Photos of William F. Buckley at the 92nd Street Y in 1974, 2001 with Jeff Greenfield and a group shot featuring Katie Couric, novelist Walter Mosley, Congressman Barney Frank, writer Roger Rosenblatt and the Y's own Susan Engel in 2000.
As I think I saw someone write in the last day or so, his attitude to life was, "always forward." One of the reasons he was so captivating to his friends is that he always gave them the sense that if they would lash themselves to him, they'd be in for the ride of a lifetime...I have a hard time imagining editing National Review without Bill Buckley to read it, and send us memos about what he liked and what he didn't. Now I'll always wonder.
Buckley appeared at the Y seven times from 1974 to 2001. Lowry will be making his first this Sunday with Jeff Greenfield. Always forward.
First, a look back to Buckley's April 2001 talk with Jeff Greenfield at the Y. In the audio clip below they talk about George W. Bush's first 100 days as President and the oratory skills of leaders.
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Mos Def was engaging, animated and personable in his conversation last night with Rolling Stone‘s Anthony DeCurtis. The evening began with the premiere of a previously unreleased video for “Beef” (look for it online soon), and included comment on everything from Barack Obama’s ability to appear “above the fray” in politics to the enviable vitality and urgency of some of the hip-hop music being produced outside the United States today.
The Y audience was treated to an impromptu listening party for one of Mos Def’s new tracks to be released later this year on an album called The Ecstatic, after a novel by Victor LaValle. Titled “Pretty Dancer,” it’s dedicated to Muhammad Ali and produced by Madlib. We were also given a guided tour of the Most Important Songs in Mos Def’s life, in chronological order:
2. ”O Holy Night,” as first heard in church as a child
3. ”It’s Like That” by Run DMC, as first heard blasting from an open doorway in the Bronx in the early 1980s
4. “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, as first heard inside a Brooklyn pizzeria one day with his mother ("They sounded like they were coming from space."):
5. ”The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, as first heard during a “last day of school” class party in the fourth grade.
6. ”The Bridge is Over” by Boogie Down Productions, as first heard on a Bronx sidewalk ("It was news.")
7. ”A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane, as first heard at the age of 14 ("It was my first means of travel.")
8. The Band of Gypsys live album by Jimi Hendrix, as first heard at the age of 15 ("I remember being mad, because it was like, ‘why did no one tell me about this?’")
9. ”Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis, as first heard at the age of 16
The blogger reviews are starting to come in: Brian Litvack of YO BRO IT’S ME LITTY and Sportsvite.com was impressed:
I’m super glad I went as I was really impressed with Mos Def. He is such an astute observer of society which he then processes in his own unique way. Mos Def has the amazing ability to articulate his thoughts in such a rhythmatic flow that makes his words even more captivating. He speaks in such a deliberate and patient manner. It seems like he pauses in mid-sentence to scan his own mental dictionary for the perfect word or phrase and then nails it every time. He gets you to want to listen to what he has to say next. I think that is called charisma.
The challenge, I believe, with these “in-person” appearances is that the facade is blown. Oftentimes, I leave these events with the star losing their luster and no longer being a fan. But did the star this evening keep on shining after all of the questions from the host and the audience? Mos Def. (Oh come on, you had to know that was coming!)
And the New York Observer Politicker blog has quotes from Mos on Barack Obama.
Explaining what he considers to be the subconscious appeal of Obama, he said, “On an intuitive level I could sense it. And when I saw him on the cover of Men’s Vogue, even before he threw his hat in, I was like, ‘This guy is going to run for president and he’s going to win.’ And he’s going to win because he’s an author, and he looks good.”
Robert Klein and Richard Zoglin on Stand-Up Comedy of the ‘70s
The video above featuring comedian Robert Klein is from the recent release party for Comedy at the Edge, a book about how stand-up comedy in the ‘70s changed America, by Time magazine senior editor and writer Richard Zoglin. With the help of film clips and personal stories, both Klein and Zoglin will look back on that pioneering era with entertainment journalist and historian Eddy Friedfeld at the Y on March 20.
A recent New York Times travel article takes you inside the C. F. Martin & Company guitar factory in Nazareth, PA:
The tour guide on this day, a careworn but cheerful woman named Steph Tashner, who started here “11 years ago in the stringing department,” took the group of eight, mostly guitar geeks, on a sort of fast-forwarded version of the making of a Martin. The tour started with discussions and descriptions of types of wood — the tops are usually made with spruce, the sides and backs with mahogany and rosewood — and ended with a look at a few finished instruments.
In between, the faithful watched Martin employees soak wood so it could be bent into the sides of guitars; use clothespins to glue the interior linings; smooth frets; and stain bodies.
The employees number 560, ranging in appearance from old hippies with graying ponytails to women who would have fit right into a factory scene from “Norma Rae.” The once little company, which produced 368 guitars in 1898, now covers 200,000 square feet.
Covering the walls are pictures of some of its best-known customers, including Dylan, Young, Stephen Stills and Robbie Robertson. The 60s just might have been less groovy without Martin guitars.
The online feature also includes an audio slide show and cool interactive guide to “Making a Martin.”
If you’re a guitar fan, or music lover in general, don’t miss the Y’s 75th Birthday Tribute to Julian Bream, widely recognized as one of the most important classical guitarists of the 20th Century, on March 1. Some of today’s finest guitarists will celebrate the life and legacy of the incomparable master whose achievements as both a performer and musical advocate have boosted the guitar’s stature and popularity.
Martin Fletcher: Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
From the 1973 Yom Kippur War to the Iranian hostage crisis to the Palestinian intifada, Martin Fletcher, NBC News bureau chief and correspondent has seen up close more conflicts and hardships in his 35 years as a news broadcaster than most people will ever experience in 10 lifetimes. Stationed in Tel Aviv, Israel, the five-time Emmy award-winning bureau chief and correspondent has been in the middle of some of the most harrowing events of the past thirty-five years, bringing the news of the day to the households of America.
How do you explain your journalistic duty to your family/loved ones who might urge you not to go?
In 30 years my wife has only asked me once not to go somewhere and that is Iraq because I’m Jewish, married to an Israeli etc. She’s never asked me before, so when NBC asked me to go to Iraq I said no, the first time ever. So I don’t need to explain to my family. They understand that this is my job and I love it and they trust me. And when I told my mother not to worry because when I go to work I wear a flak jacket and a helmet, she answered, “Martin, if you have to wear a flak jacket and helmet to go to work, you should get a new job!”
You didn’t ask this, but this is what I strongly believe. Staying safe in a war zone has nothing to do with experience, it’s just dumb luck. Two friends of mine, the most experienced war correspondents imaginable, both died in silly incidents after a career of coverage (Neil Davis and Mohammed Amin). So these days I just try to narrow the odds by only doing what is really necessary. I feel that after taking risks for so long, the odds are against me. So I’m careful!
As part of our Israel at 60 celebration, the 92nd Street Y’s School of the Arts presents Out of Israel, a free exhibit in the Weill Art Gallery featuring images by four diverse Israeli photographers. Through the depiction of barren landscapes, vibrant ethnic communities, religious-secular struggles, and everyday life on the streets, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Menachem Kahana, Joel Kantor and Alex Levac (respectively) each take a different approach to capturing the richness and complexity of Israeli culture.
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz was born in Buenos Aires in 1974 and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1980. His photographs address the tension between human intervention and nature, as evidenced in his images of the uninhabited landscapes that surround settlement communities. Ickowicz’s work has been show in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Haifa Museum of Art.
Menachem Kahana was born in Ashkelon in 1958 and studied photography at the Hadassah College in Jerusalem. His photographs provide an intimate view of life in Israel’s ultra-orthodox communities. Kahana has worked as head photographer for Associated French Press in Jerusalem since 1987 and has several images in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Joel Kantor was born in Montreal, Canada in 1948 and earned a law degree from McGill University before immigrating to Israel in 1976. While Kantor’s grainy black and white photographs depict contemporary scenes, they have a nostalgic quality that suggests another time. His works are in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in New York.
Alex Levac was born in Tel Aviv in 1944. After graduating with degrees in philosophy and psychology from Tel Aviv University and in photography from the London College of Printing, he began his career as a freelance photographer and eventually settled in Jerusalem. Levrac became a staff photographer for the daily newspaper Hadashot in 1983, and has held the same post for the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz since 1993. Along with his experience in covering hard news, Levac is known for finding humor in everyday life on the streets of Israel. In 2005, he was a recipient of the Israel Prize – the highest award Israel bestows upon its citizens.
Opening Reception: Tue, Mar 11, 5pm-6:45pm. Free and Open to the Public.
Exhibit Dates: Sun, Mar 2 to Tue, Apr 22.
The photographs in this exhibit are on loan from Yosefa Drescher Fine Art in West Hartford, Connecticut.
On Friday, the New York Times published an obituary for jazz pioneer Teo Macero:
Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y.
His death followed a long illness, his stepdaughter, Suzie Lightbourn, said.
Helping to build Miles Davis albums like “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent Way” and “Get Up With It,” Mr. Macero (pronounced TEE-oh mah-SEH-roh) used techniques partly inspired by composers like Edgard Varèse, who had been using tape-editing and electronic effects to help shape the music. Such techniques were then new to jazz and have largely remained separate from it since. But the electric-jazz albums he helped Davis create — especially “Bitches Brew,” which remains one of the best-selling albums by a jazz artist — have deeper echoes in almost 40 years of experimental pop, like work by Can, Brian Eno and Radiohead.
Macero was a frequent performer at the Y from 1955 to 1972, appearing at least ten times, his first at the Modern Jazz Festival in April 1955 with Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk. Here’s the announcement from the Y Bulletin.
Watch the Savory New York video profile above of Blue Hill restaurant in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village featuring executive chef/co-owner Dan Barber who discusses the restaurant’s understated and elegant atmosphere, its “intensely” seasonal menu and his focus on sourcing fresh ingredients from farms in New York’s Hudson Valley. Here’s more video of Barber with Michael Pollan and Joan Dye Gussow at the Y food talk “Hedonistic, Healthy And Green.”
New York Times dining critic Frank Bruni has said, “Perhaps no other chef in New York City does as enthusiastic an impersonation of the farmer in the dell as Mr. Barber, and perhaps no other restaurant makes as serious and showy an effort to connect diners to the origins of their food as Blue Hill.”
Video: The Psalms with Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson
Biblical scholar and Hebrew Studies professor Robert Alter, who has received considerable praise from The New Yorker, appeared at the Y in December 2007 for a reading and conversation on “The Psalms” (previously reviewed here) with Marilynne Robinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead. In the video clip above, Alter describes how the English language fails to reproduce the sound of Biblical Hebrew due to its “compactness” and Robinson marvels at the presence of fallible human voices in the sacred testimonies of Scripture literature.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “It’s the protector that must be protected.”
Carl Swanson of New York magazine has a brief Q&A with French celebrity intellectual (and Jew) Bernard-Henri Lévy on the rebranding of anti-Semitism.
What caused you to turn to explicitly discussing anti-Semitism?
Its return. And a relatively new rhetoric. Anti-Semitism, to pass under the radar, to become again undetectable, to be in a position to operate without being accused of being anti-Semitism, must draw from three sources: anti-Zionism, the denial of the Holocaust, and victim competition. It must articulate the following discourse: “The Jews are a detestable people who, firstly, invented and exaggerated their own martyring”—which is denial of the Holocaust; secondly, “They overshadowed, in doing so, the martyring of other people”—which is victim competition; and, thirdly, “They accomplished this crime because they are obsessed with the defense of an assassin state”—which is anti-Zionism.
LeeSaar The Company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2000 by actress/writer Lee Sher and dancer/choreographer Saar Harari. Now based in New York (The New Yorker noted: “[The Israeli contemporary choreographers] moved to New York two years ago and promptly made a name for themselves"), they are recipients of the inaugural Six Points Fellowship and will be performing their newest work, Geisha, for the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Festival in March. From their website:
Geisha, an entirely new work, is a sensual duet featuring Saar Harari and new company member Jye-Hwei Lin, accompanied by spoken and sung text by Lee Sher.
Here’s what critics have said about LeeSaar The Company:
“unflinching, intensely personal the performers’ ferocious, in-your-face honesty demands attention: when they undulate, they’re frankly sensual, and when they struggle, they mean it.” (The New Yorker)
“There’s a curious rhythm to their work, the way things start and abruptly stop. It’s both effective and unsettling, yet always engaging. The performers ferocious all never let a second go to waste. Sher and Harari don’t just grab your attention; they wrestle it to the ground.” (CultureVulture.net)
92Y Podcast: Madeleine Albright Offers Sage Advice for the Next President
Previously, we posted a video excerpt from a talk between former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Foreign Affairs editor James F. Hoge, Jr that took place at the Y on January 20. You can listen to more of her thoughts in the audio clip below where Albright gives her advice for the next President by telling the cautionary story of a superpower from 2,400 years ago (Athens) that made a preemptive strike on a perceived enemy (Sicily) and how that turned out.
Hoge’s Foreign Affairs Series at the Y continues on May 7 with Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and host of Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS.
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Mos Def was engaging, animated and personable in his 
