Words and Music

From the Food Vault Dept. : I ended the year 2008 with a review of an Albany-area diner, the Metro 20. Two years later, it changed hands and...

AT SOME POINT during my single-digit Christmas years, I learned to impress my parents and other elders by declaring that what I really, real...

EVEN IN THIS STAY-AT-HOME version of the Christmas season, we're bombarded with music. Music that easily can drive the sensitive human i...

Guest Blogger Dept .: We’re hurrying O. Henry back into the fray in order to set the holiday mood for us. He did it brilliantly in his most ...

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE smack-your-forehead, it’s-so-obvious ideas: collect the other sides of all the 78s that Harry Smith chose to include in ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We welcome, for his first appearance on this blog, the great juggler and ventriloqist – and he had something to do wit...

From the Computer Vault Dept .: And then there are the seeming orphans that crouch in old computer directories, pieces that I wrote many yea...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : The internet can be as opaque as it is revealing. I dug out the below review, which I wrote 35 years ago, a...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept. : Thanks to a recently acquired scanner that whisks piles of papers into PDFs – and its accompanying OCR pro...

IT'S THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the lavish Thanksgiving dinners we've served here at Jollity Farm, so we weren't about to let ...

Guest Blogger Dept .: This Thanksgiving slice-o-life comes from O. Henry, who spent the dawn of thge 20th century relentlessly chronicling t...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Here’s another look back at where I was planting my critical butt thirty-five years ago. Performances by Ca...

From the Vault Dept .: Twenty years ago, I had the pleasant job of writing liner notes for Dorian Recordings, a small company producing fant...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Who celebrates a nineteenth anniversary? That’s a date calling for a gift of bronze, which hardly applies t...

THERE COMES A MOMENT in each person’s life when dance-band recordings from the 1920s are discovered. It’s hard to be unmoved by them, and, w...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Early in my restaurant-reviewing years I spent an afternoon at the Schenectady Museum’s Festival of Nations, a f...

From the Computer Vault Dept. : I heard you clamoring for another one of my vintage computer-magazine pieces describing an era the technolog...

From the Vault Dept .: This was one of the most compelling talks I’ve ever attended, and I’m grateful to have my review of it linger as a so...

From the Theater Vault Dept .: I would have loved to have seen the revue “Cole” in its original Mermaid Theatre run; I saw “Cowardy Custard”...

Guest Blogger Dept .: We welcome back the late H. Allen Smith, whose wonderful books, beginning with the best-selling Low Man on a Totem Pol...