November 01, 2016

Madeline and Sam have been working together for about three and a half years. Since the fall of 2015, they’ve also been living together as a couple. They’re professional circus acrobats, trained in skills like static trapeze, hand balancing, aerial silks, and corde lisse. Together they make aerial art...and try to avoid calamity. 

May 03, 2016

All right, let’s take it out,” I said, leaning forward in my chair and sighing heavily at the doctor. What a waste. For the past month, I’d had inside my body a gnawing little T-shaped device made out of plastic and copper, called ParaGard. It had seemed to me an ideal birth control solution: invisible, forgettable, long-lasting, highly effective and hormone-free. But it turned out to be too good to be true.

April 19, 2016

One cannot help but wonder what author Andrew Solomon would have achieved had he been born into different circumstances. A preview of his newest book, Far and Away.

March 01, 2015

Andy Warhol ushered in a new era of visual culture. As the initiator of the Pop Art movement, he turned faces into icons, soup cans into celebrations of commercial sameness, and colors into commentary. While most of us appreciate Warhol's impact on the art and advertising worlds, few realize that he had a lifelong obsession with books. His work blurred the boundaries between media forms and broadened the definition of what a book could be, an approach expressed in his famous aphorism, “Art is what you can get away with.”

December 01, 2014

Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" is an indisputable rite of the holiday season. Every year, its decadent orchestral suite graces shopping malls, street corners, stages, and living rooms, cuing a barrage of gift giving and merriment. The accompanying ballet is usually a gold-and-tinsel affair, recognizable for its dreamlike sets, elaborate costumes, and Old World sensibilities. Can we still hear the music of "The Nutcracker" underneath all these layers of nostalgia? David Parker, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and master choreographer, explores that question in "Nut/Cracked," which will be performed by The Bang Group at Bard's Fisher Center on December 20 and 21.

March 01, 2014

Everywhere Greg Dunn looks, he finds the bones of stories. As a building renovator with Albany Artisans, he’s no stranger to aged wood, buckling drywall, leaky pipes and old machines. Dunn sees these objects as holders of memory, and he can’t stand to throw them away. When he describes the thrill of uncovering a piece of wood that’s been “entombed” for ages, you’d think he was talking about rescuing a person.

August 07, 2014

“Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.”

These Pink Floyd lyrics, blasting from a car stereo, would normally remind the listener of his/her place within an all-seeing, ironclad system. They point to the dilution of creativity and the triumph of human greed. An artist's death sentence. 

But Dana Owens isn't your typical listener. For him, those words provided the moniker for a project that is changing the cultural landscape of Lark Street. In 2013, Owens co-founded the Machine: A Creative Co-op with Kateryne Lora and Mic DeBellis, two fellow graduates of the SUNY Albany arts program. It's a working studio that welcomes people to witness the creative process—and take part in it

August 06, 2014

Let me start with a caveat: I'm not normally a fan of musical theater. But every once in a while, I stumble across a production that makes me wish I'd been granted more access to the brightly-lit,  challenging, and emotionally expressive world of showbiz as a child. Oliver! is one of those productions.

June 23, 2014

In early May, the Albany Institute of History and Art unveiled a unique exhibit with a suggestive name: “Small and Seductive.” Admittedly, I was expecting tiny, blush-worthy tableaux of sexual intimacy. Instead, I found a blue-walled room filled with a variety of media—painted landscapes, vignettes in pencil, ceramic vessels, sculptures of melted plastic, and much more.

October 12, 2009

The Going Green Tampa Bay Expo created a lot of buzz on the USF campus last Friday. Cars fueled by compressed natural gas were parked in front of the Marshall Student Center, while other sustainable energy exhibits and workshops were set up inside. Energy experts from all over the state came to share their green wisdom with the public.

October 26, 2009

This past Saturday marked the International Day of Climate Action, a global call for an active, scientifically-minded approach to climate change. With 4,000 simultaneous demonstrations taking place in over 180 countries, it was the most widespread day of environmental action in history.