Iris DeMent Sings the Delta By JOHN DEMETRY During the last decade, Iris DeMent’s New York concerts featured an expanding repertoire of new folk songs uncannily attuned to the needs of the audience. This fall, she releases many of these songs on the studio album Sing the Delta. Earlier in the decade, DeMent expressed the sublimation of 
What happened to Fred Schepisi? His newest film, The Eye of the Storm, is such a messed-up family comedy, it seems the work of an unhinged amateur who is both amused by his subject and yet incapable of dealing with it. Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling), a dowager dying in her Australian mansion, is visited by 
By Elena Oumano Just before a recent performance of Dan Fishback’s musical The Material World (held-over, full house, many turned away), Dixon Place’s omnipotently attractive founder/creative director Ellie Covan took the stage to thank “those of you in the audience who are holding drinks” and then warmly encouraged everyone else to also visit the upstairs 
By John Goodrich Kusama moves beyond pop What kind of pop artist “does battle at the border of life and death”? Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who so described her art-making in 1961, suggests a Japanese Andy Warhol in terms of sheer energy, protean endeavors and fixation with publicity. But Warhol would never have professed such 
By Ben Kessler London-based musician Rod Thomas makes pop music under the name Bright Light Bright Light, which is, of course, the exclamation with which gentle mogwai Gizmo expresses his sensitivity to harsh illumination in the movie Gremlins. The name encapsulates the strengths of BLBL’s debut album Make Me Believe in Hope, which displays a very special 
By Elena Oumano BAM’s ‘Do the Reggae’ series explores music on screen Jamaican music came into its own in the early ’60s, thanks to the advent of cheap transistor radios and the country’s 1962 release from British rule. The island’s 2.7 million descendants of African captives could now tune in more easily to Miami, New 
NYPL brings back a moveable feast By Caroline Birenbaum It’s always fun to see how the palatial Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the New York Public Library is transformed by the nature of the material on view. This summer it has become a vast food hall, where the social history of the lunch hour is presented, 
By Elena Oumano The day after the Twin Towers fell, Jonathan Kuhn and his two young sons headed for the woodland solace of Central Park’s North End Ravine, where a lone man was catching crayfish in the stream. Nearly 12 years later, the director of arts & antiquities for NYC’s Parks Department walks several times 
By Steve Haske Every June, industry types and journalists converge in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big annual conference where console makers and developers have historically announced new hardware, innovations for current platforms and surprise tentpole titles. It comes at a price. Loud and neon-soaked, E3 is a garish playground of 
By Joel Lobenthal Béatrice Massin is a specialist in Baroque dance. She was co-choreographer of Lully’s Atys when the opera was presented by Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last fall. She has choreographed for several films and directs her own dance troupe, Compagnie Fêtes Galantes, and school, the Atelier Baroque. She 
