Arts

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

On the second floor of McNally Jackson at the South Street Seaport, in the children’s section of the bookstore, a long table displays objects including a baseball glove, a Mr. Potato Head, and a collection of silk neckties. Two rows of chairs surround the table on three sides. This is stage and theater. A show

November 19 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the death, at age 84, of philosopher & novelist Umberto Eco. For a guy like me at least, Umberto Eco was a fun guy to be around with his amazingly encyclopedic mind, and flrehose delivery of information complete with extensive quotes from memory from a varied selection

Before anyone takes umbrage at the linking of Catholics and bohemians, please allow me to do a bit of historical explication: Early in the 20th century, at a time when all newspapermen were called bohemians, GK Chesterton was one of England’s most prominent journalists and writers. He was also a devout Catholic. He created Father

A ring of hefty paint cans on the floor confronted me upon walking into the Ezra Johnson show at the Freight & Volume Gallery on Lispenard. A deft Duchampian touch, I felt upon departure. So wrong. “They are made of cardboard,” Johnson would tell me later. “There’s a little papier mache … some plaster, resin.

  Small Pleasures of a Long Marriage I asked my husband: Cumulus and cirrus, but what’s the third one? Thromboid, he replied. Immaculate Conception On a wall in our bedroom in a wooden frame hangs a photograph of Gus the neurotic polar bear, who spent his life swimming from one side of his tank in

“Here we go. Here comes the sober. I hate this part, when the dam breaks and the questions come pouring in: How long was the blackout? Hours? Days? How did I get this cut? …” Those words are spoken by Josh, protagonist of Jake Brasch’s new play, The Reservoir, at Atlantic Theater Company (February 5

Feeling Violated, Authors? “Move fast and break things” has been a recurring motif in the rise of tech moguls. In the case of artificial intelligence, this philosophy, if one can call it that, may have hit a wall. The result could be the same as a car doing 90 miles an hour hitting a wall—not

I spent the first week of October aka the official beginnings of spooky season reading The Brood, Rebecca Baum’s latest surrealist horror novel. Baum is a writer and author, her recent work includes Lifelike Creatures (Regal House Publishing, September 2020) and now The Brood, the latest in her repertoire, a body-bug forward horror novel which