averyfineline

From the comments:
Those were the days. It was edgy. Now it’s just plastic.

From reader EF:

There is an old saying that says, “some do, and some teach.” You do neither. Anyone, even those with extreme mental health issues, ( I work with the mentally ill ) can set themselves up as critics. You should hear some of the stuff I hear almost daily. Your opinions are just that: […]

I’ve spent the day reading … the Sunday papers, a stray magazine or three, a new novel by Richard Ford, and then the last few hours an academic book I’ve been assigned to review for a journal. It’s week overdue and yet I’m already fleeing from it, after only a few chapters, the writing so […]

NQC is struggling. The good news is, there’s evidence (as I noted Thursday night) of an attempt to think differently. This being sg, the innovations are often too nearsighted to have much of a felt impact right away, but the innovative impulse is essential if NQC wants to save itself from obsolescence. The bad news, […]

The only showcase I attended last week was the songwriter’s thing that Phil Cross hosted, mostly because I’m always curious to hear about and see a little into the creative minds behind songs. So often the way a songwriter writes or imagines a song is simply nothing like the way it’s sung and though the […]

A friend of mine who attended the Friday afternoon Brooklyn Tab showcase was kind enough to write up some reaction to it. Obviously, she’s a real fan, so feel free to quibble. But I did hear from several people that it was pretty good stuff.

Friday’s Brooklyn Tabernacle Singers’ performance was one of the […]

An anticlimactic conclusion to three long days, with a long weak lineup at the center, tonight was both interminable and largely tiresome, to the extent that I simply could not make it all the way to Legacy 5’s final set (which would have meant wading through the Dove Brothers). So tonight’s report will be brief(er). […]

Tonight’s concerts were a strange mix of the mundane, the magnificent, and the mediocre all jumbled together. If, as I suggested last night, NQC feels different this year, it is equally true that NQC Friday and Saturday are no longer the climax days for the convention. I can remember when I first started attending 15 […]

So color me ignorant, but during the course of a conversation at lunch today, the topic of radio interviews with artists came up and I discovered that it’s a common practice for radio stations to charge an artist for an interview. $100 for 15 minutes on a prominent sg radio station. $900 to be featured […]

*You know, I regret my use of the phrase “fairly innocuous” in the post below to describe Gerald Wolfe’s remarks. The reality is, the history of race and race relations in our society makes comments like this wrong, despite intentions. Period. Situation and contexts matter to some extent, of course, and this is what I […]