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Brian Slattery |
Jun 3, 2022 9:07 am
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A cluster of paintings on the wall of the gallery all border a central piece, as if feeding it, which in a sense they do. The central piece holds the others together. In it, a yard bordered by trees is the site of some kind of excavation, roped off. Something is being unearthed there, the ruins of a house, or something still older, maybe. But instead of a crew with tools, the only animals in sight are a cardinal and a bluejay, watching over the proceedings in a moment that’s both funny and a little magical, a flight of fancy on the part of the artist, though very much grounded in reality.
The derelict former clock factory building at 133 Hamilton St.
Markeshia Ricks photo
Redeveloper Scott Reed at 2018 alder hearing. His company allegedly owes city $137K in back taxes.
Has the clock stopped on a long-delayed effort to convert a derelict former Hamilton Street factory into 130 affordable apartments?
The property’s Oregon-based developer says the project is still moving forward. Three years of unpaid property taxes, a recent default in a tax foreclosure court case, and a spate of city anti-blight and building safety citations suggest a different story.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 2, 2022 8:59 am
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Them Airs.
“Exploded Whip,” from the new album of the same name by the New Haven-based Them Airs, starts with chiming guitars, keys, and bass, a steady rhythm with skittering beats beneath it. “He drive exploded car,” the vocalist sings, “he never intended to die / I watched as he spun out / turned his human skin outside.” The dark surrealism of the lyrics is set at an oblique angle to a song that sounds written by musicians with a lot of experience, yet who are still bursting with ideas.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 1, 2022 8:46 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Beach Side Property.
Two high-energy bands — Beach Side Property and Seeing Double — shook the floorboards of Never Ending Books on Tuesday night, turning the State Street community space into a frenzied dance club.
The Shoreline-based emo band Beach Side Property — Kate Burton on guitar and vocals, Ruby DeGoursey on bass and vocals, Patrick LaLonde on guitar and backing vocals, and Ryan Shea on drums — immediately tore into a set of mostly originals with a cover or two sprinkled in for good measure that showcased what the band was all about: tight musicianship, sharp songwriting, and the ability to draw and hold a crowd. Shea on drums was a constant source of propulsion, while DeGoursey’s muscular bass playing provided pulse, rumble, and slyly sophisticated harmonies. On guitars, Burton and LaLonde created shifted textures of sound out of one hook after another. All this was the grounding for Burton and DeGoursey’s earnest, funny lyrics, delivered with a lot of heart and a sly grin. If the lyrics were often about anxieties, heartbreak, and insecurity, the voices of people moving into an uncertain future, the music itself conveyed a constant message of strength and hope — a message amplified by the sheer amount of fun the band was obviously having playing music together. That enjoyment was infectious, packing the room of Never Ending Books with cheering, dancing fans, and giving the touring band that followed the warm-up they deserved.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 31, 2022 9:05 am
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Perennial Photo
Perennial.
“Come on can you do the skeleton dance? Can you foxtrot from the crypt? Can you waltz three four five six? Yeah, it goes like this, it goes like this,” sings vocalist and keyboardist Chelsey Hahn before she and the rest of the post-hardcore power-punk band Perennial — Chad Jewett on vocals and guitar and Wil Mulhern on drums — create an absolute onslaught of sound that could both wake the dead and get them on the dance floor.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2022 9:00 am
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Dunn.
“It was kind of like I was squished so hard it leaked out,” Sarah Dunn said of her first EP, Thank You — coming out this Saturday, June 4, with a release party at Gather on Upper State Street — and the torrent of songwriting that followed, in between shifts in nursing homes during the depths of the pandemic. “I happened upon a very strange way of having silence, and it allowed the space inside my head to put things down that maybe had been festering there for a while. I didn’t have the opportunity before, but suddenly I was provided the time, so I did it.”
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Maya McFadden |
May 30, 2022 2:28 pm
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Book Trader Blue Hawaiian (coconut/vanilla) & Lilikoi (passion fruit) shave ice.
A chilled sweet taste of Hawaii has hit Chapel Street just in time for the summer heat — and to help a local business survive the pandemic with a new passion (fruit) lure.
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Laura Glesby |
May 30, 2022 9:40 am
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Laura Glesby Photo
Sarya Provite leads dance in rain at mental health awareness fair.
Baron “Von Leek” felt nervous at the prospect of talking to others about mental illness for years, he said as rain poured from the sky.
An hour later, sunshine surprised Jocelyn Square Park — and Von Leek found himself rapping about his self-diagnosed schizophrenia to a moved audience of mental health activists and stigma-breakers.
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Thomas Breen |
May 27, 2022 3:02 pm
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Thomas Breen photo
City Librarian John Jessen.
A decades-long champion of reading and neighborhood engagement who bolstered the public library system’s social services as he led it through a pandemic, City Librarian John Jessen passed away from cancer on Friday. He was 56 years old.
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Brian Slattery |
May 27, 2022 8:29 am
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The pulsating orb-like structure in the Liberty Science Center appears to float, impossibly, high above the heads of people walking below, as if it’s lighter than air, or underwater. The fact that it isn’t just a sculpture, but in fact a playground for children, only adds to its improbable whimsy. Liberty Science Center is in Jersey City, N.J., but the shop that designed and built the orb, Luckey Climbers, is right in New Haven, on East Street. Its chief architect, Spencer Luckey, has been around the playground design business all his life. He took over the company from his father, and has made dozens of climbers for clients all over the world. But he also has a vision for the Elm City.
Participants in Thursday's "Children's March" to Edgewood Park.
One hundred and fifty New Haven middle and high school students put their pencils down and posters up Thursday to give the city a lesson on solidarity, passion, and leading through action.
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Thomas Breen |
May 26, 2022 4:41 pm
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A sculpture by artist Yvonne Shortt on display outside 51 Trumbull St.
Clockwise from upper left: ECOCA board members Suneet Talpade, Jeanne Criscola, Debbie Hesse, Jeanne Ciravolo.
A downtown visual arts nonprofit has closed on its purchase of the John Slade Ely House — warding off the building’s potential sale to a residential developer, with the help of a loan from two Fair Haven businessmen.
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Brian Slattery |
May 26, 2022 9:25 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Ingui.
“So did you hear? We’re moving,” said Kit Ingui, managing director of Long Wharf Theatre, to appreciative laughter Wednesday evening at the Stetson branch library in Q House on Dixwell Avenue. Ingui, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón, Mayor Justin Elicker, branch manager Diane X Brown, and Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala were there to announce Long Wharf’s plans for its 2022 – 23 season, as it moves out of the space it has occupied on Sargent Drive for years and moves into an itinerant model, bringing theater directly into New Haven’s communities.
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Colin Roberts |
May 26, 2022 9:24 am
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On Wednesday night, Cafe Nine hosted a gem of a show to a small but captivated audience. Blues and rock were the musical selling points, but the artists who shared the stage all brought an extra dimension — that of showmanship and sincerity — that can only happen in small venues like the New Haven club.
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Brian Slattery |
May 25, 2022 8:47 am
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The foggy, paranoid view through the peephole of a door to an apartment. A painting of a container ship erupting into flames. A gas can looking ready to be ignited. They come across as a dislocated parts of a whole, tiny fragments of something too big to comprehend all at once. They’re part of “Proximity,” a show running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through June 8, in which artists come to grips with the war in Ukraine, producing an exhibit that conveys the conflict’s harrowing immediacy and something of its historical context at the same time.
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Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2022 8:14 am
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You may have seen the signs at the exit ramps of I‑91 or I‑95 around town, or on long straightaways on Whitney Avenue, or that particular curve of road on Mather Street in Hamden. They say “Slow Down,” and they’re clearly directed at car traffic. Neatly stenciled and uniform in size, some of them look quasi-official. But they’re not.
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Brian Slattery |
May 23, 2022 8:31 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
On Sunday afternoon, dancers blessed the elements in four cardinal directions, following the traditions of generations — traditions carried from Oaxaca, Mexico to New Haven, and presented in the Elm City’s first-ever guelaguetza.
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Colin Roberts |
May 23, 2022 8:23 am
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With Honor.
For two sold-out nights at Space Ballroom, Connecticut’s own With Honor delivered to their fans after a 10-year absence, bringing an energetic and positive communal vibe to the Hamden club.
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Donald Brown |
May 23, 2022 8:21 am
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T. Charles Erickson
“We gonna talk about war and genocide and PTSD and molestation. So it’s OK to laugh,” says Larry (Justin Gauthier), the amiable host of Between Two Knees, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. He reappears in a variety of guises and his deadpan commentary is one of the best things in the show. He enters the stage on a lift through a trapdoor, looking like an icon of Native American tribal lore, and he ends the show in a kind of glam Native American spacesuit, a way of saying that the people who were the earliest human inhabitants of the American continent will always be here, no matter what the future holds.
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Brian Slattery |
May 20, 2022 9:35 am
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Erica Chambers Photos
Bob Martin as Ezell.
Bob Martin, playing Ezell, the titular character in Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, stands in the mud of an outdoor set that is part nature run amok, full of huge, twisting tree trunks, and part industrial drilling site, with metal poles driven into the ground and chains connected to them. In this moment, he embodies a sense of desperate defiance, as he enunciates a key sentence twice: Ain’t nobody gonna tell me this isn’t my place to be. As Ezell proceeds with its story, the audience movingly learns just how fraught and fragile that ground beneath that assertion is.
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Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2022 8:41 am
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Jeremy Daniel Photos
Srinivasan and Janssen.
Researchers Sanam Shah and Ariel Spiegel are presenting the findings of a project that may, once and for, stick it to the man. Their advisor is watching with eagerness as Spiegel turns on the fire, cutting straight to the chase about how they’ve uncovered evidence, real evidence, of corporate wrongdoing, creating active ecological harm. She’s flush with her commitment. That’s when Shah gets worried. Isn’t her presentation maybe a little too subjective? Her advisor disagrees; if anything, he suggests, Spiegel should lay it on thicker. After all, the passion is backed up by hard data. Isn’t it?
That’s when Shah suddenly looks worried. She’s found an anomaly. But she can fix it. She knows she can. In that moment, it’s hard to tell whether she’s reassuring them or herself.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
May 18, 2022 9:11 am
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Hamden will get a head start on bolstering summer programming this year with the help of a two-part job reorganization, according to the town administration.
