–Brooklyn’s Finest and Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton at the Pavilion
–Sunday, March 7 at 8 PM Pops Corn live blogs the Oscars right here on OTBKB!
MUSIC
–Friday, March 5th at 8 PM Lauren Ambrose and the Leisure Class and the Wahoo Skiffle Crazies at the Bell House
–Saturday, March 6th at 8:30 PM indie music with Moshe Hecht at the Jewish Music Cafe
–Saturday, March 6th at 10 PM Find out what happens when New York jazz musicians play and improvise around the melodies of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at Barbes in Park Slope
–Sunday, March 7th at 8PM Nerissa Campbell’s Oscar party and concert at Puppets Jazz Bar in Park Slope.
THEATER
–March 5-7 at 8PM and through March 13th: Brave New World Repertory presents The Crucible by candlelight at The Old Stone House in Park Slope.
Through March 28th A Life in Three Acts at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo. “Hilarious and touching… a priceless repository of mischief and mimicry, honesty, wisdom and defiance” – The Times.
POETRY
On Sunday, March 7th at 7PM (before the Oscars) the Brooklyn Lyceum Writers Series presents poet Edward Hirsch reading from The Living Fire. He is the author of eight collections of poetry and four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller.
MUSEUM NIGHTLIFE
On Saturday, March 6 starting at 5PM until midnight, First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum features special programs, and access to the exhibitions.
Read all about it in the Daily News: A third-generation Slope businessman is paying the community back.
Nick Kotsonis, the owner of Slope Health and Fitness, has pledged $10,000 toward the funds needed to send the Dancewave teens to the prestigious Aberdeen Festival in October. The group’s money disappeared along with the travel agent it trusted.
Kotsonis’ family opened and ran Purity Diner on 7th Ave. for 50 years.
Wait! What does this mean? Well, they’re going to project the Oscars on a screen & also have it playing on two television screens! There will also be music from Nerissa and her wonderful band. It has been said of Nerissa’s music: “There’s an easy, swingin’ film noir feeling that evokes dark bars and mystery dames and her voice is wistful and melancholy, like Billie Holiday singing a Nick Cave song.”
You will probably get commentary from her, too because, she says, “if Avatar cleans up I will be most distraught. C’mon, it’s Pocahontas in 3D. Really. (You can come and argue with me if you wanna!! I love it!!).”
They’ll be playing original material, perhaps some standards and *maybe* some of the Oscar nominated songs. Dress up if you want to. Don’t if you don’t want to. It all happens Sunday, March 7th at 8PM.
Puppets Jazz Bar. 481 5th Avenue. Brooklyn, NY 11215. (718) 499-2622
TONIGHT: Josh Shneider’s Easy-Bake Orchestra will be at the Music-Theatre Group@OneArmRed. Shneider is the composer and conductor for this large, talented group, which is comprised of some of NYC’s most illustrious and adventurous improvisors. Melodic, grooving, searching and harmonically inventive, the music draws inspiration from a wide variety of musical influences and includes Jazz, R&B, World and American Pop elements.
Shneider has written for and performed with a wide variety of artists, including Art Blakey alumni pianists Donald Brown and James Williams, composer Bob Telson (The Gospel at Colonus, Calling You), vocalist Bobby Caldwell and Playwright Eve Ensler among others.
Tonight go early and check out the First Thursdays Gallery walk of artist’s studios in Dumbo.
Wouldn’t it be fun to watch the Oscars with OTBKB’s film expert and critic, Pops Corn? Isn’t he just the guy you’d like to be sitting next to on the couch trading Oscar stories, film facts and critiques of the Oscar presenters and winners?
Well, here’s your chance. Sort of.
Pops will be live blogging the Oscars live on OTBKB on Sunday night starting at 8PM (no, I don’t think he’ll be live blogging the Barbara Walters Show). But he wouldn’t miss the red carpet for anything. Pops will be online posting every 15 minutes or so exactly what he’s thinking and feeling about the broadcast, the ceremony, the movies, Alec, Steve, the audience and all the rest.
That’s Oscar night with OTBKB’s Pops Corn. Don’t miss it!
No honorary Oscars will be given at the Sunday ceremony, as I understand it. Sorry if you’ve been waiting 60 years to see Lauren Bacall get her statue. Wanted to see cinematographer Gordon Willis, the “prince of darkness” get his? The man who revolutionized the look of American movies (see Klute as an example his low-light style, shot before film technology and his influence made this look commonplace) won’t be on the big broadcast either.
Bacall and Willis got their lifetime achievement awards at a separate ceremony. And they were joined by a legend of another kind, Roger Corman, who was also recognized. Corman is known as being film school and proving ground to a generation of filmmakers including Best Picture/Director winners Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard. His low-budget filmmaking style was trailblazing and the industry can attest to his skills as a businessman, as hinted at by his 1990 autobiography’s title, How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime. Still, his contributions as an artist should also be considered as part of this equation. Two recommendations:
The Intruder isa film about race relations with an edge more akin to Melvin Van Peebles and Spike Lee than to the pious political correctness in “good-for-you” message pictures of the day. The title may sound sci-fi, but the monster here is the racist activist preacher, dressed in white, and interested as much in his cause as he is at advancing his ego. His casting of a young William Shatner as the lead, Corman channels all the actor’s elements—his sex appeal, charm, the cheese behind the smile—is downright prescient, forecasting the hallmarks of Shatner’s enduring, fascinating appeal. The narrative unfolds mysteriously; it’s half-way through before we’re comforted by the film’s political position. And Corman uses visual elements such as flashing lights and audio inserts such as the sounds of baby’s cry during the panning of an angry white mob to an expressionistic effect.
The Trip is another unique Corman effort. Written by a young Jack Nicholson (Corman wasn’t so prescient when he would cast Bruce Dern over Nicholson sometimes, but…), the film is neither the celebratory stoner jam nor the admonition picture that every drug-centered film predictably becomes (in fact, to gain Catholic Legion of Decency approval the film’s final image features a mirror-crack effect over lead Peter Fonda’s face). The narrative becomes reportage. Simply, this is a man’s first acid trip. One stunning sequence features Fonda entering someone’s home and speaking with a young kid who can’t sleep. As the two talk as equals, the scene manages to be both startlingly creepy and uncommonly respectful. It’s exciting to see Corman recognized by the Academy. His quick shooting style and business acumen shouldn’t obscure his status as an auteur of solid work.
Emily Zuzik is a singer-songwriter who is a familiar part of the New York music scene frequently playing around town. But 2010 is going to be a busy year for Emily with her day job (she’s a model) and another non-music project keeping her busy. So take advantage of Emily’s appearance at The Rockwood Music Hall tonight and see her perform her own well-crafted songs and probably an inspired cover or two. Complete details about tonight’s show are posted at Now I’ve Heard Everything. And if you need more convincing, just check out the video of Emily posted here yesterday.
Tonight you can check out Red Hook’s own KaiserCartel playing their harmonic acoustic and folk-rock songs over at The Highline Ballroom. Details here. But for those of you who need to plan in advance, there’s a rundown of musical events for most of the month of March right here.
Those wild and crazy folks that bring you the eccentric and always entertaining lecture series, Adult Ed at Union Hall, have a great line up this week.
This month’ s theme is: ”Animal Minds, Animal Bodies” and it happens on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 – 8 pm (doors at 7:30) Union Hall in Park Slope 702 Union St. @ 5th Ave $5 cover.
Come see the following folks pontificate on their areas of expertise.
KATE KUNATH, “The Rabbit Stereotype and its American Exploitation” Kunath, a photographer who has studied rabbit breeders and their charges, discusses the history of rabbit breeding and its sometimes peculiar practices. Above is one of Kunath’s photos.
CARRIE McLAREN, “Why You Want a Monkey: On Primates Owning Primates” McLaren examines humans’ unconscious drive to have and to hold monkeys and apes.
ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ, “Bad Dog! Creating the Guilty Other in a Domestic Environment” Anthropomorphic assumptions we make about dogs, deconstructed.
KRIOTA WILBERG, “The Amazing Fibroblast! Peter Parker’s Remarkable Transformation” Drawing on examples from Hollywood’s Spiderman franchise, Wilberg explains how human wrist and hand anatomy would need to be altered in order to accommodate caches of radioactive spider silk.
Elliot Sharp on guitar and Andrea Centazzo, percussion: two masters of improvisation meet for a set of wide-ranging sonics and rhythmic extremes at Issue Project Room on Third Street and Third Avenue in the Park Slope/Gowanus area.
Divas love the Clover Club! This week’s featured diva, producer, director, and Carnegie Mellon-trained actor HaJ, also chose the chic Carroll Gardens cocktail lounge as the spot for our interview. Over whiskey sours, HaJ told Sarah Deming about her new blog, the Home of the Urban Chameleon and her video content site Tickles TV.
Sarah: What does the term “urban chameleon” mean and how did you come up with it?
HaJ: I was sitting around with my friends Andress and Zuley and we were brainstorming terms to describe people of our background: people of color who were raised by parents who wanted us to excel, who grew up in low-income urban communities but went to the best private schools and colleges. We evolved the ability to move freely between various social spheres, to move left and right and up and down. Yet we never forgot where we came from. Urban chameleons are the type of people who work an office job in midtown, but go back to the old neighborhood to get our hair done, because it’s just not the same without the lady who knows your hair, has all the gossip, and has a guy out front selling bootleg DVDs. There’s a more detailed description of the term on the blog as well as some funny videos of classic Urban Chameleon moments.
Sarah: I was reading about how chameleons change color. Apparently scientists used to think that it was to protect them from predators, but now they think it evolved mostly to signal socially to other chameleons, for courtship and things like that.
HaJ: It’s not a defense mechanism; it’s a way of identifying. When Jay-Z shouts out to Marcy Projects or when Obama makes a veiled hip hop reference in a speech, it’s all about signaling to other urban chameleons. A key word you used is “courtship.” It’s all about wanting to connect and create commonality. One of my closest friends who is Haitian has been my muse for a lot of the work because her story represents the American dream. Her family came to this country from Haiti and sacrificed a great deal in order for her to excel. She’s the ultimate urban chameleon, goes from business meetings, to posh events around the city and then gets on a plane to help rebuild Haiti.
Sarah: In Prada pumps?
HaJ: I think she prefers Louboutin.
Sarah: This makes me think of the Carol Burnett quote “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” Often there’s something quite dark and sad at the heart of your comedy.
HaJ: Absolutely. You have to be really careful whenever you make comedy about race, because you are going to piss some people off. Recently we curated an event at Howard University Homecoming. We submitted a couple of skits and got comments back like Korean Nail Salon being “coonish,” participating in a sort of minstrel tradition of stereotyped blackness.
Sarah: I think that’s an absurd misreading!
HaJ: I know. But I learned a lot from that experience. I don’t mind making people uncomfortable, because discomfort is how we grow. I love surprises. I love creating a situation where the audience is surprised by what comes out of a character’s mouth or the way they move their body. On my blog we wrote about this recent controversy where a group of white girls won the Sprite Step Challenge. They probably didn’t deserve to win based on their technical proficiency, and many people saw the judges’ decision as a racist one. It may have been. But I have to say I think surprise has its own value as entertainment. When you see a group of white girls get up on stage and move in a way you don’t expect, it’s exciting. I think everyone loves that kind of surprise. It empowers them to break out of the boxes society has put them in. For example, when we filmed that skit in the nail salon, the Korean ladies cracked up when I spoke Korean at the end.
Sarah: So that was real Korean?
HaJ: Absolutely! My friend who is Korean coached me on it. I’m saying, “Oh no, Young Sok, you have got to fix this one nail!”
Sarah: How do you develop your skits? Are they improvised or written out?
HaJ: I think of a scenario and give it to the actors. Sometimes I have certain lines I want them to hit, but often it’s just a beginning point and an ending point. We shoot a few versions and keep the best take. Improvisation is very important to the process. And the biggest rules of improv are to always accept and build and always say yes.
Sarah: You have to be comfortable with chaos to work that way.
HaJ: I’ve always been a non-traditional thinker. My mom likes to tell this story of how when I was about five my dad put on his overcoat and lay down in bed, just as a joke. He asked me: “HaJ, what’s wrong with this picture?” I said: “You forgot your hat.”
WHISKEY SOUR
This basic formula for a sour can be adjusted for other base spirits, but whiskey is the classic. This is one of the simplest and most crowd-pleasing of cocktails.
2 ounces rye or bourbon
3/4 ounce lemon juice
1 ounce simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water heated together to dissolve)
optional: 1/2 ounce tannic red wine such as Bordeaux
Shake all ingredients vigorously over ice. Strain into a rocks glass filled with large ice cubes. For the optional “claret float,” pour the red wine slowly over the back of a barspoon onto the surface of the drink. It will float atop the surface in a red layer, creating a graceful, multi-layered cocktail that commemorates the urban chameleons among us.
Chuck Prophet and his band, The Mission Express, will be in the neighborhood at Southpaw next Friday, March 5th. I’ll have more to say about Chuck next week, but in the meantime, I have what looks to be a professionally shot video with great sound for you to get you in the mood for Chuck here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.
Not only is Neko Case’s People Got a Lotta Nerve one of my favorite songs released in 2009, I use it as my ringtone. But the second verse of the song which once seemed a literary allusion now seems to be predictive in light of yesterday’s sad story about a killer whale turning on its trainer. See an acoustic version of the song here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.
–Saturday, February 27 starting at 7:15 with a reading of the Megillah followed by Purimpalouza at 8:45 PM at the Jewish Music Cafe
–Saturday, February 27 at 8 PM Glenn Branca CD release party with slide show by Robert Longo at La Poisson Rouge
–Sunday, February 28 at 9PM French virtuoso guitarist Stephane Wrembel channels the technique and the fire of Django Reinhardt.
MOVIES
–Shutter Island, Avatar and Crazy Heart at the Pavilion in Park Slope.
DANCE
–February26 & 27 at 8PM, BAM presents Mark Morris Dance Group in the premiere of the humorous Looky, choreographed to Kyle Gann’s idiosyncratic score for Disklavier (digitally driven player piano); world premiere of Socratesl; revival of Behemoth— the sole Morris work performed in silence—reveals that Morris’ genius can be independent of his love of music.
–Through March 7 at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company presents the world premiere performance of Coltrane’s Favrite Things, set to an iconic recording of John Coltrane’s interpretation of the Richard Rodgers song “My Favorite Things” and incorporating Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm.”
WRITERS
–Friday, February 26 7-9 PM at Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Colum McCann will read from, sign, and discuss his 2009 National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin. Inspired by Phillipe Petit’s infamous real-life tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, the novel weaves together a panoramic array of disparate stories and voices: an Irish monk, a prostitute in the Bronx, a group of grieving mothers who lost their sons at war, a city judge, an alcoholic, and the tightrope walker who obliquely binds them all together. This is McCann’s only FREE reading in NYC.
ART
–February 26-28 at the Dumbo Arts Center: The Great Pop-Up Art Sale, a benefit for the arts center.
Brooklyn photographer Nate Kensinger, just wrote to say that’s he’s posted a new photo essay on his blog.
And that is always cause for celebration.
Kensinger’s photos are often heart-breakingly beautiful observations of abandoned urban environments,
Here is an excerpt from the essay he calls simply, The Whole Foods Lot. See more text and many more pictures on his blog. His work is also featured in The Pink Elephant: Gentrification Speaks show currently at MoCADA.
While the pictures speak thousands of words, Kensinger writes eloquently and informatively about this particular urban landscape:
“The story of the Whole Foods lot is one of the best examples of how New York City’s recent real estate boom and subsequent collapse unfolded. Located at the intersection of 3rd Avenue and 3rd Street, this empty lot is bordered on two sides by the Gowanus Canal. In 2006, it housed an active scrapyard, but this closed when ground was broken for a planned 68,000 square Whole Foods Market, which promised “Brooklyn residents a wide array of natural and organic foods” alongside a public esplanade and community center. The idea of building this market on the banks of a toxic industrial canal struck some local residents as a far-fetched idea, but this was representative of the ambitious yet ill-conceived development projects that were common during the past decade.”
Todd P, the leading impressario of Brooklyn’s all ages music scene, is introducing the MtyMx All Ages Festival of Art and Music on March 20-22 at the Autocinema Las Torres in Monterrey, Mexico
Brooklyn goes to Mexico?
The festival is scheduled just after SXSW in Austin, Texas, a multi-day music, film, and interactive conference and festival. MtyMX organizers are running shuttle buses from Austin, Texas to the festival site in Monterrey.
The MtyMx festival is a collaboration between Yo Garage | http://yogarage.mx | and Todd P | http://toddpnyc.com | and will feature up to 25 bands a day for three days, playing outdoors on two stages in a beautiful drive-in movie theater on the side of a mountain in the Sierra Madre Oriental. Over one-third of the bands playing are from Mexico!
For information about the city of Monterrey and the festival go here.
The festival includes a substantial visual art element as well, with the perimeter of the space decorated by huge original murals and projected video pieces (on the drive-in screen of course!) by such artists Stephanie Davidson, Sumi Ink Club, Jesse Spears, Katja Mater, JD Beltran + many more to be announced soon!
Tonight at 9pm is the last show of Milton‘s residency at The Living Room. If you haven’t seen this lively seven piece rock/folk-rock/Americana band before, you own it to yourself to catch them tonight at their NYC home base. And not only is the music great, but Milton himself has said some pretty funny things between songs. Details here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.
Martin Scorsese is known as an auteur with a signature style. Shutter Island may be a genre picture, but it is a completely new aesthetic for Scorsese.
The movie takes place on an island of no escape and this claustrophobic atmosphere is reminiscent of the director’s “man in a room” movies such as Taxi Driver and Bringing Out The Dead. And there are stylistic links to classic film noir and the American masters of the director’s youth. Films like T-Men and Shock Corridor (playing at the Film Forum April 30) come to mind. These are expected reference points from Scorsese, whose encyclopedia knowledge of classic American cinema is often evident in his own work , however they’re handled completely differently here as stylistic cousins rather than direct references.
While the classic noir narrative is at work, Shutter Island also has a dreamlike quality to it that likens it more to a contemporary European aesthetic. The way reality bleeds into fantasy through time-shifting nightmarish, hallucinatory flashbacks, brings to mind something more like The Diving Bell And The Butterfly or La Vie En Rose. Interestingly, the contemporary European and the classic noir aesthetic both have distinct perspectives on World War II and this Dennis Lehane adaptation with the trauma of war at its core somehow incorporates both of these perspectives. There’s also an element of the what’s-going-on layered twists increasing popular in thrillers post-Sixth Sense, and it is perfectly applied here.
I stood in line for the movie with what was basically the Jersey Shore cast, so I expected, as is the norm for movies in my local multiplex, the yells at the screen to only be paused long enough to send and receive texts, but the audience was completely silent, riveted the entire time.
This is what Scorsese has done for years – entertain audiences while providing something intellectually challenging and with great visual and thematic depth. Shutter Island, a film I would not likely have known to be by the filmmaker or his regular crew, including editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Robert Richardson. It is proof that Scorsese has new ways of doing what he has always done so masterfully.
It saved writer/dancer Maria Finn, who will be reading from her new memoir, Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home on Thursday February 25, at 6:30 PM at the The Meat Hook/Brooklyn Kitchen Labs (100 Frost Street).
There will also be a tango lesson, wine tasting and Argentinean snacks.
How’s that for a great way to promote a book?
When Finn discovered that her husband was cheating, she threw him out. Then she cried. Then she signed up for tango lessons.
It turns out that tango has a lot to teach about understanding love and loss, about learning how to follow and how to lead, how to live with style and flair, take risks, and sort out what it is you really want. As Maria’s world begins to revolve around the friendships she makes in dance class and the milongas (social dances) she attends regularly in New York City, we discover with her the fascinating culture, history, music, moves, and beauty of the Argentine tango.
With each new dance step she learns the embrace, the walk, the sweep, the exitóshe is one step closer to returning to the world of the living.
Eventually Maria travels to Buenos Aires, the birthplace of tango, and finds the confidence to try romance again.
The Salem witch-hunts and trials will come alive in Park Slope when Brooklyn’s Brave New World Repertory Theatre presents a two-week run of Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible, March 4-14.
The site-specific production will take place in The Old Stone House, originally constructed in 1699, seven years after the Salem hangings. The production will be lit entirely using candlelight lanterns (no electric lights) to deepen the dramatic impact of the play and its subject matter.
Rather than change scenery, Brave New World (BNW) will invite the audience to move after intermission—from the setting (the Parris and Proctor homes) on the ground floor for Acts One and Two, to a larger room upstairs (the courthouse and jail) for Acts Three and Four.
The evening will commence with a prologue in the front yard seen through the parlor windows. (Complete dates/ticket information below)
Brave New World Repertory has garnered attention over the past five years for its site-specific productions around the borough, including To Kill a Mockingbird on the front porches of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street, On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay,and The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island.
This production of The Crucible got its start as a highly popular reading during Brave New World’s 2009 Salon Series of Play Readings, also at the Old Stone House. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.Continue reading The Crucible by Candlelight at the Old Stone House→
This is the second in a series of interviews with Brooklyn women artists at their favorite bars by Sarah Deming. This week, she met modern dancer Julie Worden for a delicious martini at the magical Clover Club in Carroll Gardens. Julie has been dancing with the Mark Morris Dance Group since 1994.
You can catch Julie and the Mark Morris Dancers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week on Tuesday the 23rd and Thursday the 25th through Saturday the 27th. The program features the world premiere of “Socrates” to music by Erik Satie. For online ticketing, go here.
Sarah: Tell me about your childhood and when you knew you wanted to be a dancer.
Julie: I grew up in the small town of Naples, Florida, where all the little girls took dance. We performed at the Swamp Buggy Parade, the Moose Lodge, and the local mall. I was incredibly shy. I think I liked the idea of being able to communicate nonverbally, by getting inside of something that already existed and expressing it from the inside out. I was fourteen when I left home to go to the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Sarah: That’s a very rigorous program. Looking back, do you think the strictness was helpful?
Julie: They tried to break you down, to see if you had a backbone. I was lucky in that I had a strong family and sense of self. I suppose it’s good to weed out the people who won’t make it. Better to learn the truth early on than after 25 years of dance classes.
Sarah: What attracted you to Mark Morris’s work?
Julie: I met Mark when I was fifteen and I knew I had to work with him. I told my teachers that and they said, “He’ll never make it; he’s the bad boy of dance.” But the next year they were showing us the BBC documentary on him! I consider Mark a cultural father, not only in dance but in music and art. I see music better through his dances, through the things he pulls out of it.
Sarah: Is there room in the choreography for your own individual expression?
Julie: With Mark’s work, yes. The choreography comes from him, but each dancer represents a different part of humanity. Together we convey a more well-rounded expression of each particular move, and he wants that spread of personalities.
Sarah: What is your favorite piece to dance?
Julie: Lately it’s been “All Fours.”
Sarah: I love that one! To Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet.
Julie: The amazing thing about Mark is that he takes pieces that are technically “undanceable” and makes them sound like pop music. Two smalltown girls in California told me they loved that piece and called it “the hip hop number.” Mark assigned two dancers to each string part and broke down the piece bar by bar. Sometimes we took two hours to work through two bars of music because it’s so complex. It has these very tense, spare, Orwellian moments that to me are about suppression and control of emotion, and it has pizzicato movements where it’s like the floor is opening beneath you. Mark shows the audience the structure and the rhythm so clearly.
Sarah: Tell me more about rhythm. Do you think it’s innate or can it be taught?
Julie: I don’t think rhythm can be taught. It’s something outside of yourself that you have to just exhale and open into. Overly intellectual artists sometimes have difficulty with this, because there is a striving, a kind of reaching in advance of the beat. But rhythm is about being almost late. It’s about the bottom. Sometimes when the company is most fatigued, that’s when we’re the most together. We’re all together – the dancers, the musicians in the pit, the audience. It’s a huge and beautiful thing, because Mark’s work is based on folk traditions. It’s like opening into a huge vibration.
Sarah: Where do you think the vibration comes from?
Julie: The earth? The ocean? I don’t really know.
Sarah: I think dance is the most fleeting of all the arts.
Julie: It’s the saddest thing in the world. Once you get something figured out, it’s over. The older you get and the deeper you become, the more your cartilage wears out. Maybe that’s what makes it so beautiful: The fact that it could be taken from you any second.
Sarah: How do you want to be remembered as a dancer?
Julie: As someone with a pure and clear intent, who meant everything she did. I want people to look at me and see the music. I want them to sit back in their seats and think, “I’m in good hands.”
RECIPE: GIN BLOSSOM
This delicate and delicious recipe comes courtesy of the Clover Club’s Julie Reiner, who says that when she opened her bar she wanted to create a cocktail that would be Clover’s house martini.
1 1/2 ounces Plymouth Gin 1 1/2 ounces Martini and Rossi Bianco Vermouth 3/4 ounce Apricot Eau de Vie 2 dashes orange bitters
Stir all ingredients very well over ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist. Drink while discussing deep things.
Friday’s Steve Wynn and The Miracle 3 50th birthday show at The Lakeside Lounge found Steve and The Miracle 3 at the top of their game. Although I lost my camera and the pictures I took their right after the show, Bill Holtzheimer of South Jersey Taper has graciously permitted me to post some of his photos which you can see here.
And now for something completely different. Every year the South By Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) posts mp3s from many of the bands playing their. 646 of them have been put together in one massive file and it is available for download via Bittorrent. Now I’ve Heard Everything has a link to that download here and even instructions on how to use Bittorent technology here.
When you belong to a community you should, ideally, feel as comfortable in its houses of worship as you do on its streets, its schools, its stores, parks and restaurants.
Which isn’t to say that one has to be polytheistic. It’s just that visiting a community’s religious spaces is a meaningful way to learn about your neighbors and friends as they engage in the spiritual side of their lives.
Indeed, to see people at church, synagogue, mosque or Buddhist temple is to see a very private side of them. But it’s public, too. It can feel intrusive to walk in on a religious group that is not your own. But it can also be highly instructive and even enlightening.
To see people in their house of worship is to observe them at their most quiet, their most thoughtful and inwardly focused.
Last week I went to Sunday services at Park Slope’s Old First Dutch Reformed Church. I went, partially, because the title of Pastor Meeter’s sermon, “Passionate Physicality,” intrigued me.
Later the title was changed to “Passionate Spirituality” but I still decided to check out what he had to say.
He even quoted me in the sermon:
“Passionate Physicality.” The context of that sermon title is my preaching theme for the last few months: “Passionate Spirituality.” I posted that sermon title, and it was seen by a friend of mine, not from this church, who didn’t know the context, and she asked me what I would be preaching about with “passionate physicality.” Well, sex, I guess! There’s a mystery. What are our bodies for? What is their glory? Where do we get passionate?
We have these bodies. It’s in our bodies that we carry our emotions and our histories, our talents and our characters. I’d like to be a great musician, but I just don’t have it in my body. I’d like to be good in sports, or relaxed and easy-going, or warm and fuzzy, but I don’t have it in my body. If I had grown up differently, I might have become a decent dancer, but it’s too late now, not with my history.
Would you like to be different than you are? Would you like to be transformed? Do you consider it desirable? Do you believe it’s possible? Do you believe that people can be changed? So often in pre-marital counseling I have given the warning that people do not change. “If you think he’s going to change after you get married, you’re in for it. You’re not going to change him.”
We know that cultures change. We know that civilizations change. We know that nations can be transformed. Indeed, the Bible considers it the will of God that the ethics of the Torah and the Gospel should gradually transform the nations. But what about individuals? What about you?
Feb 20 at 8:30 PM: Jewish Music Cafe Ayreh Kunstler Band, The Aboriginals, Aural Law
Also Feb 29 at 8PM: Andy Statman, Klezmer genuis at Barbes
Feb 21 at 5PM at the Bell House: Several local record collectors (including Billy Miller of Norton Records and Michael McMahon of Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co., more to be named later) have agreed to share the sounds contained within their favorite 78s at this event, which will be hosted by Phast Phreddie the Boogaloo Omnibus (The Wang Dang Doodle, Subway Soul Club).
Steve Wynn and the Miracle 3 are the best rock n roll band that I know (and I know a fair number of them). They’ll be playing a set at The Lakeside Lounge tonight as part of Steve’s 50th birthday celebration. That should be enough encouragement to get you down to Avenue B and 10th Street, but if you still need more convincing, how about this: in addition to his current band, Steve has been a part of The Dream Syndicate, Danny & Dusty, Gutterball and is also currently part of The Baseball Project. He’s also coming off what is probably the ten most musically prolific years of his life as I noted when he became Now I’ve Heard Everything’s Artist of the Decade.
