BillyBlog2

Gratuitous Indoor Soccer Dad Post (Shayna Scores again, 12/16/2007)

2007-12-19T05:55:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are gluttons for blurry, shaky footage of Shayna's awesomeness, here's the second goal from Sunday, December 16, 2007. It's not as clear as the first goal (here), but fellow team member and part of the dynamic duo, Max, gets the credit for a sweet assist.

Again, stick around to the end of the clip for the goal.

2007-09-23T16:36:00.000-04:00

Shayna's Gold Team beat the Orange Team today 2-1. Shayna was studly, scoring both goals for the Gold. Both goals are below.

Goal #1: Within the first 30 seconds of the game, Shayna drove the ball down field, outrunning the defense and launching a bullet into the net for a quick 1-0 lead:

Later, Shayna scores a sweet goal, dribbling through a sea of Orange defenders and knocking in what will eventually be the game-winning goal:

Definitely a banner day for Shayna!

Where the City Schleps

2007-07-09T07:11:00.000-04:00

Weekend In New York | Subway Survival

Where the City Schleps

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Anders Kruus, center left, a tourist from Sweden, navigates the subway system at Canal Street.

By SETH KUGEL

Published: July 8, 2007

HERE'S an abbreviated list of what tourists interviewed recently from Battery Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art said were problems they encountered on (otherwise wonderful) trips to New York:

• It's hard to figure out which restaurants the natives go to.

• The subway.

• Chinatown is too touristy.

• The subway.

• That cheap hotel found online turned out to be shabby.

• The subway.

• It's illegal to carry a concealed weapon.

• The subway.

Souvenir hawkers take note, it looks as if it's time to add something to the back of the “I ♥ New-York” T-shirt: “But I hate the subway.” It's too dirty, visitors say. Too loud. Too hot. Too confusing which MetroCard to get. Can anyone tell me if it's safe to take late at night? And what was that muffled announcement about “express to Brooklyn?”

Alma Buss of Plano, Tex., in town with her husband, Leroy, and her granddaughter Bethany, wished they could make it work. “We try,” she said, “we really try.” But it's unbearably hot — especially in the depths of the No. 7 train platform in Times Square.

“A, B, C, D, where do they go? Which one's an express?” asked Patricia Wundersee, a military pay technician at Fort Riley, Kan.

“When should you not get on the subway?” asked Doug Ivey, in from Tennessee.

“It's rundown,” said Fernando Guerrero of Mexico City. “Considering what country we're in, it's really unsuitable.”

Those who moved here as adults remember how it feels. It takes weeks, if not months, for that multicolor spaghetti jumble to morph into a comprehensible map and for the screeching of brakes to fade away. But now, despite complaints galore, few New Yorkers would trade it for a cleaner, close-at-midnight-and-go-hardly-anywhere system.

But if you're only here for a few days, how to survive? Take taxis and tour buses? You can't really claim you've been here until you've swiped a MetroCard and received a “swipe card again at this turnstile” message and a courtesy jolt to the pelvis, or experienced the utter discombobulation of emerging back onto street level and having no idea which way is north or south or east or west.

So, visitors, here is your crash course (New Yorkers: add your own tips here:)

Plan your route You've journeyed back in time to pre-G.P.S. navigation. Get a map from the token booth attendant; it's free and comes with citywide technical support. New Yorkers have an entire lobe of the brain dedicated to calculating subway routes, and a soft spot for tourists who can't find their way. So stare at the open map, express confusion loudly, and 9 times out of 10 someone will magically offer to help. And though that person who comes to your aid may have an Indian accent, she won't be talking to you over a scratchy line from Bangalore.

If you're too immersed in the modern age to work with paper maps and human interaction, try www.tripplanner.mta.info or www.hopstop.com for MapQuest-like help. Both are surprisingly functional on BlackBerrys and Treos, though Trip Planner is New York-only and requires fewer clicks. Check for notices about service changes and get a second (human) opinion.

MetroCard math Here's the basic rundown: Official price is $2 a trip, but if you buy five, the sixth is free, effectively cutting the price to $1.67 a trip. (Multiple riders can swipe the same card.) Compare that with the individual unlimited passes — the one-day for $7, worth it if you're going to take at least five trips before 3 a.m. the next morning, and the $24 seven-day pass, if you're sure you're taking at least 15 trips.

Dirt and noise The subway has been around since 1904, so expecting it to be as clean and quiet as Washington's or even Mexico City's is unreasonable. (Mr. Guerrero, are you listening?) That's not grime you're seeing, it's historical charm. And those creatures scurrying down the tracks are, um, underground squirrels. As for the screeching cars, how else can you tell the train is coming? A computerized announcement? Flashing lights? So unromantic.

Safety No one will fault you if you want to take a cab back to the hotel at 3 a.m. But you don't have to. Around 3 a.m., the Manhattan trains can be so jammed with late-night revelers (and a few jealous bakery workers) that you'll feel silly for even having worried about your safety. Two incentives to take a cab late at night: trains are less frequent, and should you fall asleep on the way, the cabby will wake you up at your destination; subway cleaners will wake you up at 4:30 a.m. — in the Far Rockaway section of Queens.

The heat In summer, stations can be a tad stuffy. Some prefer the terms “stifling,” or “living inferno.” One possible solution: come back in the winter. Another: buy cold water from the underground newspaper vendors (it looks as if they wouldn't have a refrigerator back there, but nearly all do). Once you realize those people are stuck there all day, it's harder to feel sorry for yourself.

The wait Sure, but a taxi doesn't provide entertainment. Check out the crazy fingernails on that woman. Is that guy really playing the theme from “Happy Days” on his sitar? Who'd have thought there'd be so much legit artwork? And a special for science lovers: understand how anthill traffic works by observing the teeming underground corridors of the Times Square stop, where miraculously people never bump into one another.

Bearing the noise There are five kinds: a) The rumbling that says the train is coming; b) the honking that indicates a train is bypassing the station; c) the cursing that follows; d) the unimportant, clearly enunciated announcements (“thank you for riding New York City transit”); and e) the vitally important incomprehensible announcements (blah-blah-will-be-skipping-blah-blah-now-running-express-blah-blah-shuttle-bus). Solutions: bring earplugs, and ask for help.

Finding a restroom Good luck.

Jazz Messenger

2007-07-09T07:07:00.000-04:00

Essay

Jazz Messenger

Haruki Murakami at his jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Sendagaya, Tokyo, 1978.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Published: July 8, 2007

I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.

I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living.

The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.

I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked.

A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his cellphone and asked me, “Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?” “Of course,” I said, practically at a loss for words. He called Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or since. Life is so strange, you never know what’s going to happen. Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined it.

When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel — that I could do it. I couldn’t write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to become a literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all, and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument.

I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Haruki Murakami’s most recent book is a novel, “After Dark.” This essay was translated by Jay Rubin.

From Hawaii with Love from the Yankees

2007-07-09T07:02:00.000-04:00

Cheering Section

From Hawaii With Love for the Yankees

Suzy Allman for The New York Times

Don Mayo with his daughters, 10-year-old Racquel, left, and Summer, 16, at Yankee Stadium last Sunday. They came from Hawaii for a 10-game homestand.

By KEN BELSON

Published: July 8, 2007

Many fans take the subway, some drive and a few walk, but when it comes to getting to Yankee Stadium, Don Mayo tops them all: He flies 12 hours from his home in Maui to see games in the Bronx.

Mayo is one of about a dozen Yankees season-ticket holders from Hawaii. For years, he bought single-game tickets during his frequent trips to New York, where his parents grew up. But playoff tickets have become so expensive that since 2005 he has bought two full-season passes that include postseason seats at face value.

Mayo, a former professional surfer who attended his first Yankees game in 1970 with his uncle Buddy and has loved the team ever since, owns a construction and restoration business. This gives him the flexibility and the means to attend about 40 games a year. Mayo said he flew in for about four homestands a year, including opening day and games against Boston and other top teams. He said he had not missed a playoff game since 1997.

He gives the rest of his seats away — to friends, cabbies, waitresses, police officers and strangers on the subway. He asks only that they not resell them.

“I get a big kick out of giving away the other tickets,” said Mayo, who paid $5,670 for his two tier box seats in Section 653, not far from the right-field foul pole. “In Hawaii, we have aloha spirit; you give, and it comes back to you. I try to put out good vibes.”

Despite his imposing frame and massive grip, Mayo appears as if he belongs on the beach, with his sandy blond hair, sunglasses and a Yankees tank top.

For the current 10-game homestand, he brought his daughters, Summer, 16, and Racquel, 10, who sometimes have to skip school, much to the consternation of their teachers. Mayo gathered single seats so the three of them could sit together.

“I have one friend who likes the Mets, but most of them don’t know much about baseball,” Summer said. “Mostly, they are jealous of my coming to New York so much.”

Finding lodging is tough. Sometimes, Mayo gets a discount from a friend who works at Marriott. Some strangers who hear about his long-distance devotion to the Yankees have bought him meals and drinks at restaurants, including some on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

Then there is the bowling. Thanks to jet lag, Mayo goes bowling after every game at the lanes across the street from the stadium, sometimes finishing at 2 a.m., which is dinnertime in Hawaii.

“The day games are killers,” he said.

So far this season, Mayo estimated that he had spent about $20,000 on tickets, airfare, food and other sundries, including a No. 1 foam finger and a hat for Racquel. He said he expected to spend roughly that amount in the second half of the season if the Yankees make the playoffs.

“I’m one of those impetuous people who will figure it out later,” Mayo said. “I don’t stress how it will work out. I don’t even read my credit card statements.”

In the feast-or-famine construction business, Mayo often takes on extra work during the winter to finance his habit. If money is tight or his schedule is too hectic, he will cancel a midseason trip.

“I work for these tickets,” said Mayo, who likens his ethic to that of Paul O’Neill, the former Yankees right fielder. “Nothing is for free.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Summer and Racquel want to meet Derek Jeter. They take their father’s affliction in stride and seem at home in the stands, particularly Racquel, who often wanders off by herself to find food. They also enjoy the visits because they can visit their paternal grandmother in Connecticut.

In Maui, Mayo follows all the games on MLB.com. Conveniently, night games in New York begin during lunch hour in Hawaii. Mayo turns on the game in the office and does paperwork or works out in the gym while listening.

Mayo’s friends and former wife say he is nuts for spending so much time and money following the Yankees. But they realize that Mayo’s passion for the Yankees is in line with the way he runs his company and his life.

“He’s kind of an extremist,” said Stephen Santos, who works for Mayo on Maui. “Everything he does, he does beyond what people normally do or expect to do.”

Santos, who said he rooted for the Los Angeles Angels, added that Mayo talked so much about the Yankees that “he’s gotten me interested” in them as well.

The Yankees’ recent woes have not diminished Mayo’s enthusiasm. In a rare flash of annoyance, he said he disliked fans who booed them.

“The Yankees never let me down,” he said. “Even if they lose 100 games, I’d be here. I’ll make it happen, unless I can’t pay my mortgage.”

Cracker-Barrel 2.0

2007-07-09T06:59:00.000-04:00

Cracker-Barrel 2.0

By GREGORY BEYER

Published: July 8, 2007

ONE Monday morning, on the way to her office in the basement of the Montauk Club in Park Slope, Louise Crawford passed a man staring up at a tree. Lingering for a moment, she asked him what was so interesting.

It turned out that a yellow-throated songbird known as a Nashville warbler, in its northward migration, had made a pit stop in the neighborhood and was perched on a branch.

Not exactly a lunar landing. And even on a slow news day, the warbler’s arrival seemed unlikely to attract the attention of the news media. But Ms. Crawford, who writes a Park Slope-focused blog, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, and whose role in the borough’s blogging family most closely resembles that of the nurturing matriarch, was elated.

“It’s a good story,” she said. “It’s an exclusive.” Later that day, the post went up: a short account of the human encounter and the bird sighting, tinged with Ms. Crawford’s recollection of her father, an amateur ornithologist, taking her as a child to Central Park on bird-watching excursions.

Such musings, embroidered with the personal, are a critical element of “placeblogs” like Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, whose writers frequently and sometimes obsessively punch point-of-view histories into their laptops to yield sites that document everything from a neighborhood’s significant quakes to its slightest tremors.

Or, as Placeblogger.com, a Web site that promotes and tracks blogs with a hyperlocal focus, put it: “Placeblogs are about the lived experience of a community, some of which is news and some of which isn’t.”

In the past year, the word Bloglyn has been cropping up a lot, a reflection of the fact that Brooklyn, particularly brownstone Brooklyn, has emerged as possibly the center of the placeblog world. Web forums serve as virtual town hall meetings (complete with hecklers), and bloggers peer with equal interest at controversial development projects, restaurant openings and the most minute of neighborhood minutiae.

After tracking blogs in about 3,000 American neighborhoods for six months, a study released this year by the Web site Outside.in declared Clinton Hill the “bloggiest” neighborhood in America.

No other Brooklyn neighborhoods made the top 10. The people conducting the survey acknowledged, however, that Brooklyn neighborhoods could have taken up a lot of space on the list; as if wary of placing an entire ball club’s roster on the all-star team at the expense of the rest of the league, they chose Clinton Hill for the No. 1 slot but omitted the others. And as Steven Berlin Johnson of Park Slope, a creator of Outside.in, explained, in terms of socioeconomic makeup, the national top 10 and the Brooklyn top 10 look a lot alike.

“On a per capita basis,” said Robert Guskind, founder of the year-old blog Gowanus Lounge, which he says gets 85,000 page views per month, “we have more bloggers than any other part of the city, and more than anywhere that I know of. More than in Manhattan, and way more than in Queens.” Mr. Guskind, who is also the Brooklyn editor of Curbed.com, said he was not aware of any placeblogs in Staten Island or the Bronx.

•

Ms. Crawford is typical of the breed of individuals running these quirky byways of the information highway.

In accordance with the unwritten rules of placeblogging, Ms. Crawford considers her three-year-old blog an “informal portal” with no pretense of objectivity and, by definition, an automatic interest in anything that ever happens in or relating to Park Slope. This is why she welcomes e-mail tips from readers sharing observations like “I think I heard a gunshot” or questions like “What was that smell last night?” For Ms. Crawford and her audience, absolutely nothing is too trivial.

The quirks of her own life reflect her postage stamp of home turf. Ms. Crawford, a mother of two, writes a parenting column called Smartmom for The Brooklyn Paper, and observations on education and child-rearing factor prominently in her blog. In a recent entry on her daughter’s fifth-grade graduation ceremony at Public School 321, she wrote: “Graduations. Parties. They’re going on all over the city. These are the milestone moments that require Kleenex and a strong margarita afterwards.”

Inspired by The Atlantic Monthly’s list of the 100 most influential Americans, last year Ms. Crawford compiled the “Park Slope 100,” a list that included well-known Slope figures like the writer Paul Auster and the actor Steve Buscemi, but also lesser-known residents, like a stoic local barista who serves coffee and muffins with a particular grace, and her therapist.

“I just kind of threw that in,” Ms. Crawford said of this last inclusion. “Nobody mentioned it.”

One of the longest-running and most popular Brooklyn placeblogs began in September 2004 when Jonathan Butler, formerly the owner of a real estate investment company, closed on his Clinton Hill brownstone, and, as he put it, “I had all this interest and energy that I needed to channel somewhere.”

The next month, Mr. Butler created Brownstoner, a real estate blog that assiduously monitors Brooklyn properties, claims more than 100,000 unique visitors a month and receives more than 100 e-mail tips a day from readers. The site’s ubiquity in the blogosphere, both in and beyond Brooklyn, earned Mr. Butler’s neighborhood top blogging honors in the Outside.in study.

Whether or not neighborhood-focused blogs like Brownstoner actually play a role in enacting or preventing change, as some bloggers claim, they undeniably give local residents a sense of empowerment. This may be one reason for their proliferation.

Robin Lester, who operates online under the name Lesterhead and who last summer launched the Clinton Hill Blog, which boasts about 750 unique visitors a day, has another theory. She sees the surge in neighborhood-focused blogs in Brooklyn as a reflection of the borough’s relatively high ratio of homeowners to renters. That long-term commitment, she suggests, inspires a strong bond between resident and neighborhood, one she did not feel when she lived in Hell’s Kitchen. There she briefly considered, then dismissed, the idea of starting a neighborhood blog.

When a friend of Ms. Lester’s, inspired by the Clinton Hill Blog, recently mentioned an interest in starting a blog about her Manhattan neighborhood, Tudor City, Ms. Lester encouraged her but with ambivalence: “I thought, ‘That’s great, but that’s kind of weird.’ ”

Mr. Guskind of Gowanus Lounge offers yet a third theory to explain the proliferation of Brooklyn blogs.

“The only explanation I can think of is the critical-mass explanation,” he said, suggesting that Brooklyn’s abundance of charged issues, coupled with its rich culture and long history, has led to an exponential increase in the number of blogs devoted to covering its neighborhoods. Or, as he put it, “Blogs breed more blogs.”

•

Still, not every corner of Brooklyn is lucky enough to have a blog.

“There are large parts of Brooklyn, be it East New York or Sheepshead Bay, where you just don’t have blogs being done,” Mr. Guskind said. “There are still a lot of niches out there, a lot of gaps, and it would be great to fill them.”

In the past few months, several blogging outposts have sprung up in less-gentrified neighborhoods like Bushwick, where in March Jeremy Sapienza inaugurated BushwickBK.com.

“There was a big vacant spot waiting in Bushwick for somebody to start talking about it,” Mr. Sapienza said. “I was moving into the neighborhood, and I couldn’t find any local information, any local blogs or papers. I thought, I’ll just do it myself.”

The Brooklyn blogging community actually inspired one person to move to the borough and explore the blogging possibilities of Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of the least-blogged neighborhoods.

“Being a blog reader gave me a taste of Brooklyn life, and I liked what I saw and read so I decided to move to the borough,” wrote the author of Bed-Stuy Blog, who blogs under the name the Changeling.

Mr. Sapienza pronounced himself thrilled by the arrival of Bed-Stuy Blog in March, and promptly launched into a debate with the site as to which neighborhood has more bodegas.

“Mm-mm, girl, you need to take a walk up in here one day — you cannot stand on a Bushwick corner and not see a bodega — some corners have two and even three!” Mr. Sapienza wrote in defense of his neighborhood.

•

One evening in May, more than 100 bloggers gathered at the Old Stone House in Park Slope for the second annual Blogfest, an event organized by Ms. Crawford to bring together Brooklyn bloggers to discuss the impact of their work.

Most of the participants chose to write their blog names, not their real ones, on the name tags they had been issued at the door, and some people, unaware that an R.S.V.P. had been required to gain entry, met with confusion and even resistance upon arrival.

“What’s your name?” asked a woman posted behind a check-in table, whose nightclub-bouncer approach was roundly criticized in the next day’s Blogfest comment section.

As one man gave his name, the woman dragged a finger down the guest list. His name was not on it.

“Do you have a blog name?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you have any other name?”

He didn’t, and he left the building.

Introducing the event, Ms. Crawford said she was thrilled at the turnout, especially because she had first conceived of Blogfest almost as a joke. After brief speeches from some of the borough’s most prominent bloggers, including Mr. Butler, Mr. Guskind and Mr. Johnson of Outside.in, more than 30 new bloggers lined up behind a microphone at the front of the room to plug their projects.

Earlier, Mr. Guskind and others had spoken of the need for more diversity among bloggers, but as the newest members of the community introduced themselves, there was a conspicuous lack of representation from less gentrified neighborhoods. No Brownsville. No East New York. No Canarsie. To remedy this, several bloggers, including Ms. Crawford, have organized a series of blogger socials, the first of which took place last month in Flatbush, to encourage networking and, as she put it, to “take the show on the road” to underblogged neighborhoods.

There was, however, much diversity of subject matter: love of Brooklyn and eagerness to blog threaded through interests ranging from politics and gentrification to gardening and food. Among individuals in this last category was Emily Farris, who is at work on a casserole cookbook and whose blog Casserolecrazy.com contains her recipe for the Greenpoint, inspired by her neighborhood’s Polish flavors: kielbasa, cheese, mushroom, potato and sauerkraut.

Nearly two weeks after the Blogfest, Ms. Crawford reflected on a moment that seemed to define the evening. After the meeting, when the bloggers retired downstairs to a catered party of Mexican food and margaritas, one of the bartenders told her the event had him thinking about starting a blog.

“This is the year that we’ve carved out our own various pieces of Brooklyn,” she said. “Everybody’s grabbing their neighborhood.”

Brooklyn Blogs

Here are a few but by no means all of the Brooklyn blogs.

"To Jewishness" by Kenneth Koch

2007-05-23T06:21:00.000-04:00

As you were contained in
Or embodied by
Louise Schlossman
When she was a sophomore
At Walnut Hills
High School
In Cincinnati, Ohio,
I salute you
And thank you
For the fact
That she received
My kisses with tolerance
On New Year's Eve
And was not taken aback
As she well might have been
Had she not had you
And had I not, too.
Ah, you!
Dark, complicated you!
Jewishness, you are the tray
On it painted
Moses, David and the Ten
Commandments, the handwriting
On the Wall, Daniel
In the lions' den
On which my childhood
Was served
By a mother
And father
Who took you
To Michigan
Oh the soft smell
Of the pine
Trees of Michigan
And the gentle roar
Of the Lake! Michigan
Or sent you
To Wisconsin
I went to camp there
On vacation, with me
Every year!
My counselors had you
My fellow campers
Had you and "Doc
Ehrenreich" who
Ran the camp had you
We got up in the
Mornings you were there
You were in the canoes
And on the baseball
Diamond, everywhere around.
At home, growing
Taller, you
Thrived, too. Louise had you
And Charles had you
And Jean had you
And her sister Mary
Had you
We all had you
And your Bible
Full of stories
That didn't apply
Or didn't seem to apply
In the soft spring air
Or dancing, or sitting in the cars
To anything we did.
In "religious school"
At the Isaac M. Wise
Synagogue (called "temple")
We studied not you
But Judaism, the one who goes with you
And is your guide, supposedly,
Oddly separated
From you, though there
In the same building, you
In us children, and it
On the blackboards
And in the books Bibles
And books simplified
From the Bible. How
Like a Bible with shoulders
Rabbi Seligmann is!
You kept my parents and me
Out of hotels near Crystal Lake
In Michigan and you resulted, for me,
In insults,
At which I felt
Chagrined but
Was energized by you.
You went with me
Into the army, where
One night in a foxhole
On Leyte a fellow soldier
Said Where are the fuckin Jews?
Back in the PX. I'd like to
See one of those bastards
Out here. I'd kill him!
I decided to conceal
You, my you, anyway, for a while.
Forgive me for that.
At Harvard you
Landed me in a room
In Kirkland House
With two other students
Who had you. You
Kept me out of the Harvard Clubs
And by this time (I
Was twenty-one) I found
I preferred
Kissing girls who didn't
Have you. Blonde
Hair, blue eyes,
And Christianity (oddly enough) had an
Aphrodisiac effect on me.
And everything that opened
Up to me, of poetry, of painting, of music,
Of architecture in old cities
Didn't have you
I was
Distressed
Though I knew
Those who had you
Had hardly had the chance
To build cathedrals
Write secular epics
(Like Orlando Furioso)
Or paint Annunciations—"Well
I had David
in the wings." David
Was a Jew, even a Hebrew.
He wasn't Jewish.
You're quite
Something else. I had Mahler,
Einstein, and Freud. I didn't
Want those three (then). I wanted
Shelley, Byron, Keats, Shakespeare,
Mozart, Monet. I wanted
Botticelli and Fra Angelico.
"There you've
Chosen some hard ones
For me to connect to. But
Why not admit that I
Gave you the life
Of the mind as a thing
To aspire to? And
Where did you go
To find your 'freedom'? to
New York, which was
Full of me." I do know
Your good qualities, at least
Good things you did
For me—when I was ten
Years old, how you brought
Judaism in, to give ceremony
To everyday things, surprise and
Symbolism and things beyond
Understanding in the
Synagogue then I
Was excited by you, a rescuer
Of me from the flatness of my life.
But then the flatness got you
And I let it keep you
And, perhaps, of all things known,
That was most ignorant. "You
Sound like Yeats, but
You're not. Well, happy
Voyage home, Kenneth, to
The parking lot
Of understood experience. I'll be
Here if you need me and here
After you don't
Need anything else. HERE is a quality
I have, and have had
For you, and for a lot of others,
Just by being it, since you were born."

YOUR LOVE IS A MACHETE

2007-05-20T13:18:00.000-04:00

YOUR LOVE IS A MACHETE for Shayna

I want to bottle the moment,

extract the essence, save it for some future crisis,

when I can take it out and savor it

like a glass of icy water

on a continent of asphalt.

It is inconvenient, to say the least,

to leave work, take the Q to DeKalb,

transfer for the R, ride to 86^th street

and wait with all the mothers outside

of your kindergarten class

then head back

toward Manhattan, getting off in Park Slope

to take you to gymnastics

and wait another 45 minutes for your grandmother

to arrive

so I can return to work,

this time via the F, walking into the office

three hours after I left

and amidst the chaos and scramble,

there is that frozen moment, your tiny hand

resting in mine; your grip firm (but not frenzied)

and through your fingers, in the simple gesture

of your touch, I feel your trust

and the matter-of-factness that

I am the Father, and in so being,

that I am Great and I am Caring and

that I am Strong and I am Superhuman

and most of all:

that I am Loved.

I can see it in your glittering eyes,

but I can feel it more in those fingers,

giving themselves to mine with the blindest of trusts.

The chaos swirls and you are a beacon

righting my course, saving me from madness.

Your touch, when I hug you, is an elixir of strength

So when I leave the gym,

the last flash of blonde ponytail waving in my mind,

I have the wherewithal

to head back into the jungle.

Your love is a machete, hacking through the foliage

of the routine, as your smile illuminates my path

like a thousand flaming suns.

2007-04-24T09:48:00.001-04:00

Concert Review: Fishbone Summerstage 2000

2006-12-27T12:11:00.000-05:00

The following New York Times concert review of Fishbone at Summer Stage in Central Park ran in 2000.

POP REVIEW; An All-Embracing Sound To Cheer the Distressed

By JON PARELES

Published: July 10, 2000

If there is one impulse shared across African-American music, it is the determination to convert tribulation into good-time music. That impulse links blues and calypso, reggae and rumba, and it takes hyperactive form with Fishbone, which headlined Central Park Summerstage on Saturday afternoon.

From its beginnings in the late 1970's, Fishbone has been a breathtakingly ambitious band, and one that knocks itself out to entertain an audience. Its songs are not only eager to address the ills of everyone from hapless lovers to victims of nuclear attack but also to sum up American (and Jamaican) party music from the swing era onward.

Angelo Moore, Fishbone's lead singer and saxophonist, sang about ''AIDS and Armageddon'' over chomping, ratcheting New Orleans funk verses with a reggae chorus; ''Karma Tsunami'' was a frenetic mixture of gospel, ska, punk and two-beat. Not all his concerns were global; he also bemoaned a failed marriage to the bouncy reggae of ''Suffering'' and ogled Spandex contours in a ska tune, ''Where'd You Get Those Pants.'' All four songs were from Fishbone's current album, ''The Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx'' (Hollywood).

While the core of Fishbone's music is revved-up Jamaican ska, its set also touched on progressive rock, hip-hop and jump-blues, not to mention funk variants from Detroit and Minneapolis. Mr. Moore threw in a Little Richard falsetto whoop and some Sly Stone growls. He also bounded across the stage, recited poetry, mugged like a born comedian and launched himself into the happily moshing crowd.

Despite lineup changes through the years -- including the replacement of its founding drummer, Fish, by John Steward -- Fishbone still tears through its songs like a band jamming in a garage, then reveals its precision with an instantaneous stop or a sudden jump into a different style. Its career timing hasn't been as good. It was too early for the California ska revival that it anticipated, and it has remained too eclectic, and too raunchy, for most commercial radio stations. But onstage Fishbone is still an all-American underdog, playing its musical erudition and serious ideas for very knowing laughs.

The Persuasions, who opened the concert, are a five-man a capella group that has been singing together for 37 years. Their roots are in doo-wop and its antecedent, gospel quartet singing; they usually place three-part harmony between Jimmy Hayes's subterranean, nonsense-syllable bass lines and Jerry Lawson's exhortatory baritone leads.

Through the years concerts by the Persuasions have relied on 1950's oldies, but they have lately moved their timeline forward. They recently released ''Frankly a Cappella'' (Earthbeat), an album of songs by Frank Zappa, whose label released the first Persuasions album in 1970, and they have recorded an album of Grateful Dead songs to be released in October. Onstage they repatriated both Zappa's infuriated cynicism and the Dead's frontier romance to the three-chord warmth of doo-wop.

DJ Swamp, a turntablist who is now in Beck's band, played a solo set with two turntables and a laptop. He scratched records, and sometimes just the needle itself, to make chirrups, whistles, shivers, whooshes, scrapes and hard-rock chords. He rapped along with his own scratching, boasting that now, ''Everybody wants to be a D.J.,'' but ''it takes more than your mom buying two Technics, you geek.'' He delivered precise bursts of sound while controlling discs with his nose or his elbows (as he played the word ''elbow'' repeatedly). It was like a latter-day vaudeville act: geeky showmanship for both eyes and ears.

Writer Depicts Scientists Risking Glory for Truth and Truth for Glory

2006-10-24T10:30:00.000-04:00

Novelist at Work | Allegra Goodman

Writer Depicts Scientists Risking

Glory for Truth and Truth for

Glory

By GINA KOLATA

Published: March 21, 2006

A postdoctoral student at the Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has an astonishing result: a virus he engineered seems to cure breast cancer in mice.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Now the two lab directors, cautious Marion Mendelssohn and politically savvy Sandy Glass are arguing about what to do. Dr. Mendelssohn wants to take her time and make sure the results are correct before discussing them; Dr. Glass wants to make his move now, before a competitor hears about his work and beats him to it.

"We can wait until we've dotted every 'i' and crossed each 't,' " Dr. Glass tells her. "We can wait until we reproduce it all and submit it to Nature. We can make sure every research note coming from the lab is of archival quality. Or we can seize the moment now. We can announce results that are still preliminary."

"Results that may be incorrect," Dr. Mendelssohn replies.

"Right," says Dr. Glass. "We can risk that they're incorrect and stake our claim before someone else does."

To scientists, this sounds oh so familiar. But the institute, the scientists and the discovery are actually fictional. They are from a new novel, "Intuition" (Dial Press), by a nonscientist, Allegra Goodman, whose doctorate is in English literature.

Scientists who have read the book say that somehow, Ms. Goodman has managed to write a tale about life in a science lab that rings so true and includes details so accurate and vivid that they say they are left reeling.

How could an outsider, someone who has not been bathed in the culture and mores of science, get it so right?

"I think it's a unique book because it completely nails this world," said Dr. Jerome Groopman, an oncologist and a professor of medicine at Harvard and the director of a laboratory there.

"It understands the psychology, the dynamics, the processes and pressures that exist in the current culture of science," Dr. Groopman, who reviewed "Intuition" for the online magazine Slate, said in a telephone interview. "I was stunned. I was really stunned."

At its base, "Intuition" is a novel about scientific fraud. A postdoctoral student becomes suspicious that another postdoc's dazzling discovery might not be all it seems. His data seem too good to be true.

It is a tale that evokes the famous case in the 1980's, when a postdoctoral student, Margot O'Toole, accused a researcher in David Baltimore's lab, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of faking data published in the journal Cell. As in the Baltimore case, the allegations in Ms. Goodman's novel end up with an investigation by the National Institutes of Health, hearings in Congress and an appeal. (In the real case, Dr. Imanishi-Kari was exonerated.)

But Ms. Goodman's novel is neither science history nor anthropology. She did read a book on the Baltimore affair, by the historian Daniel Kevles of Yale, but her aim was not to write a thinly disguised rehash of that painful episode.

Instead, Ms. Goodman says, she wanted to write about character and motives and ambiguity. Her book, she said, is about a family — a professional family, the family of a lab — that was, in the end, destroyed.

"I knew science was a great topic, with its rituals and hierarchies and moral ambiguities and dysfunctions," Ms. Goodman said.

She added: "People write about kings and queens and the important part of society. To me, the scientists, that's the nobility. The questions they work on are so fundamental."

Ms. Goodman, a 38-year-old car-pooling mother of three grade school boys and a 3-year-old girl, is not a complete stranger to science. Her husband, David Karger, is a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her sister, Dr. Paula Fraenkel, studies zebrafish at Harvard Medical School. Her mother, Madeleine Goodman, was an epidemiologist at the University of Hawaii. Some of her friends are scientists, and she has seen their struggles and triumphs, but at a distance.

Ms. Goodman was always the literary one in her family. At 15, she was obsessed with John Donne. She received a Ph.D. from Stanford in English literature in 1997.

She delves into contemporary literary fiction and loves classic writers, like George Eliot and Charles Dickens. "Intuition" began with a literary notion — the idea of a couple whose relationship becomes poisoned by suspicion.

She envisioned one member of the couple becoming convinced that the other is cheating, but not being completely sure.

"I am not interested in adultery," Ms. Goodman said. "That's been done."

Instead, she said, "I thought of moral ambiguity."

She thought of science, and the gray areas, the times when experiments stopped working or results were questioned and it was so hard to figure out what had happened. Was it human error? Was it sloppiness? Was it a natural human tendency to believe in a hypothesis so strongly that somehow data that do not seem to fit are edited out? Or was it fraud?

Ms. Goodman started reading accounts of scientific fraud and saw, she said, "how dry they were," although, she added, "their essence was compelling.

"What I was interested in was not the mechanics but the motives," Ms. Goodman said.

Five years ago, as she started research for the book, an acquaintance of her brother-in-law gave her some advice.

"Allegra," he told her, "what you have to capture is the bitterness of being a postdoc."

She laughs in telling the story. Bitterness, she says, she can do. She is a novelist, she understands bitterness. What she had to learn was the minute, telling details of how a lab actually works. That meant that she had to go to a lab and observe and then write about it so vividly and accurately that scientists would feel she must be one of them.

She knew that researchers would be nervous with her hanging around, taking notes, and she did not want to impose on her family or friends. So she found friends of friends who let her into their laboratories at the Whitehead Institute, not far from her home in Cambridge.

Ms. Goodman visited the labs only a few times in the late winter of 2001 and early spring of 2002, "an afternoon here and there over a few months," she said. "I was trying really hard to make the most of whatever time I had there."

She kept detailed notes, printing names and dimensions of equipment in a notebook, drawing little pictures of what a mouse's cage looked like, where the water bottle was, noting what was on the bottom of the cage and what the food smelled like — "slightly fermented granola just going bad."

She asked how the scientists punched holes in the animals' ears to attach tags that identified them. She jotted down that the mice had "tiny pink toes." She watched an autopsy of a female mouse and noticed that female mice have rows of mammary glands that go up to their chins. She noticed that when mice are anesthetized their bodies go limp but their ears are erect. She drew a picture. And she drew a map: 36 cages on a rack, 300 mice in the room.

"I wanted to take the reader there, to give the reader that concrete sense of process, people working," Ms. Goodman said.

Once, she saw a sign that had been posted by a postdoctoral student: "DO NOT use my NaOH!! STOP!!!!"

"I copied that. It was just too good," she said. The sign shows up in her book.

She also noticed the routine, casual ways that the scientists would deviate from their protocols. There was a laminar flow hood in the lab to allow researchers to work with the mice and not spread any viruses from the mice into the room, possibly infecting other animals. The researchers often ignored that hood.

"There is the theory and then there is the practice," Ms. Goodman says. "All that was very, very interesting to me."

When it came to writing the novel, Ms. Goodman mapped out each chapter with detailed outlines in notes that looked much like a script for a play. She diagrammed scenes; a few pages away from a drawing of a mouse cage in one of her notebooks is a sketch of the annual picnic that the laboratory held on the grounds at Walden Pond.(She also clocked her husband swimming back and forth across the pond so that when her characters did the same thing, she could get the timing right.)

When she finished a second draft, Ms. Goodman showed the manuscript to Tom Schwarz, a researcher at Children's Hospital in Boston. Friends with Dr. Schwarz's wife, Ms. Goodman wanted his opinion: was the science right?

Dr. Schwarz said he began to read the book and could not believe it. Ms. Goodman had not interviewed him, and she had not been to his lab. But, Dr. Schwarz said, "I saw myself and I saw things I knew, everything from the greasy falafels from the truck parked outside to the characters."

He recalled a scene in which a young postdoc, Cliff, on the verge of being dismissed from the lab, suddenly has astonishing results. He presents them to his colleagues at a lab meeting.

"The researchers were all staring: intent, admiring, jealous," Ms. Goodman wrote. "These were Cliff's siblings. They had been his peers here at the wood-grain table, they'd drunk bad coffee with him at these meetings."

Now everything was changed and, Ms. Goodman continued, "their emotions became much more complex."

Reading the scene, Dr. Schwarz said: "I had a tingle in my spine. How did she know?" The book, he noted, "also beautifully puts its finger on the ideals of science" the tension between the need to tell the truth and the need to present research in its most promising light.

Dr. Schwarz said he got a dose of this when he was a young Stanford professor in the early 1990's. He wrote a draft of a paper and showed it to a colleague who, Dr. Schwarz recalled, said, "If you want to send it to Nature, you have to take the hemline up a few inches."

For Ms. Goodman, the trick was not so much getting the nuances of science right as recognizing what a lab can reveal about jealousy and aspirations and, yes, nobility.

In one scene in her book, Dr. Mendelssohn's husband considers the drama playing out: "As far as Jacob was concerned, his wife's work was basic science. Cancer was her instrument, not her enemy. The disease was her reveal, framing and displaying the workings of the cell."

Ms. Goodman says that ""The starting point for me is always the character."

The lab was her reveal.

Two Blackbirds

2006-04-21T09:31:00.000-04:00

First, by Wallace Stevens:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Now, William Dickenson Cohen:

A BLACKBIRD LOOKING THIRTEEN WAYS
(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

I.
Among mountains of white
I move
like nothing else.

II.
Equidistant am I
from my reflections
in stereo.

III.
My wings are too tired
to interrupt this dance.

IV.
I am one, Alone.
In company,
everyone is one
but me.

V.
My song is silent.
Its echoes are loud.

VI.
There are reasons
I fly to and fro
painting and unpainting
an icy picture.
They are reasons
I do not care to reveal.

VII.
I walk among shapely trees.
No one notices,
the leaves are too busy
admiring the sun.

VIII.
I know what is within
is shared by all creatures.
Only I know, however,
to translate
my knowledge into song.

IX.
The ripples
on the surface of the sky
are sliced to pieces
by my beating wings.

X.
The clamor caused
by my flight
is a bright
green deafening noise.

XI.
Even in my absence,
I am omnipresent
in the shadows of ghosts.

XII.
I fly with all motion.
When movement ceases,
so shall I.

XIII.
I will always be content
to sit and watch
the dark whitening of the sky,
the pale burial of the earth.
I will always be content.

BillyBlog's Sister In the News

2006-04-11T21:58:00.000-04:00

Is this any way to spend spring break?
Students going wild for charity work during a break from school
By Valerie Kuklenski, Staff Writer
U-Entertainment

Late at night on certain cable channels, commercials for "Girls Gone Wild" videos show 20-somethings in the depths of debauched revelry, feeding a fear that American youth are falling off a moral precipice.
For a more optimistic view, check out "The Amazing Break," an MTV documentary that chronicled trips taken earlier this month by scores of college students who chose to take what's known as an alternative spring break, a week away from classes doing something to make the world a better place. It's the antithesis of the vacations those videos portray: seven sun-and-sand days of, at best, laziness and, at worst, self-destructive behavior.

The MTV teams, which included the inaugural Storm Corps crew that worked with United Way in the hurricane-battered Gulf region, are just a portion of the high-school and college students who are learning how to give and getting something back in the process. Students traveled to a homeless shelter in Florida, a child-care center in Costa Rica, even an orphanage in South Africa to do their part in improving the lives of others.

Jaime Linn, a 25-year-old graduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, returned this week from a mission trip to Aldama, a rural town in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was serving as a translator and escort to eight high-school students from a large church in Fayetteville, Ark., in their assignment to help build a new Protestant church in the village.

"We bent rebar and did blocks and cement," Linn said. "It was awesome. These were sophomores and juniors from very privileged backgrounds, as I am. It was very good for us to see life that was a little bit different."

Alicia Cohen is preparing to take part in a hurricane recovery trip to New Orleans coordinated by Hillel, the Jewish student group at California State University, Northridge. Cohen leads the local organization's service corps and says soon after Hurricane Katrina struck, students began inquiring about traveling to the region to help. Giving hours of work seemed the best response for students who don't have much cash for charitable giving. After checking with organizations in Houston and New Orleans, spring break, the week of April 10, seemed to be the best time to make the trip.

When word of the project spread, there was no shortage of volunteers. "We started with a budget for 10 students and we're taking 23," Cohen said. "We've probably had interest from 45 to 50 students."

The Hillel trip, funded mainly by Jewish organizations and private donations, comes during Passover, which presents some additional challenges. Cohen said there was some resistance at the outset stemming from concerns that students would violate Jewish law regarding diet and prohibitions against work at the first two days of the holiday week.

"But I didn't want to look at it as something that was going to stop us from doing something that I saw as being really important to our students, and to the CSUN community as a whole."

Organizers have arranged two Seders and kosher provisions for the students, and on the holiest days will have them serving food rather than doing the heavy labor, such as mold abatement and roofing, that they expect later in the week.

Chad Boettcher, director of strategic partnerships at MTV, oversees the network's efforts to get viewers involved with social causes, such as its "Choose or Lose" initiative to spur voter turnout in the 2004 election, and its newer thinkMTV project. His Storm Corps initiative created with United Way was planned as an alternative spring break for 100 students from around the country.

"When we first launched the (public service announcement) at the beginning of February, it was pretty clear right away we were going to be inundated with young people," Boettcher said. "We had tens of thousands actually log on to the site with over a quarter million page views."

There is a huge, largely untapped volunteer force in the MTV audience, given its standing as the No. 1 basic cable channel for 12- to 24-year-olds for nine years. The thinkMTV.com site - which boasts MTV.com's second-most-popular message board - has been directing viewers to other organizations that would put them to work during spring break and in the future.

The real success of alternative spring breaks, organizers say, is in making the spirit of such endeavors last for years to come.

Boettcher says Storm Corps applicants had to write out two essays in their online forms.

"One was why did they think it was important to volunteer over their spring break in the Gulf Coast. And then, second, what was it they were going to do back in their community after that one week, because while it was important to go down there and help build homes and rebuild lives during the week, we knew it was just a dent in a huge problem."

Boettcher was set to hold a conference call today with his Storm Corps participants to discuss leadership training, grant opportunities and other means to build on their experience.

Nikki Maxwell, CSUN's student development director, has seen growth in the number of students interested in volunteerism, and the campus' response to Katrina - $90,000 in donations collected - reflects that cultural change.

She said some of the enthusiasm for helping Katrina victims stems from the students' understanding that so many came to CSUN's aid in the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. "But I also see more and more students and groups saying, `Service is part of our mission statement,' and, `Service is really important to us."'

Linn, the Fuller seminary student, says the beneficiaries of those construction projects and support services are not the only ones to gain from volunteerism. She helps to arrange mission trips for the campus and has noticed the positive effects on those putting in hard work for a good cause. "Very often, when they come back they find they're more refreshed than if they sat around a pool all week."

Boettcher said there are more thinkMTV projects in the works that would provide constructive outlets for energized youth, but he wouldn't give any details.

`I think at MTV we like to see ourselves as a reflection of the lives of our audience," Boettcher said. "And whether it's through community service programs at their schools or interest that they take on their own ... thinkMTV will seek to provide them opportunities to give back. And the more they want to give back, the more thinkMTV is going to be there for them to give them those opportunities."

Valerie Kulenski, (818) 713-3750

valerie.kuklenski@dailynews.com

THE AMAZING BREAK

Where: MTV, or viewable anytime at www.thinkMTV.com.

When: 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. today.

Year in Pictures 2005

2005-12-28T20:20:00.000-05:00

Joe Rosen celebrating his surprise 85th birthday in April at Good Fellas Pizzeria, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His lovely bride Harriet goes in for the smooch.

Melanie coordinated the "Weight Watchers Walking Club" for the New York City AIDS Walk in May.

Jolee bonds with cousin Sarah Block in LA in late May. Sarah is just a few days older than Jolee, and they seem, at times, to have been made from the same mold.

At Seth Cohen's graduation in May from Chapman University, Bill and Melanie posed

and Seth shared the moment withgrandparents Sy and Resa Brenner.

Jolee and Shayna share a classic moment at Tracy & Tony Tambascia's in Whittier, CA.

Jolee and Shayna with Resa and Sy Brenner at Leon and Donna's home in Plaos Verdes.

Jolee and Shayna at the oldest Memorial Day parade in the US, home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Shayna in action, in one of her final gymnastics performances, before retirement.

Bill and Seth pose from the bleachers at Petco Park, San Diego, June 2005.

Jolee and Shayna with Grandpa Barry Liss in Brooklyn over the Summer.

Jolee and Shayna on the Big Island of Hawai'i, Akaka Falls, August 2005, with Grandma Diane Ferreira (right).

Jolee and Shayna at Shea Stadium, after the Mets scored a late inning win over the Padres. It was HOT!

Jolee and Shayna, Hilo Bay, Hawai'i
(right) and Shayna with new friend Ronin, the Akita puppy on Grandma Diane and Poppa John's ranch.

Bill and Melanie pose near Waipio Valley on the Big Island.

Jolee celebrates her 9th birthday in Honolulu.

Bill at his Iolani reunion with old classmates Jeff Hawk and Ben Ignacio.

Shayna with a feathered friend on Kalakaua in Waikiki.

Jolee at Pihanakalani Ranch ("The Nest in the Heavens") with "Kona" and "Blue," two of Grandma Diane and Poppa John's fellow residents of the ranch.

Jolee and Shayna on their first day of fourth and first grade, respectively.

Shayna takes a nap waiting for the New York City marathoners to pass.

Jolee is amazed by the number of runners.

Melanie with friend Janet Loder at Janet's wedding in late November.

Bill bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge on Day #2 of the NYC Transit Strike in December.

HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

Love is a Three-Legged Cat, a Poem for Marriage

2005-11-28T08:22:00.000-05:00

For Lionel and Janet, November 27, 2005

Dear Bride, when I first met your Groom last autumn
under the trees in front of the Library at 42nd Street,
I sensed a shift in the universe, a settling of two souls.
The sunlight was golden and the sky was a masterful blue.

And when, months later, you e-mailed out a photograph
of your new pet, Wally, a three-legged cat, content and
basking in a patch of sunshine, everything fell into place.
For true love is a three-legged cat, cherished despite its imperfections.

Yet Wally has no memory of a missing limb, he knows
no other existence, knows only that he is Love,
he is happy to be what he is and will continue to be.

I looked for other poems, published poems by famous poets,
to read on your wedding day, but nothing I found fit.
I kept thinking of Wally, and the joy that you and Lionel share, as a couple,

the love of that three-legged cat, reclining in the sunshine,
knowing without knowing, through half-closed feline eyes
that the union of two souls is powered by all that is right in the world,
Two Loves, holding one another in silence,

listening to the perfect sound of contentment,
pouring forth, purring forth,
emanating in waves from a three-legged cat,
echoing and accompanying your two beating hearts:
a Symphony tuning its instruments for this day
and the next, the concert of a lifetime
together.

Amber Redux

2005-11-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

November 20, 2005

Wedding Singers? Not!

By ALEX WILLIAMS

JA RULE stopped by a party at Shaquille O'Neal's mansion in Miami Beach the Friday night before last as a favor to the host, who asked him to grab a microphone and rock the house to surprise his guests. He obliged, he told friends, but for only two numbers. Ja Rule, the platinum-selling rapper accustomed to Madison Square Garden, could not afford to strain his vocal cords. He had an important gig the next night. He was playing a Miami steakhouse. The occasion was a bat mitzvah.

The next night he displayed considerably more fire, performing for more than an hour in front of 215 friends and relatives of Amber Ridinger, 13, sometimes barking out their names as he rapped. But that wasn't all. As he closed out the set, another superstar, Ashanti, joined him onstage for three numbers. As they performed, Amber stood onstage with them, in a $27,000 Dolce & Gabbana dress, waving to the crowd, particularly her deep-pocketed parents, Loren and J. R. Ridinger, the founder of an Internet marketing company.

The Ridingers, who recounted the evening in an interview, proudly acknowledge that their booking two pop stars for a party that would typically call for a kitschy cover band wearing ill-fitting tuxedos was a social achievement, even in Miami money circles. In this case the stars worked free as friends of the family, the Ridingers said. But for the mega-rich, Mr. Ridinger said, a superstar's fees should be no deterrent.

"If people can afford to do it, it certainly does make a party special," Mr. Ridinger said. "It brings an electricity to it you otherwise couldn't create."

The concept is not hypothetical. Disco throwback acts like KC and the Sunshine Band, young stars like Beyoncé Knowles and Christina Aguilera, and even legacy acts like Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney have all taken part in an increasingly common star-for-hire side business, quietly signing to play the occasional but very lucrative private party, be it a wedding or a birthday bash.

"It's definitely a growing trend," said Erik Marshall, a partner at Hank Lane Music and Productions, a company that recruits stars to perform at private and corporate events in New York. He said he has handled events involving Neil Sedaka, the B-52's, Blues Traveler and Billy Joel.

"You used to hear about it maybe once a year, even as recently as five years ago," he said. Now, he added, his company handles more than 20 such gigs a year. The stars command fees that can range from $25,000 to more than $1 million, event planners and music industry people say. And the entertainers almost always insist on one other thing: that the public not find out.

Before committing to a private date most stars or their representatives carefully read the guest list and demand a clause in the contract forbidding publicity: no press, no cameras, no video. The secrecy, say people involved in these functions, stems in part from the stars' insecurity. They worry that cashing a six-figure check for a couple of hours of rocking out for Aunt Alice or Cousin Bobby will make them look like sellouts - or, maybe worse, wedding singers. The last thing they want is to be associated in the gossip pages with an event that smacks of elitist excess.

"You don't want it to seem like you're doing it for all the wrong reasons," said David Tutera, a party planner in New York, who has been involved in parties with music stars.

But for the hipper breed of business mogul with the right connections the opportunity offers little but upside. Not only do they get the party of a lifetime, but they also gain a status symbol few can match. None of your friends are going to crow about scoring front-row seats for an Elton John concert, after all, if you had him perform at your birthday party.

"It can be seen as over the top when really the reason you hire a top entertainer is to give your guests a once-in-a-lifetime experience," Mr. Tutera said.

Several people familiar with such parties say that the largest market for them are baby boomers (or those born just before the boom) who are now well into their prime earning years and earning a lot. Unlike the Ridingers though, they are usually not looking to sign up the hottest young rapper on the scene. They want to mingle finally with the stars they grew up listening to on the radio in their Volkswagen Beetles.

For the corporate chieftain who once wore bellbottoms, what better way to confront a dread milestone birthday like 50 or 60?

WHEN David Bonderman, who runs an investment company in Fort Worth, turned 60 three years ago, he shelled out millions (newspapers reported anywhere from $6.75 million to more than $10 million) to lure no less than the Rolling Stones to jam for a few hundred guests at his party at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. (Representatives of Mr. Bonderman and the Stones declined to comment.)

When Wendy Walker Whitworth, the executive producer of "Larry King Live" on CNN, turned 50 two years ago, her husband, Ralph V. Whitworth, a financier, made sure his Beatles-loving wife would cross that threshold in memorable fashion. He hired Paul McCartney to play a surprise 19-song set for about 150 people at the Ranch Blues Club in San Diego. Sir Paul walked away with $1 million, which he donated to the Adopt-a-Minefield charity, a McCartney spokesman said, adding that Sir Paul's motives were strictly charitable and that he was generally not for hire for private events.

Elton John is also offering his services for charity as one of the extravagant gifts available in this year's Neiman Marcus holiday catalog. Sir Elton is promising to perform a 90-minute one-time-only private set for anyone willing to pony up $1.5 million, which he says he will donate to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The only stipulations are that the party take place in 2006 in the mainland United States, that it have a guest list of no more than 500 people and that it not be held for commercial purposes.

The British press has said that Sir Elton also performed at the wedding of Peter Shalson, a British financier, in London in 2001, but Fran Curtis, a spokeswoman for the singer, declined to confirm the gig. Nor would she discuss where another client, the Rolling Stones, made private appearances.

"For many reasons," Ms. Curtis explained in an e-mail message, " 'private concerts' are private."

Parties of this magnitude are rare enough to become international news sometimes in gossip columns. But patrons only slightly less well off are hiring celebrities nearly as famous, for fees nearly as extraordinary and doing so entirely out of public view, according to an agent whose job at a major talent agency in Los Angeles is to book stars for private parties.

The subject is so sensitive in the music industry that the agent spoke only on the condition that he and his agency not be identified, saying he feared alienating his clients. He said his agency has a roster of more than 80 entertainers available for such gigs. The majority of bookings are for corporate events, he said, but individual parties represent a small and growing portion of his business.

"It becomes a showoffy thing," the agent said.

People in the music industry say the lure of such work for performers is obvious: a big paycheck and an adoring crowd. Even rock stars who are concerned that they will appear venal or trivial if word gets out can be seduced by pay that can exceed $100,000 an hour. All they have to do is run through a series of familiar songs in front of a small crowd that feels honored just to stand in the same room with them. There is no fear of empty seats. There are no critics.

The willingness of rock stars to play private parties for business moguls is just an evolution of their increasing enthusiasm to perform at lucrative corporate events - which would have meant career suicide for rock acts in the 1960's - said Gary Bongiovanni, the editor in chief of Pollstar, a concert trade magazine. In recent years the stigma has all but evaporated, he said. "If the price is right," he said, "you just think you're in practice for an hour."

For acts well past their heyday private gigs can offer a lucrative way to wring new life out of old hits. Even KC and the Sunshine Band, which started churning out gold records when Carol Burnett ruled the television airwaves, can cost a party giver more than $100,000 once all the expenses are added up, said Mr. Marshall of Hank Lane Music, which has hired the band for events.

David E. Monn, an event planner in New York, who says that more than half of the private functions he has done lately have involved name entertainers, stressed that the artist's fee is usually only one of many expenses for the client. Stars "don't just come with themselves," he said. "They come with a brigade, from all over the world. "

Mr. Monn said for one party, "a big name," whom he declined to identify, came with 38 people, many of whom had to be flown in. Production costs alone were more than $200,000. "It's like buying a horse," he said. "The horse is the cheapest part. Feeding and caring for it, that's the most expensive thing."

While aging acts may bank most heavily on private gigs, young stars at the peak of their fame are hardly immune from temptation. In September, Ms. Aguilera appeared in gossip columns around the world after she sang at the wedding of Andrei Melnichenko, a Russian billionaire, on the Côte d'Azur for a sum said to be in excess of $1 million. (A spokeswoman for Ms. Aguilera would not discuss details of the wedding but confirmed that the singer had performed.)

Playing private parties has even become primetime entertainment. Last January MTV introduced "My Super Sweet 16," a reality show that takes viewers to lavish birthday celebrations for wealthy girls. In the show's first episode two friends in La Jolla, Calif., pressure the father of one of them to hire Ms. Knowles for their joint sweet 16 party at a Hard Rock Cafe. But confronted with an asking price of $500,000, the family decides to scale back and instead hires Unwritten Law, a local punk band.

Last May press reports in Britain said that Philip Green, whose company owns Top Shop and other stores, had hired Ms. Knowles and her group, Destiny's Child, to play his son's bar mitzvah. Ms. Knowles had been brought in, many accounts said, after Justin Timberlake accepted the gig but pulled out because he underwent throat surgery.

Ken Sunshine, a spokesman for Mr. Timberlake, denied those reports. "Justin never got invited and never, ever agreed to perform," he said. (Ms. Knowles confirmed to Vanity Fair that she did play a bar mitzvah in the South of France, but declined to discuss specifics. A spokeswoman for Mr. Green did not respond to a request for comment.) Mr. Sunshine points to Barbra Streisand, whom he has represented for years, as an example of how performers can improve their image by just saying no, even to enormous paychecks for minimal effort.

"You can only imagine how much money she's turned down for private parties over the years, and she's had a pretty good career," Mr. Sunshine said. For those who do agree to sell their services, he said, "there's definitely a cheese factor."