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Published Works of Aaron
Howard
Aaron's Archives
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Search Results - - The Arts District |
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Click on the Name of the property to see pictures and more details. |
The Revival of a Groundbreaking “Pillar of Fire”
| Ballet was taking a pretty radical departure from the classical ballets that came before when the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) debuted Antony Tudor's “Pillar of Fire” in 1942. Set to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, “Pillar of Fire” got 42 curtain ca |
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2nd Annual Houston Jewish Film Festival, March 16-26
| "Fateless"
In a recent conversation with memoirist Emil Steinberger, he expresses discomfort in the way so many recent Holocaust memoirs seem to paint the same bleak picture. “There was life and there were possibilities,” he arg |
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Houston's Best Public Garden
| As late as World War I, the boundaries of Houston were confined to downtown and South Main. During the post-war boom of the 1920s, the city expanded into new neighborhoods including the wealthy planned subdivision west of downtown called River Oaks. |
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"When Do We Eat": Turning Dysfunction Into Reconciliation
| “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet…and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 3:23-24) reads the prologue to the film “Whe |
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Two On DVD
| "Ushpizin"
Outside of a documentary, making a film in which the major characters are ultra-Orthodox would appear highly problematic. What’s the audience for this film? Obviously, the ultra-Orthodox won’t be buying popcor |
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Moby Goes Ballet
| The melancholy techno music on Moby’s 1999 smash album “Play” seems more appropriate for club moves than the ballet stage. But leave it to Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch to visualize the movement inherent in Moby’s music and be capabl |
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Judging Photos - HCP Show June 2-July 16
| What Madeline Yale says, goes.
As one of the two jurors for the Houston Center for Photography’s (HCP) upcoming 24th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition, Yale examined photographs submitted by 134 artists from all over the cou |
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The Opera That Would Not Be Silenced
| Immediately when Hitler came to power, the Nazis began a program to “purify” German music. The campaign began on April 1. 1933, with a day of boycott of Jewish composers. By the next year, a formal ban was instituted against Jewish music, Jewish musi |
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A Guide to the Films at Jewish Book & Arts Festival
| A screener is an advanced copy of a film sent to distributors, critics and other cinema industry types. Film companies send out screeners, particularly of small, less widely distributed films, so that movie critics will write about the films prior to |
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Third Annual Jewish Film Fest
| An Israeli Buddy Film About Two Women Soldiers
One consequence of the Israeli occupation and the continuous Palestinian low intensity conflict is that all Arabs have come to be regarded as potential terrorist bombers. The role |
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Painter Blends Biblical Figures and Jewish Folktales
| Think of Dan RiiS Grife’s “Tanakh” paintings as the stuff of legends. Within each of his acrylic on copper panels is Bible stories, myths, Midrashim and folktales. It’s a place where spiritual imagination meets Jewish storytelling.
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First Love In the Islamic Republic - Aaron At the Movies:
| Most of director Abolfazl Jalili’s films are prohibited from being screened in Iran. Not surprising, if the autobiographical “Abjad” represents his feature works.
Set in the religious city of Isfahan on the eve of the Islamic revolutio |
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How A Curator Presents Modern Art
| Museum curator. The word "curator" comes from the Latin "curate" which means to be responsible for the soul of others.
Another root for curator is "to care for," as in caring for a work of art by providing a good home for it. |
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A Tribute to TUTS Frank Young
| The New York Times once called "Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) founder and CEO Frank Young “the David Merrick of the provinces". That’s a compliment to Young and a put down of Houston. But on September 15 1968, when Young produced, directed and condu |
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New Jewish Museum Rises in San Francisco
| With two exceptions, Jewish museums in the United States are either Holocaust or heritage. The Council of American Jewish Museums lists 75 institutional members—nearly all monuments to Jewish history or Holocaust themed. In contrast, a $47-million mu |
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"Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Jewish Connection
| Of course, the 3.2 million-year-old fossil of Lucy is the star of the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) exhibition “Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”, which opens on Aug. 31. But in addition to Lucy, the exhibit features more th |
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How We Got Here in Oratorio Form
| In traditional opera, an oratorio is the telling of a story in a speech-like musical setting. Although we tend to associate religious themes with oratorios, Houston writer and librettist Leah Lax wants audiences to re-think of her oratorio “The Refug |
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What A Newspaper Can Do Best
| There are some stories that can best be told through long form journalism.
In the summer of 2005, three Washington Post staff reporters began discussing the impending tenth anniversary of the Million Man March. What had become |
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Screenwriter Works His Way Back To Jersey
| There’s an old saw in the theater that goes “Write Yiddish, cast British”. In co-writing the script of “Jersey Boys”, Marshall Brickman wrote Yiddish and cast Italian.
“Jersey Boys” is, of course, the 2006 Tony Award-winning m |
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Resuming the 20th Century Musical Conversation
| Robin Hood saved his life.
Austrian Jewish composer Erich Korngold didn’t share the fate of other European Jews “by dumb luck” as he used to say.
As Houston Community College at Northwest College Fine Ar |
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Make Us Holy As G-d Is Holy
| “Turn it and turn it again for everything is in it.” That’s what the rabbis in the first century said about Torah. Rabbi Seymour Rossel uses the same phrase to open his new book “The Torah Portion-by-Portion” (Torah Aura).
We |
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She's The Queen Of All Things Gross and Slimy
| Sylvia Branzei had an epiphany while cutting her toenails. She began thinking about the gunk underneath her nails. Ewwww! Gross!! Just the sort of gross stuff the kids in her middle school science class loved. Branzei thought: why not teach science t |
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Building A Print, Layer By Layer
| Making a print is usually simple. The artist transfers an image from a matrix onto a transferring base and makes a limited number of multiple originals. Print maker Orna Feinstein creates one-of-a-kind prints. That’s because Feinstein works in a proc |
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Where You're The Exhibit
| I’ve seen the museum of the future. It’s right here in Houston.
Although The Health Museum is a work in progress, with the opening of “You: The Exhibit” last month, the museum demonstrates that the future will be about the production o |
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Fontainebleau in Imagination, Art and Reality
| Sunday in the forest of Fontainebleau. Located just 35 miles southeast of Paris, Fontainebleau became the world’s first nature preserve in 1861 (11 years before Yellowstone, the world’s second preserve, was created). Because of its proximity to Paris |
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In Their Youth, Dr. Seuss' Characters Went to War
| Horton hated Hitler.
Twelve years before the kind-hearted elephant became famous by exclaiming, “a person is a person no matter how small” in the Dr. Seuss children’s book “Horton Hears A Who”, the cartoon character made his appearanc |
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Tom Cruise As The Good German
| From the getgo, Tom Cruise knows what to do. More accurately, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the character Cruise plays in the film “Valkyrie” knows what to do. “We can serve Germany or the fuehrer,” muses von Stauffenberg. “To serve Germany, I must |
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"Waltz With Bashir": Reclaiming Memory, Frame By Frame
| A pack of 26 snarling, wet-fanged dogs smash through a nighttime urban landscape like a tsunami. The dogs are part of a recurring nightmare that Boaz relates to his friend, Ari Folman, in a bar one evening at the opening of the film “Waltz With Bashi |
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Poor, Unemployed and Jewish in the Bronx
| When Director Cheryl Kaplan wanted to get it right, she asked her dad. Kaplan is directing a revival of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!”, a play about a Jewish family in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.
“My father, Murray Kaplan, |
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Just An Ordinary German Seduced By Extraordinary Evil
| Good intentions. That’s obviously what screenwriter John Wrathall and director Vicente Amorim had when they embarked on making the film “Good”. The film, set in 1930’s Germany, follows the relentless moral slide of university intellectual John Halder |
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Topol: An Old Man Before His Time
| Tevye or Sallah? Sure, it’s easy to identify Chaim Topol with the patriarch he’s played on stage and in film over the past 44 years. But as the head of a large Mizrachi immigrant family to Israel, Topol’s Sallah—first on stage and then in the 1964 Is |
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Two Questions For: Daniel Silva
| “The Defector”, spy fiction author Daniel Silva’s ninth novel featuring Israeli Gabriel Allon, begins where his last novel, “Moscow Rules” left off. Allon’s nemesis is Russian espionage agent Ivan Kharkov. Silva will be in Houston to speak and sign h |
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Two Questions For: Marcia Sterling
| How do you dance to klezmer music? Marcia Sterling says there’s an entire dance repertoire that was traditionally done to the Jewish music played at weddings and other social events. Sterling, violinist and band leader of The Best Little Klezmer Band |
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Two Questions For: Al Marks
| Al Marks and his daughter, Karen Marks Aarons, will be featured on twin pianos at
a special benefit Holocaust Museum Houston concert,
"A Journey of Musical Memories". Dates are Wednesday, September 2 beginning with a
reception at |
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Tarantino's Sweet Revenge
| Contemporary critical theory suggests that the purely artistic and the purely historical worlds are never really pure of each other. That is to say, the events of a historical phenomenon like the Holocaust are shaped after the fact through their nar |
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Democracy In the Middle East and Other Misadventures
| The American social experiment to create democracy in the Middle East has failed.
Failed in Iraq. Failed in Gaza. Failed in Egypt. Failed in the Gulf States.
Let’s exclude the fact that many people in the Middle East w |
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Two Questions For: Larry Miller
| Actor, writer and stand-up comic Larry Miller will appear at The Improv, 7620 Katy Freeway, for five performances September 11-13. Miller stars in the television sit-com “10 Things I Hate About You”, and has appeared in numerous films including “Pret |
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Two Questions for: Rabbi Laura Baum
| Rabbi Laura Baum is the founder of OurJewishCommunity.org, an online congregation that uses blogs, podcasts, online Shabbat services and other technology to engage Jews. This year, the site will videostream live Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur services |
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"A Serious Man": A Serious Comedy
| Blameless and upright is Larry Gopnik. A physics professor at a midwestern university, Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is about to come up for tenure. Then, for no reason, Gopnik begins to be deprived of all the rewards of his upright life. A student trie |
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We Regret To Inform You
| Our country has been continuously at war for eight years. Approximately 124,000 young American soldiers are stationed in Iraq. And about 57,000 are in Afghanistan.
Here, we don’t think much about these soldiers. We don’t ha |
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Don't Kill the Critic
| “Why do you think critics didn’t like your film,” asked a radio host to the director of one of the many Adam Sandler-type comedy films aimed at adolescent audiences.
“I dunno,” he replied. “We made the film to get laughs. It made us l |
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How To Get Rid Of A Dictatorship
| Gene Sharp has been called a CIA agent and a central figure in a conspiracy to overthrow the Islamist government of Iran. Not bad for an 81-year-old scholar whose organization, the Albert Einstein Institution, operates out of the two-room office in a |
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Two Questions: James Belcher
| The Alley Theatre’s company member James Belcher steps over to Stages Theatre to star in the Regional Premiere of “A Picasso”, playing from January 27-February 21. It’s 1941 and the Nazis have conquered Paris. Pablo Picasso is summoned by a female Na |
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Austin Gets World Class Photo Collection
| One of the great collections of photography has come to stay on the University of Texas campus in Austin for the next five years. Around 200,000 photographic prints representing photographers active with the Magnum Photos agency will be available for |
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Sixth Annual Jewish Film Festival
| The upcoming 6th Annual Jewish Film Festival promises to be the strongest programs of Jewish cinema that we’ve seen in Houston. Running from March 9-21 in three venues, the festival includes 18 films from the United States, Israel, Denmark and Austra |
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Eichmann--The World's Most Notorious Nazi
| The hunt for, capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann became a watershed moment in history. Before 1960, the world had, in many ways, swept the Holocaust under the rug.
“Neither Jews nor non-Jews wanted to face the Holocaust,” contends Ne |
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Moving Towards the Light In A Museum Exhibit
| There’s a line of poetry written by the Persian poet Rumi that goes: “I know not how to distinguish myself from light”.
That line seems to communicate the essence of Sufi thought. Followers believe in a discipline that will ultimately |
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Making Aliyah In 2010: How Best To Serve American Jews
| The early 20th century Zionists probably wouldn’t understand. When they established the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1929, their singular purpose was to return to the land to rebuild the Jewish national home. For them, aliyah was the main option to |
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Stuffed Into A Metal Sauna On the First Day of War
| During the war in Lebanon, Israeli tanks operated in urban operations for the first time. Former advantages of armored tanks were reigned in by claustrophobic Lebanese urban settings. The frequent shifting of units from the operational control of one |
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