Late last year, songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Jeff Buckley emerged from New York’s underground cafe scene with Live At Sin-é, a four-song CD-5 capturing one sweltering night in the East Village. That recording was one sliver of sound taken from two year’s worth of innumerable solo electric performances. Now, Jeff Buckley is releasing his first full-length album, the ten-song Grace.Late last year, songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Jeff Buckley emerged from New York’s underground cafe scene with Live At Sin-é, a four-song CD-5 capturing one sweltering night in the East Village. That recording was one sliver of sound taken from two year’s worth of innumerable solo electric performances. Now, Jeff Buckley is releasing his first full-length album, the ten-song Grace.

Every spring the sidewalks, stoops, fence posts and fire escapes surrounding Washington Square blossom with eye-catching canvases, wild watercolors, still lifes and sculptures.

"Look out!" Two agile teens whiz by on skateboards across the cavernous hall. Club crawlers dance to funk music vibrating through the floor. The totally-tattooed man shows you his chest and then bares his soul. And a few dim-eyed, aging hipsters look like circus roustabouts as they smoke in the shadows before the urge to guzzle beer tugs them back to the bar.

As an early-morning light filters through scarlet and russet-colored trees, and a whisling autumn wind fills the air above Weir Farm with flickering, spiraling leaves, various local painters make their pilgramage to the top of the meandering Nod Hill Road to capture some of the scenes on canvas.

Anyone who ever wonders about the relationship between the artist's creative act and the vision of reality seen daily before his or her eyes has to only enter the old factor building near the seaport at 18 Marshal Street.

"Does anyone know what I'm supposed to be doing tonight?" The actor-monologist Spalding Gray walks tentatively out to center stage inside the Norwalk Community College theater Saturday night.

Poet Allen Ginsberg stood waiting in the wings on the downstairs stage at the Village Gate--one of a handful of city night spots that has an historic link to the oral tradition.

The poetically resonant dialogue of his plays alone mesmerizes audiences in theaters from Johannesburg to New Haven. And when his lithe figure appears at the doorway of the White Barn Theatre, many of the guests just stand motionless and send him admiring and fascinating stares.

Luka Bloom is a traveler, a nomad. It's no accident the Irish singer-songwriter's three albums have names inspired by geography or vehicles; they reflect the songs, which are linked by their sense of place and motion. Of course, Bloom has been a traveling kind of...