Celebrating Community
Something in 4/4 time. Late last year, Robert Fripp—the lynchpin between ambient music and prog rock—appeared on an episode of Daryl Hall’s home cooking and barn jam show Live From Daryl’s House. The series has been airing intermittently since 2007 and is generally a pleasure. (All of the episodes can be found on YouTube.) The reason episode 87 matters to […]
Moral panics have been around long before Socrates was forced to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of Athens. Since civilization began, there’s been an endless cycle of social/political/artistic change provoking reaction from those who are fearful of any change whatsoever, or even, in Mencken’s immortal words, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The challenge for the […]
Authors sometimes see renewed interest in their old work, especially if they’ve made a name for themselves. These older titles may not be as good as their most popular books (though occasionally, they’re better). Yet it’s always interesting to dip into an author’s back catalog to see how they’ve evolved. Early attempts often have a freshness that embodies what we […]
Author Nelson Algren wrote in 1951 about Chicago that, “once you’ve come to this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” That sentiment could also apply to the Brighton Beach neighborhood filmmakers Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg captured some 30 years […]
Boomer– R.J. Cirillo Millennial –Amy Flatow We are in Park Slope, sitting with coffee. R.J. –“So Amy, what generation are you?” Amy –“I’m technically a millennial, but considered a geriatric millennial, or like the first crop of them.” And she laughed. R.J.– “I’m a boomer, so I get some flak for that, the term itself becoming sort of a put-down.” […]
You don’t choose to attend a performance at the floating cabaret, the Avalon. The Avalon chooses you. And you’re not only the guest of honor—you’re the only guest. Every song, every dance, every act is written just for you. But the invitation comes at a high price: step on board once, you risk leaving your old life behind forever. This […]
The beginning of another new age. The year that’s just passed might go down in history as the one in which New Age music at last made its triumphant return. The media likes nothing more than a counterintuitive tale, and so a rapper long off the scene, André 3000, of the groundbreaking Atlanta duo OutKast, releasing a new age record—New […]
Music making is a social activity. Anyone with a laptop and a bedroom can make an album, but there’s limits to that, not the least how far one’s imagination can go without the stimulus of other personalities. When musicians get together to play it’s a social activity, they make something together whether or not they’re in front of an audience. […]
It was in September, sitting in the big auditorium at BAM, packed with people, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Near the beginning of the film is a shot of rain dropping into a pond, the water rippling out into green shards of wetland flora — nothing special, necessarily, but the kind of pastoral lyricism Tarkovsky routinely leaned on. […]
Cemeteries freak some people out. My mother, who grew up in Queens, is still traumatized from an experience she had as a little girl. Her family visited dead relatives every Sunday. Once, she peeked into a mausoleum window and saw a baby carriage. She never got over it. I grew up differently. Perhaps as a result of my mother’s unhappy […]