Seth Rogovoy

This week’s cultural highlights in our region include new arts exhibitions, a new BSO online program, a tribute to Jerry Garcia, a new broadcast live from Club Helsinki Hudson, and a whole lot more.

This is the last weekend to view an important, provocative, and beautiful exhibition of photography by four emerging Black artists whose work deals with current cultural narratives and the fight for civil rights. Called “Solidarity,” the show at Sohn Fine Art Gallery in Lenox, Mass., includes works by Jacob Borden, Yannis Davy Guibinga, Pops Peterson, and Shawn Theodore.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include a cutting-edge sound installation, a jazz piano genius, a new look at Elvis Presley … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Bach, Handel, and Nathaniel Dett … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include a site-specific sound installation, chamber music, Celtic music, folk-pop, Beethoven … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include virtual theater, Iraqi jazz, a site-specific sound installation, a piano recital and a whole lot more.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival has finally released the first production of its 2020 season on Audible. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Emmy, Grammy, and six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald as Blanche DuBois, is now available to stream via Audible; more plays will be released in upcoming weeks.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include chamber music, virtual theater, a site-specific sound installation, jazz fusion … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include a sound installation, chamber music, literary readings, dramatic readings, more chamber music … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include visual art, online theater, a live screening of a classic rock music documentary, chamber music … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include virtual theater, online orchestral music, a tribute to the Grateful Dead, a real-life in-person Halloween burlesque show … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include folk-rock, chamber music, vocal music, organ jazz … plus a whole lot more…

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include indie-pop, theater, chamber music, jazz … plus a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include indie-pop, theater, art, chamber music, jazz … plus a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include indie-pop, folk, plywood paintings, sculpture … plus a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include roots-music, folk, Baroque, jazz, classical, and a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include R&B, gospel, roots-music, outdoor dance, art, and a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include chamber music, orchestral music, experimental movement, jazz-funk, choral music, and a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include a Broadway cabaret, roots-music, folk-rock, art openings, literary events, plus a whole lot more.

The weekend’s cultural highlights in our region include spaced-out funk, 20th century classical, dance, visual artists, show tunes …. plus a whole lot more

The weekend’s cultural highlights in our region include roots music, folk-rock, contemporary classical, comedy, the songs of Rodgers & Hammerstein, plus a whole lot more.

This week’s cultural highlights include indie-rock legends, new music, old music, jazz, plus a whole lot more.

This week’s cultural highlights in our region include avant garde music, chamber music, Americana, contemporary art, plus a whole lot more.

The cultural highlights of this weekend, streaming and in real life, include string quartets, folk-rock, Beethoven, a singing family, and a whole lot more.

On Saturday night, MASS MoCA in North Adams will host composer-performer Treya Lam in a re-imagined concert courtyard that takes advantage of an industrial roll-top garage door and adjacent gallery overlooking the brick-lined courtyard to reveal a new stage, dramatically floating 12 feet above the audience. Lam is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose cinematic songs and ethereal vocals are built on Nina Simone-inspired piano, meditative guitar and lush chamber arrangements. RIYL Norah Jones, Ani DiFranco, Nina Simone, and Kaki King.

Slowly but surely, things are loosening up, and there are indeed some openings and live cultural events beginning to take form in and around the region. A lot of thought has gone into most of these in terms of staying safe and enforcing social distancing requirements, so be sure to check details on the appropriate websites and, for my sake as well as yours, keep your masks on.

When Bob Dylan finally responded to the Swedish Academy that awarded him the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature with the required lecture, about six months after the fact, he did so with a rambling, recorded monologue that at its best detailed some of his literary and musical influences and at its worst was a parody of an academic lecture, regurgitating Cliff Notes-like commentary about “Moby-Dick,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Odyssey.” It was, in its own way, a very Dylanesque gesture.

I like mixed nuts. I don’t know how they do it, but someone has figured out the perfect ratio of different kinds of nuts – the best-tasting proportion of Brazil nuts to filberts, almonds, pecans, walnuts, cashews, and peanuts (technically not a tree nut but a legume). I love blindly reaching into a bowl of mixed nuts and coming up with a delightful, satisfying blend of varying flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes.

You hear it all the time from natives, expats, experts, know-it-alls, and blowhards: that such-and-such a city that you’re thinking of visiting isn’t what it used to be. It’s a mere shell of its former self. While it was once the coolest, hippest place to visit, where everything was a bargain and life was still authentic and you could sit at a café all day nursing your espresso and no one would bother you and you could blend in easily with the locals, now it has become overrun by tourists. It’s been ruined by the commercialism and gentrification that follows in their wake. There’s no more there there. It’s over. It’s so yesterday, so last year. Don’t go there.

I stumbled upon a Medium post the other day entitled “The Top 10 Signs You’re Really Cut Out to Be a Writer.” It caught my eye and I thought, sure, why not? So what if I’ve been at this thing for 40 years or so. So what if I’ve written and published literally thousands of articles, essays and reviews. So what if I’ve had two books published with a few more on the way. Isn’t it time, I thought to myself, to find out if I am really cut out for this work? How can I be sure I’ve made the right decision? Why not read the article and find out?

Back when I worked relatively full time as a rock critic, I used to joke that I wished I could just set up a live video feed from the nightclubs and concert halls that I frequently attended to review concerts so that I wouldn’t actually have to leave my house. So I wouldn’t actually have to be there.