Words and Music

From the Food Vault Dept. : It took over fifteen years to discover why there was a job opening that enabled me to get hired for my first job...

Our second pandemic-era Thanksgiving! How exciting! I didn’t think “frustration” was a sound culinary theme; instead, I decided to smoke a t...

MANY, IF NOT MOST, of the stories you read here offer encouraging observations about people and places and the things they write and do that...

Another collaboration I enjoyed with Musicians of Ma’alwyck offered the challenge to feature a 19th-century schoolhouse in Glenville, NY. We...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : During its brief tenure at the Cohoes Music Hall, Heritage Artists, under the inspired direction of Robert To...

JORDAN YOUNG DIDN’T HAVE TO write a new book about Spike Jones. He covered the topic quite adequately when he came out with the first-ever b...

Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, who founded and runs the chamber-music group Musicians of Ma’alwyck, likes to explore the history of composers, p...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Wondering what I might have been up to, culturally speaking, thirty-five years ago, I came upon this piece,...

Guest Blogger Dept .: We need to hear again from George Ade, especially as we begin stockpiling books for the winter.                       ...

Scenes from Childhood Dept .: Here's a  re-run which first appeared here in 2009, but was initially published in Metroland Magazine in 1...

JAMES REBANKS SNEAKS UP ON YOU. His prose is colorful and decisive. He’s writing about nature, which encourages lavish description, but he’s...

From the Food Vault Dept. : The restaurant visit described below took place twenty years ago. It turns out that the space we visited has see...

“NORWAY BECAME OIL-RICH in the 1970s, so our view of the country is as a prosperous place on the right side of human rights,” said Darra Gol...

Early in the summer of 2021, I had the pleasure of crafting a new libretto for a one-act opera titled “The Ship’s Captain.” It was originall...

From the Tech Vault Dept. : I had a brief run of tech-oriented articles in Metroland magazine, Albany’s alt-weekly for which I wrote for som...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: I’m not sure if this piece ever actually ran in Metroland – CD reviews, at least from me, wafted in an edit...

From the Fields and Forests Dept .: A few days ago I posted a review of Laura Lengnick’s book Resilient Agriculture . Here’s a follow-up pie...

From the Food Vault Dept .: What’s encouraging is that, thirteen years later, almost all of the winter farmers’ markets detailed below are s...

NEW DEMANDS from a dynamic global economy, continued decline in the quality and availability of natural resources, and the unprecedented cha...

Guest Blogger Dept .: Robert Benchley returns with, well, thoughts on fuel saving, which are most appropriate as we enter autumn. Mr. Benchl...