maren

Thanks for the Gottschalk reference, Muskrat Ramble! I actually played a number of his pieces as a piano student in college (and used them for "atmosphere" in a production of a play set in 1898 for which I was the musical director) but I never knew all this about his background.

Very true. The culture has to be elevated; the attitudes need to be elevated; the expectations need to be elevated. And possibly the minimum wage and employment options, too...

Maren.jpg: There IS a certain resemblance, but it's a few years since I've hennaed my hair to that shade...

Look HERE, Peter -- there are all kinds of Indian groceries in Philly! (I myself happen to live 4 blocks away from a hotbed of Indian groceries and restaurants here in NYC.) I've given the Julie Sahni book as a birthday present -- at the time it was only out in hardcover, absolutely lovely -- and cost more than I would spend on myself! I've gotten lots of great crowd-pleasing meals out of the Jaffrey.

Maybe it will help return me to the good graces of Deus62 ! A lot of the above I had already known, but not the World's Fair story, nor the extent of Still's apprenticeship with W.C. Handy. Kind of a mirror image of bluesForBartok's suggestion of Still's influence as an avant-gardist on Herbie Hancock et al. A bio I read somewhere said Still's mother was very upset when he went to work with Handy -- she had raised him to play violin, on a steady diet of 19th century European classical music. [some parallels to another African-American 20th century "classical" composer, Ulysses Kay -- whose uncle strongly encouraged him to pursue that "legitimate" vein of music -- let's see, his uncle's name was, it's coming to me -- KING OLIVER!]

I've heard his "Suite for Violin and Piano" (at a Juilliard violinist's senior recital, exciting) but no recordings. I've been aware of him as "the dean of African-American composers" -- he: studied, played with and arranged for W.C. Handy (1916-21) and then studied with Varese (1923) premier of his Symphony in G was conducted by Leopold Stokowski in 1937 (off-the-wall segue: I just recently saw that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he flings his ears back and stalks to the podium, with the audience murmuring "Leopold! Leopold!") did a lot of scoring/composing/orchestrating for radio, films (Stormy Weather, Pennies From Heaven, Lost Horizons) and TV (Perry Mason, Gunsmoke) He also wrote theme music for the 1939 World's Fair (where this picture of Still and Handy is from): BUT From: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sgo/start.html

I'd recommend starting with Madhur Jaffrey's "An Invitation to Indian Cooking" It should be easy to get in paperback. She has a bunch of books out -- this one is GREAT (I also have her "World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking" but am not crazy about it). Anyway, "Invitation to Indian Cooking" is very easy to follow, has tons of recipes, tells you where to get ingredients and what to substitute if you can't. (In my experience, once you get used to making a few dishes, you could try cutting back on the amount of oil the recipes call for -- I pretty much get by with HALF.)

Uh-oh...

For today's bar mitzvah boy:

Very sorry for your loss -- your mother is surely reflected and lives on in the strong and loving connections between you, your wife and your father. My thoughts are with you all.

What is this plug-in model? Not battery-powered???

Maybe John Lennon was wrong after all.... But at least Galileo was right...

I guess sisterhood IS powerful, because here's what happens when the contest is one-on-one!

I was expecting something more like THIS...

Berigan, that story ranks right up there with this blast from the past:

Oh. My. God.

Tom, all my thoughts, prayers and wishes are with all of you.

Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle!

Can't decide whether this is TOTALLY depressing, or uplifting in a misery-loves-company or sour-grapes ("who wants commercial success, anyway?") kind of way, but: YOU CAN HAVE THE TOP THREE SINGLES OF THE YEAR AND STILL GET CANNED!

Fanny Blankers-Koen, Star of '48 Olympics, Dies at 85 By Frank Litsky, New York Times, January 26, 2004 Fanny Blankers-Koen, a Dutch housewife who emulated her hero, Jesse Owens, and won four gold medals in track and field in one Olympics — the only woman to do so — died yesterday in Amsterdam. She was 85. The International Association of Athletics Federations, which oversees track and field, announced her death on its Web site. Her daughter, Fanny, said she had had serious heart problems over the past several years, Reuters reported, and the track and field federation said she also had Alzheimer's disease. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 18-year-old Francina Elsje Koen (pronounced COON) finished fifth in the women's 4x100-meter relay and sixth in the high jump. Her most memorable moment came, however, when she got the autograph of Owens, the American sprinter who won four gold medals. The 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled because of World War II. In 1940, Koen married her coach, Jan Blankers, 12 years her senior, and by the time the 1948 London Olympics arrived, they were raising a son, Jan, and a daughter, Fanny. Blankers-Koen held or shared six world records — in the 100-meter dash, 80-meter hurdles, high jump, long jump, 4x100 relay and 4x400 relay — but she was 30 years old. No woman in Olympic track that year was older. At the time, elite track and field was still an amateur sport. She trained only two hours a day, twice a week, and in the winter only on Saturday afternoons. She pedaled to practice with her two children in a bicycle basket behind her. They would build sand castles in the dirt high-jump pit while she worked out. Her track career upset people. "I got very many bad letters, people writing that I must stay home with my children and that I should not be allowed to run on a track with — how do you say it? — short trousers," she said in The New York Times in 1982. "But I was a good mother. I had no time for much besides my house chores and training, and when I went shopping it was only to buy food for the family and never to buy dresses. "One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children. When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said, `I show you.' " She did. In the 1948 London Olympics, the 5-foot-9, 140-pound Blankers-Koen won four of the nine track and field events for women. First came the 100 meters in 11.9 seconds. Then the 80-meter hurdles in 11.2 seconds, an Olympic record, though she had to survive a three-way photo finish and a huge scare. For many minutes, the judges examined the finish photo. When the band struck up "God Save the King," she thought it meant that an English rival had won. Instead, the music marked the arrival of King George VI, and moments later Blankers-Koen learned that she had won. Next came the 200 meters and more painful moments. Before the semifinals, she told her husband she was nervous and wanted to quit the Olympics because of the pressure. "Two Olympic medals is enough," she said. Years later, her husband remembered in The Times: "I had to talk much. There is only one chance in your life that you can perhaps win three gold medals, and that's the chance that you will take." She cried, then won the 200 final by 7 yards, the widest margin ever in an Olympics, in 24.4 seconds. Then, in the 4x100-meter relay, she took the baton for the anchor leg in fourth place, 5 yards behind the leader, and won a photo finish in 47.5 seconds. In seven days, she ran 11 races and won them all. When she returned to Amsterdam, she was driven through crowded streets in an open carriage drawn by four white horses. The celebration almost equaled the one held when the city was liberated from German occupation. Queen Juliana made her a knight in the Order of Orange Nassau. Neighbors gave her a bicycle so she wouldn't have to run so much. "I didn't know the Dutch people were so interested in track," she said in The Times. "They never came to any of our meets." She was born on a 62-acre farm outside the Dutch village of Baarn, the only daughter of a well-off father who became a government inspector. When she started track at age 15, she was already a good swimmer. The pool director soon told her she had to choose one sport. She chose track, and by 17 she had broken her first national record. Blankers-Koen kept running after the 1948 Olympics. She won three gold medals in the 1950 European championships and, despite painful boils on a leg, she ran the 80-meter hurdles in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. She became dizzy from medication, tripped on a hurdle and dropped out of the race. In 1955, she retired from track but kept in shape with running, swimming, cycling and tennis. Her husband died in 1977. She remained a national hero. When she was 64, her son said in The Times: "I remember when I was growing up, there were always so many people greeting my mother on the street that I was embarrassed. I'd walk five paces behind her. I don't have that feeling anymore, but I still walk five paces behind her. That's because she walks so fast. Mother still goes everywhere in a hurry.”

And this, written last fall about her retrospective:

From the New York Times:

Tee-hee!

January 27 through February 1 at the Village Vanguard, NYC.