Celebrating Community
Black paint (by numbers). The highlight of Liturgy’s set at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights last July (the first time the band ever played in a church, as frontperson Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix announced from the stage) was a monumental, pounding and then-unreleased 20-minute song which, it turns out, will be the title track of their next album, due in the […]
Of course conservatives hate the movies and the entertainment industry that produces them: movies are, bottom line, substantial investments of capital that seek to return profits. Thy are made to sell to viewers, and so movie makers try and give the public what the producers think it wants. Thats why there’s a massive library of MCU and Star Wars movies […]
Dan Perri isn’t a name you see, as they say, above a movie’s title. That’s because he designed the title. In a monumental five-decade career that began with The Exorcist, Perri created more than 200 titles for some of the biggest, most important movies ever made: A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Warriors, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Bull […]
Review of My Perfect Life, by Lynda Barry Review by Michael Quinn In the `90s, when I was in college, a friend showed me a book from her women’s studies course. She thought I might like it. It was a comic book with a bright pink cover with a drawing of a homely-looking girl standing in front of a mirror. […]
Almighty Aaron. Back in the early naughts, the mighty Isis was a vital force in defining what has since become known as post-metal with their long, slowly developing, often largely instrumental compositions. It’s been a dozen years since they parted ways, and guitarist Aaron Turner has followed the path the band forged in differing directions, most notably with the band […]
The jazz world is vastly different than it was 100 years ago.That probably seems obvious, in that the world may seem different than it was 100 years ago, though that is mostly superficial and centered around technology. What I mean is the there are key aspects of the society that gave birth to jazz that have changed and in many […]
Let’s talk about some recent movies! I’ll start: Confess, Fletch. It’s pretty fun, a decades-in-the-making reboot of Chevy Chase’s 1980s comedy-mystery franchise based on Gregory McDonald’s series of novels, with Jon Hamm in the role as investigative reporter-turned-amateur-gumshoe I.M. Fletcher. It’s a solid effort from director and co-writer Greg Mottola, albeit a bit too shaggy and padded out to meet […]
Too much paranoias. When in need of squeaky thin organ-driven new wave of late, I often turn to the endearing L.A. four-piece the Paranoyds. The fashionista four-piece (they call themselves an “eyebrow band”) is generally just the right mix of quirky, sarcastic and sick of it. Their first album, 2019’s Carnage Bargain, got some attention with the singles “Girlfriend Degree” […]
Review of New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, by Craig Taylor Review by Michael Quinn I have lived in New York City for more than 25 years—my whole adult life. I sort of wound up here. I grew up on Long Island and went to school upstate. I had no idea what to do when I […]
No plan survives contact with reality. At the start of this summer, energized by recent listening, I started to dig into my library of books on free jazz, titles like Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your LIfe, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t by Scott Saul, Michael Heller’s Loft Jazz, and Ekkehard Jost’s im-portant study, Free Jazz. I was jazzed. But then […]