The Good Old Days
A couple weeks ago, legendary shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine released their first album in twenty-two years. The press surrounding the release of m b v was as extensive as any I’ve seen for a musical release in quite a long time. Why? What’s the big deal about this band coming back after so long?
by Tom Markham on
Game of Shows
Starting this week and every Sunday at 9 P.M. the fantastical Game of Thrones will be doing battle with the hip new season of Mad Men. So to which one of the two should you loyally devote your Sunday evenings, and which will you leave by the DVR to pick up on a lazy summer day?
by Rebecca Zhang on
Eight Feet
“Has a dude ever peed in your vag?” This is the provocative question posed at the beginning of Eight Feet. In this engaging drama-comedy written by Rafi Abrahams ’13 and directed by Rachel Alter ’14, four college students trapped in a basement bedroom during a snowstorm find themselves reconciling this urine-related trauma.
by Lily Offit on
Spring Breakers
Spring Breakers arrived in theaters last Friday only to confuse audiences around the country. The film begins practically pornographically, bare breasts splashed with beer and tan rears occupying the entire movie screen, accompanied by the aggressive sounds of Skrillex. It then flashes forward to the mundane and fictitious Kentucky College where four girls find they don’t have enough money to fund a spring break getaway to Florida.
by Veronica Nicholson on
Orange Is the New Black
This summer, I went to prison. Well, not actually, but I did watch Netflix’s original series “Orange is the New Black,” and therefore feel as though I am something of an authority on the subject of federal penitentiary. Piper Chapman, the show’s WASPy, neurotic protagonist, has led me on a tour of prison life, providing a kind of personal “scared straight” program.
by Hadley Newton on
Fear and Loathing on Cable
This summer I have taken it upon myself to tackle John Steinbeck’s American epic East of Eden, a modern retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story set to the backdrop of post-Gold Rush era Northern California—that is, Steinbeck’s own backyard. Summer is, for students at least, that blessed time of intellectual freedom during which schoolwork means almost nothing to you and you are free to read, write, study, and contemplate whatever you wish.
by Tom Markham on
Anatomy of A Single Girl
Not long ago, Random House sent a number of free books to the Nassau Weekly in the hopes that we would exercise our considerable influence on campus to publicize and review their products. One volume in particular (a bright pink thing called Anatomy of a Single Girl) caught my eye. It wasn’t just the garish cover or the titillating title, it was—actually, no, it was mostly those things.
by Dayton Martindale on
Of Matt(yboys) & Moon(thels)
Is it Matt or Matthew?”
Nearly all my life, I have faced this question. More than a courtesy, it is a challenge, a demand: “Identify yourself.”
In my childhood, I was lost and unsure. Who am I? Am I that guy who carelessly shortens his name, soiling the greatest gift, after life, his parents have given him? Or am I that guy who insists on being called by his proper name, like some pompous Alexander or Maximilian?
by Matthew Silberman on
The Things We Do for Love
It is not often I get to encounter a fellow Dayton, so when I heard about a new documentary called Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde, I was suitably intrigued. The film was to be screened on Saturday, February 8 at the Princeton Public Library, as part of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival (PEFF).
by Dayton Martindale on
Triumphant Melancholy
When the Antlers released Hospice in 2009 on Frenchkiss Records, the band established itself as a project of personal catharsis for its frontman, Peter Silberman. Designated a concept album, Hospice channeled Silberman’s past romantic failures into a story of two individuals confined to a cancer ward: a hospice worker and the terminally ill patient he gradually falls in love with.
by Kevin Cheng on
Dora’s Ghost
Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s most famous novel, Dora Bruder, is something like a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. It is a ghostly story about a young man and a nation haunted by history. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014, the fifteenth French writer to do so after the 2008 laureate Jean- Marie Georges Le Clézio. While Le Clézio’s writing is sensual and tinted with exoticism, Modiano’s is sparse, introspective, and heav- ily autobiographical, sometimes even termed “autofiction.”
by Emily Lever on
A Review
The senior thesis exhibition currently on view in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau is entirely wordless.
by Eliza Mott on