Review of “J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist,” by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler Review by Michael Quinn What are you wearing as you read this? A shirt from Under Armour? Leggings from Lululemon? Sneakers? Flip-flops? A hundred years ago, the world was different, and we dressed differently. But it was around this time that advertising first started to get […]
Arts
The Future is Now! The Singularity is Nigh! And the Singular Her is Now Our Era’s Cinematic Urtext., by Dante A. Ciampaglia
All the hand wringing and doomsaying around artificial intelligence — in tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and Midjourney — has made for some lazy movie comparisons. AI is like Skynet in the Terminator movies! These chatbots are a few dataset away from becoming 2001’s HAL 9000! We’re all destined to be mindless slug consumers controlled by corporate AI run amok, […]
Music: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk
Cindi Mayweather succumbs to pleasure. Anyone who caught Janelle Monáe’s 2018 concert in Prospect Park (and reportedly thousands didn’t and were turned away once the bandshell grounds were filled to capacity) knows what a dynamic performer she is. She seriously enjoyed herself, putting on a tight show, copping moves from James Brown and Michael Jackson and gleefully admitting defeat in […]
Jazz: The Original Idol, by George Grella
Sometimes, things just come together. I’m writing this on July 4th, at the end of a long holiday weekend which saw the conclusion of the HBO series The Idol and, this day, the first of two birthday broadcasts on WKCR—89.9 on your FM dial, or wkcr.org if you insist—for Louis Armstrong. Yes, there are two birthday broadcasts for Louis, who […]
Quinn on Books: 70 Years Later, Failed Poems Still Succeed, by Michael Quinn
Review of Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) was an American poet and the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Her award-winning book of poems, Annie Allen, focused on the life of an ordinary Black girl living in Chicago’s South Side. Brooks returned to this subject in the only novel she ever published, Maud […]
The Passenger – A Meditation, by Kelsey Sobel
For my book club, I suggested we read Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel, The Passenger. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you’d call a McCarthy expert. Over the years I’ve taught The Road to great success in high school creative writing classes, and it remains the first and only McCarthy novel I’ve read. I am, however, very aware […]
Scott Pfaffman on Gregor Wiest and the Wall Gallery and a party
Iwas invited by a friend to attend, on the evening of May 19th, a banquet to honor the work of German artist Gregor Wiest at The Wall Gallery located at 41 Seabring Street in Red Hook. The Wall Gallery is two years old and has had 5 exhibitions. It was established by myself and Franz Landspersky, two compatible Red Hook […]
A REGINA OPERA OPERETTA
Brooklyn’s Regina Opera, known in recent years for some heavy lifting in productions such as Verdi’s Il Trovatore, and dramatic turns such as Puccini’s Il Tabarro, has ventured into the light side with their production of Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince. Romberg was a prolific tunesmith in the early days of Broadway, but he is best known for the three […]
Music: Wiggly Air, June – by Kurt Gottschalk
Cruel to be Khanate. The biggest news of last month, perhaps tied with Tina Turner and the debt ceiling, was the first new album by “drone doom supergroup” (so says Wikipedia) Khanate in 14 years. To Be Cruel popped up without prophecy on streaming sites on May 19, with a CD and the usual assortment of buy-me-please limited-edition vinyl designs […]
On Jazz: Envision the Scene, by George Grella
“Community” is a word that arts organizations use a lot these days, and I in no way want to undercut the sincerity behind that when I point out that the word’s popularity is fundamentally driven by the kind of grant-writing-thinking that pretty much every arts organization has to adopt in contemporary American life in order to even hope for some […]