Pražák at Union

From the Vault Dept.: What the hell was I thinking with this lede? Even in 1986, when I was relatively fresh to the world of cranking out reviews, I could convince myself that dwelling on the appearance of the performers made some kind of sense. And what characterized this quartet’s identity so profoundly? Clearly, I was too busy lauding their wardrobe to say.

                                                                                          

CENTRAL CASTING SHOULD HAVE the Pražák String Quartet available for Hollywood. The four musicians are accomplished players, who blend marvelously and who look the part.

A concert at Union College’s Memorial Chapel Wednesday night proved that the group is good enough even to be a little eccentric, in the best sense of the word.

The quartet was founded in 1972 by students at the Prague Music Conservatory. The program – music of Mozart, Janáček, and Smetana – offered the ensemble the chance to present Czech pieces with a native accent. The interpretations took some unexpected turns but never without a felicitous result.

Should the identity of a piece of music compete with the identity of an artist? That question presupposes that a “pure” interpretation can exist, which is debatable. The Pražák Quartet has an identity as a performing group that informed everything they played and it worked. Like a fine singer, they have an identifiable voice.

The Pessimist

Guest Blogger Dept.: More of the early verse of P. G. Wodehouse.

                                                                     

P. G. Wodehouse

THEY tell me that the weather’s fair,
The day serene and balmy;
No more for rain need I prepare –
No chilly blast shall harm me.
They prate of ‘warmth,’ of
    ‘gentle glows,’
They rave of how sublime it is;
I shake my head, as one who knows
Just what the British climate is.

They say the trees are
     growing green,
That flowers are in bloom,
That bees and butterflies are seen;
They bid me quit my room.
My hat and boots to me they bear.
They tell me what crime it is
To stay indoors; but I’m aware
Just what the British climate is.

PD-ABCs

Notable Gadgets Dept.: Here’s a horrifying reminder of where technology was taking us 17 years ago. PDAs (personal digital assistants) had a good run before the Smartphone era gobbled them up. I was a contributing editor to the long-defunct Computer Life magazine, and I see in my electronic remnants of this piece that I’d gotten a little too jokey for the editor’s taste. What ran in the November, 1996 issue was shorter than what follows, and had an idiotic lede imposed upon it. Here’s the original.

                                                                                        

MY PAPER-BASED ORGANIZER measures 10.5" by 8" by 1.5" and weighs about two and half pounds. To note an entry I unzip its cover, flip to the correct page, find a pen, and write. Provided I’m not in a bouncy vehicle. The ten-ounce Psion 3a is 6.5" by 3.25" by .75" – measured in cubic inches, the Psion has one-eighth of the bulk of the organizer. To note an entry I flip it open, press a button to activate the computer, and type – bouncy vehicle notwithstanding.
   
Unlike the organizer, the Psion lets me search for previously-entered info without flipping pages. When I copy a new address and phone number into the organizer, I have to transcribe it by hand into the computer. The Psion lets me export that info. Those are very tiny keys, so it’s an extra effort for a fat-fingered typist like me to get the data in there – which makes it all the more satisfying that I don’t have to type it twice.
   
Those small keys aren’t as bad as they seem at first. You really do get used to them, and I’ve mastered thigh-top balancing of the Psion while doing my full-bore, four-fingered typing, as well as a technique in which I hold the unit in both hands and do data entry with, you guessed it, my thumbs.

Bottling a Dream

From the Canning Jars Dept.: As we finish up putting up that which we grew and recombobulated, how about that dream of bringing your product to market? Here’s my survey from a few years ago of some folks who did just that.

                                                                           

BRINGING A CULINARY CREATION to market is the dream of anyone who’s ever been praised for a particular preparation. But what motivates someone to take the risky and costly steps to bring such a product to market?

Tim Lane at the (now shuttered)
Glen Country Store.
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“I have three children,” says Delmar resident Caroline Barrett. “After my youngest was born, I decided I wanted to be able to stay home and spend more time with them.” She left a career as a graphic designer to begin what started as a home-based business inspired by her love of food.

“I looked at what I like to make, and what makes people happy. My spicy maple almonds have always been popular with my friends, so I put some packages of them together and took them to the small farmers’ market that used to be at Indian Ladder Farms. They sold well, so next I went to Delmar Marketplace – I walked in there with my three kids and sold them my product.”

Discourse

Was it something I said that’s provoking this fuss?
That we have to discuss?

Can you simply remind yourself I’m an obnoxious old cuss?
Do we have to discuss?

Must we worry this subject as if it were spread
Like a ratty old blanket on young Rover’s head
To be tossed in the air as if we intended it thus –
Do we have to discuss?

Look, I’m all for discussing affairs of the day,
Which I do with such passion my
     hair has turned grey;
And I don’t mind discussing affairs of the heart,
For what starts out as madness matures into art.
You can ask me to talk about music or books,
Or secrets of cooking (if anyone cooks),
I love to talk dirty, I’ll try to talk clean,
Or at least find a balance that’s somewhere between.
But this current disaster I’m forced to bescorn
(There’s a teapot somewhere where this tempest was born);
It’s a kiss in the dark, a forgettable buss.
Do we have to discuss?

There are plenty of problems that fester and grow
When you leave them in darkness – that much I know.
But this one’s as lively as someone’s discarded old truss.
Do we have to discuss?

I suppose I could re-set my attitude, move it from “scorn” to “nonplus.”
Do we have to discuss?

Can it just be a problem that floats near to us?
Do we have to discuss?

– 18 February 2004

Chocolate Stove

The most horrifyingly complicated
birthday cake I've ever made:
a chocolate stove.
24 Jan. 2004
Photo by
B. A. Nilsson

Dead Man’s Fest

From the Vault Dept.: In its heyday, the Proctor’s Too experiment in Schenectady offered a worthy season of fringe-like shows to an audience long in need of having its theatrical sensibilities shaken up. The experiment ended long ago; the audience is still in need. Here’s my review of one of the shows. (Theatre Grottesco, by the way, is still going strong.)

                                                                                           

THE PROGRAM BOOKLET promised a full-length show with a large cast, but the stagehands could be seen nervously scurrying as the audience settled. Finally, the announcement: all of the cast and scenery had been delayed at O'Hare. The four stagehands would produce the show with a minimum of accoutrements.

Theatre Grottesco:
"The Richest Dead Man Alive"

Those stagehands being, naturally, the entire Theatre Grottesco company, a Detroit-based ensemble that combines mime, dance and circus techniques into a theatrical experience that, as the prologue to The Richest Dead Man Alive suggests, is not going to be your run-of-the-mill play.

What bogged down this production and ultimately proved to undermine the success of the show was the way in which this piece, conceived and written by the four performers, got into too traditional a groove. Terence McNally, for instance, could make a nice door-slammer out of this story of a man misdiagnosed as dead who joins his purported widow in a spending spree of his insurance money.

Which runs out all too soon, so another faked demise must be planned. That kind of absurdity worked splendidly when played at lightning speed by England’s Goons on their 50s-era radio series, but Theatre Grottesco kept the characters a little too sketchy, seeking humor merely in mugging and funny voices. It was reminiscent of one of the less-accomplished Saturday Night Live ensembles.

Sam’s Beau

Guest Blogger Dept.: Herewith, the only Penrod story by Booth Tarkington that wasn’t collected into one of the three Penrod books. Probably because it features Penrod’s best friend, Sam Williams, in a contretemps typical of Tarkington’s sensibility. As a contemporary reader, you will have trouble with some of the language. For better or worse, it was unremarkable for its time. The story appeared in the April 1917 issue of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine.

                                                                                    

SAM WILLIAMS was always cheerful—unless something unpleasant happened to him. That is to say, Sam was no dreamer; consequently, he was not moody—though, of course, he had been in love, for he was now eleven years of age. He still hazily recalled, sometimes, a day in his eighth year when he suddenly felt the desire to let a certain little girl ride upon his velocipede because she had yellowish hair. For several afternoons he had brought the velocipede to the sidewalk in front of her house, that she might ride; but finally he decided that she was riding too much, and pushed her off—and had quite a little trouble with her mother about it, he remembered.

Drawing by Worth Brehm

That was long, long ago, and nothing resembling it had happened again. During all this time, Sam’s apathy in the presence of girls (no matter how yellowish their hair) was placid and complete. When comrades requested a statement of his views, Sam issued one of sincere neutrality. He leaned neither one way nor the other, he said. He didn’t hate ‘em, and he didn’t like ‘em.

He was never interested, even, in that petulant little belle, Marjorie Jones. He had no eyes for amber curls, and he looked at Marjorie’s as he looked at chairs or a wall. Marjorie’s exquisite profile meant nothing to Sam, though once, when he was dancing with her at the Friday  Afternoon Dancing Class, his curiosity was roused by some accessories to the beauty of her remarkable eyes.

“You got awful long eye-winkers, Marjorie,” he said. “Don’t they sting when you got a cold?”

Then he sighed, but only because he was tired of dancing. His apathy was of the true bachelor stuff, untrustworthy and whimsically treacherous; and it vanished in the manner which is characteristic of it. Susceptibility is a condition, a mood; and anyone may be in that condition without suspecting it, just as anyone may have his foot go to sleep without suspecting it. Sam had seen Mabel Rorebeck probably a thousand times, and never once had he a definite thought about her, much less an emotion.

A Little More Nightmusic

From the Scanner Dept.: Continuing my tour of vintage Metrolands, here’s a review of a Little Night Music that I attended (and wrote about) in 1986.

                                                                                        

SOME OF THE CREAKINESS was written into A Little Night Music, the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical based on Ingmar Bergman’s film comedy Smiles of a Summer Night. Some of the creakiness in the production by the Berkshire Theatre Festival must have just crept in. The combined result is a disjointed piece that nevertheless is extremely charming.

At the very start, a quintet of well-dressed men and women vocalizes on stage, launching into vocal fragments of an overture, reminding us of the improbable nature of what’s to follow. There’s a middle-aged lawyer, married not quite a year to a near-child too nervous to share his bed; an old sweetheart of his, an actress, whom he runs into through clumsy design; the officious paramour of that actress, very jealous ... just a few of the character elements in a farce that spends as much time in the birch fields as it does in the bedroom.

BTF artistic director Josephine Abady directed the production, placing it on the stylized sets by David Potts that gave us a mainstage and two wings designed like wing boxes that rotated the actors into view. Scenery, setting items, and rows of trees slid on and off from the wings, too, but all of the mechanical contrivance lacked the smoothness necessary for it to be effective.

The Russians Were Here

From the Vault Dept.: Browsing through the pages of old Metrolands, I’ve found a trove of pieces with memories attached. This one, describing the visit of Moscow Musical Theater for Children founder Natalia Sats, doesn’t give any feeling of the sterile room at the Empire State Plaza – then home to the ill-fated ESIPA – in which my interview was conducted, or of the KGB agent accompanying Sats in the guise of translator. Especially memorable was the moment in which the excitable Sats, wearying of the bother of having her words filtered, finished the interview in her own broken but sufficient English. But my time with her was too limited and my interview skills too wretched to produce anything other than the workaday piece you see below.

                                                                                        

THE RUSSIANS ARE HERE. Natalia Sats has brought her Moscow Musical Theater for Children to Albany for a series of almost-sold-out performances at the Egg.

Bill Snyder, Natalia Sats, and
ESIPA artistic director Patricia Snyder.

As part of the first cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States since 1979, the ESIPA (Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts) company traveled to Moscow in January to perform the very successful Rag Dolly; now they go from guest to host. From now until June 16, ninety-five Soviet performers and technicians are living and working in the Albany area.

Accommodations are being provided by SUNYA, where transportation needs also are being coordinated. Area groups and businesses are offering enough food to give the Soviet company a taste of the great variety of American eating from hamburgers to a covered-dish supper, with pizza and ice cream along the way.

On the March

From the Pages of History Dept.: I’ve taken a few cracks at political reporting in Metroland, where’s there no hypocrisy about having a point of view. Here are a pair of my earliest such pieces, the first my coverage of the March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1989; the second a thought piece on abortion ideology’s unresolvable divide.
   
                                                                                                                                                           
“FREE BARBARA BUSH!”

It became the surprise rallying cry of the march, as a crowd estimated at between 300,000 and 600,000 chanted the slogan from pedestrian-packed Pennsylvania Ave., Constitution Ave., 1st St., 3rd St. and the steps and lawn of the Capitol itself.

The march officially began Sunday morning on the north lawn of the Washington Monument, but for many Albany-area residents, the march began late Saturday as they boarded buses sponsored by local affiliates of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood.

At 10:30 PM, three Greyhound buses idle their engines in a parking lot at the State Office Campus. During the next few minutes the scene resembles a workday morning as car after car arrives, parks, unloads. Just as it seems that the crowd will overwhelm the bus capacity, six more buses pull in and circle the lot in formation before joining the caravan. There’s a happy sense of a picnic or vacation, but buoyed by the energy of a crowd met to fight – or, in this case, affirm. The group is varied in age, but there’s an obvious socio-economic homogeneity. These are middle-class buses, carrying a segment of society that has been accused of too much complacency during the past administration.

The Return of Tal Farlow

From the Jersey Shore Dept.: Legendary guitarist Tal Farlow periodically found it expedient to shun the spotlight his career thrust upon him, but by the time of his 1989 performance at Schenectady’s Van Dyck Restaurant he had settled into what would be a final, exciting decade of his career. Here's a preview I did for that appearance, followed by my brief review.

                                                                                            

TAL FARLOW ALWAYS seems to be returning, but the truth is he never really left. This master jazz guitarist has long kept a schedule that includes what seems to be frequent “retirement,” but he never stops playing and teaching. And this weekend he makes a rare appearance at the Van Dyck in Schenectady, a three-day stint beginning tonight (Thursday).

Tal Farlow

A self-taught guitarist, Farlow developed a completely unique sound and style that makes him the envy of guitarists everywhere. Although many artists scorn the traditional advice to maintain another vocation, Farlow has happily complemented his music with a professional sign-painting business.

“I’ve put the sign business aside now, and I’m playing full time,” he says. “But the first training I had as a youngster was as a lettering artist. I grew up in a cotton mill village in North Carolina, and my father, who worked in the mill, developed a bronchial problem from that terrible dust.” Farlow speaks with the slightest of drawls. It’s a relaxed-sounding voice, even when he contemplates the unpleasant. “He didn’t think there was a good chance of survival for me in that kind of life, and I’d always been interested in drawing in school, so I was apprenticed to a sign designer.”

Lullaby to the Leaves

Jollity Farm | 1 Nov. 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Grape & Growler

Bon Appetit Dept.: Yes, this is the review that’s in the current issue of Metroland, but I’m posting it here to show you the photos I took that didn’t run in the magazine.

                                                                            

WE ENTERED to a blast of jukebox, a bass-heavy throb that struck fear in the eyes of my wife. Not on her account, although she’s been known to plug her ears when a mildly noisy bus goes by, but because she assumed I’d want to leave. Such is the power of hunger, however, that I took us to one of the many empty tables in the place.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

It was soon enough after 5 on a Friday evening that an after-work crowd had assembled at the bar, managing, with the conversational virtuosity given to those who frequent clamorous watering holes, to understand one another. Unless it’s a matter of dumbly acknowledging that which you didn’t actually hear, and responding with what you’re confident won’t be heard.

We sat and studied the menus. The room is large enough to hold about a dozen tables a comfortable distance from one another. The ceiling is decorated with several parallel rows of beer taps, souvenirs, I later learned of Savannah’s, the downtown Albany establishment formerly owned by Joe Schaefer and Peter Cusato.

The growler end of things is celebrated with a 30-strong on-tap list, at the least-threatening end of which is Coors Light, heaven help you, but it goes on to include such stalwarts as Smithwicks, Harp, Newcastle Brown and Guinness (with which I immediately slaked the thirst and aggravated the appetite), and local brews like Saratoga Lager, Saranac Blueberry Blonde Ale and a couple of selections apiece from Ommegang and Lake Placid.

Your Presence is Requested ...

All in the Mind

Across the Boards Dept.: Amidst the summerlong festival of music, Bard College also throws in a worthy theaterical production or two. Here’s my review of a significant one from last year.

                                                                                           

WERE YOU TO LAUGH hard enough at this production to be-merde yourself, it would only be in keeping with the spirit of the play. Molière’s “Imaginary Invalid,” the valetudinarian Argan (Ethan Phillips), leads us at the top of the show through a monologue in which he details no end of scatological disorder, punctuating the diatribe with a long, silent, lovingly rendered fart.

Peter Dinklage and Ethan Phillips
Photo by Cory Weaver

The temptation to overdo it must have been considerable, but Phillips and director Erica Schmidt found the right confluence of character and delivery to allow the laughs to emerge from the heart of the show. Molière gives plenty of room for stylization and stage business, and the ensemble that tore into this piece must have used up most of that space.

This marked the return of Schmidt and her actor-spouse Peter Dinklage to the Bard stage since their 2008 “Uncle Vanya.” Dinklage’s PR stock since has soared with “Game of Thrones,” but he was every bit the ensemble player in this rollicking farce.

And the ensemble was made up entirely of men, as we learned during the sung prologue that brought out the nine cast members in period undergarments, soon to sport costume designer Andrea Lauer’s true-to-the-spirit suits and gowns. Beyond Commedia dell’arte tradition itself, there was little in the way of camp to this production. In a very short time you forgot that lovesick Angélique was being played by a man, because Preston Sadleir informed the character with a core of truth.

Daly Theatre

Guest Blogger Dept.: Augustin Daly was a theatrical producer in the late 19th century, working in New York and London, known for his melodramatic adaptations of popular works and for his (usually trimmed) productions of Shakespeare’s plays. The success of his “Taming of the Shrew” was celebrated, after its one hundredth performance on 13 April, 1887, with a dinner party. Held on the stage, it featuring the show’s stars, John Drew and Ada Rehan, and including such luminaries as Rose Eytinge, Horace Porter, Elihu Vedder, May Irwin, Otis Skinner, and General Sherman, who, as toastmaster, introduced fellow-guest Mark Twain. Twain gave the following speech.

                                                                               

I AM GLAD TO BE HERE. This is the hardest theatre in New York to get into, even at the front door. I never got in without hard work. I am glad we have got so far in at last.

Mark Twain

Two or three years ago I had an appointment to meet Mr. Daly on the stage of this theatre at eight o’clock in the evening. Well, I got on a train at Hartford to come to New York and keep the appointment. All I had to do was to come to the back door of the theatre on Sixth Avenue. I did not believe that; I did not believe it could be on Sixth Avenue, but that is what Daly’s note said—come to that door, walk right in, and keep the appointment. It looked very easy. It looked easy enough, but I had not much confidence in the Sixth Avenue door.

Well, I was kind of bored on the train, and I bought some newspapers—New Haven newspapers—and there was not much news in them, so I read the advertisements. There was one advertisement of a bench-show. I had heard of bench-shows, and I often wondered what there was about them to interest people. I had seen bench-shows—lectured to bench-shows, in fact—but I didn’t want to advertise them or to brag about them.

Dose of Oates

I’m Telling You Dept.: Let’s wander back 23 years for a visit to Union College and a talk by Joyce Carol Oates, and an opportunity for Dr. Helen Caldicott to piss off the kind of folks who deserve to be pissed off daily.

                                                                                   

SCIENCE, WHICH BEGAT the annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research four years ago, has been moving aside during recent sessions to accommodate the humanities. And the talk by Joyce Carol Oates that concluded this year’s conference at Union College deftly and charmingly punted one area of science out of the picture when she confessed that she recently got rid of her word processor “because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life staring at this little screen.”

Joyce Carol Oates
Photo by Marion Ettlinger

I don’t think Science – or any of the scientifically minded who helped fill the Memorial Chapel – was offended.

Oates, prize-winning author of over 30 volumes that comprise novels, short stories, essays and criticism, examined aspects of writing and the writer’s experience, reading excerpts from an essay that she punctuated with wise and amusing commentary.

Although she alluded to the boring nature of essays as if to explain a need to depart from her own, it was an artless performance that presented one of our most dangerously insightful literary talents in a vulnerable light.

Research was the focus of the conference, and research showed in Oates’s material. Not in any unpleasantly dusty sense, but rather in an artistic style that emphasized the need to enhance the recorded findings of others with interpretations and amplifications of our own.

Return to Kovacsland

From the Tube Dept.: Ernie Kovacs essentially invented television comedy through his creative use of a medium still in its rudimentary technical stages. But, like Buster Keaton with silent movies and Stan Laurel with talkies, he figured out how to push the limits. Here’s my review of a couple of worthy Kovacs items.

                                                                                              

THE SIX-DVD SET that Shout! Factory released last year was as wonderful a bounty of Ernie Kovacs material as you could desire, righting the wrong inflicted by an earlier collection that chopped his shows to smithereens.

Ernie Kovacs
Drawing by Drew Friedman

This new collection, which is half the size, is very much a supplement, concentrating its contents on the morning show Kovacs hosted through most of 1956. Eight episodes were part of volume one; here are eight more technically crude monochrome programs minus most of their musical guests (to avoid paying licensing fees), most of them culminating in a sketch too labored to seem as funny today as it might have come across back then. It doesn’t matter. Every show has elements that transcend the limitations of time and technology, showcasing the nonstop inventiveness of TV’s first great comedy talent.

Kovacs was a one-off, an original, whose innovations during television’s crude adolescence (he worked from 1951-1962) showed promise that took years for the medium to fulfill. He blasted the small screen with surreal gags, blackout sketches, musical essays and an amazing ability to ad lib.

The Music Goes Round and Round

Date and photographer unknown