92Y Podcast: Pianist Bill Charlap, Artistic Director of Jazz in July Summer Festival
Pianist Bill Charlap, Artistic Director of 92nd Street Y's Jazz in July Summer Festival, recently sat down with us for a phone conversation. In the first half of the podcast above, Bill tackles the first week of Jazz in July, followed by a discussion of the second week. He spoke about his vision for the festival, the significance of New York Jazz, the role Vince Guaraldi (composer of the Charlie Brown songs) played in quietly introducing America to his own music without notice, why this series is unique in the season and more. At one point, Charlap declared the acoustics at our concert hall as the best of any he has played.
The music you hear during brief moments in the podcast is from Bill's album, Stardust. Yesterday, we gave a few copies of that album away, but you can still win your free copy by visiting our Facebook page and leaving a comment on our wall. We've got one more CD to give!
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Alice McDermott “is a genius of quiet observation,” said the Los Angeles Times. “One of our finest novelists.” McDermott’s books includeCharming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and After This. In January 2008, she appeared at 92Y for our Afternoon Night Table Series hosted by award-winning journalist, essayist and television commentator Roger Rosenblatt. You can listen to the full program above, where they talk about the art of fiction, both writing and teaching it.
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Save Now and Become a Subscriber of 92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center: The 2009-2010 season will feature appearances by some of today’s finest authors, among them Adrienne Rich, Annie Proulx, A.S. Byatt, Chinua Achebe, Orhan Pamuk, John Irving, Paul Auster, Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, Natasha Trethewey, Javier Marías, Peter Esterházy, John Banville, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks. Special events include A Celebration of Vladimir Nabokov with Martin Amis; An Evening of Beckett; The Tenth Muse with John Ashbery and much more.
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In March 2007, Ms. magazine founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin interviewed comic legend Gene Wilder, whose debut novel My French Whore was released that month, at the 92nd Street Y for our Funny People series. Read a recap of the evening here, and even better, listen to the full program above. Highlights include the interesting story that he agreed to play the part of Willy Wonka only on the condition that he get to introduce the character in a certain way: appearing before the townspeople for the first time, Wonka hobbles out with a cane, pretends to stumble, and goes into an acrobatic forward somersault. He explained that the change was critical in setting up the character, because “from that point on, you don’t know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.”
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Business legend Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, returns to the Y on June 18 with his wife Suzy to discuss "Decision Making the Welch Way." (On a related note, you will not want to miss "Dollars and Sense: What's Next for the Financial Sector and Economy?" with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, John Paulson and Matthew Bishop on June 1.) The Welches are the coauthors of the bestseller, Winning: The Answers, and a syndicated column, The Welch Way. They last appeared here together in January 2007 with Businessweek editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler. You can listen to the program below.
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More Upcoming Talks:
Bill Scheft in Conversation with Susie Essman: May 20
David Gregory in Conversation with Jeff Greenfield: May 26
Ace Every Interview: Getting the Job You Really Want with Barry Cohen: Jun 9
Fear and Loathing on Wall Street—Investment Strategies for a Post Bear Stearns World with Jason Trennert: Jun 9
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92Y Podcast: The Borowitz Report: Obama’s First 100 Days
Last night at the Y, award-winning comedian and satirist Andy Borowitz (Borowitz Report), and a stellar panel including Hendrick Hertzberg of The New Yorker, journalist Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and comedian Judy Gold took an irreverent look at President Obama's first 100 days in office. Andy starts the evening off with a hilarious monologue and in case you think the Y crowd doesn't appreciate "blue" (several meanings implied here) humor, Andy is pretty liberal with the f-bombs. Just a warning. You can listen to the whole program below.
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Galway Kinnell, one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century, has had a career full of accolades. About his work, Liz Rosenberg wrote in the Boston Globe: "Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart." His relationship to the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center is very special and he has appeared here over 30 times. This podcast is from his 3rd on November 29, 1965. He reads First Song, The River That is East, Middle of the Way and other poems.
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John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.
The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike died at a hospice outside Boston.
Of Mr. Updike’s 61 books, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public as those about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. His best-known protagonist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the sad life of this undistinguished middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.
“My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”
Updike made four appearances at the Y's Poetry Center between 1967 and 2005. Listen to the Q&A portion of his last where he talks about poetry influences, his transition from would-be cartoonist to writer, finishing what he starts and art criticism.
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W. D. Snodgrass, who found the stuff of poetry in the raw material of his emotional life and from it helped forge a bold, self-analytical poetic style in postwar America, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his debut book, died on Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., in rural Madison County. He was 83.
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Kathleen Snodgrass, said.
“Your name’s absurd,” Mr. Snodgrass wrote in an early poem, “These Trees Stand...,” as if at once to silence the snickering and skewer himself. But only a few lines later he sang out his name, declaring, “Snodgrass is walking through the universe,” as if to announce the sort of poetic journey of the self he had undertaken.
It found immediate expression in “Heart’s Needle,” a collection he published at the age of 33 in 1959. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, startled American poetry circles and prompted a letter of praise from Robert Lowell.
Lowell, who had taught Mr. Snodgrass in a poetry workshop at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), had at first admonished his student about his early poems. “He said, ‘You’ve got a brain; you can’t write this kind of tear-jerking stuff,’ ” Mr. Snodgrass recalled in an interview with The New York Times at his home in October.
“But I came to a point where I had to rebel against my teachers, including Lowell,” he said. “I wanted to use a much more simple and direct kind of language, something that would be common without feeling worn out or used.”
Lowell changed his mind, persuaded Knopf to publish “Heart’s Needle” and called it a “breakthrough for modern poetry.”
Snodgrass made six appearances at the Y's Poetry Center between 1959 and 1997. Listen above to the full program, with an introduction by critic John Simon, of his reading from March 28, 1963.
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92Y Podcast: Dennis Prager makes The Case for Judaism
On March 11, 2008, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Dennis Prager—described in Jewish Week as “one of the three most interesting minds in American Jewish life”—made a presentation at the Y to offer compelling arguments in favor of Judaism, developed over many years of speaking to people from virtually every religion and culture. Prager, a popular radio talk show host since 1982, is the author of The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, Why the Jews?, The Reason for Antisemitism and Happiness Is a Serious Problem. In the clip above he discusses the Jewish relationship to Christianity, the self-criticism of Judaism and how the Torah makes the case for "good people" - no matter their religion.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
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Related: The New Administration and the Mideast: What Will Happen in 2009? with David Makovsky (Jan 11) and State of World Jewry Lecture: Martin Indyk in Conversation with David Remnick (Jan 15)
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92Y Podcast: Garrison Keillor and Roger Rosenblatt
On this past Saturday's A Prairie Home Companion radio broadcast, the last of the year recorded at The Town Hall in Manhattan, Garrison Keillor and Heather Masse sang a New York landmarks version of “Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry” which included references to the Y along with the Algonquin, Circle Line, Cartier’s and many others. Here's an excerpt of the lyrics but you should really listen to the whole song here in segment 1.
...Papa’s gonna take you to Russian-Tea-Room,
And if the blinis seem just too small,
We’ll go next door to Carnegie Hall.
And if some choir’s singin Messiah,
Papa’s gonna take you to Gray’s Papaya.
And if the papaya leaves you feeling dry,
We’ll go to the 92nd Street Y.
And if the poetry reading’s a bore,
And if the metaphors you’ve heard before,
And if the poet’s muse is a much-too-solemn-muse,
Papa’s gonna take you to St. Bartholomew’s…
Keillor, a frequent Y guest, is never a bore in his appearances which you can judge for yourself below with the full program of his talk with Roger Rosenblatt for the Afternoon Night Table Series on April 9, 2008. We previously posted a video excerpt of the program.
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As a young man, Earvin "Magic" Johnson admired his father and other small-town entrepreneurs who created jobs and served as leaders in his Midwestern community. He worked for them, watched them and his interest in building communities through economic development grew even while his basketball career flourished. His fame as an NBA star gave him access to some of the most successful business leaders in the country. On November 20, 2008, he sat down with Stephen Adler of BusinessWeek for the Y's Captains of Industry Series. In the excerpt above, Johnson talks about his early development as a basketball player and the racial tensions he encountered in high school.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
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Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said Thursday.
Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.
In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.
Pinter, one of over 40 Nobel Prize winners who have spoken at the Y, made five appearances at our Poetry Center between 1964 and 1996. You can listen above to the full program of his first on November 12, 1964 which includes a reading of short stories and poems—Tea Party / New Year in the Midlands / A Glass at Midnight / You in the Night / The Drama in April / The Anesthetist’s Pen / Jig / Episode / Afternoon / The Error of Alarm / The Table / The Black and White selection / The Examination—followed by a Q&A where he talks about literary influences, point of view, his opinion of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the classic Beatles vs. Rolling Stones debate.
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With women’s wear couture and ready-made lines, Ralph Rucci is known for a signature style that merges extraordinary craftsmanship with a sophisticated, restrained aesthetic, derived from his connoisseurship of history and art. A recipient of the 2008 National Design Award, Rucci has taken on the role of ambassador for American fashion, as the first American to show in Paris couture since the 1930s. On September 18, 2008, Iké Udé of aRUDE magazine interviewed Rucci for the Y's Dialogues with Design Legends Series. In the excerpt above, Rucci talks about his philosophy of maintaining quality and control of his work.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
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92Y Podcast: Bernard-Henri Lévy with Sam Tanenhaus
On September 18, 2008, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy sat down with Sam Tanenhaus, senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, at the Y to talk about his most recent book, Left In Dark Times, where he argues for a new “left” based on universal values and ethical commitments. In the excerpt above, Lévy discusses left-wing anti-Zionism, domestic anti-Americanism and the global effects of both.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
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Upcoming: Jewish Survival on College Campuses and in the Ivory Tower (Dec 8), Breaking News in the Jewish World and Beyond: Katie Roiphe and Joe Berger (Dec 16), State of World Jewry Lecture: Martin Indyk with David Remnick (Jan 15)
