Arts & Events

Any cinephile within the greater Tacoma area no doubt regards October as a special time of year for the community. While October can hold different importance for different people, this past month from Oct. 9 to Oct. 16 we saw what has essentially become a staple of the moviegoer community make its triumphant return. This year marked the ninth annual Tacoma Film Festival, and it’s safe to say it was met with the level of acclaim and merit such an event deserves. Over the course of one week, ticket holders...

The School of Music continues their Jacobsen Faculty Recitals this year with a series of unique concerts. There are three more available to experience this year, so be sure to stay tuned (pardon the pun) so you don’t miss out! The Jacobsen Series is a unique opportunity for faculty members to put their best feet forward and demonstrate their enormous talents to the Puget Sound community. The series was established in 1984 in honor of Leonard Jacobsen, former Chair of the Piano Department at Puget Sound. Ticket sales support the...

What is jazz music in 2014? What could it become? While I would shudder at the task of addressing this through writing, Steven Ellison, the heavily experimental and highly esteemed multi-genre music pioneer best known by fans as Flying Lotus or more recently as the elusive rapper-villain Captain Murphy, has crafted a worthy hypothesis in his latest LP, You’re Dead!. We haven’t heard from Flying Lotus in a while; his last record under that alias was 2012’s gorgeous Until the Quiet Comes. In those last two years, the quiet must...

Every few years, audiences are tricked into thinking a David Fincher movie is good. While some of them are indeed good, his latest, Gone Girl, a film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling airport read of the same name, is not. With the film’s 87% on Rotten Tomatoes indicating “universal acclaim,” David Fincher has critics and moviegoers alike raving about a movie that is exactly like all of his others, but contains none of the redeeming qualities of his previous two films The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon...

This past Wednesday night, those passing by the piano lounge were treated to more than the idle sounds of a half dozen conversations and the aroma of warm coffee from Diversions. Those passersby were treated to song, poetry and more, as the first Open Mic Night of the semester made its debut to an impressive turnout, thanks in no small part to the sterling efforts of the English Department. Having started out a number of years back and reappearing in some incarnation or another, Open Mic Night was brought back...

This year marks the Town Crier Speaks Festival’s 13th annual run. The Town Crier Speaks Festival is a production of Barebones Collective, the student theater group on campus. Town Crier Speaks consists of six different one-act plays, all of which are acted, written and directed by students. Town Crier Speaks, an entirely student-run production, gives many students who aren’t normally involved in theater a chance to perform. “Over the year has given a lot of opportunities to new writers, new directors, new actors, to feel a part of the campus...

Alicia Matz hosts this year’s Film Series for the Honors Program. Catch these free films in Wyatt 109 at 7 p.m. every Tuesday this month. It’s a chance to see some classic Shakespearean plays adapted to modern times and modern audiences. The Honors Program selects a student each year to pick a theme for a series of films that will be shown on campus. Matz selected “Shakespeare for a Modern World.” 10 Things I Hate About You, based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, was shown on Sept. 30, and...

If you’ve been in Tacoma for long, or even if you’ve just walked into Wyatt while on campus, chances are you have heard of Dale Chihuly, or at least seen his work. But have you ever heard of Lino Tagliapietra? Venetian by birth, like Chihuly, he too is a glass artist. According to his website, Tagliapietra has established his own forms of creativity with blown and fused glass forms, engineering models with incredible technical and aesthetic quality. He has created numerous glass vessels, permanent installations and glass panels. Throughout his...

Between midterms, finals, surprise essays and the ever-so-dreaded idea of 8 a.m. classes, it’s fair to say that college can be a stressful experience. When faced with the challenges of what amounts to a usual college week, it’s important for the students of the University of Puget Sound to have somewhere where they can forget their troubles and laugh for a while. Luckily, there’s a group on campus that can help with that. They’re called Ubiquitous They, and they’ve been making students laugh for nearly 15 years. Started originally as...

Did you ever play the nonsensically-titled GameCube game “Sonic Adventure 2 Battle?” Well, it was actually an American port of a Dreamcast game, but do you remember the gem-hunting levels, featuring Knuckles the inexplicably red echidna and that bat chick who had literally no part in the history of the Sonic franchise until that game’s 2002 release? OK, last question: could you do me a favor and put this website into your preferred web browser: https://ecovirtual.bandcamp.com/track/lavender-club? Don’t try to tell me you can’t see the connection here. Take your pick;...

What do you get when you give a well known senior his own morning show on KUPS? If you’re a student who tunes into the University’s renowned radio station Thursday or Friday mornings, you may have just found out. Beginning Thursday, Sept. 25, Lee Pennebaker took to the airwaves and debuted his new early-morning talk show: “Ain’t Nothin’ But A Morning Show.” On the inaugural show, he sat down with Passages co-coordinators Brandon Johnson and Brad Heusinkveld, speaking with them about their experience with the program this year. The show...