Popular comics theorist Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame has called Tom Hart “one of my favorite cartoonists of the decade.” Hart’s Hutch Owen graphic novels and comic strips have garnered raves from The Comics Journal and Time.com and now appear daily in the New York Metro newspaper. Luckily for us, he’ll be teaching a new course here, Gag to Strip: Intermediate Cartooning, alongside courses from fellow cartooning all-stars Lauren Weinstein and Rick Bleier. He posted the full syllabus of his upcoming course on his website as well as a bit of his teaching philosophy:
I’m reminded of a comment from an interview with a Walt Kelly, who stated (somewhat adamantly): “You have to be articulate!”
In my teaching, I try to focus on learning the craft of storytelling as a way of being articulate. Of giving yourself the largest vocabulary possible, but also to give you a deep understanding of how to maneuver, access and control that vocabulary.
More importantly, in learning that vocabulary, we often learn what it is we WANT TO SAY. By working deeply and by paying attention, our own unthought thoughts and hidden aspects of our emotional narrative can reveal themselves. In other words, what I try to teach is discovering what it is you want to say and how to best say it. Through exercises and personal connection, I hope to bring you to a new place with your own ideas and inspiration, while giving you the tools to connect with your readers.
My students over the course of my 7 years of teaching continually thank me for helping them learn to access their creative fire, but also to organize it. For giving them the ability to literally find new life on the page, and the tools to keep it alive and find purchase in the mind of a reader.
Huzzah!
Comics blog The Daily Crosshatch has an in-depth interview with Hart up as well.
His course here is starting to fill up, no doubt thanks to the positive word of mouth his SVA courses and personal tutoring engagements have generated. Now is the best time to register for any of our fall art classes, in fact—quick, before everyone else returns to town next week!
Many of our lectures have books associated with them, many of them brand new. Above are some from the forthcoming month of lectures and conversations. Remember that you can almost always bring your copy of the book in question and have it signed by the author after the event, or purchase a discounted copy of the book at the event courtesy of Barnes & Noble. Call 212.415.5500 or email us to confirm that there will be a book-signing after your favorite author’s Y event.
Andreasong and the 92nd Street Y Lyrics & Lyricists series recently announced the release of Kurt Weill In America, the CD of the original concert conceived, written and directed by Andrea Marcovicci and presented at the Y in November 2005. The album, produced by Ms. Marcovicci and her longtime musical director Shelly Markham, with Frank Skillern serving as executive producer, celebrates the German-born composer Kurt Weill and the lyrics of Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, Ogden Nash, Paul Green and Ann Ronell. The cast includes Andrea Marcovicci, Anna Bergman, Barbara Brussell, Mark Coffin, Chuck Cooper, Jeff Harnar and Maude Maggart. The CD is available through Andrea’s web site www.marcovicci.com, at Lyrics & Lyricists shows and now, being distributed through LML Music, is in record stores throughout the country, as welll as for sale online at Amazon.com, iTunes, CD Universe and Circuit City, among others.
The recording has received exciting reviews from newspapers around the country, as well as online publications. It will be submitted for Grammy consideration in the coming season.
Rating: (WILD APPLAUSE) EXCELLENT. The genius of Kurt Weill shines in the melodic mastery he brought to lyricists Maxwell Anderson, Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner and Ira Gershwin. A generous 27 songs, from the underappreciated “Johnny Johnson” (1936) on, are beautifully rendered by seven superb voices and musical director Shelly Markham’s small ensemble at this 2005 concert, scripted and directed by Andrea Marcovicci, in the 92nd Street Y Lyrics and Lyricists series. Selections range from familiar—Chuck Cooper’s celestially poignant “Lost in the Stars”; a swinging “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”; Barbara Brussell’s lilting “Speak Low”—to such rarities as Weill’s last song, “This Time Next Year” (deftly styled by Marcovicci), and “The River Is So Blue” (cut from a 1937 film), sung with magnetic yearning by Maude Maggart, who also excels on “My Ship.”
—Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
In November 2005, [Marcovicci] thrilled audiences with her innovative program, Kurt Weill in America; and now, a CD of that show—which also features Anna Bergman, Barbara Brussell, Mark Coffin, Chuck Cooper, Jeff Harnar, and Maude Maggart—“I’m just thrilled about it,” she says. “I work for a year on these projects and usually, poof, they’re gone in a flash and all your hard work disappears in the ether. Now, this experience is permanent.”
—Theatermania.com
Listen to an audio clip of the cast singing Alan Jay Lerner’s “Love Song.”
Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet on one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvellous first book of poems. We had never had news like this before, not about a new book of poetry or about any kind of book, and I still wonder by what means this news could have reached us...It seemed unlikely that there were people out there who were guardians of the life of the mind, were watching out for new movements, and could make a serious judgment about a new book of poetry.
But in the strangest way something like that had happened. The young poet became famous among us. He came from the island of St Lucia. If Trinidad was a dot on the map of the world, it could be said that St Lucia was a dot on that dot. And he had had his book published in Barbados. For island people the sea was a great divider: it led to different landscapes, different kinds of houses, people always slightly racially different, with strange accents. But the young poet and his book had overcome all of that: it was as though, as in a Victorian homily, virtue and dedication had made its way against the odds.
The poet was Derek Walcott. As a poet in the islands, for 15 or 16 or 20 years, until he made a reputation abroad, he had a hard row to hoe; for some time he even had to work for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian. Forty-three years after his first book of poems came out, self-published, he won the Nobel prize for literature.
Video: Terem-Quartet. “Mozart, Chopin, and Bizet as you have never heard them before—classical music become theatre” —The Scotsman (Edinburgh)
Watch the 7-minute video above for an amazing look at St. Petersburg, Russia’s Terem-Quartet, who have revolutionized the way music is played on folk instruments. They’ve been representing the soul of Russian music for the last 20 years and are considered a symbol of St. Petersburg’s great traditions. The Baltic Times recently noted, “The Terem-Quartet was one of the first bands to overthrow Soviet folk music by harking back to the ancient Russian Skomorokh traditions in a style that fits in with modern musical tastes.” They make their only New York appearance this fall at the Y on October 28.
Doug Varone, choreographer of contemporary dance for the concert stage and opera, is the artistic director of Doug Varone and Dancers which was named this year’s Harkness Dance Center Company-in-Residence, the first at the 92nd Street Y in decades. As a company-in-residence, Varone and his dancers will be calling the Y their home, including being at the Y for company rehearsals, workshops, classes, studio showings, Fridays at Noon performances and the unique opportunity for teens in the Y’s Harkness Repertory Ensemble to work with this master choreographer.
Varone is the recipient of numerous honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Sustained Achievement in Choreography and, most recently, a 2006 OBIE Award for his production of Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice at Lincoln Center. He recently answered some questions from Harkness Dance Center staff for the Y blog.
Harkness Dance Center: How do you hope that this next year at the Y will help you creatively?
Doug Varone: At this particular point in the Company’s life (we are in our 21st year), it will be very satisfying to have a place that we can call home. We have been a bit nomadic in terms of rehearsing everywhere throughout the city and this remains frustrating, as the quest for studio space often overshadows the creative drive. Being able to create new work in one environment will be tremendously healthy for the dancers and our process.
HDC: What is appealing to you about being with us?
DV: I have a long history with the Y and have rehearsed here with the company (and before then even, as an independent choreographer). The energy in the building is remarkable and it fuels creativity. There is SO much going on so many different fronts, like a small city that educates and supports. It’s thrilling to walk the halls and feed off of that.
HDC: What will you be working on going into this season?
DV: I will be creating a new repertory work for my company set to the entirety of Daniel Variations scored by preeminent American composer, Steve Reich. I will take my inspiration directly from Reich’s composition, scored in four movements that alternate between the stories and words from the biblical book of Daniel, an Israelite and advisor to the King of Babylon (located in present day Iraq), and from Daniel Pearl, the American Jewish reporter, kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in 2002. Although the work is steeped in a personal tragedy, there is a universal undertone of defiance in the score juxtaposing the written words of both universes: violence, cruelty, mercy, and compassion. I am hoping that the work ultimately will explore how mercy and compassion in the face of brutality can offer us hope as we struggle with continual and devastating human violence. I am hoping that the inspiration for the piece and the topic of the score will resonate culturally on political and religious levels and generate vigorous dialogue that will attract and engage new and diverse audiences.
HDC: How does Buttenwieser Hall affect your creative work?
DV: It is a beautiful HUGE space steeped in so much dance history.
HDC: This year at the Y we hope to have you work with teens and with seniors – any thoughts or fulfilling experiences you have to share about working with these populations?
DV: I love working with a broad spectrum of people and think that dance can truly be a connector in so many ways. On tour, we regularly work with young people in creative situations and I am always eager to work with seniors. I love hearing about their lives and encouraging movement from their own personal histories. There’s such an amazing wealth of information to glean from smart, passionate adults.
HDC: Anything else?
DV: It will be so wonderful to be part of the Y. I feel as if the work that I explore and create is very much in keeping with the humanistic ideals that the Y represents.
Stay tuned to www.92Y.org/harkness for year-round information about this exciting new partnership with Doug Varone and the 92nd Street Y.
The New York Times made note of the Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center 2007-08 season yesterday in Arts, Briefly:
The 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center announced its 2007-8 lineup of readings yesterday. Among the writers scheduled to appear are Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning West Indian poet, on Sept. 17, and the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and the South African novelist Zakes Mda on Sept. 20. (Ms. Danticat will read from her new memoir, “Brother, I’m Dying.") Mario Vargas Llosa is to appear on Oct. 15, reading from his new novel, and the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski on Dec. 6. On Jan. 7 the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will read, along with Dave Eggers. (After the reading, they will talk with the Sudanese civil war refugee Valentino Achak Deng, on whom Mr. Eggers based his latest fictionalized biography, “What Is the What.") Roddy Doyle, from Ireland, and A. L. Kennedy, from Scotland, will read on Jan. 23; the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak reads from her latest novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul,” on Feb. 11. Andrew Motion, the poet laureate of Britain, will appear on April 7, and the Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, from Hungary, will share the stage with the pianist Andras Schiff on April 17. The full schedule of readings is available at 92y.org.
The Y has several reading series which showcase the biggest names in the literary world:
Grace Paley, winner of the 1993 Rea Award for the Short Story (credit: Karl Bissinger) and guest at this past year’s award presentation (credit: Bookish Love).
We were saddened to learn of the passing of Grace Paley, the great and inspiring short story writer, poet and political activist. Margalit Fox of the New York Timestouchingly writes:
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.
And read them aloud she did. Paley graced the stage at the 92nd Street Y a total of 10 times over 33 years, the first with friend Donald Barthelme in 1971. The Books Archive on the Times website has early reviews and articles, even an audio excerpt from a reading she gave at the Y on April 3, 1995. (It’s incorrectly listed as 1985.) Paley’s portion of this event—Sandra Cisneros also read—has the following segments: Translations / Sometimes / Song Stanzas of Private Luck / In the Bus / Dreamer in a Dead Language.
Are you going to Burning Man next week? If you don’t know what Burning Man is, then you obviously haven’t been living under a Black Rock. Held every year in the Nevada desert, it’s a festival “dedicated to self-expression, self-reliance, and art as the center of community.” Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, explains more in the video above. He’s coming to the Y with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Dancing In the Streets: A History of Collective Joy and architect David Rockwell, author of Spectacle, to discuss Everyone’s Invited: Public Art and Festivity in Our Culture on October 7.
Mark Lilla, humanities professor at Columbia University, wrote the cover story for last Sunday’s New York Times magazine with an essay adapted from his book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. It’s an informative overview of the history of political theology. Here’s an excerpt:
Among Jewish liberal thinkers, there was a different sort of hope, that of acceptance as equal citizens. After the French Revolution, a fitful process of Jewish emancipation began in Europe, and German Jews were more quickly integrated into modern cultural life than in any other European country — a fateful development. For it was precisely at this moment that German Protestants were becoming convinced that reformed Christianity represented their national Volksgeist. While the liberal Jewish thinkers were attracted to modern enlightened faith, they were also driven by the apologetic need to justify Judaism’s contribution to German society. They could not appeal to the principles of the Great Separation and simply demand to be left alone. They had to argue that Judaism and Protestantism were two forms of the same rational moral faith, and that they could share a political theology. As the Jewish philosopher and liberal reformer Hermann Cohen once put it, “In all intellectual questions of religion we think and feel ourselves in a Protestant spirit.”
Pound Ridge resident Tim Robbins will join fellow actor Bob Balaban on Sept. 23 at the 92nd Street Y for a discussion about the late Academy-Award winning director, Robert Altman.
Altman directed Robbins in 1992’s “The Player,” 1993’s “Short Cuts” and 1994’s “Prêt-à-Porter,” so the actor should have quite a few stories to tell about Altman, who died in November due to cancer complications.
The 7:30 p.m. event, which includes film clips, will be moderated by entertainment journalist and historian Eddy Friedfeld.
Has the 92nd Street Y usurped Nobu as the place for A-listers to be seen? Check out some of the other celebrities booked for the weeks ahead, according to The Apiary: Michael Palin, Larry David, Stephen Colbert and Steve Martin.
Given how expensive our lives are, how can money not be a factor? We have huge mortgages and tapped-out home equity lines of credit weighing on us. College tuition bills have never been more daunting. Our employers are less likely to give us a defined-benefit pension, so the onus is on us—and our 401(k)s—to figure out how we’ll be able to afford retirement. If we’re lucky enough to get health insurance through our employer, the trend is for each of us to be responsible for a greater portion of the bill.
I wish authentic happiness were achievable solely from the richness of relationships, but I’m a realist. And the reality I see—and that so many of you write to me about—is one in which money plays into our ability to be truly happy.
I’m talking about how your happiness is affected when you’re worried about how you’ll pay the bills at the end of the month, save for the future and be able to afford to retire. In other words, how you’ll make ends meet. When those worries are your reality, I think it’s ridiculously hard to be authentically happy.
Suze Orman, a two-time Emmy Award-winning television host and bestselling author, appears at the Y on September 9 with Dr. Gail Saltz to discuss the psychology of women and money. It’s the first talk in The Ruth Stanton About Women Series which also features Geraldine Ferraro, Cathleen Black and Liz Smith.
Sarah Vowell (pictured), author/journalist/humorist and regular contributor to the radio program This American Life, was recently interviewed by NYC blog Gothamist and here’s what she says about her decision to live in New York:
I can live anywhere in the world; I choose to live here. I live here for no other reason than I love to be here more than anywhere else in the world. I’m incredibly optimistic. I guess in that ‘where you buy your towels’ sense maybe things won’t be so Mom n’ Pop, but I’m old school about all our major civic institutions: The Metropolitan Museum and MoMA and The New York Public Library and the 92nd Street Y...Central Park Summerstage and Town Hall, and all the things we hold dear. I don’t see a decline in those institutions and I love MoMA since their renovation and there’s nothing I like better than a Friday night at The Met and I’ve seen some things at the 92nd St Y that I hold dear.
Thanks, Sarah. We hope the Y’s new season will provide more of those moments.
From the new edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust anthology edited by Charles Fishman, author of Chopin’s Piano, for Time Being Books to be published in November 2007:
My Mother as Superhero by Marilynn Talal
Faster than a fleeing cattle car, she flies to smash tracks.
Her bare hands destroy swaths of barbed wire. At the gas chambers,
she tears out canisters of Zyklon B, not leaving one whiff
to poison the air. With her superhuman breath, she blows out
fires in the crematoria. A careless throw tosses Hitler
into space where he tumbles, slowly disintegrating.
Pleased with her feats, her Krypton strength,
she trucks loads of nourishing food to feed the starving.
She transports frightened refugees home, builds comfortable houses,
answers cries of the tortured, locates the lost, reunites families,
uses her strength, speed, fantastic vision and hearing to help
the helpless and soothe the broken, flying everywhere, never stopping.
Throughout the night, she holds the weeping in her embrace,
yet all this saving leaves her empty unless the rescued love her,
unless they praise her with superheroic gratitude that covers up
self-loathing and stops the demon anvil banging in her head.
How I wish I could have helped her to enjoy miracles of unheroic
achievement: a lifetime with loving friends, the hosting of happy parties.
Her dearest wishes never brought contentment. She could never rest
with her own goodness.
# # #
In March 2008, you can join Talal, Fishman and eleven other acclaimed poets for a special evening and reading, New York Poets on the Holocaust.
Popular comics theorist Scott McCloud of 
From personal finance expert 
