The limitations of human perception and human existence, and the longing to extend both, are at the center of the Block Museum’s latest exhibit, “The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto.”
Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky
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Review: You People
The film is much more interested in social embarrassment cringe and gags than it is in any sort of close examination of how racism affects interracial couples.
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Review: Unicorn Wars
The wilfully mean-spirited desecration feels at points like wallowing in unpleasantness for its own sake. But the film has a larger point than adolescent snickering.
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Review: The Seven Faces of Jane
For the most part, despite its adventurous structure, The Seven Faces of Jane shows us features we’ve seen before.
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Norwegian electronicist Deathprod embraces a more minimal minimalism on Compositions
Norwegian artist Helge Sten, who makes music as Deathprod, trades not in massive dynamic shifts but in uniformly gray ambient soundscapes. He typically uses a variegated array of homemade electronics, samplers, out-of-date processors, and other audio detritus that echo, hiss, and throb like futuristic boilers arduously coming online while retro steampunk conglomerations cough and doppler […]
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Review: The Pale Blue Eye
The center of the film is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky.
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Gomorra trample all beneath their metal assault
As soon as you see the ridiculous “Iron Maiden meets fantasy novel with skulls” cover art for Dealer of Souls (Noble Demon) and hear the demi-classical opening, you know what Gomorra have to offer. And these German metalheads do not disappoint. Guitarists Damir Eskic and Dominic Blum blast out adrenaline-pumping, assault-by-lightning thrash riffs, while drummer […]
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Nina Hagen’s pop-punk politics age Into awesomeness on the new Unity
Some aging rock legends make music that feels like a shadow of the early work that cemented their fame. Not Nina Hagen, though. On Unity (Grönland), her first album since 2011, the German pop-punk icon unleashes a blast of feral camp that sounds if anything more Hagen than ever. Her distinctive theatrical voice has roughened […]
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Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have the power to shock that it once did, but in Clermont-Tonnerre’s hands it retains both romantic and social resonance.
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The Soft Moon continues to hammer out industrial darkwave misery
“I’m starting to turn into someone else . . . again,” moans Luis Vasquez on “Monster,” from his latest album as the Soft Moon, Exister (Sacred Bones). It’s true that Vasquez, who’d been holed up in Berlin during the pandemic, moved to Joshua Tree to record this effort. But whatever else might’ve changed about him, […]
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Comic art rapper Open Mike Eagle keeps on fighting
Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based rapper Open Mike Eagle is a seemingly inexhaustible font of laugh-out-loud one-liners, and he delivers as always on his latest album, Component System With the Auto Reverse (on his own Auto Reverse label). You need to be careful drinking anything while listening to it, lest uncomfortable snorking ensue when the rapper gets […]
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The Reader’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2022
The term “world music” has never been adequate to the task we’ve set it—even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of the world. And if that listener is in the United States, our country’s global hegemony in popular music colors the term’s meaning too. Americans don’t […]
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Santigold is still headed toward a new world on Spirituals
When Santigold emerged in the late 2000s, her hip alterna-pop seemed to waltz out of left field, incorporating elements of every genre she could put her hands on: punk, hip-hop, new wave, dub, and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. More than a decade later, it’s clear to see how her genre-smashing music paved the way […]
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Look Both Ways
Wanuri Kahiu’s Look Both Ways in other contexts might simply be a fairly inoffensive feel-good romance riff. As it is, though, the film’s lack of courage is painful and unforgivable.
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Kehlani sails into perfect sun-dappled R&B
Kehlani’s second album, 2020’s It Was Good Until It Wasn’t (Atlantic), features the brooding, moody, left-of-center R&B that’s become their signature. The singer’s new LP, Blue Water Road (released this spring on Atlantic), is still left-of-center, but its musical palette is significantly lighter and more eclectic, with tinges of folk and orchestral pop. To that […]