Celebrating Community
ON DECK Velvet Underground overloaded. Todd Haynes’ new documentary The Velvet Underground is well worth watching, even if it falls off after John Cale leaves the band, giving only scant attention to the band’s remarkable, self-titled third album and then trickling away with the last one. But watching it got me to go back and dig out a couple of […]
There’s a small group of filmmakers whose latest work gets me into a theater no questions asked. Wes Anderson is near the top of that list. Beginning with Rushmore (1998) straight through to Isle of Dogs (2018), even as the films went further and further into a meticulously curated twee formalism (parts of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), for instance, […]
What if jazz is the original fusion music? What if it was always fusion music, from the very beginning, long before the Tony Williams Lifetime and Electric Miles and Weather Report? That is all the truth, so obvious that it was overlooked before Williams and Miles brought the startling, creative rock of the late ‘60s into jazz. But jazz never […]
Lifelong Brooklyn residents, Mingo Tull and Roseann Natale are well known for Rock’Scool Brooklyn, a school for music education offering Band and Orchestral Instrument Rental. This business has endured many changes recently; like so many independent business owners, Mingo Tull and Roseann Natale were forced to shut down due to Covid 19 and the inability of having in person music […]
Drag queen Linda Simpson has been a unique presence in New York City nightlife since the 1980s. She’s not known for barn-burning performances (her longstanding gig is as a Bingo hostess) or for being a look queen (her off-the-rack outfits veer toward the pedestrian, capped with an out-of-the-bag, shake-and-go red wig). Her wisecracks and corny sense of humor are as […]
Try to imagine a world without windows, how uninhabitable homes and works spaces would become, how menacing and dystopian buildings would seem from the outside. Windows are an indispensable element in any human abode, an architectural necessity without which interiors becomes oppressive. For those of us inside, they frame fragments of the outer world, letting it in, and for those […]
It’s no secret that people are continuing to process their emotions after enduring more than 18 months of uncertainty, separation, stress, and yearning for “normalcy.” With that in mind, Mil’s Trills, a Brooklyn-based children’s music project released its fourth album, Let It Out! on September 29. It was made and mastered within eight months, in an urgent effort to combat […]
Late style, the idea that an artist’s work changes markedly as they see the end of life on the horizon, is mainly reserved for discussions of literary figures, or else musicians, like Beethoven, that literary figures hear of enough to dig, if not understand. Another way to put it is that it is a middle-to-highbrow topic that you can read […]
ON DECK Melvins unapologetically unplugged. Way back in 2014, the mighty King Buzzo made his NYC solo debut with an acoustic set at Santos Party House, and it was even more epic than the album (This Machine Kills Artists) he was supporting. The guy is a solid rock star, from the hair to the unaffected vocals to the measured perfection […]
Fire Shut Up In My Bones The Metropolitan Opera reopened on September 27 with the Met Premiere of a new opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, which is the first opera by a black composer to be performed at the Met. The opera, which has a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, is based on a memoir by Charles Blow, about […]