Andrew Gold died over the weekend at the way too young age of 59.  He was involved with a large number of musicians through the years including Linda Ronstadt; see more information about Andrew’s background here.  You might know him as the guy who wrote the songs used as the themes for Golden Girls and Mad About You.  But if you were around listening to a radio in 1977, you would know him as the musician who had the hit Lonely Boy.  So we’ll remember Andrew today with a live performance of Lonely Boy from the TV show Midnight Special.  Click here to see the video posted at Now I’ve Heard Everything.

–Eliot Wagner

by Katie Husted

The opening scene of Sex, Lies and Videotape plays in my mind a lot. Andie MacDowell in a therapy session calmly tells her therapist “Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can’t stop thinking about it…I’m worried about all the garbage.”

I think about this scene almost every time I take out our trash. But I also think of a slight variation every time I’m with a client. My version is “Stuff. All I’ve been thinking about is stuff. I’m worried about all the stuff.”

We almost all have too much stuff, and seniors tend to have the most. It’s not that seniors are particularly bad at throwing things away or that they shop too much. It’s simply that they’ve had more years to accumulate their stuff, and they tend to stay in the same home for much longer than younger generations, so they don’t have to go through the tedious process of boxing their belongings and forcing themselves to ask if they really need old tennis balls or cracked dishes.

When you pack to move, you challenge yourself to get rid of things. You almost have to – either you’ve got to fit everything into a small U-haul truck, or your mover is charging by the pound, or you just can’t bear the thought of scrounging the neighborhood for more boxes.

I moved a lot in my twenties and a few times in my thirties. I’ve moved across the country, across the city, even across hallways to bigger apartments in the same building. I hope I’m done moving, because I like where my husband and I have settled and I believe it will suit us for years to come. I want to be an octogenarian in our Park Slope apartment, finally with enough time to sit in our garden all summer long. But one thing that scares me is that if we stop moving, we may wind up with too much stuff.

Yesterday I helped a (non-senior) friend move his belongings out of a storage site. We spent a lot of time at the site, which depressed me beyond belief. I think of storage facilities as crutches that allow us to accumulate more than we need. It’s similar to how healthy eaters must feel about fast food restaurants. There are too many of them and they make it too easy to consume. Storage sites tantalize by telling us that we can have more and more stuff. Just upgrade to a larger storage unit when you outgrow your current one!

Most of my clients have lived in their present home for 30 years, minimum. They come to me because they are moving but can’t imagine how they’ll deal with all their stuff. How will they fit into their new apartment? Where do they start with the sorting process? They have no idea what’s in the backs of their closets. They are afraid of the top kitchen cabinets. They can’t remember if they’ve read half the books on their shelves.

The only way to get through it is one item at a time. Senior move managers are excavators, sorting through 70+ years of belongings, looking for treasures.  We climb up on stepladders, open dusty cabinets, and pull out the things that haven’t been seen for years. We set dishes out on the bed for our clients to touch and hold. We ask where things came from and listen as they tell us the stories about their stuff. Our seniors sometimes cry with excitement when we find something long thought to be lost, and they often shake their heads in disbelief that they still have things they haven’t used in 20 years.

As we sort, our clients start to shape their futures by deciding what they will keep. An accomplished pianist who played daily for years couldn’t fit her piano in her new apartment, so we donated it for her. Instead she kept a guitar she looked forward to playing regularly. Another client who once cooked every family dinner and baked her own bread had to move into a residence with no private kitchens. She was torn up about this at first, but then realized she’d finally have time to read all the books she had collected. We sold her beautiful cookware but she took all her books with her. Our stuff can define us. I’m a reader, not a cook. I’m a guitar player now.

Our clients seem to go through a similar set of stages. First they don’t want to move at all. They often express resistance by not wanting to part with any of their belongings. Nothing should be given away or sold. Then, as we patiently go over floor plans with them and ask them about their future homes, they start to face reality and understand that it’s not practical to keep it all.

Slowly, as they see the alternatives – bestowing mementos to children, donating furniture and clothes to favorite charities, selling silver and art to offset the cost of the move – they begin to realize that their stuff may be better off without them, and that they may be opening up their worlds a little by shedding a bit of it. At some point they start to have fun. Either they get excited because they realize they’re going to be making some money by selling the mink stoles they haven’t worn in 40 years, or they start to feel good about the family in need who will be eating off their dining room table.

When done properly, the move itself can be a happy time – a time for the senior to reinvent himself and plan for the future. It’s not an easy process, and it requires patience and time, but moving can be incredibly rewarding, for all of us.

My friend, Betsy, is selling novelty salt & pepper shakers from her collection at the annual Carroll Park Flea Market today  between  10AM and 5PM.

I remember years ago when Betsy was buying these vintage shakers at flea markets, antique stores, thrift shops. I was collecting globes then. Now she has so many and I have more globes than I can count. It was fun to have a collection when I was in my thirties. Now we have too much stuff and I need to get rid of THINGS.

She writes: “If you’re in town come on by … there are always some good tables of “stuff” at this event and it’s supposed to be a nice day for walkin around the hood.”

Carroll Park
Court St. between President St. and Carroll St.
F train : Carroll St. stop
see Park / Playground across the street

Tonight two excellent but very different musicians play at the same time in different parts of the city and both are favorites around here.  Choosing between them will be tough, but let’s face it, when you have two great options, whatever your choice is, it will be a good one.

Over at Southpaw in Park Slope, you will find Eli Paperboy Reed and The True Loves. The band is an eight-piece affair (guitar, bass, drums, keys, trumpet, sax, baritone sax and Eli on vocals and guitar).  Musically, the band plays very good original soul numbers with some covers of some stuff going back to the 60s.  The biggest strength of Eli and the band is in their live show.  Eli, originally from the Boston area and now living in Brooklyn, is an engaging live performer.

Lelia Broussard plays upbeat pop rock which is never less than a pleasure.  Even though Lelia lives lives out in Los Angeles these days, she tends to play New York City in general, and The Rockwood Music Hall in particular, frequently. And right now Lelia is on the cusp of something interesting happening: she’s one of the two finalists in a contest whose prize is your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Get more details and links to videos at Now I’ve Heard Everything by clicking here.

–Eliot Wagner

Hillstock, a DIY music festival in Williamsburg June 3-5, sounds like quite the fun event this weekend if you’re of a certain age in body or mind. My son’s new duo, Humbert Humbert will be playing there, as will his friend Jack’s new band, Sharpless (from Chicago).

So I’m just saying. Full disclosure: I know those guys…

Blue Bell Art Camp is for 4-6 years olds this August in Prospect Heights. The activities will be held at LAVA (I’m not sure what that is) and and it sounds very exciting and fun for kids. One program is called Amazing Animals and the other is called We Built This City. This is the camp’s first year so they’re trying to reach as wide an audience as possible.

I know August can be a bit of a desert when it comes to kid’s activities in Brooklyn so you might want to check this out:

Even though it’s officially my day off from OTBKB, I’ll sneak back to tell you that there is a wonderful Park Slope based musician, Dayna Kurtz,  playing at Barbes tonight.  I saw Dayna and her band at The Living Room last December and at The Bell House a few weeks later. Each set was mostly made up of songs from Danya’s forthcoming album, Secret Canon, Vol. 1, which consists of mid 20th century r&b, jazz and/or blues songs which have not been previously covered or covered only once. Dayna was able to infuse this material with enough passion to get an “Oh, Wow” from me and the crowd.  Tonight’s set should be drawn from the same material; at this show Danya will be playing in a trio format with Peter Vitalone on piano and organ and Dave Richards on upright bass.  The rest of the details are waiting for you at Now I’ve Heard Everything; just click here.

–Eliot Wagner

Brooklyn-based Leslie Mendelson is a favorite singer-songwriter of mine.  In years past you could find Leslie playing her original piano-based songs and some inspired covers around town often.  But she took much of 2010, during which time she put together a new band called Melody Kills, which includes Steve McEwan and The Madison Square Gardeners. Melody Kills is full of fun and energy and is just top notch musically.  Details about tonight’s show are waiting for you at Now I’ve Heard Everything when you click here.

–Eliot Wagner

Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House in Park Slope PRESENTS “Coming to America” on June 16 at 8PM. This exciting reading curated by novelist Martha Southgate brings together three new and acclaimed authors, Teju Cole, Tiphanie Yanique, and Victoria Brown, who came to America from Nigeria, the Virgin Islands and Trinidad respectively. There should be an interesting Q&A after the readings.

When: June 16 at 8PM

Where: The Old Stone House in Park Slope on 3rd Street between 5th and 4th Avenues. Note: due to construction in park enter from west side of the house.

What else: $5 suggested donation includes wine and refreshments.

About Teju Cole:

“An indelible novel. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.”

—The New York Times

“Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original…What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.”

—James Wood, The New Yorker

About Tiphanie Yanique:

“The effects of colonialism throb in Yanique’s vivid debut collection. . . Yanique penetrates the perils and pleasures of lives lived outside resort walls.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

About Victoria Brown:

‘Nanny lit’ may have turned heads years ago in the publishing world, but there’s a new voice – and a new book – getting people excited about the genre. Trinidadian immigrant Victoria Brown worked as a nanny on the Upper East Side, and she talks with us about her new book, Minding Ben, as well as her own path to motherhood. -The Takeaway

Teju Cole is the author of Open City (just out from Random House). He was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. He writes: “My mother taught French. My father was a business executive who exported chocolate. The first book I read (I was six) was an abridgment of Tom Sawyer. At fifteen I published cartoons regularly in Prime People, Nigeria’s version of Vanity Fair. Two years later I moved to the United States. Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.” Teju is also a terrific photographer. He took the photo above. You can see more of his work here.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony. A fiction writer, poet and essayist, she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. She is the winner of the 2010 Rona Jaffe Prize in Fiction.

Her fiction, poetry or essays can be found in the Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies. She has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers.

Tiphanie is a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.

Victoria Brown was born in Trinidad and at sixteen came alone to New York, where she worked as a full-time nanny for several years. She majored in English at Vassar College before attending the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. Eventually, she returned to New York, where she taught English at LaGuardia Community College. She is now completing her MFA at Hunter College. Victoria lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young children. She has a part-time babysitter in her employ.

I found some long forgotten 45 rpm records in the back of a closet this weekend.  In the interest of history, science and mainly because I think that these are pretty neat, I posted scans of five of them them today at Now I’ve Heard Everything.  Click here to see them.

The Baseball Project is currently touring with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills pinch hitting for Peter Buck.  Mike stepped up to the mike as The Baseball Project covered R.E.M.’s (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, MN on May 26, 2011.  Click here to see it.

–Eliot Wagner

The musical summer schedule starts in earnest in June with several of NYC’s outdoor festivals opening.  All this adds up to more shows in more places, with too many of them opposite each other.  I’ve compiled 53 shows which you can find on the June Music Calendar at Now I’ve Heard Everything, just click here to see it.  And, as always, the calendar remains a work in progress with additions (and occasionally a subtraction) to be made further on down the road.

Tuesday night’s live presentation of The Radio Free Song Club at The Living Room was a star-studded absolute delight.  Backed by the house band, The Radio Free All Stars (Andy Burton, Doug Wieselman, Paul Moschella, David Mansfield, JD Foster and Dave Schramm), Don Piper, Jody Harris, Laura Cantrell, Dave Schramm, Kate Jacobs, Jennie Lowe Stearns, Victoria Williams and Freedy Johnston each played a new song for the show.  Although they were not present, Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, Peter Blegvad and Peter Holsapple contribute a pre-recorded song for the festivities as well.  Nicholas Hill was the emcee/dj for the show, the 16th in the Radio Free Song Club series, which after a vote and discussion was dubbed the Sweet 16 Tons edition.  See 11 photos of that show by clicking here.

–Eliot Wagner