Bright Star

So quickly, in January, the afternoon Sun lingers longer and longer. The days are changing, although we are still in winter, the changing light gives a promise of the further seasons to some. These days, in the mornings, weather permitting, I usually get off the train at DeKalb Avenue, making the straight walk up a quiet Fulton Street, to my office on Court.

This morning, the rising sun was a fantastic orange and gold ball, impossible to ignore. It stopped me in my tracks and I turned to catch this image, the morning shadows slowly giving way to this emerging star, bathing sections of Fulton Street in
its soothing, blinding glow.

Remembering America's Greatest Spiritual, Ethical and Political Leader, Martyr

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

Had he not been martyred, could the Rev. Dr.King have been the United States of America's first African-American President? That would have been a remarkable dream. Despite, or perhaps because of, the despair triggered by his martyrdom, before his death, Dr. King predicted a Black US President within 25 years, countered to the more conservative prediction of 40 years by assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Bob Dylan performs at the March on Washington


Joan Baez and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A troubling, visionary statement of what might have been had the Confederate States of America succeded and defeated the United States of America in the Civil War:
Kevin Wilmott's brilliant "alternative history"and faux documentary film, produced by Spike Lee, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

Haiti: When the already fragile is further shaken

A map showing the areas in Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, impacted by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Tuesday.

From time to time, the pop and circumstance of daily living give way to the grim reality of living on a planet that brings its own separate grief, aside from the economic, social and political struggles of daily living, in the form of natural disasters. On an early morning Q train passing through Flatbush, three women chatted in hushed and worried tones about the latest disaster to befall Haiti.

“I couldn’t reach my cousins, I don’t know what to think.”

“It looks like nothing was left standing.”

This scene was no doubt repeated many, many times wherever emigrants from Haiti gathered, so, of course, there is great concern in Brooklyn’s Haitian community.

“First the hurricane, now this….”

Haitian-Americans in Miami, New York and other U.S. cities tell a similar story of frantically trying to get through to relatives and friends to see if they survived the largest earthquake to hit the Caribbean nation in 200 years. Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a full picture of damage and casualties as powerful aftershocks shook the desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy.

The New York Times reported a comment from one Haitian in Miami: ''The level of anxiety is high,'' he said. ''Haiti has been through trauma since 2004, from coup d'etat to hurricanes, now earthquakes.''
The New York Times also reported that Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author whose books about the country have won the National Book Award and the Pushcart Prize, gathered family and friends at her Miami home, which has become something of a command center.

''Some people are online, some are watching CNN, some are listening to Haitian radio,'' she said late Tuesday night. ''There's a huge sense of helplessness about it. You want to go there, but you just have to wait. I think the hardest part is the lack of information.''

She said that for years, Haitians wondered with trepidation what would happen if an earthquake hit.

''Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this.''
More from the Times here.

For more coverage, see The Haitian Times

HOW YOU CAN HELP: CNN IMPACT HERE

And, a site established by Yele Haiti, an aid and charitable organization founded by Haitian American artist Wyclef Jean.

The Miami Herald provides more detail and updates here.

U.S. Representative Kendrick Meek advised any citizens wondering about their family in Haiti to call 888-407-4747, a phone line set up by the State Department in conjunction with American Citizen Services.

Time Magazine Photos of the Aftermath here.

Update from Cortelyou Road: The Latest From The Wall

Ditmas Park's own version of "The DaVinci Code" -- the grafitti wall at Cortelyou Road. From the plain to the arcane, it's all there. Photos by Anthony Napoli

Montague Street Journal: Brooklyn-Based Reflections on Bob Dylan

In “Joey,” from the Desire album, Bob Dylan sings about Joey Gallo (aka “Crazy Joe” and “Joe the Blond”), a mob figure from Red Hook, Brooklyn, elevating him from gang boss and gunman to a more mythical status, more guru than Brooklyn gangsta. Now, a new Dylan journal, has been published, “Montague Street Journal: The Art of Bob Dylan,” that not only takes its name from a street in the “town of Brooklyn” (that itself appears in “Tangled Up in Blue”), but also is published right here in the borough of Kings.

Montague Street Journal features more scholarly takes on the work and impact of Bob Dylan. Articles include “Reading Masked and Anonymous: A close of examination of Larry Charles’ off-beat masterpiece” and “Minds out of time: societal dichotomy and anachronism as recurring theme in Dylan’s lyrics.” It isn’t available in bookstores yet, but is available online here.

MSJ's editorial and publishing staff are Brooklyn residents. Editor Nina Goss grew up in Brooklyn Heights (attended P.S. 8 and P.S. 7), although, like many natives, she has migrated elsewhere in the borough. “Montague Street is a real and remembered place for me, like the layers of time portrayed throughout Blood on the Tracks,” she said in an email, “and it meant quite a lot” that her colleagues at the journal concurred on using it as a title.

She, like me, was at Dylan’s first Brooklyn show in Prospect Park in 2008, although on the masthead she indicates she also has attended a total of 38 shows. I always thought that, were Dylan to play Brooklyn, BAM would have been the first venue chosen. Nina recalls that Prospect Park was “a strong and vigorous set, and a wonderful counterpart to the next night's show at Asbury Park, which had a dark edgy quality to it.”

Nina Goss delivered her paper on globalization and Bob Dylan entitled “Show me all around the world, or the Whole Wide World Which People Say is Round” at the 2009 Northeast MLA conference, it will be published in an upcoming book on Dylan she is editing. She also publishes a website, Gardener is Gone, on Dylan.

For more on the bona fides of the editorial and publishing team (including number of Dylan concerts attended) here

A more in-depth interview from the Examiner online appears here.

Although I didn't have the opportunity to ask, I recall having heard a-- probably apocryphal/urban legend-type-- tale that in Dylan's post-Born Again days, in the 80s, around the time of Infidels, he spent a lot of time in Brooklyn, re-immersing himself in Jewish culture and studying with an Orthodox rabbi.

As a fan of all things in print, not just digital text, I salute Montague Street Journal's decision to go paper and am happy to see that Brooklyn remains fertile ground for the launching of new intellectual enterprise and as source of new knowledge and analysis on this important American artist.

Happy Friday: It Really Is 2010

The end of the first business week of the year; well, it will be in a few hours. The post-holiday lethargy begins to lift. For what it's worth, we've survived the transition into another new year. It really is 2010! Conan and Jay Leno at loggerheads? Alabama takes Texas? Let's see what the future brings. But for now -- "I don't wanna work; just wanna bang on the drums all day." ">Happy Friday.

Wassily Kandinsky @ Guggenheim Museum through 1/13/10

"Thirty" by Wassily Kandinsky 1937


Wassily Kandinsky 1913 or earlier


Portrait of Kandinsky by Gabriele Munter, a German abstract expresssionist painter who was personally and professionally involved with Kandinsky from 1902-1914. Her work is itself rich and intriguing. More on Munter here.

The Guggenheim Museum is presenting a breathtaking retrospective of more than 100 works by this founder of abstract art, culled from its own collection, as well as that of the Pompidou Centre and the Annegret Hoberg, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. We caught the exhibition last weekend and it was packed, but absolutely, positively worth the visit to view such an extensive and informative exhibition on Kandinsky, the artist and theorist. The exhibtion runs through January 13.

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (English pronunciation: /kənˈdɪnski/; Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, Vasilij Vasil'evič Kandinskij; 4 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Ažbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. More here

"Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Wassily Kandinsky is an exploration of his theory and vision on art here

More on the The Guggenheim Museum Retrospective here

2010

Above, Times Square, 2009


2010

"America": Audio Recording Walt Whitman, Brooklynite, reading from "America." [This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America." For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.]

America by Walt Whitman
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Tis Wonderfulish: Yip Yip Hooray for Finian's Rainbow

Forget Washington, DC for the moment. Hope, happiness and the promise of change have touched down at the St. James Theater, although re-emerging from an earlier era, courtesy of Burton Lane (music), Fred Saidy (book) and "Yip" (Isidore Hochberg) Harburgh (lyrics and book). This wonderful and lively musical, combining song and dance, Broadway standards, Irish music, gospel and blues with a sincere progressive message combined with warm sentiment and broad comedy is a delight.

Jim Norton as Finian; Kate Baldwin as his daughter Sharon; Cheyenne Jackson as Woody; Christopher Fitzgerald as the remarkable leprechaun Og; Terri White as Dottie, belting out a remarkable "Necessity"; Chuck Cooper as the post-wishful gospel singing senator Rawkins; William Youmans (who we last caught in his amazing performance as the melting/shrinking evil mother/witch in "Coraline" off-off Broadway at MCC) as Buzz; Guy Davis as Sunny; Alina Fey as Susan---the talent of this ensemble cast seems endless. Up, down and all around Rainbow Valley in Missitucky, it's a play with so much heart and soul that by curtain you think you might bust.

The progressive message of equality is anti-consumerist and anti-corporate but actually rails against greed in all its forms (remember credit swaps, anyone?) And while Harburgh took a swipe at the GOP, his major target is the racist Senator Rawkings, based on real racist/red-neck Democratic senators of the era. Although it seems to be teetering close to the rails of cornpone and historical naivete, in an era that elected the first Black U.S. President, there is an essential sincerity here, which may be why "Finians Rainbow" still seems to be playing to packed houses while "RagTime" with its more complex and darker tones, is posting a closing notice.

Yip, Yip, where are you now that your nation needs you? Despite the accomplishment of 44 in D.C., Harburgh, who was too much the artist and iconoclast to belong to the Communist Party, would not be loathe to challenge the inconsistencies and confusion of the not-so-new administration. As I recall, Harburgh also wrote:
"Democracy gives you a choice, of which machine to vote with/Or choose which brand of razor blade/You'd rather cut your throat with."

Leaving the theater, some of the audience was crowded around the stage door. When Cheyenne Jackson emerged, bundled against the cold. He smiled and his first words to a youngster proferring a playbill and a pen was "Where are your gloves?"

More on Yip Harburgh here.

The N.Y. Times' Edward Rothstein muses on Yip Harburgh's "Grandish Wordplay" in "Finian's Rainbow," "The Wizard of Oz," "Flahoolie," and other works.

Art of the Crash @ Fusion Arts Museum: Closing Night Event, Sunday, December 27

Art car at the Fusion Arts Museum, above.




Above, Fusion art by Shalom Newman.

An entertaining end-of-year art event: a Closing Night Party for "Art of the Crash" plus a special screening of "Automorphosis" CLOSING NIGHT PARTY FOR "ART OF THE CRASH" plus SPECIAL SCREENING of "AUTOMORPHOSIS," tonight, Sunday, December 27, 2009,6 PM - 9 PM

Fusion Arts Museum, 57 Stanton Street, Lower East Side highlights this "Art of the Crash" comprising all automobile-based art, including sculptures made from automotive parts, and an ornate highly decorated vehicle. The title of the show can be taken literally, referring to a car crash, or a metaphor for the state of the economy. This also will be a last opportunity to see this timely and unique exhibit, which will include a lively year-end performance by Trystette and Bobbie Rae. More details on the Fusion Arts Museum here.

The Fusion Arts Museum includes a permanent exhibit of work by fusion-, multimedia artist Shalom Newman, founder of the Museum.

Watching the Passing of Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, Years, Decades..............

Bob Dylan performs "Cry A While" here at the 2002 Grammys and on an audio clip from Stockholm in March 2009. Getting into the year-end Festivus groove....

President Obama, Political Climate and Health Care Reform

Despite some recent diminishing polling numbers for President Obama and his administration, today's Quinnipiac poll showed some interesting nuggets, hidden among all of the continued looming uncertainty on the economy and the complexity and doubt spiraling around the current health care reform initiative:

"But voters say 49 - 29 percent that Obama's policies will help the economy and voters trust him rather than Republicans in Congress 45 - 36 percent to handle the economy.

"In what might be his brightest point in an otherwise dark economic picture, more Americans believe President Obama's policies will help the economy, even if they don't believe those policies will help them personally," said Brown. "And they trust the President more than the Republicans to fix things."
From December 15 - 20, Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,616 registered voters nationwide with a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.

Nevertheless, a total of 91 percent of American voters describe the economy as "not so good" or "poor." Voters split 28 - 28 percent on whether it is getting better or worse with 43 percent seeing no change. The results on both questions are virtually identical to when Quinnipiac University asked them in July.

"On Wall Street, the stock market's performance has many people optimistic and economists may be telling us that the recession is over. But on Main Street, Americans think the economy is still in the toilet," Brown said.

Details here.

In a related topic, opposition to the Obama health care reform initiative comes from both left and right:

The GOP/Right: Opposes financial penalties for failure to buy health insurance. Opposes costs to business including increased taxes to support the plan. Opposes use of any public monies for performance of abortions. Opposes additional debt that will result from the health care overhaul, among other issues.

The left: Opposes absence of a public option in the health care plan (the bill provides for health care provided from a pool of corporate insurers). Absence of a
provision for public funding of abortions. Proposed bill will not permit purchase of pharmaceuticals from Canada.

Based on the previous Clinton administration's failure, concern that this will represent the last opportunity for health care reform, at a critical point where the future of the American economy depends on this reform to spur business and growth, highlights the likelihood that the administration will fashion a new approach to health care that, out of the box, will satisfy neither left nor right but will open the door for subsequent "reform of the reform" that may in fact offer economic relief and, hope and, yes, "change."

Dylan and Kubler-Ross: The 5 Stages of "Christmas in the Heart"

"Love and Theft" ? "Love and Death" ? Good grief!

Harold Lepidus's review in the Examiner.Com takes the long way around to enthusiastically appreciate Dylan's new holiday album "Christmas in the Heart." It may be too soon to tell if it will in fact assume Holiday Classsic Status. And, since the unusual Christmas (or Xmas) cover material, arrangements, and mix of musicians and singers may at first be off-putting to fans who have found new appreciation of Bob Dylan as he seemed to renew his relationship with "American roots" music in the past decade or so, Mr. Lepidus compares the shock 'n awe for fans of this new Dylan album to the 5 stages of grief assigned to dealing with death in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's "On Death and Dying":

"Bob Dylan fans are familiar with these feelings. When he went electric. When he went country. When he put out Self Portrait. When he "found Jesus" and stopped singing his old songs. When he made Hearts Of Fire. When he asked Michael Bolton to collaborate on a song. If you were a Dylan fan during any of these endeavors, there's a good chance it was a shock to your system.

"Then the Kubler-Ross model kicks in. Denial - "This can't be happening." Anger - "It's not fair ! Who is to blame?" Bargaining - "If I can just go on long enough until he's onto something else." Depression - "I give up." Acceptance - "Dylan does it again. It took a while, but I love it ! " Who among us have not felt that way about something Dylan has done ?

"When Dylan sings on Christmas In The Heart, I listen to the lyrics just as I would any of his other albums. It's interesting to pay attention to the craft of songwriting that inhabits each and every song here. You can see why he chose these classics. To Dylan, the cliches are invisible. What's even more fascinating to me is that the lyrics are more Dylan-esque than one would ever imagine. Can't you just hear the lines, "The ox and lamb kept time," or "Jump in bed and cover your head" on Bringing It All Back Home ? How about " As we dream by the fire to face unafraid the plans that we made, " or "Some day soon we all will be together, if the Fates allow. Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" on Time Out Of Mind ? "

The full text here

Let's see, perhaps the following epigraphs are suitable:

"I make shoes/for everyone, even you/But I still go barefoot" - "I & I " -Bob Dylan

"I did it for you/And all you gave me was a smile" - "Cry A While" - Bob Dylan

The 500 Words for Snow...

Inuit and other native peoples to the Far North ostensibly have a panoply of words to describe snow. I do admit right after the Thanksgiving holiday thoughts start to turn toward the holidays and the first snowflakes. Well, yesterday, we got 'em, wuff, and then some, with a vengeance.

We spent an hour or so shoveling the stairs and sidewalk around the house, and then another couple of hours attempting to get the cars free. (My Better Half is a NYC teacher at a school in East New York - Bushwick, and there is no easy public transportation access to her school.)

So, after a few hours with my son spending some "Quality Time" shoveling, pushing (with thanks to the considerate help of our neighbor as well), and sweating out the snow hassle, and generally freezing, I have already had it with snow for the Winter of 2009-2010. Dean Martin's "Winter Wonderland" and "Let It Snow," will not be on my play list for the foreseeable future..

Now, I, too, can think of -- if not hundreds--dozens of words to describe the snow, none of which are really printable here....

Well, still, it's good to be home for the holidays although Rome last year wasn't so bad, either.

Remembering Theater 2009: 'Himmelweg' at Teatro Circulo

Dramatic setting from "The Way to Heaven" (Himmelweg)at Teatro Circulo this past summer, a play by Juan Mayorga.