PICK: Met Stars Live in Concert

Hitting the high notes: Though the Metropolitan Opera house remains dark, the talent from its stages is still beaming around the world. Met Stars Live in Concert (in HD broadcast) features two performances from last summer: Renée Fleming from the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., and Jonas Kaufman from Polling Abbey in Munich, Germany. […]

PICK: Equinox

Safety dance: “Well, everybody’s dancin’ in a ring around the sun,” sang the Grateful Dead. Seems that vibe is right on time to shake off a year of COVID quarantine. GD cover band The ’77z takes up the mantle of the hippie pied pipers at Equinox. The live gig will explore the transitional moods of […]

Letting it flow

By Alana Bittner When writer and photographer Kori Price agreed to be part of the curation committee for a Black artists’ exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, water was not on her mind. It didn’t come up until someone asked how they wanted viewers to move through the gallery. Price recalls discussing ways to make viewers […]

Rockin’ stout

Beer drinkers are weaning themselves off of so many unfortunate St. Patrick’s Day traditions. Green beer? Gone. Drinking enough to shame their Irish forebears by the end of the night? Well, mostly gone. The next step? Reaching for a locally made, artisanal stout or porter, rather than that well-known macro sludge. No, we’re not talking […]

Music, mystery, memory

It’s been the year of the pandemic, yes—but it’s also been the year of the book. Since the world shut down 12 months ago, we’ve turned to books to escape our stressful surroundings and also to explain the cataclysmic shifts outside and inside our homes. Last year’s Virginia Book Festival was cancelled as the pandemic first […]

Small-town noir

S.A. Cosby set out to be the next Stephen King. But he soon turned to a life of crime writing, and his latest noir caper, Blacktop Wasteland, may have pulled him in too deep to let him out. “I love writing about crime because it’s something everyone can understand,” Cosby says. “The platform makes it […]

America’s poisoned cities

Everything is falling apart—and I don’t mean that metaphorically. In Texas, a winter storm recently caused the power grid to fail, leaving millions without heat and icicles dropping from ceiling fans. In Jackson, Mississippi, 96 broken water mains in a 100-year-old system of municipal pipes have dirtied the water for three weeks and counting, and […]

Gospel according to Harold

Between 1980 and 1994, Christian/gospel music sales grew from $190 million to $390 million. And some folks in the business were uncomfortable with that success. Because gospel music is different.  “Were the contemporary gospel artists who experimented with the rhythms of funk, disco, and hip-hop more concerned with selling records than with saving souls?” wonders […]

Microaggression rebrand

Tiffany Jana doesn’t like the term microaggression. “The very nature of the word puts people on the defensive,” says the diversity and inclusiveness expert. “It definitely is not a place from which people grow very readily.” Jana and co-author Michael Baran both took umbrage with the term and set out on a mission to rebrand […]

Exalt in the everyday

With the one-year anniversary of hunkering down in our houses approaching, it’s easy to forget about the beauty of the natural world that we still have access to. Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil are here to remind us.  Poets Gay and Nezhukumatathi will discuss their essay collections—The Book of Delights and World of Wonders, respectively—during […]