Celebrating Community
I’ve known Louie Gasparro for over forty years. We both grew up in Long Island City, Queens. In my earliest memory of Louie, he is wearing a red pinstripe baseball uniform. We were both about eleven at the time. “Who’s that kid?” I ask my best friend, Lan. Louie looked like a jock. “That’s Louie Gasparro. That kid does it […]
Art that endures is art that evolves, that speaks to us across time and experience, that fully reveals itself only when we mature into its sensibilities. As Anthony Lane wrote in 2012, “The Portrait of a Lady that I read in my late teens bears the scantest relation to The Portrait of a Lady that I read today.” A book […]
Porgy and Bess Porgy and Bess is the rare American opera which is truly American. The music was written by George Gershwin who wrote many Broadway musicals throughout the 1920s with his brother Ira as lyricist, who wrote the lyrics for the set pieces within the opera. The text is by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward who had earlier collaborated on […]
The Sunn in the cloud. It’s not difficult to make an argument in support of a new Sunn O))) album, it’s just hard to fathom to whom one is arguing. With the band’s flooding of the marketplace and the fanatical fan base waiting in earnest, it might not be so off base to imagine that 95% of the buyers for […]
Review of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World by Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis Review by Michael Quinn My partner is a Christian. He’s been seeking a spiritual home. Prior to the pandemic, he spent many Sundays trying out different churches throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Some, he felt, had a drowsy, […]
I met Sugandha Gupta during a weekend visit to downtown Manhattan with my friend, Steve. I became completely fascinated when Sugandha began telling me about her textile artwork and her unique niche in the industry. Sugandha is from India. But she was born with Albinism, so she is very blonde. Once I better understood her perspective, we decided to talk […]
TURANDOT The Met’s Production of Turandot opened in 1987 directed by Franco Zefferelli. The production has remained one of the most popular productions at the Met. It is easy to see why, the gorgeously detailed sets and costumes are pleasing to the eye and perfectly fits Puccini’s grand score. And it is a truly excellent evening when the singers rise […]
ON DECK Velvet Underground overloaded. Todd Haynes’ new documentary The Velvet Underground is well worth watching, even if it falls off after John Cale leaves the band, giving only scant attention to the band’s remarkable, self-titled third album and then trickling away with the last one. But watching it got me to go back and dig out a couple of […]
There’s a small group of filmmakers whose latest work gets me into a theater no questions asked. Wes Anderson is near the top of that list. Beginning with Rushmore (1998) straight through to Isle of Dogs (2018), even as the films went further and further into a meticulously curated twee formalism (parts of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), for instance, […]
What if jazz is the original fusion music? What if it was always fusion music, from the very beginning, long before the Tony Williams Lifetime and Electric Miles and Weather Report? That is all the truth, so obvious that it was overlooked before Williams and Miles brought the startling, creative rock of the late ‘60s into jazz. But jazz never […]