Sunday, August 28, 2011
Urgent: NYC bus and subway service to be restored starting 5PM on Sunday 8/28 in Manhattan, then other boroughs
Note, everybody. This release should have been public!
Labels: Irene, NYC bus operations, NYC subway operations
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
Vacationing in Upstate New York, in the woods where minimum property size is zoned foe farming at 7 acres (some of us are grandfathered at low numbers) has advantages and disadvantages. Television comes in via satellite, and internet is abominable dial-up, but we are close to the Tanglewood Festival, one hour north.
This is the US best known music festival, initiated in the 1930 with the gift of the Tappan family estate of 216 acres in the Berkshires, and the invitation of the Boston Symphony and its conductor Serge Koussevitzky to make a summer home there. The rest is history, site design by Eliel Saarinen, construction of the music center, the long reign of Music Director Seiji Ozava, replaced by Jimmy Levine, who splits the BSO duty with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
The Tanglewood weekend program, from late June through August, typically consists of a Friday 8:30 PM concert in the big building, the Shed, then a 10:30 AM rehearsal of the Saturday 8:30 PM or the Sunday 2:30 PM concert, then the two concerts, in the Shed. Interspersed are off-hours chamber or vocal music concerts at the smaller Ozava Hall, and special weekday events,
The Sunday August 14 all Brahms concert was dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who died October 14, 1990. We attended the 10:30 rehearsal of the Saturday concert, which included Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, a favorite here and also of Bernstein’s. It was in his 1960s Young Peoples Concert series, a beautiful work and a teaching tool, to identify instruments.
The Saturday rehearsals have changed since last year, the tickets are sold in $20 and $30 price ranges and they are for numbered seats. When we commented, the volunteers offered a story of injuries suffered when people aggressively climbed to the more desirable spots. Anyway, the Shed was nearly filled, and another thousand or two listeners with lawn chairs sat in the huge meadow, fairly well shaded by giant trees. Looking at the crowd, one wondered whether there were any doctors left in Boston for the weekend.
The rehearsal, conducted by guest director Christoph von Dohnanyi, famous as the leader of the Cleveland Symphony for 20 years and now ranging world-wide, started with Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, with guest soloist Yo-Yo Ma, whose style is very muscular, and includes directing the violins. After playing through, the conductor went into a detailed replay of the transitions, as well as some of Yo-Yo Ma’s solos. So much time was taken up, and the Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 1 and my patiently awaited Prokofiev ended up being rehearsed in snatches, without a play-through. One begins to wonder whether the great BSO, after Seiji Ozawa’s departure led by James Levine, who splits his time between Boston and New York’s Met Opera, might be best served by a full time musical director. The beloved Jimmy is not all that well physically, and is rushing through his days all too fast.
Anyway, Tanglewood was good, an offset to the nervous political scene. I’m now talking local, not national. Upstate is largely Republican country, and the local politics of this small and relatively poor farming community involve a contest between a town supervisor and the largely oldtime board, mostly locally born, a rich newcomer who wants to build a racing track and spreads his largesse around, and the more recent NYC retirees, who want peace and quiet maintained, and strive for equitable taxes. Actually, all news is local as oldtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once declared, and it applies here. Family farming is marginal, and there is lack of exportable product, and new jobs are few. Technology companies cannot move in because of lack of broadband facilities, and the available jobs are in the minimum wage category. Andrew Cuomo to note.
Music lovers who vacation along the route of Taconic Parkway, have another pleasure for them, if they cross the picturesque Catskill Mountains, driving to Cooperstown, in Otsego County, where the Glimmerglass Festival holds its summer session. Funded in 1975 and in 1987 relocated on an estate donated by the Goodyear family, this year it has a four-opera season, with Bizet’s Carmen, Cherubini’s Medea, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, and a new double bill, consisting of Later The Same Evening, composed by John Musto, libretto by John Campbell, and A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, composed by Jeanine Tesori, with libretto by Tony Kushner.
The new operas, heavy on words and requiring full attention to the text board above the stage, are an attention problem. A Blizzard is more easily followed, featuring a quarrel between playwright Eugene O’Neill and his wife, with the writer nearly dying. Interspersed with little playful songlets, the arias are easy to follow and hold your interest.
Later The Same Evening, based on five unhappy lives based on five paintings by Edward Hopper, featuring his usual lonely people sitting in empty coffee shops, has convoluted texts about the sad fortunes declaimed in dull dirges. Someone joked that Later was shown first, to avoid the O’Neill fans walking out. Grand opera has no future if it depends on modern composers and dull non-theatrical librettos for its continued existence. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Timescannot say this, but this paper can. Good luck!
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
Vacationing in Upstate New York, in the woods where minimum property size is zoned foe farming at 7 acres (some of us are grandfathered at low numbers) has advantages and disadvantages. Television comes in via satellite, and internet is abominable dial-up, but we are close to the Tanglewood Festival, one hour north.
This is the US best known music festival, initiated in the 1930 with the gift of the Tappan family estate of 216 acres in the Berkshires, and the invitation of the Boston Symphony and its conductor Serge Koussevitzky to make a summer home there. The rest is history, site design by Eliel Saarinen, construction of the music center, the long reign of Music Director Seiji Ozava, replaced by Jimmy Levine, who splits the BSO duty with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
The Tanglewood weekend program, from late June through August, typically consists of a Friday 8:30 PM concert in the big building, the Shed, then a 10:30 AM rehearsal of the Saturday 8:30 PM or the Sunday 2:30 PM concert, then the two concerts, in the Shed. Interspersed are off-hours chamber or vocal music concerts at the smaller Ozava Hall, and special weekday events,
The Sunday August 14 all Brahms concert was dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who died October 14, 1990. We attended the 10:30 rehearsal of the Saturday concert, which included Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, a favorite here and also of Bernstein’s. It was in his 1960s Young Peoples Concert series, a beautiful work and a teaching tool, to identify instruments.
The Saturday rehearsals have changed since last year, the tickets are sold in $20 and $30 price ranges and they are for numbered seats. When we commented, the volunteers offered a story of injuries suffered when people aggressively climbed to the more desirable spots. Anyway, the Shed was nearly filled, and another thousand or two listeners with lawn chairs sat in the huge meadow, fairly well shaded by giant trees. Looking at the crowd, one wondered whether there were any doctors left in Boston for the weekend.
The rehearsal, conducted by guest director Christoph von Dohnanyi, famous as the leader of the Cleveland Symphony for 20 years and now ranging world-wide, started with Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, with guest soloist Yo-Yo Ma, whose style is very muscular, and includes directing the violins. After playing through, the conductor went into a detailed replay of the transitions, as well as some of Yo-Yo Ma’s solos. So much time was taken up, and the Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 1 and my patiently awaited Prokofiev ended up being rehearsed in snatches, without a play-through. One begins to wonder whether the great BSO, after Seiji Ozawa’s departure led by James Levine, who splits his time between Boston and New York’s Met Opera, might be best served by a full time musical director. The beloved Jimmy is not all that well physically, and is rushing through his days all too fast.
Anyway, Tanglewood was good, an offset to the nervous political scene. I’m now talking local, not national. Upstate is largely Republican country, and the local politics of this small and relatively poor farming community involve a contest between a town supervisor and the largely oldtime board, mostly locally born, a rich newcomer who wants to build a racing track and spreads his largesse around, and the more recent NYC retirees, who want peace and quiet maintained, and strive for equitable taxes. Actually, all news is local as oldtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once declared, and it applies here. Family farming is marginal, and there is lack of exportable product, and new jobs are few. Technology companies cannot move in because of lack of broadband facilities, and the available jobs are in the minimum wage category. Andrew Cuomo to note.
Music lovers who vacation along the route of Taconic Parkway, have another pleasure for them, if they cross the picturesque Catskill Mountains, driving to Cooperstown, in Otsego County, where the Glimmerglass Festival holds its summer session. Funded in 1975 and in 1987 relocated on an estate donated by the Goodyear family, this year it has a four-opera season, with Bizet’s Carmen, Cherubini’s Medea, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, and a new double bill, consisting of Later The Same Evening, composed by John Musto, libretto by John Campbell, and A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, composed by Jeanine Tesori, with libretto by Tony Kushner.
The new operas, heavy on words and requiring full attention to the text board above the stage, are an attention problem. A Blizzard is more easily followed, featuring a quarrel between playwright Eugene O’Neill and his wife, with the writer nearly dying. Interspersed with little playful songlets, the arias are easy to follow and hold your interest.
Later The Same Evening, based on five unhappy lives based on five paintings by Edward Hopper, featuring his usual lonely people sitting in empty coffee shops, has convoluted texts about the sad fortunes declaimed in dull dirges. Someone joked that Later was shown first, to avoid the O’Neill fans walking out. Grand opera has no future if it depends on modern composers and dull non-theatrical librettos for its continued existence. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Timescannot say this, but this paper can. Good luck!
Labels: glimmerglass, tanglewood
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Wake up President Barak Obama, the clowns are coming in...
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Wake up President Barak Obama, the clowns are coming in...
To a New Yorker the Iowa straw poll looks like a marionette show, with the players mouthing sound bites as they affirm their mantra imposed by another stagey figure of no political office stature, Grower Norquist of the Americans For Tax Reform (“no new taxes.”)
The result show it, of the 17,000 votes cast (Iowa has a population of 3 million souls), voters persuaded by free trips, dinners and millions spent in advertisements, winner is blowhard Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R, MN) with 4,823 (“let’s make Obama a one-term president”), followed by the luddite Rep .Ron Paul (R, TX) with 4,671 (“phony worthless paper money”), former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (“Bachmann lies”) with 2,293, then former PA Rep. Rick Santorum – 1,456, write-in candidate Texas governor Rick Perry 718, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney 567, Newt Gingrich 386, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman 69 and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R. MI) 35, with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin flitting around (more sound bites) but earning no known write-in votes.
Just cast your eyes at the names and numbers to share my sense of despair (Pawlenty wisely resigned). Are these the people America want to lead us in the crazy world of $900 billion annual trade deficit, 10 percent of growing unemployment, (constantly increasing as they try to balance budgets by firing civil service employees and teachers), and upping corporate pay with tax and deduction benefits (the more to enable the tycoons to kill US jobs by investing abroad) and putting the balancing burden of cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits? And Afghanistan $1 T war?
Do the Iowa heroes have a clue of how to recover from a largely Republican-caused deficit? Well, being a hypocrite helps. Bachmann and gov. Perry have used Obama money, Perry to the tune of $6 billion that enabled him to balance a deficit, only to condemn the source. Being single tune anti-tax “balance the budget” ideologues, the common element in tea party membership also helps.
Re deficit, Conservatives, e.g. Jim Cramer of “The Street,” explain the American tycoons, who invest their high income tax and expense reimbursements abroad because the US government system has too many restrictions for investing at home. This is partially true, and a high standard of living is the main one. I remember hearing Robert Reich, then secretary of Labor, explain in a 1990s industry conference, that the US will never catch up in labor costs with the newly industrializing third world countries. He did not expect us to compete in the mass product industry, and opined that in transportation we could become the world’s special function automotive producer, e. g. the ten to fifteen special vehicles used only in airports. There was no question then that we would remain supreme in technology, now an area where we are challenged by the Asians. As to labor unions being a block, my upstate NYS conservative pizza shop owner friend tells me that a neighbor, a restaurant equipment maker, had moved his manufacturing to Pakistan. His last complaint had been the requirement, by law, to employ two carpenters, hired via union hall, for a few days, at the cost of $1,400 a day for the two, covering straight pay and deductions, a major one being unemployment insurance, to provide pay for the winter months when the carpenters are jobless. In terms of the US, the objections to unions are not quite valid, given that private industry union membership has shrunk from 35 percent area to under 10 percent, while the unionized government employee count has grown, from 10 to 35 plus percent, all within our generation. Non funded government union social benefits, plus widely reported abuses in using artificial overtime earnings to boost retirement benefits have been the sources in causing the state and legal government budget indebtedness reaching towards the trillions of dollars areas.
The Obama administration saved the American car industry, and its millions of direct and indirect jobs, against the Conservatives’ expressed principles and the unions cooperated. A two-tier wage system keeps the automobile prices competitive. In the realm of state and local government jobs and wages, our NYS governor Andrew Cuomo worked a set of funding compromises with the unions covering a total of over 100,000 employees, with full cooperation of labor leaders, who are in the process of persuading the members to accept a lesser take home pay rather than no pay. The tycoons who seek excuses to invest abroad and kill more jobs in the US are traitors breaching our social contract.
You tea party suckers beware, greed is at work.
This much for the Democratic and Obama no-leadership image perpetuated by the
opposition. There is also the Obama dollars’ use in developing new energy resources, the inevitable nuclear industry, in case sun and wind power development lags, and technology. As I recollect, President Obama intended to set up directions for his government, and let the precise details be worked out by Congress. This worked for the health plan, but not well. Now it is absolutely essential that the President take a stronger hand, else we will end up with some tea party guided marionettes leading the world. And the jobless uneducated minority young can start riots that will put Watts, Crown Heights and Detroit to shame.
Reply Reply to all Forward
Wake up President Barak Obama, the clowns are coming in...
To a New Yorker the Iowa straw poll looks like a marionette show, with the players mouthing sound bites as they affirm their mantra imposed by another stagey figure of no political office stature, Grower Norquist of the Americans For Tax Reform (“no new taxes.”)
The result show it, of the 17,000 votes cast (Iowa has a population of 3 million souls), voters persuaded by free trips, dinners and millions spent in advertisements, winner is blowhard Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R, MN) with 4,823 (“let’s make Obama a one-term president”), followed by the luddite Rep .Ron Paul (R, TX) with 4,671 (“phony worthless paper money”), former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (“Bachmann lies”) with 2,293, then former PA Rep. Rick Santorum – 1,456, write-in candidate Texas governor Rick Perry 718, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney 567, Newt Gingrich 386, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman 69 and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R. MI) 35, with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin flitting around (more sound bites) but earning no known write-in votes.
Just cast your eyes at the names and numbers to share my sense of despair (Pawlenty wisely resigned). Are these the people America want to lead us in the crazy world of $900 billion annual trade deficit, 10 percent of growing unemployment, (constantly increasing as they try to balance budgets by firing civil service employees and teachers), and upping corporate pay with tax and deduction benefits (the more to enable the tycoons to kill US jobs by investing abroad) and putting the balancing burden of cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits? And Afghanistan $1 T war?
Do the Iowa heroes have a clue of how to recover from a largely Republican-caused deficit? Well, being a hypocrite helps. Bachmann and gov. Perry have used Obama money, Perry to the tune of $6 billion that enabled him to balance a deficit, only to condemn the source. Being single tune anti-tax “balance the budget” ideologues, the common element in tea party membership also helps.
Re deficit, Conservatives, e.g. Jim Cramer of “The Street,” explain the American tycoons, who invest their high income tax and expense reimbursements abroad because the US government system has too many restrictions for investing at home. This is partially true, and a high standard of living is the main one. I remember hearing Robert Reich, then secretary of Labor, explain in a 1990s industry conference, that the US will never catch up in labor costs with the newly industrializing third world countries. He did not expect us to compete in the mass product industry, and opined that in transportation we could become the world’s special function automotive producer, e. g. the ten to fifteen special vehicles used only in airports. There was no question then that we would remain supreme in technology, now an area where we are challenged by the Asians. As to labor unions being a block, my upstate NYS conservative pizza shop owner friend tells me that a neighbor, a restaurant equipment maker, had moved his manufacturing to Pakistan. His last complaint had been the requirement, by law, to employ two carpenters, hired via union hall, for a few days, at the cost of $1,400 a day for the two, covering straight pay and deductions, a major one being unemployment insurance, to provide pay for the winter months when the carpenters are jobless. In terms of the US, the objections to unions are not quite valid, given that private industry union membership has shrunk from 35 percent area to under 10 percent, while the unionized government employee count has grown, from 10 to 35 plus percent, all within our generation. Non funded government union social benefits, plus widely reported abuses in using artificial overtime earnings to boost retirement benefits have been the sources in causing the state and legal government budget indebtedness reaching towards the trillions of dollars areas.
The Obama administration saved the American car industry, and its millions of direct and indirect jobs, against the Conservatives’ expressed principles and the unions cooperated. A two-tier wage system keeps the automobile prices competitive. In the realm of state and local government jobs and wages, our NYS governor Andrew Cuomo worked a set of funding compromises with the unions covering a total of over 100,000 employees, with full cooperation of labor leaders, who are in the process of persuading the members to accept a lesser take home pay rather than no pay. The tycoons who seek excuses to invest abroad and kill more jobs in the US are traitors breaching our social contract.
You tea party suckers beware, greed is at work.
This much for the Democratic and Obama no-leadership image perpetuated by the
opposition. There is also the Obama dollars’ use in developing new energy resources, the inevitable nuclear industry, in case sun and wind power development lags, and technology. As I recollect, President Obama intended to set up directions for his government, and let the precise details be worked out by Congress. This worked for the health plan, but not well. Now it is absolutely essential that the President take a stronger hand, else we will end up with some tea party guided marionettes leading the world. And the jobless uneducated minority young can start riots that will put Watts, Crown Heights and Detroit to shame.
Reply Reply to all Forward
Labels: the clowns are coming in, wake up Obama
