BY SCOTT STIFFLER  | Someone once said,” observes artist Richard Baumann, “that landscape painting is all about loss and memory.” A project that began in 1993, it took only two decades for many of the West Village and Lower Manhattan shops depicted in Baumann’s oil paintings to go from neighborhood anchors to relics of a bygone read more here »

  BY TRAV S.D.  (travsd.wordpress.com)  |  If you’re at all like me, this Halloween season you’ll be asking the question: What are the best ape-related classic studio era horror films for me to watch, not including “King Kong” or its sequels “Son of Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young” — which are GIANT ape movies, a different species of horror film read more here »

CHANT MACABRE: SONGS FROM THE CRYPT It’s no wonder ghosts, ghouls and goblins haunt so much of mid-19th century music. A high mortality rate meant death was always lurking nearby — and when the time came for internment, a somber procession would ferry the coffin from parlor to graveyard. The Bond Street Euterpean Singing Society read more here »

Buran Theatre’s immersive style is sublime BY MARTIN DENTON  | The first Buran Theatre production I saw was “The House of Fitzcarraldo,” which had a brief but memorable run at the Brick in early 2012. We went to the opening night performance, which was sparsely attended because at that point few New Yorkers knew about Buran read more here »

Puppets, Pie and Penny Populate the Off-Off Boards BY TRAV S.D.(travsd.wordpress.com)  |  Much like schools, Downtown theaters seem to start their annual “year” in the autumn — often presenting their best and most interesting work in the crucial fall months when it’s no longer so warm that most people are recreating outdoors, and not yet read more here »

  BLOCKS NYC: 60’s FOLK ALBUM COVER HUNT Why go to all the trouble of gathering three buddies, crossing the pond, parking your white VW bug to the left of the frame and holding up traffic while crossing the street? There’s got to be an easier way to put your own stamp on an iconic read more here »

Mickle’s remake a rare horror film for adults BY SEAN EGAN  | Jim Mickle’s newest feature, “We Are What We Are,” is a strange and contradictory beast. Though ostensibly a horror movie, one could mistakenly take the film for just another dark family drama — at least its first half. While technically a remake of Mexican read more here »

INDIA MUSIC WEEK When they’re not adding wax to that 2 million-plus library of recordings, the ARChive of Contemporary Music is cooking up new ways to collect records. The Downtown non-profit can already lay claim to having the world’s largest collection of popular music — and on Oct. 6, ARC hopes to secure a place read more here »

Seven-night gig’s ‘more of the same’ hardly seems like enough BY SCOTT STIFFLER  |  They haven’t given us any new studio tracks since 2003’s “Everything Must Go” — but the sun isn’t even close to setting on the sleek, sharp, intellectually stimulating band that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen named for an instrument of pleasure read more here »

Axe fanatic Lydon, on what strums his strings  BY MICHAEL LYDON (michaelydon.com) | Guitar players are all a little nuts — I know, I’m one myself. We love our axes, as we call them, and we’re proud of their history that stretches back to the cithara of ancient Greece. We dream of the day when read more here »