For a long-enough-time fan of a band, there’s pique little joy in witnessing them play to a small crowd. All the empty space in the venue, a confirmation of all the folks you don’t yet know — and how fortunate you are to have been one of the lucky ones to find out. It’s all even better when the set is comprised of mostly new music:
Stimmerman’s set Wednesday night blasts off with a tune I did not recognize, and for a moment I was again one of the missing uninitiated. My ears struggled to wrap around the hierarchy between Eva LaWitts’s grind and pummel bass, the two guitars (Chris Krasnow and Gannon Ferrell) weaving bar-wire lines across each other, and Theo Walentiny’s shrieking synth. The drums from Connor Parks were the only thing seeming to hold the gargantuan sound down and grounded, until Eva’s voice came in to stich the system together completely.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Fake it, Fake it -- till you Fake it.
Thomas Hirschhorn: Fake it, Fake it —till you Fake it Gladstone Gallery 530 West 21st Street Through March 2, 2024
Stepping through cluttered aisles of warfare, punctuated by the ubiquitous emojis of social media, visitors at Gladstone Gallery in New York City walk smack-center into today’s zeitgeist materialized. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Fake it, Fake it — till you Fake it stares you in the face, with a reflection of our contemporary culture. It forces the questions: “What have we become and where are we going?”
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 25, 2024 1:16 pm
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Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia Film Forum West Village, NYC Feb. 23, 2024
The average shot length in contemporary, big-budget films — both your Marvel slogs and flacccid A24 pseudo-arthouse meanderings — is, by my very cursory research, somewhere between six and two seconds.
If one were to replace the images enlivened within these frames with, say, slides of alternating color, most modern films would be rendered nothing so much as strobing lights, never lingering on one slide long enough to even allow the color to register in any quality other than their constant shifting. It is, quite frankly, a small miracle that the goopy hardware in our skulls — no longer though as the mystical seat of a soul, but only soup solid enough for neurons to carve permanent impressions through — has stood up to this test, this shift in our mode of storytelling. The simple fact that we can still hold narrative cohesion together through all of this astounds me. But, it has perhaps come at a cost. And even if not at a cost, it would still very likely behoove us to realize there are other ways to experience the totalizing art of cinema.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 22, 2024 2:30 pm
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Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith The Jazz Gallery Flatiron, Manhattan Feb. 21, 2024
Ears on a swivel and eyes wide, we all hold our breath for the moment pianist Yvonne Rogers’ hands break from grace.
Up to this point in the music, Yvonne’s hands have been locked into the role of accompanist, adding shimmer and concretizing context to the barefoot rollickings of her compatriots on the bandstand. They’ve all been running their wildness through the newly constructed Eden of Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith compositions, staking their claim in this cacophonic aural paradise, playing the Creator hand for hand.
Now the moment’s come, as Adam in the garden asked by Yahweh to give it all a name, for Yvonne to build for the band her vision of what this is all to mean.
And the break from grace is apocalyptic. We’ve all watched and listened as her hands feint and splay out Messiaen chorale chords and circling rivulets a la George Crumb’s little sacred musics. Now, held in a moment of Rogers’ sole creation, her hands ball in to fists and hammer away, setting to work, render a new sonic world forth, set the foundations before the others join in their roiling play.
Assemble the stage. Hang the soft goods. Focus the lights. Focus the projector. Coffee break.
Usually, when I write down these words, it’s for my work in production management, where I’m responsible for creating the schedule for “load-in”, the period of time when design and technical elements are installed and prepared in a venue ahead of a given production or performance. Load-in usually begins and ends hours, days, or even weeks before an audience ever enters the space. And usually, if these activities are being performed in front of a sizeable paying audience, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Not so during Performance Space New York’s third annual Arts Workers Are Artists Too event, where the opening act, a mini load-in of sorts, was but the first of many unusual and exciting pieces created and performed entirely by members of Performance Space’s crew.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 20, 2024 11:00 am
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Grotto: Shrine Soloway Gallery Williamsburg, NYC Through March 25, 2024
I’ve written before that art in this city finds incredible ways to survive. Whether it’s noise shows in unfinished apartment basements, poetry readings in sag-floored lofts, or operas performed on floating barges, the creators of NYC will find somewhere to put up what they’ve starved for making.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 19, 2024 11:03 am
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Justine-Juliette Photo
Cesar Acevedo with Doc Honey at WIndjammer.
Doc Honey Windjammer Ridgewood, NYC 11/16/2024
It’s an undeniably special thing to watch an ensemble come together. Pay attention when your friends say they’re starting a band. Go to every show you can make it to. Listen deeply and remember each one.
I am proud to say I knew most of Doc Honey before they ever started, particularly drummer David Gruber and bassist Cesar Acevedo. I remember when the two of them first started talking about the jam sessions they were having with a new guitarist and songwriter. I’ve written about him for this publication in the past, his name is Ian Taylor, and he’s a talent to keep an eye on. The excitement my longtime friends Cesar and David had toward this burgeoning musical relationship has proven itself in spades. Saturday night at Ridgewood’s Windjammer, Doc Honey absolutely blew the roof of the joint.
Neighborhoods in NYC, despite decades of gentrification, massive demographic shifts, and architectural changes, always seem to hold onto whatever legacy the cultural unconscious of the City deems most permanent. This phenomenon is palpable in the now commercial Hell that is Lower Manhattan’s SoHo. You’ve seen the Scorsese movies, you remember the ’70s and ’80s grime — the spirit of the hard-scrabble arts are still given to feebly haunt these cobbled, rectangular blocks. These days, it’s all brands I’ll never be able to afford. But the murals, street vendors, bookstores, and art galleries (which are in general no better than expensive brands, but that’s another article…) all do their best to remind us that something worth happening used to happen here.
One of the galleries, the publicly-funded Drawing Center, is currently hosting an exhibition of an artist who is a tendril of the aforementioned pervasive specter.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 16, 2024 12:34 pm
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Ennio Film Forum West Village, NYC 2/15/2024
You know who Ennio Morricone is. Trust me. You do. Even if the name only rings on account of it’s own sonic beauty, you — like any person inured in televisual and ‘pop’ culture — know what his music sounds like. I’d list the films he’s scored, but it’s too many — so, I’ll link to the wiki page and we can all just scroll in awe that one man, more or less, was responsible the aural underpinnings of such a glut of our favorites.
There is something to awe at here, I’m not being sarcastic. On the surface it’s an impressive number of films, a little deeper it’s an impressive number of culturally relevant and fine films — there’s more than several handfuls of pictures within his oeuvre that would come up in almost any conversation with even the most obscurantist film-buff: Leone, Pasolini, Maleck, Argento, fucking Tarantino, etc.
And the music is killer stuff. Before Morricone, nobody did it like Morricone. After Morricone, everybody tries not to do it like Morricone.
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Rebecca Salzhauer
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Feb 9, 2024 11:03 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
Ben Levi Ross and Hannah Cruz in The Connector
The Connector MCC Theater 511 W. 52nd St. New York Runs through March 4
Just under halfway through The Connector, we see Ethan Dobson, a wunderkind magazine writer, on a Jersey City street at 3 a.m. interviewing Willis Taylor, a Black man who may have a videotape of the city’s corrupt mayor smoking crack with a teenager. Ostensibly in response to a question from Ethan, Willis lays out work as an “unelected, off-the-books political operative.” He struts around the stage, boasting about being impenetrable in densely rhymed hip hop.
As the song goes on, it becomes clear that we’re not seeing Ethan’s interview. We’re seeing his story. Everything we know about Willis and the tape and the Jersey City street is filtered through Ethan’s subjective lens – and the free-wheeling journalistic liberties he takes.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 5, 2024 10:15 am
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Fly By Brass Band Rubulad Brooklyn Feb. 4, 2024
In my years in NYC I’ve spent many a Saturday night in Bushwick’s Rubulad — address to remain undisclosed. It’s one of those great weird DIY-scene fixtures that host shows and parties of a myriad sort. The nights are almost always hazy by the end and consist of intimate conversation tucked away in one of the venue’s many highly decorated hideaway lounges in between acts, smoking a few too many cigarettes and passing around a pint-bottle of liquor. It’s generally a really great time.
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K Hank Jost
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Feb 4, 2024 10:15 am
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Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) IFC Center Part of the Panic Attacks: The Films of Dario Argento series IFC Center West Village, NYC Feb. 2, 2024
Among the great Italian giallo filmmakers, Dario Argento is by far the most well-known and, by now, mainstream. This is not a knock against his craft, not some hipper-than-thou estimation. It is a simple fact. His place in the canon of film-nerdom is certainly deserved. Films like Suspiria, Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and Opera are forever part of our collective horror-consciousness and have informed developments within the genre since their release.
As part of their celebration of the release of Panico, a highly anticipated documentary about the master filmmaker’s career, the IFC Center in the West Village is doing regular screenings of Argento’s classic filmography. Friday night I was fortunate to catch 1980’s Inferno on 35mm.
Something’s happening in NYC right now. Whether it’s a blending of scenes that previously had very little to do with each other, or the last gasps of a living literary moment post-Covid. I cannot exactly diagnose it. I only know that things have gotten strange.
There’s been a slew of grander versions of what I witnessed last night. There was Madeleine Cash’s books release party, during which there were no readings. There was Car Crash Collective’s over booking the KGB Red Room with listed guests to the point that nearly no one from the street could get in. And then there was this thing last night — another over-crowded gathering of the uber-hip under the guise of independent art and culture.
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Adam Wassilchalk
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Jan 30, 2024 10:23 am
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Adam Wassilchalk Photo
Golden Diner's Honey Butter Pancakes.
Golden Diner 123 Madison St. New York, N.Y.
I am not immune to brunch propaganda. As I come up on almost a year in NYC, all my algorithms seem to have caught on to the fact that the best way to get engagement from me is to show me all the places I could go for my favorite meal of the week. So when my friend Bradley asked if I wanted to go to brunch somewhere neither of us had ever been before, I had multiple suggestions, including Chinatown’s Golden Diner, known for their light-handed, Asian-inspired twists on diner classics.
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K Hank Jost
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Jan 29, 2024 2:21 pm
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K Hank Jost Photo
Luke Herbermann plays Heaven Can Wait.
Luke Herbermann Heaven Can Wait East Village, NYC 1/26/24
Just kitty-corner to Tompkins Square Park is a music venue that never once in my four, five, six, or seven times attending has had the same name. This place has been known as Berlin, Lulu’s, Coney Island Baby, and a few other less memorable monikers. It’s now going by Heaven Can Wait.
Charming, truly. All more charming for the fact that the name stands no chance of sticking.
Being honest, it’s one of my least favorite places to attend a show. The layout is weird, there’s no good place to sit or stand unless you position yourself directly in front of the band, the sound is usually trash. All to say, it takes something special to get me to go to this place. That special thing this time was Luke Herbermann.
