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Laura Glesby |
Oct 11, 2024 2:36 pm
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Flicker
Are these prairie dogs wondering what makes them prairie dogs?
Laura Glesby Photo
Jeff Cibulas, with Jenny Trujillo at last NHDoc screening: “I’d rather see the truth and know how horrible it is.”
Prairie dogs have a word for “human.” They talk about us in a language with nouns, adjectives, and variable dialects — even though, to most of us, their words sound like unintelligible squeaks.
I learned that delightful fact at the last-ever film screening by NHDocs, from a vegan advocacy film about what it means to be human in a world of other animals.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2024 9:02 am
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Robert De Matteo
Charles Island On My Mind.
The diptych, by Robert De Matteo, offers two shapes that strongly echo each other, but are from quite different models. The one on the left is easier to identify right away, as a brain scan from an MRI. The image on the right, though, might require a look at the title. Sure enough, it’s drawn from a satellite image of Charles Island, off the coast of Silver Sands State Park in Milford, the sandbar that connects it to the mainland at low tide clearly visible. The visual pun is funny. The idea that the forms would mirror each other closely says something a little deeper, about recurring patterns in nature, perhaps about how we aren’t as separate from our environment as we might like to think.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 10, 2024 9:35 am
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Rita Hannafin
Rita Hannafin's Float, on display for Open Studios.
Rita Hannafin’s Float hangs in the midst of City Gallery’s latest show on Upper State Street, a quilt of bright, shifting colors, surprising shapes, dynamic contrasts, and ultimately, cohesion.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 9, 2024 8:42 am
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Anna Webber Photo
Christian Sands.
“Good Morning Heartache,” the opening track on Christian Sands’s latest album, Embracing Dawn, begins with a warm, gently unfolding gesture from the piano, an easing into consciousness. But then there’s an insistent ping from somewhere else. Something’s off, something’s wrong. A beat settles in, heavy and lethargic, with strings adding extra weight. It’s an exploration of a state of mind, in which maybe everything will be okay in time — but it’s not okay now.
Bechard: It's difficult to run a film fest when "there's no movie theater in New Haven."
After a decade-long run of bringing documentaries and filmmakers from all over the country and beyond to New Haven — and, for a brief time in October, turning the city’s downtown into a documentary lover’s paradise — the New Haven Documentary Film Festival has come to a close, and will have a final farewell screening on Wednesday, at the Cannon on Dwight Street.
Gracy Brown, with Kay Anderson: Saturday's Lit fest was filled with "kindness and community."
Inspired by James Baldwin’s commitment to telling the truth, Jacqueline Brown raised her hand to ask a question of the two literature scholars in front of her.
“In your personal experience, how has his work taught you to find joy? How has his work incited you towards action?”
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 7, 2024 8:18 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Luca McCarthy at work: “I’m very anti-garbage. Nothing is garbage.”
One view of the CAW exhibit, featuring pieces by Simmons, Giroux, McCarthy, and Brantley.
You know October is here when New Haven sidewalks are dotted with fallen leaves, and art studios and galleries are open for all to see. Open Studios 2024 began on Saturday with a variety of locations ready and waiting to share art in a variety of media, including City Gallery, The Institute Library, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Creative Arts Workshop (CAW).
CAW, however, had a unique set up offered to the public. While an exhibit by eight artists from the Ely Center’s 2024 open call was on view on the first floor of the Hilles Gallery at CAW on Audubon Street, those same eight artists were on the second floor, creating new pieces and greeting visitors who wanted to engage them in discussion about their work.
by
Karen Ponzio |
Oct 2, 2024 9:41 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
The Psychedelic Furs: Still making music that's fun, sexy, and a bit dangerous.
October opened with a one-two punch as the dreamy double bill of the Psychedelic Furs and The Jesus and Mary Chain turned College Street Music Hall into a post-punk version of heaven.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 1, 2024 8:50 am
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Do you have a mind’s eye, the ability to not just remember, but visualize the past? Do you have an interior monologue? Rich childhood memories, full of sights, sounds, and smells? For science writer Sadie Dingfelder — speaking to an audience of about a dozen Monday night at the Edgewood Avenue bookstore Possible Futures — the answer to all these questions and a few more like it were a clear no.
And until just a few years ago, she thought the same was true for everyone else. Until a fateful trip to the grocery store led her to become the subject of a few lab studies, and to the work of New Haven-area science journalist Carl Zimmer, and on and on — heading toward the edges of neurologists’ understanding of how varied the human experience can be.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 1, 2024 8:49 am
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Artistic Managing Director Sarah Machiko Haber.
The life and death of viral celebrity. Keeping the stories of ancestors alive. Death and rebirth.
The mythological phoenix is famed for rising reborn from its own ashes. Chosen as the title for Yale Cabaret’s 2024 – 25 season, the name is fitting — not only for the themes running through what the Cab is producing this year, but because the Cab is a student-run theater that has “died” and been reborn 55 times before. Each season has new artistic directors and managing directors who, in a manner of speaking, rise from the ashes of their predecessors.
“Beautiful!” a passing motorist called out while heading downtown Monday on Chapel Street.
“Thank you!” Jessie Unterhalter said for the tenth? 20th? time of the day.
Unterhalter didn’t want to be rude. People passing by the once-blank warehouse wall at Chapel and East Streets have brightened to see the swirling bright colors Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn have been painting there for the past three weeks. Unterhalter appreciated their appreciation.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 30, 2024 8:37 am
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Kelly Jensen Photo
Taylor Ho Bynum.
Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum smiled from the stage at Firehouse 12 Friday night, explaining how good it was to be back there. “I cannot imagine my life without it,” he said, from his collaborations with Anthony Braxton to his numerous performances there with other groups. On Friday, however, he was there with UK-based pianist Alexander Hawkins, as part of the Crown Street bar- recording studio-performance space’s fall jazz series, running now into December.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2024 9:23 am
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Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad.
The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall.
It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 26, 2024 9:23 am
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In the short film Dendrostalkers, the view is from the driver’s seat of a car curving along a dirt road through a forest at night. The trees are thick and dark, then give way to a clearing, a pile of fresh lumber. The narration speaks of foreboding. The car stops, and something springs from the pile of dead trees, a new limb, animated, making shapes in the air. It’s the next step in evolution, maybe a dispatch from the future. It’s an art project that has something to say about our relationship to the forest now.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 25, 2024 11:47 am
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Brian Slattery photo
One of the many artworks on display at the first ever show hosted by a Legion Avenue mental health, addiction, and homelessness services nonprofit.
The pill bottles hang suspended in the air, a testament to their ubiquity and the damage they cause. Behind them are arrayed a series of facts and statistics about drug overdoses. Over 1,000 people die from them in Connecticut every year. Since 1999, almost 1 million have died nationwide, with opioids accounting for two-thirds of those deaths.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 24, 2024 9:22 am
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Carol Strause FitzSimonds
Flora and Fauna #23.
“My art is a living thing, a labor of birth, exasperation, growth, change, and joy. Printmaking has always been my primary passion, from exploring traditional Old World techniques to new 21st-century materials and technologies. Wanting to expand my art into a more sculptural tactile experience led me to experiment with altering published books and to crafting one-of-a-kind books from my original prints and drawings. I find my image inspiration in the everyday of nature, ordinary places and things, and the human form.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2024 9:12 am
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Magdalena Abrego crouched over her pedalboard Sunday evening at Never Ending Books on State Street, and unleashed a lush, complex soundscape, a series of guitar-made tones layered over one another, now vibrating together.
As the sounds continued pulsing around her, she began to play simple chords, laying down a rhythm, a chord progression. On the downbeat, Mali Obomsawin and Willis Edmundson joined Abrego. The soundscape switched off in a second, and the band — Deerlady — sounded, suddenly, like a rock band. But the impression was left, and a point made, that the trio was drawing from a broad musical vocabulary. Which made sense; the last time Abrego, Obomsawin, and opener Allison Burik were in town, in May 2023, they were playing music that brought together elements of traditional Abenaki song and free jazz at Firehouse 12. Deerlady deployed a different sound, but still had the same searching sensibility.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 20, 2024 11:16 am
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Series co-organizers Shelton, Mattison, Czepiel, and Jessen.
A room full of writers and fans of the written word gathered Thursday night at Best Video for the first installment of the Sleeping Giant Reading Series, an event aimed at creating a space where authors not only share their works, but gather in community with others to offer support, make connections, and have a little fun.
Co-organizers Alice Mattison, Sandi Shelton, Kathy Czepiel, and Heather Jessen — all New Haven-based writers — will be curating a two-hour event every third Thursday of the month. The first hour will feature professional readings by published authors. The second hour will be dedicated to shaking away that oft-felt sense of isolation many writers have by sharing a “Writer’s Happy Hour” where they can chat with each other about their work and writing in general.
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.
