Cover Story
On the Cover: Humongous
Sharp-eyed drivers on Rosendale’s Main Street—perhaps warming up for the movie-poster head-swivel up the block—may have noticed a house with a grinning green monster adorning its lavender side wall. Who painted it? A) A well-known children’s author/illustrator; B) The designer of the Rosendale Theatre Collective’s red-ticket logo; C) A local rock climber with a bizarre…
TAXMEGEDDON!!!!!!!
There are three, count ’em, three major financial events coming up. 1. Taxmageddon! An immensely exaggerated media term for the expiration of the Bush and Obama tax cuts. 2. Fiscal Face-Off! A repeat of the debt-ceiling, let’s-blow-up-the-whole-government-debacle of last year. 3. Sequestration! As scary as castration—at least it’s supposed to be. A “super-committee” was set…
Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays
Hailed by the New York Times as “funny and moving,” members of Actors and Writers will perform this off-Broadway hit at Maverick Concerts on June 30 at 6:30pm. “Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays” includes 10-minute “microplays” by Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, José Rivera, Paul Rudnick, and Doug…
Editor’s Note: This Must Be the Place
If you’re at all familiar with Talking Heads—deeper than, say, David Byrne’s big suit from Stop Making Sense and “Psycho Killer” and “Take Me to the River”—than you know their song “This Must Be the Place.” Aside from being a mellow electronica masterpiece, it’s perhaps the only true love song (in the conventional sense of…
Still Waters Run Deep
The Center for Photography at Woodstock’s (CPW) excellent new group exhibition, “Surface Tension,” is bursting at the seams. Curators Ariel Shanberg and Akemi Hiatt fiercely unpack the proposition that photography is an inherently process-oriented, experimental, and aggressively unpredictable medium whose most interesting practitioners are now hyperaware of the exciting possibilities that abound when known orthodoxies are thrown…
On a Roll Food Trucks of the Hudson Valley
Years after gourmet food trucks took hold in big cities, the Hudson Valley has finally attained an abundance of quality establishments on wheels. While some restaurants have opened trucks to expand their reach–’Cue in Saugerties and American Glory Barbecue in Hudson have them, as does Yum Yum Noodle Bar of Woodstock and Kingston—those are the…
Be Like an Ant Screening
After returning from the Vietnam War, Paul Plante purchased a trailer for his family to live in outside Troy. Frustrated with the unlivable conditions during winter, he began to build a DIY house around his trailer. Thirty years on and still in the making, the home is almost completed, with a structure built with no…
A Small Poem in Which Socrates, Mozart, Matisse, Chekhov, and Einstein are All Squeezed In
Poor old Socrates had so few geniuses in history to keep him company. He never had Mozart’s piano music to listen to. He never had Matisse’s colorful observations to find pleasure gazing at. He never had Chekhov’s letters to read, one in which he mentions enjoying a bowl of rich sorrel soup in a train…
When BBQ and Art Collide
“We curate artists, not works of art,” says Mathew Pokoik, executive director of Mount Tremper Arts, a Catskills retreat for experimental performance. All the artists are in residence—for one or two weeks—during which they either invent or perfect their works. Pokoik founded the center five years ago with his wife, the dancer Aynsley Vandenbroucke. Because…
A Strange Kind of Hope at the Dawn of Father’s Day
“Among the primates, parenting behavior by males is rare. This isn’t necessarily because males have less interest in infants, but because primate mothers generally will not allow males to get very close to their newborn. The males of many primate species have been known to harm infants.”—James Kimmel, The Natural Child Project “Somewhere at the…
Bordering on Treason
In February 2003, Lorna Tychostup, then senior editor for this magazine, traveled to Iraq to document the conditions of the people of Iraq on the eve of the US invasion. This was the first of a series of reporting trips for Chronogram that shed light on the often forgotten populace that was being fought over…
My Son
My son can touch the face of the moon each night And swing the stars in wide arcs across the sky He dances on the peaks of mountains As his laughter flies down the long valley on the wind His vibrant energy trails a rainbow Measuring the course of his life And he waits smiling…
Storm King Art Center opened its 2012 season in May with “Light & Landscape,”
Storm King Art Center opened its 2012 season in May with “Light & Landscape,” a new exhibition that showcases the work of 14 artists who employ natural light as an artistic material. Alyson Shotz’s Mirror Fence is much as it sounds, a 130-foot-long length of picket fence running along the edge of a copse of…
Local Notable
Song and prayer often go hand in hand as a way to express the celebration of one’s spirituality. Rabbi Jonathan Kligler knows this firsthand as both the spiritual leader of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation Kehillat Lev Shalem and as an established folk musician. For more than two decades, he’s incorporated song and creative expression as…
Peekamoose Restaurant & Tap Room
You’re on Route 28 in Big Indian, and you step into a dark cozy bar. A loaf of warm homemade bread appears, which you eat. You order up a plate of smoked mussels in mustardy cream sauce, a sweet little hill of beet tartar, then a grass-fed burger and uberfries. You wash it down with…
High Falls
Like hot wires thrust through the snow, the magenta bush of stems splinters the air beside the waterfall. The current, in its green tailcoat, could sweep a body away. The wet rocks are gems, translucent joints of bone and cartilage, and planets. Berries cling onto their brambles like drops of blood, drawing confused mosquitoes close.…
While You Were Sleeping
Sleep-deprivation, capital punishment, American obesity, HIV-preventatives, and Jurassic Park in the Catskills: this month’s updates are sure to shock.
Local Notable: Nena Thurman
Since the strife of the Tibetan people was brought to US public attention decades ago, there has been a steady currant of organizations and volunteers offering time and resources to help free the state from China’s firm grip—or at least preserve the Tibetan way of life. Nena Thurman, Executive Chairwoman of Phoenicia’s Menla Mountain Retreat, holds…
Brasserie 292
In an alternate universe, the French invade Poughkeepsie. Before the cheese-eating surrender-monkeys are run out of town by patriotic Poughkeepsians, they open a shrine to French gastronomy on Main Street to remind them of home: white-tiled walls, a long red leather banquette fronted by cafe tables, a tin ceiling, Kronenbourg 1664 on tap. The raw…
The Romantic Age Versus
The Metallic Hummingbirds, or How Fuddy Dud Joins the Resistance I’m somewhat prone to an archaic language. Lest we forget, it rhymes best. This modern language cuts like an ax, is clean as a whistle, etc. A drone hovers. (We lie prone in our covers, imagining nothing.) Clean and quick is the new barbaric.
Home Is Her Castle
Robin Palmer in short…All told, Palmer has written 10 books in five years, including Ways of Being With, due out in 2013. “I never feel more myself than when I’m writing in this house. This is where I belong.” Everyone knows how a fairy tale ends. In bedtime stories and countless Disney movies, an evil…
Rollin’ on the River
If the communities of Newburgh and Cornwall had a theme song it might just be Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” with its “rollin’ on the river” chorus. Both communities are set against the majestic backdrop of the mighty Hudson River. Newburgh is a city that has been marred by crime and negative publicity in recent…
Outpost BBQ
Sometimes the best barbeque can be found in the most inauspicious places. Nothing more than a shack built on a trailer with a smoker on the back, you’ll find Outpost BBQ in Kerhonkson at the corner of Routes 209 and 44/55 in the parking lot of Minnewaska Motors. Owner Dennis Ballentine serves up pulled-pork and brisket with just…
Fruit #3
I write—for a living— the copy on the bottom of juice drink caps. The work demands economy but more: a motive oblique, a secret her. To move you, I think of another and the word just comes. “Mouthy” I wrote the other day, fairly amazed at the richness.
CD Review: The Summer I Stopped Whining by Little Green Blackbird
“Sing Hallelujah” is the opening track on the premiere CD by Little Green Blackbird, the recording guise of Woodstocker Kirsti Gholson, and it could not be more appropriately placed on this jubilant 10-track recording. “Sing hallelujah to know my arms could be the safest place in all the Earth and sky,” sings Gholson in a…
Local Notables
Growing up in nearby Washingtonville, Christopher Basso always thought Newburgh would be an ideal spot for some type of culinary-related business. “I always thought Newburgh would be a great place to do something. I went to culinary school, so I was thinking originally maybe a restaurant,” he says. Basso’s interests would soon take him out…
Portrait of a Fracking Town: Dimock, Pennsylvania
Lynn Woods navigates the pros and cons of fracking and the lives that are affected in the process.
A Family-Friendly Frida Kahlo-Inspired Contemporary
Architect Ulises Liceaga paid $200,000 for eight pitched, rocky acres near the Cargill Reservoir in Cold Spring in 1999, three years before the Mexico City native married his New Yorker wife, Christina, with whom he today has five young children. “In Mexico, if you can afford it, that’s just what you do,” says Christina, a…
R.I.P.
The night they drove old Dixie down I was painting my masterpiece To Dick Clark who was at the Helm I told him to Take the load off The Weight But, He was looking for a place to hide Up on Cripple Creek Where she sends me To Dance The Last Waltz But Slippin and…
CD Review: Marco Benevento Between the Needles and Nightfall
It begins with an acoustic piano, but, good Lord, it doesn’t end there. Marco Benevento makes John Cage and Rick Wakeman shake hands with his freewheeling approach to the keyboard. Benevento attaches pickups, processes the sound through piles of pedals, and generally regards convention the way a butcher regards a chicken. But the end result…
Local Notables
It’s surprising when a lawyer gives up a 20-year law career to start her own farm, and it’s even more surprising when that turns out to be a good business move. That’s the story of Talitha Thurau, the owner of Edgwick Farm on Angola Road in Cornwall, a farm where goats are raised and milked,…
Call of Doody
I don’t know if having one rabbit qualifies me as an urban minifarmer, but she does give me manure (“bunure”) that has done wonders for my vegetable garden. Bunure and other manures add organic matter to the soil, which in turn helps increase water holding capacity, nutrient availability, and soil structure (important for air and…
The Floundering Fish Hudson River Shad
Sometime in April, when the little white clusters of Dutchman’s breeches and the shadbush are in bloom, schools of shad enter the Hudson from the Atlantic Ocean and swim upriver to spawn. From mid-May to the end of June, shad mate, a dance that usually begins at dusk in shallow water. In The Founding Fish,…
Go With the Flow
We dug a mini ditch to let the maxi waters flow for the mini stream in winter sparked a torrent after snow mini banks of mud dis placing last year’s grasses coarse displaying mini f l o w e r s in new maxi mats of moss Count on ample Mother Nature never fretting at…
Planet Waves
“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” —Sulamitis, from the Song of Songs of Solomon On June 5 (June 6 in some time zones) Venus and the Sun…
Esteemed Reader
Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine: Not long ago I found myself in the presence of someone, who, years before, had been my enemy. By chance we were confined together at a seminar on a distant continent. It was as though an animosity that I was unable to integrate seven years previous was being re-presented, and…
The Question
If the impassioned, full-page antifracking ad in the New York Times on Mother’s Day is any indication, Americans are taking an increasingly personal stake in how their energy is generated. Yet there remains a perception that only those with a significant amount of disposable income can avail themselves of the benefits of alternative choices. With…
Local Luminary: Judith Bromley
At a recent “Women of Accomplishment” dinner, associate participants of Project Hope, a woman-to-woman mentoring program based in Kingston, were celebrated for what they’d achieved this past year—such as learning to drive and getting a license, earning a GED or AA degree, finishing cosmetology training or completing work on an LPN degree, and for staying…
Summer Reading Roundup for Kids: Picture Books
And Then it’s Spring Written by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin E. Stead Roaring Book Press, 2012, $16.99 “First you have brown, all around you have brown…and then there are seeds.” The winter-to-spring waiting game has never been so simply, evocatively depicted in both word and line. This delightful collaboration by a Woodstock resident and…
Beacon Riverfest
This year’s Beacon Riverfest takes place on June 30 at Beacon’s Waterfront Park.
Chronogram Seen: June 2012
New Yorkers Against Fracking: protests, concerts, and more in this month’s Chronogram Seen.
Age of Interdependence
These are not the hospitals of our youth. The “supermarket” model of hospital care, in which a standalone facility or campus served up all of the community’s medical necessaries in one place, is as nearly as dated as the little white caps nurses used to wear. Burgeoning technology and its soaring cost, combined with the…
Young Adult Books
Dreamsleeves Coleen Murtagh Paratore Scholastic Books, 2012, $16.99 It’s a good thing 12-year-old Aislinn’s name means “dream” in Gaelic, because without her passion for “wide-awake” dreams, she’d have no life at all. As summer arrives, her beloved Nana is away, her mother’s pregnant again, and her alcoholic father’s become increasingly abusive. Her best friend Maizey…
Sounds in the Sun
Every June since 2009 we’ve been sifting through the news of the area’s many summer music festivals to bring you our top picks. And the opening spiel for these roundups has usually been something along the lines of: “Hey, look at us, we’ve survived another brutal winter! And along with the beautiful warm weather we’ve…
Back in Your Life
Wrap your head around this: It’s been 40 years since the Modern Lovers’ eponymous debut was recorded. And that geeky kid who wrote and sang its singularly wide-eyed, teen angst-injected songs? Well, it seems last month he turned 61. The kid in question is, of course, none other than New England’s favorite son, the inimitable…
Dog Days
In the slow groaning passage of summer, the only thing worse than being in the dirt was sitting and watching your yard sizzle, vinyl folding chairs branding your thighs, jars of watered-down lemonade sweating puddles on the porch rail my sister and I are mid-glory: two months in wild rebellion of our parents’ wishes. we’d…
No Accounting for Accountability
Red Hook author Frank Miniter will bring his unique take on manhood and nature during Millbrook’s 5th annual Literary Festival June 16. His Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide aims to restore dignity and honor within contemporary society, traits Miniter believes have fallen by the wayside. “The desire to learn and grow takes a lifetime to develop.…
Chris Smither
June 1. Apparently the Towne Crier has, at least for the moment, averted the impending loss of its home of 24 years (as reported in our February issue, a rent increase had the owners scrambling for a new venue). Thankfully, the present site has been soldiering on with fine dates like this one by folk-blues…
Deeper Than the Shade
Deeper Than the Shade Let’s talk about my lamp The shade is pleated muslin. Forget what I said…I don’t want to discuss what isn’t puzzlin’ I will peek around the corner to see what’s truly comin’ Let’s speak about my bird His wings are green with yellow streaks He speaks and he speaks Quite a…
The Sweet Clementines Though it Were the Kiss of Death
Throughout Though It Were the Kiss of Death, the Sweet Clementines’ second release, one imagines New Paltz singer-songwriter-guitarists John Burdick and Chris Tanis throwing gauntlets: “Badfinger-meets-Django Reinhardt, sir! I dare you!” “Simon & Garfunkel-meets-Ennio Morricone!” “Tom Waits-drinks-absinthe-with-Neil Young!” The two former English teachers receive enthusiastic encouragement from co-conspirators Jason Sarubbi (bass, co-production with Burdick), Marianne…
Dog on Fleas Record Release Show
June 9. For 13 years Dog on Fleas has been bopping out fun ‘n’ friendly family tunes. Led by multi-instrumentalist Dean Jones (producer of kindred “kindie” acts Uncle Rock, the Deedle Deedle Dees, and Elizabeth Mitchell), the NPR-acclaimed trio draws on pop, jazz, and world music to get “kids of all ages” clapping and dancing.…
The Dark Side of the River
Crossing the Rhinecliff This is normal A weekly routine A fork in the road The rightmost path my Usual route Somehow does not call me today Turning the first corner Is not as easy as I Remember when the road is not Covered with a Maliciously fluffy, immaculately white Menace Approaching the shoulder Seeing the…
Northern Lights
In many ways the village of Woodstock is a much different place than it was during its heyday when Hendrix and Dylan roamed, wrote, and performed around town. It is, however, still a place where artists thrive, everyone is or knows a musician, wars are protested, thoughts are openly expressed, and the rules are malleable.…
Kinky Friedman
June 23. There’s truly only one Kinky Friedman. Besides being hailed as “the Frank Zappa of country music,” the Austin, Texas, institution is a self-proclaimed “author, columnist, musician, and beautician” and one-time gubernatorial candidate whose songs like “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” and “They Ain’t Making Jews like Jesus Anymore” reference his Jewish heritage with sidesplittingly in-your-face…
Borsodi’s Coffee House on Howe
I own this place— or it owns me. Here is where I grew awhile, stumbling through the unaware of this one’s style and paperbound hyperbole hid within a smile. Here lies the ghost of LaGalette while Stiles and stone prevail. Floorboards bare a cup, a chair exterior worn pale. No reading from a further room,…
Seduced by the Sun
If the national media is a circus parade, the clown in the ultraviolet spotlight last month was 44-year-old Patricia Krentcil of New Jersey, who was arrested for allegedly bringing her five-year-old daughter to a tanning salon. But far from white-faced, this big-tent star had the dark, leathery visage of a tanning fanatic. The little girl,…
Baczkowski-Nace-Corsano
June 28. Now striking out as a trio of their own, saxophonist Steve Baczkowski, guitarist Bill Nace, and drummer Chris Corsano once backed Thurston Moore as his Dream/Aktion Unit. Of the three, Corsano is perhaps the most known: The Berkshires percussionist is a member of the group Rangda, played with Björk on her 2007-08 Volta…
Keeper of Theatrical Truths
While Broadway seems fiscally robust these days, discerning theatergoers may question the creative health of the Great White Way. As stage production costs soar, show producers have their sights set squarely on the pockets of tourists. Hence, they skew their offerings to the palates of out-of-towners, wooing them by reheating old musical chestnuts and stunt…
Exquisite Edge
Choreographer Takehiro Ueyama and his company TAKE (pronounced Tah-keh) Dance reside firmly on the cutting edge of modern dance. On Saturday, June 9, TAKE Dance brings its blend of expressiveness and whisical exuberance to Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli. Born and raised in Tokyo, Ueyama was spotted breakdancing in the streets there by a…
Marc Von Em/KJ Denhert
June 30. Singer-songwriter Marc Von Em recently unveiled Crash Boom Pow, his fourth release, and has toured with Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas and opened for Martin Sexton, Glenn Tillbrook, and Lucy Kaplansky. Among other honors, Bronx-raised urban folk-jazz artist KJ Denhert won the Mountain Stage New Song contest in August 2005 with “Little Mary” and…
