Arts

Nostalgia slop, from AI-generated trash to IP-leveraging franchise flicks, is belched out so regularly our culture practically runs on the stuff. From the outside, Obex, Albert Birney’s lo-fi, black-and-white ‘80s-set 90-minute valentine to pre-Internet culture, might be mistaken for more of the same, albeit in an indie vein, especially with a press pitch that insists the […]

The well-made theater at Hudson Guild hides unassumingly inside the Community Center in the NYCHA Elliott-Chelsea Houses on West 26th Street. It has professional lights and sound booth, a deep and well-proportioned stage, men’s and women’s dressing rooms, 100 comfortable orange upholstered seats, and not a bad sight line in the house. I didn’t know

I always had this fantasy about becoming an official tour guide in the Village. But I never got beyond taking friends on informal tours of Westbeth Artists Housing (my building) and leading them through the quaint cobblestone streets of the West Village. Instead, I’m an armchair guide who hangs out in the active Facebook group

The current oeuvre of Fernando Pomalaza, a Peruvian-born, New York City based artist (who for many years showed at the Marunouchi Gallery in SoHo) presents to the viewer a complex interplay of textures and forms. His canvas, “Escaping the Pandemic,” showcases a deliberate application of bulbous, lugubrious black paint, evoking mandala-like wheels of incarnation. The

Kelly Reichardt might be one of our era’s most subversive filmmakers. In this attention-addled age, cinema has gone increasingly loud, increasingly bombastic, increasingly frenetic. And not just in mediocre blockbuster franchise flicks, like Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning or Tron: Ares, where you expect a certain kind of screaming antsyness; it’s found in more ambitious, highbrow films,

Review of “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Ross Benjamin by Michael Quinn A director has an idea for a screenplay: wealthy passengers aboard a luxury cruise ship find their peace of mind poisoned by rumors of an impending war. Trust erodes, factions form, conflict escalates. Then, news arrives from a

I used to be half of a musical act named Working Class Bohemians. The name choice was mine. I got it from a line in Judith Thurman’s excellent biography of the French writer Colette. Whenever I did a gig as part of a duet, it was as Working Class Bohemians. Often it would be with

Among the urban renewal disillusionment of gentrification and post-disaster capitalism exists an oasis of boundary-breaking, artist respite, a well of art spirit since 1980, Performance Space. Performance Space is on the fourth floor in the former PS 122 building on First Avenue. The center is humanitarian in practice, a refuge for “queer and radical voices

At 5:30 p.m. one Wednesday, I stopped by Sly Fox only to find the door locked, the lights off. Forlorn, I walked the busy streets of East Village, sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, listened to a girl describe seeing multiple rats frolicking in the park, watched a squirrel eat a napkin, then