In the end, I kept thinking of that line from Bob Dylan's "I and I" from the album INFIDELS: "I make shoes, for everyone, even you, and I still go barefoot." The Shoemaker, directed by Antony Marsellis, with Lucy DeVito and Alma Cuevo, and starring Mr. Aiello, is in an extremely limited engagement through August 14.
Ideas in Art, culture, technology, politics and life-- In Brooklyn or Beacon NY -- and Beyond (anyway, somewhere beginning with a "B")
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Shoemaker with Danny Aiello: The "Heeling" Arts
The Shoemaker, a play in two acts by Susan Charlotte at the Cause Celebre in the Acorn Theater on Theater Row, stars Danny Aiello and is an ambitious and extremely striving piece of theater art, seeking to mine and intertwine deep emotions and powerful threads of history and contemporary memory. It may fall a little short in its reach but it certainly can't be faulted for trying.Theater needs more original works and especially those that feature actors not regularly appearing in the NY theater scene. And when that actor is Danny Aiello, full of authentic passion and gruff personality, who has the courage as an actor to reach out, even at the risk of not quite grasping the gold ring, it is even more rewarding. The fact that Mr. Aiello,at 78, gives a strong performance, all storms and shouts and whispers and tears, through Ms. Charlotte's play (which itself attempts to weave, perhaps a little too preciously, 9/11 and the Holocaust into a complicated tale), is amazing inasmuch as Mr. Aiello's authenticity and sincere Italian-American soul seems to cast just the right magical spell needed to untangle the play's gordian knot. When you get down to the heart of the matter, it is Giuseppi, the Italian Jewish shoemaker in Hell's Kitchen ,who strives to "heal" as he heels, ministering to the needs, both in terms of footwear and life's mysteries and conundrums, of his family and customers, while never quite finding solace in his own life.
-- Tony Napoli - Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn
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Current Reading
- Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War- Tony Horwitz
- A Sultan in Palermo - Tariq Ali
- Hitch-22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens
- Negropedia- Patrice Evans
- Dead Funny: Humor in Nazi Germany - Rudolph Herzog
- Exile on Main Street - Robert Greenfield
- Among the Truthers - A Journey Among America's Growing Conspiracist Underworld - Jonathan Kay
- Paradise Lost - John Milton
- What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Thinking the Unthinkable - John Brockman
- Notes from the Edge Times - Daniel Pinchbeck
- Fringe-ology: How I Can't Explain Away the Unexplainable- Steve Volk
- Un Juif pour l'exemple (translated as A Jew Must Die )- Jacques Cheesex
- The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
- Pale King - David Foster Wallce
- David Bowie: Starman bio - Paul Trynka
- Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat - Andrez Bergen
- The Future of Nostalgia -Svetlana Boym
- Living in the End Times - Slavoj ZIzek
- FIrst as Tragedy Next as Farce - Slavoj Zizek
- How to Survive a Robot Uprising - Daniel Wilson
- Where is My Jet Pack? -Daniel Wilson
- Day of the Oprichniks - Vladimir Sorokin
- Ice Trilogy - Vladimir Sorokin
- First Civilizations
- Oscar Wilde -Andre Maurois
- The Beats - Harvey Pekar, et al
- SDS - Harvey Pekar, et al
- The Unfinished Animal - Theodore Roszak
- Friends of Eddy Coyle
- Brooklands -Emily Barton
- Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahme-Smith - Entertaining and historical
- Dictionary of the Khazars - Pavic
- Sloth-Gilbert Hernandez
- War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
- Charles Addams: An Evilution
- Life in Ancient Greece
- Time - Eva Hoffmann
- Violence - S. Zizek
- Luba - a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez
- Life in Ancient Egypt
- Great Apes - Will Self - riveting and disturbing
- Lost Honor of Katherina Blum - Heinrich Boll - could not put it down
- Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed (author deserving of new wide readership)
- Living in Ancient Mesopotomia
- Landscape in Concrete - Jakov Lind - surreal
- 'There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby'-Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - creepy stories - translation feels literarily "thin"
- Mythologies - William Butler Yeats (re-read again & again)
- How German Is It ? - Walter Abish
- The Book of Genesis - illustrated by R. Crumb - visionary
- "Flags" - an illustrated encyclopedia - wish I could remember all of these. Flag culture
- Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
- Ubik - Philip K. Dick
- Nobody's Fool - Richard Russo
- Hitler's Empire - Mark Mazower
- Nazi Culture - various authors
- Master Plan: Himmler 's Scholars and the Holocaust - Heather Pringle
- Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt
- Living in Ancient Rome
- Traveling with Herodotus -R. Kapuszynsky
- Oblivion - David Foster Wallace - Some of his greatest work
- Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace - still wrestling with this great book
- Netherland - Joseph O'Neill - staggeringly great read
- Renegade - The Obama Campaign - Richard Wolffe
- Mount Analogue - Rene Daumal
- John Brown
- Anathem - Neal Stephenson - love Stephenson but tough slogging first few chapters
- 7 Deadly Sins
- ALEX COX - Alex Cox
- FIASCO by Thomas Ricks
- I, Fellini - Charlotte Chandler & Federico Fellini
- Best of 20th century alternative history fiction
- Judah P. Benjamin - Eli Evans - Confederacy's Secretary of State & source of the W.C. Field's exclamation
- Moscow 2042 - Vladimir Voinovich - Pre-1989 curiosity & entertaining sci fi read; love his portrayal of Solzhenitsyn-like character
- Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano - Mafia without the It-Am sugar coating. Brutal & disturbing
- The Sack of Rome - Celebrity+Media+Money=Silvio Berlusconi - Alexander Stille
- Reporting - David Remnick - terrific journalism
- Fassbinder
- Indignation - Philip Roth
- Rome
- Let's Go Italy! 2008
- Italian Phrases for Dummies
- How to Pack
- Violence - Slavoj Zizek
- Dali: Painting & Film
- The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight - Jimmy Breslin
- The Good Rat - Jimmy Breslin
- Spook Country - William Gibson
- A Blue Hand - The Beats in India - Deborah Baker
- The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menard
- Coast of Utopia - Tom Stoppard
- Physics of the Impossible - Dr. Michio Kaku
- Managing the Unexpected - Weick & Sutcliffe
- Wait Til The Midnight Hour - Writings on Black Power
- Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed
- Burning Down the Masters' House - Jayson Blair
- Howl - Allen Ginsberg
- Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
- The Palace Thief - Ethan Canin
- John Adams - David McCullough
- The Wooden Sea - Jonathan Carroll
- American Gangster - Mark Jacobson
- Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
- Gawker Guide to Becoming King of All Media
- Jews and Power - Ruth Wisse
- Youth Without Youth - Mircea Eliade
- A Team of Rivals - Doris Goodwin
- Ghost Hunters -William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death - Deborah Blum
- Dream -Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy - Stephen Duncombe
- Love & Theft - Eric Lott
- Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
- Studio A - The Bob Dylan Reader
Current Listening
- Alexi Murdoch Wait
- Wilco Summer Teeth
- Wilco The Album
- Carmina Burana - Ray Manzarek (& Michael Riesmann)
- Polyrock - Polyrock
- 96 Tears - Garland Jeffries
- Ghost of a Chance Garland Jeffries
- Yellow Magic Orchestra
- Mustang Sally Buddy Guy
- John Lee Hooker
- Black and White Years
- Together Through Life - B. Dylan
- 100 Days 100 Nites - Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
- DYLAN: 3 disc Greatest...
- Glassworks - Philip Glass
- Wild Palms - Soundtrack -Ryuichi Sakamoto
- Dinah Washington - Best of..
- Commander Cody& His Lost Planet Airmen Live at Armadillo
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