“Westworld” — HBO’s ambitious new effort to update their drama slate — is a flawed, but exciting new hit series that grapples with questions about human nature, consciousness and scientific progress.
This past weekend, the Amherst College Green Room performed Shakespeare’s classic “Romeo and Juliet,” with a twist. The cast traveled with the audience across campus to perform several scenes in different locations. The audience was treated to a massive Capulet vs. Montague brawl on the stairs of Frost Library, attended the Capulet ball and watched the iconic balcony scene in the Greenway courtyard, witnessed Mercutio and Tybalt’s deaths on the first-year quad and bore witness to the tragic final scene in front of the Mead.
Each genre of music elicits a unique response in the body language of a listener, from head-banging, to fist-pumping, to pogo-hopping, even moshing. The term “shoegazing”, although named for its guitarists with perpetually bent necks to help them see their frequently used pedals, can be just as easily connected to the response of many audience members nodding along to the undulating music. Canadian shoegazing band, Living Hour, held such a spell over their captivated audience Friday night in the basement of Greenway A.
On Sept. 6 FX premiered the pilot of Donald Glover’s new series, “Atlanta.” Glover, who has done everything from writing for Emmy-winning TV shows like “30 Rock,” to releasing critically-acclaimed rap albums under the moniker Childish Gambino, takes on the roles of creator, executive-producer, writer and lead actor in this comedy-drama series. The show is situated in Atlanta, where Glover’s character, Earn, is homeless and in search of a steady paycheck in order to support his daughter, whom he had with his best friend and on-and-off landlord, Van.
The Rotherwas Room in the Mead Art Museum is over 400 years old. According to the Mead, the intricate wood panels that constitute the room have meandered from an English castle to a New York City gallery to Amherst over the last few centuries. The panels were commissioned to be crafted in the early 1600s by English knight Sir Roger Bodenham, were moved to a Fifth Avenue showroom three hundred years later and were eventually auctioned to Amherst alum Herbert Lee Pratt (half-brother of Charles Pratt) and subsequently gifted to the College in 1944.
Once upon a time, classical music was considered cutting edge, a place for bold and brash experimentation. This past Saturday, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra brought one of those experiments to life with massive success. In a welcome concert for the class of 2020, the Symphony performed Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony #9, “From the New World” in E minor.
“Train to Busan” is a zombie film that yet again explores our collective anxiety that, just maybe, the person sitting next to you who looks, smells and sounds nothing out of the ordinary may succumb to the universal violent impulse to bite your face off. And like many of its more socially conscious kin, it additionally wonders whether tearing off someone’s face is the preeminent moral standard to which we want to hold our species accountable.
