Month: February 2014

I took a picture of a basement window display that I’ve been passing by for years.

Here’s a picture I took of the same window in 2008! I’ve been scrutinizing this shot to see if anything at all is the same, and I found one item, but I have to show the view a little more to the right. See below …

The drawing of lips in the upper right hand corner.

I’m so mad at myself! I meant to post about this event tonight a lot sooner! But tonight, at 8pm, at the Queens College Aaron Copland School of Music, there is a concert featuring the work of women. Performers and composers include: The iTones at Queens College The Balsam Trio, Jacquie Caruana, Britlin Losee, Taylor Blanket, Melanie Genevieve Ramos, Adrianna Mateo, Fessica M Altieri, and more.

For more information, go to the event page on Facebook.

Scratched into a sidewalk in Brooklyn, I know not when.

So there’s a show which premieres on March 9th which seems like a remake of the most excellent French series called The Returned. Speaking of which, I’d like to take this opportunity to complain about the length of time between seasons for some shows. Like, I just read we’re going to have to wait perhaps more than a year for the next season of Sherlock?? And how long has it been since the finale of season one for Orphan Black? NINE MONTHS.

Anyway, I’m certainly in for Resurrection, but I’d also like the second season of The Returned to start as soon as possible. The ad on this phone booth (phone booth!!) is for Resurrection.

I’m sorry I didn’t post about this sooner! What a great contest this is. The deadline is March 3rd, but if you can’t make it in time, this is an annual contest (for New Jersey high school students). Full instructions are here.

Watch this video though. It’s so inspiring how life changing this contest is. And I love love love the piece being sung in the background. It was written by Martin Sedek and it was commissioned for last year’s concert: Alleluia! A New Work is Come on Hand. It’s just beautiful. I want to buy a recording of it.

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

Saw and loved the movie Winter’s Tale yesterday, although it should have been incandescent, and it was not. Still, I loved it. I went home and immediately started re-reading the book, which is one of my top ten favorite books. There’s no way the movie could touch the book, and I didn’t expect it to. I was thinking before that the way to go would have been to not even try. A book has to take so many words, so many pages, to set up something, like the expression on someone’s face, and that can be shown in seconds on the screen. The right actor can communicate an entire chapter. Kinda. Go with what the movies do best and don’t try to be the book.

But with a work like Winter’s Tale, you need every word. A great big grand scale of things are being set up and you need every page to feel the full glory of what is happening over the span of all of them, and the screenwriter had such an impossible task. Which of all these millions of threads do you include? The cloud wall? The seething, breathing machinery of the 19th century and all the vignettes of the people who lived then, the child in the hallway—anyone who has read the book knows I could go on and on, and then Helprin does it all again for the 20th century. Behind every expression on a character’s face, and every action, were all these stories and you must have lived through every one of them to fully understand each look, every step taken, and the character’s and society’s deep need for justice, redemption and once in a while a miracle. The screenwriter was pretty much doomed.

They chose to go a much simpler route, and although I am saying they could have done better, a thousand times better really, they made a movie that I walked out of feeling happy and alive. How can I complain? It was lovely. And there were incandescent moments. I walked home thinking I want to write a non-fiction book showing that there is still magic and enchantment in the world and you don’t need to believe in anything supernatural to feel it.

If you are feeling sad go. I believe it will cheer you up. But I think it might only work if you’ve read the book. It could be that my heart filled in the blanks, the stories that were left out.

On another note, I looked for an article discussing the science in the book. I suspect that just as Helprin based all the history in the book on real people, places, and things, and he was absolutely meticulous about that, he was also as meticulous about the science and his departures from science. I would like to know more about the theories he was referencing and playing with.

Back to the history though, if you love New York and New York history you MUST read this book. It is so immersed with a deep love of New York and every second of it’s time and evolution it will make you weep.

Toys buried the children’s park at Bleecker Street.