Holiday Interlude

You probably know this already, but Duke Ellington thought that 13 is a lucky number and thought that Friday the 13^th is a particularly lucky day.

I think he was right.

So to celebrate this particular Friday the 13^th right now in the Holiday Season, I refer you to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s version of The Nutcracker Suite, which if you don’t own already you should run out and get a copy right now. 

In the meantime, here’s a video of Wynton Marsalis and I’m guessing it has to be the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra doing the overture.  


There are plenty of other viddies on the internets too, but you really want to get the Duke’s recording.

Happy Friday the 13^th!

Amandla Madiba

Been thinking about Mandela a lot the last few days (I think everyone has been thinking a lot about Mandela the last few days).

Photo 1961, Eli Weinberg

One of those people who has done more important work, more capably, more generously, more courageously, persistently, than it's even really possible for me to fathom.  It's scarcely original to say so these days, but I feel tremendously blessed to have been able to share time on the planet with him.

Thank you Tata.

Press Pause

Rally beard still going (for now). 

Among the Frenzied Return to Life After London, this weekend's hosting of out of town friends, including trips to Broadway to see No Man's Land, and Brooklyn to see the amazing Streb, and getting ready for T-Day next weekend, an afternoon pause in the 'boken to listen to Lucius, YLT, and Zappa, make leftovers into a meal, and read about the Dylan portraits we saw on Tuesday at the National Portrait Gallery.

Necessary.

Sad Song

I might have more to say about this later, but for now suffice to say what I've said before: I love the man and his work. He'll be more than missed.



Have been listening to Lou and Lou-related tunes all day.  Put on Berlin first thing this morning, and even though I knew it was coming, when I got to this song I was stopped in my tracks.  This performance might not be the cleanest of all time (who wants clean?), but it was recorded in the city they named the record after, and I like it.  (Thanks crazyritchie, whoever you are.)

Too young, to be sure.  But if it can be said of anyone, Lou Reed LIVED.  And if we want to take him at his word when he says "My week beats your year" then he lived to be well over 3,600 years old.  Methuselah can suck it.

Goodbye Lou.

Banksy in Chelsea

We're a few days into Banksy's New York residency.  I haven't been too engaged in the Painter Chase, but this piece is so close to Chome that I hunted it down.

Worth a look.  As all the press mentions, his pieces tend not to last too long before other taggers get to it.  If you review those press and online items, you'll notice that many of the images are different from each other in content as well as perspective: more or less in the way of images and verbiage, depending on when the taggers and photographers got to the spot.  You can see in the shot above that someone (who? a sympatico fellow tagger? one of the nearby gallerists?  Banksy himself?) has recently gone over "THIS IS MY NEW YORK ACCENT" to reinforce it, so that it is complete on the surface, above the other tags, at least for a little while on Friday morning.

And then there's the (slightly) greater context.  Again, this surface - like most un- or semi-sanctioned street art canvases - is continually evolving.  Some 'vandalizing' Banksy's attention-getting 'vandalism'; a Bronx record label making use of the attention; someone calling on (challenging?) Banksy to make use of his newly declared accent to use the megaphone of the attention to, you know, come out and say something; another stencil down left wondering out loud if the emperor's wardrobe is really all that impressive.  This could go on for a while.

What do you think?  Important urban art?  Commentary on the Gallery District/the Great New York Art Scene (now polished and sanitized for your protection and convenience!)?  A damn squit?

Look closer.  And keep looking - we should be getting more of these all month all over the city.

For all Intents and Purposes...

October begins tonight.

The Great Butter Slide of American Culture

Article in the Times about a drop in Arts Attendance in America.

Theater takes the brunt and "straight plays" (also known as "plays") are worst of all, attendance having dropped 33% in the last 10 years.

"At the end of the day, I’m not troubled by it."

No no, of course not, executive director of the American Theater Wing. Everything's fine; nothing to see here; move along...

photo c 1928, Man Ray

RAGE

Sesame Street goes Upstate

This has been around for a few months, but I just ran across it recently.  Of course I'm behind on most things: it's a problem.  But in this case I feel more or less off the hook, in that, having no children and not likely to become a parent anytime soon, I don't feel much responsibility to keep up with the details of kid's TV.  But this is significant on a few levels, so I was impressed when I found out about it.

Meet Alex, a new character on Sesame Street (or at least an online version of Sesame Street) whose father is in jail.  It says something pretty important about the World We Live In that this platform is necessary – as this Pew Research article mentions, some 2.7 million American children currently have a parent in jail or prison.  That would be 3.6% of American children with an incarcerated parent.  Incarcerated, one might add, in a correctional system that is arguably ineffective, weighed down by misguided drug laws, and inescapably, profoundly, maddeningly racist and classist.  Oh, and well nigh devoid of any noticeable corrective element.

But this piece is for the kids.  And of course Sesame Street being Sesame Street, they find a way to deal with this unbelievably tough-to-even-wrap-your-mind-around topic with not just kindness and sensitivity, but with a "did they just pull that off?" sense of humor.

“What’s ‘carcerated,’ and why was your dad in it?”

Well played, Children's Television Workshop.  Well played.

'Prison-Industrial Complex' is one of those terms that rubs me kind of wrong, being that too clever for its own good brand of inflammatory.  But America is out of balance - way out of balance - in the way we handle corrections, and the penal system is so seriously in need of reform that I'm willing to accept the provocation.

More materials and more video is on the Little Kids/Big Problems section of the Sesame Street website.

Hobson Haiku (for Arthur)

There are three books - ah!

When I die, please bring them back

to the library

A Modest Proposal

Because that would, you know, totally work.

Courtesy of Michael Stipe's Tumblr.

Another Self-Portrait

Oh, and here's an interesting article from The Guardian about the newest installment of The Bootleg Series.  The most notorious so-called 'bad' Dylan album is getting deluxe treatment.

Photo from the Deluxe Edition - photographer unknown (to me)

Whatever you think of the original Self Portrait (and you can be forgiven and will never walk alone if you, umm, don't much care for it), you'll probably want to give this collection a chance.  I just listened to a stream of part of it - definitely some worthwhile stuff there: simpler arrangements of material from the Self Portrait/New Morning era, some demos, some live Isle of Wight tracks.  Worth shelling out the bucks for the full 4-disc version?  Reckon that depends on your level of interest.  But I'm happy for even still yet another look behind the scenes at the ideas and processes going on in that (or pretty much any) era of this particular song and dance man.

Still sort of wish his show at Pier A Park last month had been better...

More from Above Oak Bluffs

For the Ultimate Get Out of Town weekend, we're staying in town.  Well, two towns I suppose, as we'll split our time between NYC and the 'boken.

We ran up to this long weekend long celebration of Labor with a trip to Martha's Vineyard.  Land of presidential retreats and old-school Yankees; beaches and bluffs and whaling wealth still evident in the gorgeous houses of the captains and ship-owners; wasps of the sun-dressed and stinging varieties fill the air.


Also kites.

Above Oak Bluffs

Do Not Mourn

Maxwell's
CBGB
The Bottom Line
Mudd Club
The (original) Knitting Factory
The (original) Kitchen
The (original) Cutting Room
Brownie's
The (real) Birdland
The Five Spot
Nada con Todo
The (real) Fillmore East
The Bouwerie Lane Theater
The (original/real/jury's still out) Bowery Poetry Club
Gerde's Folk City
Max's Kansas City
Franklin Furnace
Tramps
The Limelight

Thinking of the last days of Maxwell's and night falling on Hoboken, I made up a quick, off-the-cuff, extremely incomplete list of some of the performance spaces in the area that are no more.
And so it goes...

Maxwell's Closing Night Block Party

I didn't get to all those places; some were gone before I ever made it here.  But I went to some of them quite a bit, and performed in a few.  And of course, New York/New Jersey is not alone in seeing this kind of transition: in my one-time-home-and-still-close-to-my-heart city of Boston, I can think of 2 or 3 places just in Kenmore Square.

This is what happens.  And it breaks your heart.  But then you have to put your heart back together, get up and find/build new spaces and make new work.

I think that's pretty much it.

Mott the Wilco

Ian Hunter, Warren Haynes, and My Morning Jacket join Wilco for "All the Young Dudes"

Rocking out ensued.

To the Prince of Cambridge

Because, why not?

4th of July (weekend) Madison Square Park

Before this "Hundred and Ball Sweat degrees" heatwave, it was, well, still really hot.

To get through it last weekend, we were back in the Old Country.  The weekend before that, we Honored America by sticking around and watching fireworks.  And on Sunday, I took a stroll to the park and had a beer and read the paper, then Cory joined in and we had concretes.

 Sondheim and Chicago vied for stupid puns to be included in the title of this post.  Instead, I just went with a decidedly post-Sandy Springsteen reference.

A fine afternoon by the Shack.

The Sandcastle Metaphor

Beautiful, Brilliant, Brutal.

Chad Wright's Master Plan series.

The Sandcastle Metaphor gets the (Sub)Urban Planning treatment.

Development, speculation, sprawl, environmental shifts, child's play, the American Dream.

Thanks to Colossal, which also has a good piece about the Xu Bing exhibit at Mass MoCA.

As it happens, Cory and I had our Fancy Wilco Dinner at Solid Sound a couple weeks ago in that room under those giant Phoenix sculptures.  But that's another box of wine...

Tyrannosaurus Mets

Story Pirates at Solid Sound.

Solid Sound

Ad to Joy

Maybe you're not susceptible to flash mobs.

If, however, you are a member of that portion of the population who occasionally enjoy life, you may wish to spend 5 minutes and 40 seconds viewing and listening to the following:



As far as I can tell, it is some kind of extended promo for a Catalan bank.

I don't think I care.

What Else Is to be Done?

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.” — Hermann Hesse

Gezi Park

This video is disturbing as can be, as is a lot of what's going on in Turkey. A friend of Cory's in Istanbul also reminds us that there is a real opportunity for positive developments too. She writes:

"it is nuts but it is also so exciting. we have been so depressed thinking nothing could be done about the spiraling hell..and now! so in general we are happy. just hope it causes some real changes." 

Keep an eye and some focus on that part of the world, please.

Sad, and then More Sad

Maxwell's is closing.  It's surreal.  For all the changes that have happened in Hoboken, Maxwell's was one place I was sure would endure, would fight the good fight until the tolling of the final bell.

A lot is happening in this crazy world, but right now, it all takes a back seat to the moment of silence we need to respect for this imminent loss.

I get it.  The people who make Maxwell's Maxwell's are moving on, going where the life is, where the ground is still fertile for the kind of creativity that once grew in the rotting wood of the waterfront.  And it's true that the green spaces and some of the restaurants are nice, but the condos have taken more than they have given, and we'll be biting back tears for a while.

The list of acts I've seen perform at this temple, four blocks from my home, over the last I don't even want to say how many years, includes, among others:

Alex Chilton
Nels Cline
The Baseball Project
Bonnie Prince Billy
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Harvey Sid Fisher
Magnetic Fields
Mission of Burma
Roy Loney
New Pornographers
Kurt Vile
Doug Gillard

And, yes, The Feelies, Richard Barone, Spent, and of course Yo La Tengo.

We've lost other clubs, and theaters, and record stores and book stores and restaurants and coffee shops and somehow we go on.  But it's driving me a little insane that the yuppies are driving out what a hurricane couldn't budge.  Next month.

I feel like gravity has been revoked.

Gray Day in Chelsea

The precursor to the holiday weekend is a gray and rainy one.  

To add to the celebration-worthiness, it's also Bob Dylan's birthday.  The good people at Slate added to the festivities with this nifty map with a pin on (they claim) every location Dylan mentions in any of his songs.  There is definitely some fun to be had playing with that.

If you zoom way in on the NYC area of the map, you'll eventually land on this location, where he claims in this great song, that he wrote this other, even greater, song.

[There is some vintage video and some interesting lyric changes in that live version of Sara linked above.  In case you are interested in that kind of thing.]

Took that shot in front of one of our favorite coffee shops.  Then turned west and took this shot of an even bigger, if less historic, proclamation of Chelsea.

Have a good Memorial Day weekend, everybody.  And happy birthday Bob.

We Are All Bradley Manning

Daniel Ellsberg

I was the Bradley Manning of my day. In 1971 I too faced life (115 years) in prison for exposing classified government lies and crimes. President Obama says “the Ellsberg material was classified on a different basis.” True. The Pentagon Papers were not Secret like the Wikileaks revelations, they were all marked Top Secret—Sensitive.

Ultimately all charges in my case were dropped because of criminal governmental misconduct toward me during my proceedings. Exactly the same outcome should occur now, in light of the criminal conditions of Manning’s confinement for the last six months.

From: I Am Bradley Manning

Monday Remedy

Say you had a busy weekend.  Say you had a houseguest (a great one!), plus a more-than-usually satisfying audition you helped a friend with, and an art opening, followed by going to a show at Lincoln Center, and then Sunday you played tennis in Central Park and then gave the final performance of the show you were in, then met friends and went to another show from the same festival your show was a part of, then saw another out of town guest.

Of course, that's just one way to have a busy weekend.  You probably have your own ways of doing it.

Then on Monday you might go back to the office or the shop or the salt mine or wherever you work.  You're feeling ok, but you've been beating back a cold and maybe you didn't really get as much sleep as you'd have liked and you haven't had a chance to rest rest for a while, so you have a perfectly ok day and you get a lot done, but you don't really click into gear. 

But on the way home you might stop by that fancy grocery on the corner which for some reason gives you a really good price on shiitake mushrooms.  So before your girlfriend comes home, you mince up some garlic and onion and put it in a bowl with oil and a Malaysian spice blend (which may or may not have been created by the artist who made the show you went to on Saturday) of turmeric, cumin, cayenne, coriander, cinnamon, and some other herbs and goodies, plus a few dashes of that insanely spicy naga jolokia sauce you got when you were in the Keys, and you marinate the chicken breast you brought out of the freezer this morning in the mix.  Then you decompress from the day for a while, which is nice.  And the gal comes home and you let her do her own decompression while you go back in the kitchen and put on some good music and whip up some wild rice and chop those shiitakes into strips, sear and stir fry the chicken and then put in the mushroom strips, and you finish it off with a shot of liquid aminos and give one last stir, serve on a bed of greens and top with crumbled bleu cheese and dressing.

I'm calling that a remedy to a Mediocre Monday.

Plus we got to watch the premier of a very cool show that Cory worked on!

What Is To Be Done?

There’s nothing to be done but to go on restating the importance of this kind of courage, and to try to make sure that these oppressed individuals — Ai Weiwei, the members of Pussy Riot, Hamza Kashgari — are seen for what they are: men and women standing on the front line of liberty. How to do this? Sign the petitions against their treatment, join the protests. Speak up. Every little bit counts.

From Salman Rushdie's OpEd in today's Times

Hamza Kashgari, uncredited photo

Are you there world? It's me, Friday.

Home in Hoboken after a long week, and a good long night of moviegoing at the Tribeca Film Festival, listening to some Caroline Shaw and sinking into not-unpleasant exhaustion.

Saw a program of documentary shorts - fantastic, love this fest if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) than that I get a chance to see things like this instead of just making a stray comment while watching some awards show that "we ought to go see things like that."

Then hustled over to another theater and watched Adult World, which was fun and funny as hell (and I'm not one to give an automatic nod to the latest member of the Roberts Dynasty).

Tomorrow is an appointment in the morning, followed by I hope another film or two, followed by a performance of East Side Stories.  Sunday is a breakfast/rehearsal date, then more movies, then another show.  And then a week of work, auditions, rehearsal, and performances.  Nobody ever said a weekend had to be restful.

Boston

One of my homes.  Not the one I live in today, but one where I lived for 6+ years, and which still holds a more-than-little piece of my heart.

Where Monday happened.

All my friends are ok, as far as I can tell, none of them were in the vicinity.  Most were at work (while they're proud of Patriots' Day up there, they still don't usually give you the day off unless you managed to score Red Sox tickets), a few were at home.  The physical therapist who helped me in the wake of surgery last year qualified for the Marathon, but opted not to run it this year.

Bostonians in general have been dealing with it amazingly, but not surprisingly.  The news outlets have rightly referred to their heroism, generosity, fearlessness, and humanity.

And I'm not going to dwell on the typical media sensationalizing of tragedy (and I'm certainly not going to dignify crap like this with a response)

What I will spend a little bit of time on are a couple pieces that talk about resilience, toughness, and not giving into the fear that, by definition, feeds terrorism.  Here’s one, from cryptographer and security maven Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic. It’s a good reminder that we get to choose how to react (or overreact) to these horrors, and that giving into our fear is neither necessary nor useful.

We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That's the very definition of news: something that is unusual -- in this case, something that almost never happens

And then this one from Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and a bunch of other Boston-centric work.  I like that this piece confronts Boston's blemishes (which is too weak a word; maybe I should say Boston’s glaring flaws) directly, but wraps them in the resiliency we all can be proud of.

Trust me, we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won’t cancel next year’s marathon. We won’t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we’ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives.

There’s been a lot of Boston love going on in the media, including some standouts in the sphere of late night comedy, and even the Yankees got in on it, much to their credit (and – you know this – I do not like to give the Yankees credit for anything, but damn, they deserve it for that.)





Also published in The Atlantic, with the caption: A sign saying "New York Loves Boston" is projected on the facade of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in New York, late on April 15, 2013, hours after the bombings of the Boston Marathon. The work was done by the Illuminator, a guerrilla projection van that was a project of Occupy Wall Street, and members of the the OWS Light Brigade. (© Lucky Tran, The Illuminator collective)

Do what you do. Make the things you make. Definitely keep up with any activist work you're doing.  And send a little love and healing mojo to the Hub.

Oh, and my show opens tomorrow night.

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Memories of English lefties adapting Maggie's Farm as a response to/indictment of Margaret Thatcher sent me down the Dylan rabbit hole once again. 

More on Baroness Thatcher later, but for now, shifting from one quicksilver song to another, I now pose the following query:

Was Dylan writing about someone in particular in the song Queen Jane Approximately?  I got pulled into the song (again) when listening to "Hwy 61 Revisited" the other day.  There's certainly no need to associate it with any particular person in the flesh & blood universe, but I wonder...

I've never held much truck with the notion that it was about Joan Baez.

The idea that it's about literal Queen Jane Seymour has struck me as even more farfetched, though there's something vaguely interesting about thinking that the "smell of roses" has something to do with the War of the Roses, and that he was being extra special clever referring to "all her children" starting to resent her (when she died of complications from the birth of her only child.)

Naaaaah, that's crazy talk.


I have thought that it might have more than a little to do with Edie Sedgwick.

But I am intrigued by the notion I came across while scouring the internets the other day that it might not be this Factory Girl, but actually the Boy who started the Factory, Andy Warhol himself, who's being addressed in the song.  I picked up the idea from one of the sites out there (cheese factories themselves, for the most part) devoted to picking apart song meanings, with a guy calling himself LuckyTown making the case.  Further steps down the rabbit hole led me to this interview Nora Ephron did with Dylan around the time the song came out - it is vintage Bob being random and chaotic and anything but serious or straightforward, but it does contain the quip "Queen Jane is a man."  And he offers this mini rant on art and accessibility:

Great paintings shouldn't be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men's rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it's happening is on radio and records, that's where people hang out. You can't see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That's not art. That's a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that's in tune with what's happening. It's not in book form, it's not on the stage. All this art they've been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn't make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It's not the bomb that has to go, man, it's the museums.

SO - is it possible that this is an offer/invitation to the artist of plastic (inevitable) repetition who ran the Factory where his kinda sorta girlfriend spent a lot of her time?

When your mother sends back all your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all of your creations
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
And all of your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned
Have died in battle or in vain
And you're sick of all this repetition
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Oh when all of your advisers heave their plastic
At your feet to convince you of your pain
Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all of the bandits that you turn your other cheek to
All lay down their bandanas and complain
And you want somebody you don't have to speak to
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?
Ah, Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Just askin'.

Long Week

Which included Cory's birthday, and the birth of this little one.

And now there's a little extra-special Friday-ness in the air.

Off to rehearsal.  Have a good weekend.

Steubenville

OK

It’s not ok

it’s so not ok

it wasn’t ok to do

and it wasn’t ok to take pictures of

and talk about

and text about

and brag about

and joke about

It’s not ok

that you thought it was ok

That you thought it was just

     a thing that people do

That it kind of is a thing that people do

That you thought it was funny

That you thought it would go away

That you thought you would get away with it

That you didn’t really think at all.

It’s not ok this happened.

It’s not ok, ok?

It’s not ok

You’ll be ok

You won’t be ok

It won’t be ok

     for a while

Wheels turn and things are set in motion

And then it’s too late

and it’s not ok.

It’s not ok that –

     OK – THAT –

what happened

didn’t just happen to happen.

It happens not to be ok

that it ever happens.

And it happens ever.

Because if it didn’t happen

if this thing that shouldn’t happen

     didn’t happen

you wouldn’t have taken pictures

and shared them

and told jokes

and expected to be excepted

from accepting the attention

to your unacceptable attentions.

It’s not ok that you expected

her to accept it

took exception to the suggestion

that it might not go away.

It’s not ok.

We shudder as the shutters shut

and tellers tell of promise cut

     off

But I can think of something else to cut off.

And others say it’ll be ok

you’ll be ok.

And you will,

You’ll be ok, you’ll even play

but the playing field won’t be level.

Not for a while.

Not by a long shot

or a wide shot

or a tight shot

a close-up

that you share

     Why would you share that

     Other than that that’s done?

            that’s

            what’s

            done.

And what’s ok about that?

And at the end of the carnival

we look back at the video

and the cotton candy may make us sick

some of the rides turned faster than we thought

didn’t turn out how we thought

turned into something

     not a carnival at all

     something not ok

And I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced

by the fact that the wax figurines

     you thought you won

     turned out to be flesh and blood.

On the other hand

You should have known

     You did know

     You knew

It wasn’t ok

It isn’t ok

You’ll be ok

She’ll be ok

Actually

She won’t be ok

She’ll be better.