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Brian Slattery |
Feb 26, 2024 9:15 am
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James Paul Nadien sat behind the drums with an impish grin as violinist Sabrina Salamone tightened the hair on her bow. “F.I.M. 50!” he yelled. The crowd, a packed room at Never Ending Books on a Saturday, cheered. It was an appropriately direct introduction for the 50th installment of the F.I.M. concert series, which was started in April 2022 by guitarist Luke Rovinsky and bassist Caleb Duval and has quickly become a linchpin of the Elm City improvised music scene, joining the New Haven Improvisers Collective and the Instantiation series to solidify the next generation of players.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 30, 2024 9:09 am
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It was 7:30 p.m. on Monday at Never Ending Books, and Bob Gorry of the New Haven Improvisers Collective had a few instructions for the musicians gathered in the room.
The collective always started with the same exercise, of playing long tones together, “whatever that means on your instrument,” Gorry said. “It’s very important for listening and for figuring out the room. It’s really important that you hear everybody.”
The idea was to play a tone as long as possible, then pause and play another, while listening to everyone else. “If you can’t hear someone,” Gorry said, “play quieter.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 22, 2024 12:55 pm
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Sounds like nature. Sounds like video games. Choirs of unearthly voices and raspy tones from a saxophone. And people listening hard to build sounds together. All of this awaited the healthy crowd that showed up at Never Ending Books on Friday evening for a triple bill of The Sawtelles, Human Flourishing, and Angel Piss.
As a practicing agnostic, I’ve often wondered why the Civil Rights Movement began in the church. Christianity has always seemed antithetical to Black liberation to me. After all, this is the white man’s religion, with a white Jesus foisted upon our people during the degradation of slavery. I’ve resented my people’s devotion to a God we wouldn’t even know if not for our conquest.
This question was cycling through my mind when I stepped off with the members and supporters of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church for their 54th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Love March through the streets of East Rock, the state’s longest-running celebration of Dr. King’s life and achievements.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 8, 2024 9:12 am
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Nicholas Serrambana on bass came on with a prowling, acrobatic line. Jeff Dragan on electronics countered with purrs and hisses, as though from a virtual snake. Nick Di Maria played his trumpet into a microphone to apply effects to the horn’s sound, from echoing reverb to electronically generated harmonies.
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Adam Matlock |
Dec 14, 2023 8:56 am
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Setting up for a meeting of the Album Club at Never Ending Books on State Street, organizer and host Dean Andrade said that “I think this album will be kind of a revelation for our regulars.” On Monday night, the club assembled for the 16th time since starting in 2022 to discuss Alice Coltrane’s 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda — the first time, according to Andrade, the group had discussed a jazz album, or anything without lyrics.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 31, 2023 11:06 am
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Volume Two and a crew of three local acts amped up their audience for Halloween on Sunday night with a spooky video release celebration and a selection of songs that got everyone in the holiday spirit.
Musician Laura Klein started working on the video for “Faux Départ” while recovering from surgery. She happened upon unreleased tracks from her band Western Estates, deciding “this song deserves more than just an internet blast.” After working on the video for over two years, she gave it its premiere in front of an enthusiastic crowd, some dressed in apropos Halloween attire, and all surrounded in the appropriate art of the most recent Volume Two art exhibition, titled “Volume Boo!”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 10, 2023 8:32 am
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The Volume Two collective at Never Ending Books threw open its doors Friday night for a seasonal art opening running at the space at 810 State St. through the end of the month — not of fall foliage and decorative gourds, but of ghosts, ghouls, and other visions of the macabre, as New Haven prepares for what is, in some ways, its most celebrated community holiday. The exhibition, called “Vol. Boo,” is a collaborative art show featuring the work of 15 artists who all took the chance, some playfully, some seriously, to explore and illuminate the darker side of life.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2023 9:07 am
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On the last page of the new poetry anthology Never Ending Poetry — a celebration of the first year of Open Mic Surgery, the poetry reading series that happens almost every Tuesday at Never Ending Books on State Street — there’s an incisive poem by Alice Prael about a barrel in a field on fire, melting plastic. “Polymers propagating / intimate inanity / inane intimacy,” she writes. “It’s poison but it’s warm.” On the same page is a poem called “Ode to Baby Jesus” by Julie Meehan. “You’ll get nailed down,” she writes, “but you’ll get up again / They’re never gunna nail you down.”
The juxtaposition is just fine by Brian Robinson, who runs Open Mic Surgery and put together the anthology. “I love that one poem is a beautiful, really elegant” piece, “and then the last poem is an adaptation of a Chumbawumba song about Jesus,” Robinson said. To him, “that’s the dichotomy” of Open Mic Surgery itself. “Nothing is off the table.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 25, 2023 9:03 am
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On Monday night three acts — Low Ceilings, Kendra McKinley, and Maya Elise and the Good Dream — brought the warmth of connection and culture to an appreciative crowd at Never Ending Books, turning the communal spot at 810 State St. into a sanctuary.
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Brian Slattery |
Jul 17, 2023 3:07 pm
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Four bands made an emotional evening of music at Never Ending Books Sunday night, as Nose Bleed, Sallow Friend, Mildly Allergic, and Kitchen gave a rapt audience songs that were by turns energetic and meditative, angular and wistful.
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Eleanor Polak |
May 31, 2023 8:35 am
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Brian Robinson, organizer of Open Mic Surgery, the poetry open mic running for almost a year at Never Ending Books, walked into the State Street spot carrying a giant unicorn-shaped piñata. “You don’t leave a dog in the car.… I’m not going to leave a unicorn in the car,” he explained. “It could get hot.”
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Karen Ponzio |
May 2, 2023 8:38 am
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Sunday morning may have been gray and rainy outside, but inside Never Ending Books a group of artists was bringing color and shape to the State Street space with pencils, pens, clay, watercolors, and acrylics. Arts Meet Up, a twice monthly event, provides an open area for creatives of all kinds and all levels. According to Ryan Licwinko, a member of the Volume Two collective that runs the space, the event has been going strong since June of last year with a simple and straightforward goal: to give artists a space to create.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 2, 2023 9:25 am
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Haley Grunloh’s rendition of dragonflies shows off, first, her technical skill as an artist, as the insects are depicted with all the attention to their form a viewer could want. But she has also chosen to depict them mating, one of the most fascinating and also slightly awkward moments in a dragonfly’s life cycle, as it’s one of the few moments when they’re not capable of the aeronautics we usually associate with them. It’s a hint at Grunloh’s attraction to the unusual, and a doorway into her artwork — assembled as a show running at Never Ending Books on State Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 19, 2023 8:40 am
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At the beginning of his set, 185668232 asked everyone in the audience to say their names while he held out a microphone. “One, two, three,” he said, and everyone in the audience said their names. The syllables blended in the air. 185668232 looped the sound. “Do you like your name? Can you say it with some energy?” he asked. We did, and he mixed the two samples together. Now it was a surging mass of noise, swelling and subsiding, creating a rhythm. Now 185668232 was ready to begin.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2023 8:52 am
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Brian Robinson, poet and host of Open Mic Surgery — a weekly open mic poetry night held at Never Ending Books — joked on Tuesday evening that poets are always late. Yet when he arrived at the appointed time of 6:30 p.m., he found a room of people waiting for him.
“Everyone’s here on time, and it’s kind of weird,” he said.
“I think it’s a sign that more people are coming,” someone in the audience said.
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Lisa Reisman |
Dec 13, 2022 1:52 pm
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After moving to a place that Conde-Nast Traveler had judged to be “one of the 10 unfriendliest cities in America,” author Lary Bloom worried that — if he were to slip and fall on an ice-coated sidewalk — his new neighbors would simply look the other way and keep on moving.
Instead, those neighbors sprawled on couches, perched themselves on stools, crammed into chairs that ranged outside a Goatville gym’s common room, and braved the December snow to listen to Bloom read and wisecrack about his newly published slim volume which is, in fact, a valentine to New Haven.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 22, 2022 8:43 am
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Sara Scranton’s “Spider Girl” partakes of old circus posters and underground comics from a generation past, but it has a modern twist that tweaks the formula. “Don’t get caught in her web,” the caption warns. It gives Spider Girl a little say in the matter.
That say is brought out in the poem by Karen Ponzio of the same title. “You speak of webs woven / Though your version of a trap is / My version of home. / Should I be punished for being hungry? / Is every ‘should’ a lure / Towards my demise? / Break my heart if it feeds / Your appetite or / Brings you joy. / I can rebuild anything / You attempt to destroy.” The poem, written in response to the painting, twists the painting even further, turning it inside out. Each piece amplifies the other.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 18, 2022 9:00 am
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Poetry about the end of the world. Pop music by turns dreamy, elliptical, lush, and jagged. And transfixing music from half a world away. All three art forms were on lavish display at Never Ending Books on Thursday night, as two poets and three musical acts comprised a diverse and thoroughly engrossing evening that entertained, warmed, and nourished.
Once you hear how many steps Estelita Boateng took before arriving on Nicoll Street Wednesday with her 4‑month-old son Lucas, you may never complain again about your exhausting daily routine.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2022 9:19 am
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On Thursday evening, the storefront space at Never Ending Books was filled with shadows — not only in the images lining the walls, but from the people who came to visit the dimly lit spot, transformed into a gallery as part of the Open Source Festival organized by Artspace. The show on display was “Spectral Musings,” by artists from the Bridgeport-based URSA Gallery, now up at the State Street arts collective through Oct. 31. That date isn’t an accident; in time for Halloween, the art on the walls features artists investigating the darkness that lies within — and ways to move into the light.
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Lindsay Skedgell |
Oct 3, 2022 8:51 am
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Through the curtain-lined doorway of Never Ending Books on Saturday night, an older woman in a blue shirt left the performance room, plugging her ears with her fingers. This reporter passed by her, going in the opposite direction. The room inside was in darkness, the sounds of metal grinding and shaping layers of noise music, echoing from a monitor on a fold-out table. Behind the table, OPCOH moved his hand along what looked to be a black electric violin, while the monitor, with wiring colored red, yellow, and blue, jutted out from the near corner of the table. His performance felt like a conjuring, what with the backdrop of wind from Hurricane Ian’s remnants picking up speed behind him. As he neared the end of his set, it sounded as if raindrops were falling from different corners of the dark room, the sound of them moving off into the distance and then disappearing.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 8, 2022 9:10 am
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The walls of mActivity — like the walls of other New Haven-area businesses — keep getting a little brighter, thanks to an embrace of public art that is now transforming buildings outside and in. In the case of mActivity, the art is the result of series that began in 2017. Curated by Barbara Hawes, the series has hosted a wide array of New Haven-based artists, from public art maestro Kwadwo Adae to graffiti artist Michael Deangelo, from photographers Phyllis Crowley and Sean Kernan to painters Vienna Hinkson and William McCarthy.
For the rest of the month of September, visitors can now see the works of artists Esthea Kim and Eliza Shaw Valk, whose work mirrors the mood of the hottest season and, in keeping with the fitness center’s mission, captures some of the renewed spirit many have found in exercise during the pandemc.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Aug 17, 2022 4:01 pm
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Five years after her father was murdered by the Taliban, and just three months after the extremist group burned down her family’s house, 19-year-old Malalay stood with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal in front of a cluster of TV cameras and pleaded for the passage of new legislation that could help her and her relatives establish a permanent home in the United States.