The beer dinners at Jimmy's No. 43 always fun and intimate and the latest one the other week with Stillwater was no exception. Held in the backroom of the main dining area near the kitchen, a couple dozen beer enthusiasts gathered for a sampling of half a dozen of Brain...

It's been a packed month of culture. I finally made it down to the Barclays Center for Mumford and Sons in February and was really glad I did. The space is more intimate and has better acoustics than Madison Square Garden. As a lot of people who love Brooklyn, I...

I've been traveling at an increasing rate these past couple years and have had some amazing food moments, including eating king crabs in a Norwegian hut just minutes after they were pulled out of an ice-capped fjord. Sometimes though it's nice to skip the trip and stay home. With that...

The unknown is generally thrilling in any form. It's the feeling that all your past experiences have been rendered irrelevant by what's now in front of you. That's the thought I had watching two elephants have sex last summer from the deck of a whimsically named lodge (The...

Stepping into the Dead Rabbit, the soon-to-open mid-19th-century-styled bar situated on a lonely stretch of Water Street, is like stepping through a wormhole into the days of Boss Tweed. The bar takes its name from the gang that used to rule over the area though those folks would...

I found myself in Rotterdam this summer covering the North Sea Jazz Festival, one of the largest of its kind that takes place each year in the seaside Dutch town just outside of the more famous "dam." For those like Benjamin Schwarz who proclaimed jazz was dead in a recent...

When you travel from New York to the northern most reaches of the civilized world in February, you have a purpose.

I was drawn by reports of the Northern Lights showing their strongest in decades to Kirkenes, Norway this winter as my friends...

Bogota is both a confounding and beautiful city. Public transportation is lacking, cabs are peculiar (one driver drove in reverse on the highway after realizing he missed our exit), and service leaves a lot to be desired. Nestled below the Andes mountains, the expansive developing metropolis doesn't reveal its charms...

I'm not one for light-colored spirits, so it was a shock for me to find myself on a balcony in Miami Beach last November drinking Ketel One. The occasion was Sleepless Night, an all-night culture festival modeled after Nuit Blanche in Paris. While vodka purists may scoff at flavored vodkas,...

I've generally believed that when large groups of people get together to hear music, some level of chaos is inevitable -- the light rail line at All Points West comes to mind -- but the organizers behind Governors Ball proved me wrong this weekend. At every turn, I was amazed...

Mike Bartlett's buzzed about new play, Cock, from the Royal National Theatre opened to a thunderous and mostly deserved standing ovation at the Duke Thursday night. The intimate one-act focuses on the shitstorm that evolves out of a young man's inability to choose between his longtime male lover, M (Jason...

It's been a busy month on the culture front, and I've neglected this blog. Since I last wrote here, a lot has gone down in the music, theater and film worlds. The beginning of the month saw the Magnetic Fields play a graceful, almost stately show at the Beacon Theater,...

It's heartening that one of the hottest theater tickets of the season is a word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Running eight hours and absent of any special effects, Gatz is the polar opposite to Spider-Man and other sensationalist fare that permeates not just Broadway but often...

New Yorker events are always a treat, so when I heard Editor-in-Chief David Remnick was hosting a panel featuring the magazine's younger generation of cartoonists a couple weeks back, It was an easy invite to accept. The evening (pretty short at just over an hour) was made up mostly of...

I never quite understood the thrill of Blu-ray until I watched Criterion's new release of Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour. The film made an indelible impression on me when I saw it as a teenager and fueled my exploration of the director's more absurd gem's, including The Discreet Charm of...

Identity is at the heart of two superb but very different plays currently running off-Broadway: Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One. The former was first performed in Johannesburg, South Africa more than 50 years ago, which was a decade before the playwright of the latter...

Jeff Mangum's big return to New York the other week followed sold-out sets at last year's All Tomorrow's Parties. Adding to the anticipation, Mangum aka Neutral Milk Hotel hasn't actively toured in over a decade, leaving his fans to replay In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as they strung together...

My main experience with Porgy and Bess has been listening to the Miles Davis album. I first came across it soon after discovering Miles early in high school and like many of his albums, I can pick it up after years absence and hear something new.

Being so familiar...

I'm not sure what my expectations were when I went to Southwest Virginia for a week a few months back. The only part of Virginia I had glimpsed before was Arlington, which, as one native told me, is worlds away from the sliver of the state that's closer to Tennessee,...

It's that time of year again. You've probably done most of your holiday shopping, but for those procrastinators, here's a collection of my favorite gifts I've received this year. From epic CD and DVD collections to cool little gadgets, it's been a good year for both pop and high culture....