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(09/15/15 3:53am)
The world around us would be even more bleak without the presence and occurrence of rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and involuntary actions, such as laughter. But why? Laughter does not necessarily mean that you’re happy, or even content. Perhaps that’s exactly why. Even in the deep pit of absolute misery, we can laugh with reckless abandon. We have such an ability to laugh, even if we may not always be cognizant of its existence. Some of the best laughs I’ve had have been in moments when life has pummeled me black and blue into a bloody mess of despair. That’s when you sometimes need to laugh the hardest to acknowledge that nothing at the end of the day seems quite so apocalyptic if you can simply laugh at it.
(09/10/15 6:45am)
What does it mean to be a grown-up? Be it the 18-year-old incoming freshman or the 22-year-old senior at the cusp of graduation, adulthood and the pressure to grow up hovers above both. But do any one of us even know what it means to be a grown-up? I’ve spoken to people in their late twenties and almost thirties who scoff when referred to as a grown-up. So clearly, it isn’t the state of holding a professional full-time job, living by yourself in an apartment or seriously seeing someone. But what is it then? We’re told that turning into the milestone of our legal age and entering college puts us into the world of those that have grown up at some level. We’re also told that graduating college and entering what is sadly called the real world is the mark of adulthood. And yet we neither feel nor think of ourselves as grown-ups.
(04/30/15 2:17am)
“Mamma Mia” may just be theater’s ultimate feel-good tale of love conquering all. Written by Catherine Johnson back in 1999 to the music of ABBA, 54 million people have seen the musical, which has earned over 3 billion dollars. Having grown up listening to those songs either through my parents or my school’s music teacher, and having heard the story of it since before Amanda Seyfried and Meryl Streep’s movie, it was truly a remarkable pleasure finally watching it in theater Tuesday at the Overture Center.
(04/29/15 4:37am)
Why do people go to concerts? It seems like a superfluous question considering the answer should be quite obvious. Live music holds a certain appeal. What’s more, seeing an artist you know perform a song that you remember intimately right in front of you is an unrivaled experience. But this holds true for all genres of music. Some concerts, though, are more than just the sum of the music the artist will put on a show for. Some attract the crowd because the artist is also the performer. Some concerts are frequented because you want to feel the music. You might hope that you get such a concert from most dance music artists, but with Kiesza, you go in knowing that. And that alone is a gift by itself.
(04/28/15 4:40am)
Figaro figaro figaro figaro… Figaro. I believe most of us are familiar with Gioachino Rossini’s Figaro either from a movie at some point or at the very least from Bugs Bunny’s comic version of it. When I first heard it, I do not remember for the life of me but I have remembered Figaro since then. I’ve remembered it without knowing who wrote it or what opera it was from. All I knew was that I remembered it perfectly, the melody and the words.
(04/20/15 2:38am)
Most Badgers have probably seen the UW Varsity Band play at some point, either at a football game, pep rally, basketball game or just another random sporting event. These are the Badgers that feel an affinity—love, even—for the school like no other, because they’re at these events cheering our teams on with the band. Seeing the band at games and other events has never been about them though: the band is there to make it more fun, to help us cheer that much harder for our teams. However it was only this past weekend when I realized that a true Badger hasn’t experienced the varsity band until you’ve seen them at their annual concert.
(04/20/15 2:28am)
“Hideaway” is an earworm, that song that gets stuck in your head. It also makes you want to dance every time you hear it, throwing caution and abandon to the wind, making you “Ohh” and “Ahh” so much that people quite seriously consider locking you away. That all happened to me when I first heard “Hideaway.” Amazingly though, as it does with most other catchy songs, it did not go away. Making her mark in Madison for the first time this Sunday at The Majestic, Kiesza, the stage name for Kiesa Rae Ellestad, holds the promise of one of the best shows in the city this year.
(04/09/15 1:56am)
I love to dance. I think there is no better way to feel music within you except for letting it take over in a way that makes you dance. Not all music can do that; it can be loud, fun and hip but, sometimes, no amount of bass in it will prompt you to really move.
(04/06/15 3:18am)
I’m not a sports fan. I never have been and I probably never will be. Not for lack of trying though because I tried for half of my life to either excel at some sport or really fall in love with one. I couldn’t do either and never do I feel that loss more as when I witness the love and devotion for a sport by thousands, if not millions of people during sporting events.
(03/26/15 1:35am)
Although most people are still unfamiliar with this band’s name, they have however danced at some point to the band’s Grammy winning song “Rather Be.” Now that you know who I am talking about, the British electronic group, Clean Bandit, is set to bring their classical and techno fusion music to the Majestic April 4. The group is comprised of four twenty-somethings who met during their stint at the University of Cambridge, and discovered a shared love for creating truly unique music.
(03/17/15 3:11am)
Let’s be honest here, with a show like “The Book of Mormon” you are already walking in expecting to see profanity, crudeness and a more than healthy amount of offensiveness. The show is, after all, created by the same diabolically devious minds behind “South Park:” Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone. The show’s biggest weapon is its shock value, but how shocking can such a value really be when people are turned toward you already salivating, with heaving bosoms, to be shocked? The answer lies in the progressively more breathier gasps of the elderly lady feasting her sensibilities of this atrocity next to me last Wednesday at the Overture Center.
(03/02/15 4:58am)
A road trip is more than traveling from point A to B. Like everything around us it can be just that, simply a route to travel to reach somewhere, but sometimes, it can encompass the entirety of American mythology regarding road trips within it and be so much more. It ceases to be a route to get somewhere and takes the form of an adventure, one that takes you on uncharted water and exposes you to unexpected things. There is nothing quite like having the late afternoon sun kissing your face, the wind dancing through your hair and the great expanse of a road in front of you, waiting for you to envelope it. It is the epitome of ways to find yourself at this time in your life, to drive away in your car, alone or with a few friends, and let your mind think and dream in ways you didn’t know were possible. Regardless of the reasons, it will bring you the clarity you so desperately need. Better yet, it will bring you much more.
(02/23/15 3:29am)
A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and a hurricane ravages an entire area elsewhere. There might be days where everything about us feels small, insignificant and unnecessary. It is difficult to fathom what our being here really means or contributes in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes can all feel like the hypnotic chug-chug of a train rolling down old wooden tracks; the courses, clubs, weekends, games. Rolling down the same path it always has, making the same sounds and traveling the same route. It isn’t morbid but human curiosity to wonder what the world would be like if we hadn’t been pushed out, squalling and terrified from the first moment, into it.
(02/16/15 5:51am)
Society deemed it necessary we have a day for love—showing, in my opinion, how little the very same society actually knows about love, thinking it can be squeezed into a day, that it can actually encompass it—and thus began an almost rabid furor for Valentine’s Day. The commercial build up is quite epic to witness, with pink and red slowly appearing everywhere you look weeks before the actual day. The day itself is supposed to be one of great business for bakeries and flower shops. But what comes after?
(02/02/15 3:32am)
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(01/26/15 3:04am)
It is curious how a new year brings with it the longing for new beginnings, new attitudes and a new self. How much of it is actually possible though still seems quite shrouded in uncertainty, but there is no denying the furor of resolutions we witness around us during this time. I, for one, have always held quite a healthy amount of disdain for New Year’s resolutions. It seems superfluous for me to hold out for the hand of the clock to strike midnight into the new year to put into affect everything you want to do, and all that you wish to change.
(12/01/14 4:57am)
There’s a need inside all of us to witness happy endings. It is perhaps the most human and honest part of who we are that revels in the victory of the good guy. It is also why we’re always left feeling bereft after witnessing a grand happy ending at the end of a story, be it in film or literature, because however happy that ending may have been it is an ending nevertheless. We never see what follows and therein lies the true problem.
(11/11/14 7:15am)
Recently, I watched the movie “Lucy,” a science fiction thriller depicting what happens if human beings can actually reach and utilize 100 percent—we’re purportedly using only 10 percent—of their cerebral capacity.
(11/04/14 6:41am)
The era in which Bo Burnham was reigning over YouTube and Vine with comedic brilliance and scathing (yet joyfully crude) social commentary with “Words, Words, Words” was an era that unfortunately completely bypassed me.
(10/28/14 5:37am)
Clive Barker once said that horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion. It’s a curious thing to say, but it makes you wonder. Where did the need to scare come from? What caused the birth of horror literature? What would induce someone to wake up one day and concoct a milieu of elements designed to do nothing but inspire the existence of fear within the imagination of those who cross paths with it?