Words and Music

From the Film Cans Dept. : I noted earlier that I rarely review movies, yet years ago I cherrypicked some good ones to describe and therefo...

From the Vault Dept .: I’ve been reprinting pieces describing my 1989 cross-country trip in a VW camper. A year later, I rode the train to M...

From the Back of the Fridge Dept .: I’d assumed, when the Hooters in Albany’s Crossgates Mall went belly-up, that the community had outgrown...

From the Music Vault Dept.: The now-defunct classical-music website andante.com had an ambitious program of surveying concerts and recordin...

From the Vault Dept .: The Cohoes Music Hall has met its impossible goal of raising a boatload of money in order to produce this season’s s...

From the Salt Mines Dept .: Here’s a piece that was intended for (the long-defunct) Computer Life magazine, for which I was a contributing...

August 23, 2012 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Across the U.S.A. Dept .: Another installment from my Ernie Pyle-tribute series of articles chronicling a car trip my wife and I made from ...

From the Vault Dept .: I missed Joshua Bell’s appearance last week with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, ...

From the Electric Vault Dept. : "Not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells's history, but history nevertheless," intones Kaspar G...

Jack Yellin Guest Blogger: Jack Yellin . He wrote enduring songs like “Alabama Jubilee,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” and the perennial “Happy Day...

From the Vault Dept .: Although this piece dates back nine years, the problems examined therein never grow stale. As a former server, my ye...

“God isn’t interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution.” – Michael Palin ...

Houston & 6th | Aug. 17, 2012 Photo by B. A. Nilsson

IN AND AMONG THE trendy, the take-out, the tortured eateries that take up a considerable amount of Manhattan’s real estate is any number of ...

OF THE THIRTEEN – make that fourteen – people gazing at some manner of distraction in not-too-crowded subway car (afternoon 1 train south to...

SHE’S STROLLING THE closed-to-traffic stretch of Broadway at 45th Street, an area thronged with tourists and those who would like to make mo...

Working in Coffeehouses, West Village Branch : HE WAS A BARBER for forty years. It was the family business. But in 1927, Dominic Parisi spe...

The Fiction File Dept. : Before it became an official alternative newsweekly, Albany’s Metroland Magazine published all manner of oddball st...

From the Vault Dept .: From the February, 1986, issue of Capital Region magazine, whose headline story, “Doesn’t Anybody Go Out Anymore?” ...