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Brian Slattery |
Jan 5, 2023 8:51 am
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The intersection of Orange and Crown can be quiet this time of year, as it gets cold and the street has opened up again to traffic. But there’s still foot traffic, a passing car, a man flitting by on a bicycle. And now, in the windows at Artspace, a series of projections, of shapes that move and change, looking first like crystals, then reflections in glass, and sometimes perhaps like physics experiments. They invite anyone to stop and linger, and maybe even get a little lost. But maybe the most intriguing thing about them is that they’re not films; they’re digital animations. They’re just lines of code.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2023 8:52 am
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Brian Robinson, poet and host of Open Mic Surgery — a weekly open mic poetry night held at Never Ending Books — joked on Tuesday evening that poets are always late. Yet when he arrived at the appointed time of 6:30 p.m., he found a room of people waiting for him.
“Everyone’s here on time, and it’s kind of weird,” he said.
“I think it’s a sign that more people are coming,” someone in the audience said.
A hot over-the-counter remedy this pandemic-flu-Covid season turns out not to require a prescription — and it goes down smooth while soothing your sinuses.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 3, 2023 9:02 am
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The image of beloved New Haven photographer David White, Jr. is an image that plays with time. It starts with the obvious anachronisms, from the instrument in White’s pocket to the sepia background, even as it’s clear that White is a modern man. The melted edges of the image, though, are another layer of history. They’re not digital artifacts, but the blurred edges of a process few people see anymore: the development of a Polaroid, and in this case, an especially hefty one — a 20 x 24 camera, “so rare only five were initially manufactured,” an accompanying note explains. The photograph was taken in 1993. Why the Polaroid? Why the anachronistic style? And why is it paired with an image from 1815?
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 2, 2023 8:39 am
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Friends gathered, greeting each other with wishes for a happy new year while music swelled all around them. A New Year’s Eve gathering, perhaps? Actually, it was the night before, as Best Video was the setting for the penultimate night of 2022 — and who better to bring it through than local favorites The Sawtelles and Lys Guillorn & The Void Kittens?
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 23, 2022 10:09 am
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(Arts Analysis) We’re back, but we’re not.
That’s the message I got over and over again in 2022, from artists, organizations, and audiences — as an arts reporter, a working musician, and someone who’s part of the informal network of people giving touring musicians a place to stay while they’re on the road.
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Thomas Breen |
Dec 22, 2022 4:00 pm
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Words flew off the pages of landmark new New Haven books, brought readers together in bustling new Dixwell and Edgewood community spaces, and sparked City Hall protests and public-education debates around how to create a better city — making 2022 a year even more than most in which books made a difference.
A retired tool-and-die maker named Fred White kept moving Thursday, hopping on his music-amplified Kent Cruiser two-wheeler to navigate the busy Norton-Whalley intersection.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 22, 2022 9:05 am
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The image of people huddled together in a dark, circular tunnel could be coming from Kyiv or Mariupol, ripped from any number of newspapers covering the war in Ukraine. The expressiveness of the image, undoubtedly the work of an experienced photographer, conveys the misery, the desperation, the desire for it all to be over, in a single snapshot. But it’s not from Ukraine. It’s from London, in 1942.
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Laura Glesby |
Dec 20, 2022 10:11 am
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On the “Collective Memory Map,” most streets have no labels. Someone hand-drew the salt piles by the Mill River. Scantlebury Park could be identified only by the caption “Skateboarding happens here.”
Corie Betha peered at the map, orienting herself by the shapes of the unmarked streets, before uncapping an orange pen to add her own landmark. “1974 – 75 Betha & Henderson Ages 4 & 3 yrs old skating,” she wrote by the Yale ice rink, enshrining her and her sister’s last names alongside names of Yale buildings and longstanding businesses that others had preserved on paper.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 20, 2022 8:34 am
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A mix of familiar and new faces dropped in on the latest installment of “Animation Celebration,” the ongoing series from the New Haven Free Public Library hosted by Haley Grunloh, library technical assistant at Mitchell Library. Attendance may have been down slightly thanks to the holidays, but enthusiasm was as high as ever, thanks to the particularly bewitching choice for this month — the film János Vitéz, or Johnny Corncob, a 1973 film from Hungarian animator and director Marcell Jankovics.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 19, 2022 9:44 am
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Four horn mics, three drum sets, two keyboards, and one massive stage set up was ready Friday night to present The Holiday Jam, the season friendly version of The Jam, a now iconic New Haven music series and staple of The State House where it has found its home since 2019.
A musical mélange of friends and fellow musicians that come together to improvise and inspire, The Jam is the brainchild of musicians Paul Bryant Hudson and Jeremiah Fuller, who, along with a core group of musicians, typically play one set as a full band, and then a second set where they invite other musicians and vocalists to come up and have a turn at being part of the magic. The entire time, they intertwine their respective skills and sounds of jazz, R&B, soul, and just about everything and anything else, uplifting each other to reach the highest of heights.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 19, 2022 8:51 am
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Sunday allowed music lovers to take in live music from the afternoon through the evening at Cafe Nine and the State House, in offerings that encompassed jazz to rock to hip hop, all within the space of a block.
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Maya McFadden |
Dec 16, 2022 5:19 pm
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With a look of defeat, Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) eighth grader Dakarai Langley lifted his left foot and dangled it over the edge of an auditorium stage as a song shook the dark room with the lyrics: “Would anyone cry if I finally stepped off of this ledge tonight?”
And then Langley kept dancing, proving to everyone in the room before him just how lucky this city is to have this young artist call New Haven his home.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 16, 2022 9:12 am
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The subjects of Julie Fraenkel’s Party Girls are as the subject says. One after the other, they’re portraits of fun, leisure, unwinding. One of them dances with a lampshade on her head. Another arrives with a large piece of cake and an expression on her face that suggests that she knows the recipient of that slice is going to first politely refuse such a large slice, then acquiesce and eat the whole thing. A third is being borne aloft by balloons. The general public will never know what one party girl was doing, however, because that piece has already been sold.
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Thomas Breen |
Dec 15, 2022 1:49 pm
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A New Haven-based fiscal policy watchdog has proposed cutting a money-pit state film tax credit as part of a broader suite of reforms targeting Connecticut’s “unfair tax system.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 15, 2022 8:55 am
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Leonard Cohen: celebrated songwriter, poetic dreamboat, ladies’ man, writer of “Hallelujah,” a song so ubiquitous and covered so many times that even Cohen, by the end of his life, felt maybe people should give it a rest. Diving into the details of all that, for some, would be enough.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 14, 2022 8:45 am
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Tuesday evening at Three Sheets on Elm Street found not a band onstage, but a vast assortment of paper with arrays of compelling images on them — from owls to goat people to skeletal horses, as well as letters, dingbats, and geometric shapes — along with scissors, pieces of cardboard, and glue sticks. The tables and chairs in the room were full of people using those materials to make collages — and try what Three Sheets and Hershey, Penn.-based brewer Tröegs Independent Brewing had to offer.
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Lisa Reisman |
Dec 13, 2022 1:52 pm
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After moving to a place that Conde-Nast Traveler had judged to be “one of the 10 unfriendliest cities in America,” author Lary Bloom worried that — if he were to slip and fall on an ice-coated sidewalk — his new neighbors would simply look the other way and keep on moving.
Instead, those neighbors sprawled on couches, perched themselves on stools, crammed into chairs that ranged outside a Goatville gym’s common room, and braved the December snow to listen to Bloom read and wisecrack about his newly published slim volume which is, in fact, a valentine to New Haven.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 13, 2022 9:14 am
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Strange Ways was the place on Monday night not just for your holiday shopping needs, but for your live music needs. The Pitkin Plaza storefront hosted four acts that started the festive season off right with plenty of fun, friendship, sharing, and caring. It is all part of owner Alex Dakoulas’s goal of making his downtown location, with its open side room, into a hub for shopping and gathering.
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Allan Appel |
Dec 12, 2022 12:04 pm
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A young African American musician named Ibn Orator wanted to know if Black and white people, who have such starkly different common memories — the one of slavery and incarceration and the other a rosier patriotic version of the American past — can ever develop a memory broad, shared, and potent enough to be the basis to solve our country’s seemingly intractable problems.
An answer, well, a partial answer to that profound question came during a Friday night book talk from Nicholas Dawidoff, the white, New Haven-born prize-winning author of the recently published The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and The American City.
The answer was: “Yes, for all our enduring troubles, this is a country where historically change has happened. “