Celebrating Community
Review by Michael Quinn Like the Ghost of Christmas Past in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I’m taking you back in time. Come. Hold my hand. No need to be afraid. We’re flying out your apartment window, and heading toward Manhattan. Look at all those people down there. So much hustle and bustle. Why, it’s Christmastime! There’s the tree in […]
With Dry Cleaning’s second album released in October—building on the unexpected success of their infectious 2021 debut New Long Leg—and the subsequent (and harder to fathom) popularity of Wet Leg’s chatty single “Chaise Lounge,” it seems what I want to call the talkcore movement’s got, you know, legs. Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. and Yard Act out of Leeds are more closely […]
Just in time for your shopping lists, and just before you might, I hope, have some time off and can spend some of your evenings these dark days listening to fine music, here are my choices for the best jazz albums of 2022. I make this list because I think lists are useful, and year-end ones help focus the mind […]
Review of TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life, by Lynn Spigel Review by Michael Quinn For a long stretch of years, I lived without a TV. What do you do at night?, people would ask me, more concerned than curious, as if there was only one thing you could do and one thing you needed to do it. As […]
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 […]