern-day man unhappy with his current life and the romantic atmosphere of Paris in the Roaring Twenties.
MOVIE REVIEW One small step for man, one giant leap for … wait, is that an alien ship?
Michael Bay’s newest installment of the Transformers movies, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, starts with a sequence explaining the “true” motivations behind NASA’s Apollo program: In 1961, scientists witness an alien spaceship crash on Earth’s moon. To explore the wrecked vessel, the Apollo program is initiated. President Kennedy makes his famous statement to bring a man on the moon within a decade, and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally land on the moon in 1969 with Apollo 11, their true mission is to investigate that wrecked vessel on the dark side of the moon.
Music around town
Students staying on campus this summer should be happy that MIT is next to the lively city of Boston, Mass. and not Ithaca, N.Y. Here are some moderate-size, lower-cost venues that you should visit while you are still immune to p-sets.
GOING DIGITAL Maps of paint
Google Art Project was only unveiled in February, but already it has professional artists and amateur art lovers alike raving. It’s no wonder that people are impressed. A visit to the home page gives a crystal clear close-up of a famous painting. In the introduction video, painting after painting presents itself in proper Google Maps style as a voice tempts us to “discover hidden secrets, or get in close to see the most miniscule details, like the brushstrokes of van Gogh.”