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Maya McFadden |
Jun 17, 2022 5:34 pm
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Maya McFadden Photos
Nyasia Davis and Daniya Cox at graduation Friday: We did it for Mooka.
Davis' cap Friday picturing her father and best friend Mooka, who died in a car crash senior year.
She didn’t live to attend in person, but Camryn “Mooka” Gayle was there in spirit Friday to graduate along with her classmates from Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 17, 2022 9:12 am
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“The genius of a lot of Octavia’s work,” said Toshi Reagon about visionary science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, is that the circumstances she describes in her books are “applicable to anyone at any time.” Reading Butler’s work, she said, the reader may think, “that could happen to me.” Or: “I hope that never happens.” Or: “I can imagine myself there.”
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jun 16, 2022 10:31 am
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Greg Scranton Photos
Kraftwerk at work Wednesday night at College Street Music Hall.
Another lonely night… stare at the TV screen…I don’t know what to do… I need a rendezvous.
Over a bass line you could feel in your chest, embellished with an array of colorful synths, the seminal techno German music group Kraftwerk played their 1970-track “Computer Love” to an audience at College Street Music Hall Wednesday, filled with fans who may have related more strongly to the lyrics than half a century ago when the song was first released.
The lyrics evoked an experience all too familiar: an unrelenting sense of alienation, that is unsolved by modern technologies, especially those that promise to connect us.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 16, 2022 8:55 am
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Origins and Future, detail.
Origins and Future spreads out across the floor of an upper gallery at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. It’s composed of shapes that are fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure. Are they the result of biology or technology? The stranger ends of the plant and animal kingdoms or something that was created in a lab? Or perhaps are they a mixture of both? Or, is it that the line between the natural and technological world is a lot more porous than we usually think it is?
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Laura Glesby |
Jun 15, 2022 1:34 pm
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Laura Glesby Photo
Rebecca Patterson, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra's principal cellist and a Neighborhood Music School instructor, plays "Sicilenne" by Maria Theresia von Paradis at Wednesday's announcement.
Four local non-profits will stand on stronger financial footing as they steward New Haven’s history, culture, and mental health care, thanks to a record $35 million donation to the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven.
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David Sepulveda |
Jun 15, 2022 9:12 am
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David Sepulveda and Frenemy Photos
Corner of new mural facing Exchange Street.
Frenemy: Man with a can, and a message.
A sharp-eyed osprey peers over the edge of its densely woven nest of thick branches. A frog, dressed in patched coveralls and top hat, sits comfortably on a tree stump, reading to a school of attentive rainbow trout. Only the moon seems to have dozed off, its exhalations producing cottony-white night clouds with every breath.
These are some of the vignettes of animated plants and wildlife that have taken residence on the exterior walls of a previously faded and graffiti-marked industrial property adjacent the John S. Martinez Sea & Sky STEM Magnet K‑8 School in Fair Haven — thanks to the work of a globe-trotting muralist and illustrator who goes by the name Frenemy.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jun 14, 2022 11:19 am
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Kids' class at Westville Performing Arts Center.
Friends Latisha Douglas and Samantha Williams brought their children to violin lessons. They waved goodbye to their budding musicians — then, instead of heading home or out for errands, they went down the hallway, into another classroom, for a contemporary dance class.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 14, 2022 9:34 am
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Facebook// Babz Rawls-Ivy
On Monday night, the Big Tent Party, a gala fundraiser for Long Wharf Theatre, saw the regional theater institution begin its slow turn away from its Sargent Drive home and into a more nomadic future, as patrons gathered for an evening of food, drink, and entertainment that began and ended outside.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 13, 2022 3:29 pm
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Early in Felon: An American Washi Tale, poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about how, as a prisoner serving time for a carjacking, he heard his fellow prisoners calling to each other in the dark, looking for something to read. “Yo, send me a book!” they called out, and in the dark, he heard the paper slide across the cell block floor. It took him a while to muster the courage to ask for himself — “Yo, send me a book!” The poetry anthology that slipped under his door set him on the path to his freedom.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jun 13, 2022 9:28 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Mussels from La Molienda Restaurant and Bar
Enchiladas, ceviche, plantains, and pastries were served up with a side of history, as the Grand Avenue Gastronomy Tour returned as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas Saturday. Twenty participants, led by Lee Cruz of the Chatham Square Neighborhood Association, ate their way down and around Fair Haven while also learning about the neighborhood itself: past, present, and future.
Kristen Ford performs her new song "Best Friends" on WNHH FM.
Onstage, a touring indie singer-songwriter was singing a Mother’s Day song paying tribute to a woman who made a difference in her life.
On a stool near the back of Cafe Nine, a woman retrieved a packet of tissues. She pulled one out. She needed to use it several times before the song was done.
The song was about her: The performer onstage, Kristen Ford, is her stepdaughter. It wasn’t the first time the stepmom, Diane Whittie, had shed tears over the song.
You didn’t have to be related to Ford to be touched by the song. You didn’t even have to be a mom or a stepmom (though if you have kids, it may have helped).
“Happy mother’s day / Even though it’s not your name …” Ford sang. “I will always be your kin …” She had the whole audience, not just her stepmom, with her at each step.
Ford’s unvarnished, passionate vocals added to the poignancy, as did the guitar arrangement, which made use of open high strings as a foil for a descending chord progression. Her skills as an arranger were on even more obvious display as her high-energy set continued; using a guitar, a microphone, and a loop pedal, she was able to create the sound of a full band, and like the best loop-pedal users, she made the creation of that sound part of the show, as the audience got to watch each song constructed in front of them.
Ford was in New Haven on a stop in a national “Pride” Tour that doubles as an introduction to the tracks on War in the Living Room, her new (and fifth) album.
Before heading to Boston for her next tour stop, Ford played “Mother’s Day” and stripped-down versions of two songs from the new album amid a discussion about her music and career during a visit to WNHHFM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click on the above video to watch her perform the album’s first single, “Grey Sky Blue.”
Ford, a familiar face over the years on stages in New Haven — where her father and stepmother live — has seen her career start to take off. In addition to the new album and tour, she has an acting role and two songs on the soundtrack album to the 2021 film Valentine Crush. (She plays a roller derby-er named Knockout Nancy.) She has embarked on side projects including Evrgrn, a project with cellist Kels Cordare, and the hip-hop duo Blu Janes, with rapper MC Genesis Blu.
Based in Nashville, Ford is described as an “indie rock singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist.” I might describe her sound as “Ani DiFranco meets Tracy Chapman meets the Ramones.” (At Cafe Nine she updated “Give Me A Reason” to reflect on American’s downward slide toward fascism.)
Whatever labels one tries to attach to her, Ford is a talent to watch as she continues spreading her wings. She returns to Connecticut for a June 16 stop at Bridgeport’s Park City Music before the tour heads west.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 9, 2022 8:45 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Seny Tatchol Camara, giving instructions on how to strike the drum.
On a recent Saturday, the main hall of Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center echoed with the sound of drums, playing driving, intricate rhythms together — compelling enough to bring someone in off the street to ask if she could join in. She was in luck: the drums were part of an African drumming and dancing class offered by the New Haven School of African Drum and Dance, which, after a long Covid-imposed hiatus, has resumed, holding classes Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings for the forseeable future.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 8, 2022 9:30 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Kotcher (aka Frenemy) and Bernblum at 162 James.
The latest mural from public art organization Site Projects is transforming a building in Fair Haven — just as the projects it’s connected to, from Save the Sound and the Mill River Trail, are hoping to transform the surrounding community’s relationship to the river nearby, and the nature all around them.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 7, 2022 8:52 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Stephen Julien and cast.
The band room at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School was full of students getting into their costumes, changing into sailors and spirits, monsters and magicians. They donned robes and fixed their crowns of flowers, then congregated onstage.
“How does everyone feel in their costumes?” asked co-director Justin Pesce.
“Good,” said one student. “Hot,” said another. If they were all still wearing masks due to Covid concerns, it was a detail; what mattered was that, after two years, Mauro Sheridan was mounting its 2022 production of The Tempest, in collaboration with Elm Shakespare Company, in person.
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Olivia Charis |
Jun 6, 2022 3:01 pm
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Olivia Charis photos
Azucena Rojas with her mom and business partner, Angeles Romero.
At the 10th annual Quinnipiac Riverfest on Saturday.
Fair Haven businesswoman Azucena Rojas moved her Mexican grocery outdoors for the day — and further connected with the neighborhood she calls home — during a festive, sun-dappled 10th annual Quinnipiac Riverfest.
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Jordan Ashby |
Jun 6, 2022 12:30 pm
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Jordan Ashby Photos
Families hula hooping at Saturday's festivities.
Members of the Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House.
Lance Legion looked out on a Dixwell Avenue bustling with dance, music, art, and laughter — all in front of a reborn “Q” House community center and a relocated and expanded Stetson Library.
“I’m really happy about the changes they made,” he said with a smile, holding his son in the afternoon sunshine. “Growing up, I’ve always wanted to come to the ‘Q’ House, so it’s nice to see it’s open and that they’re finally giving back to the community.”
