With Thanksgiving not far behind in the rear view mirror, Heretic is a movie that may feel familiar to many viewers — even if you aren’t one of two young Mormon girls spreading the Word to an older atheist man who traps you in his house, subjecting you to Saw-like games.
The Johns Hopkins Taskforce on the Arts is a group composed of 15 people with members ranging from faculty to students with an interest in the arts across the University's schools and programs. These different representatives are serving to help the Taskforce on the Arts understand what opportunities there are and what improvements could be made across the various arts programs and schools.
SLAM’s 16th Annual Benefit & Showcase gathered folks from Hopkins and Baltimore in Shriver Hall on the evening of Nov. 16 for a night filled with high-energy performances and stylish choreography. The event featured 12 student-led groups, from Hopkins, neighboring universities or the DMV area, and showcased each one’s passion for urban dance and free expression.
Is a text supposed to die? This is the question that probed my mind as I exited the Merrick Barn, where I attended the Johns Hopkins Theatre’s recent production of Christopher Chen’s Passage: a variation on E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. Despite having never read A Passage to India, my skeletal understanding of the novel’s plot is that it’s about the tension between Britain and India during the former’s colonial rule over the latter. This helped me identify the chief difference between Passage and its muse. The play never mentions “Britain” or “India”; instead, the places are named Country X and Country Y (with the occasional arbitrary allusion to Country Z).
In this revolving door of shifting relevancy and style biting, SahBabii has kept a steady popularity without changing himself completely. He is still trap’s most interesting side character: an amphibian-voiced crooner with a fixation on various animals and an insatiable freakiness only matched by Kevin Gates.
Rock, pop, metal, punk — all these and more were on show last week from Hopkins and Peabody’s student bands. Harnessing the power of live music to raise money, two fraternities threw a Battle of the Bands event and donated the proceeds to charity.
Bryson Tiller: a name synonymous with R&B, known for his hits such as “Don’t,” “Exchange” and “Whatever She Wants.” Tiller has nearly 22 million monthly listeners on Spotify, three Grammy Award nominations, multiple Billboard Music Award wins; and for only $15, any Hopkins student could see him up close during a campus concert on Nov. 9 hosted by Student Affairs.
Sharp angles. Bare sides. Flat features. Only lines. Am I talking about Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or about Elon Musk’s relatively new Cybertruck? If you weren’t sure either, maybe you’ve already made the connection that the Cybertruck is our modern version of cubist artwork. We’ve moved away from the canvas and oil paints and ventured into the world of stainless steel and armor glass.
The Peabody Concert Orchestra (PCO) displayed an exceptional performance on Saturday, Nov. 9 in the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. The excitement in the packed hall could be felt, especially as Dean of the Peabody Institute Fred Bronstein dedicated the opening of the annual PCO in memory of Steven Muller — former president of the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital — who passed away in 2013. The program notes describes him as — “a visionary leader who reshaped and reinvigorated JHU during his long tenure as president.”
Do you feel winter on its way yet? The Arts & Entertainment section is here with another list of media to make your next week a little more colorful. This week’s picks include a new book by Haruki Murakami, an alternative album, a fresh take on classical music, two blockbusters and a documentary.
If you could have everything you could ever dream of, you would probably grasp tightly onto this new reality. In Sean Baker’s Anora, a sex worker who goes by Ani becomes roped into a life of extravagance and grandeur after impulsively marrying the son of a Russian oligarch.
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.
