Editor's Message
All Aboard!
Don’t blink. You may have missed another Rail event. Our most dazzling art show, “Made in Brooklyn: Selection 1,” curated by our publisher, Phong Bui, just closed in early March. It was capped off with a festive evening of readings and Cuban music. That came in the wake of a quiet lively reading we sponsored in late February by poet D. Nurkse, who’s interviewed elsewhere in this issue. Sprinkled throughout these pages, you’ll also find announcements of an NYU panel on the arts and neighborhood change that we’re involved wit, and of a regular reading series, organized by our forceful new fiction editor, Donald Breckenridge, that we’ll be holding starting in May as the main branch of the Brookyln Public Library. Check ‘em out, they’re all great events.
And be sure to stop by our revamped website, www.brooklynrail.org, a product of the prowess and handiwork of our stalwarts Michael Bubb, Amelia Hennighausen and Beth Rosenberg. There you can find your back issues, announcements of upcoming events, and the real nitty gritty, like our mission statement. Interactively speaking, we’d also like to hear more from you, the reader. By all means, feel free to write us a letter and let us know how the Rail makes you feel—angry, dizzy, and gleeful are three of many possible responses.
And one more note of thanks: to Amelia, our designer (etc.) extraordinaire, for making this issue—and all of the much, much more that we’re doing—happen… She rules.
T. Hamm
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
From March to May
By Tatiana TrouvéSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
In March 2020, the world began to close its doors, first in China, then in Italy… Everywhere, uncertainty was growing. In France on March 15, 2020, the day before what would later be called the first confinement began, the front page of the newspaper Libération was headlined: "Coronavirus: Le jour d’avant” (Coronavirus: The day before). This uneasy title is a reference to Nicholas Meyer's film The Day After. A question emerged from this mirroring game: when would be the day after? And, above all, what would that day be like?
A Message from the Publisher
River Rail Puerto Rico | Publisher's Message
We are all artists, writers, poets, musicians, revolutionaries, and above all, we are all a million things in-between life’s multitude of experiences with strength and dignity.
8. March 4, 1955, Broadway just above West 52nd Street
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2022 | The Miraculous
A quintet (sax, trumpet, piano, bass, drums) led by a legendary saxophonist is booked for two nights at a midtown jazz club. The first evening gets off to a bad start when the piano player, who has a long history of alcoholism and mental health problems, tells the sax player, who himself has struggled with heroin addiction, “You ain’t playing shit no more.”
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards’s Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music
By George GrellaJUNE 2023 | Music
It is absolutely a measure of his importance and achievement as a musician that a major publisher has brought out this book, Henry Threadgill’s autobiography (written with Brent Hayes Edwards in a fluid and engrossing style close to that of an oral history). Jazz in general is not a subject the big publishers are interested in, much less for someone like Threadgill who has been a leader in the avant-garde for decades.
