The small crowd that trickled in for Theater Intime’s Saturday night “service” was greeted by altar servers handing out bulletin-style programs and invited to enjoy an evening of readings by Father Eddie, applause from Brother Lawrence, and…a basketball game with Death, a stationary bicycle torture device, and gunshots ...

During the vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin was asked twice if she wanted to respond to Joe Biden’s accusation that the subprime mortgage crisis was attributable to the deregulation that John McCain and other Republicans had actively supported since George Bush took the White House. She chose at each moment ...

Although the films display a wide range of subject matter, they share a common purpose: to make the spectators’ experience part of the movie itself, “like ruins or outlines where the viewers have to fill in the gap,” as featured Spanish director José Luis Guerín put it.

The main character, Jon, whom the composer named after himself, struggles with an unsuccessful career composing musicals (or did that meta just blow your mind?)

The album titles I want to highlight here earn my praise not as a result of vitality in any traditional musical- or thematic-unification, but because, they’re just pleasing somehow—they make me raise a bemused eyebrow, and then giggle like a schoolgirl. Is this not reason enough to crown a king?

It is a shame that most performers (or perhaps concert organizers) don’t have the courage to end a program with Bartók, instead opting for the Romantic route. With the Takács at the helm of the evening, however, the audience was willing to go wherever they took us.

Silvery and warm, Anderson’s voice is comfortable, like that of a children’s book narrator. It sounds terrifically, radically human through a vocoder, a fact that she indulges frequently on record and in live performance.

Last week, this writer ended a review of Fox’s new show Fringe with the words “Watch it.” Oh, how wrong she was.

Once Hannah has dipped her toes into the world of popularity, her life begins to spiral out of control. She becomes friends with the popular girls, among them a girl played by Miriam McDonald, who proudly shows that she can play a blonde in something else besides Degrassi.

I had never heard a Jonas Brothers song before the first week of this school year. I was throwing a pre-game for Lawnparties, offering Tequila Sunrises and mojitos in the a.m.—the youngest oldest thing Princeton students do. The eclectic and up-to-the-minute iTunes playlist I had made for the occasion had run out, and some roommate of a friend had taken over the computer to keep the mood going. “‘Burnin’ Up’!” someone requested. Probably the new Usher single, I thought, and then a nineteen- or twenty-year-old played me my first Jonas Brothers song. “Don’t they wear chastity rings?” I asked no one.

ERICA:  That’s another issue I feel is important to raise up in terms of the discussion we’re having between each other about these politics in regards to our opinions about the political election.  McCain is so old.  He’s like, older than my dad and your dad combined.  Do you seriously think that he’s not too old to not die if he does or does not become President?

MEGAN:  Um, Erica?  Old people don’t just die all the time.  That’s a very popular misconstrued misconception about them.  It is so hard to watch America not understand the most important issues about America, like all of the problems in the world such as killing people and poor people, because the only important issues about America that they care about are age.  My grandpa is 73 years old, but he only died once last year.

Fringe, like Lost, is a show that immediately ensnares the viewer with its mysteries. Within the first five minutes, we are left wondering what kind of chemical weapon can cause the pilot to erupt in huge boils before his jaw falls off.

We’ll continue watching Gossip Girl, perhaps, like we look through old postcards or yearbooks. We’ll speculate what it would have been like to watch it over the course of a school year, as though the show transpired in real time; what it would have been like to watch it with Kate or Shannon or definitely Erin, at least back when she said you looked good in red, before her flitting, girlish sarcasm started to sound programmatic and conditioned.

If anyone can pull off the role of satirical, socio-political prophet and shnooky belletrist, it’s Gary Shteyngart. The author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Shteyngart is one of the punchiest and funniest young novelists out there. His writing, colored and coarsened by the blunt cynicism of his 1970s upbringing in the Soviet Union, draws on intricate tessellations of classic Russian literature, self-deprecating Semitic humor, and current global politics. Being a Jew born in 1972 in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union and having immigrated to Queens in 1979, he has achieved status as a perpetual outsider, who can observe from remove and criticize with greater perspicacity.

Rufus Wainwright performed at McCarter Theatre last Saturday. It was a gorgeous weekend all around, though less so as Saturday waned and Sunday’s clouds arrived unfashionably early. I freely admit to never having heard a lick of Rufus Wainwright’s recorded music. Wainwright’s is one of those singer-songwritery names that lurks around the back of my mind with “Ben Folds,” “Duncan Sheik,” “Jeremy Enigk,” and “Mason Jennings.” Such a name, Sheik.

We seem to be sailing in familiar waters: when a sad young literary man writes a book about sad young literary men, and when it is reviewed by a sad young literary man, the old anxiety arises that perhaps those critics were right—literature isn’t universal; it’s no more than a Narcissine pool for a particular class to enjoy. Or, at least, these were the familiar issues I anticipated having to address in my review when I began to read. So you can imagine my surprise at finding that this novel does not deal with men who are literary, or even particularly sad.

After The Pillowman’s last show, I spent the night in a bed on the Intime stage. This was not my plan. Rather, my play was over: the actors were drunk, the set would soon be struck, and I, a tiny Atlas, newly liberated and upright, had merely intended to lug my mattress from its place on the stage and return it to my little bunker in the Witherspoon basement. But by the time I reached Intime – from Terrace, at 3:30 am, giddy with the removal of a gargantuan weight and hugely exhausted – I couldn’t do it. I curled into a ball and fell asleep.

I spent this past weekend at the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle, Wash., an annual gathering of journalists, academics, and writers of all stripes to talk about pop music with varying degrees of seriousness. If you were there, you might have known what most of them were talking about, or you might not have. Myself, I spent most of the past seven years listening to Shaggy (“It Wasn’t Me”), Outkast’s Stankonia, The Beatles Anthology 3 (Disc 2), and music that appeared in the Star Wars films.ray

Installation art evokes a cyclical arc of feelings: first, walking into a room of junk or seeing a bizarre box with a peephole: “This is retarded.” Then, once the initial assault wears off comes the feeling that maybe something complicated just happened. Depending on the particular piece, the final stage involves either the sense of satisfying complexity or the feeling that you have probably just seen another overly pretentious piece of modern art.

I didn’t find Funny Games particularly scary on a visceral level. I’m not saying this to suggest I have a hard stomach for movies like this. I don’t. I over-think them and too often imagine what it would be like to be in the characters’ shoes. I try to freak myself out. Funny Games invites its audience to do just that – freak itself out. Funny Games establishes a genre that marries horror with documentary.

Sunday, March 16 was the premier of Mary Zimmerman’s Argonautika at the Matthews Theater at McCarter. The two-and-a-half-hour play is an adaptation of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, starring Jake Suffian as Jason, Lisa Tejero as Hera, and Sofia Jean Gomez as Athena. Zimmerman, known for her inventive vision, won a Tony for Best Direction in 2002 for her adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Zimmerman’s production is an impressive, oftentimes explosive, interpretation of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, filled with whim, wit, and a touch of the modern.

“Morphing Double N.” That was the link I clicked on, the link at which I knew that researching this article, on lolcats of all things (a joke so quirky-yet-plain that it netted coverage in Time), was going to lead me all the way down, through every level of adolescent offensiveness into the final stage.

The utilitarian function of the museum as mere container has long been eclipsed by its function as signifying apparatus. On the one hand, the design of the interior is responsible for the terms of encounter with individual works of art. On the other hand, the shape of the exterior mediates and proclaims a role for art within the surrounding architectural landscape, cultural mise-en-scène, and even historical moment.

PUP’s The Flood is a rarity among campus shows; as a great production of a bad play, it is the inverse of the norm.