Celebrating Community
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 […]
Review of Carpenters: The Musical Legacy, by Mike Cidoni Lennox and Chris May, with Richard Carpenter Review by Michael Quinn Two journalists approached musician Richard Carpenter to get his blessing on a book they were developing on the band that he’d he fronted in the 1970s and ’80s with his sister Karen (now deceased). Richard offered more than his approval. […]
’Tis the season—to get lots and lots of packages! Before you flatten the boxes to put out with your recycling, consider transforming them into holiday crafts. Here’s a step-by-step guide to turn empty cardboard boxes into festive gingerbread houses. Choose your box. For this project, look for boxes that already resemble the shape of a house. Think rectangular rather than […]
The idea of the “star,” a celebrated and famous performer, isn’t new in and of itself. It goes back at least to the career of pianist Franz Liszt, who in the mid-19th century caused such public sensations during his European tours that he begat a new word, “Lisztomania.” And before Lady Gaga and even Barbra Streisand, there was the first, […]
I’ve known Louie Gasparro for over forty years. We both grew up in Long Island City, Queens. In my earliest memory of Louie, he is wearing a red pinstripe baseball uniform. We were both about eleven at the time. “Who’s that kid?” I ask my best friend, Lan. Louie looked like a jock. “That’s Louie Gasparro. That kid does it […]