Deep Blue

Laura Letinsky's deceptively spare still-life photographs make astringently formal beauty out of leftovers and trash. Her show at Carroll and Sons visits four bodies of work the artist has made since 1999, all color photographs shot in available light. The light plays a vital role, filling in emotional tonalities. For "Untitled #64" from the first series, "Hardly More Than Ever," Letinsky photographed the discards of a family meal: a peach, small shell, pale blue cup, and more, all casting back to the gluttonous realism of Dutch and Flemish still lifes.

Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. "The Deep Blue Sea" has a scene like that. Weisz sits at a table in a London restaurant whose patrons are all singing Jo Stafford's "You Belong to Me. " Some of these people are seated at her table, including Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), the RAF pilot she loves, and they know the song and sing it with real fervor. It means something to them. It's uniting them, soothing them, seducing them.

Whew! It was beginning to look like Imax had cornered the market on nice, interesting wildlife documentaries. You know, those innocuous mini-movies in which creatures you rarely see so close up do the cutest and most curious things. For 10 minutes or so, the non-Imax "Deep Blue" seems like that sort of movie. Look, for instance, at those sea lions frolicking on the shore. You're noticing how totally shiny and adorable their pelts are, when, suddenly, the carcass of one sea lion goes flying through the air and crashes, hard and ominously, back into the ocean.

This Saturday, as about 700 of the nation's top crossword solvers gather in the Grand Ballroom of the Brooklyn Marriott for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, there will be an interloper lurking in the back of the room. The interloper is known as Dr. Fill. Unlike the other assembled crossword experts, Dr. Fill is not human. The Doctor is a crossword-solving program, and will be running on the notebook computer of Matt Ginsberg, a software engineer from Eugene, Ore. When the bell rings and humans start solving the first of seven championship puzzles, Ginsberg will hit "enter" and Dr. Fill will get...

This Saturday, as about 700 of the nation's top crossword solvers gather in the Grand Ballroom of the Brooklyn Marriott for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, there will be an interloper lurking in the back of the room. The interloper is known as Dr. Fill. Unlike the other assembled crossword experts, Dr. Fill is not human. The Doctor is a crossword-solving program, and will be running on the notebook computer of Matt Ginsberg, a software engineer from Eugene, Ore. When the bell rings and humans start solving the first of seven championship puzzles, Ginsberg will hit "enter" and Dr. Fill will get...

AS A moderate Republican, I would like to respond to President Obama's State of the Union address. While the rest of the members of my party are stirring in fury over Tuesday's address, a few of us reds, along with many members of the blue, looked beyond the bickering and noticed a terrifying promise from our president. This pledge will undoubtedly have negative and harsh repercussions for my country and that of my children. Obama vowed to open 75 percent of US offshore oil and gas resources.

How lovely to begin a new year with a fresh batch of children’s books, including a baby’s concept book, a brand new love story, and four classics newly gathered together under one snowy roof. “My First Memories: An Early Album’’ makes it possible to start baby’s new year with pictures both fictional and real. It’s such a radical, yet simple idea - but so it often goes with concept books. On one page we see an imaginary illustrated creature, i.e. “Baby polar bear likes to be held.” Facing it is a photograph of a mother lifting her baby: “I like being held, too!

Americans don’t sleep enough. We can’t sleep; we suffer sleep disorders; we take sleeping pills. Like insomniacs, Robert Knight’s camera stays awake and observant through the night, as he records his subjects tossing and turning. In his photographs at Gallery Kayafas, light takes on a hallowed glow as it enters the darkened room and the camera lens. Everything inanimate remains still and crisp, while all that moves — the body on the bed — blurs close to oblivion. Knight prints his photos on watercolor paper.

PORTLAND, Maine - What if you could stand in a windowless room yet see the surrounding outdoors. Could you observe wildlife or people going about their business, without them knowing you are there? It's possible with an optical instrument called a camera obscura. The term, meaning "dark room" in Latin, was first used in the early 1600s by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Eventually, portable versions evolved into what we know as a camera and led to the development of photography and movies.

AS A moderate Republican, I would like to respond to President Obama's State of the Union address. While the rest of the members of my party are stirring in fury over Tuesday's address, a few of us reds, along with many members of the blue, looked beyond the bickering and noticed a terrifying promise from our president. This pledge will undoubtedly have negative and harsh repercussions for my country and that of my children. Obama vowed to open 75 percent of US offshore oil and gas resources.

Laura Letinsky's deceptively spare still-life photographs make astringently formal beauty out of leftovers and trash. Her show at Carroll and Sons visits four bodies of work the artist has made since 1999, all color photographs shot in available light. The light plays a vital role, filling in emotional tonalities. For "Untitled #64" from the first series, "Hardly More Than Ever," Letinsky photographed the discards of a family meal: a peach, small shell, pale blue cup, and more, all casting back to the gluttonous realism of Dutch and Flemish still lifes.

Americans don’t sleep enough. We can’t sleep; we suffer sleep disorders; we take sleeping pills. Like insomniacs, Robert Knight’s camera stays awake and observant through the night, as he records his subjects tossing and turning. In his photographs at Gallery Kayafas, light takes on a hallowed glow as it enters the darkened room and the camera lens. Everything inanimate remains still and crisp, while all that moves — the body on the bed — blurs close to oblivion. Knight prints his photos on watercolor paper.

How lovely to begin a new year with a fresh batch of children’s books, including a baby’s concept book, a brand new love story, and four classics newly gathered together under one snowy roof. “My First Memories: An Early Album’’ makes it possible to start baby’s new year with pictures both fictional and real. It’s such a radical, yet simple idea - but so it often goes with concept books. On one page we see an imaginary illustrated creature, i.e. “Baby polar bear likes to be held.” Facing it is a photograph of a mother lifting her baby: “I like being held, too!

PORTLAND, Maine - What if you could stand in a windowless room yet see the surrounding outdoors. Could you observe wildlife or people going about their business, without them knowing you are there? It's possible with an optical instrument called a camera obscura. The term, meaning "dark room" in Latin, was first used in the early 1600s by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Eventually, portable versions evolved into what we know as a camera and led to the development of photography and movies.

A young Vincent van Gogh was so struck by a dead willow leaning "lonely and melancholy" over a pond near The Hague that he knew at once he had to paint it. "I'm going to attack it tomorrow morning," he wrote to his brother Theo on July 26, 1882. The Van Gogh Museum unveiled the painting Thursday, the first addition in five years to its world-famous collection of works by the postimpressionist master. At a time when the artist was still honing his skills in perspective, anatomy and proportion using pen and pencil sketches, the watercolor was a bolt from the blue, although its...

What color is an orange? To most of us that's an obvious joke, but in "Blue/Orange," serious questions of sanity are balanced on the answer. For in Joe Penhall's three-character cryptogram, now in its local premiere at the edgy Zeitgeist Stage Company, a white psychiatric establishment grapples with a black man's "borderline personality disorder" -- and in the process comes to grips with its own racist notions of insanity. Never mind that citrus; the real question in "Blue/Orange" is, "What color is psychiatry?"

Whew! It was beginning to look like Imax had cornered the market on nice, interesting wildlife documentaries. You know, those innocuous mini-movies in which creatures you rarely see so close up do the cutest and most curious things. For 10 minutes or so, the non-Imax "Deep Blue" seems like that sort of movie. Look, for instance, at those sea lions frolicking on the shore. You're noticing how totally shiny and adorable their pelts are, when, suddenly, the carcass of one sea lion goes flying through the air and crashes, hard and ominously, back into the ocean.

What color is an orange? To most of us that's an obvious joke, but in "Blue/Orange," serious questions of sanity are balanced on the answer. For in Joe Penhall's three-character cryptogram, now in its local premiere at the edgy Zeitgeist Stage Company, a white psychiatric establishment grapples with a black man's "borderline personality disorder" -- and in the process comes to grips with its own racist notions of insanity. Never mind that citrus; the real question in "Blue/Orange" is, "What color is psychiatry?"