New York History

Yoko Ono

     Dressed all in black, except for the  red flower at the tip of her men’s fedora, Yoko Ono claimed the stage last night on the eve of her 77th birthday with a primal scream that seemed to contain all at once, grief, rage and intense, existential joy. Her journey that night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music began with a poignant series of home movies from her childhood in pre-war Japan and moved from there to  her provocative life as a performance artist in the early 1960’s — and then — to her epic romance with John Lennon.
      Her comrades that night included her son, Sean Lennon — as well as members of the We Are Plastic Ono Band, Justin  Bond,  The Scissor Sisters — as well as members of the original Plastic Ono Band.   That band was launched in 1969 with the hit single “Give Peace a Chance,” and that’s how Yoko ended the evening. W ith everyone singing about peace and love.
     “Love everyone,” she implored. ”Hug everyone, she smiled. “Give peace a chance.”
     

Gregg Breinberg

      Teacher Gregg Breinberg is  The Whiz Kid behind the Whiz Kids otherwise known as the PS22 Choir.  Made up of 4^th and 5^th graders from PS22 on Staten Island, they’ve  performed at Madison Square Garden, sung for movie stars and politicians and melted hearts  all over the world.
      But for their fearless leader –  what’s most important is helping students find the heart and soul of a song — and of themselves.
      In an interview with OpenEducation.Net, Breinberg told writer Thomas Hanson the key to their successful collaboration is having High Hopes, Great Expectations and Kindness. And it doesn’t hurt to be a Bit of A Clown yourself. ‘Kindness and patience are #1 with me,” Breinberg said in the interview. “I also think it’s important to be willing to try things, step outside your comfort zone, embarrass yourself, make mistakes — because you can never forget that’s basically what you’re asking from all of your students at some point or another.
     The kids have taught him as well, Breinberg said.
    As Joey, one of the kids in the choir told MSNBC:   ‘Mr. B, he’s a handful — he teaches us but we teach him — he’s not just a regular teacher — he is un-ordinary.’   Check out the  whole interview with the ‘Un-Ordinary’ Breinberg  and his Extraordinary work with the PS22 Choir here.     

Orson Welles, 1937

    In 1937, a mad  genius stood poised, ready to unleash his vision on the world. The Crazy Genius was Orson Welles — and his production of  Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’  at his newly created Mercury Theatre in New York City would bring him infamy and opportunity.  Filmmaker Richard Linklater brings the period — and the genius  to life in his new film ‘‘Me and Orson Welles.’
    Based on the coming -of -age novel by Robert Kaplow,  Linklater  shows us all the fun, craziness, treachery and heartbreak that came under the rubric: A Life in the Theatre  — especially if it involved the Boy Wonder who was Orson Welles in 1937.
      We get the backstage intrigue, the romances and Welles as a kind of sometimes benign, sometimes cruel dictator/director. He wanted results and adoration — didn’t hesitate to cut anyone who didn’t give him enough of either.  British actor Christian McCay, who stars as Welles, nails the director’s brilliance — as well as his ability to manipulate and seduce.
       Zac Efron is touchingly vulnerable as Richard Samuels,  the high school kid who stumbles on a rehearsal at the Mercury and gets a small part in the production.  At the end, after Samuels has tasted some success, some betrayal, and some joy, he tells his friend, Gretta, who has dreams of being a writer: “It feels like we have everything before us…..” The camera pulls back in a gesture of joy and acknowledgement.   That everything would eventually come to mean World War  II — and for Welles — more masterpieces, fame, financial ruin — and a haunting memory of a sled called Rosebud.  But in that moment, for those characters — the world was alive  — with possibility and with hope. 

He Who Binds Himself to a Joy
Does the Winged Life Destroy
But he Who Kisses the Joy as it Flies
Lives in Eternity’s Sunrise

William Blake

         Along with her husband and artistic collaborator Christo, she helped wrap the Pont Neuf  in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin;  swathed the Biscayne Bay Islands near Miami in a luscious  Pink,  and in 2005, she filled  Central Park with 7,503 Saffron Colored Gates .  Those gates transformed a barren winter landscape into something amazing and alive and created a new relationship to a  familiar terrain. 
      French artist Jeanne-Claude – of the  vibrant red hair and even redder lips  – didn’t mind,  she once said, in an interview, that the monumental projects that she and Christo devoted themselves and that took years to complete and cost millions —  were just transient – ephemeral works.  What it was all about – she said – was creating joy.  Their works expressed “the quality of love and tenderness that we human beings have for what does not last.”
       Jeanne-Claude died this week, at the age of 74.

The Milkmaid

       Noone knows exactly who she was now.  A woman ensconced in domesticity, pouring milk — the scene may have  seemed mundane.  But the Dutch  painter Johannes Vermeer saw something majestic and sensual — even monumental in the moment.  The colors seem translucent.  The level of detail makes it seem almost photographic, although it was likely painted sometime during the year  1657- 58.  The painting possesses a moving luminosity.  Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Nov. 28,  ”The Milkmaid”  is considered the painter’s masterpiece.  She was sent over this year — along with other paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries as a gift from the Netherlands to pay homage to the 400th anniversary of explorer Henry Hudson’s visit to the island, we now know as Manhattan.
       To see more of the Dutch influence, check out the exhibit at the South Street Seaport,  “New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World.”  And through June, 2010, The Holland on the Hudson festival will celebrate the 400th anniversary with events and exhibitions.

     The anguish and ecstasy of romantic love are embodied by  “In-I”, a theatre-dance piece currently on view at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
     French actress Juliette Binoche and British choreographer Akram Khan create a searing portrait of two lovers struggling with sexual and emotional intimacy.
      ”La Binoche,” as she is often referred to in the French press is all over New York this month and next.  A collection of her paintings is at the French Consulate.   And there is a book, “Portraits in-Eyes,”  which has poems and pictures based on characters she’s played and directors she  has worked with.   Her new film, “Paris,” opened this Friday.     

  Finding Magic

        Binoche, who has had a spectacular career, working with directors as varied as Kieslowski, Godard,  never thought about being a dancer. But at age 43, after answering her masseuse’s question: Do you Want to Dance? — she embarked on this project.
      But stretching boundaries is what she is all about.
      In an interview with writer  Faith Salie for  Double X,  she said she tries to stay away from labels. “I  try not to call myself [anything], because otherwise you get stuck into ideas.  Getting into other fields, worlds—it gives me certain freedom, and at the same time it shows me my limits, my pain.
       ”We have a tendency because of fear or of a lack of imagination to be out of tune with the truthful, magical side [of our bodies,” she told Salie.  And I have to say that if I didn’t get through that experience, I wouldn’t have discovered my energy—what the Chinese people call qi, you know the tai chi, the qi gong. I would say it is a sign of what the body has, which is the energy that you can’t see but you can feel.”
Finding Dreams
       Fearless  would be one word that would describe her.
       She posed naked for Playboy at the age of 43 and  while she doesn’t think she will keep dancing, she told Double X, she hs been transformed by having had the experience.  ” Dancing taught me to go for my dreams. And not to judge my dreams from outside, just to do it.”
    “In-I” will run through Sept. 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is paired with a retrospective of her films at BAMCinematek: “Rendez-Vous With Juliette Binoche” through Sept. 30. Her paintings will be on display at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy at 972 5th Avenue through Oct. 9.

September 1, 1939
By W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame

       In the current political climate where pettiness, careerism and obfuscation rule, Sen. Edward “Teddy ” Kennedy did something radical.  He actually dared to stand for something — that as a United States Senator it was his duty to make the world a better place. 
      Most of the landmark bills he worked on during his  46-year history as a senator dealt with civil rights, health care, education. He cared about the disabled and those lost outside society’s safety net.
     His speeches were impassioned — eloquent. They felt torn from the gut. 
    And even during the years marred by catastrophic scandals and tragedies – before he married Victoria Anne Reggie and finally rose to become the senator we mourn today, the seeds of greatness could still be seen. 
     In 1980, while ending his bid for the Presidency, he made one eof his most memorable speeches.  He told the roaring, mourning crowd:   “For those whose cares have been our concern — The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives — and the dream shall never die….”
     Teddy Kennedy.  You Kept the Faith….
   

Salita Vs.Munoz, May 24, 2009 - Photo by Mary Ann Owen

     When you ask Dmitriy Salita how he is doing, he answers with a fervent: ”Fine, Thank God.”   It’s not just an expression of speech. For Boxing champion Dmitriy “Star of David” Salita is a believer. 
      His whole life is one of devotion — from the Judaism he embraced after he came to this country from the Ukraine to Boxing — the sweet science that has catapulted him to fame  in the United States.  Soft-spoken and gentlemanly, the 27-year-old Junior Welterweight — who is undefeated this year with a record of 30-0 — sees no contradiction in being a devout Jew and his obsession with a sport that turns him into a predator in the ring.  
       “Religion is integrated with everything you do,” Salita said during a recent telephone interview. “It’s a very false idea that it is only practiced in a synagogue. Religion is practiced in every field that you’re in. You take what you learn in the synagogue into the street.
      “It’s a step by step process. It helps develop and improve you as a human being.”
      It hasn’t been an easy path. Because of increasing anti-semitism, his family left Odessa when he was 9 and settled in Brooklyn. They struggled — with the culture — and lack of money. Someone gave him a boxing glove when he was 13 — and the rest — as they say is History.

         Finding a Dream

         But the seeds of that passion were planted earlier — in Odessa. He told an interviewer he remembers running through the snow  pretending to be Rocky. In Brooklyn, he discovered the Starrett City Boxing Club and Jimmy O’Pharrow,  the African-American coach who famously said: “Salita looks Russian, prays Jewish and fights black.”
      “I came to Starrett City and I met O’Pharrow when I was 13,” says Salita.  He didn’t immediately become a mentor. It happened step-by-step. Jimmy recognized my abilities and my hard work…  He saw something in me and developed it,” Salita says.  He moved through the ranks quickly, winning a Bronze medal at the Junior Olympics when he was 16 and a Golden Gloves title 3 years later.
      When he was a teenager, Salita’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Before she died, his mother asked O’Pharrow to look after him. O’Pharrow did that, watching over his protégé with a gruff tenderness.  Salita, who also trains with Francisco Guzman, remains extremely close with O’Pharrow.  ”Jimmy is like my grandfather,” says Salita.  “He will always be in my life. He’s someone that I love. He taught me a lot about life. Jimmy is a great person — someone I continue to learn from.”
      It was in his mother’s hospital room which she shared with a Chabad Lubavitch woman that Salita connected with his Judaism in a profound way.
        He goes to services every day now at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn and refuses to fight on the Sabbath.  “The Chabad Lubavitch outlook — they are very orthodox. They know the value of every person — they don’t judge.”
 
        Still Hungry                
                          
      A Salita boxing match draws more than just the usual suspects.   Much of his fan base comes from the orthodox community. Kids dressed in yeshiva garb and grey bearded rabbis mingle with Brooklyn hip hoppers and boxing aficionados. When he is introduced, an Israeli flag comes out and Israeli music is played. His fans call him ‘Dima’ and ‘Kid Kosher’ and of course Dmitriy, ‘Star of David’ Salita.
     He’s the subject of a documentary “Orthodox Stance,” and an HBO special. But he’s still hungry. He still wants more. He wants, he says, a shot at the Title.  He wants to be World Champion.
    That opportunity may come soon — later this year in London — when he will fight Amir Khan, the current Junior Welterweight world champion. “I look forward to my title shot,” says Salita.  “That should be the most exciting night — as it has been my dream my whole life.”

     Sixty-four years ago today, the  Japanese  surrendered and New York erupted in a frenzy of joyous celebration.   Strangers kissed  strangers and  strangers together mourned  and remembered their losses.
     In a world  now where the big question is ‘What’s the New New?’ nobody thinks much about World War Two anymore. Unless , of course, a Spielberg or Tarantino make a  movie about it.
        In a touching article in The New York Times  today,  veteran Albert Perdeck talks about how traumatized he still is by the memories he has from the war – and how he has struggled to get anyone to pay attention to remembering this date: August 14, 1945 — otherwise known as VJ-Day.
      The  retired postal worker, who fought in the Pacific, and now lives in  New Jersey, told The New York Times: ” Attention Must Be Paid.”   He told ‘The Times’  he can still hear the cries of his fellow soldiers who were wounded, lost, mutilated.   He was only 19 during that war. Now he’s 84.  He can still see the mangled bodies of friends and fellow soldiers, he says  – and those he killed. 
         So — for Albert Perdeck — and all the other forgotten soldiers. Let us remember…..