Celebrating Community
Review of “Portraits in Life and Death,” by Peter Hujar The end of the year always feels like the end of the world to me. I feel a giddy sense of abandon: to do more, eat more, see more—and inevitably spend more. (Wheee!) January is always a shock. (Whoa.) Somehow, the beginning of the year starts in a place far […]
As a critic, I’m wary of addressing issues of taste. Taste is personal, it’s what we like and what we don’t—I love how in Italian you say you like something with “mi piace,” which means “it pleases me”—and there’s very little taste-wise that is truly bad. Bad taste, done with affection, is kitsch, which is a good thing. Criticism is […]
Happy New Year and welcome to the very first 2025 “Tits Up Brooklyn” of the year! I hope you’re as excited to be here as I am! 2024 ended with a bang and 2025 is proving to be just as good, if not better, muse-ically speaking. So let’s wrap up December 2024 together, like you would a gift, with twinkling […]
Review of “New York Nico’s Guide to NYC,” by Nicolas Heller, with Jason Diamond; photography by Jeremy Cohen Review by Michael Quinn For nearly a decade, I managed a Brooklyn mannequin factory. Everything was made by hand. The work was messy, and the tools were loud. The process demanded precision and speed. My job was to oversee production and act […]
Smart, simple pleasures. On Only the Void Stands Between Us (LP and download released last month by Silver Current Records), Julie Beth Napolin sings of distance and intimacy. She sings quizzically of a fire coming to burn, it seems, those who don’t deserve to survive, and she sings very directly about praying for the living and the dead. In other […]
Last spring I wrote in these pages about my discovery of Bay Ridge’s Regina Opera Company. While I did grow up in a house where the Metropolitan Opera was on the radio every Saturday, that was not my cup of tea. The idea of dressing up and paying lots of money to hear a musical show was not my scene. […]
This is just one calendar year, which may be sufficient time in the pop music manufacturing industry to spot a trend, but is a far less meaningful span in music that wrestles with its own history—the old is constantly being renewed and incorporated with ideas from other genres—as jazz does, and that is so free of commercial pressures (unfortunately) that […]
Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten […]
Urban Recovery (UR), which opened at 411 Van Brunt St. in January, is the only private residential treatment facility in New York City. The five-level building houses 36 inpatient beds (including six detox-specific), and provides private inpatient and residential treatment for a variety of conditions, with a primary emphasis on substance use disorders. We walked down the block to find […]