After reading the writings of some of my peers, I find myself compelled to issue this plea: Ladies, please stop trying to be Carrie Bradshaw. Her pseudo-insights and lackluster musings on contemporary life were more than adequate; you don’t need to supplement them.

On Jan. 27 the exhibit “Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran” opened at the Johnson Museum. This hallmark exhibit features 60 works by 20 of Iran’s photographers and is one of the first major surveys of contemporary Iranian photography held in the United States.

Last Saturday, Fanclub Collective hosted its first show of the semester in JAM. The intimate venue proved itself to be the perfect location for an evening that became increasingly abstract as it progressed.

Done well, this film could have intelligently tackled the issue of what allegiances still stand in a world where money and guns speak louder than words. Done with a bigger budget and a different writer, this film could have served as a cautionary tale of the dangers of inadvertently falling into the seedy underworld of drugs.

The opening scene of The Queen takes place on May 2nd, 1997. Her Majesty Elizabeth II sits for a portrait, watching news coverage of Tony Blair’s campaign for Prime Minister — he emphasizes the role of modernization in an effective government that serves the people. She sighs and makes a remark about “the joy of being partial.” Immediately, the tone for The Queen is set — a monarch, whose existence is grounded firmly in tradition and decorum, is confronted with growing demands for change and, in essence, an abandonment of the only world she has ever known.

In one of his poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote that, “Dada would have loved a day like this/ with its very realistic/ unrealities…”
The new exhibit at the Johnson Museum, “A Private Eye: Dada, Surrealism, and More from the Brandt Collection” embraces that sentiment. “A Private Eye” brings together pieces from the 20th century that force the viewer to consider the world from a kaleidoscopic and somewhat eccentric perspective. Two of the major artistic movements represented in this exhibit, Dada and Surrealism, invite the viewer to interpret art and the world through new sets of eyes.

Whether through watching images slowly appear on a piece of instant film or perusing old photographs, the Polaroid corporation has found its way into most people’s lives. The all-too-familiar outline of a Polaroid photo (a black square enclosed by white borders in a convenient 3.5 by 4.2 inch rectangle) captures and represents moments with a unique immediacy that digital photography has yet to rival.

I’ll admit it: the concept of Snakes on a Plane piqued my interest. The beginning of a new era in American cinema has arrived when the title of a film provides a reasonably complete synopsis of its plot.