Celebrating Community
Islands, mountains and valley girls. LA’s Death Valley Girls have released a couple of singles since 2020’s Under the Spell of Joy, and those songs have found a happy home on Islands in the Sky, the band’s fifth full-length. “When I’m Free” was the flip of Le Butcherettes cover of their “The Universe,” and it was a perfect pairing of […]
Jazz is political. I’m not here to shock or confound anyone, but in contemporary American culture, there’s a pervasive need to point out the obvious when so many people put effort into blocking the evidence of their eyes and ears from reaching their brain. Jazz is political, all music is political, all creative, cultural endeavors are political. They can’t help […]
Sitting on the beach, David Craig Ellis took a deep breath. The artist and curator had contracted COVID-19 April 2021. And in turn, long COVID – with symptoms ranging from sleeping problems to problems concentrating and thinking — set in. Ellis flew from New York to Miami in hopes that the sunshine would improve his state of being. While the […]
Review of Lunch with Lizabeth, by Todd Hughes Review by Michael Quinn Falling in love happens differently for everyone. Cupid picks up his bow and sometimes shoots an arrow where you’d never expect it to land. In the 1980s, gay filmmaker Todd Hughes fell head over heels for a femme fatale. She had him from hello—a sultry one spoken on […]
Written, directed, and music by Jean-Christophe Klotz Opening in New York January 27 and expanding to select cities in January/February Unrated 58 minutes I think a lot about history, historical memory, and historical literacy. (After all, it’s kind of my job.) It is critical that we ensure the recognition of humanity’s errors and crimes, uplift those who subverted them,, […]
2-Tone in 2023. In December, the voice of the British ska revival was silenced. The wave began with the Specials in 1979, brilliantly conceived not as a band so much as a movement by Jerry Dammers, whose ouster not long after led to the splintering and eventual demise of the greatest of the 2-Tone bands. Dammers was the mastermind and […]
Near the start of this current stretch of my life, when I somehow—by circumstance, accident, and desperation—became a freelance writer, I wrote an article for a classical music publication (that still exists but is no longer a place for writing) about how there’s no such thing as difficult music. Except for typing out the words coherently, it was easy to […]
What compels a master of his craft — at the height of his powers — to walk away, to say “finito”? That question haunts Bruce Weber’s documentary The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo Di Paolo, and it’s one the filmmaker spends 105 minutes not answering. It’s easy to be taken in by the film because it’s […]
Review of No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, by Paulina Porizkova Review by Michael Quinn Books by authors whose first language isn’t English are always interesting to read. You often “hear” something unusual in the rhythm of the sentences. It has nothing to do with the writer’s command of the language. My guess is it’s a kind […]
Todd Field’s Tár begins, essentially, with the end credits: dozens of names in white scrolling over a black background. It could be taken as an indication that it’s time to go home. Once the credits are done, things don’t pick up. The first third of the movie is belligerent in its boringness. It sets up the titular, successful orchestra conductor […]