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 […]
My oldest friend Lan comes into New York City about once a year nowadays. He’s lived in Orlando, Florida, for the past 20 years. One night, three years ago, he insists that we go out. “It’s late. I’m tired,” I say, feeling lame. But it’s a cool summer night in Brooklyn. He didn’t come all the way from swamp Orlando […]
Orson Welles once described Harry Lime, his character in The Third Man (1949), as the greatest star part ever written. “It’s where they talk about you for an hour and then you appear,” he explained to friend and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. It took 70 years, but Welles’s Lime has a challenge for star-part supremacy in Toni Servillo’s Silvio Berlusconi — […]
It is said that art imitates life, and if TV trends of the past few seasons are of any indication, more accurate words have never been uttered. As political views drench into cultural spheres, rendering the world around us an overcrowded bundle of arguments and screaming matches that involve much more than politics; as “feel good journalism” becomes a relic […]
Dag Hammarskjöld was a Secretary General of the United Nations, a Nobel laureate, a staunch anti-imperialist, and, according to a certain Jack Kennedy, “the greatest statesman of our century.” On September 18, 1961, while en route to a small Rhodesian airport, his plane crashed, killing all on board. In his newest film, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, Danish documentarian and provocateur Mads […]
I set out to write a story on busking, the hip word for performing in the streets, in hopes of meeting crazy characters and hearing spectacular stories the likes of which could only happen in the chaotic streets and underground train stations of New York City. However, I got no such tales from the dozen or so musicians I spoke […]
[pullquote]Our fall theater guide highlights the much-anticipated Tina Turner musical, yet another adaptation of West Side Story and Marisa Tomei’s return to the Broadway stage.[/pullquote]There is something about the theater in the fall that encompasses the hopefulness that New York is known for: as the days turn shorter and darkness envelopes the city at earlier hours, the twinkling lights of […]
Hope you are well. Reaching out as I am so sad to say that after 12 years of personal financial contributions and countless hours of labor all provided by my wife and myself to transform this abandon lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn leveled in one morning (video on IG account). With out any warning, contact or heads up NYCHA rolled over all our hard […]