The headline almost says it all.
Mariners Trade Ichiro to Yanks for Two ProspectsOne of the great, great players of our time, distinguished to the point of heroism not least for staying in sad, anemic Seattle (the baseball club, not the city, which is fantastic).
Today is Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday. Which is as worth a mention as just about anything I can think of.
In the wake of the closing of Lost in Staten Island, here's a very nice piece by Nicky Silver in the wake of the closing of The Lyons on Broadway. Worlds apart, but hopefully of interest.
Lost in Staten Island, More Tales of Modern Living had our first performance last night, and I'm about to head to East 4th for show #2 in a few minutes. It's a good one, and you should join us one of these nights. We run through July 1 - a bit of an unusual schedule (10 p.m. show tonight, 5:30 tomorrow, our official Opening Night is Monday at 7:30; 10 o'clock shows next Thu-Sat, and another 5:30 show next Sunday; we wrap up with three 7:30 curtains the following Thu-Sat and a 2:30 matinee on Sunday, July 1) It's a good company [Sarah Corey, Wendy Merrit, Chris Orbach, Catherine Porter, and Richard Scheinmel (who also wrote the script), along with yours truly, with songs by Clay Zambo, directed by Jason Jacobs] and there are some really wonderful moments, if I may say so myself. Click on the link for ticket info; or, you know, just be in touch with me.
I'm almost two months past my surgery.
Cory is two days out of her dance company job (and three weeks away from starting her TV job).
R.I.P. Richard Dawson (most famous for the Feud, I first saw him on Hogan's Heroes, like most people, but probably remember him most fondly for his appearances on Match Game 70-whatever.)
The next incarnation of the Modern Living series starts in less than two weeks at La MaMa. Rehearsals really clicked in for me this week - good group and some killer material.
This weekend we had George again. Yay!
Last weekend we went out to the Old Country for Grandma and Grandpa's 70th Anniversary. 70 years, people! Crazytown!!
The Red Sox are finally above .500 and out of last place. The Celtics are fighting hard to even up the series against the Heat.
Tonys next weekend. Fingers crossed for Clybourne Park.
That is all.
Shoulder - stiff and sore
Brain - hazy but excited
Body - very, very tired
Soul - satisfied
Heart - full,
Prospects - outstanding
Sleep - imminent
The Stranger to Kindness has closed. One of the more intense experiences of my recent life.
Well, there's it's been on the Upcoming Events sidebar for several weeks, but now The Stranger to Kindness is up and running at the Kraine Theater, and you should go see it.
Just because I'm on a roll - here are some more shots from the trip to Central Europe last fall.
...in terms of food.
No, I have not yet commented on the loss of Vaclav Havel here. That will come soon, and I'll post another slide show video when I do it.
For today, here are three things:
1. All hail Helen Frankenthaler, explosive Abstract Expressionist Extraordinaire.
2. Ave atque vale Sam Rivers, Loft Jazz Maestro.
3. Yet another way of demonstrating that there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
Are you rockin' the Holiday action? I know you are.
Quick rundown of some of what's been going on:
Hanukkah Nights 2 and 7 were spent with Yo La Tengo - great shows, natch. Please send lots of good healing mojo to Ira the K.
Christmas Eve in Dumont with Cory cooking and eating the Feast of the Seven Fishes with Cory's Italian Family. All went well in spite of a small, shall we say, disagreement with a can opener.
Christmas morning I woke up way too early and couldn't fall back asleep for a long time, so I watched the last hour and a half of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Of course I did.
Later on, after waking up for real and having some steak and eggs (for some reason, I was craving a cowboy's breakfast) I called the folks and the grandfolks and then it was out to Paramus for Christmas presents and dinner with Cory's Extended Italian Family. Jollity ensued.
Boxing Day was chill; bit of running around looking for a place serving brunch food in the 'boken on a day that wasn't technically a weekend day but sure felt like one. Wound up at the diner. Later on, caught War Horse at the cinema up the street from BoHome before going to Maxwell's for dinner and the show.
And now it's back to work. I'll leave you with this holiday message from the world of Pop.
If my eyes and the internets don't deceive me, this is a poster from 1972 wishing "Season's Greetings from Ardent Records" We can only hope it's the real thing.
Here is another set of Prague pix. Went with some funkier music this time around, partly because, irrespective of the fact that this city is wildly historical, jam-packed with churches and has beauty from every age anywhere you turn, it doesn't take itself terribly seriously and has a long and proud party tradition. (And an extremely powerful connection to rock and pop music. Seriously. Did you see Tom Stoppard's Rock and Roll? Were you aware that Vaclav Havel proposed Frank Zappa to be the official U.S. cultural envoy in the early '90s?)
But mostly I went with the funkitude because our hosts Kristin and Ondrej like the music. Take a look and listen if you have a spare 6 minutes.
Untitled from nycmick on Vimeo.
Heard from Kristin the other day, after the first slide show went up. As it happened, and very apropos my post earlier this month, she had been to a couple of events where the Dalai Lama was speaking that day. (She's a pretty amazing person and does some pretty amazing things on a regular basis. In case that wasn't already clear.) She shared what she found to be the most interesting thing he had to say: "Action is more important than prayer or wishful thinking."
Amen, sister.
The shots in this viddy are from our second day in Prague. The Eiffel Tower looking thing that starts you off is the Petrin tower, built two years after Eiffel did his thing in Paris and it's the same altitude - if you factor in the mountain it's standing on. Many of the opening shots are from the top of that tower, and there are also a bunch from a tour of the Prague Castle, including the Valdstein/Wallenstein Gardens, the Loretta and Capuchin Monestery (home of some truly astounding beer - in a world where excellent beer flows freely), more locations from the Amadeus shoot (look - there's the exterior for Wolfy and Stanzie's apartment!) and our own private wanderings. Enjoy.
Ok, much later than I'd expected, but here at long last is some visual and sonic stimulation from our trip to Prague. This little project is set to music, so you can't go through it at your own pace. Live with it.
Ok, I might not agree with every single one of these "reasons," but check out an interesting list of infobits about one Mr. Fred Rogers, courtesy the good people at Project Argus.
In honor of Thanksgiving, which will see me with my family for the first time in a looooooong long time (since high school? Is that possible? I can't think of a time since then that I spent Thanksgiving with my blood relatives except for Freshman year of college, and that was when Dad came out to Boston to have Turkey Day bachelor-style):
And also in honor of Carrie, with whom I saw La Boheme last night, and who I think would approve:
This year's election day was fairly anti-climactic in a lot of ways. No big national contests or anything. But there were a few important items if you were paying attention.
First, some of the good stuff:
The one that got the most press as far as I could tell was a ballot initiative in Mississippi that defined human life as beginning at 'fertilization.' Turns out that was a bridge too far even in a place so devoted to ending abortion, maybe because the wording could be interpreted as making certain forms of birth control illegal. And in vitro fertalization. And chemo for pregnant women. And forcing a woman to carry her rapist's baby might be too much even in Mississippi. And it was voted down.
Then, in Ohio, the voters decided it is actually not a very good idea to prohibit your public workers' unions from collective bargaining, and they rolled back a bill that had taken that right away from them. We can only hope that that trend catches some traction in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other places dear to me.
But in a sad and upsetting turn of event in my own city, Hoboken had a disaster of a referendum, replete with the most demoralizing kind of municipal bullying and buying of political power.
The basic sitch: a landlords' lobbying group succeeded in getting the Hoboken City Council to pass an amendment to the Rent Control law in my city. It's not the worst amendment they could have come up with, but... one thing I think everyone should be able to agree on is that if a landlords' advocacy group supports an amendment, the amendment benefits landlords; and if a tenants' advocacy group opposes that amendment, the amendment benefits landlords. In this case, it would seem to benefit the mostly absentee landlords who have sponsored (some would say forced through, by means of the threat of an expensive class-action law suit) an amendment to weaken rent control protection in Hoboken, and at the very least make it easier for landlords to get away with bullying long-term residents into vacating their apartments so they can 'deliver vacant' (with raised rents, of course), and make it harder for tenants to fight back, while reducing the amount of time the tenants can take to figure out the best way to do it.
So a repeal of the amendment was put on the ballot as a referendum. I figured that putting this in the hands of the voters was a fairly decent way to put the matter to rest and stop the attempted erosion of tenants' rights. If you vote "yes," you support tenant's rights; if you vote "no," you support additional protection for landlords. Straightforward: it's your right to have either opinion and vote your convictions.
What stopped me in my tracks after I voted and sent me straight to my computer to write letters to local papers and websites was when I ran into an activist canvasing for "no" and when I asked her why, she said she was there to protect rent control, and had a pile of fliers that claimed as much (though the flier didn't do a very good job if you bothered to read it). Not only were they trying to make it easier for landlords to skirt rent control laws, they're trying to make it look like it's good for tenants. I probably shouldn't be surprised. It's even confusing how it was put on the ballot - all the dancing around with double negatives - if you want them NOT to change Rent Control, vote YES; if you DO want them to change Rent Control, vote NO.
Never was I so envious of my friends who have jobs that give them election day off. Never have I had such an impulse to make a homemade sign and wave it around in front of a polling place. I scarcely have to tell you the result of the vote: the amendment-supporting "NO" won. In a landslide.
I know that I spend a lot of my life and work in New York City, to the extent that my handle on this site is "nycmick," but I've been a proud Hoboken resident for enough years now that I feel no shame calling myself an LTR. But I feel a lot of shame around the way the city government and local media let this play out.
Reminded of a quote from Howard Zinn's You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train, appropriate to the situation, and even more so to what's happening around the Occupy movements.
The state and its police were not neutral referees. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it, and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new President, or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
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.
Well, the Cherry Orchard has been chopped down.
Could this have been avoided? Or was it the inevitable result of the end of a pseudo-feudal aristocracy and the rise of market capitalism? Why or why not?
Discuss.
*Extra credit for references to Occupy (fill in your city's name here)
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!
If the internets are to be believed, this is a screen shot of Bill O'Reilly telling Tavis Smiley and Cornel West that Wall Street has committed no crime.
Stunt? Maybe. But - worth how many words?
A day and change later than we planned, and smarting from the delay, but happy, relatively healthy, and uninjured for all intents and purposes. And very much basking in the glow of one of the best trips ever.
AS you might have surmised, the R.E.M. breakup remained on the forefront of my mind for much of the day. When I first got word, I shared the news with the people around me at work, and one guy said "Well, they are pretty... seasoned."
I stifled an outburst and mentioned that the Rolling Stones have a lot more 'seasoning' and they still entertain a crowd once in a while. The co-worker then said something to the effect of "In my opinion, the Rolling Stones should have pulled a Seinfeld years ago." Meaning that they would have been better off quitting at the top of their game (as R.E.M. appears to be trying to do) rather than dragging on.
Ok. Perhaps. I grant the possibility.
But that didn't really mitigate my mental breakdown when, a while later, another guy from the office came by and asked how I was doing. I said, "Well, R.E.M. broke up, so I'm a little shaken about that."
His response: "R.E.M.?! Man, that is past time! They were the 90s! I was all about them back then though. (singing) Jeremy's spoken..."
I have some regret that I was not able to restrain myself from grabbing my head in my hands and saying "Urggmmphhh! THAT'S PEARL JAM!!!" I was able to restrain myself from literally shouting that exclamation, but just barely.
When I told Cory this tale, she asked "Did that vein in your forehead bulge out?"
Yes. Yes, I believe it did.
I have, very clearly, lived too long.
That said, for today's listening list, I am through Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, and am now almost at the end of Lifes Rich Pageant. It's going to be like this for a while.
Well, not really.
But evidently, it's the end of R.E.M.
photographer unknown
And I don't know how to feel.
All right.
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.
Easing out of what was a great week of vacation, capped by a very intense couple of days of travel and hurricane-fatigue.
...is to be an Echo, of course. (It's well known to all the visitors of Solid Sound.)
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.
That phrase has a couple different meanings for me this week. On a personal level, I've had a big week for music - made a visit to my local shop in Hoboken and got some fun stuff, including the Feelies new album (their first in just about forever), a really good Buddy Holly tribute album, a Peter Greenaway/Louis Andriessen opera that I haven't had a chance to listen to yet, and Volume 2 from the Baseball Project, just in time for the Sox/Yanks series.
“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again."
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