Month: April 2014


Forgotten Heroine — The Story of Newport’s Ida Lewis

In the pantheon of great American heroes from the 19th century, the vast majority of them are men. I mean, who can argue with the accomplishments of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark (i.e., Lewis & Clark), Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Sam Houston, and everyone’s favorite, President Abraham Lincoln? However, there is a […]

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Album of the Week: Mean Creek’s Local Losers

It can be a gamble when a band tweaks their sound, especially when everything they’ve done beforehand is simply brilliant. Enter Boston’s Mean Creek, starting out with multidimensional bluesy Bruce Springsteen meets The Replacements alternative rock and progressing into an angsty, emphatic punk monster. Mean Creek keeps it highly amplified from the first track to […]

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Cloud 9: “We Are Not In This Country To Enjoy Ourselves”

Decades before playwright Caryl Churchill in her dotage earned a notorious reputation as arguably the most virulent anti-Semite active in mainstream British theater, her plays, despite the heavy baggage of Marxist Brechtian dialectical conventions, were plausibly entertaining. Indeed, like “Saturday Night Live,” her best and funniest work was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, […]

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