Today's Ted Toons

by Ted Littleford | Nov 14, 2023 8:00 am | Comments (0)

Newhallville Church's Roof Repairs Celebrated

by Allan Appel | Nov 13, 2023 9:05 am | Comments (1)

The congregants of Pitts Chapel United Free Will Baptist Church are not only raising their historic sanctuary’s roof in dancing, singing, and exuberant prayer as they do every Sunday — now they are also able to fix it.

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Zines Create Scene At Possible Futures

by Karen Ponzio | Nov 13, 2023 9:02 am | Comments (0)

Tiny Ghosts Haunting Small Things, The Band Plays in Front of a Big Audience, and Cars Go Too Fast (and our road design encourages it) are not titles you might find on the bestseller list or at your local news stand. But you can find them in the zine library making its way through the city as part of the New Haven Zine Scene, a group of creatives that meet up once a month to make, read, and talk about zines and share everything and anything zine related. This past Saturday, the group met for the first time at Possible Futures on Edgewood Avenue, where it will continue to trade off monthly meeting dates with Witch Bitch Black Box on Whitney.

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Today's Ted Toons

by Ted Littleford | Nov 13, 2023 8:00 am | Comments (0)

Shubert Opens Broadway Season With Hope

by Brian Slattery | Nov 10, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (2)

A bus driver has brought a busload full of stranded airline passengers to a camp in Newfoundland, in the middle of the night. The passengers don’t really know why they’re there, and many of them are scared. When they arrive at the camp, the first passengers in line don’t want to get off the bus, and they don’t speak English. The bus driver doesn’t know how to get through to them. Then he notices that one of them is holding a Bible, and he knows his Bible. He flips the pages to Philippians 4:6: ​“Be anxious for nothing,” the verse begins. He points to the page. The passengers read it, and understand.

“And that’s how we started speaking the same language,” the actors address the audience.

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Today's Ted Toon

by Ted Littleford | Nov 10, 2023 8:00 am | Comments (10)

Hundreds Celebrate 51st Links Gala

by Lisa Reisman | Nov 9, 2023 1:54 pm | Comments (0)

The crowd listened, rapt, as Diane X Brown told her story. 

The scene was a lavish Saturday-night black-tie affair in the ballroom of Hamden’s Cascade Fine Catering to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the New Haven Chapter of The Links, a historic Black female advocacy organization rooted in community service and philanthropy.

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Nature Journal Club Draws From "Urban Oasis"

by Karen Ponzio | Nov 9, 2023 9:25 am | Comments (3)

East Rock Park on a sunny November Saturday was an idyllic setting for the most recent New Haven Nature Journal Club meet-up. The biweekly event focuses on gathering in natural settings to witness, observe, and document the surroundings through drawings and writings, with a bit of guidance and a bunch of support. 

The group, led by Madelyn Neufeld, meets on Saturday mornings twice a month: once in East Rock Park and two weeks later at another location that changes each time. Neufeld started this club back in August after researching the Wild Wonder Foundation — which provides free nature journal resources — and finding no groups in Connecticut.

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Today's Ted Toons

by Ted Littleford | Nov 9, 2023 8:00 am | Comments (3)

Berryman Strikes Up The Choir

by Paul Bass | Nov 8, 2023 12:23 pm | Comments (1)

Dr. Jonathan Q. Berryman isn’t lamenting how technology has changed our world. Instead he’s harnessing it to help young people find their voices in the choir.

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Artists Lead The Narrative In "Voir Dire" Exhibition

by Brian Slattery | Nov 8, 2023 11:14 am | Comments (0)

The two men in Cal Bocicault’s painting are, first and foremost, stylish, and they know it. Peering askance at the viewer, colors coordinated with themselves and each other, together they open the shoeboxes on their laps. The shoeboxes themselves become classic MacGuffins. We have no idea what’s in the boxes. For all we know, the boxes are empty. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they contain the most stylish sneakers we’ve ever seen, footwear that elevates all the clothes around it. The important thing is that the two men can see what we can’t. They know what’s in the boxes. They’re just not telling us.

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"Rustin" Revives Oft-Overlooked Civil Rights Leader's Story

by Babz Rawls-Ivy | Nov 7, 2023 11:20 am | Comments (2)

At a time when civil rights are being challenged and some of the 60-year-old battles are being waged again, last Saturday night, Yale Schwarzman Center (YSC) presented an early screening of ​“Rustin,” a film about an often-forgotten civil rights leader.

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Two Bands Move From Darkness To Light

by Brian Slattery | Nov 7, 2023 9:29 am | Comments (0)

Seven precise strokes from a rhythm guitar don’t prepare the listener for the way ​“The Dream Broker” — the first song from Without Intervention, the latest release from New Haven-based progressive rock band Head with Wings — takes a sudden turn, into thick drums and bass, soaring guitars, and straight through the middle of it, strong yet plaintive vocals. ​“It’s not funny when you feel this way / You’re champing at the bit to make money then you feel ashamed / Yet you’re coming back for more and more and more,” the singer belts out. ​“Nobody wants to relive the beginning / Or walk away from a life they’ve built on borrowed time / The situation is so goddamn deflating / Just sign your name along the dotted line.” And then the song turns again, heating up, making the words sink in that much more.

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Arts Awards Fetes Creative Futures Amid Arts "Crisis" And "Renaissance"

by Karen Ponzio | Nov 6, 2023 8:48 am | Comments (0)

On Saturday night, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 43rd annual Arts Awards honored six of New Haven’s creative minds — Juanita ​“Sunday” Austin, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Adrian Huq, Sun Queen, Possible Futures/Lauren Anderson, and William Graustein — at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University.

In the shadow of a multitude of changes this year in the city’s arts scene, which continues to be reimagined and restructured, these six recipients — who have each added to that scene in multiple ways far beyond their own creations and personal accomplishments — offered speeches that touched upon the personal, the profound, and the importance of caring for one another in the local arts community and around the world.

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Art Exhibition Unveils The Horror Beneath The Horror

by Brian Slattery | Nov 3, 2023 8:52 am | Comments (0)

Joan Fitzsimmons’s images both beckon viewers and warn them about what’s in store in the Institute Library’s upstairs gallery. The hands, in part because of their visual treatment, feel iconic, perhaps from an old horror movie. But what are they doing? Are they trapped? Are they casting a spell? Are these the hands of a prisoner, or is the owner of those hands doing the manipulating?

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Student Moviemakers Keep It Spooky

by Maya McFadden | Nov 3, 2023 8:49 am | Comments (0)

Despite New Haven having no more movie theaters, it isn’t lacking in young, creative, and spooky-loving moviemakers — particularly at John S. Martinez School. 

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Collective Consciousness Takes The Sharpest View

by Brian Slattery | Nov 2, 2023 8:41 am | Comments (0)

There’s a moment rather early in Fairview when a family is dancing together, performing steps and singing a song that they all remember. It’s an expression of joy, the strengthening of a familial bond. It’s silly and easy to like. But then Keisha, the youngest family member, steps away from her family and into a spotlight. She’s not having fun. She’s troubled. ​“My future just looks so big and bright, I can’t wait for it to hurry up and Get Here. I want to know all there is to know and be all there is to be,” she says. ​“But. But I feel like something is keeping me from all that. Something.… Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be. And that something. It thinks that it has made me who I am. It’s.… It’s just so confusing.”

Something’s off. Something’s wrong. And we’re just getting started.

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Student Artists Run Like Aliens & Bankhead Bounce

by Maya McFadden | Nov 1, 2023 8:16 am | Comments (1)

In a dim and costume-filled drama classroom at New Haven Academy, time slowed down as an alien ran away from two space cadets looking to capture it.

Time then sped up, and back down again, as theater educator Tyheed Scurry gave the student actors a lesson in tempo. 

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Two Artists Consider The State Of Play

by Brian Slattery | Nov 1, 2023 8:13 am | Comments (0)

Two photographs by Marjorie Gillette Wolfe hang in the front of Kehler Liddell Gallery, at 873 Whalley Ave. in Westville. They’re both of hedges, and the way Wolfe composes the image, the eye is drawn to the plant life, without worrying too much about where it is. We can see the similarities in the forms of the plants, the spacing between them. It’s only in looking at the titles that the true humor comes out, as one photograph is taken in front of a diner somewhere, and the other is taken at the Alhambra, one of the great architectural wonders of the world. Both locations are almost entirely absent from the images.

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Madeline's Expands Empanada Universe

by Dereen Shirnekhi | Oct 31, 2023 2:08 pm | Comments (2)

Madeline’s Empanaderia
86 Spring St.

Madeline, the 11-year-old cello player who is also the namesake of a Hill empanaderia, likes the Guava Lava her mother serves there — it’s her favorite, the one that sticks while she goes through phases of Cheeseburger or Sweet Flame.

It’s not mine, though. I liked the Baked Bee, whose combination of sweet potatoes and chili-infused honey surprised me.

But our table couldn’t agree on a favorite, and it’s not hard to tell why. 

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LIFFY 2023 Takes "An Honest Look"

by Karen Ponzio | Oct 31, 2023 2:05 pm | Comments (0)

The Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale — a.k.a. LIFFY — commenced Monday night with a screening of the documentary film Una Mirada Honesta/An Honest Look, the story of Argentinian photographer Eduardo Longoni and his iconic images that changed history. It was a fitting way to begin the festival’s 14th year, as it has become known for its provocative and passionate presentation of films that open viewers’ eyes and hearts with stories often left untold elsewhere. 

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"Faux Départ" Gets A True Start

by Karen Ponzio | Oct 31, 2023 11:06 am | Comments (0)

Volume Two and a crew of three local acts amped up their audience for Halloween on Sunday night with a spooky video release celebration and a selection of songs that got everyone in the holiday spirit.

Musician Laura Klein started working on the video for ​“Faux Départ” while recovering from surgery. She happened upon unreleased tracks from her band Western Estates, deciding ​“this song deserves more than just an internet blast.” After working on the video for over two years, she gave it its premiere in front of an enthusiastic crowd, some dressed in apropos Halloween attire, and all surrounded in the appropriate art of the most recent Volume Two art exhibition, titled ​“Volume Boo!”

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NHSO Makes Time For Three

by Adam Matlock | Oct 31, 2023 8:09 am | Comments (1)

In introducing Thursday Night’s New Haven Symphony Orchestra program in Woolsey Hall, Music Director Alisdair Neale cut to the chase. ​“Both these works feature a lot of art — without artifice,” he said, referencing their emotional immediacy. The program, featuring Grammy-winning trio Time for Three as something along the lines of a group of concerto-grosso soloists, featured two works by American composers, both of which presented a more romantic vision of orchestral music.

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"Bank of Targets" Screening Uncovers Palestinian Suffering Amid Israeli Airstrikes

by Allan Appel | Oct 30, 2023 9:38 am | Comments (1)

Roughly 130 people from around the world tuned in to a virtual movie screening to get an on-the-ground view of the human suffering caused by bombs dropped on Gaza, past and present — and to vent their frustrations and fears of still more bloodshed to come amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

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"Golda" Screening Seeks Resilience, Survival, Hope Amid Israeli Wars

by Allan Appel | Oct 30, 2023 9:37 am | Comments (1)

A colossal intelligence failure, an arrogance of power, followed by a surprise attack, on a major religious holiday, and of a scope and lethality adding up to the most serious national trauma inflicted on the Jews since the Holocaust.

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