The Gieseking Story on Disc and Page

THE MOZART RECORDINGS grabbed my ear with their delicacy of touch and overall ethereal sound. This was late-night radio listening for me, a teenager in thrall to the many discoveries I was making in world of classical music. An eccentric radio host named Bill Watson purveyed the Mozart, calling particular attention to the fact that these sonatas and other keyboard works had been recorded by Walter Gieseking. 

I’d been amassing piano records by Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, but I sprang for the low-priced Seraphim-label reissue of Gieseking’s Mozart, and I have not been without it, in some form or another, in the half-century since. 

Gieseking was a unique phenomenon in the crowded world of piano virtuosos. From all accounts, his technique was impeccable, his six-feet-four body hunched close to the keyboard, the fingers seeming to move hardly at all. In his early years, his repertory was quite large, but it contracted as concert promoters grew increasingly wary of new works – a category Gieseking championed. He could sight-read anything with no mistakes, and he learned scores by studying them as an actor would study a script.

A Tangled Web

From the Unihanded Reading Dept.: My debut as a writer of smut occurred in D-CUP, a magazine devoted to – but need I explain? This takes us back to 1995, and the piece below is interesting more as a nostalgia trip for computer nerds than as anything salacious. I signed my pieces for that magazine “Dr. Barry Tetons,” but took on other names as I branched out to such other publications as “Shaved,” “Sex Acts,” and “Plump and Pink.” My daughter went to college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and told me that when a group of students got to discussing their parents’ occupations, she offered “porn writer” as mine and immediately won all the prestige points.

                                                                                              

YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT the Internet. You may even know that its most passionate users are also passionate about a free exchange of ideas. What you may not know is that beautiful naked women are among those ideas, and just in case you don't get the idea, you settle for getting the picture – a full color, let’s-leave-nothing-to-the-imagination picture, that is.

Cat Tailer would have been 
at home in D-CUP

Let me be your guide. I’ve been working with computers for a decade, and if there’s smut to be seen on the screen, I’ve seen it. I’ve taught computer beginners in classrooms but that’s too damn polite and forces me to leave out the good parts. And that’s what I’m going to help you find every month as we explore together.

All you need is a good computer, the right software, and a little know-how. Let’s talk first about your hardware. I’ll show you mine: it’s an IBM clone, based on a 486 processing chip. It’s got 8 megabytes of memory, and a good color monitor. That’s the basic stuff to run Microsoft Windows, and the easiest way for us peeping Toms to find our thrills is to look through Windows. You can find a system like this for well under a thousand bucks.

I’m also going to show you in a moment how easy it is to help yourself to pictures of those sultry Internet women. It takes a little patience and perseverance, so don’t be like the cheesehead who recently complained that he was tired of the searching, and would someone just send dirty pictures to his e-mail address. “Go out and buy a magazine,” snarled one of the angry responses.

 From the Culture Vault Dept.: Forty years ago, our already loose delineation of the Capital Region (often erroneously monikered as the Capital District Region or the Capital Region Area, among other such variants) expanded in the summer to take in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and areas of the immediately southern counties of New York. That’s because the region exploded with happenings when the weather got warm. Here’s a listing I compiled for Metroland Magazine in 1986 of my disciplines of interest. I don’t expect you to read it, but I invite you to remember the impressive performers who stopped and marvel at the amount of dance.

                                                                                              

Summer Arts Preview: Theater

SUCH  IS THE BUSY state of the stage that we devoted a cover story all its own to summer theater (May 15, not posted here ), but there have been a few changes and announcements since that time, so let’s check in with the various groups and see what’s happening.

Lou Harrison

The Lakehouse, in Albany’s Washington Park. has announced a title for its city tricentennial revue: Nice TRI, Albany, to be directed by Michael J. Hume and Lloyd Waiwaiole (July 18-20, 23-26 at 8:30 PM). Also look for visits from the Lake George Opera Festival (August 5, 7 PM) and Kuperberg & Morris Movement Theatre (August 12,7 PM).

At New Lebanon’s Theater Barn, the season Is well underway with second production “On Golden Pond” running through, Sunday; next Thursday, the musical revue “Cole!” begins a 10-day run.

The Lake George Dinner Theater announced the title of its summer production: running from June 20 through October 12 at the Holiday Inn in Lake George will be Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

Footloose in Philly

From the Food Vault Dept.: Recently, I was reminiscing about the variety of restaurants I found in Philadelphia in 2008, and the crazy trip I took one evening to get from one to the next in order to sample a single entreé at each. You might want to learn about it, too, I reasoned, so here is the piece I wrote about it. Please note that this was eight years ago, so there’s no telling who’s still in business.

                                                                                            

DURING THE LONG DRIVE home from Philadelphia last weekend, my family and I visited Valley Forge and sought lunch in a nearby town. We found a street flanked on several blocks by chain stores and restaurants, but we also spotted an obviously local place promising pub food. It was so disgusting inside – filthy walls, sticky tables, apathetic servers – that we hightailed it to one of the chains and contented ourselves with an acceptable, if boilerplate, meal. 

Noodle soup at Viet Huong

It was a depressing end (on the culinary side) to an otherwise delightful weekend, during which my wife escorted my daughter to a concert by her favorite rock band at a downtown arena while I drove around South Philly that evening to check out recommended restaurants. Finding those restaurant has never been easier when you take advantage of current technology.

Having been consulted by a visiting alt-newsweekly writer in the past, I sent my own request to Drew Lazor at Philadelphia’s City Paper, and he and his colleague Felicia D’Ambrosio generously put together a list of eateries reflecting the area’s ethnic variety. The magazine’s website (citypaper.net) also has restaurant listings and a lively food-related blog. [Note: The paper folded in 2015.]