Celebrating Community
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 […]
It was 31 long months ago that the polls read conclusively that Hillary would lose and Sanders would win. Yet, thousands of New Yorkers saw their income projections safeguarded in her youthful chagrin. They crowded into the Jacob Javitz Center a few hours after the polls closed and waited for her to claim victory. But as Tuesday rolled into Wednesday […]
There’s a new wave of black artists tearing down, and redefining age-old commandments and narratives about their identities with uncompromising honesty, voice, and talent. One emerging band aims to be part of this movement. Bathe is a Brooklyn based duo comprised of Corey Smith – West and Devin Hobdy, guitarist/producer and singer-songwriter respectively. They met in 2014 while in college, […]
The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous, and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, […]
Hank’s Saloon, a century old dive bar, is gone. It tried to reinvent itself through relocation, but it ended in an ill-fated merger with a food court that could not sustain its own share of the bills. Hank’s was a part of a now-vanishing beautiful culture in New York where people from all economic backgrounds might meet, drink, be teased, […]
The cities are toxic. The subways are seething. The carbon is cooking. The forests are burning. Siberia’s melting. The ocean is rising. South Asia’s flooding. Our cells are half plastic. Miami’s a puddle. They site nuke plants on rivers. The war is raging. The money is talking. The radio’s braying. The TV is barking. The press has got to be […]
There is great reverence among the British towards certain American songwriters. The cultural impact crater from the US musical asteroid stretches across genres and time, and I’ve been unfortunate enough to bare witness to its effect in drizzly pubs, enduring a dire British approximation of a Johnny Cash impression in an oversized cowboy hat. As much as we fetishize American […]
Media, Literally The Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to New York once a year. So when the director of the film ‘Bellingcat’ — a documentary about a popular European ‘citizen journalism’ site — strongly recommended it, we booked a seat. Citizen Journalism is widely believed to provide a cure for the corporate media model. The concept quite rightly implies […]