Sunday, Oct. 13: On his latest, Let It Slide, Woodstock’s surreal cabaret ringleader ups his game once again as a singer and a writer, leading to a delightful blip-pop record that somehow manages to make sense in the barns of Woodstock and the basements of Brooklyn.
Two of the more renowned American art colonies developed right in Woodstock: Byrdcliffe and Maverick. And then there is Elverhoj – news to most of us, first and foremost because you can’t visit there.
Singing is my personal dragon: a problem with inflamed resonance in my daily life. When I arrived at Omega, I was there, straight-up, in the role of seeker and supplicant. This was Omega, an institution in the direct line of descent of 20th-century psychology, especially the humanistic and integrative psychology of its second half. I fully expected that my traumas and histories would be invoked. I expected to tell my singing story, which is something I am good at and easy with – unlike, say, singing itself.
I went to Omega to attend Claude Stein’s three-day “The Natural Singer” workshop. Had it been for any reason other than singing, I might have come equipped with some critical detachment, an analytical readiness to “read” this place and its people, its language, its demographics, its style and its values, like some rural smartass who had attended half a lecture on Roland Barthes 25 years ago. I am no hardened skeptic or serial debunker (who has the time or the authority for that?), but I might have gone hunting for a playful and unorthodox “take.” That’s my brand, you see.
When the young Leader first went to Europe on a food tour, bread was not on his mind. Things changed fast as he found himself thrust into a series of unplanned apprenticeships with some of Europe’s most revered traditional bakers.
Saturday, Sept. 28: After a successful freshman campaign in the summer of 2018, with more than 15 short films screened to an audience of over 300 at the Water Street Market, the organizers have moved the event to the larger venue on the SUNY campus. Predictably, submissions have greatly increased as well, topping 100 this year, coming from a wider range of independent filmmakers across the Hudson Valley.
Sunday, Sept. 22: A founding member of the Hollies and a constant in all the alphabet soup of CSNY, CSN and CN, Nash has written more hits than you probably realize. And he knows everyone. That is why it is hard to say which is the more alluring part of this date: the songs or the stories. Luckily, we don’t have to decide.
Saturday, Sept. 21: This musician, songwriter, MacArthur Fellow and radio host shreds not only the mandolin, but also whatever is left of the perceived walls dividing folk, rock, jazz and modern classical.
Michael Maruti Projansky’s autobiographical memoir I Don’t Know…I Love (Epigraph Publishing, 2019) might have been restricted to the literary technique of episodic collage by the unique conditions of its writing. A genuine exit project, I Don’t Know…I Love finds the well-known New Paltz patriarch, psychologist, world traveler and spiritual seeker in his own words, “progressively disentangling from being human,” in his late 70s and five years into a struggle with a rare form of ALS that will claim his life – within half a year, by the author’s own estimation at the time of publication.
Tuesday, Sept. 10: Long, long after his brilliant modernist masterpiece The Satanic Verses made him newsworthy and transformed his public and private life in unfortunate ways, the British Indian novelist continues to be prolific and expansive. His 13th novel, Quichotte, is a Don Quixote for the modern age.