Friday, April 12: She has released ten albums, written four books and been called “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters” by The New Yorker. Unison booked her, but she’ll be performing at SUNY-New Paltz’s Studley Theater.
Saturday, April 13: I am not sure anyone would have predicted the return of vinyl, and with it the flourishing of record stores, and with that the renaissance of record-store culture and its barbershop vibe of feverish cultural engagement and curation. But here we are.
Saturday, April 13: In her latest volume of poetry, Visiting Days, area poet Gretchen Primack literally goes to jail. A collection of short, imagistically keen dramatic monologues, Visiting Days captures images, stories, voices and fragments of lives on the inside, connecting them in subtly woven themes to the racial, economic, and human realities that feed the booming and largely private prison complex that is barely ever mentioned in public discourse.
I work from home, which is to say in a blurred and solitary world in which duty and comfort bleed together like a really sloppy Monet. There is a saying in football: if you have two starting quarterbacks, you have no starting quarterback. I propose that if you work from home, you have neither work nor home, really. Your days lack the essential subordinations and separations of which a modern life is built. Your peace is never complete and neither, oddly, is your stress.
Friday, Aug. 16- Sunday, Aug.18: What does Woodstock even mean, 50 years later, to a generation that has its own zeitgeist-defining festivals like, well, Fyre?
Friday, Apr. 5: When the dust clears from the still-raging oral history/memoir/spoken-word renaissance, David Sedaris may well stand as the one to credit or to blame for the whole damn thing.
Saturday, Mar. 23: They lit up 2018 Mountain Jam with a wild set or organ-fired funky rock ‘n’ roll led by an irrepressible entertainer who understands nothing of restraint.
Friday, Mar. 29: A smooth jazz master with a truly global purview, this trumpeter/composer is one of the very few pop superstars that the genre has produced. While he always keeps it accessible, singable and user-friendly, there is no denying the man’s musical substance.
Saturday, Mar. 16: While Tony made his name playing with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson and David Bowie (and John Lennon and, and, and), Pete’s thing has always been jazz and its derivatives. A New York session ace who has recorded or performed with Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus, Pete’s résumé is hardly less impressive than his rock-star brother’s.
This is a love story as well as an environmental and political thriller and exposé. Ironically, it is the love story that asks the most willingness and imaginative extension of the reader.