$150M Eco-topian “Village” Envisioned
by | Feb 17, 2020 1:19 pm | Comments (8)
Yale Divinity School
Rendering of planned “Living Village.”
Soon you may be able to walk up Prospect Street — and enter utopia.
Arts & Culture
A Happy Ending Birthday at Best Video
by | Feb 17, 2020 8:45 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Hank Hoffman.
“I’ll do my impresario thing, which is normal, and then I’ll do something which is not,” said Hank Hoffman, who on Saturday night not only played the part of executive director of Best Video Film and Cultural Center, but also stepped up to the stage on vocals and guitar for the band Happy Ending, which he has been a part of since 1983.
Another special role Hoffman played on this evening: birthday celebrant.
The band always plays a show annually near Hoffman’s birthday, but this year’s was a special one. Hoffman — famously a Beatles fan — was turning 64.
Beer Garden Finds A Place To PARK
by | Feb 14, 2020 8:37 am | Comments (6)
Allison Hadley Photos
PARK on Crown should be a familiar sign to any passersby on Crown Street for the last decade. The sign, that is. Whether they know it’s now also the sign for a new bar is another thing entirely.
Long Wharf Tells A Survivor’s Story
by | Feb 14, 2020 8:30 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
The Gründerzeit Museum in Berlin houses transgender survivor of Nazi Germany and East Germany Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s collection of manufactured objects from the “founder’s period” of Germany — the 1870s through the start of World War I. Set in a “memory space” inside the museum, Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of I Am My Own Wife, the Tony and Pulitzer-winning one-person show by Doug Wright, creates an eerie space that is both inside and outside.
Reinaldo’s Corner
by | Feb 13, 2020 9:16 pm | Comments (0)
“Today is the beginning of the end of Donald Trump …”
Artist Gets Found In The Labyrinth
by | Feb 13, 2020 12:57 pm | Comments (0)
Daniel Eugene
The lines are so close together and so meticulously drawn that they buzz by proximity to one another. The effect is disorienting, like an optical illusion, a trick, a puzzle. It gets that much more intense when you see that New Haven-based artist Daniel Eugene’s drawings can be interpreted as a maze — a series of patterns that invite you to take a closer look, and slowly but surely, have your vision rearranged just a little.
Black Inventors Get Their Due
by | Feb 12, 2020 4:09 pm | Comments (0)
Maya McFadden Photos
Assistant Principal Tianko Ellison: Idea grew over years.
Erin Palmer and Nicholas Clement with their display.
One thing the fire extinguisher, guitar, super soaker, and pressure cooker have in common? They were all invented by African Americans.
Thanks to the students of the Ross Woodward School, those and other African American inventions are showcased in a Black History Month gallery.
New Italian Eatery Coming To Wooster St.
by | Feb 12, 2020 1:13 pm | Comments (5)
Thomas Breen photo
The new home of Pasta EATaliana at 121 Wooster St.
A Naples native and former head chef at Anthony’s Ocean View plans to open a new Italian restaurant at the heart of the city’s Little Italy.
The Invisible Made Visible
by | Feb 12, 2020 1:12 pm | Comments (0)
The music helps create the atmosphere of floating, but the banners do the trick. Never mind that one of the windows leads to the street. With the tapestries hung in front of one wall and a stripe of color on the wall opposite them, it’s possible to think of yourself in a submarine — albeit a microscopic one, because the view outside is of plankton.
Opera Heads Up The Amazon
by | Feb 11, 2020 1:02 pm | Comments (0)
A steamboat is churning up the Amazon, heading for the city of Manaus. Florencia Grimaldi, a soprano, is going to sing at the opera house there, hoping to find a lost lover. Rosalba, a journalist, is there to try to write a book about Grimaldi, but falls in love with the nephew of the steamboat’s captain in the process. So far so good — until a storm rises and creates havoc. Will the ship make it to Manaus? Will Rosalba find love? Will Florencia find her lover?
3 Bands Shred The State House
by | Feb 10, 2020 1:00 pm | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Sperm Donor.
“Give me a minute and I’ll say something entertaining,” said Phil of Sperm Donor, the second act of a three-band bill at The State House on Sunday night that gave everyone who wasn’t in the mood for Oscar speeches a reason to leave the house and experience the kind of live music you feel in your bones.
Lunarfest Connects Body And Mind
by | Feb 10, 2020 9:00 am | Comments (0)
Shirley Chock stood in the upstairs ballroom of the New Haven Museum, her hands poised as if cradling a ball. In front of her, a few dozen people were doing the same. She smiled.
“Everyone is trying too hard,” she said. A ripple of appreciative laughter flowed through the room. “Your body is not just letting it happen.” She paused. “Tai chi tells your brain to stop getting in the way of the moment…. It’s not about trying to make these movements happen. We’re actually trying to not move at all. We’re moving through stillness.”
Mandingo Ambassadors Return To Best Video
by | Feb 10, 2020 8:49 am | Comments (0)
Daniel Shoemaker Photos
“Best Video is my best place.” remarked Guinea-born guitarist and longtime New Haven resident Mamady Kouyate, who on Friday returned with his band, the Mandingo Ambassadors, to perform at Best Video Film and Cultural Center for the second time in under a year.
Continue reading ‘Mandingo Ambassadors Return To Best Video’
Bluegrass Band Goes The Extra Mile
by | Feb 7, 2020 8:51 am | Comments (1)
Allison Hadley Photos
“You know in The Grinch when he has a ‘wonderful, terrible idea? That’s how we’re feeling about learning all of this,” said Chris Evans, Mile Twelve’s guitarist. He and the rest of the band — David Benedict on mandolin, Catherine “BB” Bowness on banjo, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Evan Murphy on guitar and vocals, and Nate Sabat on bass and vocals — grinned ruefully at the packed house Thursday night at Best Video Film & Cultural Center in Hamden. He had just explained that to shake up their tight tour schedule, the band had decided to learn — and play at Best Video for the first time — the entirety of Tim O’Brien’s landmark bluegrass (country? acoustic?) album Fiddler’s Green, an album that clearly carried the heart of the band.
Cafe Nine Works Blue
by | Feb 7, 2020 8:50 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
GA-20
“We’re gonna warm it up like that coal-fired pizza,” said Steve Balkun, one half of Balkun Brothers, who were one half of a powerful two-band bill Thursday night at Cafe Nine that included Boston’s GA-20 and filled the misty February night with enough heat to chase the forecasted snow away.
Reinaldo’s Corner
by | Feb 6, 2020 4:58 pm | Comments (0)
“I was acquitted … Don’t forget what I asked you …”
At Erector Square, Tap’s All, Folks
by | Feb 6, 2020 12:40 pm | Comments (1)
Cara McDonough Photos
Observing Alexis Robbins’s Friday evening tap class, held on the top floor of Building 5 at Erector Square on Peck Street, one has to wonder if the people one floor below — and perhaps the people below them — are distracted by the sound. But one also has to wonder if those people, artists themselves, after all, might excuse the ruckus. It’s such a joyful noise.
Q Meadows Approves Butterflies, Traffic Calming, Historic Markers
by | Feb 5, 2020 10:33 pm | Comments (2)
Allan Appel Photo
With results far clearer than those partially reported in Iowa, residents on the east side of town completed a months’ long process and used a version of ranked choice voting to approve a wide range of projects to improve the Quinnipiac Meadows neighborhood.
Continue reading ‘Q Meadows Approves Butterflies, Traffic Calming, Historic Markers’
Hillhouse Eases Down The Road
by | Feb 5, 2020 2:19 pm | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
On Tuesday evening, the students in the Academic Theatre Company at James Hillhouse High School were airborne. They were doing a strenuous warm-up for their rehearsal of The Wiz — which will be playing at Hillhouse High School from March 19 to March 22 — and learning to sing and fly at the same time.
CAW Goes All In
by | Feb 4, 2020 1:21 pm | Comments (0)
Abigail Wilcox
The Inner You.
Abigail Wilcox’s The Inner You is part anatomical drawing, part phantasmagoria. It somehow illustrates both the physical nature of the gray matter of the brain and the qualities of the uncountable thoughts inside it. Those thoughts could encompass just about anything: sharp cityscapes, bubbles in churned water, blue guitars, a dinosaur.
Crossing Mill River (District) By Foot
by | Feb 3, 2020 1:03 pm | Comments (1)
Thomas Breen photo
Carina Gormley on Grand: “My favorite walk.”
The four-block stretch of Grand Avenue between Olive Street and Wallace Street is scattered with empty lots, storefront churches, social service nonprofits, and Italian eateries, all overshadowed by a towering highway overpass and a rich working-class history.
It’s Carina Gormley’s favorite walk in New Haven. She sees the city’s past and present in each step.
Artspace Makes A Feedback Loop
by | Feb 3, 2020 1:02 pm | Comments (0)
Jon Kessler
It Takes a Global Village Idiot.
People walking by Artspace since December have been treated to It Takes a Global Village Idiot, the chaotic kinetic sculpture by Jon Kessler that serves as a gateway to the rest of Strange Loops, the exhibit running at Artspace through Feb. 29. Curated by Johannes DeYoung and Federico Solmi, the exhibit seeks to explore “the social and psychological impacts of rapid technological change, and the consequential ways in which contemporary notions of self might be transforming.” The exhibit itself just might prove to be as distracting as a constantly pinging cell phone — and that’s part of the point.
Killer Kin Kicks Into The New Year
by | Jan 31, 2020 4:34 pm | Comments (0)
“Here Comes The Killers/Snake Oil,” the first song on Killer Kin’s Bad, Bad, Minds! starts with a grinding, strutting guitar, ominous enough already. Then the drums crash in, a distortion-drenched tremolo guitar, somewhere between punk and surf.
Even before the singer starts chanting out the first lines of the first verse — “here comes the killers / here comes the kin” — it promises danger. But it also promises something else: fun.
“Manahatta” Sets The Hook
by | Jan 31, 2020 8:41 am | Comments (1)
Joan Marcus Photos
Flores and Gladstone.
Before the curtain rises on Manahatta — now running at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 15 — there is an announcement in the theater, an acknowledgment that New Haven and Yale are built on Native American land, that other people were here first.
It’s an acknowledgment also heard at Long Wharf, at Arts Council events, and at smaller shows throughout town. Rarely, however, has the event that followed so ably showed the intense need for such an acknowledgment, and at the same time, demonstrated its near-futility compared to the monumental problem it seeks to address.
Woody’s Wings Takes Flight
by | Jan 30, 2020 5:47 pm | Comments (0)
Allan Appel Photo
The Lacys, Cathy Graves, Mayor Elicker, and Alder Richard Furlow.
Forty different glazes for chicken wings — ranging from mango habanero to garlic parmesan — are just not enough for fledgling and creative restauranteurs Lachelle and Linwood Lacy.
They have a still-secret 41st sauce coming, combining the best of the previous 40. It is still in the research stage, meaning only family members get to try it.
Glazes and wings galore will also be ready for upcoming Super Bowl weekend.