Celebrating Community
John Pinamonti and his band have been performing as a regular combo at Sunny’s Bar on Conover Street, Red Hook, since the year 2000. The history of Sunny’s Bar is wonderfully told in Tim Sultan’s book Sunny’s Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World (2016). I have no intention of competing with that; indeed […]
The fifth annual Brooklyn Americana Festival is September 19 to 22 in several spots primarily surrounding the East River in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by Jan Bell (who has several albums and toured the United States and Europe in her own right), the Brooklyn Americana Festival is quickly establishing itself as a major artery of the Americana music establishment. Brooklyn, […]
John Buchanan: So you and your wife at the time, Florence Neal, came to Red Hook together? Scott Pfaffman: Yes in 1984 we put together a proposal for an artist housing project at 353 Van Brunt Street. It produced about six citywide artist housing projects. And we were the lucky recipients of one of them. I was summoned to the […]
Help! I’m being swallowed by an avalanche of needless reply-alls! A cascading torrent of “sound’s good’s and “right on”s have squeezed the air out of me. Endless streams of emojis and GIFs berate me from day into night into day again. Needless questions directed at anybody on the thread but me… the “gig economy” (aka freelancing) has taken the form […]
Black voices and stories have historically been silenced or pushed to the background. Afrofuturism puts a spotlight on black stories, and conceptually, the genre places black subjects in settings that didn’t usually include or consider them. Afrofuturism, in short, is where the themes of black culture throughout the diaspora meet technology and science fiction, usually via an artistic medium. Though […]
“I came here to raise badass, obstreperous, antisocial, pestiferous, brutalitarian, loudmouthed and chaotic bloody hell. The roaring kind!” ]In playwright Mac Wellman’s Sincerity Forever, a celestial visitor to a hamlet of reverent, well-meaning hillbillies announces her presence by the declaration above, but it might also serve as the motto of the artist himself. Wellman – a major figure in New […]