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Summers in Vermont boast an embarrassment of riches chief among them the idyllic grounds of Shelburne Museum. Set impossibly close to Route 7, this rolling green Mecca is a wonder of the northern world. Miles of groomed pasture stretch out to a stunning wooded horizon, where five times this season, local sponsors will land a mother ship of marquee music. And who better to pilot its inaugural, hazy June opening than goodwill emissaries Michael Franti and Spearhead?... Read more

(Self-released, CD)

When I was 9 years old, I was playing my first year of Little League baseball. I finished the season with exactly zero hits and considerably more dropped balls than caught ones out in right field. That’s a summer of my youth I’ll never get back. So it is with no small degree of jealousy that I report 9-year-old Aidan Patterson Deutsch is making far better use of his childhood than I did.... Read more

(GTD Entertainment, CD)

Burnt MD and Tha Professor’s self-titled album opens in cinematic style, with the orchestral majesty of the Universal Pictures theme song. It’s an appropriate first gesture, as the Vermont hip-hop duo then takes us on a journey that transcends the mere aural. Like any epic movie or hip-hop album there’s an award-worthy supporting cast, high-profile cameos and a smart script that suggests Webster’s dictionary was close at hand when these two were growing up.... Read more

An amazing example of Earth Art blossomed in 2001 along a mile of Route 4 west of Rutland, and the piece was brilliant in both senses of the word. Montpelier artist Alisa Dworsky directed the placement of 1000 blue and green reflectors in geometric patterns beside the highway; they shimmered in the headlights of passing cars after nightfall. The ingenious piece was entitled “Luminous Fields, Longitude in Time.”... Read more

Once in a blue moon, a G-rated animation comes along that appeals more to adults than to kids. Pixar’s WALL-E could be one of those exceptions to the rule. True, it features silent-film-inspired slapstick, which knows no target age, and a really cute robot. But to feel the sadness at the core of the movie, it helps to be old enough to remember the heroine of sex, lies and videotape telling her therapist that she obsesses over the fate of the world’s garbage.... Read more

Imagination, patience and an appreciation of the unfamiliar will come in handy for American audiences fortunate enough to find themselves confronted with the latest creation from Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Imagine, first of all, a world in which motion pictures are commissioned by great museums rather than green-lighted by studio bean counters. It sounds like something that could happen only on another planet or in a work of utopian fantasy, but this is, in fact, how Flight of the Red Balloon came to be made.... Read more

If the best way to combat speech you find offensive is with more speech, the same goes for art. Last fall, a South End Art Hop talk occasioned by the display of Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann‘s mural “Independence Paintings” drew protests from people disturbed by the work’s visual analogy between Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and Palestinians under Israeli authority.... Read more

It’s a tale with a happy beginning, a troubled middle, and knock wood - a happy ending.... Read more

Oscar Wilde’s wit is like icicles in the midday winter sun: glittering, dripping and slightly dangerous. The Irish playwright’s bons mots and barbs sparkle as sharply today as they did during his creative apogee in the early 1890s, when his plays were the toast of the London stage. Failure to smile while watching or reading Wilde may indicate a Botox overdose.... Read more

Conventional wisdom suggests that when a person loses the ability to use one sense, the other senses compensate by becoming sharper. Not so in The Nose, writer-director Aaron Masi’s original stage adaption of 19th-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same title. When a gentleman’s nose goes missing in this satirical tale, total nonsense ensues.... Read more