2004 October

In his first book of poetry Raymond McDaniel has created a fascinating, mysterious story and then shattered it into sixty glittering, polished fragments that, as McDaniel puts it in his preface, “describe by accretion,...

The music of Ollabelle is at once lush and spare. The four men and two women who form this New York City-based group let their blending, bleeding voices rule, backed by restrained accompaniment — sometimes just drums,...

Near the beginning of Dancemaker (1998), Matthew Diamond's Oscar-nominated documentary, Paul Taylor admits, "I get my energy, I think, from being afraid — being afraid to choreograph, being afraid to fail."...

Many of today's younger improvisers look back with awe to the 1960s and early 1970s, when political, social, and cultural upheavals in American life were accompanied by radical challenges to the jazz tradition. Most of the...

Othar (or Otha) Turner died in February 2003 at ninety-five. He learned to make and play a bamboo cane fife as a youth, from an old man who told him that the drumming that accompanied the fife came from Africa. Turner worked a...

A ragged black hole where an eye should be howls out of a photo of a sprawled dead GI. The other lifeless eye is fixed on the viewer of New York photographer Tony Vaccaro's exhibition of fifty-five riveting World War II...

In the beginning was Brian Wilson's "Good Vibrations." Given its world premiere by Wilson's Beach Boys in 1966 in Hill Auditorium, the song sold a million copies within a week of its release, and 16 million in...

Before hearing his music, I interviewed Eric Kelly about Dylanfest, which he organizes. I figured he'd probably be as quick-witted onstage as he is face-to-face, and I was right. Between songs, Eric banters with pedal steel...

Let me just say this right up front: I am not a cat person. Oh, I know this just sets me up to receive hate mail, but (1) I don’t like boxes of shit in my house, and (2) they get mad at you and pee on your stuff anyway....

Humble Boy, the season opener at the Performance Network, is a perfect storm of transcendent script, stellar ensemble acting, and the directorial hurricane force of Malcolm Tulip. Tulip can usually be counted on to deliver...

Comedian Margaret Cho is barnstorming swing states this month, hoping to provoke her fans to vote the president out of office. A lot of protest singers are doing the same this fall, but they aren't calling Laura Bush a...