Features

Robert Leslie’s audience is typically transient. They’ll pause to take in a song or two, maybe shoot a quick video, or take a moment to dance. But eventually they move on, quickly replaced by a new set of curious faces. As the sun sank in the sky over Tompkins Square Park on April 11, however, […]

I love being a sidewalk gardener on Bethune Street. When I moved into Westbeth Artists Housing, I spotted the nine planter boxes lining the block from Washington to West Streets, each tended by a different gardener. This looked like fun, so I put my name on a waiting list. (Everything at Westbeth involves a waiting

For fifteen years we had a dog, which meant that for fifteen years my days were meted out in companionable, purpose-driven walks. Then, in early 2020, the dog—bless his wiry coat and big dachshund heart—began an excruciating decline. He grew so thin he became almost luminous. We had to put him down that August. I

At the end of 1977I flew to London to join the Ramones for their New Year’s Eve Concert at the Rainbow Theatre. I had not been to London since 1974. When the Ramones and their manager, Danny Fields, invited me to join them at the Marble Arch Holiday Inn and review their New Year’s Eve

Liquid Years. The last day of last month marked 40 years since the release of Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days. At the time, Glass was riding an unprecedented wave for a composer in the classical world. His soundtrack to the film Koyaanisqatsi four years earlier had put New York Minimalism before a much wider

Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from the Australian Desert. January 22-April 11, 2026. Grey Museum, New York, NY The paintings are unquestionably beautiful, rich with vibrant colors, precise symmetry, intricate geometric patterns, cross-hatchings and luminescent dots. They are beautiful and I don’t understand them at all. To engage with these paintings is to be

Walt Disney’s 1952 film “Fantasia,” a 125-minute abstract interplay between classical music and modern animation, opens with musicians tuning up, silhouetted against a regal blue background. The owlish critic and composer Deems Taylor, in a white-tie tux, introduces us to the proceedings with a mix of cheer and gravitas, before giving way to conductor Leopold

At a concert in a church in June 2025, singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche mused on the nature of live performance. “Maybe this will be seen as something weird and strange in the future,” she wondered, “Something only a few people do and go to and see.” Such questions about modernity abound in today’s culture as society

Robert Deniro’s famous quip that New York is dead to him north of 14th Street sounds more like something Leo DiCaprio would say, given it appears that no one above 25 years old lives south of 14th Street anymore. Yes, there’s Tribeca with the strollers and Soho with the skinny jean, long gray-haired stragglers who

Last December I was sitting in an intimate space with great acoustics, listening to the John Eckert Quartet. The veteran trumpet player led a swinging group with a guest singer, Pete Caldera, who channeled Frank Sinatra. No, I wasn’t at Mezzrow. I was at the Westbeth community room attending a show in the First Fridays