Celebrating Community
Rock and Roll Priestess Patti Smith Returns to SummerStage (photo by Marissa Blitz) I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Patti Smith. On the street in the West Village one momentarily thrilling winter afternoon, but besides that, in concert, more than a half dozen times, and most of them outdoors. She gives to New York. The first was at […]
Music has been the sound of humanity’ s oppressions and will since the beginning of times, sharing it’s essence with revolutionary and changing periods. “ Allen A, better known by Suave_A, has been surrounded by instruments since he was a school boy going to church. Coming from a Haitian heritage, and growing up in the Caribbean section of Flatbush, the […]
American journalism is on the ropes. The nation has lost one in four newspapers — 2,100 publications — since 2019. (That number has surely grown during the pandemic.) Half of what’s left is owned by vulture capitalists, private equity firms and hedge funds that have perverted local media ownership into cynical resource extraction. Newsrooms are gutted, and what’s left is […]
For Rachel Cleary, the dream of starting a radio station came about while in repose on her living room sofa. She was initially inspired by her desire to translate her experiences at open mics to radio. She recalls discussing the idea with her partner Robert Prichard and friend Tom Tenney. “We knew a physical location was too expensive. They got […]
Review of Black Star by Eric Anthony Glover, illustrated by Arielle Jovellanos Extreme temperatures. Flash flood alerts. Wildfires. Sounds like this past summer, no? These conditions are also found on the fictional planet Eleos, the setting for Eric Anthony Glover’s debut graphic novel, Black Star. Brilliantly illustrated by Arielle Jovellanos, the story follows an all-female team of scientists dispatched on […]
It’ll be four days into the fall, but the Last Taste of Summer Festival is set to squeeze the last drops out of the season while raising money for food relief. The evening, presented by Humbler.co, Chelsea Records NY & Sustainable United Neighborhoods (S.U.N.) will start at 7:00 pm at The Bushwick Generator and run until the last of the […]
On Deck Truth, Prince and the American Way. Last month, the British newspaper The Guardian proudly declared Welcome 2 America the best album of Prince’s last two decades. They’re hardly alone in praising the record Prince shelved in 2010 and, fair enough, Prince never managed to surpass his remarkable album-a-year run from 1984’s Purple Rain to 1988’s Lovesexy. But Prince’s […]
There’s lots to love when it comes to Blue Note records, not the least of which is that the combination of the consistently fine music they recorded and released and the distinctive and influential graphic design of the record albums were some of the most important elements of creating what “cool” meant in American culture, before it was coopted and […]
All of it was inconceivable — the scale, the carnage, the optics. To watch the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in real time, especially on television, was to thrash desperately for order as everything fell away. For many of us, that tenuous toehold was Hollywood. “This is like something out of a movie” was a natural first reaction. With more […]
Jonathan Ames, author of several books (including You Were Never Really Here, adapted into a film starring Joaquin Phoenix), creator of two television series (Blunt Talk and Bored to Death), and sometimes boxer (fighting as “The Herring Wonder”), continues building an eclectic body of passion projects with his latest work, A Man Named Doll. This novel focuses on the improbably […]