Book Reviews
The Original Blues
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville debunks popular notions about the origins of the blues.
Music Features
The World of Captain Beefheart
Guitarist Gary Lucas and singer Nona Hendryx talk about their (2017) album The World of Captain Beefheart and the man behind the monicker.
Jazz with a Sicilian Accent
Sicilian jazz saxophonist Francesco Cafiso thrills the audience-- and this critiic -- in a 2016 concert at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York
Rocking Chair Blues
Howlin' Wolf's Rocking Chair -- a track-by-track appraisal of a blues classic (PopMatters)
Journalism
Serpico, Part II
Interview with filmmaker Antonino D'Ambrosio about his 2017 documentary, "Frank Serpico"
Face Forward and Forgetting
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman, The Hakawati) talks about his sixth novel, The Angel of History, and about the German-Jewish Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin, the “othering” of Arabs in Western societies, and contemporary gay life.
Broken Windows, Broken Lives
In this interview before he announced his run against New York mayor Bill de Blasio, veteran advocate Robert Gangi says that policing in New York City is "institutional bullying."
Addio, Cosimo
Remembrance of the late Cosimo Matassa, who recorded many of the great R&B and rock 'n roll hits that defined the New Orleans Sound.
Music Reviews
The Ghosts of Highway 20
The older she gets, the better she gets. Review of Lucinda Williams' 2016 double album, The Ghosts of Highway 20
Cultural Criticism and Reporting
"A Finook in the Crew"
"A Finook in the Crew: Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of the Mafia Genre" (from The Essential Sopranos Reader
Film Criticism
Essay
Nonfiction