As Essential as Groceries

The title of this post is paraphrased from Dr. Fowler's paraphrasing of Amiri Bakara in the opening moments of this clip (with thanks to Poets and Writers Inc. for drawing attention to that video).



The clip has about 7 minutes of interview footage, and includes great perspective from Baraka on the importance of speaking and hearing poetry, as well as simply reading it off a page.  Early on, it also has this pearl of Truth:

The reason they cut the arts always is because the people that run the world don't want you to be conscious, because otherwise you'd resist. You couldn't possibly be living like we live if you understood what they were doing, you know, you'd fight them.  So the arts is always expendable.  Anything that makes people conscious of what the world is, and what it could be, is always expendable.

Baraka goes on in this interview to discuss how an artist needs to live and work on this earth, in this actual world, the physical universe of people and things, rather than retreating into an imaginary, idealized, self-constructed cave or tower, of ivory or any other color.

This world has plenty that is nearly uncontrovertibly craptastic in it [which, in case it's not obvious by now, is one of the most important reasons why art and poetry out loud are as essential as food].  But one of the things I'd argue is good about these internets is that, in addition to the cat videos and endless rants, you can find a trove of material at a moment's notice about Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and delve into a rabbit hole of your own devising.

For now, I'm leaving you with a couple clips of Baraka reading his work.  One, a relatively recent live performance video with Rob Brown, courtesy of The Sanctuary for Independent Media.



And this other, even more powerful and controversial (if that's possible) earlier poem - audio only, with a still photo - Black Art, with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Sonny Murray, Henry Grimes, and Louis Worrell.  Required listening.



Rest in Power.

Ave Atque Vale Phil Everly

I've found that it's fairly typical for people not to recognize the vast importance of the Everly Brothers to the history of 20th Century music.



It's reductive, but it might be useful to think of it this way: without the Everly Brothers, there would be no Beatles.  And without the Beatles... well, you can finish that sentence on your own.



Bye Bye Phil.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yo La Town Hall, or, Big Week, part three

Part three would properly be about the Steppenwolf production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we saw that Friday.  All I'm going to say about that right now is that it was brilliant, and quite a contrast to any Valentiny sentiment that lingered from the previous evening.

But this post is about the Yo La Tengo concert at Town Hall that Saturday.

They were incredible, of course.  They did kind of a Rust Never Sleeps-type show, with a mostly acoustic Side A set, and a louder electric Side B set [including two versions of Ohm, which continues to reveal its versatility layer by layer - on Fade, on the Fallon show, at their bookstore appearance].  Both were fantastic.  Love the new record, loved the show, love these guys and looking forward to seeing them again at Solid Sound in June.

Sadly, that Jimmy Fallon link no longer takes you to an active video of their performance.  So to make up for that, here are two videos YLT have graciously made available on the internets.

First, Ohm:

And this one, for I'll be Around has to be one of my favorite viddies out there right now.

Les Miserahahahahahaaaaaa!!!

Spoiler Alert(?) You may not want to watch this if you haven't seen the Les Miserable movie yet.  But if you have seen it (or don't care about it), For Your Consideration...


Put the "?" there because - even if you haven't seen the film, you've probably seen at least part of the scene the (holy crapballs amazing!!) Emma Fitzpatrick is satirizing, because it's been clipped on every awards show and every talk show and late-night comedy appearance Anne Hathaway has made.

Now let me be Obama clear here: I love Anne Hathatway.  I LO-UH-UH-UH-LOVE Anne Hathaway and want to see everything she does.  She should probably win some sort of award just for how she handled Matt Lauer, and is a brilliant actress on stage and on screen.  And I will shed no tear if she wins an award on Oscar night.

But I also have no beef with those who claim Les Miz iz lame.  And this viddy is effin funny.

Last from London

Well, for now anyway...

One last photo montage video from London.  It's a little longer than the others, but it's split into two parts, so that may help.  Think of it as an A Side and a B Side.

I had to resort to YouTube for this, but I was able improve the resolution a bit.  Enjoy.

A lot of this is pretty self explanatory - don't think you need me to say much about Big Ben, Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, or Richard the Lionheart.  I do want to mention, especially for the Rodin fans out there, the juxtaposition of the Burghers of Calais in the shadow of Parliament (as opposed to casts I've seen at the Rodin Museums in Paris and Philadelphia, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, all of which I have since found were cast after this one in London).  The placement in Victoria Tower Gardens is poignant in that these French business leaders and legal authorities are shadowed by one of the most important legislative structures in the Western World; and it calls to mind their story - offered as a sacrifice to save the citizens of Calais from Edward III's siege of their city.  (Remember Edward III's hunting palace from an earlier post, and the last video?)

It's worth mentioning are a couple of light art pieces from the Tate Modern that were as photogenic as they were engaging:

• Lis Rhodes' Light Music was the setting for the shots that come near the end of the first song.  It was part of the Tanks portion of the Tate Modern - which is amazeballs and you should definitely go there.  I think that Light Music has closed up and moved out of the space, but we were lucky to catch it while we were there.  The projectors practically dared you not to walk in and interact with the light.  Luminous and irresistible. 

• The sequence about halfway through featuring two light tables in the room with white walls is made up of shots of an Alfredo Jaar piece called Lament of the Images.  He's looking at the way people can be so saturated with media images (and words) that they can be blinded by the excess: so many images flood ones view that one stops seeing the content of what is actually being shown.  That blindness is revealed in that installation (as I interpret it) by the light that floods the room as the light tables spread apart (the tables become a light source, illuminating the people, objects, and walls themselves, but the light itself ceases to be an object of attention), and conversely by the darkness that pervades when the tables close in together (the beams of light become focal, but the darkness literally prevents one from seeing around it).  Beautiful, simple, this piece had a powerful, magnetic draw, and I also enjoyed the lucky arrival of a school group when I went back into the room to grab these shots.

Also part of the Tanks was Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt.  My photographs don't remotely do justice to the complex power of that brilliantly feminist activist piece [which had the added interest, to me, of having originated in Minneapolis, a city (and a landscape) dear to my heart, woven into this contemporary art exhibit in London].  The video embedded in that link does a better job, but if you come across an exhibition of The Crystal Quilt anywhere, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

And I can't sign off without mentioning the shots from the Churchill War Rooms - including the color-coded phones, his cabinet meeting room, and the map room complete with a caricature of Hitler penciled into the middle of the Atlantic.  Fascinating. 

And then undercutting any sort of heightened thoughts or reflections on the living memory of War in London, and how vastly it differs from a sense of war in New York, we have shots of the Sherlock Holmes pub which I took for my Sherlock-fan nephew, Mols getting ready for her kayak final test in her wet suit, and shots of our time in Shoreditch/High Street.  All of which was fantastic!

As for the music: why can't Rudie fail?  Just because.

Taking Stock

Getting to that part of the year where one takes stock.  It's been a rough fall-into-winter - the Storm, the shootings, the subway pushings, the other evidence of Humanity's lack of humanity: these affect everyone, irrespective of what might be your personal drama (or family drama, or work drama, or some version of 'all of the above').

Let none of this mute your comfort and joy.  Breathe in the beauty, live deeply, gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  Or anyway, that's one idea.

Back to London.

The first viddy I put together uses a lot of images from the first couple days which are already represented here, so I'm going to skip that one for now.  Here's one that's more food-centric covering the T-Day redux and the German Holiday Market on Southbank, along with shots from Bermondsey and Rotherhithe showing Execution Dock (where pirates would be hanged in gibbets) and the ruins of Edward III's hunting palace, including Holiday imagery that it's not quite too late in the Season to put out there.

Enjoy.

Piano

It is more than worth the 5 minutes it will take you to watch this video.

Sound on or sound off, it is gorgeous.  Pop it into full screen and take a look.  Fair warning: you might cry.

It was made by Anthony Sherin, and put out there by Times.  You can read more about it here (or click the Related Article link. I recommend you read the article after you watch the video).

On to Vienna

Just because I'm on a roll - here are some more shots from the trip to Central Europe last fall.

Vienna from nycmick on Vimeo.

Vienna was astonishing. Every bit as impressive as Prague (or any city I've been in, really) but in a completely different way. If Prague has a rather anarchic spirit, the spirit of Vienna is, well, archic. It's history as an imperial city is evident everywhere. It has to be the most follow-the-rules, law-and-order place I've ever been. Never have I received such stoney glares for jaywalking. Cory made the mistake of going out the in door at a supermarket and the manager literally ran across the store screaming at her. In German, of course. Disconcerting.

But it was a gorgeous, stunning place. A living monument to music, both literally in terms of the concert halls, opera houses, statues, etc., and figuratively as a historical capital of composition and musicianship. It's long and, um, complicated history is on display in all corners as well. The food was great, and copious. We dove as deep as we could in two days into the city's offerings of architecture and visual art: Klimt and Schiele, the Belevedere, the Secession (holy sh*t the Secession!) the Leopold.

Although we didn't stay with them, we had the great fortune to have a couple of friends to help show us around. Ellen, a filmmaker and producer whom Cory knows from the dance world, helped us book our hotel (a great hotel! We had a super room with a balcony and they served a really good breakfast!) at a discounted rate, had a couple meals with us and went on some long walks with us. Her husband Rudi, a lighting designer and technician, got us into a performance of Woyzeck, in German but with music sung in English by The Tiger Lillies. (One of the best quotes of the trip came from Ellen: "If anyone had told me I'd marry an Austrian, a non-Jewish Austrian, and live half the year in Vienna, I'd have said they were out of their minds") It was Rosh Hashanah, so Ellen took us to the kosher bakery to get challah and we talked theater on the walk back.

Let me mention at this point that pretty much the only exception to completely sunny days on our entire trip happened the morning we took the really early train from Prague to Vienna - which just meant that I got to see the sunrise through the mist while listening to Mahler. Don't know how we managed that kind of luck...

Ave Atque Vale Václav Havel

I haven't yet written a proper eulogy for Václav Havel. Well, I'll never write a proper eulogy for him, but I want to write something from my point of view. He certainly was a personal hero of mine, which puts me in broad company. He was, of course, brilliant across an entire spectrum: writer, philosopher, activist, playwright, politician, theorist, statesman, artist. I guess I must have first heard of him in the late 80s, just before the Velvet Revolution was getting ready to happen. I'm sure the first play of his I ever saw was Audience, a brilliant and powerful one-act based in part on a time in Havel's life when the Communist regime forced him into line work at a brewery, and one of the first Off-Broadway shows I ever saw, back when I was just visiting the City from time to time, before I moved here.

He got a lot of press in the late 80s and early 90s, going from being a dissident who was never far from the threat of arrest, if not actually in prison, to being the President of the country whose leadership he'd helped to topple. Before I became aware of Havel and the Velvet Revolution, what did I know from Czech? I'd knew what Czechoslovakia was, of course, but only in those broad (and often only semi-true) strokes that a Midwesterner was likely to encounter: as a child I had general awareness that it was part of the Communist Bloc and therefore somehow vaguely evil, or at least repressive.

I later learned that it had been the first nation that the Nazis invaded and annexed against its will, but this was not to be confused with fleshed-out knowledge - again, just a vague sense of a place suffering from victimhood: it was a place lumped in with places like Poland that Hitler took over and where he built concentration camps; and then lumped in with Romania, Yugoslavia and, again, Poland as a place under the Soviets' thumb that tended to produce athletes who were successful in Olympic Games.

And then when I was old enough to watch Stripes, I got to see Czechoslovakia as the place that Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and company invade accidentally while on a joyride in the Urban Assault Vehicle they borrowed from Uncle Sam, and got to take misguided pride in the exchange (paraphrasing now)

Bill Murray: "It's not like we're going to Moscow. It's Czechoslovakia! It's like driving into Wisconsin!!"

Harold Ramis: "Yeah? I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once!"

Funny? Sure. But not much of a lesson in history or international relations.

Then college happened, and Czech got more real. Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Milos Forman. And Václav Havel and 1989.

Thanks to our trip to Prague in the fall, and especially to the time we spent with Ondrej, we got some more personal insights into Havel and the Velvet Revolution. Saw the café where he met and drank and smoked with other dissidents and writers; of course we went to Wenceslas Square (in Czech, "Václavské Námesti, Václav being the original Czech word for Wenceslas), but it meant a lot more hearing from our tour guide Jakob the story of the body of the 'dead student' that helped to intensify public support for the revolution (and learning that the guy was neither dead nor a student, but actually a member of the secret police who never explained why he did it), and hearing from Ondrej first hand about his going to the protest as a boy with his father, both of them rattling keys - as in the Keys to the Castle, as in "Václav to the Castle," the cry of the people who filled the square and fueled the transition.

Havel had been seriously ill for some time, but it was still a profound loss when he succumbed to cancer at 75. But I don't want to be too morbid in my mourning. I'll post the last couple photo-montages from our Prague trip and leave it at that for now.

Prague 3 from nycmick on Vimeo.
Prague 4 from nycmick on Vimeo.

More Fun with Pythagorean Tuning

Happy November, everybody.

I know I'm supposed to care about the romantic breakup of the dynamic pop stars behind She & Him and Death Cab for Cutie, but I'm sorry - I just don't. Oh wait. I'm not really that sorry.

On the other hand, check this out:



This little slice of amazing comes from Alexander Chen, who seems to be pretty handy in the musical/graphic ideas department. In a nutshell, he's created an 'impossible harp' where each line in this viddy represents a string that changes length to accomodate the frequency needed for each note in the first Prelude of the first Bach Cello Suite. 8 notes per phrase, ergo 8 lines - check out the link above for his discussion of the math behind string length and pitch, Pythagorean Tuning and the way Chen put this together.

And Another Thing...

I'm doing a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Theater at Schapiro Hall at Columbia U. this weekend. I have not been very vocal about it (or anything else, lately) in this forum, but it's been taking up quite a bit of my time. Here's a little promo viddy from the director, Katie Naka.

Email mydogluvsnuts@gmail.com for your free tix!

The Voice of Absurdity

All right.

It seems there is no direct way to upload an audio file to this platform without using an online file storage site. In addition to increasing my desire to set up a proper website for myself, this has prompted me to go for the temporary fix of creating a video out of my audio voice over demo.

Please listen first (if you're inclined to listen) with your eyes closed or the screen blacked out or something, as the audio portion of this enterprise represents a bona fide effort. Then feel free to watch my little testament to the absurd.

And that's what I have to say about that.

Fun from the World of Audio

Taking a break from working on a voiceover project (mostly involving putting together emails, demos and letters to send to agents - send good mojo to the casting gods!) to have lunch and bang out a post for your reading and listening pleasure.

First of all, Happy Birthday Chris Knox! I've written about him before here, and on the occasion of this, his not-quite-60th birthday, feel free to take a look at this article from Pitchfork which looks back at some music Chris enjoyed at 5-year intervals in his life.

And not only that, here's a pre-stroke video from a show that I don't remember existing called Recovery (I guess) that seems to have had The Fauves as its house band. (it did? shouldn't they have told us about this?) Chris' performance is superfab, and shows how much fun can happen when things go wrong.

As chance would have it, Jeff Mangum (who figured so prominently in the Chris Knox benefit last year) has been leaking some un-or-barely-released Neutral Milk Hotel tracks as teasers for the big boxed-set coming out later in the month. Click here to get a taste. Down on the right, to the side of Jeff's always-interesting curated playlist, is an unreleased version of Engine. The regular playlist is worth a listen too!

In case you're wondering what I'm listening to now as I do my thing in the Hoboken kitchen of random magic - we've got Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights going on, vaguely in anticipation of seeing Richard at Town Hall in October.

What I would love to do but have not figured out how to do is attach my VO Demo to this post without making it into a movie. Why should it be hard to share an audio file? Can anyone help with this?

Stay tuned for photos from the Vineyard. Meanwhile, happy long weekend, everybody!

His Goal in Life...

...is to be an Echo, of course. (It's well known to all the visitors of Solid Sound.)

Which is also the name of the Jaume Plensa sculpture that's been gracing Madison Square Park for the last few months.

As in Echo and Narcissus. As in from the Greek myth of the beautiful nymph who is cursed to be able only to repeat what others say. Whose last day of residence in the park is tomorrow.

It's been a great sort of up-from-the-ground, "what's that?!" addition to the area, in my opinion. Little bit of mystery, little bit of mythology. If you haven't seen it and you're around, maybe run by and pay a visit.

And it's one of the corollaries of public art that it doesn't always get to stick around forever. And this Echo's farewell may not be as heartbreaking as the one she gave Narcissus, but it does mean that we won't be able to have this scene any more.

Or this one:

And with that, I give you a lovely little viddy of the song that gave this post its title. Enjoy.

This Is a Public Service Announcement

PSA that evidently has been running on television in Scotland.





I dare say this falls into the category of "Things the Scottish are doing right."