Category: Arts & Humanities

Does jazz count? Not if youâ??re a college student who wants to graduate as a music major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When Donna Silver took a new job as secretary of the academic staff at UW-Madison, the first thing she did was transform it.

“This office was a very dreary, dark, not-welcoming place,” Silver said.

With the help of Helen Klebesadel, director of the UW System Womenâ??s Studies Consortium and a local watercolor painter, Silver installed track lighting, hooks and nine of Klebesadelâ??s richly textured paintings.

The Madison Trust for Historic Preservation welcomes Whitney Gould, a Madison native and former urban landscape writer and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as the featured speaker at the annual awards presentation. Being honored are the Barbara Hochberg Center for Jewish Student Life, 611 Langdon St.; and the Washburn Observatory on Observatory Drive on the UW-Madison campus, built in 1878

Yo, check this out. A workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this summer instructs teachers and others how to use hip hop in the classroom.

Troubled waters arenâ??t being bridged for local Simon & Garfunkel fans.

After announcing Thursday that a May 9 concert by the duo had to be postponed to July 14 due to a vocal strain by Art Garfunkel, the venue is now switching from the Kohl Center to the Coliseum. The topper? The tickets for the Kohl Center canâ??t be used at the Coliseum, and ticket holders must get refunds from the Kohl Center and then purchase tickets at the Coliseum.

Simon & Garfunkel have rescheduled their entire spring tour, including a May 9 stop at the Kohl Center, the duoâ??s website announced Thursday morning.

Last Sunday the film historian David Bordwell watched movies from Spain, Denmark and Romania at the Wisconsin Film Festival here in Madison, where he has lived if rarely stayed still for four decades. He had just returned from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, after which he drove some 400 miles (and back) from Madison to Bloomington, Ind., to deliver a lecture.

“Lost” writer and producer Adam Horowitz knows exactly what he wants to do after the long-running ABC show wraps up its last episode on May 23.

“After the last episode, I want to go to a bar and have all the â??Lostâ?? fans come up and be able to say â??Yep, thatâ??s what happened,â??” he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “Thereâ??s nothing to hold back. You just saw it!”

For the showâ??s entire six-year run, Horowitz and his writing and producing partner Edward Kitsis, both UW-Madison graduates, had to keep their lips zipped about all the secrets they knew about on the show.

“Donâ??t push me,” cautions Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “I am an American on the edge … and Iâ??m trying.”

Joseph takes on murky questions of race, identity, history and art in “the break/s”, a 90-minute genre-busting show that played the Wisconsin Union Theater on Saturday night. The event capped two weeks of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiativesâ?? Line Breaks Festival, which Joseph helped found three years ago.

For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elementsâ??what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will establish a center for Yiddish culture, to be directed by Henry Sapoznik, an expert on klezmer music and Yiddish and American popular culture. The Mayrent Insitute of Yiddish Culture will be funded by a $1 million endowment from Sherry Mayrent and Carol Masters via the Corners Fund for Traditional Cultures, a donor advised fund of Bostonâ??s Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

The Wisconsin Film Festival has “summarily rejected” Christopher Ewingâ??s and Jacob Strunkâ??s films for years, as Strunk put it. This year they finally got in: Ewingâ??s “Thru” and Strunkâ??s “This Is the Place” screened as part of a series of five shorts Friday night at the Cinematheque.

Both filmmakers have local connections (Ewing graduated from UW-Madison, Strunk grew up in Oconomowoc) and live in Los Angeles doing film-related work and making shorts on the side.

â??Bel canto” might be nicknamed “opera for divas.” The Italian phrase means “beautiful singing,” and itâ??s designed to show off the best trills, frills and ornamentations a singer can produce.

“It would not be possible to do this opera if it were not for the extraordinary singers that will be performing in it,” said William Farlow, director of University Opera.

“Paddle to Seattle” is one of those movies that is summed up neatly by its title. Itâ??s about two guys who, well, paddle to Seattle. In 2008, J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas built their own kayaks and paddled 1,300 miles from Alaska to Seattle along the Pacific shoreline, filming along the way.

The feature-length documentary, edited by UW-Madison graduate Ben Gottfried, screened Sunday afternoon to an enthusiastic crowd in the Wisconsin Union Theater as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.

The stateâ??s largest film festival continues in Madison with one movie thatâ??s generating quite a buzz. Wisconsin Film Festival Director Meg Hamel was surprised when the film â??Svetlana about Svetlanaâ? made so much news. The documentary highlights Joseph Stalinâ??s reclusive daughter, who many area people had already known is a badger state resident.

Even the most diehard cinephile is only going to see a fraction of the 192 films that are playing at this yearâ??s Wisconsin Film Festival, which runs Wednesday, April 14, through Sunday, Spril 18, at several downtown and campus venues, including the Orpheum Theatre, Wisconsin Union Theater and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

All 192 movies â?? thatâ??s a lot of to choose from, and somewhere in that massive schedule at wifilmfest.org is something for everybody.

Big fun was had by all at the big band dance party on April 7 at Monona Terrace, with the UW-Madison Jazz Orchestra swinging through the sweet sounds of Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, music that first revved the engines of the orchestra membersâ?? grandparents and continues to keep a stomp in the Savoy step of be-boppers today.

The free event was part of the Tunes at Monona Terrace series, which features local musicians and dancers from a wide spectrum of sounds and styles.

Sometimes, itâ??s difficult to keep a solid grasp on reality. With the many self-conscious, self-indulgent neuroses we as humans possess, it is amazing we can manage to walk down the street without consuming ourselves in overwhelming feelings of guilt, fear, doubt, love and anxiety. But this is life. As the movie says: â??This is just something to get through, thatâ??s all.â? And this is the simple truth of Christopher Ewingâ??s short film â??THRU,â? screening Friday at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

The reclusive daughter of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was interviewed in Wisconsin by an independent filmmaker, some two decades after she spoke with a WKOW 27 news reporter. The film, “Svetlana About Svetlana,” is scheduled to be screened this weekend during the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison.

While Madison has certainly carved its initials deep into the grunge tree, it has never been acknowledged as a booming hip-hop community. However, in recent years, some at UW-Madison have been working tirelessly to change thatâ??whether by bringing in the iconic Chuck D for the Hip Hop As A Movement Week conference in 2008 or throwing a bad-ass international break-dancing competition called Breakinâ?? The Law.

There are probably a lot of 70-year-old men who owe Bert I. Gordon a big debt of gratitude.

Back in the 1950s, when those guys were teenagers at the drive-in movies, giant bald men (“The Amazing Colossal Man”), giant spiders (“Earth Vs. The Spider”) or giant grasshoppers (“The Beginning of the End”) rampaged across the screen in one of Gordonâ??s monster movies, Those guys probably got some serious cuddle action from their dates.

Itâ??s unlikely that theyâ??ll reveal any substantial spoilers about how the epic television series “Lost” will end (in only five more episodes!).

When “Lost” co-writers and executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis visit UW-Madison next Wednesday, theyâ??ll more likely share how they went from UW-Madison students to major players in show business.

None of this might have happened if a Madison woman named Jane Pawasarat hadnâ??t had an extra ticket to a documentary at the Wisconsin Film Festival seven years ago. The film was “Spellbound,” which followed eight young spellers as they prepared for and competed in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

Pawasarat called a friend – Jeff Kirsch, who directs the independent learning program in Spanish and Portuguese at the UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies – and asked if he wanted to go.

When artist Beth Cavener Stichter visited the Chazen Museum of Art this month to introduce her sculpture, installed on the fourth floor of the museum, the crowd was tiny. But museum officials anticipate the installation â?? a provocative rendering of two aroused male goats in an intimate embrace â?? may start to attract more attention.

Museum director Russell Panczenko has agreed to conceal the bottom half of the sculpture when student groups visit.

MADISON, Wis. — A new piece of artwork on display at a museum in Madison is raising some eyebrows. Some say the piece has crossed a fine line between artistic expression and being offensive, but officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s Chazen Museum of Art said it is a beautiful work expressing human emotion.

This year Jacqueline Houtman turned 50, published her first novel and embraced her inner geek. â??The Reinvention of Edison Thomas,” targeted at readers age 8 and older, was written by Houtman, a professional science writer who earned her doctorate in medical microbiology and immunology in 1996.

French spies. A magic sword. Yodeling lesbian twins from New Zealand. A giant monster terrorizing South Korea. And, perhaps most bizarrely of all, Tom Cruise. Theyâ??re all part of the schedule for the 11th annual Wisconsin Film Festival, which is posted online Thursday at wifilmfest.org.

The schedule features 139 ticketed events, including narrative films, short films, documentaries, foreign films, and restored prints of classic films. This yearâ??s festival runs five days instead of the traditional four, April 14 to 18.

For film junkies, today is like Dec. 23, two days before Christmas. On Thursday, the full schedule for the 11th Annual Wisconsin Film Festival, which runs April 14-18, will be released at wifilmfest.org and in this weekâ??s Isthmus. Itâ??s a cinematic feeding frenzy, because tickets go on sale this Saturday, leaving moviegoers just 48 hours or so to pore over the list of titles and plan out which movies they want to get tickets for.

Madison audiences have been able to keep tabs on the growing Romanian New Wave through the free Romanian Film Festival. This springâ??s festival, which takes place Thursday through Saturday at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, is no exception, showing that Romanian film is here to stay.

The series is funded by the Romanian Cultural Institute and facilitated by UW-Madisonâ??s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia.

Danielle Trussoni, a Wisconsin-born author and 1996 graduate of UW-Madison, has crafted an engrossing fiction debut in “Angelology,” a novel where the battle between good and evil has been waged for millennia.

Sitting in his hostâ??s living room under a colorful piece of artwork depicting a man and a woman comfortably sharing space, Jordan Rosenblum explained to interviewer Nancy Brown and an audience of 35 how Judaism was like tofu.

Rosenblum was speaking Sunday morning in Brownâ??s Palm Beach home ahead of the upcoming Passover holiday.His talk was an opportunity to introduce Palm Beach residents to the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rosenblum is the Belzer Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the university.

Memoirist Danielle Trussoniâ??s gorgeous writing, fantastical imagination and familiarity with biblical and mythological texts are on splendid display in “Angelology,” her first novel – an ambitious adventure story complete with epic battles between good and evil, a decades-long search for a life-extending treasure, and social commentary about class conflicts. Trussoni majoed in English and history at UW-Madison.

Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” will be part of a talk and panel discussion at the Health Sciences Learning Center, near UW Hospital.

UW-Madison students Quincy Harrison and Cliff Grefe were profiled in USA Today last December for a song they wrote in the basement of their Langdon Street fraternity house.

Midway through Februaryâ??s Black History Month, the UW-Madison Health Sciences Learning Center opened “Passed but still Present: Icons of Black History,” a show presenting artist Stanley Sallayâ??s images of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and Bob Marley.

…in 2006, an experience in the UW-Madison Odyssey Project, a free humanities course for adults facing economic barriers to higher education, led him to take up drawing again.

How do I poison thee? Let me count the ways: arsenic, mercury, strychnine, chloroform, wood alcohol and carbon monoxide. These were just a few of the options available to would-be murderers whose crimes were likely to go unpunished less than a century ago because of bumbling coroners and shoddy methods of chemical detection.