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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2020 9:06 am
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Benny Mikula appeared with guitar in hand on Saturday. Before the pandemic he’d usually be found with seven-piece band The Alpaca Gnomes; tonight he was billing himself as the Lone Gnome.
“How’s everybody doing? Thanks for tuning in,” he said. And then sang a song that felt like easier times. “Little bit of happiness after the pain,” he sang. “A little bit of love can go a long way.”
It was part of the Shubert Theater’s Apart Together program, and part of the rollout for its fall programming as the theater finds ways to stay connected to its audience virtually during the Covid-19 shutdown.
When the author, jazz critic and poet Stanley Crouch died last week, some folks in Greater New Haven must have recalled, as I did, what happened on the first day of autumn in 2016.
Crouch, seated with cane in hand in a room at the Whitney Humanities Center, lured a crowd of about 50 that day into a meditation on a lyrical masterpiece.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 22, 2020 10:34 am
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Puma Simone locked eyes with the camera Monday night, and by extension, the audience of two dozen looking back at them through Zoom. “I’ve always been on my own timeline,” said the New Haven-based artist. They were “trying to remember that there’s a greater plan to this journey,” and that things might “take longer than I want.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 21, 2020 9:04 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
A crowd descended on Bassett Street in Newhallville, ready with brushes, rollers, and cans and cans of paint. They were there to make art that delivered a simple, powerful message — Black lives matter — by spelling it out on the street for all to see.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 21, 2020 8:54 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Dust Hat up on the roof.
“I’ve never played on a roof before,” said Dan Soto, vocalist and bassist for Dust Hat — a couple of hours before his band did exactly that on top of the three-story building that houses Cafe Nine, with a socially distanced array of rock ‘n’ roll fans watching from down below.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 18, 2020 9:27 am
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The first song The Bargain played in their set at Best Video Thursday was “a pandemic song,” said singer Frank Critelli. But it was a pandemic song with perspective; it was about how even now, there was still time to work on yourself.
It was the beginning of a set of original songs from The Bargain — Frank Critelli, Shandy Lawson, and Muddy Rivers — that showed the band as a group of artists already responding to the immediacy of the moment, but with their eyes on the bigger picture and what it all might come to mean. It was also warm, humane, and a lot of fun.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 17, 2020 9:46 am
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“Someone once told me I should write all my dreams but I don’t see the point / rather live and learn and light a joint,” Siul Hughes begins on “Still Doubting,” the opening cut from Hueman, Hughes’s fifth and latest album, but first with New Haven’s own Fake Four, Inc. It’s a disarming introduction to the bars that follow, which are both effortless and acrobatic, direct and elusive, filled with the complications of being a talented, self-reflective Black man in America, as the pressures from society get mirrored in the pressures that come from within. “The pain is mine,” Hughes concludes, an acknowledgement of both oppression and personal responsibility. It’s a heady trip, and it’s just the beginning.
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Thomas Breen |
Sep 16, 2020 3:04 pm
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Thomas Breen / NHFPL images
Clockwise from top left: City arts director Adriane Jefferson, Stetson Librarian Diane Brown, and the public library notice for Dana King’s and Lisa Dent’s talk about William Lanson.
When young Black New Haveners walk by the new statue of William “King” Lanson, Dana King hopes they think to themselves, “That looks like me.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 16, 2020 10:23 am
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Judy Atlas
Southwest Memories 2, Bryce.
On one side of the gallery, the shapes are recognizable as landscape, and desert landscape at that. The rocks are rusty colors, the sun brightening them where the light touches them. The sky is a bright blue. On the other side of the gallery, the shapes are simpler, more abstract, the colors more varied. Following the paintings from left to right across the gallery, you can trace where the artist, Judy Atlas, began — and where she ended up — in City Gallery’s latest exhibit, “The Landscape Real and Imagined,” running now through Sept. 27.
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Laura Glesby |
Sep 15, 2020 10:45 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 15, 2020 10:38 am
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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.
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.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 14, 2020 9:23 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 11, 2020 10:46 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 10, 2020 10:11 am
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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.
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Daniel Shoemaker |
Sep 9, 2020 9:15 am
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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.
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Cara McDonough |
Sep 8, 2020 10:20 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 7, 2020 10:02 am
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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.
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.
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.
