Celebrating Community
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
Going to the movies right now feels like huffing exhaust. The fumes of tired franchises, hyperfrenetic filmmaking, and cheap sludgy visual effects choke multiplexes and streaming services, strangling creativity and our own good judgment. But there are still rare clearings in the miasma, when a film can be a cleansing blast of the cleanest oxygen that reminds us why we […]
Review of Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, by Jeremy Dauber Review by Michael Quinn Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Melvin Kaminsky was the youngest of four boys whom the fatherless family doted on. “Until I was six, my feet didn’t touch the ground,” he remembers. He was quick with a smile, a natural mimic, and good at making people laugh. He […]
There were some among the first generation of punk who decried the Sex Pistols for being so bourgeoisie as to put out an LP. Singles were punk: short, cheap and disposable. Albums were the domain of bloated acts like Van der Graaf, Stills & Palmer or whatever. A Pistols long-player would have happened sooner or later, of course. It’s the […]