The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/arts_story_type/page/3/)
What do a 17th-Century Dutch printmaker, the Edict of Nantes and two present-day Ithacans have in common? Quite a bit, actually. So do the political commentary and a urine sample from Louis XIV. Their unifying thread is on display at the Johnson Art Museum’s new exhibition, Romeyn de Hooghe: Virtuoso Etcher, a show of de Hooghe’s etchings in subject matters ranging from the commercial to the political.
The artists of the Bloomsbury circle were at once radical and conservative, intellectually adventurous and promiscuously imitative. The group centered around the writers and thinkers Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, who dominated English high society around the early years of the last century; the circle sometimes included other luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and E.M. Forster. A current exhibit at the Johnson Museum, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, features the often overlooked visual artists who informed the group’s development as a hotbed of sexual and ideological libertinage as well as the bedrock of upper-crust cultural strictures.
This past Saturday night, the Cornell Concert Commission welcomed both new and old students alike with a free concert at Barton Hall. The contenders were Ithaca’s own Hubcap and California based Rogue Wave. While the former tried to intrigue new and old students with their alternative rock music and mentions of the ever so fine tastes of Ithaca, such as the all day music festival in Stewart Park next Sunday, the latter spent the majority of their set trying to rouse the Cornell corpses from their zombie like trance, which could have been attributed to the bleak weather outside or a general dissatisfaction with entering into or coming back to Cornell life.
NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL
This article was originally published online on July 8 in a different format.
The Newport Folk Festival — having endured Dylan’s controversial ’65 burst of electricity, financial turmoil and an addiction to corporate sponsorship — has come a long way from its folksy, populist incarnation of 1959. But at this 50-year benchmark, Newport’s architects have struck gold in grafting the Festival’s roots to anachronisitc, serene Fleet Foxes and progressive-folk-rock showmen The Decemberists. Seeger’s even leading a sing-along at age 90, for Pete’s sake.
If there were any film to show how to get over someone, (500) Days of Summer would be it. It’s uplifting, it proves that nothing is meaningless and that, despite the fact that not everything works out for the best, end all is resolved in the end. (500) Days of Summer is not a typical romance; it is the tale of a young man, Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who must get over someone who he has no desire to get over. In turn, by getting over her, he learns more about himself and, within 500 days, somehow seems to have a completely new perspective on life and his own destiny.
It’s not hard to poke fun at Quentin Tarantino’s distinctive writing style: Choose an obscure pop culture reference, have two odd characters argue about it over coffee, have one provide a radically new interpretation of the reference and throw in as much profanity, sexual slang and the n-word as possible (maybe have one of them comment on the quality of the coffee.) When writing by a particular auteur gets so predictable, it is either a welcome expectation by longtime fans or a glaring revelation that an artist has run out of steam and is fumbling at the frayed bottom of his bag of tricks.