In the 1980s and early ’90s, Burlington craftsman and entrepreneur Steve Conant kept in his car a small brass thermometer he’d picked up at a garage sale or antique store. By then, Conant already had a reputation around the Queen City for refurbishing and selling old metal goods and crafting the funky, unique light fixtures…
Underhill engineer and Navy vet worked for Oscar Meyer, Frito-Lay and Wyeth Nutrition
Professional horseman started his long ride on Rose Street in Burlington
Some folks really went all in this Halloween. Twenty-two divers gathered over the weekend at Perkins Pier in Burlington to jump into Lake Champlain and carve a pumpkin — underwater. Donning wetsuits and oxygen tanks, the competitors headed into the depths with hollowed-out gourds and came up with their spookiest creations. The only rule? Stay…
Last week, Sam Markowski pulled his pickup truck into a field where he once planted 10 acres of feed corn. Instead of neat rows of corn stalks, however, thousands of dark green hemp plants dotted the landscape. Markowski, wearing a fleece and a baseball cap bearing the name of his family’s excavation company, threaded his…
Dear Reverend, I met this girl at a bar, and a few days later we went on a date. After dinner, we went to my house for a few drinks. We fooled around for a while, and not long after we started to have sex, she yelled: “Punch me!” I got really uncomfortable and froze…
In his introduction to the Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes translation of the I Ching, psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “Even to the most biased eye, it is obvious that this book represents one long admonition to careful scrutiny of one’s own character, attitude, and motives.” For Essex Junction poet Anna Blackmer, that scrutiny has taken…
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In his novel Zone One, Scorpio author Colson Whitehead writes, “A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.” He means it in the worst sense possible: the emergence of the ugly beast who had been hiding behind social niceties. But I’m going to twist his meme for my own purposes.…
Chris Cole is used to hocking trucks, fuel pumps, filing cabinets and office chairs. As commissioner of the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services, he’s responsible for selling off the state’s surplus property. “We’re the Kmart for state government,” Cole said. These days, he has a new line of products on his shelves: hundreds…
One of Vermont’s strangest years on record was 1816. It was also one of the coldest. That year the state endured snowstorms in June and a frost every month. The skies were perpetually dark, and locals reported everything from failed crops to mysterious lights. Those dire and seemingly inexplicable oddities led some to suspect supernatural…
Possibly the biggest trend in commuting right now? Listening to stories of chills and mayhem via our phones. It’s been five years since Sarah Koenig reshaped true-crime reporting with her podcast Serial, whose imitators are legion. The wildly popular My Favorite Murder, in which two comedians discuss killings, netted its makers a high-profile book deal.…
Ben Patton is an old soul. Clad in trousers and a fine shirt, the singer-songwriter has a dapper appearance and genteel, deliberated cadence reminiscent of a bygone time and place. He almost comes off like a character from a golden-era Hollywood drama. His eloquence is matched only by his humbleness. The 36-year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist…
The first time I ever heard the name Dolemite, it was uttered by Bill Murray in a riff from Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 Broken Flowers. But Jerry Seinfeld is responsible for me finally finding out who Dolemite was. And for bringing a reanimated Eddie Murphy back from wherever he’s been nursing his wounded ego for the…
At a recent rehearsal for an upcoming performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the energy and focus were palpable. In the small South Burlington studio, voice teacher and soprano Sarah Cullins observed closely as three soloists, singing the parts of Pamina, Tamino and Sarastro, sang a trio to pianist Mary Jane Austin’s direction…
Soundfrights 2: Double Tap Given how Halloween party planners and music makers like to spread out the hellish holiday for as long as (in)humanly possible, last week’s petrifying preview of evildoings on the local music scene needed a sequel — especially because Halloween, October 31, falls within this week’s issue. So, as promised last week,…
“It’s been a gorgeous fall, hasn’t it?” My customer, Jane Gembart, was conversing with me from the shotgun seat of my taxi. She was easy on the eyes, but I mostly managed to keep mine on the road. When I did glance over, I noticed that her wavy, gray-streaked hair was fashioned into two loosely…
(Self-released, digital) From the bowels of hell come Nechromancer, Vermont’s only goth-IBM band. IBM stands for industrial body music, a particularly dark strain of electronica that emerged in the 1980s. As I wrote in my review of the band’s 2017 debut, Intersect, “If Fangtasia, the fictitious vampire nightclub on HBO’s ‘True Blood’ had a house…
It started with rattling doors and shaking beds. Then Jennifer Dunbar smelled smoke and heard heavy footsteps when no one else was home. Twice, when she was sleeping, she was pushed into her pillow until she couldn’t breathe. She moved to a different bedroom. Then she saw the little boy in a white, puffy-sleeved shirt…
(Big Mo Records, CD, digital) For the last several years, Royalton singer-songwriter Alison Turner, aka Ali T, has been plying her trade around Vermont and the greater New England circuit. She’s carved out a niche playing intimate solo shows and made a name for herself with promising songwriting and no small amount of drive. Turner…
Mural Coincidence [Re “American Vandal”; “A Greta Thunberg Mural Is Defaced and Rebooted in Rutland,” October 23]: I couldn’t help but notice the strikingly similar mind-set and tactics shared by Burlington mural vandal Eric Maier and the unknown perpetrator who vandalized the Greta Thunberg mural in Rutland. At first glance, Maier, a self-described leftist,…
Sean Hunter Williams’ granite sculpture “Culmination” is an eight-foot-tall cluster of forms that suggests the silhouette of a city rising from a quarry. It’s the newest addition to Barre’s Art Stroll, which offers to strollers an outdoor collection of granite works. Williams’ four-sided sculpture is composed of domes and spires reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques,…
Twenty cyclists careened down a paved pathway under a canopy of yellow foliage last Friday. In a parade-like procession, the riders pedaled over speed bumps and past a fountain and a pond, drawing attention from locals in Montréal’s Parc La Fontaine. “Bixi boys, Bixi ladies!” a man riding a red moped exclaimed in a thick…
Failed Oscar bait is a genre unto itself — just ask the hosts of the podcast This Had Oscar Buzz. The Current War could be the quintessential example of a movie engineered for glories it probably won’t obtain. Helmed by a Sundance Film Festival darling (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl),…
The endlessly witty Beatrice and Benedick in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing have taught decades of Hollywood screenwriters how to use bickering as prelude to a swoon. Setting the play in the 1940s suits these precursors of Hepburn and Tracy, and the Middlebury Actors Workshop production does a hilarious job of exploding their romantic…
The first time I ate at Stoke Ramen Bar in Waitsfield, I showed up for a late lunch and took a seat at the bar. Chef Colby Miller, who works in an open kitchen, walked over to talk to me. As I considered building my own ramen bowl, he suggested an alternative: On my inaugural…
Bundled in layers for the 50-degree weather, vendors carefully stacked bins of leftover delicata squash and beets, packed up unsold pastries, and disassembled their tents. It was a classic farmers market scene — and the final one of the season at Burlington’s market on Saturday, October 26. But, as the vendors reassured curious customers throughout…
The Vermont Cheese Council has announced that seven Vermont producers won medals at the World Cheese Awards, judged on October 18 in Bergamo, Italy. Gold medals were awarded to Bayley Hazen Blue and Moses Sleeper from Greensboro’s Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm. Other entries from Jasper Hill received silver and bronze medals. Parish Hill Creamery…
About a year after opening Mark BBQ in Essex Junction, chef-owner Darrell Langworthy will launch a second restaurant in the same building. Heart n Soul by Mark BBQ will open in December at 34 Park Street, he said. Heart n Soul will serve “inspired comfort food,” including chicken-fried steak, fried chicken, crab cakes and a…
