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Brian Slattery |
Oct 6, 2022 9:05 am
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The cover for Big Wheel.
“Ghost of Fun,” the lead song from Christopher Cavaliere’s new album Big Wheel, starts off on a lope so easy and free that it takes a closer listen to appreciate the clever construction of it. There’s a guitar that draws the ear, but all around it, a organ bubbles, percussion doesn’t do quite the obvious thing. The song takes its time, building slowly but irrepressibly, pushed along by lyrics that show humor and humanity (“He prefers his drama first thing in the morning”). By the end, that lope is headed into outer space, floating off on clouds of fluttering synthesizers. We’re not going back to the beginning. Where are we headed?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 4, 2022 8:30 am
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Rawling.
In preparing for the latest production from Madame Thalia — the Prohibition-era vaudeville show that music and theater mastermind Zohra Rawling is bringing back to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 — Rawling thought of the last time she got to stage it in the club on State and Crown, in 2019. She ended a particular segment on a complete cliffhanger. “Tune in next time,” she recalled intoning to the crowd, only to have a member of the audience interrupt, yelling back “you monster!”; the cliffhanger was apparently too much anticipation for them to take. “I’ve done my job,” Rawling recalled thinking. “That was the best compliment I’ve ever received on stage.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 3, 2022 8:57 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Sunday afternoon found Trumbull Street between Whitney Avenue and Orange Street closed for the Ely Center of Contemporary Art’s first block party — featuring the gallery’s latest shows inside the John Slade Ely House and a bazaar of art, zine, clothing, and food vendors lining the street, serving a steady stream of visitors. As DJ Dooley‑O headed into a festive set outside and the Ely Center filled with voices inside and out, the block party felt true to its name.
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Lindsay Skedgell |
Oct 3, 2022 8:51 am
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Through the curtain-lined doorway of Never Ending Books on Saturday night, an older woman in a blue shirt left the performance room, plugging her ears with her fingers. This reporter passed by her, going in the opposite direction. The room inside was in darkness, the sounds of metal grinding and shaping layers of noise music, echoing from a monitor on a fold-out table. Behind the table, OPCOH moved his hand along what looked to be a black electric violin, while the monitor, with wiring colored red, yellow, and blue, jutted out from the near corner of the table. His performance felt like a conjuring, what with the backdrop of wind from Hurricane Ian’s remnants picking up speed behind him. As he neared the end of his set, it sounded as if raindrops were falling from different corners of the dark room, the sound of them moving off into the distance and then disappearing.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 30, 2022 9:15 am
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Virginia Semeghini Photos
Ray and Semeghini in front of their new location with faithful friends Chubble and Hazel.
Something new is brewing behind the paper-covered windows of 105 Whitney Ave., and business owners Virginia Semeghini and Eva Ray are hoping you’ll want to come down and be a part of it. Witch Bitch Thrift, the online thrift shopping site that became a cherished Bridgeport storefront has now moved its headquarters to New Haven in the former home of Take 5 Audio. The plan is to continue to foster a community that has its roots in one person’s dream of making a space where she could not only sell thrift clothing and other treasures, but also build a treasured group of supportive friends.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 30, 2022 9:13 am
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Duvall.
Amanda Duvall, of the New Haven-based dance studio Baila Con Gusto, danced a solo salsa on the stage of the New Haven Green Thursday afternoon with a heady mixture of strength and grace. As the music churned out its unstoppable rhythm, a sense of joy and play surged through her, a smile never leaving her face even as the moves became more athletic. Her enthusiasm, it turned out, was contagious. Five minutes later dozens of people, adults and high schoolers alike, would join her and Baila Con Gusto co-instructor Jason Ramos in a dance and history lesson that deepened understanding as it taught steps.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 29, 2022 1:44 pm
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Brian Slattery Photo
At one point during the first hour of the evening, a concertgoer turned to this reporter and asked, half rhetorically, “are you here for Yo La Tengo or Japanese Breakfast?” “Both” was a valid answer, as the bill at College Street Music Hall Wednesday night, uniting indie rock veterans with a recent indie favorite, brought together multiple generations of New Haven music fans and showed how two groups can arrive in the same expansive musical territory by different routes.
Tamales, cupcakes, hot sauce, and corn ribs were just a few of the locally made items on the menu at a Q House-hosted showcase of homegrown foodie talent.
by
Karen Ponzio |
Sep 28, 2022 8:25 am
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Leigh Busby Photo
Alexis Robbins.
Tap dance is an indelible form of American art, a practice we have all seen on screens little and big, but have you ever seen it done in a public park? And have you ever thought, “Hey, I wish I could do that?” Tap dancer and choreographer Alexis Robbins is here to tell you that you can see it and practice it, on a stage and in a park, right here in New Haven in the days and weeks to come.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 28, 2022 8:23 am
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The video for Ionne’s latest single “The Last Time” — off his new album Fracture — sends the viewer into a spiral from the start. When the camera finally stops spinning, it’s still moving, and there is Ionne himself, singing into the darkness on a beach, a crashed spaceship behind him. “All we ever feared / Was killing time / Several hundred years / Amount to castles that we’ll never own / And songs I write / But cannot sing myself / Our dreams of spaceships and their secret plans to take us somewhere else,” he sings. It’s a melody about loss, but the music isn’t about giving up. It’s about falling down and getting up again, of finding the strength to start something new.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2022 11:10 am
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Joy Bush
Loose Screw.
The title photographer Joy Bush gives to the image — Loose Screw — suggest something about the sense of humor she wants the viewer to have in looking at the piece. But it also offers some direction for how to look at the image. The first thing that jumps out, after all, is the chair. But the story, whatever it is, starts with the screwdriver balanced on the power outlet. What’s it doing there? And where is the screw it was brought out to tighten? Is it between jobs? Has it been forgotten? Where is the owner of that chair? There’s a sense of incompletion; something hasn’t happened yet, but it’s about to.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2022 8:24 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Ninja Brian, a.k.a Brian Wecht, stood on the stage of Cafe Nine Monday night without uttering a single word, communicating with the audience only through a poorly constructed PowerPoint presentation, bodily gestures, and flashing eyes. “Hello,” the first card read, as if warming up the crowd. A few other typical pleasantries followed. Then: “I will kill you all after the show.” The full house assembled for the show dissolved in laughter.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2022 8:31 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The images up on the screen at Gather on State Street on Thursday night were from the Canadian mockumentary comedy series Trailer Park Boys, but they were altered, made psychedelic. The ambient music behind it felt sad and urgent. It was a quick reminder to the people filing into the space just how much a few images and the right music can alter the vibe of a room — fitting, as Gather was performing yet another transformation, from coffee shop to after-hours lounge.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 22, 2022 10:32 am
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Ilana Harris-Babou
Still from Leaf of Life.
The tree in the image from the short film Leaf of Life has spread its branches wide, offering inviting shade, protection — and perhaps nourishment. The fruits that artist Ilana Harris-Babou has placed in its branches are healthy enough, but the way Harris-Babou has rendered them, there is something fake about them, a little suspicious. We want to eat well. We want to be healthy. We want to live better lives, in greater harmony with our neighbors and with nature. But how do we know when we’re doing that? How do we know if we’ve been had?
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 21, 2022 8:44 am
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Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè
Ẹnìkan Ìí Pèrò or Ẹnìkan Kìí Pa Èrò (Two Heads
Are Better than One).
The piece, by famed Nigerian sculptor Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè, depicts two mothers with two twins. The style is soaked in tradition, but the sculptor has also found his own voice within that tradition, and in turn, given his subjects their own voices as well. Look closely, into the abstraction, and you can see the individual expressions of the figures, the things that make them unique, perhaps a mixture of dignity and worry in the adults, a sense of determination and mischief in the children. Look even more closely and you understand more of the relationships among the figures. The two mothers are themselves twins, and they are supporting each other; their outside arms, meanwhile, are there to protect and guide all of their children. They’re a small society unto themselves, even as they’re connected to everyone around them.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 20, 2022 9:13 am
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The small first-floor gallery of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art is flooded with multicolored light. It darkens the room overall but has the effect of making the atmosphere in there more vibrant. The gallery becomes a place where you might want to linger, the way people linger around any places that are alive with color, from rooms strung with Christmas lights to meadows full of wildflowers. It’s a place to take a breath and, in keeping with the theme of an exhibit currently staged there, think about new beginnings.
Edgar Marcial inside his now-shuttered Orange St. restaurant.
A kitchen-wall fire shut down Edgar Marcial’s Tacos Los Gordos restaurant barely a month after it first opened on Orange Street.
Now, the California transplant is working on raising money to rehab his recently renovated culinary home so that he and his staff can soon get back to cooking up and dishing out nopales tacos, esquites, and other Oaxacan fare.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2022 9:07 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Cara DeLucia of Qween Kong.
Artist and musician Bill Saunders, of New Cardiff Giants, was beaming from the stage of the State House Friday night, looking over the good-sized crowd who had assembled there. He marveled at the health of the New Haven music scene, the emergence of new bands, the persistence of older bands. “It seems like everyone’s coming out with their own form of self-expression,” he said. Then he introduced the first band by saying he got to announce something he’d wanted to be able to say for a long time: “The Queen is dead! God save Qween Kong!”
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Jake Dressler |
Sep 16, 2022 10:15 am
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0shotzphotography Instagram
Fivio Foreign and Coi Leray performing Thursday night at College Street Music Hall.
New York drill icon Fivio Foreign and TikTok sensation Coi Leray performed at College Street Music Hall Thursday night in front of hundreds of teens in a sponsored collaboration with New Haven’s Youth and Recreation Department. The event — titled as a “Back 2 School Concert” — sold out in less than two days.
Fall has arrived early on State Street with Caramel Apple Pie, Skinny Pumpkin Teddy Graham, and Maple Glazed Donut shakes — all of which can now be filed under the category “health food.”
