Cultivating the Vine

From the Literary Vault Dept.: Did this piece actually run in Metroland? I can’t remember, and I’m not curious enough to go digging through my attic-clogging stacks. But I enjoyed Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland enough to write two reviews of it. One ran in the Schenectady Gazette; it’s reprinted here. The one below would have run under the pseudonym I used at Metroland for while to hide my activities from a witless editor at Albany’s long-defunct Knickerbocker News, who insisted that I write for his paper exclusively (even through they were paying me the grand sum of twenty bucks for the once- or twice-a-week notices I filed).

                                                                                   

SOME CRITICS HAVE BEEN HUFFING AND PUFFING in the papers that Vineland isn’t the novel they were expecting from Thomas Pynchon, especially after waiting 17 years. It’s stirred up interest enough among readers, however, to shoot it up near the top of the best-seller lists, which is a credit to this mind-jarring novel.

Is it important to go on record with once-and-for-all opinions? That’s a handy critical crutch but it tells you more about the critic than about the work in question. So I’ll restrain myself from taking pot-shots at posterity and simply say this: Vineland is a hell of a terrific read.

It’s a roller-coaster of a book, which you expect from the author, but it goes beyond mere bouncy thrills. It’s an exquisitely crafted work, layered like a gooey French pastry. You bite through those layers in the course of digesting the book, and each holds another sweet – or sometimes tangy – surprise.

Foremost of the delights is Pynchon’s screwy sense of humor. It comes through in everything from character names (Brock Vond, Frenesi Gates) to lunatic plot twists to the insanest of puns (my favorite is a dizzying jingle for a lawn-care specialist calling himself the Marquis de Sod, part of a TV ad ...

Climbing the Wall

From the Vault Dept.: Some thirty years ago, Proctors in Schenectady tried a noble experiment by inaugurating a small, separate theater series dubbed Proctor’s Too. An engaging lineup of not-so-well-knowns was engaged, and every performance I witnessed was a dazzler. The first space was a small brick building across Broadway from the Proctors block, but the brief lease ran out and it was turned into a car wash before being demolished. The second incarnation was on the grounds of Union College. There was no third incarnation.

                                                                                

AT THE HEART OF THE SHOW – and the stage – is a large brick wall. It has ledges and hidden doors. It has an alcove. A clever fellow might climb that alcove with his back to one side and his feet jammed against the other, inching upward like a beetle.

Mur-Mur, but from a much more recent performance.

But the DynamO Théâtre, a Montreal-based group, sees much more of a challenge in such a wall. This quintet of acrobats, clowns, jugglers and mimes used it both as challenge and impediment during their short, furious show at Proctor’s Too last week. It was there to be conquered; it was also there to play against.

They assigned themselves roles as a sort of family of superannuated children. Two couples pair off right from the start, dancing their way into adolescent romance, while the fifth wheel, the Huntz Hall-like “Ralphie,” is a puckish mischief-maker.

Tours de Force

From Somebody Else’s Vault Dept.: Here’s an unsigned piece from the Chatham (NY) Courier’s “Rough Notes” section. That it comes from nearly 90 years ago seems incredible. It could have been written yesterday.

                                                                                        

THIS IS THE SEASON for tourists to stop at carefully restored old homes, castles, etc., for the guided tour and the spiel that often goes like this: “G’afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 4:15 tour of Sprawling Mansion and Palatial Gardens. My name is Jeri and I’ll be your guide of one of New York's most historic landmarks which – after a 13-minute stop – should.get us back here by approximately 5:27.

Remain with the group at all times and I don’t mean the fringes. Dawdling is prohibited by state law. Anyone who goes into a roped-off room will be apprehended by a Landmarks Commissioner. Refrain from touching anything, take pictures only in designated Snapshot Areas.

There will be 17 opportunities for Personal Looking. When I’m not talking, feel free to gaze at Official Interesting Things, marked by placards, along the way. Avoid poking your head around a corner before others arrive. You will be given the signal to advance 2½ steps into the next room, then halt. Speak only in hushed tones so as not to disturb the antiquities. No sitting down except where yellow stickers mark Official Tired Zone. Leaning is hazardous except in posted Slouch Areas.

Hidden Treasure

From the Food Vault Dept.: I ran into Joseph Soliman while food shopping today (I buy in large-enough quantities to justify going where the restaurateurs shop), who assured me that his excellent restaurant, Sage Bistro, is still going strong. I’ve never had a disappointing meal at either of his establishments. My Metroland review of Sage Bistro is here, and I’m accompanying it now with my two reviews of his Hidden Café, which is where we met, and which, I should warn, has long since closed. Go to Sage Bistro for the kind of meal described below.

                                                                                       

GAZE THROUGH THE LARGE WINDOWS at the front of the restaurant and you see ... a white wall on the other side of an alley. It’s hidden, all right, tucked into the apex of the two major wings of Delaware Plaza.

The Hidden Café opened less than two months ago in a space that “unassuming” hardly begins to describe. A dozen tables, a long bar, a register near the door, white walls, few decorations – it’s a place in the throes of first life, but it’ eager and the food is good and dinner business, the owner assures me, is already taking off.

The lunch menu leads with the welcome surprise of omelettes ($4.25-$5.25), with even more welcome variations. The house omelette, for example, sports garlic and mozzarella, seasoned with cumin and cilantro; the “oinking omelette” has bacon and ham. Burgers, wraps, salads and specialty sandwiches are all priced under $7, and scaled-down versions of dinner specials also are available.

Those burgers, wraps and salads are repeated on the dinner menu, some priced slightly higher to accommodate more side-dish offerings. Among the specialty sandwiches are grilled chicken breast with pesto sauce ($8), Reuben ($7) and grilled veggies (onions, carrots, portobello mushrooms and zucchini, among other ingredients, $7).

Sustainable

AS A TERM OF SOCIAL IMPORT, sustainable, like so many politically charged buzzwords, threatens to blur into non-specificity. “Sustainable,” the documentary by Matt Wechsler and Annie Speicher, seeks to re-focus the term into a term of art. And they do so by making the best kind of argument in favor of a social ideal: a look at its successful implementation. “Sustainable” won the 2016 Accolade Global Humanitarian Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Wechsler and Speicher are the creative talents behind Hourglass Films, which also produced the Emmy-nominated documentary “Different Is the New Normal, Living a Life with Tourette’s” (2012), which was shown on PBS, and “Right to Harm: A Public Health Crisis Too Big to Ignore” about the health effects of factory farming on rural Americans, which premiered in 2019.

Acclaimed chef Rick Bayless opens the award-winning “Sustainable,” asking simply, “How am I going to make great food if I don’t have any connection with the people who are growing that food?” Bayless, host of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series “Mexico: One Plate at a Time,” has famously made a point of working with local suppliers in his Chicago-area restaurants.

It’s one of those suppliers who is the focus of the next ninety minutes. Marty Travis and his family own and operate Spence Farm, a 160-acre farm about two hours southwest of Chicago. He’s the seventh generation of his family to work the farm; with his son, Will, alongside him, there are eight generations in the fields. Twenty years ago, Marty returned to a family property that had been factory-farmed for many years and then left fallow. He applied an eco-responsible approach that has turned his farm into something both profitable and exciting, and the film follows his family and farm through a cycle of the four seasons, reminding us of the seasonality of all these efforts.

Bacon Grabbers

From the Food Vault Dept.: It was a mob scene. The 2012 Bacon Fest in Hudson, NY, attracted so many attendees that almost no food remained by the time I got there to be one of the judges. I described the experience in the Metroland article below.

                                                                                       

IN A PERFECT WORLD, there would be no bacon. A perfect world, that is, for nutritionists and vegetarians. In a perfect world, there would be bacon galore. A perfect world for those who’ve succumbed to the rasher’s charm. In the imperfect world of Hudson’s first-ever Bacon Fest, we experienced both, which is a fancy way of noting that the festival’s many charms were overshadowed by the fact that it was visited by the worst possible problem: the bacon ran out.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Sunday, Sept. 2 – the Sunday of the holiday weekend – the morning was warm and clear and the day seemed to grow hotter and sunnier. I’d been invited to the festival as a judge, and who can turn down an opportunity to sample a varied canvas of bacon?

This came on the heels of a tasting a I attended last month, at a whitewashed gallery space on Manhattan’s Mulberry St. It was the launch of Jennie-O brand turkey bacon, joining a line of other processed-turkey products made by this Hormel subsidiary, and it was presented as a healthy alternative to the traditional stuff, with high-energy TV chef Devin Alexander on hand to guide us through a quartet of breakfast-y preparations, each of which substituted altruism for flavor.

Turkey bacon is like a frozen dinner – a simulacrum that should be taken on its own merit. When real bacon sizzles at you from the stove, there’s no mistaking it for any other foodstuff. For many, it’s a cheerful link to childhood. For some, it’s a rebellion against our over-protective age. But I’m guessing for most it’s purely sybaritic. The combination of fat and crunch and meat and salt is as compelling a culinary experience as you could desire.

The Power of Hatred

From the Vault Dept.: Lully’s “Armide” won that composer his greatest acclaim, and the 2005 production by Toronto’s Opera Atelier was successful enough to warrant revivals in 2012 and 2015, both of which traveled to Versailles. The 2012 production was also part of the Glimmerglass Festival season. My review is below.

                                                                                    

WHEN THE FIRST CONFLAGRATION ERUPTED, it was a charming kerfluffle of lighting and drums. The next one was more frightening, because by that time I’d settled into more of a 17th-century sensibility and thus was more susceptible to the power of vintage theatrical magic. An audience witnessing “Armide” in its own era – it debuted in 1686 – probably got the bejabbers scared out of them when all hell – literally – broke loose in the piece.

Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Opera

The Glimmerglass Festival is presenting a co-production of Lully’s most-praised opera, with Toronto’s Opera Atelier, which nets the bonus of several fine singers associated with that company and an excellent ballet ensemble.

And ballet is crucial to a piece like this in two respects. It’s part of the story-telling mechanism, able to impart emotional abstractions that play against the more straightforward music-and-words combination. And it reinforces the stylized look of Baroque acting, in which what we’d now consider exaggerated gesture is crucial to the piece.

Armide (soprano Peggy Kriha Dye), a sorceress, has been thwarted by the crusader Renaud (tenor Colin Ainsworth), whom she vows to destroy – unless her burgeoning love for him gets in the way. And the heart of the opera is her journey through these conflicting feelings, culminating at the end of Act Two, when she triumphantly declares that the enchanted Renaud is now in her power and then quickly vacillates among many shadings of passion.

The Fat Man’s Diet (Chapter Four)

Lost Masterpieces Dept.: I wrote a few chapters of a book to be titled The Fat Man’s Diet many years ago and could persuade no publisher of its timeliness and charm. Now that the World Obesity Movement has gained so much more momentum, I might try again. Meanwhile, here’s the fourth chapter. You’ll find chapter one here and chapter two here. I have yet to write chapter three.

                                                                                     

IV. FISH

George Friderick Handel
Portrait by Thomas Hudson

The Fat Man is settled in front of the TV set, cool brown bottle of beer in one hand and an hors d’oeuvre of pepperoni-and-cheese-on-a-cracker in the other.

And it happens again: another ad for a diet cola. Lissome bodies of dewey nubility writhing to a snappy beat, pretty striplings laughing and splashing on a butter-cream beach. Lose that weight, pal, drink the product and these babes are yours!

A minor tremor shakes the living room floor as the Fat Man laughs softly to himself, vast belly acknowledging his merriment with a quiver. Because he has no desire for these silly unfortunates, these hipless, breastless clones. So much running around, especially on a beach, he knows, is bad for the heart. And besides: he has yet to meet a skinny woman who can cook half as well as he can . . .

Christmas Afternoon

Guest Blogger Dept.: What better way to finish the year than with some holiday reflections by Robert Benchley? He describes the following piece as “Done in the Manner, if Not the Spirit, of Dickens,” and I think we can take him at his word.

                                                                          

WHAT AN AFTERNOON! Mr. Gummidge said that, in his estimation, there never had been such an afternoon since the world began, a sentiment which was heartily endorsed by Mrs. Gummidge and all the little Gummidges, not to mention the relatives who had come over from Jersey for the day.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating – and true enough she didn’t – a dragging, devitalizing ennui, which left its victims strewn about the living-room in various attitudes of prostration suggestive of those of the petrified occupants in a newly unearthed Pompeiian dwelling; an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year.

Then there were the toys! Three and a quarter dozen toys to be divided among seven children. Surely enough, you or I might say, to satisfy the little tots. But that would be because we didn’t know the tots. In came Baby Lester Gummidge, Lillian’s boy, dragging an electric grain-elevator which happened to be the only toy in the entire collection which appealed to little Norman, five-year-old son of Luther, who lived in Rahway. In came curly-headed Effie in frantic and throaty disputation with Arthur, Jr., over the possession of an articulated zebra.

Where There’s Smoke

From the Food Vault Dept.: Last New Year’s Eve, I sought a restaurant to which to retreat after a performance I give in Albany. The place has to stay open late and offer no price-jacked holiday specials. The only place I’ve been able to find is Smokey Bones, which has done a good job of satisfying those needs, although the service, unlike what’s reported below, can be glacial. I'm sure I'll be visiting again late Tuesday night. Here’s a review I wrote of the place when it opened in Albany in 2000, before Metroland established a policy of avoiding chain restaurants. Don’t expect the menu and pricing to be like this should you visit.

                                                                                              

THIS IS A KILLER IDEA: chain-restaurant barbecue. The fact that it originates with the same company that gave us the Olive Garden gave me pause – after all, that emporium of pre-fab Italianesque food rises to the barely mediocre at best. And the fact that it’s combined with a sports bar theme made me even more nervous: there’s no greater torture for an uncoordinated endomorph like myself than to be remind of the humiliation of high school gym class.

Courtesy Smokey Bones

Yes, it turns out that you’re surrounded by TV sets, but at least you don’t hear them unless you specifically tune your table speaker to one of the channels. And it amused me, earlier this week, to see the Bush-Gore Supreme Court fight broadcast side-by-side with wrestling and ball games.

This place has two killer characteristics going for it: service is first-rate and the ribs aren’t far behind.

I visited twice to make sure this was true. The first time, a couple of weeks ago, my family and I showed up on a Saturday evening not long after the grand opening and joined a throng that had dug in for a 30- to 45-minute wait. I’m not a patient fellow, but my wife persuaded me to cool my heels, which wasn’t so bad when I found a space on the couch. We were assigned a large paging device that flashed in red when we were summoned, and that summons arrived within 20 minutes.

Rondo de Larrocha

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Pianist Alicia de Larrocha switched record labels in the late 1980s, and embarked on a project with her new label, RCA, to record all of Mozart’s sonatas and concertos. The review below looks at (or listens to) the debut recording in that series. She did, in fact, cover all of those sonatas, which are available now in a plain five-CD set on the Sony label; she also recorded the piano concertos 9 and 19-27 with Colin Davis and the English Chamber Orchestra, which are a little more difficult to find right now.

                                                                                   

ALTHOUGH SHE RECENTLY PASSED the traditional retirement age, pianist Alicia de Larrocha obviously has no plans to retire. She has just begun a recording project that will see her through all of the 17 sonatas and 25 concertos by Mozart.

Last week the first instalment was issued, a collection of four sonatas that demonstrates the pianist’s masterful affinity for Mozart.

Although de Larrocha is quickly identified with Spanish composers – Granados, Albeniz and de Falla figure prominently in her repertory, and a new recording of Granados’ “Goyescas,” a sort of Spanish “Pictures at an Exhibition,” is due in September – it’s a mistake to pigeonhole her work.

Recording a piano can make as much of a statement as the work of the artist herself. It’s a difficult instrument to capture well, but RCA’s engineers have done a nice job conveying not only the color and range of the piano but also the spaciousness of the hall (in this case, an RCA studio) as well.

Which is kinder to the piano than the more brittle sound of de Larrocha’s earlier London recordings of Mozart.

Hineni

Follow-Up Visit Dept.: As part of my research while writing a review of Gary Kleppel's book The Emergent Agriculture, I visited his farm. This turned into a companion piece for the review on the inspiring website knowwhereyourfoodcomesfrom.com.

                                                                                    

GARY KLEPPEL HAS PUT HIMSELF in an excellent position to practice what he preaches. He and his wife, Pam, own and operate the 16-acre Longfield Farm in Knox (Albany County), NY, where they raise sheep and chickens – and produce amazingly wonderful loaves of sourdough bread.

Gary Kleppel | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

How did he get interested in sustainable farming? “I didn’t know the real answer when I was writing The Emergent Agriculture,” he says. We’re sitting in the living room of his pleasant farmhouse, a building dating from the mid-19th century, which seems appropriate to the subject at hand. “I remember seeing a Leonard Cohen documentary, he adds, in which there was a song of his called ‘You Want It Darker.’ In it, he uses the Hebrew word hineni, which means, ‘here I am.’ It means, ‘I’m ready.’ And the song made me cry. Even now I’m choking up. So I asked the question, ‘What am I doing here?’”

He’s continuing to explore the topic in a new work, a book-in-progress titled Eden 2.0: How Farming with Nature Can Save the Food System (and Maybe the Planet). But the first inklings of agricultural aspiration came when he was a college kid. “I was driving to Cortland, to go to college, and we were going past these beautiful hills and pastures with cows – which I know now is all wrong – and all of a sudden the landscape turned to dairyland, and I was moved by that. I was in no way interested in farming – I was a pre-med student who didn’t want to be a pre-med student – and every time I would drive back and forth between Rockland County and Cortland, I would feel my shoulders relax, and I would feel my head clear.”

Fields of Dreams

WHAT’S MOST IRONIC about Gary Kleppel’s plea for sustainable agriculture is that he’s merely asking us to do what was done for thousands of years in the years before chemicals and industrialization dominated the fields: keep it natural, diverse, and local.

Kleppel sees his essay collection The Emergent Agriculture: Farming, Sustainability and the Return of the Local Economy as a conversation with the reader, a conversation developed over the course of his thirty years as a university professor. But it’s an academic text only insofar as his arguments are well-reasoned and backed with proof; otherwise, it’s a pleasant and inspiring manifesto.

His suggestions seem radical, but so do the threats of disease from unsafe farming and the loss of farming itself due to climate change. “If you attended an agricultural college in the past 60 years, this is how you were taught to farm,” he explains, describing the industrial model he’d like us to get away from, and he also castigates “privatizing elements of the food system (such as plant genomes) that have always been in the public domain and belong there.” So it’s not a book to make Big Agriculture very happy – but Big Ag doesn’t seem to care.

The iconic image of the American farm is very much at odds with its reality, where pollution and unsafe practices result in huge swaths of unusable farmland and ever-growing instances of food recalls. But the agri-business model persists, on the one hand strangling farmers with the costs of seed and equipment, on the other bottlenecking the farmers’ sales channels by owning the distribution system.

Turn of the Century

Guest Blogger Dept. It hardly seems like twenty years since we witnessed a turn of the century, making the turn of a century before that seem even more remote still. But Booth Tarkington witnessed it, and captured some of its spirit in his novels like the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Magnificent Ambersons. Here’s an excerpt (Chapter Three) from an autobiographical work from 1929 titled The World Does Move.

                                                                                         

Booth Tarkington

ONE EVENING we had our own gaslight accident on the top floor. An Irish housemaid used a spiral paper taper to light the gas in the hall bedroom; then she dropped it to the floor and put her foot over it to extinguish it. But there was still a flame from the taper, and the girl’s skirt and petticoats, which of course were so long that they touched the floor, caught fire, and instantly she blazed from foot to head. The medical student and I heard her making strange moans of protest; but she was already in flight, a wild torch with her long thick hair aflame high over her head. We chased her down two flights of stairs before we caught her, and the medical student wrapped her tightly in a heavy curtain he had torn from a doorway as we ran.

She recovered, after a painful siege in the hospital; but the kind of accident she suffered was not infrequent and sometimes was fatal. Nowadays she would not use a taper to light the gas; she would not light the gas. She would not light the gas and drop the taper on the floor; but, if she did, her skirt would not catch fire. And, if her skirt did catch fire, her petticoats wouldn’t, because she wouldn’t have any; but if she did wear them, and if her skirt and petticoats did catch fire, her hair wouldn’t. No matter how they may look, girls are at least safer from fire to-day than they were then.

Berkshire Abduction

From the Vault Dept.: Berkshire Opera was founded by Rex Hearn in 1985; with a few changes of venue, the company lasted until 2008. It was re-started in 2016 under completely different artistic management. Here’s a trip some thirty years back in time to re-visit a production of a Mozart opera.

                                                                                

BERKSHIRE OPERA GENERAL DIRECTOR Rex Hearn finished his welcoming words to last night’s performance of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and dashed up the aisle of the Cranwell Opera House, stirring a fresh breeze in the still air.

Cranwell Resort, Lenox Mass.

It’s a metaphor for what he’s brought opera in the Berkshires these last few summers: a fresh breeze to enliven the classics of the repertory. This production only confirms what’s already been established.

The piece is skillfully placed in the odd little theater (it’s a former chapel), set by designer Kennon Rothchild in a whimsically-drawn Turkey draped in silks and pastel. The orchestra, led by Amy Kaiser, has never sounded better, and the cast is nicely chosen for this particular work.

Some fussy characteristics of the story make it a challenge to pull off. What promises to be a fast-paced tale of abduction and intrigue turns instead to the overrated question of virtue, leaving us wondering only who’s doing the chasing and who’s being chaste.

Mangia e Corri

From the Food Vault Dept.: And where did I dine back I went to that Penn & Teller show I wrote about earlier? The same issue of Metroland that ran my advance had this overview of an Albany-based pizza and casual dining restaurant called Mangia, which had three units in the area at its height. The place closed in 2008 and was demolished to make way for a more upscale place called Créo, which suffered a series of management vicissitudes that brought down the place after seven years. It’s now home to Jacob & Anthony’s, a casual-Italian restaurant with a sibling in Saratoga Springs.

                                                                             

MY FIRST RESTAURANT-BUSINESS FRIEND was a chef named Angelo who proudly ran his own eponymous place near the town’s post office and Grand Union. As a teen, I’d stop in for a lunchtime bowl of soup on the many days I skipped school, and Angelo would sit with me in the nearly-empty place and shake his head and complain, “People don’t want to go out to eat in a shopping plaza.”

Sound wisdom, I’m sure, but the Capital District’s exurbia is a far cry from small-town New England and a shopping-plaza restaurant has a better chance in an easily-accessed place like Stuyvesant Plaza. Besides, Angelo was offering fine dining. Mangia, the latest occupant of the plaza’s southeast corner, is a much more casual place.

What killed the Howard Johnson’s that was there I don’t know – people seemed to have grown used to the mediocre food. The sports bar that followed was phenomenally silly, so Mangia is a relief. The food is good, on the order of the nearby Coco’s, and the place has a gimmick: wood-fired pizza.

The Curse of Cassandra

From the Vault Dept.: In my ongoing effort to clear out desk and filing-cabinet drawers, I’ve been turning old paperwork into PDFs and old audio tapes into MP3s. Even though it’s unlikely that any of this material will be seen or heard again, it remins “there,” and it takes up far less space. I ran across (and digitized) my 1992 interviews with Penn and Teller, conducted in order to write an advance about their upcoming Schenectady debut; that piece is followed by my review of the show.

                                                                                            

ONLY VERY RECENTLY has Penn Jillette referred to himself and his partner, Teller, as magicians. “When we first started we were very hesitant to let anyone anywhere call us magicians, because when people said ‘magic’ they pictured – and still do – a greasy guy in a tux with a lot of birds playing bad white-boy Motown music and pushing women around. And that’s not what we do.”

Penn & Teller, back in the day.

What they do do they’ll be doing at 8 PM Saturday at Proctor’s Theatre as they make their Schenectady debut. You’ll see needles swallowed, a straightjacket escape, an almost never-before-seen finale and the possibility that Teller won’t make it through the show.

Is it magic? “If you look the real definition of magic,” says Penn, “if you think past the image of Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy – all it really means is doing special effects that the audience can’t figure out. When something looks one way and is done another, that’s your definition of irony, which is a backbone of the theater. So magic is actually a very intellectual and adult form. It’s just that over the past fifty years, it’s been moved to the barrooms and it hasn’t really developed like the other art forms. I mean, Houdini was not a big star for magic. He was a superstar of his day. He was Bruce Springsteen. That’s what people forget. They start thinking, well, Copperfield is good for a magician – that’s like a Special Olympics type thing.”

Island Paradise

This year's Thanksgiving menu returns us to the realm of Caribbean cuisine, with some fanciful additions and alterations. The menu is below; a retrospective of menus past is here.

Underneath the Mistletoe

I’VE JUST HEARD an incredibly wonderful, enjoyable Christmas album, and if you’re as weary as I am of the shopping-mall treacle that annually assaults our ears, you’ll want to hear it, too. Be warned: it’s built around a dynamic big band playing new arrangements that hearken back to the classic decades of such bands. It’s the brainchild of guitarist Glenn Crytzer, a young virtuoso steeped in those traditions, and he ices the already lavish cake with original holiday numbers that are better than anything else that has tried to muscle into the repertory lately.

“Underneath the Mistletoe” is a 20-track collection placing those eleven originals alongside some unusual but brilliant choices of companion, all arranged by Crytzer for his 24-piece band. We get a good taste of what’s to come as a lively version of “Over the River and through the Wood” kicks off the disc, showcasing a tight five-man sax section, but it’s the second cut, Crytzer’s title song, that welcomes the eight-piece string section and gives the truest feel of the unique, swinging feel of the disc.

To say that it seems as if Gordon Jenkins just walked into the room is to pay Crytzer a high compliment. He really shows off his arranging skills here, with a deft integration of those strings (great pizzicato moment!) amidst the brass and reeds – and Hannah Gill puts over the witty lyrics with a sly smile and warmth in her voice.

Soul on Display

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: Here’s one of the couple of dozen pieces I wrote for the the short-lived The Alt, a mis-managed magazine that struggled to become an alt-weekly, filling the void left by Metroland’s collapse. And it’s nice to re-visit the terrific theatrical experience that gave rise to this review.

                                                                                 

“THIS IS A TRIUMPH of post-modern meta-theater,” declares the character Kieron Barry, not to be confused with the playwright Kieron Barry although it’s understandable if you do. To which Danielle, his director (within the play, that is; not the director of the play), replies, “Are you sure it’s not just a fuck-and-tell?”

Jason Guy and Bonita Jackson

Under discussion are, or is, “The Official Adventures of Kieron and Jade,” the world premiere of which took place at Catskill’s Bridge Street Theatre, and which brings back to the area the work of a playwright previously acclaimed for “Tomorrow in the Battle.”

Love relationships were scrutinized in that dark, dramatic piece; here a dark, dramatic break-up becomes the stuff of comedy as Kieron Barry (the character) seeks meaning in the abrupt departure of Jade, his girlfriend of three years, a fate similarly suffered by the playwright.

It sounds confusing. It is. It has to be. There’s no keener crisis of rejection in one’s life, and I mean knife-edge keen. And there’s usually deception involved, as when Kieron self-destructively draws a blade across his forearm, producing stripes of blood – only to be admonished by Danielle that stage blood will emerge more easily if he moves the knife this way.