Austin Scelzo hit the two bottom strings of his violin, struck a couple higher notes, launched a high-lonesome lament that seemed to stretch back eight decades to rural Appalachia.
Trouble in my soul I know it’s wrong But it’s feeling so good …
Did Bill Monroe originally sing this? Was it a gospel number repurposed for bluegrass barn dances? It sounded as though it leaped from an old vinyl 78, minus the scratches.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2024 9:36 am
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Jangly, catchy riffs. Yearning melodies. Rhythms designed for dancing. Three bands — Floater Verses, Toy Cities, and Los Shadows — deployed all three elements to great effect at Cafe Nine Wednesday night, adding up to one of the poppiest nights the club on State and Crown has booked in recent memory.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 18, 2024 9:20 am
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Judy Atlas images
Mykonos 2 and Mykonos 3.
They’re abstractions, but still connected to something in the real world. Even without knowing the original inspiration, the signs are there. The blue the artist, Judy Atlas, has chosen is one that occurs in nature, in the sky and water. The pristine white a common color in manmade structures around the world. Then there are the architectural features, the arches and doorways, that suggest something of a maze, but one you might want to get lost in.
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Lisa Reisman |
Sep 17, 2024 4:07 pm
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courtesy Marcus Carpenter
From left, servers Big Don McDaniel, Marcus Harvin, Greg Altieri, Adam Rawlings, Marcus Carpenter, Babatunde Akinjobi, and Bradley Woodworth.
One group brought a full-course dinner, complete with a choice of jerk chicken or fried chicken. Another brought a “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”DVD, a movie projector, and popcorn. Then a half-dozen smartly dressed servers showed up.
And just like that, with the inaugural “Dinner and a Movie” hosted by Best Video and the Newhallville nonprofit Fresh Starts, a dream, seven years in the making, saw its realization at Life Haven women’s shelter in Fair Haven.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 17, 2024 8:59 am
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Sven Martson Photos
Rochester Truck Door.
The profile, of a cartoon crone, is easy to see — easier than seeing what it really is. Keep looking and you might see other faces as well. But keep looking, and you see that it’s all something else, that your mind is finding patterns, meaning, in a chance encounter. “I was walking around in Rochester one day, and before crossing a street, I looked to the right, and down at the end of the alley was a shiny truck door reflecting the distorted image of the building across the street,” Sven Martson notes. “My point of view was all important. Just a few inches to the right or left and the image broke up and disappeared.” It’s only a reflection of a building. But it also reflects something else, in the way we find so much else in it.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 16, 2024 10:09 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Gogol Bordello.
In an election cycle marked by acrimony and fractious divisiveness, the music at Toad’s on Friday — featuring international punk band Gogol Bordello, supported by label mates Puzzled Panther and Crazy and the Brains — amounted to a ragged, full-throated cry for action and greater community, with a sharp edge.
Renderings for the future of the Church Street South site, including a "central green" pictured here, were revealed...
Laura Glesby Photo
...at a packed meeting on Thursday.
Townhomes shift into high-rises as the buildings transition from the Hill to Downtown, anchored by a “central green.” In the mix is a coffee kiosk, an outdoor theater, and a pedestrian promenade.
A team of architects and designers sketched out those ideas on Thursday for a future mixed-use, mixed-income development at the vacant site of the former Church Street South housing complex and the current Robert T. Wolfe public housing apartments.
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Lisa Reisman |
Sep 13, 2024 3:00 pm
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Lisa Reisman photo
"Nightmares" cast and crew: D. Jeff Bell, Ann Bell, Darrell Bellamy Jr., Clifton Bey, Myron Attoh, and Ian Mann, at Armada Brewing for awards night.
Director-producer Darrell Bellamy Jr. was in a creative slump — but he had already signed up to participate in the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project, an annual summer competition to make a short movie over the course of just two days.
“I had to go for it,” said Bellamy, co-creator of the upcoming thriller “Marblehead,” as well as “Get Yer Mind Right,” a coming-of-age YouTube series.
Several weeks later, he found himself at a raucous 48 Hour Film Project awards ceremony at Armada Brewery — buoyed by two award nominations, and waiting to see if he and his team would make it out on top.
Steve Mednick performing Thursday in the WNHH FM studio.
Steve Mednick played a song from a new album as well as from his next album — while waiting to see how both the track, and country’s political future, play out.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 13, 2024 9:20 am
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At Lawrence Street Plaza Thursday night.
In the city’s latest experiment in closing a road to vehicle traffic to better boost community, Lawrence Street Plaza shone on Thursday night — with music, pizza, bean bags, picnic tables, and car-free safety.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 12, 2024 8:53 am
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Liah Sinq
For a split second, the kid is in the hands of gravity, but you just know he’s going to be all right. Maybe it’s the matching pajamas that give it away. It’s Christmas morning, perhaps, and the kids want to play with a father, or an uncle. But what really seals the deal on the tone of the piece is the quality of the sunlight, streaming through the window behind them. It lets us see the care the adult is putting into it, lets us see the way the kid is enjoying the ride. He may be falling, but the landing will be safe.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 10, 2024 9:16 am
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We first see Duane Luckow backlit. He’s filming himself with his phone. “Hey everybody, can you see me?” he asks. We can’t. But then he turns into the light, and there’s his face, looking concerned. “I’m going to give you a little tour of this place,” he says. He shows us a bedroom, clean, well-lit, and very institutional. There’s a teddy bear on the bed. “I’m not supposed to be filming this,” he says, but gives us a view out the window, of a courtyard garden. “That’s the only thing I have hope for,” he says, “that someday I’ll get out of this place.”
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Lisa Reisman |
Sep 9, 2024 11:56 am
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Courtesy of Josh McCown
Time A Tell's Josh McCown in action with Moroccan-born American rapper French Montana at Oakdale Theatre.
Jayce Greene, 10, and his mother pushed through the door of Time A Tell, the clothing store and smoke shop at 1700 Dixwell Ave. He was looking for a Time A Tell hoodie.
“All the kids on my team are wearing them,” said Jayce, a student at Worthington-Hooker School and member of the Elm City Elite basketball team, as owner Joshua McCown brought out a selection of sizes and colors in the high-ceilinged, warmly-lit space. “They’re all over New Haven,” his mother added.
That’s an index of the quantum leap that McCown, 20, has taken in the two years since opening his shop with a mission to leverage his eye for fashion into being his own boss and realizing financial freedom.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 9, 2024 8:45 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Michael Pollack and his pizza monument.
The subject of pizza is always on the minds of New Haveners, whether it’s deciding what kind to order and where to order it from or what makes the perfect pie and slice. On Friday night, those pies and slices were unveiled as the theme of a world premiere art exhibit at District NHV. “New Haven Pizza Club: Discover the Art of Pizza” showcased the four-year-long odyssey of artist Michal Pollack to commemorate everyone’s favorite meal as a contemporary symbol representing a local legacy.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 9, 2024 8:38 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Leyla McCalla.
A flurry of rainstorms throughout the afternoon on Saturday didn’t keep the CT Folk Festival and Green Expo out of Edgerton Park — nor did it keep stalwart listeners away, to hear from some of the finest voices of two different generations of artists upholding traditions and carrying them ably through the present and into the future.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 6, 2024 9:29 am
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Brian Slattery photo
A deer head with flowers for eyes. Streams of color stretching down from the ceiling. And, on a couple dozen cardboard panels, all manner of people, in all manner of poses. It’s all part of “This Art is Trash,” an exhibition at Never Ending Books on State Street by artist Alice Prael that puts humanity into the things we usually throw away.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 5, 2024 9:29 am
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Manuel Álvarez Bravo
La hija de los danzantes.
It’s a famous picture, of a girl peeking into a window, and seems almost like a happy accident, a case of the photographer being in the right place at the right time. If so, that timing was nearly miraculous, due to the beauty in its formal composition. The circle of the hat echoes the circle of the window, while both offset the relentless diamonds on the wall. It succeeds in feeling like street photography and like an intricately composed image all at once.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 4, 2024 9:12 am
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Brian Slattery photo
Sam Carlson and Aug Stone.
“When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces. “Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 3, 2024 9:39 am
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“I tend to see skateboarding as almost a kind of dance, a conversation with the terrain around you,” says J. Joseph in the documentary Fly, a silent film about skateboarding in New Haven that has inspired a new local album.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 3, 2024 9:15 am
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A still from Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The 50th anniversary of a Francis Ford Coppola classic, a historic documentary set in 1970s New Haven, and The Bride of Frankenstein screened on Halloween night: these are just a sampling of what Yale Film Archive is offering movie fans this fall, revealed along with a host of other anniversary screenings and premiere prints at the first screening of the semester this past Friday at the Yale Humanities Quadrangle.
First, however, a capacity crowd was treated to a new 35-mm print of Peter Weir’s mesmerizing 1975 classic Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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Marisa Torrieri |
Aug 30, 2024 9:39 am
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Marisa Torrieri photo
Jammin out at Cafe 9 on a Sunday afternoon.
Turkey Vulture — a metal/punk duo of Milford-based couple Jessie May (vocals, guitar) and Jim Clegg (drums) — typically spend Sunday afternoons entertaining their two toddler sons. So when May growled into the mic and ripped into a distorted-guitar riff at Cafe Nine on a recent Sunday afternoon in early August, it felt wholly cathartic.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 30, 2024 9:26 am
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A still from Beauty and the Beast.
The Institute Library became le cinema Thursday night as its French film series — “Bonsoir, Mes Ami(e)s!” — began with Beauty and The Beast (also known as La Belle et la Bête), the renowned 1946 film by Jean Cocteau based on the fairy tale originally published in the 1700s. The three-film series is being presented in conjunction with Best Video and is being hosted and curated by John Hatch, who recently organized a successful Italian movie series at the Chapel Street institution.
