Celebrating Community
My favorite pop stars are all pop stores. Rumors continue to circulate about the next Warner Bros. Prince deluxe reissues in online communities. 2021 came and went without a new box (although the first issue of the shelved Welcome 2 America was a happy surprise). Diamonds & Pearls was a prime contender, the 30th anniversary of its release passing last […]
A strange Vice headline recently crossed my feeds: “Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China.” Thanks to Tencent Video, Fight Club, director David Fincher’s searing adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, finally made it to China! Only took 22 years. Thing is, it also came with a new finale. If it’s been a while, a quick refresher: […]
Although the popularity of Airbnb has skyrocketed in recent years, many people still enjoy staying in hotels. One of the reasons is having someone to clean up after you. But what if that person had another reason for being there? For three weeks in 1981, Sophie Calle worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. While cleaning 12 rooms on […]
Last month’s Winter Jazziest 2022, such as it was, was disappointing for all the wrong reasons. This had nothing to do with jazz and everything to do with America writ large, and the destructive nihilism of self-proclaimed conservatives and the political class overall. There are too many people with everything they need in life who can’t even conceive of enduring […]
One of the tricks of making crafts out of recycled materials is letting the natural shape of the objects you choose inspire what they can become. Take paper towel rolls, for instance. Their long, narrow shape calls to mind other long, narrow things, like wands and flutes. Here you’ll find instructions for a magic wand, a fairy wand, a playful […]
Stranger from paradise. Sarah La Puerta spent five years working on her first album, in the process moving from Austin, Texas, to upstate New York. The result, Strange Paradise (available on vinyl, cassette and download from Perpetual Doom), is a wonderful, personal, inviting, distancing, obscure, sweet, sappy, wistful set of simple songs rich with layered emotions. La Puerta performs most […]
In spring 1999, the world stared down a new century. It prepped for a Y2K computer meltdown, grappled with millennial paranoia, witnessed widening class and wealth gaps, and wrestled with culture rapidly moving online. Into this din came the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, its sexy leather-clad cyberpunk heroes kung-fu fighting and bullet dodging the Men in Black avatars of an evil […]
On the afternoon of Sunday, November 21st at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy of Brooklyn, in Sunset Park Brooklyn, a special memorial tribute to famed conductor José Alejando “Alex” Guzmán (1946-2021) was presented to his longtime fans at the Regina Opera. Selections from Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro and Don Giovanni; Beethoven’s Fidelio, Verdi’s Otello, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, […]
Tosca A Revival of Sir David McVicar’s production of Tosca opened on Dec 2. A Revival already happened of this production and a scheduled one got cancelled. So, a revival of this production, or Tosca in general, wasn’t very rare so it just seemed a typical revival along with so many others in the season. Yet, it was terrific. It […]
This month’s name comes from Janus, the two-faced god, looking forward and backward. A crossroads on the calendar, in other words, and here we are again at a crossroads that I’m sure most of us wish we could leave behind. Where is jazz in January? As December began, I was organizing this month around the return of the NYC Winter […]