On Monday, Oct. 8, my First Year Seminar, Writing with Pictures: An Introduction to Writing Picture Books and Graphic Novels, was glad to welcome Elizabeth Lilly as a guest speaker. Lilly is a Baltimore local, a professor at MICA and Towson, and both an illustrator and a writer.
Hello everyone and welcome back to our “To watch and watch for” series, where the Arts & Entertainment section compiles a list of all the upcoming films, TV shows, books, albums and live events happening on campus, in the wider Baltimore area and beyond. I’m excited for this new format we started, because it means I get to share even more new releases. This week was extremely hefty in the musical department, with plenty of big names like Jon Batiste, Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige, and the list of live events continues to grow as we get further into the semester.
You loved it in the beginning, but the older it got the messier it got, and you started feeling mad more than anything else, especially when you kept finding pee on the carpet, and in the very end, it died a rapid, out-of-left-field death caused by rabies: violent and hard to watch but harder to stop watching, and once it was over you wished none of it — the dog, the death — ever happened in the first place. Before you click away from this article or my editor can highlight and leave a comment for revision — “Rephrase for clarity” — let me tell you: I’m the first one to admit that my description is over-the-top, vying for attention, maybe not the best option and overall confusing, even if it does leave you with a visceral image.
On Oct. 1, the University’s very own alumna Louise Erdrich published her latest novel The Mighty Red, an idiosyncratic story following the teenage, gothic intellectual Kismet Poe. Throughout the narrative, Poe survives her tragic newlywed life in her small, sugar-beet-farming town in North Dakota, backdropped by the 2008 financial crisis.
There has been an almost perverse public obsession with Donald Trump ⸺ 45th president of the United States, convicted criminal and renowned business tycoon. Ali Abbasi’s latest film, The Apprentice, explores the latter of Trump’s identities.
Listening to Machine Girl can sometimes feel like being inserted headfirst into a meat grinder; it’s an unrelenting assault that leaves you strangely exhilarated but also satisfied. Their latest release, MG Ultra, which dropped earlier this month, strays slightly from their usual aesthetics, but still manages to deliver the sonic violence that unmistakably qualifies it as a Machine Girl album.
What if, somehow, scientists discovered a way for us to regain youth? What if suddenly, we had the means to not just feel younger, but actually become a younger version of ourselves again? Should we have this ability? And is there a cost to chasing this societal ideal of the perfect (read: young) woman?
A new take on the love story ended prematurely by illness, We Live in Time gives us a realistic and bittersweet view of what it means to love without regrets. Its genuine interactions and nonlinear plot create a relationship that’s beautiful because of the characters’ efforts toward each other, rather than their tragic premise.
On Oct. 4, Netflix released The Platform 2 which is a Spanish dystopian thriller that reimagines the prison system as a vertical self-management center. A second installment to The Platform universe, the movie begins with two cellmates Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian) and Perempuán (Milena Smit) who wake up on level 24 of the prison.
Hello and welcome! It’s time for another week of new media. Whether you’re on the lookout for inspiration, entertainment or both, the Arts & Entertainment section is here with our list of fresh recommendations.
The rollout for Chromakopia — a series of dystopian, auteurist videos set to abrasive musical snippets — felt like deceptive advertising...There is a disconnect between the album’s industrially-tinged, barren aesthetic framing and its actual lyrical themes. On first listen, I found myself questioning: Why the mask, the military-inspired imagery and the shipping containers?
For their Fall 2024 show, Hopkins’ longest-standing theater company, The Barnstormers, performed one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays, the romantic comedy Twelfth Night. I made sure to attend their first performance on Oct. 24, which had a sparse crowd — likely due to it being on a Thursday — but an energetic atmosphere.
In an interview with The News-Letter, Judah Akers, lead singer of indie folk band Judah & the Lion, says that they make music, “for people… to point people to hope.” Their newest album, The Process, is a journey through the five stages of grief.
On Oct. 13 from 2—4 p.m., four faculty filmmakers from the Film and Media Studies department screened their work... The event highlighted the presenters’ labors of love, with a program that featured the following works: unravelling by Susan Leslie Mann and John Bright Mann, Manger by Jimmy Joe Roche, Turf Valley by Adam Rodgers and Tom Ventimiglia, and I’m Not Your Monster by Karen Yasinsky.
“It’s like standing in a power station on acid,” said Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, of his landmark album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Thirty years later, its beautiful yet unsettling dreamlike soundscapes remain as captivating as ever, and earlier this month the album returned with an expanded anniversary edition.
Whether your Halloweekend just passed, or for some reason you’re celebrating in November (weird choice), there are plenty of new releases and events which will soothe your soul — perhaps enough to reinhabit your body.
Lizzy McAlpine’s most recent release, Older (and Wiser) won me over before I even listened to it. I cannot emphasize how much I love a good — or bad — pun, and deluxe albums with witty titles are my guilty pleasures (see: guts (spilled) by Olivia Rodrigo and Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale by Tyler, the Creator).
Poet Megan Pinto held an event at local cafe Bird in Hand to present her debut poetry collection, Saints of Little Faith on Sunday, Oct. 6. Alongside Pinto, Samuel Cheney, Jimin Seo and Jess Yuan presented their work. After the attendees had settled into their seats inside of the atmospheric bookstore, the poets were introduced and the event began.
The Hopkins Symphony Orchestra (HSO) delivered an expert performance on the evening of Oct. 5 in the Shriver Hall auditorium. The orchestra opened with William Grant Still’s Serenade before shifting to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and ending with Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, or From the New World.
Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, the Sept. 24 addition to her oeuvre, is a novel chronicling the tumultuous relationship between the Dublin-based 22-year-old competitive chess player Ivan Koubek and his 32-year-old barrister brother Peter after the death of their father. Or, more suitably, Intermezzo is a novel chronicling the men’s relationship with women. What could have been a novel interrogating a variety of worthy themes — the function of grief and trauma in love, the explosive or inopportune nature of fate or the destructiveness of family — is instead a novel that reads like a pubescent teenage boy preoccupied with sex.
