Estrellita’s Bio & Bonus Tracks
Carmelita Estrellita has a dozen songs in the new “First of the Year: 2010”. Here’s a snap-shot of her life and times and five bonus tracks.
Sphere of Influence
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Robin D. G. Kelley
Free Press
Savoring the Roots of New York Mambo
THE PARK PLAZA CHRONICLES OF VINCENT LIVELLI
Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson
Park Plaza essay by Vincent Livelli
Postscript by Pablo E. Yglesias
Edited by Robert Farris Thompson and Pablo E. Yglesias
When I Paint My Masterpiece
ELGIN REDUX?
When Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng missed his second of two free throws with two seconds remaining and his team leading 108-106 in the third game of the Chicago-Cleveland first round NBA playoff series, it was clear LeBron James would not have an overtime period of five minutes in which to add to his total of 39 points.
Truth & Time
A week is a long time in politics, as Tip O’Neil once said.
The Drop Edge of Yonder
Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novels have moved a generation of writers and rockers. He’s carried his themes and dreams along the “celluoid trail,” writing screenplays for memorable movies such as “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” “Little Buddha,” “Walker” and “Candy Mountain.” His latest novel, “The Drop Edge of Yonder,” is a book (as per Patti Smith) “you watch as you read, cast the film as you reread, and create a sequel as you sleep.” Scott Spencer has wondered at “Yonder” too: “I have never read anything like it. Every page transports the reader from the cerebral to the visceral and back again, until you start to feel that in the end there is no difference between the two.” Take the following chapters from Wurlitzer’s soulful trip as an invite to get “Yonder” .
Free at Last
Willie Mitchell: 1928-2010
Willie Mitchell slipped away this January 5 just past. Trumpet player, bandleader, songwriter, he was foremost a producer. Not a celebrity producer, he was better than that.
Politics and Theater
In 2007, in the midst of a glut of anti-Iraq-War plays, experimental theatre venue P.S. 122 presented the most challenging piece of political theatre that I’ve seen performed in New York in my lifetime: Young Jean Lee’s Church.
Battles of Ajami
Fifty years ago, the Israeli film industry was largely churning out pro-Zionist propaganda films (Ephraim Kishon being the rare exception). To represent its face to the world in 2010, Israel brought to the Academy Awards an Arab-language flick co-directed by a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, focusing largely on inter-Arab issues; Ajami was one of the five nominees in the Best Foreign Film category.
The Palestinian co-director has been called a collaborator. Israel’s nominating committee has been demonized as a pack of lefties. But something is changing on the streets of Jaffa, whose citizens have been given, in Ajami, both a mirror in which to behold their own community and an international voice.
Nailing Avatar
The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance.
“Shipwrecked on the Wrong Side of Tomorrow”
Rory Nugent, Down at the Docks Anchor Books Paperback, February 2010
The Politics of Love
What do you get when you fall in love?
You get a lot of pain and trauma
Even with Barack Obama
I’ll never fall in love again!