Celebrating Community
In late 2015, I browsed through the sometimes strange, uncharted corners of YouTube (as I regularly do) – laptop on belly, fingers (middle and pointer) on mousepad, I discovered The Grapevine TV, and haven’t stopped watching since. To see long-table conversations with numerous intelligent and expressive young black people, discussing topics with such kitchen-table honesty, for me, was a dream […]
“His longing eyes, impatient, backward cast / To catch a lover’s look, but look’d his last; / For, instant dying, she again descends, / While he to empty air his arm extends.” The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice recounts how Orpheus, the fabled poet and philosopher, violated Hades’ conditions for his dead lover Eurydice’s release from the underworld by turning […]
For better or worse, when visitors come to Red Hook’s Pioneer Works, the first work of art they see – before they even enter the building – is the blue and white fence on the west side of the property. In 2017, Pioneer Works’ tech department invited me to hold a workshop on laser-cut stencils, and I met the organization’s […]
Review of Kevin Baker’s The Fall of a Great American City: New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence Years ago, I came across a seldom-seen friend on Houston Street. Ranee was sitting on a bench in front of an American Apparel, wearing sunglasses and eating an ice cream cone, looking very self-satisfied. We marveled at the unlikely odds of […]
When everyone is making it up on the spot, who’s the composer? This is a question every time an album track has a composer credit, or when a musician on the bandstand announces that “this was written/composed by” so-and-so. If you listen to jazz at all, you’ve heard one or more musicians play a tune (usually a song form of […]
OK, sure, you can find “worst” music countdown clips on YouTube, but they’re full of all the obvious choices, with none of the deep cosmic thoughts you’ll find here in the Star-Revue. And I can pretty much guarantee no bandwidth problems with this page. Also, this countdown is all about the record, recognizing not only the song, but the artist, […]
I know this has happened to most of us who are big city dwellers – in saloons, clubs and airport bars, on train platforms, on the high street, in greasy spoons, a few times in likely places, but more often than not in the most outlandish and unexpected of circumstances. I’m talking about what the paparazzi refer to as celebrity […]
John Zorn has been more than just a staple on New York’s creative musical landscape: he’s been a defining factor. Like an institution, flowing from one decade to the next, unchanging, yet always updating, he has been here. Flowing seamlessly between genres, linking half a dozen scenes together in a musical cauldron, he is also an artist defined by his […]
I’m at Vox Pop, an artist lounge and cafe-bar on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn. It’s Sunday night, open mic. It’s 2009. Many of the performers are good. Some, like me, are playing solo and singing for the first time in front of an audience. I’ve been playing guitar for a long time, but never carrying the load by myself with […]
Buzzy Linhart passed away February, 13, 2020. He was 76. Buzzy was a musician and songwriter revered among the Greenwich Village scene of the ‘60s. He was also a muse of the hit-making singer-songwriter era. Mr. Linhart once sang “Get Together” at an open mic; it blew away Jesse Colin Young who was in attendance. Linhart taught the song to […]