Celebrating Community
Lucifer on the dancefloor. A new of Montreal album is always a time of revelry—nobody does dark disco quite like Kevin Barnes. For a while, though, the albums have run thin fairly quickly for me. That’s not necessarily a problem; there’s far too much pop in the world for all of it to be permanent. But for a songwriter who […]
There is nothing new under the sun. Not to mention, you’ve heard that line before. How often? Well, Ecclesiastes was written about 3,000 years ago, so imagine the level of boredom it took to have someone mention it in the Old Testament. And they didn’t even have records back then. As surprising as it has been to admit this to […]
When was the last time you thought about Elvis Presley? When did you last think about breathing? Elvis is everywhere and nowhere — in music and marriage, camp and cliché, a singular entity who inspired countless imitators and reshaped nearly every facet of American life. Forty-five years after his death, his endurance is something of a paradox — more complicated […]
The Long Play festival, which ran in various venues around downtown Brooklyn from April 29 to May 1, was created to replace the previous Bang on a Can marathon, an annual single-stage daylong free presentation usually in Manhattan. Over three days at 10 venues, more than 60 acts represented a mix of contemporary composition, jazz-based improvisation and updatings of folk […]
Beauty runs deep. The surprise hit of the summer may turn out to be Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” which, after placement in an episode of the Netflix series Stranger Things, hit the top 10 in 14 countries and raced to the top of the Apple Music charts in the states. It’s not exactly a deep cut. […]
In the winter of 2020, trumpeter Wallace Roney appeared one evening on WKCR. A few weeks later, he was dead, killed, by the coronavirus. As Sharif Abdus-Salaam, who had hosted Roney, said with some shock when reporting this, “COVID does not play around.” No it does not. Nor, now with more than a million Americans needlessly dead, has it stopped […]
Have you ever seen a man play an umbrella under an iron horse? Neither had I, until I attended Mecha Sonic Sessions 2 at an undisclosed location in deep Gowanus. On Saturday, May 21 I went beyond Smith and 9th streets. Across from Bayside Fuel and a metal scrap yard stands an innocuous looking cinderblock building near Hamilton Parkway. A […]
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned 60 this year, is undeniably a classic. Pairing John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart for the first time, it’s the Western that introduced Duke’s “Pilgrim” into the Hollywood firmament and gave the world the irresistible line, spoken by a newspaper editor, “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” And, […]
We are children for only a short time, but spend the rest of our lives making sense of our childhoods. It’s an impressionable period of so many firsts. We soak them up like a sponge. In his heartfelt coming-of-age memoir One Headlight, Matt Caprioli (a former arts editor of this paper) wrings out his origin story as a gay man […]
Summer is around the corner, and for many people the thought of traveling cross country in a motor home seems like an ideal vacation. Then there are those for whom a vacation is not enough: The lure of the open road inspires some to refurbish vintage Airstreams, camper vans, and even school buses into full-time residences. In the new book […]