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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 10, 2018 8:30 am
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Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds
“I live in the desert now,” said Kid Congo in between songs at his set with the Pink Monkey Birds at Cafe Nine on Friday. “I sit on my roof with a big sign that says ‘Take Me.’” He raised his arms to the ceiling and the crowd did the same, cheering him along and ready to be taken anywhere he was going. It was a night of sweet and sweaty worship of two bands who each brought their own kind of rock ‘n’ roll spirit to the stage on State and Crown and created an old-time new-wave goth-punk revival.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 5, 2018 12:13 pm
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In one portrait, a man with glasses gazes from the frame, friendly but appraising. In another, Ruth Bader Ginsburg peers out from a background swirling with color, bringing all her intelligence and experience to bear to size up the viewer. In a third, a woman, nobody’s fool, gazes out from a scintillating wall of hues, a clock tower to her left.
It turns out that the woman is Marilyn Walton, a construction worker, hairdresser, and business owner who happened to be the grandmother of artist Jaida Stancil. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, of course, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, rendered by Aliya Anna Hafiz. And the man with the glasses is artist Salvador Bacón, father of Patricio Salvador Bacón Guaray, who painted his father’s portrait.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 24, 2018 7:45 am
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Morris.
Sitting on the stage of the recently opened State House on State Street, guitar improv maestro Joe Morris revealed that he grew up in New Haven and remembered the space from his childhood. He reminisced about the Horowitz Brothers store, which had been just around the corner. He looked around at a building that was, for him, steeped in history.
“It’s really nice to be able to play here,” he said. “I love New Haven. Beautiful things happen here.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 16, 2018 7:35 am
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Stephany Brown Photo
La Tunda.
Stephany Brown, Kriss Santala, and Andy Beetham burst into laughter in Cafe Nine, in the time between happy hour and that night’s featured show, when asked how they got the name for their band, La Tunda.
A Boston-based developer will buy over 300 Ninth Square apartments and keep more than half of them “affordable” in return for a 20-year tax abatement, under an agreement revealed Monday night.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 6, 2018 8:03 am
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Alash
It was yet another hot and humid summer day in New Haven, which has seemed almost empty at times due to summer breaks and vacations. But the air-conditioned Cafe Nine was well packed with an audience that were transported for an hour or so on their own little break — to the center of Asia.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 25, 2018 12:01 pm
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Olguin.
On Tuesday afternoon, two piles of soil had been dumped in the corner of the back gallery at Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown Streets. Two shovels protruded from the piles. Artist Ruben Olguin stood over a wheelbarrow, adding water to its contents, then mixing it with his hands. In a rack near the window, a row of bricks lay in the sun to dry.
Olguin was practicing a craft he learned from his grandfather — a craft millenia old — in the service of a new art project about who gets to use the earth, and for what.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jul 24, 2018 8:08 am
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Danielle Capalbo, a.k.a. daniprobably, took her time tuning her guitar midway through her set at Cafe Nine Monday night, telling the audience she didn’t want to take her tuner out.
Local artists meandered between guns lining a gallery floor Thursday night. But the firearms were decommissioned, disarmed, and the dismantled pieces were free for the taking.
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Allison Park |
Jul 12, 2018 12:31 pm
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Allison Park Photo.
duoJalal.
When New Haven’s youngest musical prodigies attended a classical chamber music performance, little did they know they were in for an hour-long program consisting of commissioned works for viola and percussion, a cello-trombone duo, and a laughing piano.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 26, 2018 7:39 am
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Anahita Vossoughi
Caterpillar.
A mound of flesh, skin stretched by clips. Livid coloration, like a bruise.
Caterpillar is an entry into Anahita Vossoughi’s “Beige Thick Golden Glue,” an exhibit running at Artspace on Orange and Crown until June 30. “Created over the past two years,” as the accompanying literature explains, “these works continue Vossoughi’s career-long investigation into the anxiety of the contemporary body and its anatomy, asking how and why bodies are fashioned, manipulated, maintained, imagined, and represented by the self and others.” What do we do to ourselves for other people? Why do we do it?
The questions — especially in our current political climate — become that much more pointed when Vossoughi addresses them to women. In artspeak, Vossoughi “proposes a new ambivalent language for an aesthetics of desire and fetish written by and for women.” It’s about wanting things, and about wanting control over wanting things. It’s about who gets to make the decisions, and what for. And placed in this context, the pieces in this exhibit speak.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 25, 2018 7:43 am
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Malian musician Cheick Hamala Diabate grinned as he looked over the packed room on the second floor of the Grove on Chapel Street. “Maybe I’ll move here to Connecticut,” he said. “I like everyone here.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 20, 2018 12:47 pm
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Nicki Chavoya
Brendan Toller
Brendan Toller — whose inaugural dance night at Cafe Nine, “Shake ‘N’ Vibrate,” happens this Sunday, June 24 — recalled the first time he walked into Cafe Nine on a Sunday evening for the monthly Sex Beat Dance Party with Kid Congo Powers.
“I remember going the first night and being super thrilled because I could already tell it was my aesthetic, my taste and there it was right in front of me. It created this rock ‘n’ roll realm … this small tight knit group where you get to know everybody, like it or not, because it was on the dance floor. Even if you didn’t know them by name you knew what kind of moves they were doing. It was a real open space — all of his flyers said ‘All Stripes Welcomed’ — and it was just free and magical, the best elements of rock ‘n’ roll as an art form and as a political force coming together. It made for a really fun night.”
Toller never missed another one. When he found out that Kid would be ending his run due to moving, he was worried that the community that had been built would vanish. Thus Shake ‘N’ Vibrate, with DJ B the T Jr., was born.
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Christopher Peak |
Jun 13, 2018 4:06 pm
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Christopher Peak Photo
Joseph Cohen describes six-story complex to Board of Zoning Appeals.
City Plan Department
294-302 State St.
A New York City developer who already owns several historic New Haven properties is looking to top off his Elm City holdings by erecting a 60-unit apartment complex atop a surface parking lot downtown.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 12, 2018 11:57 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Carlos Wells.
Carlos Wells recalled the first time he stepped into the space. “As soon as I walked in, it was immediate,” he said. “I already could see a stage here and thought we could do a show there.”
Four years later Wells is operations manager and co-founder, along with Slate Ballard of The Grove, of The State House, a venue opening on State Street between Chapel and Crown Streets later this month.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 6, 2018 12:16 pm
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Sarah Shook in the film What It Takes
“I don’t measure my songs by how good they are. I measure them by how honest they are,” says singer-songwriter Sarah Shook during the documentary film What It Takes, about her and her band the Disarmers, presented at Cafe Nine Tuesday evening.
Honesty is also a hallmark of the documentary form, celebrated locally this week as the New Haven Documentary Film Festival, now in its fifth year, runs through June 10. Gorman Bechard, a festival co-founder who also directed What It Takes, was on hand to introduce the film — followed by a Q&A with him led by local musician Dean Falcone and a set of music by New Haven’s own Stefanie Austin and the Palomino Club.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 5, 2018 12:12 pm
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Peak Photo
Goldberg.
When renowned jazz and klezmer musician and composer Ben Goldberg was considering the right place to do his next recording — of a quintet made up of some of his favorite musicians — “it didn’t take a lot of thought,” he said.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 4, 2018 9:00 am
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Strawberry Cheesesteak
Robbie Keenan came onstage at Cafe Nine to introduce the band Strawberry Cheesesteak Saturday night, congratulate them on their album release and thank them for allowing the night to also be a fundraiser for his cause. But he also had a story to tell.
“The story does not start very well. In fact, it starts the opposite of well,” Keenan said.
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Brian Slattery |
May 22, 2018 11:15 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Detail of Aliza Shvarts, Cite/Site.
There’s a startling collage on the wall of Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown. Cropped photos of Tawana Brawley, Anita Hill, and Monica Lewinsky. A photo that looks like a crime photo from a rape scene. All scattered throughout four grids amid a series of quotes, many as potent as the images. “Genovese syndrome,” reads one. “I believe the women,” reads another. “She used her menstrual blood as a way to inscribe her message and was not heard.”
