by | Sep 15, 2020 10:45 am | Comments (1)
Laura Glesby Photos
The bridge (above) now looks like a ship to Hercules Sessions (below).
So long predatory arachnids, hello … watercraft?
The Grand Avenue Bridge finally has its complete coat of mint green paint — and the new color has inspired some pedestrians to see poetry in their surroundings.
by | Sep 15, 2020 10:38 am | Comments (0)
Sven Martson
Street Food Vendor, Juliaca, Peru; Man in Restaurant Window, New Haven CT; Three Men in a Truck, Havana, Cuba; Antique Car Show, Torrington, CT.
In one photograph, a man lounges against a food cart; in an adjacent picture, a man rests at a counter. In one photograph, three men sit in an antique car; in another, the car is similar, but now there’s no one in it, though there is a man standing next to it. Maybe one can detect a hint of pride in his stance.
The pictures are separated by time and distance. The street food vendor is in Peru, the man at the counter in New Haven. The men in the truck are in Havana, the man standing in front of the car in Torrington. But they are unified by form — first, by the photographer’s eye, and second, by the echoes of one picture in another, whether it’s the bend of an elbow or the shape of the car’s hood.
Continue reading ‘Photographs Find The Ways The World Rhymes’
by | Sep 14, 2020 3:41 pm | Comments (2)
Rabhya Mehrotra photo
Blumenthal at Monday’s presser.
65 to 25. 57 to 17.
Those are the staffing-level cuts at two local theaters since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. On Monday, theater managers and advocates joined U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal in calling for help to save their stages.
Continue reading ‘Theaters Join Blumenthal Bid To “Save Our Stages”’
by | Sep 14, 2020 9:23 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
The William Fluker All Star Band at the Orchid Cafe
Jazz and brunch go together like chicken and waffles, like mussels and fries, like eggs and bacon. So when this reporter heard that an old favorite brunch was starting up again and a new one had arrived, I set my sights on checking out both.
Each one had a distinct flavor and sound. Each one reminded me how much I had missed the jazz brunch scene in New Haven — decimated by the Covid-19-related shutdown, but now coming back to life.
by | Sep 14, 2020 9:21 am | Comments (0)
A masked Pete Kaufman leaned into the microphone as David Sasso tuned his instrument at the start of their second set at Best Video.
“It’s such a nice night,” he said. “Not going to have too many more nights like this. What’s better than being outside?”
by | Sep 11, 2020 10:46 am | Comments (0)
Louise Mosrie, guitar in hand, looked into the camera at the virtual audience assembled before her Thursday evening. “I wish we could all be together,” she said. “When we see each other again, I hope it’ll be like we haven’t missed any time at all.” She then launched into the first song of her set, “Home” — “because we’ve all spent a lot of time at home,” she said.
by | Sep 10, 2020 4:00 pm | Comments (0)
“When you pray, move your feet.”
The late civil rights leader John Lewis would invoke that African proverb in reference to the marches that changed American history.
by | Sep 10, 2020 10:11 am | Comments (1)
Activist Angela Davis told activist Ericka Huggins that she remembered when they met, in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She met Huggins’s husband John when Davis joined the Black Panthers. She remembered when John was murdered. She had made sure that Huggins’s young daughter was in good hands when Huggins was arrested, and she was there when Huggins was released.
The connection between the two women was deep and strong. Both had been Black Panthers. Both had spent time in jail. And both had spent the past decades continuing to work for social justice.
On Wednesday night, in a Zoom talk hosted by Artspace — and filled to capacity — as part of its programming for “Revolution on Trial,” Davis and Huggins connected again, to talk about education.
Continue reading ‘Artspace Talk Brings The Revolution To The Classroom’
by | Sep 10, 2020 8:35 am | Comments (0)
by | Sep 9, 2020 9:15 am | Comments (1)
Contributed Photo
Omonte.
Multiply hyphenated New Haven creative Rick Omonte — a.k.a. DJ Shaki — has spent decades ping-ponging from project to project, adding new titles to his name and he hasn’t let a global pandemic slow his roll. With his recently revamped website for Shaki Presents, the musician-DJ-concert booker and promoter-radio host-label head-zine producer-all-around musical polyglot has managed to create something sincere, singular and engrossing: a unique collection of his insights and encounters with the machinations of the Peruvian music business.
by | Sep 8, 2020 10:20 am | Comments (1)
This fall, the members of the New Haven Oratorio Choir will sing, perform and socialize, as they always have. They’ll do so, however, from behind computer screens at home.
by | Sep 7, 2020 10:02 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
At the intersection of Orange and Crown on Sunday afternoon, artist Michael DeAngelo (pictured) stood on a ladder, a can of spray paint in his hand, putting shading touching onto a blue figure that seemed to float across the black wall in front of him.
A few addresses north on Orange Street, artist Alexander Fournier was on a ladder of his own, sketching out the ghosts of skyscrapers on a blank white wall in front of Ninth Square Market.
Around the corner on Center, Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran was putting down the linework for an intricate mural that turned the city into a blueprint and back again.
by | Sep 6, 2020 11:04 am | Comments (40)
Sam Gurwitt Photo
It felt like the whole world was vibrating Saturday on Stiles Street, as the deafening roar of multiple Harley Davidsons ricocheted off the I‑95 overpass for hours while well over 1,000 people looked on — until police shut it down.
Continue reading ‘Bikers Swarm Annex For Annual Street Bash’
by | Sep 4, 2020 1:23 pm | Comments (1)
with thanks to Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in the virus
Others say in mass delusion
by | Sep 4, 2020 8:20 am | Comments (10)
Brian Slattery Photos
Chef Lucky and the Lucky’s Star Bus Cafe crew.
Chef Larry Lucky stood in the kitchen installed in the back of Lucky’s Star Bus Cafe, deftly cooking up a piece of blackened salmon, which he explained was a customer favorite.
The year-old, family-run business recently relocated from Fair Haven to Newhallville — bringing to the neighborhood Lucky’s decades of restaurant experience and his seasoned culinary chops.
Continue reading ‘Bus Cafe Serves Up Salmon In Newhallville’
by | Sep 3, 2020 3:09 pm | Comments (0)
by | Sep 3, 2020 8:19 am | Comments (1)
As evening settled across District New Haven on James Street, Nick Di Maria and the New Haven Jazz Underground slid into another standard that filled the lawn outside the building with their sound.
by | Sep 2, 2020 8:38 am | Comments (6)
On a sunny day, the trees above the frames on the wall on Wooster Street dapple the art those frames contain. For the latest installment of Studio Duda’s outside art gallery — begun in May as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic — this interaction with nature is particularly apt.
Continue reading ‘Environmental Art Comes To Wooster Street’
by | Sep 1, 2020 5:54 pm | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen photo
Celebrating the new “Orange Street Promenade” in the Ninth Square.
Millie Yoshida, Jack Wolfe, and Matthew Shaffer on their lunch break.
Retail apocalypse? What retail apocalypse?
As commercial storefronts across the city and country struggle to stay open during the pandemic-induced economic crisis, a newly opened “Orange Street Promenade” showed off a Ninth Square in full bloom.
by | Sep 1, 2020 7:30 am | Comments (1)
Laura Glesby Photo
Shaquan Whitfield with Joshua and Justin.
Diamond Tree (center) leads a hula hoop activity.
Shaquan Whitfield brought her children, Joshua and Justin Currie, to a neighborhood-spanning, back-to-school fair on the Farmington Canal Trail because she wanted to “show my kids there’s more positive than negative” in Newhallville.
Continue reading ‘Newhallville Unites For Back-To-School Bash’
by | Sep 1, 2020 7:23 am | Comments (4)
Everyone knows Frank Sinatra, but no one knows about his agitation for leftist causes in the 1930s and ‘40s. Fiorello La Guardia got an airport, but Sacco and Vanzetti got a march and a folk song. Italian-Americans are known for their cultural contributions to American society and, of course, New Haven in particular — look no further than Wooster Street, the cradle of pizza civilization — but what about their political legacy as a group that often struck and organized for worker’s rights and better treatment by White society? The path to assimilation was not smooth, and the very organizing that got them there seems to have been lost to public consciousness.
Continue reading ‘Author Unearths The Radical Side Of Italian-American History’
by | Aug 31, 2020 8:08 am | Comments (2)
Love’N Co set up fast at the end of the block on Orange and Crown Streets and brought joyous songs to Black Art Matters, an art, music, and craft fair held on Saturday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. that — masks and social distancing and all — brought the arts back to New Haven’s summer streets, with a message.
Continue reading ‘Black Art Matters Brings Arts Back To The Street’
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:49 am | Comments (4)
Forget the door-to-door trick-or-treating and the accidental sidewalk clustering of ghosts, demons, ballplayers, and Beyonces. Covid-19 may not allow for those traditions.
Here’s an alternative idea: Invite small groups of socially distancing trick-or-treaters and their families to four different garages to watch four groups of actors perform a story of a giant Brazilian snake that saves the forests and the world.
Continue reading ‘Garage-Based Pandemic Halloween Alternative Pitched’
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:36 am | Comments (8)
Allison Hadley Photo
The Wooster Square farmer’s market, now held at Conte West Hills Magnet School on Chapel Street, buzzed with masked figures, leaning in (but not too close) and pointing at gleaming piles of produce: peppers, tomatoes, leafy greens springing up with an airy confidence.
A farmer paused between transactions to spray hands and surface with disinfectant.
Lines stretched even longer for Jitter Bus’s iced coffee, with six feet the norm between each person in the queue.
Everything was familiar and different, like a filter on Instagram, yet everything had also changed.
Continue reading ‘How New Haven Keeps Eating During Covid-19’
by | Aug 25, 2020 11:10 am | Comments (1)
The kids say I make ordinary things fun
Like straddling baby and dropping tiny socks