Special Here-Comes-Summer Drive-In Double Feature!

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: We’ve been very loyal to Jumpin’ Jack’s Drive-In, the one-of-a-kind burger joint in Scotia, NY, which is open only in the summer. I wrote about the place for Metroland Magazine four times, with my first review running in 1987, my second in 1990. To bring you up to date, here are the third and fourth, starting with the latter, from 2012.

                                                                                              

AMONG THE HORRIFYING IMAGES of Hurricane Irene’s devastation last summer was the sight of Jumpin’ Jack’s under water, many of its picnic tables rafting down the Mohawk, its ice cream building flooded so high that coolers floated up and cracked the ceiling.

Owner Mark Lansing was quick even then to put things in perspective, redirecting many of the offers of help to the hard-hit areas of Schoharie County and elsewhere. With the help of flood insurance, a loyal crew of workers and a mild winter, he worked doggedly to get the place ready for its traditional spring opening this year.

It took place the last Thursday in March, with an appropriate amount of media hoopla. Although we tend to give a place three months to get itself up and running before visiting to review, we figure that the nature of Jumpin’ Jack’s would allow a week to suffice. Besides, we were hungry.

It’s not great food. Never has been. And that has never been the issue. I have other stops for gourmet burgers, smoked burgers, fast-food burgers, whatever manifestation of beef between buns proves desirable, if you know what I mean.

Dogging the Scales

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Contemporary classical music has had a strong area champion in the Dogs of Desire, an Albany Symphony-based ensemble that concentrates on small, current, often commissioned works. Here’s a review I found nestling near the “Les Mis” piece I posted yesterday.  

                                                                                      

THE NAME OF THIS ENSEMBLE, drawn from the very fine ranks of the Albany Symphony, was chosen by music director David Alan Miller when it proved, of the many choices he compiled, most distasteful to his mom.

The Dogs of Desire is a large chamber group charged with playing new works, most of them commissioned by or on behalf of the ensemble. At this point in its nearly 20-year history, it has a long list of such works to draw from, but continues to seek out more.

Thus it was that we were treated to three world premieres, two of them written in collaboration with video artists. Putting music and moving image together creates an entirely different sensory experience that is provoked by music alone. Our eyes are sensory bullies, demanding the lion’s share of attention. Yet the addition of music, as film buffs know, deepens the emotional experience even when we’re not fully aware of it.

Amanda Harding’s “Venus Unhinged” also added the dimension of words, setting three poems by Eliza Griswold and one by Margaret Atwood, all of it exploring, as Harding explained, “the dark side of love.”

Mis-ing the Point

From the Theater Vault Dept.: This review speaks for itself, exposing me as the stick-in-the-mud that I am, a man whose early diet of Gershwin and Porter and Berlin scores inspired an oozing intolerance for more recent musicals. But I did my best to appreciate this experience eight years ago.

                                                                                        

I AM THE ONLY MUSICAL THEATER FAN IN THE WORLD who has not been exposed to any form of the phenomenon that is Les Mis. The sprawling English-language musical version of the even-more-sprawling Victor Hugo novel opened in London in 1985, hit Broadway two years later and probably has offered actors more production contracts than any other recent show.

It’s a three-hour distillation of the Hugo’s tale of sin and redemption, politics and faith, and it plays every note of sentimentality and offers every trope of melodrama that can be crammed into its nonstop score.

It’s impossible not to enjoy the experience. But it’s impossible to enjoy the show without surrendering your critical faculties to the well-crafted emotional manipulation employed by its story and song.

You know the story. Noble criminal, bastion of moral and physical strength. Dogged pursuer, obsessed with duty. Orphaned waif. Bellicose students. Sewers. You probably know the score. “I Dreamed a Dream.” “On My Own.” “Bring Him Home.” A musical progression that never strays far from resolution, a festival of V7 to I, with plenty of plagal cadences for that spiritual-experience feel.

Pleasures for the Few

From the Classical Vault Dept.: It’s no secret that the classical-music audience in New York’s Albany area is laughably small. There used to be classical-music programming at many of the area’s halls, but these days you’ll find nothing at Proctors while the Union College series soldiers own, its audience greying into obsolescence. Here’s a look at a pair of concerts I reviewed in 1986.

                                                                                    

THEY KEPT THE HOUSE LIGHTS ON at Proctor’s Theatre during the concert by L’Orchestre National de Lyon, probably so we all could see that there were some people in the house. Or maybe it was just to read the program notes. Whatever, the little club that gathered—there were, oh, maybe three times as many in the house as on the stage—rallied forth to do the clapping work of many.

Henri Dutilleux

Not that I think they should clap—this is a guilt thing that classical music concertgoers in the area seem to fall for. We’d better clap hard and make the orchestra feel good, make them think this isn’t a completely deadbeat town. But look at it this way—the fewer there are in the house, the fewer distractions you have to put up with. Let the unwashed stay home and yell at their TV sets.

It’s not as if the orchestra tried any less hard. If anything, there was a nice feeling of casualness, of spontaneity about the concert. We probably all could have taken off our ties and been that much happier.

Let’s face it—the crowd isn’t going to come out to hear stuff written by composers whose names they can’t pronounce. “So what’d you hear last night?” they ask at work the next morning. “Oh, the first symphony by Aw-Ree Duh ... Doo ... Duh-Tee-Yo!” Nope.

Dredging Up the ‘70s

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: Wasn’t I the bitchy little critic here! Not that I’ve changed; I’m simply more inclined to avoid the shows that I know will anoy me. But here’s a glimpse of what was going around 35 years ago.

                                                                                   

HAVING A COLLEGE ROOMMATE who was a slob was easy compared to having one who was a poet. I’m talking about the kind of person who would utter bathos and call it profound, who bled for correct causes, whose own shallow depths were seen as somehow mystical.

Ben Vereen

“Pippin” is that kind of show. A product of Broadway’s confused 1970s, it has dated more rapidly than the fast-talkin’ stuff of the ‘30s (I’m thinking specifically of such shows as “On Your Toes,” seen recently in a successful revival.) At least chestnuts made no bones about being fluffy.

But “Pippin” attempts to celebrate basic values of self-confidence and conjugal love by lampooning the very vehicle that propels it: musical-comedy tradition. In doing so, it smirks at itself many, many times too often.

The production that played at Proctor’s last week was directed by and starred Ben Vereen, who made a deserved name for himself in the Broadway original. Too bad he doesn’t have better material to work with. He is presented as the Leading Player of a smart-mouthed troupe that tells the story of Pippin, son of Roman Emperor Charlemagne, a young man who (and isn’t this a metaphor for the ‘70s!) seeks to find some kind of personal fulfillment.

Identity Capers

From the Classical Vault Dept.: What was the classical-music world like in the Albany, NY, area before Covid? Let’s go back 34 years to find out. Although the pandemic nipped most live performances in the bud, it’s always been a rough slog for American composers, living and dead. But the Albany Symphony has made impressive attempts, over the decades, to rectify that. Here’s what was going on in April 1987.

                                                                                    

THE IDENTITY CRISIS that continues to worry American composers has at its root mixed feelings towards the music that truly can be defined as American.

Amy Beach

We heard two different reactions to that problem at Friday night’s Troy Music Hall concert by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, as Julius Hegyi conducted works by a pair of Americans.

Amy Beach's “Le Bal Masque” demonstrated an old style. Written in 1894 as a piano solo, orchestrated at the turn of the century, it is a pleasant, three-quarter-time work, American only insofar as it has none of the ethnic eccentricities that might identify it with a particular other country. It sounds nonspecific. European.

This impression could be partly the fault of the conducting, for Hegyi brought to it his characteristically inscrutable baton, resulting in wildly incompatible changes of tempo throughout the brief piece.

Ellen Zwilich wrote her Concerto for Piano and Orchestra for a premiere just a year ago. Like any contemporary American composer, she has the varied legacy of this century to reckon with: like many, she has “gone European” in the sense that her work has more in common with the tunelessness of the Virgil Thomson school than with our very melodic domestic heritage.

How to Live to be 200

Guest Blogger Dept.: Hey, here’s Stephen Leacock again, this time with an essay about health, a topic very much on our minds in these waning pandemic days. As always, let’s forgo our Zoom-errific day for a moment and take in the advice of the Canadian humorist.

                                                                                             

TWENTY YEARS AGO I knew a man called Jiggins, who had the Health Habit.

He used to take a cold plunge every morning. He said it opened his pores. After it he took a hot sponge. He said it closed the pores. He got so that he could open and shut his pores at will.

Jiggins used to stand and breathe at an open window for half an hour before dressing. He said it expanded his lungs. He might, of course, have had it done in a shoe-store with a boot stretcher, but after all it cost him nothing this way, and what is half an hour?

After he had got his undershirt on, Jiggins used to hitch himself up like a dog in harness and do Sandow exercises. He did them forwards, backwards, and hind-side up.

He could have got a job as a dog anywhere. He spent all his time at this kind of thing. In his spare time at the office, he used to lie on his stomach on the floor and see if he could lift himself up with his knuckles. If he could, then he tried some other way until he found one that he couldn’t do. Then he would spend the rest of his lunch hour on his stomach, perfectly happy.

Remembering Ashley's

 From the Food Vault Dept.: In 1986, after I’d been writing for Albany’s Metroland Magazine for a couple of years, I proposed that we start a restaurant review column, with me at its helm. There being no budget for meals, I further proposed that we cadge a meal off the restaurant under examination, and promise them a good review. And make no bones about it in the column. This we did for 22 weeks, at which time a budget was created and the reviews became unannounced. But here’s my fourth-ever restaurant piece, written in 1986 following a meal with my wife, Susan, and good-natured photographer Drew Kinum. I wish I had a better record of his photos than the lousy photocopy reproduced here. Ashley’s is long gone, by the way, replaced by a succession of ever-less-impressive eateries in that hotel.

                                                                                            

ASHLEY’S, THE RESTAURANT at the new Albany Marriott on Wolf Road, has class. That’s more than good looks and tasty food: its a style that reflects a happy confluence of personalities on both sides of the kitchen door.

Like a good play, it’s a collaboration of dedicated people who aren’t constrained by close-minded management. The decor is classy, which means it’s not too rambunctious: multiple levels to give illusions of seclusion. with a pleasant deep violet color on the walls. There is sound thinking behind this: it buoys the traveler and neighbor alike.

One of my most-treasured dinner memories came from a visit to a five-star place downstate in which the entree was a disappointment. In spite of this, the ambiance and good fellowship prevailed. Ashley’s provided all that as well as terrific entrees, but lets start at the beginning and go through this meal.

My chief gastronomic assistant, Susan, was along to give the place what-for. She and photographer Drew sat opposite me at a long table on one of the upper levels and we unfolded the large, colorful menus to make the tough choices.

WWMHD?

WHAT WOULD MOZART HAVE DONE? We have so much evidence of what he did do that it’s almost unnecessary to ask, but there is a handful of fascinating fragments of works he wrote for violin and piano – piano and violin, if you use the ordering he gave to the pieces – that warrant some extra attention, according to Timothy Jones.

Jones is a Mozart scholar who has spent enough years immersed in the composer’s works that he can combine a sense of what should be with an adventurous exploration of what could be. Four of those fragments are featured on a new recording by violinist Rachel Podger and fortepianist Christopher Glynn, with three of those fragments presented in two different completions apiece – a total of seven pieces, then, averaging about eight minutes apiece.

Podger recorded Mozart’s completed violin sonatas a few years ago, with Gary Cooper at the keyboard, so this could be seen as volume nine of that series – but it’s taking us into such different ground that it demands to be considered apart from the rest.

In creating these completions, Jones declared his ambition as being “to recognise the ‘openness’ of the fragments, test contrasting hypotheses about the material and then seeing where different assumptions might take the music over the course of the entire movement.”

Flight of the Concord

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I wrote about a youthful vocal ensemble that made its debut recording for the Dorian label in 1999. This wasn’t written as liner notes, and I can’t recall where it was intended to land, if indeed it was used anywhere. So I share it with you, along with a recommendation that you seek out and listen to this recording.

                                                                                         

BEAUTIFUL VOICES SOUND GOOD ALMOST ANYWHERE, but place them in one of the world’s finest concert halls and the effect can transcend all expectations. As the Concord Ensemble stands in a semi-circle on the stage of the Troy Music Hall, in a once-prosperous manufacturing city near new York’s Hudson River, they sing to an auditorium of empty seats, facing a pair of microphones.

Over the course of the past few hours, the microphones had been aimed and re-aimed countless times. Now they stand near a tall stepladder a few feet from the Music Hall’s high stage. Dozens of yards of black fabric muffled the balcony and orchestra seats when the ensemble arrived to begin the recording tests; now it’s gone, removed to give a brighter sound to the ensemble.

“It’s just you and the room and my mics,” says Craig Dory, co-founder of Dorian Recordings and designer of the microphones. “But it’s still going to take us a while to decide the best setup.” He paces the stage. “Please sing out as we’re doing this – don’t mark. And don’t worry about the noises you might hear. If the hall creaks or a truck goes by, we may be able to remove that. All you have to do is sing.” He pauses and grins. “This is going to be very intensive. You will want to hate me. You will discover that I’m a big, lovable teddy bear.”

Kiss the Ground

WE’RE FEELING THE HORRIBLE EFFECTS of a global climate crisis. We’re wracked with guilt over the lousy food we consume – or we should be. There are solutions, but how do you persuade the public to change its ways?

Get celebrities to give those answers. Or so believe filmmakers Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell. Their engaging documentary “Kiss the Ground” boasts a host of celebrity actors and musicians, beginning with narrator Woody Harrelson, who also has a small but significant on-screen presence. Does Patricia Arquette’s enthusiastic encomium for composting toilets prove persuasive? Does a song by Jason Mraz help make up your mind? Is a word from recent Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady enough?

If it works, great. But the true celebrities here are those who are out in the fields, farming and teaching other farmers. The message of “Kiss the Ground” is simple: We’re destroying our land with industrial farming methods, and when you destroy soil, you create an inhospitable climate.

Ray Archuleta is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist with the Soil Science Society of America. He spent over thirty years with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and then founded Understanding Ag, LLC, [https://understandingag.com] to teach strategies for soil improvement on a national scale. He also founded Soil Health Academy [https://soilhealthacademy.org] to share regenerative agriculture principles.

Mr. President: Be Seated!

IN HONOR OF PRESIDENTS DAY, surely one of the most misused moments of patriotic prejudice, here's a short film I made with Musicians of Ma'alwyck.

Gershwin à la France

From the Classical Vault Dept.: ... and what about summer concerts? Are they coming back this year? Will they be as fun-filled as the all-Gershwin program I reviewed over a decade ago at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center?

                                                                                            

EVEN AT THIS (RELATIVELY) LATE DATE, Gershwin’s music tends to keep concert company with so-called pops stuff, itself typically lightweight American fare. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but Gershwin’s struggle to get admitted into the Classical Academy is rooted in some canards deftly disproved by last week’s all-Gershwin program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

He’s termed a tunesmith who, when confronted with opportunities for thematic development, just throws something new at us. But the same has been said of Schubert and Dvořák, and, anyway it’s just not true, as his “Concerto in F” nicely demonstrated..

With Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the 88s, the technical requirements of the piece were brilliantly accounted for. The three-movement work, commissioned by the 1925 version of the NY Philharmonic immediately after the premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue,” is in classical form, with the seeds of most of its melodic ideas planted at the top of the first movement and, of course, a consistent harmonic language throughout.

Noises Off Greece

From the Literary Vault Dept.: Sometimes you want to indulge yourself with a no-holds-barred farce, and the prolific Michael Frayn has been happy to oblige, in plays, screenplays, and novels, like the one reviewed below.

                                                                                                

MICHAEL FRAYN KNOWS THE ELEMENTS of a mistaken-identity farce. He summoned one of the most rip-roaring festivals of confusion to the stage in his play “Noises Off;” his novel Headlong wove a farce around the discovery of a long-lost Brueghel painting. Frayn’s intellectual prowess was brought to the stage in “Copenhagen,” a compelling drama about the scientific pursuits of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr.

Skios, Frayn’s latest novel, has its heart the keynote address acclaimed scientist Dr. Norman Wilfred is due to deliver at an influential research center on the fictional Greek island of Skios. But a series of missteps sparked by longing and the island’s terrible taxicab system cause someone else – a ne’er-do-well opportunist pursuing one relationship while fleeing another – to almost inadvertently assume Dr. Wilfred’s guise, thus finding himself the cynosure of the research center’s posh, pretentious attendees.

It’s unimaginable, of course, that our plugged-in era could allow smartphone-clutching travelers even a moment of such disorientation, but Frayn works the mechanics of the story like a master puppeteer. His island isn’t friendly to cell phones, and even less friendly to the wrong kind of charging adapter. A language barrier persists, giving us the term phoksoliva en route, and there’s the reliable human trait of seeing in someone only what you ardently wish to see. And, in a straight steal from the movie “What’s Up, Doc?” and who knows how many earlier door-slammers, there’s the matter of supposedly unique suitcases that look too much alike.

See How You Like It

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Summer theater is being threatened all over the country now, and our local festivals are gearing up with outdoor performances and innovative repertory. To celebrate, here’s a look back at Shakespeare & Co., production from a decade ago.

                                                                                        

A SMALL BANJOLELE emerges from the upstage curtain of the thrust stage, and the player gives the opening chords to “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” The curtain parts and the ensemble strides onto the stage, some with other instruments in hand. They’re garbed in ’20s gear, nicely put together by costume designer Arthur Oliver, and as a crooner takes to the microphone to warble the chorus, the cast breaks into the Charleston.

Kelley Curran, Jonathan Epstein, and Merritt Janson

Does it matter that the song is actually over a decade younger than the era portrayed? It does not. The success of this production – and it’s very successful – lies in a clearness of purpose, faithfulness to the clues of the text and beautifully paced energy. Director Tony Simotes leads a versatile cast through the play’s manic vicissitudes with few of the would-be improvements that can mar high-concept realizations.

There’s a joke at the heart of the play’s setting, which can be taken to be either the Ardennes region in France (where the playwright’s source material was set) or the Stratford-area Arden. Set designer Sandra Goldmark puts us in Paris at the top of the show, with miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthéon among the functional set pieces on an otherwise bare (but blue) stage. The forest, such as it is, is an upstage jumble of pipes and trees with a second level that will inspire impressive acrobatics from Orlando (Tony Roach) and Rosalind (Merritt Janson).

A Piece of Roast Beef

Guest Blogger Dept.: It’s Robert Benchley time again, and the estimable essayist today grants us a look at one of the dietary staples of my youth, even as I try to get my youth to eat something else every once in a while.

                                                                                     

PERSONALLY, I CLASS ROAST BEEF with watercress and vanilla cornstarch pudding as tasty articles of diet. It undoubtedly has more than the required number of calories; it leans over backward in its eagerness to stand high among our best proteins, and, according to a vivid chart in the back of the cookbook, it is equal in food value to three dried raisins piled one on the other plus peanut-butter the size of an egg.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

But for all that I can’t seem to feel that I am having a good time while I am eating it. It stimulates the same nerve centers in me that a lantern-slide lecture on “Palestine – the Old and the New,” does.

However, I have noticed that there are people who are not bored by it; in fact, I have seen them deliberately order it in a restaurant when they had the choice of something else; so I thought that the only fair thing I could do would be to look into the matter and see if, in this great city, there weren’t some different ways of serving roast beef to vary its monotony.

Roast beef is not the same price in all eating-places. What makes the difference? What does a diner at the Ritz get in his “roast prime ribs of beef au jus” that makes it distinctive from the “Special to-day – roast beef and mashed potatoes” of the Bowery restaurant?

Keeping It Edible

WE THINK OF FARMS as massive multi-acre enterprises, such is the pervasive image that corporate farming gives us. Ben Stein and Alicia Brown are entering their third season of providing fresh produce to a growing customer base, and their business has been growing unexpectedly well. And they’re doing it on one acre of land.

Photo by Alicia Brown

Edible Uprising Farm was born in 2019 as a passionate partnership between Ben Stein and Alicia Brown. Both of them have long pursued sustainable attitudes and practices where food and agriculture are concerned and wanted to turn that into a project that could income-sustain them as well. Although they envisioned a rural environment for their farming, they took an offer of an acre of land in the more urban Troy, NY.

“It has worked out very well here,” says Stein. “We were unsure about it – I’m from rural Vermont and always farmed in places where there’s not a big population around. We didn’t know if it would work on the edge of a large urban center. But it has been amazing. And we’ve been able to give people access to food they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get.”

Cyberotica Antiqua

From the Locked Vault Dept.: We haven’t visited my onetime alter-ego, Dr. Barry Tetons, since I offered this column from an unsavory magazine for which I used to write. Here’s a piece from the January 1996 issue, so astonishingly far from us now in terms of technology that the piece below seems laughably quaint.

                                                                                          

BASED ON A RECENT Time magazine cover story and the rantings of certain people in congress, you’d think that the Internet was a teeming electronic maelstrom of smut. Fortunately for us, it is. But the good stuff isn’t as easy to find as Time and the others would have you think.

A few columns back we looked at the specifics of getting to certain smut-rich areas. But the Internet is changing quickly, growing at an astonishing rate. It’s not for nothing that computers run on silicon chips.

Let’s tour the Internet and find out where things tend to be placed. It’s a huge club, in a way – once you find your way into one room, you’ll learn where else to go. Web sites give you addresses of more web sites; discussion groups point the way to everything. If all else fails, get over to a chat area for real-time advice.

So let’s start with the chat channels. IRC – Internet Relay Chat – originated in Finland as a way of bringing groups of like-minded people together in real-time discussion. Now it draws folks from all over the world. To keep it somewhat orderly, it's divided into channels, each of which has a name that reflects (or tries to reflect) something about its special interest. Each name is preceded by the number sign (#), so that #Big_Bitches_with_Big_Tits is one of the more alluring channel names I've seen recently.

A Beethoven Serenade

Let's take a look at a short film I made with Musicians of Ma'alwyck
to honor the big Beethoven birthday just passed.

Three to Get Ready

NOVELIST WILLIAM BOYD has long been fascinated by the movies. His 1987 novel The New Confessions combined a nod to Rousseau with an effective evocation of filmmaking in the 1920s; he has also adapted two of his novels for film and two for television. As if that weren’t enough, he wrote and directed the British war drama “The Trench” in 1999.

His is a protean talent: he has also written spy thrillers, one of which was an estate-sanctioned James Bond novel; his fiction has covered topics ranging from art to travel, war to international politics. And he does with a sense of humor in the Evelyn Waugh manner (whose work Boyd has adapted for television).

Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, takes us to world of motion pictures again, where he settles in very comfortably to give us a portrait of three movie-world participants and the variety of characters they have to deal with along the way. We’re in Brighton in 1968, where a company is filming “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon,” which seems very typical for a time that brought us such fare as “Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?,” “The Magic Christian,” and “The Bed Sitting Room.”

Threeness abounds in this book. We follow the protagonists through three different book-sections: “Duplicity,” “Surrender,” and “Escape.” Each has some manner of significant other, but another other soon comes on the scene. And the action cuts from one story to another with the deft rhythms of a good suspense saga.