The Amygdaloids: A Better Band Name Than The Stained Neurons
Video: The Amygdaloids at Madison Square Garden, May 2007
A rock band of neuroscientists? The drummer is an ex-Israeli soldier? Reading, seeing and hearing is believing.
In May at Madison Square Garden, an unknown, unsigned rock band began to play. It was only its fourth show since forming in the fall of 2006. Granted, its last show had sold out, but that was in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York, which holds about 30 people. The Amygdaloids were staring at a crowd of 10,000, a big leap for a band that had yet to release, well, anything. Then something phenomenal happened. In the midst of its signature song, “All in a Nut,” an inspired kid in the audience began leaping out of his seat, igniting a wave that went around the entire 200,000-square-foot arena. The band members were stunned; they had never seen anything like it.
All right, the occasion wasn’t a concert but a graduation ceremony for 10,000 students in the New York University College of Arts and Science. Still, this was no ordinary club band hired to entertain the students. The Amygdaloids are made up of four scientists from NYU whose chief singer and songwriter is Joseph LeDoux. Earlier in the evening, LeDoux had given the faculty address. Although one must ask what kind of neuroscience professor invokes Tennessee Williams and surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel to send a graduating class out into the world, then picks up his white Stratocaster and launches into a rock ballad about the amygdala, that almond-shaped “nut” in the brain that processes primitive emotions like fear, love, hate and anger: “Why do we feel so afraid/ Don’t have to look very far/ Don’t get stuck in a rut/ Don’t have to look very hard/ It’s all in a nut, in your brain.”
Joseph LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University, brings his band to the Y on April 3.
Here’s a recent Guardian (UK) review of Holliger’s String Quartet No. 2 performed by the award-winning Zehetmair Quartet, known for playing entirely from memory and programming rarely performed masterpieces in combination with more standard repertoire, in London.
As if being the greatest oboist of the past half century wasn’t enough, in the past 10 years or so Heinz Holliger has been recognised as one of the most significant European composers of his generation, too. One of the pieces that cemented Holliger’s reputation was the violin concerto he completed in 1995 for Thomas Zehetmair, and now he has written a string quartet for the group Zehetmair leads. They gave the first performance two weeks ago in Cologne, and included the UK premiere in their Wigmore programme, framed by Schubert’s E flat Quartet D 87 and the third and last of Schumann’s Op 41 set.
Dedicated to Elliott Carter, Holliger’s String Quartet No 2 is a single movement, lasting about 23 minutes but falling into six sections. The composer’s brief programme note talked about the burden of history weighing on anyone who attempted to compose a string quartet as one of the reasons why the new work was separated by 34 years from his First Quartet, which he describes as “much criticised”. That’s unlikely to be the fate of this piece, though, which is absorbing.
Three sections are headed by quotations from Hölderlin and Celan. They are not further explained, but the trajectory of the piece is straightforward. Beginning with glassy, densely packed harmonics, it moves seamlessly through a crepuscular slow section and a trembling perpetuum mobile to arrive at the finale, labelled as a “12-part epilogue in three parts”, in which the members of the quartet sing four of the lines over the double-stops on their instruments. It is a wonderfully unearthly effect, and a genuine summation; the Zehetmairs manage it wonderfully, too, but then they are an exceptional group.
Marie Ponsot has said of Emily Fragos, “[Her] trust in language is fruitful, and justified. No word she writes is an advertisement for herself. The out-going empathy which moves her now and then even allows her moments in which persons, acts, things, and self are poised as if reconciled. We are enlarged by her resonant verbal imagination.” Read samples of her poems on Boston Review.
The New York Times recently reviewed Modern Life, a new poetry collection by Matthea Harvey: “The good news, however, is that America’s younger poets are generating more than their share of our country’s best writing. At 34, Matthea Harvey is a case in point. She is in many ways a typical American poet in early career: She teaches workshops, helps edit a journal, keeps a busy reading schedule, pops up at artists’ colonies, publishes widely and has had to learn the basic steps of the pobiz hustle (her Web site is polished, her Wikipedia entry primed for expansion).” Read an interview with Matthea on Bookslut.com.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the recipient of the 2007 James Laughlin Award for her second book, Human Dark with Sugar. Read more information about the award and listen to her poems on Poets.org.
After Esquire contributing editor A.J. Jacobs completed The Know-It-All, the story of one man’s quest to learn everything in the world by reading the Encyclopedia from A to Z, he set his sights higher—to the heavens, if you will—when he decided to follow every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible for a year. The results are not just the before and after photos shown here, but a hilarious and reverential account called The Year of Living Biblically.
You followed the Bible literally for an entire year. If you had to do it again for one month, which month would you choose and why?
Can I make my own month? And choose to do 31 Saturdays in a row? Is that allowed? The Sabbath was one of the most life-altering parts of my year. As a workaholic, the line between weekend and weekday didn’t exist for me. But here was a mandated day of rest and joy, a “sanctuary in time,” as Rabbi Heschel called it. When I first tried Shabbat, I got the shakes, but by the end of the year, I had come to love the ritual.
You came out of your experiment with a deeper sense of transcendence and sacredness in life. Have you been able to maintain that now that you are no longer doing your biblical study and practice?
To some extent, yes. I started the year as an agnostic and I ended the year as what a minister friend of mine calls a ‘reverent agnostic.’ Which is a phrase I love, however oxymoronic it may seem. Whether or not there’s a God, I believe in the idea of sacredness, and that rituals or the Sabbath or prayer can be sacred. I still observe the Sabbath – in the sense that I try not to email or make phone calls or write on Saturdays. I still pray, even though I’m not sure what I’m praying to. And I try to maintain a sense of wonderment, which is something I gained in my biblical year (I also gained it sophomore year of high school after a night with an apple bong, but the feeling from my biblical year was more lasting).
Read the full Q&A and join A.J. at the Y on April 1 for an eye-opening lesson in the wisdom of rabbis, religion in America today, Bible history and the dangers of literal interpretation. Thou shalt not miss it!
92Y Podcast: Alice McDermott with Roger Rosenblatt
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. On January 30 of this year, she appeared at the Y for the Afternoon Night Table Series hosted by the award-winning journalist, essayist and television commentator Roger Rosenblatt. Later in the evening, she led a master class in fiction. In the audio clip below, she explains her passion for teaching - besides the money, of course.
Program Notes and Artist Bios: International Ensembles, April 10
The following are Program Notes and Artist Bios for the International Ensembles concert featuring Juliane Banse, soprano / Rossetti String Quartet / Brian Zeger, piano at the 92nd Street Y on April 10. This is the only New York appearance for the Rossetti String Quartet and Juliane Banse who will give the first New York performance of Bach’s Alles mit Gott, a work discovered in 2005.
BACH: Selections from Schemellis Musikalisches Gesang-Buch, BWV 439-507
“Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen”
“Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr”
“Was bist du doch, o Seele”
“Komm, süsser Tod”
“Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag” Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 and died in Leipzig in 1750. Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musikalisches Gesang-Buch was published in Leipzig in 1736.
In 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe published one of the most infamous put-downs in musical history, dismissing J.S. Bach’s music as “bombastic,” overwrought, and lacking in naturalness. Although Scheibe later ate his words, Bach’s reputation as a fusty academic lingered for decades after his death. Scheibe’s criticism seems particularly ill advised in light of the simple and affecting hymns in Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musikalisches Gesang-Buch of 1736, to which Bach contributed the continuo accompaniments and at least three of the hymn tunes.
The five sacred solo songs heard this evening are a fair sampling of the contents of Schemelli’s anthology. As with the other 64 hymns in the Gesang-Buch, the texts are drawn from the extensive repertory of 17th- and 18th-century religious poetry. The musical settings range from the restrained, meditative style of “Komm, süsser Tod,” in plaintive D minor, to the bright major key affirmation of “Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen.” (The latter is the only one of the five melodies that scholars have firmly ascribed to Bach.) Likewise, the unadorned declamatory style of “Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr” and “Was bist du doch, o Seele” contrasts with the showier, more soloistic vocal line of “Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag.”
Schemelli was court cantor at Zeitz, a few miles south of Bach’s home in Leipzig. His hymnal appeared at Eastertide in 1736, around the time the revised version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion had its first performance in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. No doubt the oratorio’s great double choruses struck some members of the congregation as excessively contrapuntal—or, as Scheibe put it, “artificial.” For them, the artless pieties of Schemelli’s Gesang-Buch must have been balm to the ears.
What You Missed: Economist Jeffrey Sachs, “We’ll Get Out of This Mess”
Michelle Haimoff reviews last night’s talk at the Y between Charlie Rose and economist Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, on ThePanelist.com:
When Rose asked him about the current economic situation, Sachs said, “We’ll wait a few years and we’ll get out of this mess.” Although he doesn’t see it as approaching the severity of the Great Depression, he described the mess as “intentional” and pointed fingers at Alan Greenspan, The Fed (who “didn’t pull the punch bowl away as the party got started”), and an unpopular and weak administration that is “financing a war that nobody supports.” He argued that the behavior was not prudent and that imprudent behavior blows up eventually.
In response to how much the US bubble is affecting the rest of the world, Sachs explained that the weak dollar means we’ll buy less from other countries and that the balance sheets of the banks of these countries might be in trouble. “I think we’ll have a recession. The rest of he world will have a slowdown but a modest one.” He said. “It isn’t true anymore that when we sneeze the rest of the world gets pneumonia.” Later he added that “[the US is] still the biggest economy in the world,” but no longer the sole superpower that everybody fears and admires, the reasons being that we’re making a lot of mistakes and the rest of the world is catching up.
Read more including his push for “weapons of mass salvation” and thoughts on the Fed’s bailout of Bear Stearns.
Update: Dan Brown, teacher and author of the memoir, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, was also in attendance and “came away from the event torn with alternating currents of outrage and hope.” Read his report on the Huffington Post.
Barely glancing at the menu, the novelist Meg Wolitzer ordered some scrambled egg whites, seven-grain toast and a Coke at the Three Guys diner on the Upper East Side one recent morning. As she scanned the room for mothers fresh from dropping off their children at one of several private schools in the neighborhood, she pointed out a pair of 30-something women in jeans and sweaters talking earnestly, heads together. “I think they’re planning a school event,” Ms. Wolitzer said.
A few tables away, two white-haired women sat chatting over coffee mugs. “Their children are in 80th grade,” Ms. Wolitzer said, smiling, “and they’re waiting for them to finish.”
Ms. Wolitzer, whose eighth novel, “The Ten-Year Nap,” is being published by Riverhead Books this week, did a lot of research by osmosis at the diner. Here she spent many mornings hanging out with other mothers post-school-drop-off.
Those encounters, some with women who did not work, provided the genesis of the new book, a multicharacter meditation on a group of upper-middle-class women, mostly in Manhattan, who have stayed home for a decade to raise their children.
Earlier this month, the 92nd Street Y’s Simon Center for Adult Life & Learning arranged for our patrons to participate in some of the last VIP tours of Yankee Stadium EVER. In addition to seeing the press box, clubhouse, dugout, field and Monument Park, our groups were given exclusive access to the Club Level, with stops at a luxury box, dining room and the Great Monuments Room.
This tour was added last minute and sold out fast. You can stay on top of newly added “Behind the Scenes” tours and all programs by signing up for 92Y eNews.
Wallace Stegner (pictured) read at the 92nd Street Y on September 23, 1990 with David Leavitt; they were introduced by Samuel Vaughan and Elaine Showalter, respectively. Opening remarks were made by Karl Kirchwey, then director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Upcoming readings include: Anne Carson (Mar 26), The Tenth Muse with Paul Muldoon featuring Emily Fragos, Matthea Harvey and Brenda Shaughnessy (Mar 31), Andrew Motion and Wendy Salinger (Apr 7), Garrison Keillor (Apr 9), Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton (Apr 13), Imre Kertész with musical performance by András Schiff (Apr 17), Andrew Sean Greer and Meg Wolitzer (Apr 24) and The Poets’ Theatre II: Gilgamesh adapted by Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia, directed by Robert Scanlan (Apr 28).
Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said long-held disagreements with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War may prevent him from endorsing fellow Republican Senator John McCain’s presidential bid.
“When I endorse someone, or when I work for someone, or commit to someone, I want to be behind that person in every way I can,” Hagel, who supports a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, said today on ABC’s “This Week.” “John and I have some pretty fundamental disagreements over the future of foreign policy.”
The U.S. needs a “clear plan” for ending the war, said Hagel, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and plans to retire from the Senate when his second term ends in January.
“We’re going to have to start working our way out of this,” he said. “I think we’re in a quagmire.”
Senator Hagel comes to the Y on Thursday to talk about America—The Next Chapter. Will he make an endorsement?
Video: Short film and interview clips of Autism: The Musical and filmmaker Tricia Regan on The Alcove with Mark Molaro.
The award-winning documentary Autism: The Musical—"the story of five autistic children, their families and the dynamic woman named Elaine Hall who leads them to defy expectations by writing, rehearsing and performing their own musical"—premieres Tuesday night on HBO. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with filmmaker Tricia Regan on the Huffington Post:
What message do you want people to come away with after viewing Autism the Musical?
This movie, I think, shows you, the humanity behind autism--that it’s a tough diagnosis that can devastate families. It’s certainly not something that you would want in your life but, if your child is diagnosed with autism, you’re still going to have a lot of the love and the pleasure that any parent has with their child. And that kid is still going to have the life of a kid in them first and their autism second.
There’s also a feature about it in yesterday’s New York Times. On May 4 at the Y, you can attend a special screening of Autism: The Musical followed by a panel discussion with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate; Lisa Ginsburg, the assistant executive director of Ramapo for Children, a nonprofit organization serving children with special needs; Ilene Lainer, parent and founder of the first New York City public school for children with autism; and Karen Siff Exkorn, author of The Autism Sourcebook.
Mos Def entertained and worked the 92nd Street Y crowd on February 28 with a talk covering music and politics that included video and song previews as well. We previously posted a review of the evening and now you can listen to an audio excerpt below where he theorizes on Presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
After Esquire contributing editor A.J. Jacobs completed 
