Celebrating Community
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 […]
Portrait of a lady in a world full of dirt. In hindsight, I’m not sure why I’ve been using this space in recent months to demand a new full-length from the voice of conscience for an angry, dying world known in her current form as Shilpa Ray, but I’m willing to take at least partial credit for her crucial, vital, […]
Charles Mingus is one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz and modern music. Born 100 years ago this month (April 22) , he’s one of those few musicians who, in the mind of the public and fellow musicians goes by one name: just Mingus, like Miles and Col-trane and Ella and Monk and Duke. Even rarer, he […]
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one with the fewest Spider-Men, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” in 1915 as a reflection on self-determination, or maybe a goof on his walking buddy. But, c’mon, he’s clearly got the multiverse on his mind. Two roads, two choices, two […]
Go to a mirror. Look into your eyes—the same ones you had as a child. When you look into them, whom do you see? Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, DaMaris B. Hill’s new book of narrative poems, fulfills a pledge the author made to not only acknowledge the child within, but “to carry my girl self on my shoulders […]