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Film Review | God Makes An Independent Film
ReligionDispatches.com
When an inexperienced Pentecostal pastor gets called by God to make a $50 million epic science-fiction film, is he a visionary, a prophet, or just another box office grifter? A new documentary tells the tale. (more)
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Book Review | You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antler
Bitch Magazine
In You Never Call! You Never Write! Joyce Antler traces the origins and history of the Jewish mother from her arrival in New York’s Yiddish theaters and early American cinema to her present-day manifestations in the standup routines and television shows where she’s become a regular player. Along the way, Antler tells the story of Jewish acculturation and assimilation in modern America, as well as changing notions of motherhood in American feminist discourse. (more)
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Film Review | Colma: The Musical
KQED
Checking out the most recent indie film or a new play can be an uncomfortable experience, a little bit like watching a high-wire act at the circus. Will the rope-walker make it across? Will s/he stumble? Will we laugh or shrink in our seats when s/he hits the ground with an ugly thud? (more)
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Art Review | Hidden Histories
KQED
“All right. I’m walking south on Bryant, towards 19th again. Where is this place?”
My friend was calling a second time. She’d given up and had the cab drop her off up the street. Camouflaged by graffiti and vegetation, smack-dab in the middle of Bryant Street, Cell Space makes a fitting venue for Hidden Histories, a multifaceted, collaborative series of projects exploring the familiar but obscure in “San Francisco’s Eastern landscape.”(more)
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Music Review | The Monsters of Accordion at 21 Grand
KQED
There’s no lack of love for the accordion. From lilting French ditties to rowdy German polka, sober klezmer cryalongs to obstreperous mariachi blowouts — Italian jingles, Dutch clog stomps, cajun zydeco, Scottish ceilidhs, from the circus to the chapel, the accordion has always had a home among the much of the world’s folk music and tradition, seeming to define — musically, at least — the peculiar features unique to each culture. Part-piano, part-synthesizer, part-arachnid, the accordion may be one of the most versatile musicmakers around. In its relatively short history of just under two centuries, it has managed to define an impressive amount of styles and inspired a huge range of awkward dance moves.(more)
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Theater Review | Word for Word: Angel Face
KQED
As soon as the lights go down and the shadows come out, it’s clear that Word For Word’s adaptation of “Angel Face” intends to be loyal to the dark, pulpy genre its author helped to create.(more)
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Art Review | Jeannene Przyblyski: Comings and Goings
KQED
Time travel is a tricky business. The bane of scientists, artists and eccentrics for centuries, it’s one of those theories that you just can’t disprove. Yet, once you start trying to pry apart history’s past from its present and future, you have pretty good odds of becoming unglued. Just ask anyone who’s tried.(more)
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Book Review | Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians for My Parents
Tikkun Magazine
Most of us have become accustomed to seeing life in the middle east as a series of images, a parade of olive-clothed soldiers clutching M-16s and kaftan-clad children with stones, of mutilated architecture and crowd-surfing coffins. The images are as ubiquitous as they are sensational, and they usually serve to reduce the complexity of the middle east to a series of stereotypes: Palestinian children staring down a Abrams tank; Israeli civilians confronting the charred remains of a public bus. The images of course, follow logically from the conventional discourse surrounding Israeli-Palestinian politics, in which one side is portrayed as unquestionably Good, the other, irrevocably Evil. In this climate of visual and verbal oversimplification that a new genre of graphic novel has taken root recently. Its main arsenal, like that of Speigelman’s Maus, consists of a subjective approach, grand understatement, and a certain ironic charm. (more)