Steve Erickson

4 days ago | gaycitynews.com | Steve Erickson

This month, Gay City News reviews the latest albums bi singer/actor Cynthia Erivo and trans singer/pianist Lucy Liyou. Cynthia Erivo | “I Forgive You” | Verve/Republic | June 6Even without last year’s release of “Wicked: Part 1,” in which she performed a duet with Ariana Grande on “Defying Gravity,” British singer Cynthia Erivo’s background in musical theater can’t be missed. Her voice reaches to the rafters.

5 days ago | slantmagazine.com | Steve Erickson

Pulp’s first single in over a decade, “Spike Island,” grapples with Jarvis Cocker’s mixed feelings about the song’s very existence. He reflects about the unhappiness that seeped into the band’s music after they hit it big in the mid ’90s: “I was heading for disaster/And then I turned back.” Yet he remains torn between rejecting the glare of the spotlight and feeling that “I was born to perform/It’s a calling.” It’s a hell of a way to reintroduce the Britpop icons.

2 weeks ago | richmondsentinel.ca | Steve Erickson |Steve Daniel

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — President Donald Trump green-lit disaster relief for eight states on Friday, assistance that some of the communities rocked by natural disasters have been waiting on for months. The major disaster declaration approvals allow Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas access to financial support through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Several states requested the aid in response to damage from a massive storm system in mid-March.

3 weeks ago | gaycitynews.com | Steve Erickson

“Love” works within a rigid format: its important scenes are two-handers. It’s built upon conversation, as its characters hash out their ideas about sex and relationships with each other. Lovely vistas of the Oslo harbor work as punctuation. (The first part of Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Love-Sex-Dreams” trilogy to get released in New York, “Sex” follows it next month and “Dreams” in September.) The danger of this construction is that it can feel mechanical.

3 weeks ago | richmondsentinel.ca | Steve Erickson |Steve Daniel

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to weaken limits on some harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water roughly a year after the Biden administration finalized the first-ever national standards. The Biden administration said last year the rules could reduce PFAS exposure for millions of people.