Big Feelings and Critical NostalgiaReleased in January 2024, I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) caused an improbable sensation for an arthouse film that never quite coheres into a recognizable genre. Though horrifying, it can’t be called a horror movie; at the same time, though highly stylized and full of teenaged existentialism, it’s too… Read More
En el año 2017, comenzó un periodo de transformaciones profundas para las luchas democráticas por el derecho al aborto libre y gratuito en Argentina. Entre marzo y agosto de 2018, se realizó a nivel nacional una serie de manifestaciones en apoyo a las instancias legislativas del proyecto de… Read More
Relatively recently, in a galaxy quite close to home, literary scholar Gerry Canavan vividly captured the ambiguity that shrouded the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). The second Star Wars feature film to be produced after Disney’s well-publicized acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, Rogue One was also… Read More
On the evening of August 8, 2008, the Buskirk-Chumley Theater of Bloomington, Indiana, opened its doors for the premiere of ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth), the first opera by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964). The work is a video-opera that was announced as the authentic story of Camelia… Read More
The international attention Ukraine has received in the 270 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its sovereign neighbor is unprecedented. The world has never before shown such support for and interest in Ukrainian culture, including the world of the performing arts. Countless benefit concerts have been organized by high-profile orchestras,… Read More
We are perhaps the only musicologists to have made it onto the front page of the National Enquirer, a newspaper that was the nation’s most renowned scandal-sheet for many decades. The story of our extended research trip in the late 1970s that led, in part, to that brief moment of… Read More
Avengers: Endgame is an unapologetic love letter to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ( MCU’s) past, celebrating the growth that each hero has sustained over the twenty-two film franchise. Set five years after the cataclysmic events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Endgame sees the defeated… Read More
Recently I spoke to a reporter about the controversy over singer Kate Smith (1907–1986). Although I have written about American popular music of the 1930s and 40s and its racial politics, I have not written specifically on Kate Smith. A radio, recording,… Read More
There is a lot to unpack in Avengers: Endgame, which serves as a means to tie a ribbon on more than a decade of Marvel films while hinting at what is in the future for the studio. Alan Silvestri, now scoring his fourth Marvel… Read More
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and directors Anthony Russo and Joseph V. Russo (collectively the Russo Brothers) have been notorious for their reluctance to give away anything that would spoil their films. Thus for Avengers: Endgame—title withheld until the end of the first trailer—they “almost opted for a… Read More