Arts

Arts

Selected Shorts: Review of BSC's 10x10 New Play Festival

If you have to have a citywide arts festival in the dead of winter, you absolutely must have good theater somewhere, if not everywhere. And preferably of the kind that doesn’t strain the audience’s understandably frigid attention span. This is a hallmark of 2013’s 10x10 Upstreet Festival

By Editor

Arts

Deee-Lucius: A Cult Fave Comes to the Berkshires

When Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig sing together in their Brooklyn-based band Lucius, they create a third being, an ethereal presence greater than the sum of its parts, a voice haunting, playful, yearning, and sexy. Depending on the song, that voice can conjure kohl-eyed, bee-hived 1960s girl

By Editor

Arts

Covering Duncan: Sheik At Infinity Hall

If you prefer your love odes on the bittersweet side, Duncan Sheik is your man, and his upcoming Valentine’s Day show at Infinity Hall is just the ticket for you and your date — or just you and a fantasy one. “I’ve written a lot of songs that are

By Editor

Arts

Collage Convention: Cutting It Up in North Adams

The dead of winter is a time when many shivering denizens of the Rural Intelligence zone —especially the more zealous fans of the toasty comforts of a wood stove — become more familiar with the contents of their wood sheds. Used as a verb, “woodshedding” is a term jazz musicians invoke

By Editor

Arts

Habitat for Harmony

Photos of Melissa Auf Der Maur by George Folk; Tommy Stinsom by Steven Cohen for Spinner; Meshell Ndegeocello, courtesy of www.meshell.com; Rapustina by James Jackson When three internationally acclaimed, world-traveled rock star bassists and a cellist picked the same ten-by-five block town — Hudson, NY— as

By Editor

Arts

The Grand Slambovians and Darlingside: The Twain Shall Meet

By Robert Burke Warren Americana road warriors The Grand Slambovians (left) and string-band pop upstarts Darlingside (right) are excited to share the bill at the esteemed Norfolk, CT venue Infinity Hall, in part because each band reveres the other, but also because of Mark Twain. Legend has it the

By Editor

Arts

His Brother's Keeper: Van Gogh Takes Center Stage

He was a zealous Evangelical preacher, a surrogate father to the children of a whore, a lover of wheat fields, an artist...but above all else, Vincent van Gogh was a misunderstood man with an unbridled passion for love of all kinds. So says his disabused brother Theo in Starry

By Editor

Arts

A Rhinebeck Rocker’s Christmas

Grammy and Golden Globe-nominated singer-songwriter-guitarist Marshall Crenshaw, whose songs have been covered by Bette Midler, Ronnie Spector, and Top 40 hitmakers the Gin Blossoms, is digging through the “Christmas Section” of his massive LP collection. The record aficionado, who shares his wide-ranging assortment of music on

By Editor

Arts

Speaking Through Clay

For nearly two decades, Dan Bellow was a wordsmith. You might say it’s the family business. The son of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, he worked the circuit of Northeast newspapers, covering crime in Albany, city government in Pittsfield, and state politics in Burlington, Vermont. But

By Editor

Arts

Not Just a Fluke: Sheffield Shop Perfects the Ukulele

The Stradivari family has the violin. The Gibsons have the guitar. For the Webb family in Sheffield, while the family business has yet to hit the 20-year mark, it seems they have cornered the fast-growing ukulele market, which is beginning to enjoy celebrity status thanks to the likes

By Editor

Arts

At the Clark Museum: Giselle's New World

On a free admission day at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute a couple of weeks ago, 11-year-old Giselle Ciulla seems like just one of the many other well-behaved kids hanging out with their parents on a day's cultural excursion. Upbeat and bubbly, she

By Editor

Arts

Simone Felice's Happy Days

It's been eight months of traversing the globe for musician Simone Felice, all in support of his eponymous, moody folk debut album. Even so, the singer-songwriter-author and Catskills resident says he’ll approach his December 7 performance at Helsinki Hudson, the first of two back in

By Editor