Arts: Page 259

Stuff Your Ears

Global sounds from Venezuela to France round out the month

Music

Most touring chamber-music ensembles stick closely to the tried (or is that tired?) and true 19th- and early 20th-century Central European repertoire. Not the Dalí Quartet. Starting out in Venezuela’s famous El Sistema music training program, which also produced L.A. Philharmonic music director Gustavo “The Dude” Dudamel, the members of Dalí Quartet went on to study at major American conservatories.  Continue reading →

A Child’s Christmas Memory

Eugene actor celebrates 31 years of performing A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Performing Arts

Eugene actor David Stuart Bull has been performing Dylan Thomas’ timeless story A Child’s Christmas in Wales for so long, people have forgotten exactly how long it’s been.  Ib Hamide, owner of Café Soriah where Bull performs the piece, says 27 or 28 years. Bull says it’s been more than 30. “This will be, by my count, the 31st year,” Bull claims.  What’s not debatable is that his annual performance of the piece is a local tradition. Continue reading →

Bedtime Stories

Art, truth and murder collide in LCC’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Theater

On the surface, Irish author Martin McDonagh’s plays are foul, transgressive affairs, full of piss and vinegar and erect middle fingers. In the tradition of his literary forbears Swift, Joyce and Beckett, McDonagh is a relentlessly physical writer given to depicting all manner of human grotesquery — violence, perversion, degradation, deformity and compulsive cussing of the worst kind. Continue reading →

The Spectre of Mediocrity

Film

James Bond is a real son-of-a-bitch. Emotionally withdrawn and given to bouts of depression, the agent known as 007 is a classic anti-hero — sadistic, taciturn and misanthropic, he is an assassin driven by the icy requisites of duty but given to the thrill of stepping outside the lines when he smells a rat within his own intelligence organization. Continue reading →