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Photo by Peter Foley

At the New York Public Library this week, a conversation about the story turned book turned film, “Miracle at St. Anna”. Listen to filmmaker Spike Lee and writer James McBride in conversation with Paul Holdengräber about this historical American story story that exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge, and forgiveness.

If you do not […]

Photo by Scott Irvine

If you want to celebrate the Jewish New Year with song and style head over to Le Poisson Rouge tonight to see the the Sway Machinery swing in the new year with their Hidden Melodies Revealed. The band is pulling out all the stops this year. Along with a guest appearance from […]

“Lola Montes” is, in my unhumble opinion, the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on this one proposition above all others.
Thus wrote the legendary film critic Andrew Sarris following a screening of Max Ophuls’ “ill-starred masterpiece” at the inaugural New York Film Festival […]

The Brooklyn Academy of Music held its second Takeover this weekend, filling the Opera House building with music, video art, DJs, movie marathons, games and lots of increasingly inebriated urbanites.
The fabulous Counter Critic, seen here multitasking, was my comrade for the night.
It was a packed house, but not as anarchic as the inaugural Takeover. […]

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including Sanda Weigl.
Sanda Weigl is a diminutive, soft-spoken but stunningly powerful singer originally from Bucharest, Romania. Her family […]

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band.
The Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band (ZU) is a group that’s passionate about […]

The month long (!) New York Clown Theater festival wraps up this weekend with a funeral procession. Converge at Bedford Ave. and North 7th Street (Bedford stop of the L Train) at 6pm on Sunday to join the parade. There is also another performance of Kill Me Loudly, a clown noir, at the Brick […]

Istanbul band Baba Zula opened the Droma Gypsy Festival with a rousing two hour show.
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At the New York Public Library this week, two novelists came together to talk about living and writing in a world of ordinary joys, contradictions, and impulses while always being capable of the most grotesque violence. Listen to authors Paul Auster and Céline Curiol in conversation about their novels Man in the Dark and […]

(You can hear my chat with the fabulous Soterios Johnson here)
Last week it was the opening of the Crossing the Line festival, this week it’s Prelude ‘08, the contemporary theater and performance festival, which began its three-day smorgasbord last night with a discussion entitled “Between White Cubes and Black Boxes: Performance, Place & Context.” Then […]