Arts

“I was walking down the street with Phil Ochs as we often did,” said singer-songwriter Eric Andersen at The Bitter End recently. “I sang him the chorus, just walking down Bleecker Street. He said the chorus is great. … With his encouragement, I finished the song.” That song was “Thirsty Boots,” probably Andersen’s best-known one, […]

One of the current exhibitions at the newly reopened Princeton University Art Museum, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years. 1945–50.” This compact survey offers a needed reifying of the late longtime downtown artist’s pivotal early abstractions and semi-figurative works including such noted pieces as “Secretary” (1948) and “Black Friday” (1948), the latter work culled

The scene was Shalom Neuman’s exhibit at Art Expo on Pier 36 last month. Anyone aware of the ongoing art history that began in the East Village in the 1980s knows that Shalom is a major figure, an artistic visionary with the drive to explore and realize that vision while generously sharing the bounty that

Having mixed feelings about Record Store Day is the way. It looks like a holiday, sort of, but it’s like one of those days that are supposed to be a day for some bullshit, like National Chocolate Chip Day (May 15)—which somehow manages to share the same day with Asphalt Day and Straw Hat Day

It’s almost inevitable. At each performance of Heartbreak Hotel, a theater piece by New Zealand playwright and performer Karin McCracken (co-created with director Eleanor Bishop), someone is likely to show up expecting a show about Elvis Presley. Instead, they find themselves immersed in a semi-autobiographical performance experience investigating the agonizing (and often prolonged) psychological and

Tickets are now on sale for the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, or otherwise known as the FRIGID Fringe Festival. From Wednesday, April 1st to Sunday, April 19th, seventy-five independent productions will run in five venues across Manhattan—though FRIGID is notoriously known for their primary space, UNDER St Marks at 94 St Marks Pl.

Having first premiered in 2024, Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of King Lear triumphantly returned to the stage at La MaMa Etc.’s Ellen Stewart Theatre from January 23 to February 8, 2026. A masterclass in classical text, the production features Paul Pryce (Kent), Tony Torn (Oswald), Julian Elijah Martinez (Edmund), Michael Potts (Gloucester), Tom Nelis (France),

On a snowy Sunday afternoon, you go to Pioneer Works looking for a poetry book. “The Endless Garment” is related to an exhibit at the Brooklyn’s Red Hook art space. The sign out front says free and open to the public, but the first thing you see inside, as your eyes adjust to the darkness,

In the old days, when I felt like hearing music without having to go through the Village Voice ads, I would sometimes just go to West 4th and Mercer, buy a ticket and walk into the Bottom Line. Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky never seemed to book a bad act, at least as far as

As part of my voracious reading as a teen, I enjoyed Somerset Maugham’s The Moon And Sixpence, loosely based upon the character of Paul Gauguin, in which an English painter removes himself to a remote Pacific island in his ruthless pursuit of creativity. I also read Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, about a composer loosely