Well, actually a whole lot of trees fell in Brooklyn yesterday evening. Here are some photos from the aftermath from the NY Times site. Sadly there was one fatality. Transportation was disrupted in the entire area. This is the second tornado to hit New York City this year and the fourth one in the area.
Ironically, we were visiting with some friends from Kansas when the thunderstorm hit Manhattan. I was telling them about the unusual tornadic activity we have seen here this year.
A great part of our experience in Manhattan has been really digging down and finding events and restaurants and places that would never make it into the tour guides. It is a hit and miss affair with only a few whiffs. Sunday afternoon seemed like a bit of a long shot but it turned out to be a wonderful experience.
There is an older hotel, The Roger Smith Hotel, near here that hosts a classical guitar concert in their penthouse one Sunday a month. The admission is $15 but it includes a selection of wines and cheeses. The guitarist this month was a young man from Australia named Simon Powis.
You know it is vintage hotel when the penthouse is only on the 16th floor. Toni poked around a bit and determined that this was once a large single residence with some period fixtures in the restroom. I am sure it enjoyed wonderful views at one time but today it has been dwarfed by a forest of skyscrapers. It is a little like the Writer’s Place in Kansas City picked up and plopped on top of this old building.
There were only about 40 seats and we settled in with wine in hand and cheese and crackers on our laps. We looked over the program and recognized just two names, Bach and Segovia. By the time Simon came out the seats were nearly filled. He spoke briefly about each piece and jumped right in. The sounds he got from his guitar were incredible. There was no amplification whatsoever but he must have really been using great finger strength to pluck the strings to get such volume although it looked like he was merely touching them. I got the feeling we were the only non-musicians in the room because whenever he was playing everyone would lean in a little and concentrate with so much intensity that I was afraid of making any noise by even breathing. No one would stir one bit until the piece was completed. There were many stops and silent parts to each piece so I was sure to hold my applause until Simon would look up and smile. I have to admit that I was surprised at how moved I was by this…totally unexpected.
Between the wine and the music we were so relaxed that it was almost like getting a massage. I think that we both felt a bit hypnotized at times. There was a brief intermission and everyone recharged. Simon was I am sure exhausted. When he introduced the final piece he said that it was the most difficult of the program. He did not exaggerate. It was a bit like the finale of a fireworks display with all the stops pulled out. His fingers were up and down the guitar neck at a dizzying speed with complete stops at each position. It was blur, freeze, blur, freeze, blur, freeze, like a Jackie Chan fight scene. I often wonder how a musician’s brain works. It seems to me that it would be like writing two different papers simultaneously with each hand on a different typewriter.
This is not something I would want to do every day but was definitely a perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday late afternoon.
This video is at a hall at Yale (his alma mater), a bit less intimate but you get the idea.
Earlier this week our long time friend Barb Roscher arrived in New York for her second visit since we have been here. She was here for a business meeting on Wednesday but she had all day Tuesday free. A return engagement for one night only. We got together early in the afternoon for the start of our self designed Greenwich Village crawl. We grabbed a bus on Fifth Avenue that took us directly to Washington Square Park. We had never been there on a weekday before and as we sort of expected there were no buskers to be seen. We didn’t linger long there as the fountain area was a little toasty from the midday sun. We wound our way over to MacDougal and Bleecker and chose Caffe del Mare for our late lunch. Our server had a charming Jamaican accent and was very accommodating. He rattled off the special which was a choice omelets, fries, adult beverage, salad, and coffee. How could we refuse? We didn’t even bother with the menus. In just a minute we had our wine, bloody mary, and mimosa in hand and the salmon omelets and Eggs Benedict weren’t far behind. From there we headed west to a recent find, Fat Cat. It is a large place in the basement of a building off of 7th Avenue. It is a jazz club and game room. We weren’t expecting any live music on a weekday afternoon but a band was there rehearsing so we lucked out. The place is a mishmash of seating, some booths, some small tables, sofas with coffee tables, and some long cafeteria style tables. All the tables have checker/chess boards or Scrabble boards. Play all you want for $1 per person. The perimeter of the room is lined with at least a half dozen ping pong tables behind netting to keep the balls somewhat confined. Next are eight or so pool tables, a couple of foosball tables, and a couple of shuffleboard games. Like I said it is a big space. We opted for the Scrabble board and the gloves were off. Toni was lagging behind a bit and made a valiant effort to end the game with the word QUOTE. It was close but she still fell a bit short but a most impressive finish. We went on a couple more blocks for serious drinks at a little bar, Cubby Hole, appropriately named. The drinks are cheap and the house even opened up the bar for a round to celebrate the bartender’s birthday. From there we went for a quick and inexpensive dinner at Art Bar around the corner. If you go there be sure to go to the back room for a totally different dining experience. The three of us ate for twenty Dollars including tip!! The bus stop is right outside the door and one pulled up within a minute. By the time we said goodbye to Barb and got home it was after eleven o’clock and we had been on our crawl for about ten hours.
You might recall that we went to the Village on Barb’s first visit as well. We were struggling and bumbling around with a GPS back then and the machine was even having a hard time. The Village is one of several more challenging parts of Manhattan. If you have spent any time here you are no doubt familiar with the famous grid system here. However when you go this far south you encounter streets that predate the grid. In this case there three grids crashing together and they also overlap. As a result you get a lot of odd shaped blocks of every geometric shape you can name and more. You also get intersections with six or more streets radiating out like bicycle spokes. Some east/west streets are numbered but most are not and the ones that are don’t ‘behave’ as they should. For example, 4th Street takes a few bends and winds up intersecting with 10th Street and 12th Street when it should run parallel. So we consider it to be quite an achievement to get around there now without getting lost.
We had a really low key Labor Day Weekend. Saturday we caught the bus down to the farmer's market at Union Square Park at 14th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue. This is all truly locally or at least regionally grown produce. The place was packed but we didn't care as the weather spectacular...better than I can ever remember. Seventy degrees, no humidity (37%), and a nice steady breeze. We bought quite a lot of produce including the largest radishes I have ever seen, as big as golf balls. We grabbed quick sandwich at a great BBQ restaurant, believe it or not. Hopped on a return bus and ran into a street fair where we rounded out our late lunch with some fresh roasted corn on the cob (fresh as in husk still attached).
Sunday was another great weather day and we decided to head for Central Park again. Toni put together a chicken sandwich picnic lunch and we grabbed the New York Times and read it cover to cover while sitting on a park bench at the mall. Then we went to Bethesda Fountain and watched the rowboats at the Loeb Boathouse before heading home.
Nothing too exciting, just hanging around the city before Fall kicks in.
Saturday we went down to the Village for dinner and drinks and afterwards we hopped on the M20 bus to get back home via 8th Avenue. When we got off we turned onto West 53rd Street and were a bit startled to see a couple of rows of Harleys all parked neatly right on the sidewalk with only inches between them, almost nested like spoons. As we headed toward 7th Avenue we kept seeing more and more motorcycles parked and unattended. There were hundreds of them taking up the whole intersection. Sunday morning I Googled to find out what was going on. It turned out that that what we saw was just a small part of a huge group consisting of 1,000 cyclists riding to raise money for the families of the first responders to the 9/11 attacks. This is something that our Congress could not manage to do recently. Somehow setting aside money for this cause is not beyond politics. They start the ride in Pennsylvania then on to Washington DC and finally to Ground Zero in New York for a total of 455 miles stopping at each crash site. This is the tenth annual ride growing from 200 riders the first year. The group is called America’s 9/11 Foundation and you can go to their site if you want to help.
On Sunday they all gathered up for the final leg to the World Trade Center site. Unfortunately a group of 500 protesters chose to take advantage of the bikers’ schedule to gather at the same time to steal the spotlight away from a non-partisan positive cause to get attention for their cause of hate and bigotry. Yes, they were there to protest the building of the Muslim community center two blocks away disregarding the fact that Muslims also died in the World Trade Center and that there is already a long established mosque just four blocks away. To me this is not much different than the protests of the Westboro Baptist Church and disrespects the many Americans who have laid down their lives in the hopes of making things better in Muslim countries. I will never understand all this divisiveness.
It is funny to think of how the image of the biker has changed over the years from the violent gang thug Hell's Angels to the benevolent protector and doer of good deeds.
I was able to snap off a few pictures from our window in the morning before they quietly rumbled away in the rain.
A couple of weeks ago we went to Ray Wylie Hubbard at Joe’s Pub in the East Village. Ray is far from a household name but he is one of my favorite artists. He is Oklahoma born and Texas raised and has the drawl to prove it which would lead most casual listeners to throw him in the Country Music category. But he is much more than that. His music is more rock, blues, and gospel than country. In fact his special blend of genres is nearly unique. He had put out a few releases in the 1970s garnering a small cult following mostly around Austin. Then his recorded output all but dried up until 1992 when he put out an album on his own. Since then he has been relatively prolific issuing ten CDs since and each album has been great. He doesn’t tour much outside of Texas, I only saw him once in Kansas City. So when we saw his date come up here we jumped on it even though the start time was 9:30 on a Tuesday night and going would involve a round trip cab ride as there is not a good bus option to get to this venue. Fortunately, his wife, Judy, put us on the guest list and that made up for the cost of the ride. We have been dealing directly with Ray and Judy off and on since the mid 1990’s stocking his self releases. The line up was Ray on acoustic guitar, and his 17 year old son, Lucas, on electric lead guitar, and a drummer whose name I missed, playing a small kit mostly with brushes and a variety of other small hand held rattles and odds and ends. Ray not only entertains with his music but his between song patter is just one hilarious laugh out loud anecdote after the other, most of it self deprecating and sometimes quite fantastic. He told of one encounter after a show when he was approached by a thirty-something fan who wanted to know how Ray managed to stay so committed to his music for so many years. Ray is in his early sixties. Ray proceeded to tell him how simple it was. All you have do is to ignore your momma when she encourages you to stay in school so in case the music thing doesn’t work out you will have something to fall back on. He also told of growing up and living at his grandma’s house. She was a psychic palm reader for extra money and had a creepy large red hand with weird zodiac symbols painted on the side of the house facing the nearby highway. They would stand outside when cars would approach and as his grandma watched them continue past without slowing down she would say, “I KNEW they weren’t going to stop”. If you ever get a chance to see Ray Wylie Hubbard you should go. You will have a great time even if you are not familiar with his music.
This was our second time at Joe’s Pub and I have decided this is my favorite venue. I haven’t been to all that many places here but this would be hard to beat. It is as intimate as a house concert with seating for only 160 and it has a couple of levels so there is no bad line of sight. We sat at the bar in the back on very comfortable barstools. Other seating on this second level was cushy barrel chairs and sofas. The lower level is all tables of different sizes which at worst puts you at the equivalent of the fourth or fifth row so no one is too far from the stage. This place also has the best sound I have ever encountered. You can truly enjoy the music clearly without your ears ringing the next day. It is part of The Public Theater complex which in addition to this venue includes five theaters for eclectic and avant garde stage presentations. This is where the musical Hair was debuted. The organization also operates the theater in Central Park where Shakespeare In The Park is performed. Definitely one of New York’s many assets.
As you might expect the choices for music entertainment in New York are endless. There is simply not enough time or money to get to all the acts we would like to see. Here are some things we have seen recently and some that we are going to down the road and some that we missed out on.
A week ago we saw Raul Malo, not a household name, he better known as the lead singer in the Mavericks. We have not seen him since the mid-nineties with the Mavericks at a bar in Westport and we have never seen Malo as a solo artist. We had tickets for a show a couple of years ago but the show was cancelled at the last minute. His next stop in KC came the week after we moved away. When we got to NYC he was playing but it was when we were still at the hotel and we just had too much going on at that time. So, when we saw he had yet another date here we jumped on it, especially since he would be performing on one of the Circle Line cruise boats and a two hour evening tour of the Lower Manhattan Harbor was part of the “Rockin’ The River” package.
In my head I had an image of Malo serenading us under the starlit sky and the New York skyline behind him. However, when we boarded I could see that something totally different was going to play out. First there was no stage, just an area roped off with those ribbon and pole setups like you see in a bank queue. Within the roped off area were all the trappings of a full electric band. The band area was about midship and facing one side of the boat. Four or five feet in front of the band were three rows of twelve or so chairs and we were lucky enough to snag a pair. The rest of the chairs were lined up on either side of the band and practically none of them had any kind of line of sight. This was also a covered part of the boat with a seven foot ceiling.
The Circle Line oversold this as all the seats were filled and there was hardly room for the others to stand. We had a great view for about three songs or so and then a few people started dancing in front of us and then more and more until we couldn’t see past them any longer. I can’t blame them as they paid the same as we did and deserved to get to see it rather than just hear it. As that part of the boat became more and more compressed we wound our way out and down to the lower deck where we could still enjoy the music and get the cool breeze and take in the panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty on one side and Manhattan and bridges on the other.
Although the evening was not exactly like my vision we really did have a really good time. We managed to get in a good mix of concert and sight seeing. After the show ended Malo and the rest of the band came to the lower deck and took time to meet with everyone and sign autographs.
The next day we went to a free show at an outdoor venue at Lincoln Center as part of their “Out Of Doors” summer series. This was at the Damrosch Park Band Shell just west of Central Park. The venue was set up with 1,000 or so chairs fanning out from the stage. We opted to sit back beyond the seats in a treed plaza area away from the crowd. The weather was just perfect especially as the sun retreated behind the buildings. The evening’s program was the second part of “The Detroit Breakdown”, a day long program featuring music originating in Detroit from different eras and genres. We had never heard of the first two acts, Death, a punk band from the 70s sounding a bit like Iggy Pop, and the Gories, a pop band from the eighties that were a little like White Stripes. Next up was Question Mark and the Mysterians, known for the song and garage band classic, “96 Tears”. They actually managed a nice set despite the fact that they only had the one major hit a couple of minor hits to work with…they still had the great one left. The highlight was when they finally got to perform their hit and Ronnie Spector joined the band on stage unannounced. Closing out the show was Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels who had many hits to work with. He started off strong with many of his hits, Jenny Take A Ride, Sock It To Me Baby, and Little Latin Lupe Lu. However, he left the stage to the band for a planned break to rest his voice and the band carried on with some lackluster generic rock and even a drum solo. He still had yet to play Too Many Fish In The Sea and Devil With A Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly but he was dragging the show out too long for us and we quietly slipped away back home.
96 Tears with Ronnie Spector's surprise appearance.
The upper plaza area at Lincoln Center
? and the Mysterians
Recently there have been a couple of shows we seriously considered going to but we didn’t for various reasons. One was Alejandro Escovedo at City Winery. He played just the day before Malo and it was a weeknight. I found out after the fact that Ian Hunter joined him on stage for the final song of his encore, a Mott The Hoople track, “I Wish I Was Your Mother”. Another was a few weeks ago at Radio City Music Hall where Ringo Starr was performing as well as celebrating his 70th birthday. And for his encore he was joined on stage by Paul McCartney. Of course that seems totally predictable in hindsight. Today there is a free concert on Governors Island and one of the acts is Steve Earle’s son, Justin Townes Earle. Steve lives in NYC now and it is hard for me to think he won’t be joining his son on stage for a song or two. We won’t be making it to this one either so we will wait to find out tomorrow if I am right.
So, looking to the future we are going to see Ray Wylie Hubbard on Tuesday at Joe’s Pub. In early September we plan to see Dave Alvin with Eilen Jewell opening at City Winery. Then we have tickets for September 25th to see The Fab Faux at Radio City Music Hall. Now this requires a little bit of explaining. They are, as the name may suggest, a Beatles tribute band. But they are not like others out there. They make no attempt to do impersonations or even dress like the Beatles. They are just about the music and replicating it perfectly. The only musician most would be familiar with is Will Lee who is part of the band on Late Show with David Letterman. Check the video and see/hear for yourself as they run through most of side two of Abbey Road without a break… essentially in one take. For the show we are attending they are performing a tribute to John Lennon for what would have been his seventieth birthday and will be playing his songs as a solo artist and with the Beatles. Normally I would not go in for a tribute band but this is different especially being in the city that Lennon loved so much. I have to think there will be a surprise guest or two. It is New York so we should be ready for anything.
There is something for every taste and budget here…from free buskers at Washington Square Park to the big names at Madison Square Garden.
? and the Mysterians
