Raquel Welch discusses her internal struggle to age gracefully in the spotlight of Hollywood and make peace with the sometimes uncomfortable mantle of “sex symbol.” Booksigning to follow. Read more on the 92Y Blog.
Bronx born Peter Phillips, better known by the name Pete Rock, and lesser known as Soul Brother #1 or The Chocolate Boy Wonder, was one half of the ground-breaking rap duo Pete Rock & CL Smooth. Crate Kings has him listed as the third greatest Hip Hop and Rap producer of all time. He is frequently credited with having major influence on today’s Hip Hop music.
Reacquaint yourself with Pete Rock’s music at the Hype Machine.
This April 7, Pete Rock joins Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg for the latest installment of Noisemakers at 92YTribeca. HipHopDX caught wind of this, and asked:
With rumors circulating around the Internet about Pete Rock lending his production and deejaying expertise to Kanye West’s tentatively titled upcoming album, Good Ass Job, this is the perfect time to pay tribute to the man who changed how we think of adlibs, sampled the horns from “Today” by Tom Scott and the California Dreamers. So can Rosenberg get him to give up the goods?
“Pete has a couple really big things up his sleeve, some of which I hope he publicly reveals at Noisemakers,” Rosenberg offered.
92nd Street Y Guitar Institute: High School Guitar Days
Benjamin Verdery leads a class at High School Guitar Day
They say that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. For the School of Music at the 92nd Street Y, March has wrapped up to the powerful roar of 100 high school students in response to director Anthea Jackson’s announcement, “Welcome to our fourth annual High School Guitar Day!” At the recede of the thunder, all in the room moved to the edge of their seats, eager ears awaiting the start of this year’s opening concert, as faculty member David Veslocki took the stage to begin his first piece. A classical selection, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Praeludium and Presto.
High School Guitar Day is a free annual event that brings together teens from numerous schools in the NYC metro area. The fourth annual Guitar Day offered performances and workshops spanning a breadth of areas from Funk (Chris Bergson) to Flamenco (Dennis Koster) to Songwriting (Ann Klein and Allison Cornell), Classical (Benjamin Verdery) and, a popular new addition with Sound Recording (David Veslocki) in the school’s state of the art music technology lab. At a time when the opportunity to explore the world and your own sense of identity is so crucial, participants are called together to celebrate their passion for the guitar with like-minded individuals, and are exposed to genres perhaps lesser known and celebrated by the average 16 year old.
If you have ever had the joy of witnessing 100 guitarists rock out to Proud Mary at the same time, only then might you have an idea of the awesome spirit that is High School Guitar Day. In the words of a student at the closing concert, you may just “want to play guitar forever, and never stop.”
[92nd Street Y Guitar Institute: High School Guitar Days]
The 92nd Street Y Guitar Institute is generously supported by the Leir Charitable Foundations in memory of Henry J. and Erna D. Leir; The D’Addario Music Foundation; and The Augustine Foundation.
On Wednesday, Cafe 92YTribeca‘s chef Russell Moss spent a few moments with them to talk about what they do at the Cafe and the proper way to use a knife, a skill he teaches during his Knife Skills class at 92YTribeca:
We do a lot of vegetarian cooking, and there are tons of vegetables in every style of cooking. Take something like beef stew, which has carrots, onions, celery, sometimes leeks. People who come to our classes say they don’t have time to cut all the vegetables, so they just do some of them. That won’t work—not for beef stew, not for braising, not for soups.
If you’re looking for a career in the kitchen, say at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barn for instance, or just want to become adept with your knives at home, Knife Skills classes at 92YTribeca are coming up on April 27 and May 4. Sign up here.
On March 11, the 92nd Street Y hosted a special evening celebrating the life and music of internationally acclaimed Yemenite-Israeli singer Ofra Haza.
A fan who drove in from Boston to attend the event wrote about his experience in detail and posted it to an Ofra Fan Group on Yahoo. The full review is inspiring in it’s breadth. Below is a sample, beginning with the fan’s arrival at 92Y:
I waited outside and watched the pulse of New York go in and out. I had to admit the wait was made more pleasant by the throng of young dancers exiting the building. I saw an elderly Muslim man in full garb enter the building. I wondered if the Muslim gentleman was going to the tribute concert. I also admit I wondered if I made a mistake coming down by myself, thinking that the show might be rather lame and my effort would have been a waste.
Finally they opened the doors to the concert hall for the pre-concert talk. Apparently, Professor Ephraim Isaac was not an elderly Muslim man, but an elderly Yemenite Jewish Scholar. His talk focused less on Ofra but rather the role of Yemenite Jewry in preserving Jewish identity. He ended his speech by talking about the role Yemenite Jews may play in being a bridge between Jews and the Muslim world, as they are in fact Arab Jews. I laughed when he said that whenever he entered a cab, with a Muslim driver, they would say, “salaam alachem”. He would respond, “no, no, no, I am Jewish”. They would say, “Brother, you don’t have to hide who you are here”. His reply, “no I am a Yemenite Jew” and the response, “that is o.k. you are still a brother”. A wonderful story indeed.
There were only about 50 people for the talk in a hall that held about 1000 people. My fears that the show would be lame were somewhat heightened. Slowly people started to trickle in. The closer it got to show time, the slow trickle turned into hordes of people entering. The hall was filling up and appeared to be a near sell-out. Imagine my surprise when sitting down right in front of me, was Dr, Ruth.
You can read the full review on our Facebook page where we have reprinted it with his permission.
At the 6 minute mark, a beautiful poem about her daughter. It reads in part: “I love you from here to Baghdad. And I love you more than all words. And I love you higher than the smoke in the city. And I love you louder than the sound of explosions.”
As you may know, April is National Poetry Month. On Apr 8 at the 92Y Poetry Center, Dunya Mikhail will read with Louise Glück, former U.S. Poet Laureate. And on Apr 26, poet Terrance Hayes and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey will read.
Both of these events are just $10 for those aged 35 and under (with ID); see all discounted events for ages 35 and under here.
92Y Video: Food Talks: Doing What You Love With Dan Barber and Dorothy Hamilton
Attention aspiring chefs. In the video above, French Culinary Institute founder and CEO Dorothy Hamilton asked James Beard Award winner Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns what he looks for when he hires chefs. “When someone comes for a job to be a cook at Stone Barns,” she inquired, “what its it that you are looking for?”
Barber wants to know what you are reading. He wants people who come with a passion for agriculture or experience with farming. “I tend to like cooks who have a physical background, so that often is in farming.” These are the chefs he covets, and in his experience make the best cooks. “They bring a kind of passion and devotion,” he explained, “that ends up making food taste better I think, in the end.” These are the individuals, with “stamina and drive,” Barber candidly noted, who can withstand the intensity of a line.
“Any cook can thrive on a line. It’s the cooks that adapt well to when things go wrong. And the cooks that adapt well to getting five hours of sleep a night. These are the cooks you want on your line.”
If the dedication and drive required to work at Stone Barn isn’t clear, Barber drove home the point in response to a question about misconceptions newly minted chefs have about working at Stone Barn, especially as it is situated on a farm: “They have this idea that 50% of their time is going to be spent in the fields, picking vegetables.” That’s not actually how you will be spending your time. “They’re in the kitchen by 9:30 in the morning, and they generally leave about 1 in the morning. And that’s a solid five day a week schedule.”
So what’s that you were saying about wanting to become a chef?
Upcoming Food Talks include Food Network “Unwrapped” with Marc Summers and Robert Irvine on Apr 25; Food on the Tube: How TV Shapes the Way We Think About Food with Padma Lakshmi, Amanda Hesser, Kathleen Collins and Charlie Trotter on Jun 1; and Eat, Drink and Think Like...The Ancient Greeks on Jun 6.
Nothing Lasts Forever But Photographs Last A Long Time
Director Tom Schiller, pictured at left, and star Zach Galligan answer audience questions following a rare screening of Nothing Lasts Forever at 92YTribeca on Sat, Mar 20 as part of the Not Coming to a Theater Near You series.
Next up in the series is There’s Always Tomorrow on Apr 17, introduced by Richard Brody, movie listings editor at The New Yorker.
James Wood On David Foster Wallace: “Prudent, Insightful, Excellent”
Passions ran deep at the 92Y Poetry Center Monday night when New Yorker book critic James Wood (who has many admirers) took the stage to “re-think” the work of the late David Foster Wallace (who has quite the cult following).
...Wood (probably correctly) chided Wallace for an unwillingness to just leave it alone, to let the ambiguity remain. Wallace “tends to overplay his hand,” which tendency leads him to unveil narrative corkers in his stories’ finales that might better have gone merely suggested: “Beckett does not give you the key; Wallace spoils it by giving you the key.”
During the Q&A, there was an excellent question by an older gentleman that went something like, “Can you address the idea of meta-fiction, and meta-meta-fiction, and ... how many metas one can tolerate without losing one’s mind?” Wood clearly found this very resonant, stating that one of Wallace’s key themes is indeed precisely that “one can’t escape all of those ‘metas,’ and one also can’t, unfortunately, lose one’s mind.” That is, we lose ourselves in the recursive mental spirals, in which consciousness tends to keep us mired.
The sold out event was titled “First Reads” – a new Poetry Center program where a critic is invited to read a book they never read before, then return to the Poetry Center and discuss it. We hope to hold another soon and will announce it here on the blog when it’s scheduled.
In the meantime, some upcoming Readings at 92Y Poetry Center include Ian McEwan on Apr 6, Louise Glück and Dunya Mikhail on Apr 8, Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey on Apr 26 and Opening Night of the PEN World Voices Festival on Apr 28.
All of the above readings are just $10 for those aged 35 and under; see all discounted events for ages 35 and under here.
The book includes a new introduction from the authors reflecting on how things have changed in the past 10 years; an excerpt is below:
Amid all of these changes, of course, some things remain the same: Barbie survived (she is now over fifty), the wage gap remains huge, and we still don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment. Many feminist bookstores and publications died, although some were reborn. Shame around abortion stayed the same and nineties-style anti-abortion terrorism reemerged. And there are still many points we raise in Manifesta that must be underscored a decade later; for instance, why it’s still critical to focus on gender. We know that what happens to women today (and is often overlooked because it affects “only” women) will alter the world tomorrow.
Hear more from the authors on Apr 21 when they join a panel with writers and activists Veronica Chambers and Debbie Stoller at 92YTribeca to discuss their take on the current shift from Girl Power to “Opting In” to parenthood.
Related: See Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music author Marisa Meltzer in this debut 92Y Show & Tell video, where she showed us some of her 90’s women-centered art and music, and a couple of her favorite zines from that time.
What You Missed: Kevin Geeks Out About Sharks At 92YTribeca
The Vault of Horror blog attended Kevin Geeks Out About...Sharks! this past Friday at 92YTribeca and has an extensive report:
The event was timed at precisely 124 minutes--the exact running time of the original Jaws. How’s that for dedication? And although that might seem like a long time for a clip show, Kevin and company filled every moment with aquatic predatory madness to such a degree that not one person would have dared question the decision. For instance, we learned all about one of the ultimate “what-ifs” of movie history--a John Hughes-scripted (!!) 1980s parody of Jaws that never came to be. We got to see sharks fighting Batman (shark-repellent bat-spray, anyone?), giant alligators, giant apes, and yes, zombies (the infamous underwater fight scene actually got the loudest cheer from the crowd, much to this blogger’s delight.)
And like past Kevin Geeks Out events, there were many cupcakes. Read the full post here.
Jessica Delfino, Michael Musto, Pat Kiernan And More, Together At Last!
Nelson Reilly and shag carpeting are gone forever but that can’t stop 92YTribeca from hosting Comedy Below Canal™ Presents Match Game Live!
We have so many beloved guests in the line-up this Thursday: The eclectic crew includes The Village Voice‘s beloved Michael Musto, (who recently joined Twitter!) NY1’s beloved Pat Kiernan, New York City’s beloved comedian Jessica Delfino, and more.
You really don’t want to miss what very well may be the best Match Game to ever take the stage in New York City. The show is this Thu at 9pm, tickets are available here.
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On March 11, the 92nd Street Y hosted a special evening celebrating the life and music of internationally acclaimed Yemenite-Israeli singer 
At the 6 minute mark, a beautiful poem about her daughter. It reads in part: “I love you from here to Baghdad. And I love you more than all words. And I love you higher than the smoke in the city. And I love you louder than the sound of explosions.”
Die-hard Wallace fans were in attendance, including some literary bloggers: Edward Champion 
