One-day snowfall record for Central Park: 11.3 inches.
Wind gusts: up to 50 mph (hurricane strength).
Total snowfall expected: 20-30 inches.
Living through what might be the biggest snowstorm ever to hit New York amid the winter I've taken a vow to get around only by bike and on foot: priceless.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Sunday, December 13, 2009
A feaverishly Productive Weekend!
It's mid-December. And every year around this time, two very inter-related things happen to me.
First (if I'm a student, as I am this year), I start getting all schmaltzy for my hometown, as one of my by-annual visits starts to approach. Second, I start procrastinating.
A lot.
I look for any excuse not to study for exams. Don't act like you didn't/don't do it.
Aaaaannnnnnnnnyway. If you breathe air and have ears, as I do, then you've probably heard Jay-Z's new jam, Empire State of Mind about every third time you walk into a deli in New York. And if you don't live in New York, maybe the same can be said, I don't know.
Hearing this song all the time has pumped me full a kind of strange, two-years-ago nostalgia. And as an unabashed lover both of my current city and of my hometown, I can't help wondering whether it is intended in some way as a response to Kanye West's uplifting and enchanting Homecoming (y'know, maybe one of those silly regional rivalry things that seem to go on a lot in rap... and in sports and lots of other cultural arenas, for that matter).
If you're working feverishly to be unproductive like I am, I'll leave you with some questions to fill up your mind and your time:
1)Which is the better video, and why?
2)Which is the better rapper, and why?
3)Which is the better city, and why?
Discuss.
First (if I'm a student, as I am this year), I start getting all schmaltzy for my hometown, as one of my by-annual visits starts to approach. Second, I start procrastinating.
A lot.
I look for any excuse not to study for exams. Don't act like you didn't/don't do it.
Aaaaannnnnnnnnyway. If you breathe air and have ears, as I do, then you've probably heard Jay-Z's new jam, Empire State of Mind about every third time you walk into a deli in New York. And if you don't live in New York, maybe the same can be said, I don't know.
Hearing this song all the time has pumped me full a kind of strange, two-years-ago nostalgia. And as an unabashed lover both of my current city and of my hometown, I can't help wondering whether it is intended in some way as a response to Kanye West's uplifting and enchanting Homecoming (y'know, maybe one of those silly regional rivalry things that seem to go on a lot in rap... and in sports and lots of other cultural arenas, for that matter).
If you're working feverishly to be unproductive like I am, I'll leave you with some questions to fill up your mind and your time:
1)Which is the better video, and why?
2)Which is the better rapper, and why?
3)Which is the better city, and why?
Discuss.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Disturbingly of the Moment
A version of this review will be printed in the December 9th edition of The Envoy.
On November 17th of this year, the final appeal in the case of Lynne Stewart was denied, and she now sits in jail. Stewart is a New York City defense attorney who has represented the downtrodden and the unpopular for decades. She is now serving a 28-month jail term for a conviction that was made possible because the U.S. Government, using the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, undermined attorney-client privilege, one of the cornerstones of the rule of law, in order to allege that she provided material aid to her client, who was charged in a terrorism-related offense.
What a moment in history to see the release of William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe, a new documentary by Emily and Sarah Kuntsler.
William Kuntsler was a radical lawyer and at times a political firebrand outside the courtroom. He represented scores of defendants who, he really believed, had right on their side in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His most famous case came in 1970, when he represented the “Chicago Seven,” the defendants accused of starting riots which were in fact started by police, outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He served a jail sentence for Contempt of Court in that case, and emerged more radical than ever. He represented members of the American Indian Movement when they occupied the town of Wounded Knee, SD and the National Guard descended on them. He went to Attica State Prison in 1971 to act as a negotiator for inmates who’d taken over part of the prison in protest of their conditions, and was cruelly forced to watch as troops opened fire and indiscriminately murdered 39 people, including ten prison guards.
Kuntsler’s daughters, Emily and Sarah, made the film in part to tell his story, and in part, it seems, as a way to come to grips with who he was. It walks us through his personal history from serving as a Major in the Army in World War II, to settling down as a lawyer in the white picket fence world of Westchester County, to abandoning that life to fight for what he knew was right, even when that meant providing counsel for people who’d been accused of awful things.
Told in voiceover narration by Sarah, the Kuntsler sisters’ point of view helps give this story a warm, personal touch. We get a multi-dimensional picture of a man of tremendous moral and intellectual weight, but we also get a sense his many flaws. Though at times it takes on the feel of a group therapy session, hearing the story as told through the eyes of Emily and Sarah gives a personal, accurate and complete sense not just of William Kunstler the historical figure, but of Bill Kunstler the man.
Growing up in the West Village in the 1980’s, Emily and Sarah disapproved of many of their dad’s choices about whom to represent, and lived in fear of the havoc those choices might wreak on their lives. After the upheaval of the 1960’s early 1970’s had fully ebbed, they saw their father move away from his role as a stalwart champion of the oppressed, and toward what they saw as a series of attempts to garner publicity by representing the most reviled clients he could find.
Maybe it was an expression of a lofty principle the Kuntsler sisters look back on their father once articulating to them: “everybody deserves a lawyer.” Maybe it was partly that, and partly an attempt to hold onto the fading spotlight that had shone so brightly on him for so long. But in any case, the work would go on.
Kuntsler represented a man accused of murdering a fundamentalist Rabbi in Brooklyn. The political fallout from that case sent angry conservative Jewish protesters to the sidewalk in front of the Kuntsler family’s townhouse for months. In 1990, he represented Yusef Salam and four other Black teenagers who were accused of the brutal rape and beating of a young woman in “the Central Park Jogger Case.” The brutality of the crime sent much of New York City and the country into a frenzy of retaliatory rage, and it prompted Donald Trump to take out full-page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty for the culprits.
But in 2003, eight years after Kuntsler’s death, another man confessed to the crime. That confession, combined with DNA evidence, led to Yusef Salam’s exoneration. He was released from prison after 13 years. Those kids really didn’t do it.
We all have moments in our lives that we look back on as turning points. At one point in the film, we hear Sarah recount her father’s reaction the first time he saw Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. He looked up at the hulking marble statue that depicts a young biblical king calmly pausing as he prepares to slay a giant, and immediately knew that injustice would be his Goliath, and that from that point onward, he would fight to become a David who could help slay it.
Well Bill, wherever you are, sorry to be the one to have to tell you this: Goliath’s still out there. But you know what? Yusef Salam is alive and free. And that’s gotta count for something.
On November 17th of this year, the final appeal in the case of Lynne Stewart was denied, and she now sits in jail. Stewart is a New York City defense attorney who has represented the downtrodden and the unpopular for decades. She is now serving a 28-month jail term for a conviction that was made possible because the U.S. Government, using the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, undermined attorney-client privilege, one of the cornerstones of the rule of law, in order to allege that she provided material aid to her client, who was charged in a terrorism-related offense.
What a moment in history to see the release of William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe, a new documentary by Emily and Sarah Kuntsler.
William Kuntsler was a radical lawyer and at times a political firebrand outside the courtroom. He represented scores of defendants who, he really believed, had right on their side in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His most famous case came in 1970, when he represented the “Chicago Seven,” the defendants accused of starting riots which were in fact started by police, outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He served a jail sentence for Contempt of Court in that case, and emerged more radical than ever. He represented members of the American Indian Movement when they occupied the town of Wounded Knee, SD and the National Guard descended on them. He went to Attica State Prison in 1971 to act as a negotiator for inmates who’d taken over part of the prison in protest of their conditions, and was cruelly forced to watch as troops opened fire and indiscriminately murdered 39 people, including ten prison guards.
Kuntsler’s daughters, Emily and Sarah, made the film in part to tell his story, and in part, it seems, as a way to come to grips with who he was. It walks us through his personal history from serving as a Major in the Army in World War II, to settling down as a lawyer in the white picket fence world of Westchester County, to abandoning that life to fight for what he knew was right, even when that meant providing counsel for people who’d been accused of awful things.
Told in voiceover narration by Sarah, the Kuntsler sisters’ point of view helps give this story a warm, personal touch. We get a multi-dimensional picture of a man of tremendous moral and intellectual weight, but we also get a sense his many flaws. Though at times it takes on the feel of a group therapy session, hearing the story as told through the eyes of Emily and Sarah gives a personal, accurate and complete sense not just of William Kunstler the historical figure, but of Bill Kunstler the man.
Growing up in the West Village in the 1980’s, Emily and Sarah disapproved of many of their dad’s choices about whom to represent, and lived in fear of the havoc those choices might wreak on their lives. After the upheaval of the 1960’s early 1970’s had fully ebbed, they saw their father move away from his role as a stalwart champion of the oppressed, and toward what they saw as a series of attempts to garner publicity by representing the most reviled clients he could find.
Maybe it was an expression of a lofty principle the Kuntsler sisters look back on their father once articulating to them: “everybody deserves a lawyer.” Maybe it was partly that, and partly an attempt to hold onto the fading spotlight that had shone so brightly on him for so long. But in any case, the work would go on.
Kuntsler represented a man accused of murdering a fundamentalist Rabbi in Brooklyn. The political fallout from that case sent angry conservative Jewish protesters to the sidewalk in front of the Kuntsler family’s townhouse for months. In 1990, he represented Yusef Salam and four other Black teenagers who were accused of the brutal rape and beating of a young woman in “the Central Park Jogger Case.” The brutality of the crime sent much of New York City and the country into a frenzy of retaliatory rage, and it prompted Donald Trump to take out full-page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty for the culprits.
But in 2003, eight years after Kuntsler’s death, another man confessed to the crime. That confession, combined with DNA evidence, led to Yusef Salam’s exoneration. He was released from prison after 13 years. Those kids really didn’t do it.
We all have moments in our lives that we look back on as turning points. At one point in the film, we hear Sarah recount her father’s reaction the first time he saw Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. He looked up at the hulking marble statue that depicts a young biblical king calmly pausing as he prepares to slay a giant, and immediately knew that injustice would be his Goliath, and that from that point onward, he would fight to become a David who could help slay it.
Well Bill, wherever you are, sorry to be the one to have to tell you this: Goliath’s still out there. But you know what? Yusef Salam is alive and free. And that’s gotta count for something.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Uptown is a Neighborhood, Not a Direction!
A version of this review will run in the November 23 issue of The Envoy.
It’s rare that a play can make a person homesick. You see, I grew up just outside Chicago, and Uptown, an eclectic neighborhood not far from Wrigley Field and a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the glistening shores of Lake Michigan, is where I rented my first-ever apartment. It’s also the setting of “Superior Donuts,” the newest play by Tracy Letts. It’s a gritty place, its pothole-laden streets lined with homeless shelters and seedy bars. But it’s got a tender charm and a resilient spirit that always reminds you that even when it’s down, it’s a long way from out.
Kind of like Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), a young, witty Black student and aspiring novelist who saunters into a donut shop owned by Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean), a 50-something Polish-American one-time Vietnam War draft-dodger. Franco is cocky and forthright, bursting with humor and a fiery intellect. He challenges the quiet, reserved Arthur to name ten Black poets to prove he’s not racist. Not five minutes after walking in, Franco’s acting like he owns the place!
But as the play’s well-crafted plot reveals, he doesn’t own much—other than a penchant for gambling and a chin-high heap of debt because of it.
Like “Superior Donuts,” Letts’ masterpiece “August: Osage County” first opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre to a Midwestern tornado of critical and popular praise, before making the move from the City of Big Shoulders, to the city of big, um, egos.
But whatever Tracy Letts thinks of himself, the theater world is catching on to his mastery of playwriting. “August” boasts both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for best play in 2008, and Broadway greeted the opening of “Superior Donuts” this October with a barrage of anticipatory buzz from critics and theatergoers.
Letts has described the play as an homage to his adopted hometown of the last twenty years or so, and under the direction of Tina Landau, it abounds with those little slices of life that scream “Chicago” without slipping into caricatured overstatement. One salient example is the way Kate Buddeke, as Officer Randy O’steen, a love interest of Arthur’s, nails the nasal accent and puffed-up swagger of an Irish-American patrolwoman from the South Side.
But hers is a role that avoids any simplistic vulgarization of the tension we might expect when a ‘60s liberal and a big-city cop wander into each other’s lives. The budding romance between Randy and Arthur is but one soft-spoken, roundabout front in Arthur’s larger internal battle to break out of his emotional comfort zone, ditch the lingering demons of his past, and live a truly principled life.
In exposition throughout the play and in a series of intimate monologues, we learn of Arthur’s rocky relationship with his immigrant father, his failed marriage and his estrangement from his only daughter. We also learn that he’s willing to cling to the stale comfort of the solitary life he’s known with a ferocity you might think a peacenik incapable of. But the bond between Arthur and the ever-hopeful Franco is what finally starts to erode that comfort enough to allow Arthur to see beyond the narrow horizon of a lonely life as Everybody’s Favorite Donut Maker, and at last dream of something more.
Maybe more than anything else, “Superior Donuts” is a play about dreaming, and how essential (and potentially dangerous) it is for us to dream in a world that will jump at the chance crush our dreams, or be just as happy to let them die a slow, suffocating death. The young Arthur dreamt of a better world. The older one daydreams in wistful “what-if’s.” Franco dreams of writing the Great American Novel. Kiril (Michael Garvey), the owner of the electronics store next door to Superior Donuts, dreams of owning a bigger store and his own home some day.
But these dreams are not treated with the unmoored optimism of that worn-out narrative found in the lore of the “American Dream.” That’s because, at root, what these characters dream of is something a lot harder to attain than a house or a career or a couple of cars in the driveway. They dream of a world where we can come from disparate corners of the globe and the ideological spectrum, yet live side-by-side, helping each other rise to the challenge of being the best people we can be. And Letts’ script embraces that most lofty of dreams, but doesn’t shy from making the point that it’s an awfully tall order to fill.
Kind of like Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), a young, witty Black student and aspiring novelist who saunters into a donut shop owned by Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean), a 50-something Polish-American one-time Vietnam War draft-dodger. Franco is cocky and forthright, bursting with humor and a fiery intellect. He challenges the quiet, reserved Arthur to name ten Black poets to prove he’s not racist. Not five minutes after walking in, Franco’s acting like he owns the place!
But as the play’s well-crafted plot reveals, he doesn’t own much—other than a penchant for gambling and a chin-high heap of debt because of it.
Like “Superior Donuts,” Letts’ masterpiece “August: Osage County” first opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre to a Midwestern tornado of critical and popular praise, before making the move from the City of Big Shoulders, to the city of big, um, egos.
But whatever Tracy Letts thinks of himself, the theater world is catching on to his mastery of playwriting. “August” boasts both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for best play in 2008, and Broadway greeted the opening of “Superior Donuts” this October with a barrage of anticipatory buzz from critics and theatergoers.
Letts has described the play as an homage to his adopted hometown of the last twenty years or so, and under the direction of Tina Landau, it abounds with those little slices of life that scream “Chicago” without slipping into caricatured overstatement. One salient example is the way Kate Buddeke, as Officer Randy O’steen, a love interest of Arthur’s, nails the nasal accent and puffed-up swagger of an Irish-American patrolwoman from the South Side.
But hers is a role that avoids any simplistic vulgarization of the tension we might expect when a ‘60s liberal and a big-city cop wander into each other’s lives. The budding romance between Randy and Arthur is but one soft-spoken, roundabout front in Arthur’s larger internal battle to break out of his emotional comfort zone, ditch the lingering demons of his past, and live a truly principled life.
In exposition throughout the play and in a series of intimate monologues, we learn of Arthur’s rocky relationship with his immigrant father, his failed marriage and his estrangement from his only daughter. We also learn that he’s willing to cling to the stale comfort of the solitary life he’s known with a ferocity you might think a peacenik incapable of. But the bond between Arthur and the ever-hopeful Franco is what finally starts to erode that comfort enough to allow Arthur to see beyond the narrow horizon of a lonely life as Everybody’s Favorite Donut Maker, and at last dream of something more.
Maybe more than anything else, “Superior Donuts” is a play about dreaming, and how essential (and potentially dangerous) it is for us to dream in a world that will jump at the chance crush our dreams, or be just as happy to let them die a slow, suffocating death. The young Arthur dreamt of a better world. The older one daydreams in wistful “what-if’s.” Franco dreams of writing the Great American Novel. Kiril (Michael Garvey), the owner of the electronics store next door to Superior Donuts, dreams of owning a bigger store and his own home some day.
But these dreams are not treated with the unmoored optimism of that worn-out narrative found in the lore of the “American Dream.” That’s because, at root, what these characters dream of is something a lot harder to attain than a house or a career or a couple of cars in the driveway. They dream of a world where we can come from disparate corners of the globe and the ideological spectrum, yet live side-by-side, helping each other rise to the challenge of being the best people we can be. And Letts’ script embraces that most lofty of dreams, but doesn’t shy from making the point that it’s an awfully tall order to fill.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Halloween is Over; You Know What That Means...
I've been pretty busy lately and blogging has been low on the priority list. So the first post in a while is an occasion to take note of. I wrote a poem (trust me: I use the term loosely) to celebrate.
Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice
Stop the presses, it's happened again. Mountain of candy still digesting. I always buy too much and can't give it all away. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that steak sandwich, will ya. Funny, I don't recall being asked if I wanted an image of Santa Claus on my Coca Cola can. It's official: The annual Red And Green Stampede. The Running Of The Bullshit. Run with the herd or get swept down the street. Swipe your card, please. Would you like cash back. We offer gift wrapping downstairs. Downtown. Midtown. Middle of the road. In the middle of 34th Street, watch carefully as the Empire State Building sheds that lovely orange and again dons a clashing color palette. Exactly ten minutes after sundown and you can see them go on. Check your cellphone clocks. The race is about to begin. On your mark. Get Set. Go to the mall with me this weekend. I don't envy the guy who has to unlock those doors. Up to fifty percent off. Up to here with this nonsense. Nice hat. Nice try. This wallet stays in the front pocket. This wallet stays put as mister sidewalk purse salesman cuts deals. Are you kidding me. That leather is so fake. How many animals would you say that coat is made of. How many hours would you say it took them to put up that tree. Let's go ice skating. Let's not do gifts this year. Let's go home, it's freezing out here. Freeze on the dotted white lane marker. This matador leaves the red fabric at home and opts for shopping bags with half-nude male models. They heed not. Hey asshole, I'm walking here. Some people. Some city. Somehow I knew you'd end up here.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
It’s An Album! It’s A Movie!
A version of this review will run in the October 28th edition of The Envoy.
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway snakes menacingly across 11.7 miles of Brooklyn and Queens, mangling neighborhoods and hubcaps as few roads can. The brainchild of infamous urban planner/neighborhood-destroyer Robert Moses and completed in 1960, it is, in ways literal and metaphorical, one of the ugliest things in New York City.
All the more reason to write a concept album devoted it—right?
Apparently.
Sufjan Stevens, the prolific, 34 year-old Brooklyn-based musician is at his weirdest--and somehow, also his most straightforward--with BQE (Asthmatic Kitty Records).
Stevens has carved out quite a niche for himself in early 21st Century American indie music. The sheer ambition of his projects has demanded the attention of music critics and a mushrooming constituency of fans for several years now. His is a musical style—not unlike New York City, come to think of it--that insists on doing things on an almost laughably large scale. He composes all the music, and sings and performs every instrument on all his albums. And he plans to record an album of songs thematically tied to each one of the fifty states (he’s already done Michigan and Illinois).
He is an artist with a range that is truly rare, making use of lavish arrangements that can haunt us, tickle us, or beckon us toward a quiet state of somber contemplation—and that’s just the melodies. Stevens’ meticulously-researched and heartfelt lyrics have touched on everything from the personal life of a Chicago serial killer to the rise and fall of industrial production in Detroit to a sorrowful ode to a lost friend.
BQE was originally commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2007, and was performed with a 36-person orchestra as part of its Next Wave Festival. The songs on BQE, like much of Stevens’ work, are lyricless and extravagantly composed. Piano, flute, trumpet, violin and clarinet can be heard over rising and falling tempos. But to talk about individual songs would almost be to negate the point of this album. That’s because it’s just as much a film as an album. Shot on a combination of super 8mm and 16mm film, BQE uses a triptych visual structure (three side-by-side frames playing simultaneously) with Stevens’ original score creating a mood that takes the viewer on a head-spinning journey up, down and around one of America’s most notorious roadways.
And as a nerd who collected maps of cities instead of baseball cards as a kid, it’s right up my alley (or… right up my six-lane, shoulderless, pot hole-laden behemoth).
But my enthusiasm is born of a very specific agglomeration of quirky proclivities. I’d have a hard time seeing Joe Schmoe (or even, frankly, Joe Educated Hipster) being able to sink his teeth very far into this one.
It opens with a credit sequence that introduces us to three hula-hooping, superhero-costume-clad young women: Botanica (Latin for “pertaining to plants”); Quantus (Latin for “how much”); and Electress (a term that was used to refer to the wife or widow of a politician in the Holy Roman Empire). Botanica’s costume is emblazoned with a “B” across the front, Quantus’ with a “Q,” and Electress’ with an “E.”
Is Stevens likening the rat race of the present-day U.S. to the militarism and exploitation of the Late Roman Empire? Or is he just taking us on a manic joyride through his adopted hometown?
It may be a little of both. But I’m not sure if it matters either way. Stevens’ concerns seem to lay with representing urban space with a frenetic whimsy that mirrors, yet accelerates, the way it really is.
Speaking of mirrors, the side-by-side, triple split-screen format of the film is exploited to interesting (if overdone) effect in stylized editing that presents what looks like an endlessly-reproducing wall of moving cars. This effect and others are employed in a way that tries to augment the musical score; the more frenzied and unwieldy the visuals, the more complex and climactic the music. In this way, what we see onscreen resembles a narrative.
But that leads this superhighway of musical and urban exploration straight toward one of its biggest weaknesses: the outlines of a coherent story that we are able to discern, are pretty meaningless. If, for example, the visuals of the film had included archival footage that could help tell the whole story of the evolution of the BQE and its affect on the neighborhoods it winds so rudely through, the sum total would have been a more satisfying (if less avant guard) visual and auditory experience.
The world is a complicated place. And Sufjan Stevens, it seems, doesn’t want to make anything feel simple. None of his music does, that’s for sure. That idea—that life is just… complex--might have been at the heart of his thinking in doing this project. Which is why it’s oddly incongruous that BQE ends on an image of a throng of cyclists lazily reclaiming the northbound lanes of the expressway, in no particular hurry as they ride under a string of overpasses. We’re left wondering: was that the point of this whole thing? That cars are bad?
Maybe that was part of it. But somehow, I bet there’s more to the story--even though there isn’t really much of a story at all.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Confessions Of A Recovering New York City Bike Messenger, Entry #2
10/2/09.
1:22pm.
6th Avenue at 34th Street.
I had somewhere I was trying to be. I had a little bit of a tailwind. And I might as well come right out and say it: I was enjoying myself, jutting inches in front of cars and people, rendering lane markers and crosswalks meaningless.
To a bloated throng of West-of-the-Hudson-ers, clogging the crosswalk like a weeks-old clump of congealed pubic hair:
"HEEEY! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO MOOOOOVE!!"
I didn't even have to slow down.
Hey, I'm ridin' here.
I'm not an asshole in real life, I just play one on two wheels.
1:22pm.
6th Avenue at 34th Street.
I had somewhere I was trying to be. I had a little bit of a tailwind. And I might as well come right out and say it: I was enjoying myself, jutting inches in front of cars and people, rendering lane markers and crosswalks meaningless.
To a bloated throng of West-of-the-Hudson-ers, clogging the crosswalk like a weeks-old clump of congealed pubic hair:
"HEEEY! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO MOOOOOVE!!"
I didn't even have to slow down.
Hey, I'm ridin' here.
I'm not an asshole in real life, I just play one on two wheels.
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