Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Tags: Honky Tonk Tuesday , Brett Hughes , Ryan Ober , Radio Bean , Lee Anderson , Joe Adler , Matthew Minor , Image , Video , Web Only
Monday, April 7, 2014
Alison Bechdel, the Bolton cartoonist best known for her long-running comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," will deliver the Will Eisner Spring Lecture for the Center for Cartoon Studies on April 10. The lecture will take place not at the CCS' campus in White River Junction but at nearby Dartmouth College.
Bechdel, who discontinued "Dykes" in 2008, received tremendous acclaim for her illustrated memoir Fun Home, which was later turned into an off-Broadway musical that ended its run in January at New York City's Public Theater.
Bechdel followed that book with 2012's Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. That was the same year she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle, an organization devoted to LGBT people in the book industry. She also was profiled in the New Yorker.
2013's Eisner lecture was presented by cartoonist and comics historian Scott McCloud.
Alison Bechdel speaks on Thursday, April 10, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 100 of the Life Sciences Building at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
Tags: comics , alison bechdel , center for cartoon studies , dykes to watch out for , fun home , Image , Web Only
Nancy Stearns Bercaw's father, Dr. Beau Bercaw, was a neuroscientist whose greatest fear became his life's obsession — and then a reality.
Beau began his career in neuroscience after watching his own father succumb to Alzheimer's disease, as his daughter Nancy recalls in her book Brain in a Jar (Broadstone Books), published last year. Beau spent decades experimenting with vitamins, supplements and various medications that promised to renew brain cells and fight off the degenerative brain disease. He even kept his father's autopsied brain in a jar on his desk as a constant reminder.
"Consequently, grandpa’s gray matter and my dad’s macabre dread became the center of my childhood universe," writes Bercaw in "Living Without Math," a short story selected for inclusion in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Living With Alzheimer's and Other Dementias.
The anthology, which will be published on April 22, puts a big emphasis on the struggles of family caregivers.
Tags: books , vermont , health , alzheimer's , Image , Web Only
I've never heard a standing ovation at the Flynn MainStage quite like the one that Lyric Theatre Company's production of Les Misérables got Saturday night. It was long, it was loud, and it started well before the last notes of the reprise of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" had faded. The audience really, really liked this show.
It won't earn me any hipster points (like I ever had any) to say this about Les Mis or a community theater production, but I was blown away, too.
This is a huge project for 40-year-old Lyric, as Xian Chiang-Waren chronicled in our paper last week. The show has 34 named characters and many more in the ensemble. Its action takes place over 17 years in locations all over France, ranging from a shipyard to a provincial town to a Paris sewer. Its plot involves multiple carefully choreographed scenes of onstage violence and death, not to mention allusions to historical conflicts and figures with which few Americans are familiar (why does everybody care so much that General Lamarque is dead?!).
Granted, this was my first time seeing Les Mis onstage. But I think Lyric pulled it off.
Tags: les misérables , lyric theatre company , victor hugo , Image , Web Only
Friday, April 4, 2014
As we reported this week, Ken Burns' new documentary, The Address, made its theatrical premiere at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro on April 2. The Latchis, located near Burns' home in New Hampshire, has been the site of several premieres of his films. But for this particular documentary, the Vermont connections run much deeper.
The Address documents a unique annual competition at the Greenwood School, a small school in Putney for 11-to-17-year-old boys with learning differences. Each year, Greenwood students study and learn to recite the entirety of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and perform the speech at an end-of-year ceremony. Burns, a frequent judge at the competition, was inspired by the students' determination, which became the subject of his latest film.
Several members of the Greenwood community were kind enough to share with Seven Days their photos from the film's premiere.
Tags: the address , ken burns , greenwood , lincoln , gettysburg address , film , movie , latchis theatre , Image , Web Only
This week in movies you missed: Yeah, I know. It's called Movies You Missed, not TV You Missed. But this year, despite watching almost nothing live, I keep discovering great new drama series I want to recommend. To use a bad cliché, this one might just fill the "Breaking Bad"-shaped hole in my heart.
What You Missed (if, like me, you don't want to pay for 150 or so channels you won't watch just to get the Sundance Channel)
Daniel Holden (Aden Young) has served 19 years on death row for raping and murdering his girlfriend when he was 18 years old. Now DNA evidence has vacated his conviction, to the joy of his sister, Amantha (Abigail Spencer), who always believed in his innocence.
But the rest of Daniel's small Georgia town isn't so sure. After all, he confessed to the crime — albeit after a prolonged, unrecorded interrogation. The prosecutor of his case, now a state senator (Michael O'Neill), is eager to get him back behind bars.
Tags: rectify , sundance channel , ray mckinnon , aden young , adelaide clemens , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Kin will be available locally on April 29 and nationally in June. Waylon Speed play a local release party at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge on Friday, April 25, with Austin's Sideshow Tragedy and locals Rough Francis — the last of whom also released a pretty great video recently, in case you missed it.
(Full disclosure: RF's Bobby Hackney Jr. is a Seven Days employee, and WS drummer Justin Crowther is an occasional 7D contributor.)
Tags: Waylon Speed , Kin , Rough Francis , the Sideshow Tragedy , Higher Ground Showcase Lounge , Image , Video , Web Only
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
My in-laws visited recently for a short stay, so every day was pretty well packed with activities. In the evenings, we were all a little wiped out, but my wife’s 6-year-old nephew could generally be counted on to have a little energy in his reserve tank. On one of those evenings, we decided that a movie was in order, but that it had to be a “family-friendly” one. You know – for kids.
I have plenty of animated films in my DVD collection, but the kid has seen (and can recite dialogue, verbatim, from) most of them. Anyway, it always seems to me a bit of a slippage to simply consider animated films to be kids’ films: I’m a grown-ass man, and I like watching animated films. And most films in the digital era are, to some extent, animated films, anyway. I digress.
It was my wife who alighted on Sky High on the DVD shelves. This is a movie I’d seen many times but that was unknown to everyone else in the room. It may be carefully engineered by Disney market researchers to be family friendly and inoffensive, but damn if it isn’t clever and enjoyable all the same. Plus, it has Kurt Russell in it – always a boon, in my book.
Tags: sky high , what I'm watching , film , movie , genre , high school , kurt russell , superhero , Image , Web Only
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
The film stars Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe as a young Allen Ginsberg, who, as a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, finds himself caught in a web of love, literary aspirations and murder. The film is based on actual events in Ginsberg's fascinating life.
Vachon is a figure of nearly unparalleled importance over the last 25 years of American independent film. She's produced films by such artists as Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling); John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch); and Todd Haynes, for whom she has produced five features including his breakthrough, Poison, and Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine and Safe. Vachon is also behind numerous short films and other works. Her reputation as a cultivator of new cinematic talent is well deserved, and her films have won many awards.
Christine Vachon presents Kill Your Darlings on Sunday, April 13, 7:30 p.m. at Dana Auditorium, Middlebury College. The event is free and open to the public.
Tags: christine vachon , middlebury college , kill your darlings , daniel radcliffe , allen ginsberg , Image , Web Only
If you ask Andrea Olsen, dance has a role far beyond the stage or the studio.
"Since I teach in both environment and dance at Middlebury, I’m very interested in the way that place affects your movement and also how dance fits into the larger cultural matrix of the age," says the longtime dancer and Middlebury College professor. "My own personal feeling is that dance is essential to understanding human beings at this time on the planet, rather than being something extra or nonessential."
Olsen recently published a third book, The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making (Wesleyan University Press), coauthored by movement artist Caryn McHose. This weekend, the college hosts several events to mark the occasion.
A free dance performance featuring work by 11 artists interviewed or otherwise featured in the book is on Sunday, April 6, at 2 p.m.; Olsen and McHose teach a "Finding Your Feet" workshop on Saturday, April 5, 2-4 p.m.; and a corresponding photography exhibit goes on display at Middlebury's Davis Library.
"My fear is that because there's 'dance' in the title, people who don't feel they are dancers would feel it's not for them," Olsen admits.
That would be to miss the point entirely.
Tags: dance , middlebury college , books , andrea olsen , caryn mchose , Image , Web Only