In digital photography, images receive extensive post-production. The possibilities are endless, though the farther one goes in that direction, the more one becomes a manipulator of images rather than a creator. Limiting one’s self to older methods means focusing on the fundamentals of lighting and composition.
Thursday, 4/19 and several dates afterward: In his ongoing 100 Novels project, Youd specializes in retyping novels (with the same make and model typewriter used by the author) from beginning to end in locations that are charged with literary significance in the author’s biography. The retyping of Mary McCarthy’s The Group will constitute the 56th novel that Youd has typed, and is one of several titles that he will undertake in the Hudson Valley in 2018.
Friday-Sunday, April 13-15: Written by Storyhorse Theater co-founder Jeremy Davidson and directed by his wife and co-founder Mary Stuart Masterson, the unsolved murder mystery of a local surveyor will be staged as a reading, with characters giving voice to the action.
Watching Isle of Dogs is a delightful experience from beginning to end. They might as well inscribe the name plaque for the 2018 Best Animated Feature Oscar right away.
Stargazing at Mohonk Preserve, Vernal Pool Exploration at Minnewaska, Sparrow’s Nest Spring Fling and more.
Sunday, April 15: Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change has already garnered critical accolades, including from such environmentalist icons as Jane Goodall and Bill McKibben. The book makes the case that Lyme disease is spreading rapidly around the globe as ticks move into places they could not survive before, infecting half a million people in the US and Europe each year, and untold multitudes in Canada, China, Russia and Australia.
Wednesday, April 18: Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics’ Circle Award for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but this week in particular, the world of belles-lettres is abuzz with admiration for Díaz’s moving account in The New Yorker about the fact that he was raped at the age of eight, and the way that the need to conceal that fact has twisted his life and relationships ever after.
“You could increase your weights, you know,” Gayle the trainer points out. I flash back to six months ago, when I returned to the gym, suitably recovered from radiation and steroids. I felt fine, but I was shocked that I couldn’t budge the leg-lift machine.
John Cuneo, the renowned illustrator and cartoonist known for his New Yorker and Esquire work who’s created the Woodstock Film Festival’s 2018 poster, has a distinctive line.
Sunday, April 15: Whether art should be a reflection of reality or a perfection of it is a little out of my scope at the moment, but I do want to recall how utterly alien the Afrocentric “conscious rap” of Arrested Development sounded to these ears in early ’90s, when the album for which they will always be known, 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life of…, dropped into the middle of a world obsessed with gangsta rap on the one hand and the inflammatory politics of Public Enemy on the other.