Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo does a lot of thinking about the “Great Issues” facing our country. Last week he became an active blogger with a series of guest posts on the DMIBlog sharing his insight on foreign policy, taxes, strengthening the economy and other challenges that those aspiring for the Presidency must address during their campaigns and once elected. Here’s an excerpt from his foreign policy post:
It is disheartening to note that few of the leading candidates for President appear willing to speak candidly, specifically and comprehensively about Israel and Palestine. That’s harmful to an already desperate situation. We must find a way to restart the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians no matter how difficult it may be: it is clearly a subject that promotes anger among the Arab, Muslim and Israeli population. It must begin by getting some of the Arab nations to join the United States in announcing that their earlier promise to accept Israel’s legitimacy as a starting point to discussions remains in place. Then we must renew the attempt to find a “two-state” solution with a place for the Palestinians that promises them security, opportunity and dignity, side by side with the Israelis. The fact that we have failed to be able to do this for nearly 60 years makes it a daunting challenge, but the fact that the chance of the entire Middle East exploding into a larger and more terrible war is greater than ever, should be all the incentive we need, to try again...especially since there have been no meaningful peace talks promoted by us for more than six years.
And don't forget about our free, blowout Street Festival all day this Sunday, September 16 on Lexington Avenue from 79th to 94th Streets! We hope to see you there.
Winners of the 2007 Quill Awards—"the only book awards to pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz [and] the first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of all the groups that matter most in publishing: readers, booksellers and librarians"—were recently announced on WNBC and The Today Show by Al Roker and Ann Curry. The top honor in the Health/Self-Improvement category goes to Dr. Jerome Groopman (above) for How Doctors Think. As the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he brings his wealth of doctor knowledge to the 92nd Street Y on October 16.
Other 2007 Quill winners and finalists who have been at the Y or are coming this season:
Karina Zilberman is the new Director of Jewish Arts and Culture at the 92nd Street Y. She is a singer, performing and recording artist who uses music and creative arts to foster a love of Jewish culture. Originally from Argentina, she has studied extensively with Rabbi Mitchell Chefitz and was most currently a cantorial Soloist at Temple Israel of Miami. She brings her eclectic repertoire of performing and teaching songs from all over the world in six languages; English, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Portuguese. Karina is the creator of the vocal group “Chavaia,” which helped bring Judaism to the hearts of children and adults and will be a prominent staff member for the new Shabbat and Holiday initiative at Y. She will lead the High Holiday Family Services on September 13, 14 and 22.
Listen to Karina perform Craig Taubman’s “Hashkivenu” with pianist Alan Mason.
Suze Said: “Sex, ladies, you can live without. Money, you can’t.”
The Upper East Side Informer blog goes for gold at personal finance expert Suze Orman’s Sunday night talk at the Y and comes back with a handful of nuggets. Here are a few:
Home: Talk early and openly with your spouse about money. Get comfortable with the topic. “I refuse to believe that the man in your life does not want you to know. He is probably just as afraid as you are right now,” said Orman.
Real Estate: New York will not be hit as hard by the sub-prime collapse. Most buildings are co-op and require a minimum 50% deposit; there wasn’t as much sub-prime lending here as in other states.
Younger women: 401K. Stick with it. Don’t touch it. The more stock prices go down, the more shares you are buying each month.
Eradicate credit card debt: No employee of Orman’s is permitted to have credit card debt. Pay it off now. Don’t put it off.
Buy a home: Pay off the mortgage as soon as you can. “There’s no better investment than a home,” said Orman. Most homes appreciate 4 percent in value every year. In the next four years, some 2.2 million Americans are going to foreclose. Start saving now so you can jump in to swoop up one of those houses.
Read a more detailed rundown of the night and don’t miss these business and finance programs this fall at the Y:
If you had designs on expanding your horizons with a course this fall, now is the time to get specific. Here are classes with sections starting up next Monday, September 17:
On Thursday evening the Y audience was treated to an appearance by Larry David. He surprised everyone with a screening of the first episode of the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which will air this Sunday at 10pm on HBO. After the screening Larry, while being interviewed by Susie Essman, commented that the audience laughs came in places he wasn’t expecting. We often do the unexpected.
Gossip bloggers Joan and Melissa wrote about the event and had nice words for the Y:
If you haven’t been to the Kaufmann Concert Hall (part of the 92nd Street Y) in Manhattan yet, do yourself a favor and check out their site… It’s a fabulous well-kept secret and wonderful little venue. You’re sure to find something interesting to attend. I checked this out last night, and what a treat it was!
While this event was sold out there are still great seats for the rest of our Funny People Series.
Soundwalking is the practice of walking with a special focus on deep listening, and sound artist Katie Down knows how to listen. She is a classically trained flutist who also plays guitar, ukulele, dumbek, frame drum, and various glass and homemade instruments when she isn’t developing sound designs and scores for theater and dance companies around town and around the world. In her upcoming Makor program, she’ll be leading the curious on an aural exploration of Manhattan. What exactly does that involve? It’s not just about closing your eyes and shutting your mouth, as Katie notes in her class description:
Igniting the senses through sight deprivation is one way to focus deep listening, but do we only listen with our ears? How does one listen with their ears as well as their feet, their skin, their touch? We provide a safe, nurturing environment based on trust, instinct, and of course, a sense of adventure. It will change the way you think and feel about sound and perhaps change how you “view” the city!
Canadian composer and music educator R. Murray Schafer is one of the originators of soundwalking, and the website for his World Soundscape Project offers a lot of interesting background material. See also this introductory article from radio artist Hildegard Westerkamp.
Katie’s workshop is one of hundreds of fall classes starting up now. Register before the first session of your favorite passes.
That’s how group-blog Shakesville describes the first big event of our fall season: last night’s conversation between Lorne Michaels and Monty Python’s Michael Palin.
The evening’s format centered around Lorne asking Michael about his perspectives before, and during, Python. In addition, audience members were given the opportunity to write questions for Michael on index cards, which were handed to Lorne during the course of the evening. I was pleased that one of the submitted questions asked Michael to cover George Harrison’s relationship with Python, which manifested into Lorne Michaels recalling his own interaction with George when SNL offered $3,000 for a Beatles reunion. It was such a joy listening to Michael recount some hilarious tales, throwing in some funny quips here and there.
Everyone was enjoying what he had to say. Whether it was talking about pressure during the writing of The Frost Report, Python dealing with BBC censors, or donkeys mating on the set of Life Of Brian, there was an enthusiasm in his delivery that left all of us hanging on every word. At times, I missed some follow-up joke because we were all laughing too hard at one he just made, almost like when I watched Python for the first time without any VCRs that I could rewind to catch every single thing!
UPDATE: Kung Fu Rodeo and New York Daily News comedy blogger Sean L. McCarthy have glowing reviews of the evening up now as well.
We have more blockbuster comedy nights coming up but you have to move fast. At this moment there are literally two (2) new tickets available for Stephen Colbert October 23. Andy Borowitz’s Countdown to ‘08 with Mo Rocca, Arianna Huffington and more panelists yet to be announced is starting to heat up, and Larry Davidson’s interview with Chris Elliott in November (with wine) promises to be memorable. The New Yorker‘s Patricia Marx is here as well to help out people who are funny in person but not on paper.
Brother, I’m Dying (left) by Edwidge Danticat (right)
The New York Times has measured praise for Edwidge Danticat’s affecting new memoir:
In “Brother, I’m Dying,” Ms. Danticat brings the lyric language and emotional clarity of her remarkable 2004 novel “The Dew Breaker” to bear on the story of her own family, a story which, like so much of her fiction, embodies the painful legacy of Haiti’s violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect in the lives of that country’s citizens and exiles. Ms. Danticat not only creates an indelible portrait of her two fathers, her dad and her uncle, but in telling their stories, she gives the reader an intimate sense of the personal consequences of the Haitian diaspora: its impact on parents and children, brothers and sisters, those who stay and those who leave to begin a new life abroad. She has written a fierce, haunting book about exile and loss and family love, and how that love can survive distance and separation, loss and abandonment and somehow endure, undented and robust.
Time Out New York admires the book for its disciplined storytelling:
At a time when most American memoirs practically groan under the weight of self-importance and bad-memory baggage, Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying provides a formidable example of an author who knows how to write about her family without hogging the stage. The writer refers to herself, sure, but never at the expense of her true subjects: her father, Andre, who emigrated from Haiti to Brooklyn in 1971; her uncle, Joseph, a preacher who remained in Port-au-Prince; and the ways that their lives radically differed until they converged in death.
“The idea wasn’t to talk about myself,” says the 38-year-old author [...] “I set off trying to write about these two men and the fact that for 30 years, they lived in different countries, had very different lives, and all of a sudden, they’re both buried in Queens.”
Biologist J. Craig Venter is back—four years after his former company Celera Genomics was beaten in the heated race to complete the decoding of the human genome by the Human Genome Project—and this time it’s personal. He’s been decoding his own genome, and yesterday he and his team announced that they had finished the first mapping of a full, or diploid, genome, made up of DNA inherited from both parents. This new genome sequence is considered by many scientists to be of much higher quality and contain much more detail than the genome completed by the Human Genome Project consortium.
You can explore the diploid genome sequence of J. Craig Venter in this interactive poster published yesterday along with his team’s announcement. The New York Times offers extensive background on the story:
Dr. Venter has spent the last five years and an extra $10 million of his institute’s money in improving the draft genome he prepared at Celera. That genome was based mostly on his own DNA, and the new diploid version is entirely so. His critics may accuse him of an egocentricity of considerable dimension, but by analyzing his own genome he has sidestepped the problems of privacy and consent that could have arisen with other people’s DNA when he made the whole sequence publicly available, as he is doing now.
Like James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, whose genome is also being decoded, Dr. Venter believes strongly in making individual DNA sequences public to advance knowledge and hasten the era of personalized genomic medicine.
If other experts find that Dr. Venter’s genome is the best available, could it be said that he won the human genome race after all?
Venter has also been in the news recently for seeking to patent the world’s first man-made species, a synthetic microbe that could be used to produce fuel. The creation of the life-form has not yet been announced, but Venter has indicated that his institute is very close to doing so. As someone at the forefront of some of the most significant scientific accomplishments of our time, his lecture here at the Y October 30 is virtually guaranteed to be fascinating.
Grammy-winning “hardcore troubadour” Steve Earle is well known for his sharply written folk-country songs and uncompromising political views. But ever since he moved to the West Village a few years ago and started writing songs in honor of our fair city, he’s become a New York favorite as well. New York magazine even includes him and his forthcoming album in their Fall Preview 2007:
Earle is a Nashville legend; his 1986 debut, Guitar Town, was the rallying cry for a generation of rebellious “new-country” artists, and he stayed on as their hard-living figurehead. But two years ago, Earle gave in to a longtime fantasy and moved to the West Village. His love affair with his new hometown is documented on his forthcoming album, Washington Square Serenade; the opening track, “Tennessee Blues,” makes Earle’s new allegiance clear. “Bound for New York City and I won’t be back no more,” he sings. “Boys won’t see me around—good-bye, guitar town.”
The album’s shimmering mix of acoustic guitars and supple beats was provided by producer John King, half of the Dust Brothers team that has worked with Beck and the Beastie Boys. “I wanted to make a folk record arrived at by hip-hop rules,” says Earle.
We recommend a visit to Earle’s MySpace page for a taste of his new New York-centric songs as well as liner notes from music writer Anthony DeCurtis, who will be interviewing Earle here at the Y October 9.
Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo does a lot of thinking about the 
