Words and Music

IT IS EASILY ARGUED THAT, more than ambiance, a coffeehouse needs wifi and enough room on the table for your computer, coffee, and cellphone...

AT THE CENTER OF THE DISCOGRAPHY of conductor Charles Munch are his many recordings with the Boston Symphony, which he music-directed from 1...

THE BRAND-NEW DENIZEN THEATRE kicks off its first season with a new play in New Paltz, and it’s as well-produced and compelling a drama as ...

THERE’S A CHAOS OF NOISE AND ACTIVITY as a group of movie people – directors, actors, hangers-on – wraps up a day on the set and prepares to...

From the Wine Cellar Dept.: Twenty-eight years ago, there was a fun, informative, and generally delicious event held at Albany’s Desmond Hot...

“THE LOVE OF ANOTHER will destroy the causes of my hatred!” The hulking figure is shadowed, his dark-rimmed eyes suggesting both ugliness an...

From the Food Vault Dept. : It was incredible enough to find fine dining in Canajoharie, a rural village where pizza would be the favored fa...

IT EMERGES FROM a milky, opaque bath the temperature of bodily fluids, and it’s a white rubbery mass that looks like a medical mistake. My n...

THE IDEA OF A CIRCUS invites grotesque imagery, as demonstrated, in movies, at least, by the likes of “La Strada,” “Saboteur,” and “Nightmar...

From the Vault Dept. : The piece below ran in the Schenectady Gazette thirty years ago, and the group profiled is still active, with interne...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Albany’s restaurant scene has evolved slowly. Forty years ago, only a single Indian restaurant could be found; s...

Guest Blogger Dept.: Ellen Terry owned the stage, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, during the last two decades of the 19th Century; she...

MARLENE DIETRICH BECAME A LEGEND long before she died (at 90, in 1992), a legend invented by director Josef von Sternberg, with whom she mad...

YOU’D THINK IT HAS MUCH TO DO WITH FLAVOR, this diet of ours. It turns out we’re making choices based on an amazing range of factors, includ...

WILLIAM BLAKE PUBLISHED HIS “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” a collection of metaphysical poems with mystical illustrations, at the e...

From the Record Vault Dept .: As noted in the lede, there had been plenty of versions of this set in the past and the years since have seen ...

LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S “WEST SIDE STORY” wasn’t by any means the first time Latin-influenced music came to Broadway. Irving Berlin’s “Watch You...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Let’s welcome Don Marquis to these pages. Best known for the free-verse, lower-case writings of the reincarnated cockr...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Ten years ago, my wife and daughter and I treated ourselves to a post-Labor Day getaway to the mountains of Verm...

Photo by B. A. Nilsson