Author Archives: Lawrence Modern

Breaking par at Studio 804

In what’s become an annual rite of spring, every Saturday in the middle of May the Lawrence community lines up to see a shiny new Studio 804 building, oohing and aahing like patrons at a PGA golf tournament. (The Masters tournament comes to mind.) At this year’s outing, the golf metaphor seems apt: following over […]

Love the Bomb April 24th

The absurdity of nuclear politics is dialed to an 11 in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s seriously funny film about dropping the H-bomb. Based on British writer Peter George’s novel Red Alert, which imagines rational and responsible responses to a nuclear accident between the United States and the Soviet Union, in Kubrick’s reimagining, lunacy and […]

Mr. Hulot returns Nov. 14

Back by popular demand—and perhaps by cosmic design—Jacques Tati’s PlayTime returns to the Lawrence Modern Film Series on Friday, November 14. After the laughs we shared over the summer with Mon Oncle, we couldn’t resist bringing Monsieur Hulot back for an encore. Our first attempt at a film series more than a decade ago began […]

Lawrence should have a Haystack

One afternoon in the summer of 2014, while visiting modernist architect Carol A. Wilson’s home studio in Falmouth, Maine, I mentioned that my wife and I were planning to take a trip up to Acadia National Park the next day. Knowing that I had an interest in modern architecture, Carol said, “You should go check […]

Come visit My Uncle Aug. 1st!

What happens when your charmingly clueless uncle stumbles into the future—and starts pressing all the wrong buttons? That’s the setup for director Jacques Tati’s French comedy Mon Oncle—the follow-up to his masterpiece, Playtime—where the endearingly inept Monsieur Hulot still finds himself at odds with modern architecture, mechanical efficiency and consumerism in postwar Paris. From Tati’s […]