Rappers don’t often move thematically beyond money, reputation, and women. But Kendrick Lamar does more than rap. He even called himself a writer, rather than a rapper, during an interview on the Colbert Report because his music “is more storytelling than rhyming words together.” He paints pictures in the listener’s mind. He tells the stories...
More than 600 people crammed into McNamara Rehearsal Hall Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to watch Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” Never in my four years here have I seen so many attend Opera Workshop’s annual performance. I would know — I was always performing. The show attracted audiences in mass, because it’s a classic,...
The 18-hour documentary series “The Vietnam War” opens with Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” setting the tone of casual American optimism at the outset of the ’60s. But it transitions to an admission of defeat: “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy,” the narrator intones. “It ended, 30 years later, in failure, witnessed...
In the last scene of her film memoir, the camera centers on Joan Didion’s hands: gnarled, veined, gripping the hands of her friend as she once held the pen that made her one of the master craftsmen of fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s. In “The Center Will Not Hold,” Didion holds the reins. The...
Before you threw out your checkered suspenders, you were the sort of freshman who would loudly snap those elastic hitches against your chest while you argued soteriology until 2 a.m. in the Galloway lobby. It was embarrassing. You, a Catholic, had no understanding of soteriology (it means how-we-get-the-salvation), but you were familiar with the chorus...