Archive for the ‘new york’ Category

The Evocative Power of Sound at DOC NYC

Posted on: November 1st, 2010 by admin No Comments

I want to make sure you know about something that’s happening this Sunday, November 7, because you may want to be there. And I’m hoping it sells out. So this means I strongly recommend you buy your tickets now.

What it is
I’m curating and presenting a listening experience at the new DOC NYC – New York’s Documentary Festival, which makes its inaugural launch this week in Manhattan. (Details here.) The festival is kind of a big deal. Werner Herzog will be there. Errol Morris will be there. It’s outstanding that the organizers have carved out space for radio documentaries.

Why I think it could sell out
WNYC Radio, which is sponsoring the event I’m hosting, will be blanketing the airwaves with announcements. We know that public radio listeners attend this kind of thing in droves.

Late breaking extra special cool thing
The centerpiece of this event is Joe Richman’s documentary Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair, which on Saturday took the silver prize at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.

The important thing is this
Here’s the link to buy tickets. I hope it sells out, and I hope to see you there, too.

Best to you,
Dean

Tomorrow, at Jalopy!

Posted on: October 18th, 2010 by admin No Comments

Show starts at nine. We go on after The Hot Sardines.

Some links for you:

  1. Jalopy
  2. Ragdoll Cannon

Do come, won’t you?

The Ragtime Band Is Back in Business

Posted on: October 12th, 2010 by admin No Comments

We have a new name. Now we go by Ragdoll Cannon, and here is a little web page to tell you a little more about us. We’re playing next week – Tuesday, October 19 – at the most fabulous Jalopy in Red Hook. Show starts at 9, and we go on after The Hot Sardines. Do come!

Old Souls

Posted on: October 6th, 2010 by admin No Comments

I went to the Strand in search of Alec Wilder’s classic text American Popular Song. It wasn’t there. This has happened my last several trips to the store, which boasts eight miles of books. Eight miles of books, and still their collection is missing essential titles? It made me wonder if they were culling the herd in response to cataclysm within the literary ecosystem.

In its place I found I book I didn’t know I wanted. But now that I have bought it, I cherish it much more than the source of my original hunt. It’s Alec Wilder & His Friends, from 1974, and it’s a collection of New Yorker profiles by Whitney Balliett, who died three years ago.

These are portraits of—this is a term that has been applied to me more than once—old souls who “hold a common vision of life that has lately fallen low. They are highly moral people who have guarded their souls, who have, no matter how bad the going, refused to compromise. They have gone without jobs when fashion has turned against them, rather than demean themselves in shoddy ones. They have kept their spirits intact despite neglect, near-privation, and even semi-oblivion. These sterling people, in taking the high road, have bent their energies toward the endless polishing of their arts, and pre-eminence, no matter how tardy or circumscribed, has been their reward.”

A few—Tony Bennett, Blossom Dearie, Marian McPartland—were able to hang on long enough to enjoy an Indian summer of their careers. At the other end of the spectrum you have the much less known jazz pianist Marie Marcus. All of the subjects make for companionable reading.

I borrowed Balliett’s style for one section of my book From Square One. He sets up a scene and then lets his subject talk, often for pages at a time. The illusion is that there has been no mediation by an author. Of course just the opposite is true. Balliett has erased his questions and left the answers-as-monologue. The style seems old-fashioned today, and that no doubt has something to do with why I employed it.

Tomorrow, at Soho Rep!

Posted on: October 5th, 2010 by admin 1 Comment

I’ll lead the post-show discussion. The play is called Orange, Hat & Grace by Gregory Moss, directed by Sarah Benson, and it’s about FERAL PEOPLE in a smart and creepy, Greil-Marcus-old-weird-America kind of way. Guests are Columbia University earth scientist Jason Smerdon, who studies climate change, and writer Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara. I think it’s going to be good. The theater is at 46 Walker St. in Manhattan. Curtain is at 7:30.

New Documentary Festival in New York City

Posted on: October 4th, 2010 by admin No Comments

And it’s big.

Coming the first weekend in November, it’s the DOC NYC festival. Read all about it here.

I was very pleased to be asked to sit on the board of advisers. Festival organizers Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen are insisting that the festival not be restricted only to film/video. And this is of course a terrific thing, since there is so much good work being done in sound alone.

Which brings me to my next point: I’m curating and presenting a public listening event Sunday, November 7 at 1:45pm in NYU’s Kimmel Center. More details about time and place as the date approaches. To whet your appetite, here’s the description:

The Medium Formerly Known as Radio: The Evocative Power of Sound
Media Sponsor: WNYC
Sit in a darkened theater, close your eyes, and see the best pictures of all―because you made them yourself. This public listening event features a sampler of stories told only in sound that have a way of going directly from the ear to the heart. With special guest Joe Richman, who will present his award-winning documentary Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair.

I hope you can make it.

Hopper: Painting the Loneliness on BBC Radio 4

Posted on: May 31st, 2010 by admin No Comments

There are many reasons to love BBC Radio.

I’m not talking about the World Service, which is how most Americans hear the Beeb on public radio over here. That’s boring. I’m talking about the domestic channels intended for listeners in the U.K. and which I hear over the Internet.

Radio 4 is the closest thing to NPR. During drive time, they air news programs akin to Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the rest of the day and night, instead of filling the time with excruciating talk shows, they air weird kinds of stuff that used to be on the radio here but which disappeared long ago.

The quiz shows, such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, are old-fashioned and demented in the best possible way. I find the Shipping Forecast mesmerizing.

On Tuesday, June 1, my first piece for the BBC will air. Called Painting the Loneliness, it’s a half hour program about Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks that I co-produced with Judith Kampfner. Half of it consists of documentary interviews – with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, Whitney curator Barbara Haskell and author Gordon Theisen (who wrote a smart book about the painting). That material is interleaved with dramatic monologues. I imagined what was going through the minds of the figures in the painting. Playwright Michael Dowling wrote the script and acted, along with Jim Frangione and Sara Paul. I directed their performances “on location” at Haven Cafe and Bakery in Lenox, Massachusetts. (My BBC contact noted the “depth of the atmosphere” and noted how different it felt from standard sound effects.)

You can listen to the program when it streams live on Tuesday, 11:30am London time, (click here for live stream) or else on demand for the seven days following.

The Name Game

Posted on: March 18th, 2010 by admin No Comments

Thanks to everyone who came out to Barbès to inaugurate the Band That Is Ever Closer to Getting a Name. Thanks, too, for filling out my little makeshift ballots (although almost no one wrote down any contact information – which means if you are a winner, I won’t know how to find you).

These caught my attention.

  • The League of Nations
  • The Ragged Edge (I don’t even recognize myself anymore, having whined so endlessly about how much I hate puns; I suppose I contain multitudes)

And then, the one that just might be my favorite:

  • Music Joy Group

And now for a little photographic evidence that the performance did in fact take place.

Marking the Occasion

Posted on: February 15th, 2010 by admin No Comments

The Next Best Thing (i.e., this blog) made its debut February 15, 2005 with a post about the Gates, which were all the rage at that particular moment. It seems like a lifetime ago.

To commemorate this moment, the one we’re living right now, I offer to you these lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth, who would have written them for the occasion, had he lived (to the age of 239).

***

FIVE years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.

***

(Click here for the poem in its entirety.)

Quote of the Day

Posted on: December 20th, 2009 by admin No Comments

“Those who unfeelingly push and jostle one another all the rest of the year smile on each other today, tell of the dangers they escaped, exchange addresses, and walk along with new friends. The squares are mountains of snow over which the icy lacework clinging like filigree to the branches of the trees glitters in the morning sun.”

—José Martí, “New York Under the Snow” (1888)