The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous, and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, […]
Author: A Star-Revue Contributor
Hanks Saloon has left the building… again… by Jack Grace
Hank’s Saloon, a century old dive bar, is gone. It tried to reinvent itself through relocation, but it ended in an ill-fated merger with a food court that could not sustain its own share of the bills. Hank’s was a part of a now-vanishing beautiful culture in New York where people from all economic backgrounds might meet, drink, be teased, […]
The Left Likes Its Chances by Frank Stipp
The cities are toxic. The subways are seething. The carbon is cooking. The forests are burning. Siberia’s melting. The ocean is rising. South Asia’s flooding. Our cells are half plastic. Miami’s a puddle. They site nuke plants on rivers. The war is raging. The money is talking. The radio’s braying. The TV is barking. The press has got to be […]
Jeffrey Lewis – Antifolk Hero & Comic Artist by Adam Whittaker
There is great reverence among the British towards certain American songwriters. The cultural impact crater from the US musical asteroid stretches across genres and time, and I’ve been unfortunate enough to bare witness to its effect in drizzly pubs, enduring a dire British approximation of a Johnny Cash impression in an oversized cowboy hat. As much as we fetishize American […]
Citizen Journalism Pays a Visit to US by Frank Stipp
Media, Literally The Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to New York once a year. So when the director of the film ‘Bellingcat’ — a documentary about a popular European ‘citizen journalism’ site — strongly recommended it, we booked a seat. Citizen Journalism is widely believed to provide a cure for the corporate media model. The concept quite rightly implies […]
Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance Presents a Sparkling Die Fledermaus by Nino Pantano
Martina Arroyo, Kennedy Award ceremony honoree, soprano supreme, who has been a beacon of light and pioneer since the 1960’s and 1970’s, a crossover classical singer with a delightful sense of humor still is in the game. She is a brilliant teacher “go getter”and nurturer through her Martina Arroyo Foundation. This gala event occurred at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter […]
Horror Is a Thing Bathed in Sunlight: Review of ‘Midsommar’ By Caleb Drickey
Masked killers, demons from another world, Beasts of Unusual Size: these are the things that go bump in the night, the denizens of horror films. Terrifyingly unknowable and unknowably terrifying, these monsters live in the dark, emerging only when least expected to destroy whichever horny teens disturbed their slumber. As evidenced by the recent box office success of “It,” “Halloween,” […]
An Uncomfortable Audience at Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” by Ruby Hutson-Ellenberg
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-prize winning play “Fairview” shines a light on white spaces Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-prize winning play “Fairview” will run until Aug 11, 2019 at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center after a successful production at Soho Repertory Theatre in 2018. The 95-minute play may technically be one act with no intermission, but it is divided […]
Prince Lives, by Kurt Gottschalk
The enormity of unreleased material Prince left behind him is the stuff of legend and the issues around making it available are complicated to say the least—from questions of ownership to the fact that Prince himself (as he made clear during his life) didn’t want his unfinished or abandoned projects made public. Even so, the late master’s heirs and his […]
Breaking down the proposed District 15 school rezonings, by Erin DeGregorio and Nathan Weiser
A new school building is about to open in Gowanus, and District 15 is figuring out how best to make use of it. PS 32 (317 Hoyt St.) will have 436 new seats, early childhood and special education classrooms, a rooftop playground, and a new cafeteria and library come September 2020. The goal is to reduce overcrowding and waitlists at […]
THE THAMES DELTA IS YOUR OLD BACKYARD: On Wilko Johnson By Mike Morgan
Bang! – The Unstoppable Force Meets the Immovable Object From Oil City Confidential I’m listening to the latest Wilko Johnson record called Blow Your Mind. A few years before that, I listened a lot to his previous album Going Back Home, a joint venture with Roger Daltrey, The Who singer. And way before that, I listened to his various Wilko […]
11 Alternative Education Destinations in New York City By Anna Ben Yehuda Rahmanan
An authentic New York education should go beyond mathematical formulas and dissections of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (albeit both essential lessons, of course). Here, learning is a multidisciplinary endeavor that requires creativity, because to survive amongst a myriad of high-strung New Yorkers requires a deep-dive into a culture defined by more than school: music, art, literature, science and, yes, even […]
Rip It Up and Start Again: BAM’s Exceptional Showcase of 1980s Women Filmmakers, by Dante A. Ciampaglia
If you take Hollywood at its word — and you absolutely shouldn’t — the last few years have been really good for female filmmakers. Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, was the third-biggest film of 2017, earning more than $412 million at the box office. That same year, Greta Gerwig set the zeitgeist ablaze with her exceptional Lady Bird. Ava Duvernay has […]
