Celebrating Community
Review of “Kappa,” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda Did you go on any trips this summer? Traveling has many benefits. You might interact with different people, learn a new language, and discover things about another culture’s values. Whenever you go someplace new, you see the world with fresh eyes—and sometimes the […]
Sonic revival. Concert performances by Sonic Youth were glorious things—transcendent, intoxicating, very nearly overwhelming. Sound systems and synapses couldn’t always handle them but the energy transference was reliably powerful. The band played what is commonly referred to as its last show on the WIlliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn on August 12, 2011. They actually went on to play already scheduled festivals […]
Archival recordings are tricky to think about critically, in no small part because the contents of any artists archives are always interesting and desirable to fans, and that fan enthusiasm makes criticism irrelevant for most of the people who would even consider buying them. And reader, I am one of those fans—as one example, Miles Davis’ album In a Silent […]
Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change. Working […]
Review of “J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist,” by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler Review by Michael Quinn What are you wearing as you read this? A shirt from Under Armour? Leggings from Lululemon? Sneakers? Flip-flops? A hundred years ago, the world was different, and we dressed differently. But it was around this time that advertising first started to get […]
All the hand wringing and doomsaying around artificial intelligence — in tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and Midjourney — has made for some lazy movie comparisons. AI is like Skynet in the Terminator movies! These chatbots are a few dataset away from becoming 2001’s HAL 9000! We’re all destined to be mindless slug consumers controlled by corporate AI run amok, […]
Cindi Mayweather succumbs to pleasure. Anyone who caught Janelle Monáe’s 2018 concert in Prospect Park (and reportedly thousands didn’t and were turned away once the bandshell grounds were filled to capacity) knows what a dynamic performer she is. She seriously enjoyed herself, putting on a tight show, copping moves from James Brown and Michael Jackson and gleefully admitting defeat in […]
Sometimes, things just come together. I’m writing this on July 4th, at the end of a long holiday weekend which saw the conclusion of the HBO series The Idol and, this day, the first of two birthday broadcasts on WKCR—89.9 on your FM dial, or wkcr.org if you insist—for Louis Armstrong. Yes, there are two birthday broadcasts for Louis, who […]
Review of Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) was an American poet and the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Her award-winning book of poems, Annie Allen, focused on the life of an ordinary Black girl living in Chicago’s South Side. Brooks returned to this subject in the only novel she ever published, Maud […]
For my book club, I suggested we read Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel, The Passenger. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you’d call a McCarthy expert. Over the years I’ve taught The Road to great success in high school creative writing classes, and it remains the first and only McCarthy novel I’ve read. I am, however, very aware […]