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South American Festival
Monday night at the Zinc Bar, the Lilihouse Agency presented the first annual NYC SOUTH AMERICAN MUSIC FESTIVAL. Four hours, four artists and their bands, four from the bar to lighten the heat. First up: Juancho Herrara (top), a Colombian born Venezuelan, with a precise, insistent and sardonic sound, streetwise and urban in tone; his…
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Anna Karenina
I saw Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA a while ago and didn’t know what to think about it. This is not to say that I did not have feelings, thoughts, and sensations while watching it, that some of those were positive and some not, nor that I was not glad to have seen it (I was)…
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Tango Mediterraneo
Tango Mediterraneo is a welcome addition to the options we have in New York to listen to live tango music. It has a distinctive sound, sharp and individualized in its instrumentation, and is fronted by Stratos Achlatis, the accordionist and singer, whose dulcet – I want to say honeyed – voice adds just the right…
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On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a literary rush when I read it sometime in the 1980s, the perfect expression of a sort of counter-mythology to the mainstream myth of the American Dream. The Dream myth holds that we can do anything we want in this country, choose our professions, attain wealth, and build families,…
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Tabu
I admit to a certain disappointment in the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s TABU, widely praised as a neo-surrealist masterpiece, and indeed with a number of engrossing qualities. It is visually striking, as though put together from black-and-white home movies and other found footage, although nothing is rough-around-the-edges in its austere and polished imagery. There is…
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The Brandy Library
I am sure that on this New Year’s Eve there will be a sedate and dignified celebration at the Brandy Library, to which I was privileged to pay my first visit on Friday evening. There is a kind of hush in the air at the place, as if one were reading Plutarch rather than nosing…
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A Royal Affair
I took great pleasure in A ROYAL AFFAIR. For one thing, it acquainted me for the first time with an historical event of considerable drama and importance, involving a struggle for the throne of Denmark that was a sort of proxy for the conflict between reaction and the Enlightenment that would lead just a few…
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Crudo Night at Ballarò
Ballarò is a little Italian bistro on 2nd Avenue that is one of my favorite places for a coffee or modest lunch. They have excellent panini, including some breakfast specialties, good well-selected wines, and real Italians behind the counter. So when manager Stefano Sasselli announced that he was hosting a special dinner of crudo –…
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Faust: A Love Story
In retrospect, it is not that surprising how easily the Faust story adapts as a Christmas play. It’s just that it had never occurred to me as it did to the Vesturport and Reykjavík City Theatres of Iceland whose FAUST: A LOVE STORY is playing – in English – this weekend at BAM. Poinsettias greet…
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Por el agua de Granada
Last week at Terraza 7 Train Cafe I saw POR EL AGUA DE GRANADA … CANCIONERO LORQUIANO, a collaboration of the Spanish singer Lara Bello and the guitarist Eric Kurimski to present renderings of Federico García Lorca’s poems and lyrics. As it happens, Bello is the very first person I would turn to for such…