Crimson staff writer
Alexander E. Traub
Latest Content
Top 5 Best Fictional Places for Pacing
You’re a college student writing a paper, you’re besieged by arguments about social theory, you have to walk back and forth messing up your hair. Where do you wish you were?
Sage of Innocence
Getting to the truth of Whit Stillman's films is necessary to understanding some of the best contemporary films and to saving him from a critical mischaracterization.
Belichick as Artist in Pats’ Defeat
The gutsy decision of Patriots Coach Bill Belichick to let the Giants score a touchdown at the end of the Super Bowl should be analyzed in artistic terms.
Top 5 Locations to Be Occupied
How many meaningful conversations have you had at Occupy rallies?
Incandescent ‘Dukla’ Rebuilds the Novel from the Ground Up
Through a series of prose-poetic portraits and landscapes of Dukla, a small town in Poland, Stasiuk demonstrates how the everyday can be interwoven with the eternal.
That Kind of Symbol
For a generation that had known nothing but 1990s peace and prosperity, 9/11 has come to represent, in one way at least, a loss of innocence. The very real emotion that led to the proliferation of American flags has by and large faded. All such feelings do.
Preview: Parade
In the hammy form of a musical and under the cheery title “Parade” lies the dark true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man convicted in a show trial of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913 Georgia.
A La Carte
Creative maps at Harvard shed light on the intrinsic subjectivity and artistry of the cartographer.
‘Witmark Demos’ a Distillation of the Folk Aesthetic
“The Witmark Demos” may be the best distillation yet of this musical eloquence, as its 47 tracks show the troubadour’s gifts for expressing folk’s major emotional, narrative, and characterological themes.
Roth’s ‘Nemesis’ Explores the Ideals of Boyhood
Childhood may always be a time for epic battles of heroism; for fights between cops and robbers, between superheroes and supervillains, between best friends and playground bullies.
Late Portuguese Author José Saramago’s ‘Elephant’ Falls Flat
The most compelling aspects of “The Elephant’s Journey” do not come from the cultural analysis for which Saramago is famous, but rather from a self-referential exploration of the form of the novel.
Rufus Wainwright
But if “All Days Are Nights” is an unalterable step towards a kind of maturity, it is also a regrettable one.
Gorillaz
For Gorillaz to express the plasticity of this world in conventional rap would be disingenuous, and their turn from this language toward a less human and electronic musicality represents a broader investment in a synthetic experience.
The Dutiful DJ
Student DJs across campus emphasize the intense, empathic relationship that develops between themselves and an elated (or simply drunk) audience.
A 'Frame by Frame' History
“Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive,” said Walt Disney of the cinematographic field he helped pioneer. Since Disney popularized animation however, its creative potential has been largely underestimated and the genre has often been relegated to essentially childish themes.
