In the few short years I’ve lived in the area and reviewed local music, I can’t think of a season in which more top-shelf albums have been released in such quick succession than this spring. ...
May is National Bike month, and cyclists all over the country are agitated. After the Senate passed a federal transportation bill this past March, House Republicans answered back with a proposal that significantly slashed the ...
Nature typically grants a species a couple million years on earth, but when you consider all that humans have done to birds in just the last couple of centuries, you wish you could push a ...
After a very warm spring, temperatures dove at the end of April and threatened grape buds at Natural Selection Farm Winery in Washington County. Ken Denberg, like other owners of orchards and vineyards, watched the ...
Eric Krans is down in the streambed outside his Altamont home, tossing rocks from the middle up onto the banks. “It’s only recently that we realized how important this is,” he says. The stream has ...
Director John Sowle’s set design at Stageworks/Hudson makes it easy to see why The Mound Builders was the late Lanford Wilson’s favorite play. While the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly or Hot L Baltimore or Burn ...
For a play with such an apocalyptic title, the setting and stakes of God of Carnage are mundane: Two couples, the Raleighs and the Novaks, meet in the Cobble Hill apartment of the latter, to ...
In the world of St. Forget, a prehistoric magic has a hold on the dispirited, washed-up fishing town. The townspeople wander through their daily lives in a haze, and except for the witches among them, ...
Brisk air and cold spattering rain envelopes the porch of Joe Michon-Huneau’s apartment. The lead singer of the post-pop indie rock band Alta Mira is nestled inside the papasan chair in his living room. Meanwhile, ...
“The hardest thing to do at a community college is cheat on a test, because the only people you can cheat off of also go to a community college,” jokes comedian Tommy Johnagin. He’s not ...
Among music aficionados, there are few thrills more memorable than seeing bands who deserve to be big, that you somehow know are going to be big, and being there just before they become big. A ...
Demonstrators worldwide took to the streets for May Day, aka International Workers Day, a celebration of the labor movement and workers’ rights. Here in Albany, a coalition of Occupy Albany, the Solidarity Committee of the ...
It was picture perfect: A young family enjoying the balmy spring weather with an evening stroll. Heading down the sidewalk of 19th Street in Watervliet, Eric Fagan, Jill Fagan, and their daughter Amber walked toward ...
The Avett Brothers played at the Palace Theatre just three days after Woodstock drummer Levon Helm died, a reminder that they are one of several young, exceedingly popular current bands who owe a huge debt ...
The Flame Alphabet
By Ben Marcus
Knopf, 289 pages, $25.95
In the world that Ben Marcus renders, the writing of a novel would be a fatal act of violence—to the reader and author alike. It’s an irony that ...
Scrubbing bubbles, or pulverized stone discarded from quartz mines? This isn’t a trick question. It’s a domestic question, as in: Would you rather get the ol’ porcelain facility clean with an array of potentially harmful ...
“Who’d throw this out?” says Fred Armisen, pulling a laughably tiny sweater over his head. He and co-star Carrie Brownstein are rifling through a grocery store dumpster in one of Portlandia’s characteristically funny/obnoxious skits. The ...
Gavin McIntyre wants to take away all of your plastics. And your foams. He won’t stop until he’s rid the world of the foam bumper on your car, the insulation panels in your home, and ...
If you live long enough, eventually you’ll see touchstones of your past vanish, one at a time. You’ll drive by an empty lot where your old home, or shop, or teenage hangout, or dive bar ...
At the RPI Playhouse set of Frankenstein last year, another creation came into existence besides Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. And it, too, is composed of parts that have taken on a life of their own: a ...
If you search for quotations about the importance and the power of place in our lives, a few ideas recur on a regular basis: among them, that without a sense of place there is no ...
Two musical monsters, That 1 Guy and Buckethead, combined their power to make crowds come alive at Northern Lights last week. They first teamed up as the Frankenstein Brothers in 2008 when they released the ...
When Wizards was released in 1977, it turned Hollywood’s view of feature animation on its head. The film’s success proved that there was a market for more than children’s fairy tales (though Wizards was consciously ...
“The first time I came in here with Darren Scott from the Housing Authority, we got dive-bombed by hawks,” Jeff Mirel says, noticing this reporter’s expression as I step over yet another dead crow. “There ...
Ballston Spa
By Erin Pihlaja
It isn’t crazy to ask what’s in the water in the village of Ballston Spa. The area was once famous for its mineral springs. It’s not obvious at first, but there ...
