Arts & Culture

Firehouse Ignites New Jazz Season

by | Mar 18, 2024 9:50 am | Comments (0)

Kenneth Jimenez Photo

Lilith.

Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith opened Firehouse 12’s spring season of shows at its concert space, recording studio, and bar on Crown Street with a fiery set of Laubrock’s compositions that paid homage to female energy and to the venue itself, which continues to be a hub for experimental music in New Haven, on the East Coast, and beyond.

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Yale Rep's "Escaped Alone" Lets Everyone Understand

by | Mar 15, 2024 10:10 am | Comments (1)

Joan Marcus Photos

Rosato, Shipley, Wolf, Borsay in the new play at Yale Rep.

A group of women are talking together in a garden, under the shade of a tree. In the patterns of their speech, their ability to finish one another’s sentences, it’s clear they’ve been friends for years. But their conversation is about nothing serious. It’s just a way to spend an afternoon. Suddenly there’s a piercing sound, a blinding light, and the stage is plunged in darkness, the tree suddenly a stark silhouette against a roiling background. From one of the women, we get a report of calamity, of mass death, utter mayhem. The lights blind again, and we return to the sunlit garden, the four women still just talking as though nothing has changed. But something has changed.

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Tales From New Haven's Abortion Underground Yield Modern Warning

by | Mar 14, 2024 12:30 pm | Comments (1)

Paul Bass Photo

Author Biederman at WNHH FM, and her new book about a the underbelly of New Haven-Bridgeport's turn-of-the-century abortion trade.

Emma Gill’s severed foot and severed head washed up on a beach. Three boys stumbled across them.

That was in 1898. Might new such discoveries loom as a new era of abortion prohibition looms?

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Artist Looks Through The Sky

by | Mar 14, 2024 9:24 am | Comments (0)

Esthea Kim

White Field 2.

Esthea Kim’s painting White Field 2, at first glance, could be a photograph of clouds or smoke, but its complex surface asks the viewer to take more than just one glance, to be drawn in. The more you look, the more you see: variations in colors and textures, bordering on movement. The sense of space and depth within the painting suggests something huge could be obscured by the smoky veil. What’s behind there? Threat or serenity? Or are the clouds all there is?

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New Haven, Yale, and Slavery: The Real Story

by | Mar 13, 2024 11:02 am | Comments (29)

A New Haven-made carriage popular among Southern slave owners.

William Grimes escaped slavery on a ship from Savannah to New York, then walked to Connecticut. He published his autobiography months after he purchased his freedom.

(Opinion) Inside the New Haven Museum, I asked the greeter at the front desk about the reaction of visitors to the new exhibition. 

Many are shocked,” she said. They had no idea.” 

The exhibit, Shining a Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery,” shows how the Elm City profited from America’s greatest shame, even depended on it, and when a chance came to right a wrong its leaders disgraced themselves further.

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Filthy Riffs, Fists Fly At Death Fest

by | Mar 12, 2024 10:13 am | Comments (1)

Jasmine Wright Photos

Roots of Deception lays it down at Connecticut Death Fest.

Hubert Smith took to the stage for the second time in two nights. The night before, he was playing drums for Necrocunt, something of a supergroup within Connecticut’s death metal scene. Now, he was laying down distorted guitar grooves for brutal death five-piece Roots of Deception. Photographers — myself included — wormed between audience members, who stood so close to the stage that their hair lashed its surface with each headbang. Behind us, the crowd was arranged in a circle of potential energy, the center of the Beeracks’ cavernous garage, waiting for the next mosh pit to break out.

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NXTHVN Show Dives Into Migration

by | Mar 12, 2024 9:54 am | Comments (1)

Oluseye

Good Luck Totem.

An antiquated candy vending machine sits atop a wooden stand in the lobby of NXTHVN, its faded signage and weathered hardware still beckoning the visitor to give it a coin. But it doesn’t work, and what’s inside it isn’t candy, but a multitude of cowrie shells, from sea snails found in tropical oceans. They’ve been used as money, as jewelry, and as rattles for instruments. But here, they can’t be used at all — not for any price.

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Dinosaur World Evolves

by | Mar 11, 2024 5:24 pm | Comments (4)

Mohamad Hafez's "Eternal Cities: Excavating the Present and Unpacking the Past" in the reopening Peabody.

Nora Grace-Flood Photos

Welcome back: A look down at the beloved brontosaurus skeleton inside the renovated Peabody.

I had a chance Monday to reunite with my childhood friend, a 65-foot-long brontosaurus, at a press preview of Yale Peabody Museum’s long-awaited reopening. I worried the once impressive prehistoric creature would seem small and feeble to me now that I’d reached my intimidating final height of five feet four inches. 

When I arrived, I found out that the 150-million-year-old fossil has evolved more than I over the last decade, sprouting 27 more tail vertebrae, a new front rib and an uplifted, wagging tail.

The museum, too, has evolved, as the public will find out later this month.

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All-Ages Folk Punk Show Celebrates Community

by | Mar 11, 2024 10:25 am | Comments (1)

Leo Slattery Photo

A lone child in a Rubik’s Cube hoodie stood in the middle of the small black box space at Witch Bitch Thrift on Saturday night, trying and failing with a kendama, a Japanese wooden ball and stick toy. Around him, people trickled in in groups of two or three, ready to see folk-punk acts Apes of the State, Myles Bullen, and Lars and their Lilac Ukulele. 

The band members socialized, waving to the people they recognized and smiling and introducing themselves to those they didn’t. Everyone was dressed for the occasion: a sea of Doc Martens, work boots, and old sneakers. Pants, mostly black, usually dotted in patches of the wearer’s favorite bands. The magnum opus, an Apes t‑shirt from a previous tour. April, lead singer of Apes of the State, seemed equal parts flattered and fascinated by the appearance of her decade-old merch. The most diehard of fans wore battle jackets, a punk tradition of sewing handmade patches of bands onto a denim coat. The battle jackets at this particular show almost all had Apes of the State on them. It was standing room only, save for a chair left in the corner that people piled coats under. The chair itself remained empty, as if for Elijah the prophet.

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Paradegoers Take A Drop Of The Pure

by | Mar 11, 2024 10:24 am | Comments (1)

Brian Slattery Photos

A Drop of the Pure.

State Street on Sunday afternoon was filled with signs of the end of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, whether it was the lines of people in green shirts outside Modern, the full marching bands gathered on street corners, the policemen guarding the barricades for closed streets, or the long rows of parked cars. The parade has changed a lot over the years and continues to, reflecting New Haven as it is, a diverse place in which successive waves of recent immigrants find a home. And in Cafe Nine, a steadily growing crowd came to hear A Drop of the Pure, a quartet purveying traditional Irish music and pulling at the long cultural thread that connects the present to the past.

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Love N' Co Premiere Film At Best Video

by | Mar 11, 2024 10:23 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Love N' Co performing at Best Video as part of Spoken film.

On Saturday night Best Video presented an event that married two of its main enterprises: film and music. Local favorites Love N’ Co were there to premiere their movie Spoken: The Story of Unspoken and share a few tunes beforehand. The film, produced by Free Artist Productions, documents the making of their EP Unspoken, produced by Cliff Robbins-Sennewald, which they plan to release in May. The film documents their hopes, dreams, and desires as well as the struggles they went through both personally and professionally to get it just right, proving that the band accepts a challenge and rides it through with joy and grace.

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Film Archive Celebrates End Of The Art World

by | Mar 8, 2024 9:50 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Alexis Krasilovsky.

Thursday night the Yale Film Archive added two new jewels to their Treasures series: a new 35 mm print of Daisies, the 1966 Czech New Wave film directed by Vera Chytilova, and a new 16 mm print of End of the Art World, the 1971 documentary made by Alexis Krasilovsky while she was a senior at Yale. Celebrated with a free screening at the Humanities Quadrangle, the event was made even more special by the presence of filmmaker and writer Krasilovsky, who introduced the films and participated in a Q&A afterward.

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Cafe Nine Rocks For Today

by | Mar 7, 2024 9:18 am | Comments (0)

Brian Slattery Photos

Wow, Okay, Cool.

As a heavy rainstorm pounded the pavement outside on State and Crown, drummers pounded skins inside Cafe Nine, propelling a night of raucous guitar, muscular bass, and vocals that pushed the throats of their singers to the limit, as three bands filled the Ninth Square club with the sound of the latest iteration of a now-venerable music form: The rock band.

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Lights Up Lands "Little Mermaid"

by | Mar 6, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (0)

June Lanpher, Zara Baden-Eversman, Erin Palmer.

Ariel keeps disobeying her father, Triton, king of the ocean, who tells her not to try to explore the world above the waves. But she can’t resist. She sees the passing ships, collects the artifacts they drop in the water, clambers onto rocks to gaze at the land beyond. And in time, she sees a prince — and the prince hears her singing — and suddenly both feel a tug, binding them together, that no injunctions from parents can dislodge.

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Monster Madness Marches Into Best Video

by | Mar 6, 2024 9:17 am | Comments (0)

The Thing.

With a new month comes a new Best Video movie series, and the March madness at the film and cultural center in Hamden has everything to do with horror and nothing to do with sports. 

Monster Madness, the brainchild of Best Video’s own Anthony Capasso, debuted to a crowd hungry for a good scare Tuesday night. The first film of the series was The Thing, the now classic 1982 version directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, which tells the story of a group of researchers in Antarctica dealing with an alien being that takes on the form of whatever it inhabits and wreaks havoc on the bodies and psyches of those who encounter it. 

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Students, Governor cARTie Hearty

by | Mar 5, 2024 9:45 am | Comments (0)

Students Monday outside the parked cARTie bus.

cARTie museum educator Nicole Pappo reads to students outdoors.

When asked does art matter?” second graders Mercedes, Mason, and Elia agreed yes.” Then they showed some of the reasons: Mason drew a sign reading art = peace.” Elia drew a self-portrait. And Mercedes drew a rainbow, reading I love art.” 

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T!lt Goes Through The Changes

by | Mar 5, 2024 9:14 am | Comments (0)

T!lt.

Castes,” the lead single from the New Haven-based T!lt’s new album, Death Do Us Part, starts with guitars weaving around each other, while drums and bass drop in to give the song a steady pulse. Mike Scialla’s plaintive vocal unspools a gentle song about heartbreak. Was it something stuck inside my head?” he sings. Was it something left unsaid?” Slide guitars swoop above and below like seagulls. It’s heartfelt and country-inflected, without entirely landing straight into country music. 

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"Passages" Brings Filmmaker Back To Yale

by | Mar 4, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Ira Sachs and Brian Meacham in conversation at Yale.

My husband doesn’t want to dance with me,” filmmaker Tomas says to Agathe, who’s fresh off a breakup with her boyfriend. I’ll dance with you,” she says. She does. What comes after is a sort of dance between Tomas, Agathe, and Tomas’s husband Martin in Passages, the latest film from acclaimed writer and director Ira Sachs that was screened as part of the Yale Film Archive’s Treasures From the Archive series this past Friday night. 

It was another special occasion there for two reasons: One being that the film was shown in 35 mm — the only copy of it in existence, made especially for YFA — and two being that Sachs himself, a 1988 graduate of Yale, would be there for the screening and participating in a Q&A afterward. 

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