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.

Many people have remarked upon the similarities between Emma Yates’ recent op-ed in the Prince, “Getting unlucky on Valentine’s day,” (published 2/22/08) and Francisco Nava’s infamous op-ed, “Princeton’s latex lies,” (published 11/7/07).
Both take theatrical umbrage at the prevalence of a “hookup culture.” Both take aim at the imaginary misdeeds of university or student organizations: Nava objects to the distribution of condoms by University Health Services (UHS), while Yates objects to the cavalier advertisement of the availability of condoms through posters circulated by the Sexual Health Advisors (SHA).

Two things occurred to me as I watched Wilco perform at the Tower Theater outside of Philly last Saturday: one, Jeff Tweedy is really old. And two, I hate PDA.

A week and a day after I saw Dan Deacon play his new DVD, Ultimate Reality, at Bard College, I saw him buying a camera at B&H in Manhattan. B&H is probably what the Nazis feared the planet would look like by now: an electronics store run and mostly staffed by Orthodox Jews, every item carried from the shelf to the salesman to the register by conveyor belts, each one tricked out with neon blue trim.

I hate vaginas. I always have and always will. They’re dank and cavernous and horrible, and I feel bad for every man or woman who has to venture down there without a bulwark between him and that juicy, pungent vag-spunk. So, maybe it wasn’t the best idea for ...

The Writer's Strike is over! Listen closely and you can hear the clicks of the computers as writers across America happily click away. All is good in the world, except for all of that bad that's still in there too. Writers for the Nassau Weekly strode into the ...

Though it might otherwise be dismissed as a horribly-written play, Me, Myself & I inspires additional disappointment, flowing as it does from the pen of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. A moving and clever piece, it is not. Perhaps the only element that could have saved and justified its stodgy formal progression—an insistent meta-theatricality—comes off as forced, hackneyed, dismissible. Yes, Albee reveals, these are actually actors onstage. We get it. Got it. Good.

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a fitting play for Princeton University. It takes place within the well-furnished walls of a bourgeois apartment, and is concerned with comfort, or more accurately with the horror of comfort. Like many students on campus, Hedda enters the stage entirely provided for yet entirely hungry, perversely hungry.

Sotto Happy Hour: Drinks That Rival Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino
Though it is no replacement for the Annex, Sotto happy hour is still the best deal in town. House wine and mixed drinks are only two fifty; cocktails like the Bellinitini (peach, prosecco, mint) and the Lemon Drop Martini ...

First Exhibit. Here is the July 1, 1933 issue of Das Neue Tagebuch, a newspaper for German exiles in Paris. We read of a Jewish dentist, Maier, who was forced into poverty through a ban on Jewish practitioners. In mid-July, with his wife (also a dentist) on a quick vacation, Maier clandestinely worked in her office, but was later kidnapped by four S.A. men during lunch at his own apartment. According to the report Schwarzschild received, the men had stabbed Maier twenty-one times, broken his feet by crushing them with a copying press, and shot him in the head, causing his skull to explode.

In the middle of my third night at the Sundance Film Festival the creaking of springs and the sound of a headboard slamming repetitively against the wall abruptly waked me. For a second I thought I was simply having a strange nightmare, but as my eyes narrowed into focus I ...

Barack Obama--U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for president--has, if nothing else, my entire extended, voting-age family in a polarized tizzy. My mother isn’t voting for Obama because of his smoker’s teeth--my uncle because his middle name is Hussein. My father likes his health care platform--his father-in-law is filled with warmth by his back story and earnestness. Me? I’m voting for Obama because he won a Grammy.

The Democratic Party has promised the electorate change, but is not always clear about what this will mean in practice. There is Obama change with its emphasis on bipartisanship, and there is Big Momma change with its emphasis on taking back the country for liberals. The first kind is an easier case to make to the American people, but it is the second kind that might actually make life better for them.

Marked by a certain charged starkness and by an utterly terrifying absurdity, Greenwood’s score to There Will Be Blood is ushered in with trademark twangs and plucks which register as the pulse of the film itself. In “Open Spaces” an ominous nearly-lush melodic darkness is interrupted by a hopeful ...

An older gentleman strolls out of a restaurant on the upper eastside and sees a bum slumped against the building’s wall. The bum asks for something to eat, and the man rummages in his doggy bag and hands him a baked potato. Appalled, the bum spits and returns the ...

I don't quite understand why the advertising team behind Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth<i> decided to market it as "the most alarming cautionary tale for men … since Fatal Attraction." The storyline of <i>Teeth stems from the vagina dentate myth, which has emerged in many, many myths from many ...

“What’s the point of instruments?/Words are a sawed off shotgun,” cries Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on the band’s newest studio album, (In Rainbows). How true those words are. It’s not that the music on the band’s newest disc isn’t worth listening to.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is an important mark of Swedish achievement. Throughout its one-hundred-and-seven year history, the award has been bestowed upon many legendary writers and a number of women as well. Last week, Doris Lessing joined the ranks of these few but handsome ladies when she was named ...

“Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” plead Shylock to the barrister, and indeed what characterizes Jewish history in the main is calamity and tribulation of a scope and cruelty so reckless and undreamt they seem enjoined from another universe. As Shylock suggests, extraordinary persecution is so far the ...

During a slow weekend this past July in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rob Madole, Tim Nunan, and John Nelson started scheming, started to talk of raising hell.

More than any other contemporary filmmaker, Wes Anderson has succeeded in crafting his own highly original, instantly recognizable universe. Inhabited by quirky characters usually depressed on some level or other, the world of his films is quite the whimsical place.

One day this July the heat was such that it was no longer fun to roam outside. So I interrupted my summer routine (walking the dog, eating profiteroles, thinking about what a chore it must have been for Lopokova to fuck Keynes) to sit and read something. I went to ...