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.