I play rochambeau with ghosts, take photos of space, and ride my bike in the bus lane.
What?! Two posts in two days? I just had to get all these photos up.
As I said in the previous, Losers Lounge is a great thing to do in New York City. Plenty of live video was shot. Catch them next week doing Joni Mitchell if you’re in the city!
What’s wrong with me? These photos are from February 13 and it took til now to put them up. If I’m going to be any kind of serious journalistic photographer, I have to get my stuff up faster. I also have photos of Losers Lounge from the Blondie Vs Pretenders show they did at Joe’s Pub, Thursday, March 5. I will get those up in the next day or two.
I’ve been going to Losers Lounge since the Fez shows in the early 1990s. Huffington Post did a full writeup on them last year so I won’t go into too much detail. Leader Joe McGinty does a live karaoke in Brooklyn and I’ve belted out a couple songs badly. I’ve seen them do Roxy Music, Neil Diamond, Heart, XTC, Beach Boys, Abba, BeeGees, Jackson 5, Elvis Costello, and probably a half dozen others. A few of the guest singers are friends of mine. Go see them if you get a chance! You will have a blast! They’re doing Joni Mitchell next week at Joe’s Pub.
This party at Lincoln Center has become a yearly thing around Valentine’s Day and it’s all 70s and 80s disco/funk. You can search for them on Youtube for full performances.
Catching my pal Deb Bowman sing at a local pub. She is going places! She’s doing a luxury cruise circuit for a year and a half after this. (Sorry my phone camera is so crappy.)
One of my favorite places in New York has to be Fat Cat. It’s a gigantic basement of games (pool, ping pong, scrabble, chess, shuffleboard) plus live jazz music all night long. A large percentage of the clientele is NYU students who don’t give a shit about the music but even so, the atmosphere is usually pretty crazy. The musicians might be jazz students or veterans hanging out late and playing with the kids. If you don’t like the games, have some beer or wine and just dig.
I saw a number of friends’ bands over the last couple of weeks and thought I’d give them all reviews and plugs.
Spanglish Fly, Feb 19, Rose, Brooklyn — I’ve known the leader of Spanglish Fly, trumpeter Jonathan Goldman, for about eight years as he played on the corporate softball team I coached. He led a New Orleans style jazz band for a few years, then lived in New Orleans for a few years and came back and formed this band. These guys are bringing back the boogaloo sounds of Spanish Harlem in the 1960s and 70s mixing mambo, soul, latin jazz, and funk typified by supergroups like the Fania All-Stars. They’re playing live a lot and are highly recommended! See link above for schedule.
Continue reading “February Live Music Reviews”
The SiP Lounge Christmas party was Saturday night during the blizzard. Snowstorm? (This is where I DJ most Thursdays.) The following happened during the party:
There are a lot of rooftop environments populated by after-work people in suits. Uli is punk rock even though he would say he isn’t.
I spent the weekend in Oak Hill which was a little subdued because half the family is under the weather and the weather is a little under itself. Spring comes two or three weeks later up here than in the city. It was my friends’ daughter’s fourth birthday and they had a swim party at a YMCA which was fun even though it’s really hard not to snark at basting and swimming in Clorox®.
We missed a wedding at the Twelve Tribes compound. The ceremony is said to be full of ritual reverance and divinity. Couples in the Tribe are not allowed to even kiss before they get married there although they may hold hands. I would hope they have elaborate forms of handsies and arm wrestling to go with the sweaty palms. The honeymoon suite near the creek gets lots of spring and summer action.
I’m going to try and come up to the Grey Fox bluegrass festival again this year. There’s an Irish music festival in nearby East Durham at the same time. The hills will ring of droney folk music while the people dance like chickens.
Crappy cell phone pictures are back. I’m back. Gonna put batteries back in my camera and kick some ass.
By the way, the last season of Battlestar Galactica is jumping the shark. I disagree with the prehistoric actor’s assessment of the newer version but I think the writer’s strike completely ruined the new stuff.
And I hope 24 jumps its 59th shark as soon as possible.
I believe I gave Jay his first writing job. He’s back since getting laid off of NBC. Check his blog out please.
Happy moms, happy babies…. Some friends on facebook commented on one of my earliest posts on this blog which dealt with orgasmic childbirth. Last week, ABC’s 20/20 finally ran their promised segment on it with a positive spin I’m happy to say.
If you have any questions on waterbirthing etc, see Judith’s website. Her photos are also featured on the orgasmic birth site.
One nice thing about living in New York is that you get to hang out with people like this once in a while…
Ladies and gents, Ms. Leslie Kritzer! DVD extra!! See the outtakes!!!11!!
Joe, Julie, Caiti, Cisco, Vince, me, Sandy, Mac, Guerneville, California
A year ago at this time, I was with my family in California celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, an achievement reserved for the few, the little bit crazy, the ever-loving lucky. Four of my siblings may also win this gold medal. This week my parents are celebrating their 51st so Happy Anniversary!
Nostalgia time! I can almost remember when I first learned “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” one of the ditties my parents taught the kids to sing in lieu of squabbling during trips to Arizona, Yosemite, and Utah. I thought it was the most hilarious and grand thing ever and how it was so great that “100 Bottles of Coke on the Wall” just didn’t sound right. That’s a lot of beer, I thought. What kind of weirdo puts 100 bottles of beer on a wall? Did my parents really sing this in college at parties all the way to zero and then start over? So easy to get with the program. Take one down! Pass it around!
We would all sing some rounds and then the older kids would get bored and drop out one by one and then the younger kids would sing it longer to show off how they could rock counting backwards. Finally, silence would break out in the car for a while until a smarty pants like me would start in with “A Million Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Good times. Are we there yet?