Author: A Star-Revue Contributor

Music

Notes From The Battlefield – 10 years of Baritone Army by Stefan Zeniuk

Notes From The Battlefield: 10 years of Baritone Army by Stefan Zeniuk 2008 seems like a lifetime ago. Eight years of the Bush administration were winding down, the economy was crashing, the country was embroiled in wars it didn’t know how to end, Obama was harnessing a lost sense of hope and idealism while the entire world was in the […]

Music

Cover Songs – The Agony & The Ecstasy by Antony Zito 

Cover Songs – The Agony & The Ecstasy by Antony Zito  You’re minding your own business one peaceful afternoon, silently arranging your sock drawer, and you make the fatal mistake of turning on the radio. Not the Pandora or the Spotify, but ye good olde-fashioned radio, with the waves and stuff. You’re just but a minute in, when you drop your […]

Arts, Books

Siri Hutsvedt’s Memories of the Future 

By Casey Mahoney  For those familiar with the exquisite essays of Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future will be comforting terrain. Hustvedt’s latest circles her more pressing themes of female erasure, the fallibility of memory, and the bizarre fact that imagination always plays a role in our sense of the “present.”   The situations in this novel are also familiar, namely, artists behaving oddly, cruelly, or bravely. While readers of Hustvedt’s […]

Arts, Theater

TFANA’s lucid take on The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

Through April 28, Theatre for a New Audience presents a clear and forceful production of Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy, “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.” Director Shana Cooper’s take is a great lucid rendering that accentuates the plays core themes and conflicts, even as the production careens into one too many air-knife-fights that turn the tragedy into a Mortal Combat training site. […]

Real Estate, Red Hook News

New Red Hook Buildings, Photos by Micah B. Rubin

Does Red Hook have a neighborhood “style”? Not really, it’s more of a attitude: old ghosts, waterfront grit, industrial innovation, creative hotbed, and a diverse caring community. Motley is another word that comes to mind.We used to have a lot of vacant or underused lots, over the past few years, many of them have been turned into new buildings. We […]

Arts, Kentler Gallery

The Persistence of Morgan O’Hara

It’s hard to know where to start with the artist Morgan O’Hara. Since the late 70s, she’s drawn over 4,000 pieces from everyday life — dinner with some lively Italians, a Noam Chomsky lecture, a Taiwanese Lion Dance performance — works she calls “Live Transmission.” On first approach, you’ll see a condense fog of scribbles or a soft web of […]

Arts

On the (Queer) Waterfront, Joep Van Lieshoutfor, Foam Talent at Red Hook Labs: and other art events to look forward to in March

March 1 Pioneer Works welcomes the Danish artist Joep Van Lieshoutfor for a three-decade survey of his work with “Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth.” The artist may be best known for his mobile homes that question domestic life (that or large scale cartoonish replicas of human genitalia). Atelier is an intentional misnomer, echoing his attention […]

Books

Brooklyn Heights Author Rachel Cline’s New Book Looks at MeToo — 9 Years Before the Movement Started 

The novelist Rachel Cline wrote the first page of what’s now described as a MeToo novel nine years before Christine Blasey-Ford testified.  “At last everyone is seeing how ubiquitous this experience is,” Cline, who was born and raised in Brooklyn Heights, says. “It was a moment that had to happen and needs to continue to happen.”  The good, painful, and ambiguous consequences […]