Celebrating Community
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 […]
Résistance and futility. Ultravox! is remembered, and rightly so, as a progenitor of synthpop, but what gets missed out in that compact musicological truism is their remarkable 1977 debut. The band’s early incarnation—with singer and principal songwriter John Foxx and with the exclamation point in the name—was a remarkable amalgam of glam and bits of Brit blues revivalism with punk […]
The opening credit sequence is now a kind of lost cinematic art. But there was a time when this overture, designed to ease viewers into a film’s world and tone, was ubiquitous. And even then, the first minutes of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success pulsed with a rare energy and artistry. An overhead shot of Times Square […]
Henry Threadgill, photo by John Rogers Jazz is not just modern, but modernist; not just part of the last 100 years of cultural history, but a music that took old and existing language and made it new. Bebop was an explicit modernist, even avant-garde, movement that took existing popular material, like “How High The Moon,” and gave it a new […]
Modern Vintage aptly describes the sound of The Cactus Blossoms, an indie band based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Led by brothers Jack Torry and Page Burkham, both siblings play guitar and sing tightly knit harmonies that range from the tenderness of The Everly Brothers to the powerful crescendos of Roy Orbison. They’re backed […]
Review of Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, by Cookie Mueller Review by Michael Quinn Among the arty crowd, there might be two kinds of people: those who never heard of Cookie Mueller and those who are obsessed with her. She was the ultimate free spirit. Born in Baltimore in 1949, she was, by her own account, […]
You might know the whimsical artwork of Alice and Martin Provensen without even realizing it. The husband-and-wife illustration team created more than 40 children’s books in a career that spanned the mid- to late-20th century. Some of their earliest works are classics from the Little Golden Books series, such as 1949’s The Color Kittens written by Margaret Wise Brown (one […]