Stacey Abrams (right), and interlocutor Emily Bazelon: "If you’re interested in peoples’ lives being better, that’s politics.”
State government is by far the least understood in our system, and in many ways the most important to get right if we want to achieve the goals of democracy.
Former Georgia state rep and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams made those remarks, by turns trenchant yet largely apolitical, at the Hopkins School Monday afternoon before no fewer than 1,200 enthusiastic, applauding young people.
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Laura Glesby |
Sep 23, 2024 4:18 pm
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Laura Glesby Photo
Harold Jones, in the "flow" scooping early fall leaves in Upper Westville.
“You can’t work with a cluttered mind,” said Harold Jones as he de-cluttered the Ijeh family’s front yard — on a job outing where stories of incarceration and reentry, witnessed and experienced from different angles, had a chance to intersect.
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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.
The Church of Scientology has paid local taxes for the first time in 14 years for a vacant former furniture store in Westville Village — and is now looking to demolish part of that neglected property as part of a long-delayed renovation.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 22, 2024 9:28 am
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Ralph Levesque
Match Maker.
Ralph Levesque’s Match Maker, at first glance, looks like religious art, from the halo encircling one of the figures to the positions of the figures in relation to each other. We’ve seen the general idea before, in Christian medieval art. But the first glance proves deceiving, an overt meaning elusive. Who or what is the visage in the background? And why the faces on sticks? Are they mirrors? Portals? The title suggests that a transaction of some kind is taking place. But what? We don’t know what’s going on, but the sense of meaning, a belief system being enacted, remains.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 16, 2024 8:39 am
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Sarah Groate with her two photos.
Sarah Groate’s photographs, Duke’s Arrival and Waiting at The Rainbow Bridge, married two of her great loves: photography and horses. Groate works at the CT Draft Horse Rescue, and she uses the horses there as both inspiration and the subjects of her art. “I just found that I loved photographing them,” she said. “They’re the true gentle giants.”
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Thomas Breen |
Aug 8, 2024 9:32 am
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The city’s premier outdoor concert venue won’t be quiet all summer long after all — now that four August shows have been moved from a Middlefield ski resort to the Westville Music Bowl.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 6, 2024 8:22 am
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Carlos y su Movimiento Musical.
A dozen varieties of fruit flavors and a dozen Latin rhythms came together on Monday evening as the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance closed out HI Fi Pie, its series of outdoor concerts and pie-making contests held in Beecher Park, in front of the Mitchell Branch Library, in Westville.
Charlotte Anderholt’s cranberry tart pie with hazelnut crust.
Abiba Biao Photos
Harris, Ray, and Sarah Harris Wallman.
Harris Wallman only needed an hour to craft his delicious blueberry-mint-cream cheese pie for the summer’s first Hi-Fi Pie Fest. The base, made up of sugar cookie dough, had a cream cheese filling seasoned with lemon juice, lemon zest, and ginger. The pie couldn’t be complete without the pièce de résistance: a creamy blueberry sauce layered on top.
Still of Charlie Rich from Westville altercation video.
(Updated) A group of Hopkins alums are calling on the Forest Road private school to reinstate an employee who was put on paid leave five months ago following a verbal altercation between his wife and a neighbor over the war in Gaza.
(Updated) For the first time in 14 years, City Hall has sent a property tax bill to the Church of Scientology for a long-vacant former furniture store in Westville Village.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 8, 2024 11:45 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
Stephanie Berluti.
Stephanie Berluti of South Haven Farm was selling vegetables and greens at her stand at the CitySeed Edgewood Farmers Market on Sunday when she was approached by a man asking if she had any arugula.
Unfortunately, Berluti hadn’t brought any arugula that day — it had been too hot for it recently. The man was disappointed, but he still left her on a note of praise.
“He said my arugula ruined him for other arugula,” said Berluti. “This time of year, in the heat, farming can get you down, so it’s nice to get compliments.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 8, 2024 9:24 am
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Love n'Co at Seeing Sounds.
Eleanor Polak photo
T!lt's Mike Scialla: “This is our last song, so we usually go crazy."
“You can do anything. That’s my main motto,” Lovelind of the local rock-pop-soul band Love n’Co told the crowd at Edgewood Park’s Seeing Sounds Festival. “It won’t be easy, but you can do anything.”
That proved a fitting tribute to the artistic accomplishment that was Saturday’s fest — which saw a swath of the park turn into a vibrant venue for beautiful clothing, delicious food, foot-tapping rhythms, and a feeling of camaraderie that lasted longer than the last notes of a song.
Bleachers at the Bowl. No more of this until Sept. 21.
The city’s premier outdoor concert venue doesn’t have any shows booked for July and August — with its last concert having taken place at the end of June, and its next concert scheduled for late September.
Why no live music these peak summer months? Because of “voracious competition” from Live Nation, which pays “exorbitant” prices to keep acts from coming to the Westville Music Bowl.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 5, 2024 8:31 am
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Jennifer Knaus
Jennifer Knaus's Oval, now showing in "Artist as Curator."
Jennifer Knaus’s portrait pulls in the viewer in five different ways. There’s the vivid color choices, the exquisitely rendered, phantasmagorically fecund hair. But perhaps more than anything, there’s the element as old as portraiture itself: the gaze of the subject of the portrait back at the viewer, direct yet complex. What is the subject thinking? And with a painting like this, it’s possible to take that question a step further: What is the subject thinking about us?
Crenshaw (right) teaches Tanasia Edwards how to perform a breast self exam.
Jacquelyn Crenshaw isn’t new to spotting breast tumors. Having worked in mammography for more than 40 years, she urged a crowd of over a dozen women to get their annual mammograms, perform monthly breast self-examinations, and above all, “know your breast density.”
Liam Brennan’s elderly parents will be able to live just steps away from their grandchildren — while maintaining the independence of residing in their own detached home — now that the city’s zoning board has approved the conversion of the former mayoral candidate’s backyard garage into a two-story accessory dwelling unit (aka “ADU”).
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 4, 2024 9:11 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
On Monday night, members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre gathered in the theater company’s rehearsal and performance space in Westville to roll the clock back to 1929, close to the origins of New Haven’s apizza culture.
In the scene they rehearsed, Pete Jr. (Otto Fuller) wants to introduce his friend Charles (Jonah Alderman) to the rest of his family: mother Lucrezia (Susan Kulp), Cousin Mike (Matt Gaffney), and Uncle Jimmy (Lou Mangini). Mike and Jimmy, behind the counter, roll out dough and slide apizza in and out of a brick oven. Charles isn’t there just to make friends; he wants a job.
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Brian Slattery |
May 31, 2024 8:14 am
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Frank Bruckmann
I-95 East Norwalk.
Frank Bruckmann paints the sky to convey a sense of the clouds roiling overhead; perhaps it’s getting dark, or threatening rain, or both. In the dimness, the lights in the painting are blurred by atmosphere. Metal signs gleam in the reflected light. Bruckmann gives it all emotion and loving attention, which makes it all the more interesting that his subject isn’t a beautiful landscape, or an important person, but a snarl of traffic on I‑95.
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Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2024 9:26 am
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Brian Slattery photo
Allie Bee stood in front of an admiring audience in the downstairs space of Westville’s Third Space. Tracks they’d made themself played behind them as they took their time unfurling melodies they’d written on bass. The first one, groovy, insistent, they said, was called “Wayward Giant.” The second one, hazier and jazzier, was called “Blue Moon,” named after a smoothie of the same name that they’d made at work.
“Inspiration comes in weird places,” they said.
An enthusiastic voice came from the back: “Yeah it does!”
On-duty NHPD rifle operators take positions outside Richmond Avenue house.
A late-night argument over a microwave oven Sunday led to a gunshot — and then, 14 hours later, police surrounding a house and blocking off the street until the alleged shooter came outside.
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Abiba Biao |
May 14, 2024 11:34 am
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Abiba Biao photo
Elizabeth Laconi, Anne Hartjen, Shayla Streater, and Amayah Smith.
Amid the sea of vendors and artisans on Saturday afternoon at the 27th annual Westville ArtWalk neighborhood festival and arts market, 11-year-old Amayah Smith looked around in awe at the multitude of goods people had to offer, from handmade soaps to crochet plushies. Amayah could imagine herself taking part, so folks better watch out at next year’s ArtWalk for a new business — “‘Mayah’s Joy” — bringing homemade stickers to you.
