Wednesday Night in the West Village: The Vivino Brothers at 55 Bar

(Video courtesy sgibson818)

(More videos here)

Tuesday Night in the West Village: Tom Rainey Trio with Mary Halvorson and Ingrid Laubrock at the Cornelia Street Café

(Videos courtesy kjreilly)

Tuesday Evening in the West Village: Elaine Brum reading at the PEN World Voices Festival Literary Safari at Westbeth

(Video courtesy PEN America)

Friday Night in the East Village and West Village: NYC Radical Faeries Gather at Tompkins Square Park for Gay Pride Weekend March to Stonewall Inn

Monday Night in the West Village: Morningside Opera presents "¡Figaro! (90210)" at the New School for Drama

Tonight Morningside Opera began its run of ¡Figaro! (90210), an amazing adaptation of the Mozart opera written by the brilliant Vid Guerrerio. Below are some scenes from a concert version from last fall and Zachary Woolfe's rave review from the New York Times:

“¡Figaro! (90210),” Morningside Opera’s blasphemous, brilliant new adaptation of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” owes Peter Sellars an even greater debt than it does Mozart and Da Ponte.

It was Mr. Sellars who in 1988 set “Figaro” in an apartment in the Trump Tower, the better to bring out the work’s continued relevance to an era still struggling with the issues of class and power that bedeviled the 18th century.

“Thank God the feudal system remains firmly in place in the United States of America in the ’90s,” Mr. Sellars said when the production was broadcast on television a few years later. While he used the original Italian text, “¡Figaro! (90210)”. . . goes several steps further. It retains the opera’s music — even its aria-and-recitative format — but freely riffs on Da Ponte’s libretto in English and Spanish, with slang-filled lyrics that move the action to a Beverly Hills mansion today.

In this version, fearlessly written by Vid Guerrerio, Susanna (excuse me, Susana) and Figaro are undocumented Mexican workers employed by the Contis, a real estate magnate and his aging-actress wife. The randy adolescent page Cherubino has become Li’l B-Man, an aspiring rapper pursuing the Contis’ daughter. (“Ma’am, I don’t mean to sound twisty or pervy,” goes one line in his rejiggered “Non so più.” “Damn, I just love when a body’s all curvy.”)
The stakes could not be more current, clear or urgent: Figaro and Susana face deportation if they rock the boat — if Susana refuses Mr. Conti’s advances. That “¡Figaro! (90210),” seen on Saturday evening, remains uproariously funny under the cloud of such serious matters speaks to Mr. Guerrerio’s ingenious text and the smooth, clever production, adroitly directed on a nearly bare stage by Melissa Crespo.
Joined by a six-member orchestra led with verve and precision by Raphael Fusco, the cast energetically inhabited a world both realistically contemporary and timelessly comic, creating characters simultaneously stereotypical and personal. Two sopranos — Donata Cucinotta as Mrs. Conti and Sophia Benedetti as Susana — were particularly fine, but there was no weak link in an ensemble that also included the baritone Robert Balonek as Mr. Conti, the bass-baritone Carlos Monzón as Figaro and the vocally and physically agile tenor Anthony Chatmon II as Li’l B-Man.
If there was something jarring about the final chorus of reconciliation — a celebration of American multiculturalism — coming after the exposure of so much injustice and bad behavior, that was in keeping with the original. Much more than the proto-revolutionary Beaumarchais play on which the opera is based, Mozart and Da Ponte — and, now, “¡Figaro! (90210)” — seek to moderate social critique, to show both good and bad in everyone.

All people are horrible, one character in “¡Figaro! (90210)” points out. “But not all the time, that’s the key.”

Sunday Afternoon in the West Village: Marathon Reading of Frederic Tuten’s "The Adventures of Mao on the Long March" at the Jane Hotel

Although we have to teach on Sunday, we did get to go to the first ninety minutes of today's marathon reading of Frederic Tuten's postmodern fictional masterpiece The Adventures of Mao on the Long March to celebrate its fortieth anniversary and the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions, who published it in 1971.

The marathon was an extraordinary special presentation of The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, and ForYourArt, and the place was jam-packed with audience members listening to over sixty well-known readers, each taking a portion of the novel, which we first were entranced by in 1975 or 1976 when we were in the MFA program at Brooklyn College and working for the Fiction Collective.

The Fiction Collective is how we first came to Frederic Tuten's work, through his contribution to its 1975 anthology, Statements: New Fiction. (We had a story in Statements 2 two years later.) Jonathan Baumbach and Peter Spielberg, our teachers in the MFA fiction program and co-directors of the Collective, told us we had to read The Adventures of Mao on the Long March.

We met Fred Tuten at some of the Fiction Collective publication parties in the mid- to late 1970s and were always in awe of him. Teaching at the School of Visual Arts back then (as we still are now), we heard from several of his creative writing students at City College what a terrific creative writing workshop he ran.

And we learned so much from reading The Adventures of Mao on the Long March about the uses of history, appropriation of texts, humor, documentary, pastiche, irony, and that mixture of serious and playful narrative that makes it such an exhilarating read.

It was a pleasure to hear it read today by such great artists, editors and writers as Deborah Eisenberg, Laurie Anderson, Walter Mosley, Wallace Shawn, Grace Schulman, A.M. Homes, Paul La Farge, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Epler, and others.

Among the later readers would be Linsey Abrams, Dawn Raffel, John Haskell, Philip Lopate, Amy Hempel, Ernesto Quiñonez, Oscar Hijuelos, Lynne Tillman, Richard Howard,

Francine du Plessix Gray, Jerome Charyn, Edmund White, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Brad Gooch, Patricia Marx, Cecily Brown and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Our cellphone takes horrible pics indoors, but we're sure there will be lots of good photos of this event as well as better, more detailed accounts by smarter, cooler people (update: see a professional's work at Philip Turner's post at The Great Gray Bridge) but we're grateful to the folks at The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine and ForYourArt for making today's marathon reading a reality. Most of all we're grateful for Frederic Tuten, who spoke charmingly at the start of the reading, talking about being a 15-year-old in the Bronx who dreamed of the world of Manhattan intellectuals, artists and writers, who began submitting to New Directions even at that age.

We can say for sure that Mao on the Long March and Frederic Tuten's other innovative books were inspiring to an outer-borough kid in his twenties who wanted to be a writer many years ago. Now, at sixty, we were happy to stand on a crowded staircase and squint at the author and his readers and listen to the magic of a book we first loved a long time ago.

Saturday Morning in Greenwich Village: Breakfast in Christopher Park at Sheridan Square

Just after 7 a.m., about seven hours after the New York state legislature made marriage equality reality and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law, we were in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village having breakfast in Christopher Park and looking across to the Stonewall Inn, where the gay rights movement began almost exactly 42 years ago, when we were 18 years old.

All the TV stations seemed to carry the coverage of the celebrations last night at the Stonewall, and the WCBS/2 and WNBC/Newscenter 4 vans were still outside the bar this morning.

We got our iced tea and oatmeal at the nearby Starbucks and got to the little triangular Christopher Park -- which opened way back in 1837 -- just as workers were opening the gates.

Sitting by the famous statues of the two same-sex couples, if we squinted and made things a little blurry, we could now imagine them as married couples -- or not.

Back in that summer of 1969, we hung out in the Village, though mostly in Washington Square Park (even then couldn't take a decent photo)

and we really couldn't have imagined this day. After three gloomy rainy days, the sun was out in Greenwich Village this morning.

We're grateful to Governor Cuomo, New York's state legislators, and all the groups and individuals who made this happen.

Friday Night in the West Village: Sunset on the Hudson with Guitar Man David Ippolito at Pier 45 and "Annie" at RiverFlicks for Kids at Pier 46

We were looking to chill on our last free Friday night of the summer - next week we'll again be teaching a class on the Brooklyn College campus on Friday evenings (and we have class on Labor Day weekend, too). Something relaxing and low-key. David Ippolito, that guitar man from Central Park, was having his last Friday night Sunset on the Hudson one-man concert, and he was the perfect performer tonight.

We got to Pier 45 at the foot of Christopher Street after 7 p.m. and he'd already drawn a substantial crowd on the grass. It soon became clear that a lot of these people were big David Ippolito fans, and regulars here, and there was a real family feeling to the evening. It felt like being at a nice party where you don't really know anyone but are so enchanted by the people that you hope they invite you back to the next one.

David, of course, is the chief attraction. He became a New York phenomenon and legend years ago when a New York Times editor was passing by David's usual one-man Saturday guitar performances - he gradually gathered quite a following over the years - and wrote about how good he was. David is a fine guitarist who plays his own surprisingly skillful and winning songs along with standards. He was doing "Sweet Caroline" as we approached.

We listened to him sing "Country Roads" and thought of a 1974 John Denver concert at Nassau Coliseum; at "Lola," we flashed on a very late night drive up along the beach on Collins Avenue/A1A from North Miami Beach to Hollywood; "Big Bad Leroy Brown" made us recall driving our 1973 Mercury Comet over the bridge to Staten Island for graduate classes in literature months after the singer's death.

As we said, his own songs can be funny - "Facebook Is a Stupid Idiot" - or romantic or thoughtful political or social commentary ("Tom Cruise Scares Me"). David seems like a nice guy who's been around the block lots of times, and his appeal is both generational (baby boomers and older Gen Xers) and pretty much universal.

Of course the sweet black and Hispanic gay teens who've been on this pier forever were in their own beautiful world.

Anyway, David did his usual tribute to the sunset. He's really good at chatting between songs; of course, he's had years and years of experience, but you can't fake that kind of genuinely nice personality.

And it was a gorgeous night; a gibbous moon came out above the downtown skyscrapers and across from us was the now-crowded and impressive skyline of Jersey City and the smaller one of Hoboken to our right.

David's set, a mixture of his own stuff and classic songs from artists from the 60s, 70s and 80s, mellow material of people like Donovan, Christopher Cross and Cat Stevens, was nostalgic for us. He also introduced his friend Mark Aaron James, who did one song of his own. The show ended after 9 p.m. and we went a little bit north to Pier 46, where, on our way to see the Guitar Man, we noticed Annie was playing as part of RiverFlicks for Kids.

We could hear the movie for some time. Weirdly, we got there at the best scene of a film we only mildly like:

Sandy, Annie, Daddy Warbucks, Daddy's beautiful secretary Grace Farrell, and Punjab, Daddy's bodyguard, take themselves off to see a movie at Radio City Music Hall. This is the era of F.D.R., the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act, orphan asylums and the Music Hall. Daddy, as is his way, does things right. He buys out the house for one performance.

There, in lonely splendor in the middle of that vast gold auditorium, Sandy, Annie, Daddy and Grace sit in a row, with Punjab behind them, beholding the Music Hall's wonders. First there is the elaborate stage show, including the Rockettes, followed by the feature attraction, Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in "Camille," projected, for some reason, in the wide-screen ratio of today.

After being held spellbound by the stage show, Annie and Sandy fall asleep as soon as the movie begins. Daddy Warbucks generously hides his boredom and worries about Grace, who weeps happy bucketsfull as Mr. Taylor's Armand is renounced by the great Garbo's Marguerite.

"No one has ever loved you as I love you," says Armand with all of the conviction of a Nebraska shoe salesman. "That may be," says Miss Garbo, sublime even when acting by herself, "but what can I do about it?" It's a marvelous, moving and very funny moment that suddenly defines this "Annie."

We remember the night in the mid-1970s around 11 p.m. after we'd just come back from a weeknight date and were sitting in our kitchen drinking tea when our parents came in from an angels' (financial backers) audition of Annie, where the would-be Broadway musicals' creators ran through the show with music for prospective financial backers, which included Mom and Dad and their friend and fellow Catskills hotel owner George Gilbert and his boyfriend.

They told us how stupid and banal Annie seemed to them, and how they knew it would never work on Broadway. "There's only one good song," Dad said. "Something about the sun coming out tomorrow."

We had a nice sundown and evening at Piers 45 and 46 tonight.

Tuesday Evening in the West Village: Red Hen Press presents Brendan Constantine, Jamey Hecht, Amy Lemmon & Lyn Lifshin at the Cornelia Street Café

We went to a great poetry reading tonight at the Cornelia Street Café, our first time there. They have over 700 readings a year, twice an evening, and we're not sure how we ever missed it all these years. We were grateful for the early start at 6 p.m. and didn't mind the $7 admission, which included a free drink (Diet Coke with a twist in our case).

We sat at a back table near Greg Sanders, a great writer whose story collection Motel Girl was published by the evening's sponsor, Red Hen Press, which also brought out our own The Silicon Valley Diet nine years ago. (Greg will be reading with Ernest Hilbert, Elise Paschen, Timothy Green for Red Hen Press at KGB on Friday.)

Stephanie from Red Hen was nearby with the books from the four authors who were reading, but Red Hen Press's Kate Gale, who we've always thought of as the doyenne of the Los Angeles poetry and small press scene, was late. We did get to see Kate, whom we last saw last year when we sat with her and her co-publisher and husband, Mark E. Cull, who has designed some great covers for the press, including ours.
Red Hen Press


In Kate's absence, Angelo Verga, who is the curator of all things literary at Cornelia St. Café, emceed and gave nice introductions to the four poets. He's got a beautiful venue downstairs, with antique-looking mirrors on the walls, dark paneling and warm bare lightbulbs of green, yellow and red. We'll be back after having such a good experience tonight.

First up for the evening was Jamey Hecht, who read from his fascinating poetic take on JFK in Dallas and America in crisis,Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film.

In Midnight Blue, Jamey, born sometime in 1968 between the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, uses Abraham Zapruder's most famous home movie as a meditation on American culture. Jamey is a dynamic reader; at some points he was holding the book over his head with one hand as he read from one of the numbered frames of the Zapruder film. Here's Jamey reading "Z-150," one of the poems we heard tonight:

We especially liked the poem for frame Z-192:

Imagine me riding skeletal down Main Street on a bicycle.
I get death, you get the shock of your lives, your daughters
heroin addicts and your sons marines on fire in mud, guilty.
I am pedaling through perfect silence in the capital

of Dixie. Spit on the street when you mention me.
This Site Possesses National Significance
In Commemorating The History Of The United States
of America. 1993. National Park Service. United States

Department of the Interior. You rape my brain,
I haunt you. All my unfinished work impossible,
the very thought of me ridiculous, become an airport,
fried chicken, documentaries. Salute your Nazis.

Operation Paperclip. Go look it up. And while you die,
I and my midnight blue and silver bicycle go by.

The second reader was Amy Lemmon, who read from her just-published book, Saint Nobody. Amy's poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Marginalia, and other magazines, and iIn 2006 she was awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Prize by Red Hen Press. In the fall, look for ABBA: The Poems, a chapbook Amy wrote in collaboration with our friend Denise Duhamel; it will be published by Coconut Books.

Amy, who this week has been guest-blogging at the Best American Poetry blog, is an accomplished and the snaps she got from audience members were well-deserved. Before she read, she spoke interestingly as the mom of Down syndrome child on a campaign we're interested in, to eliminate the use of the derogatory R-word. As the New York Times noted in yesterday's report by our friend Stuart Elliott, "Research found the derogatory expression 'is most extreme among older teenagers in high school and early college,'" so it's important to educate young people.

Amy read some wonderful poems from Saint Nobody that contained echoes of Blake and made us nostalgic. You can listen to Amy's poetry on the Bloomington radio station WFIU here. This is one of our favorite (somewhat older) Amy Lemmon poems, one that she didn't read tonight, "After Di Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet":

First, you notice the torso, archaic but not Apollo’s
by a long shot. It has breasts, and callipygian hips,
but isn’t exactly Venus, either. The head’s fallen off
and the arms, blunt stumps, point mute questions.
The legs halt just below the buttocks. A bunch
of bananas blooms before the crotch, connected
by a dark strip I want to say is shadow, but. . .
Tarantula? Bloodstain? I can’t see the front
lower torso, or privates of any sort, and look
again at the bananas. The black banana-stem? Naw.
Too obvious. I resist waxing Freudian since it’s 1917
and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” is yet to become
every immigrant grocer’s nightmare.

Stage right, a green coliseum arches. In the distance,
a train rushes past, all a-steam. Factory smokestack.
Ship’s mast. Not a single gun. Not even a fire. It’s 1917
and war ravages Europe, blotted to a green sludge.
Sun? Moon? No light-source to be seen. Nothing but bananas,
bananas, we certainly have bananas, and this torso—
twisted relic—truncated and the brightest thing around.

If you're not familiar with Amy's poetry, you must change your life.

After Amy, the next poet was Brendan Constantine, who lives in L.A. and has been reading about town in a visit this week.

Although Brendan said that "bringing poetry to New York is like bringing cocaine to South America," we were enthralled by his visionary poems in the form of letters to guns throughout different points in history from various inanimate objects like a Civil War army boot or a fifteenth-century broadsword. They're from his new Red Hen Press book titled, well, Letters to Guns.

We also enjoyed his non-gun poems, like a love poem in the form of a Miranda warning. Here's another poem by Brendan, "Litany":

Why do we say Good Morning like a command
when we know it won't sit still? Why Good Night
when it won't be flattered?

Why do we whisper in the presence of trees or remove
our shoes to step on the skirt of the sea?

And why do we think of the lake as lonely
when the call of the duck does not echo?
Not even in the chambers of the heart.

Why do we treat infinity as old, as something
we may look into, when we know it is a teenaged boy
who looks no one in the eye?

See what fire does to the hands, water
to the brain, blood to the color of anything;
why do we pretend God isn't an animal,
a big black beetle, antlered for the hoisting of stars?

Infinity keeps her in a box of sand, feeds her silence.
She in turn creates worlds that do not endure
so he'll feel older, grown up.

While we're at it, the sun and the moon have never
risen to greet anyone. The forest does not hear
gossip. The ocean prefers to dance alone.

And none are more abandoned than we who wait
in a wilderness for the children we have been
to lead us out.

You can see Brendan reading on this video, one of many good ones from Valley Contemporary Poets:

Finally, the queen of the literary magazines, the great Lyn Lifshin, who's published five skillion poems (she kindly remembered us as someone who published alongside her in lots of literary magazine issues).

Lyn, author of more than 125 books, read some wonderful work, some of it autobiographical, from her Red Hen book Persephone and others. What a treat to see her.

Did we tell you that we've been in love with Lyn's work since we first discovered her magical poems in every other literary magazine we saw in the early 1970s? We're proud to have published alongside Lyn in such litmags as Hanging Loose #37 in 1980, Star-Web Paper #7 in 1979, and Bachy #8 back in 1976.

Lyn didn't disappoint. She never does in print, and in person she's even better. After all, Lyn has given over 700 readings across the U.S. Here she is at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs:

Lyn is also an amazing prose writer. Her brilliant memoir, about growing up and beyond, appeared in the same volume of Contemporary Authors, #210, in 2002, along with a much less interesting autobiographical essay.

Here's a Lyn Lifshin poem we love:

IN MY MOTHER'S LAST HOURS

I write titles for
poems I'll never
write while she's
living in a note
book, shaking as
her eyes roll back
and I feel guilty
I sat on the out
side stoop this noon
while the nurse's aide
changed her. Mama
my mother calls out
only a few weeks since
we took the ambulance
down here thru black
eyed susans and she
wanted muffins,
coffee, wanted to
smell the air on
the lake. Her skin
the nurse says is
already mottled. Lyn,
she gasps, take
me home

And one of our favorites from tonight:

BEING JEWISH IN A SMALL TOWN

Someone writes kike on
the blackboard and the
"k's" pull thru the
chalk, stick in my

plump pale thighs.
Even after the high
school burns down the
word is written in

the ashes. My under
pants' elastic snaps
on Main St because
I can't go to

Pilgrim Fellowship.
I'm the one Jewish girl
in town but the 4
Cohen brothers

want blond hair
blowing from their
car. They don't know
my black braids

smell of almond.
I wear my clothes
loose so no one
dreams who I am,

will never know
Hebrew, keep a
Christmas tree in
my drawer. In

the dark, my fingers
could be the menorah
that pulls you toward
honey in the snow

The whole early evening at the Cornelia Street Cafe was wonderful, and we're grateful for the rare chance to get out during this hectic semester for us. (One of the people who hired us as a teacher of evening classes was Amy Lemmon, who's deputy chair of the FIT English and Speech Department.) It was a pleasure to hear the varied voices of the Red Hen Press poets, and it was a delight to see old friends like Susan O'Doherty ("Dr. Sue") and others there.

As Angelo kept reminding us, book make great presents for Easter, Passover and Mother's Day. Check out these exciting poets and their works.

And there's a Red Hen Press and Rattle 15th anniversary party (not a reading, a party) on Saturday from 6:00-9:00 p.m. at Telephone Bar that everyone is invited to. Come if you can!