inspiration: the ladies, leigh and heatherton

this morning i had the sudden urge to hear an old cy coleman/carolyn leigh tune: i've got your number.

i heard it for the first time years ago-- at the gym, if you can believe it. a cbs broadcast of "broadway under the starts" was cued up on the treadmill and before i could change the channel, i heard cheyenne jackson sing a few bars. the lyrics were what got me--sassy, fun, properly dated--i'm not sure if i was surprised they were written by a woman, but i was surprised that i'd never heard of carolyn leigh-- a native new yorker, member of the songwriter's hall of fame, and famous for "bringing class, sex, and wit to the Great American Songbook." "I've got your number" is not as well known as coleman/leigh's other hits ("witchcraft," "the best is yet to come") but it's surely my favorite.

i don't own a recording of it--i rely on youtube when i'm in the mood to listen to this one. it used to be that even the cheyenne jackson performance was hard to find--i'm happy it's not anymore. but i think i have a new favorite version, not so much for the singing, but for the groovy jazz dance she does about two minutes in.

presenting ms. joey heatheron:

happy friday...

inspiration: tonight you belong to me

"meet me at the turnstyle"

striding up and down park avenue, on a bright and brisk november morning, rocking out to this song, feeling like a real new york girl--well, i'm nowhere close to the tough and cool of debbie harry.
but then again, neither are these kids in the audience



(do you love the drummer? i do. also her blue dress)

here they are, sounding good live, at glasgow's apollo theatre.

see a fine ad: street magic

this ad is sweet.

(via mike/big filipino)

give a little spark...to my friends at sparkplug productions

my friend, rebekkah, and her theatre company have entered a competition to win free studio space at "space on white" in tribeca.
if you have a few minutes, please watch the video...i think it's a completely charming silent-screen piece (i love her face!) and it will really help their cause.




thank you!

hear a little song/the kids are alright

i think we need to liven up this dreary wednesday with a little west side story/bernstein mambo, courtesy of gustavo dudamel and venezuela's simon bolivar youth orchestra.

i first caught this on ovation in january--and it's on again now, which is what inspired me to share this today--and i could not contain myself. i was dancing around and applauding as if they could hear me.

a few notes: the musicians in the simon bolivar youth orchestra were trained in "el sistema"--a music program established in 1975 by the economist jose antonio abreu. it is a state funded program, which as of 2007 included 102 youth and 55 childrens orchestras. roughly 250,000 children participate, 90% of them from poor socio-economic backgrounds.

mr. dudamel himself learned to play the violin through el sistema--and eventually studied composition and conducting. he began conducting the youth orchestra at 15, was appointed its musical director within a few years.

in 2009, at the age of 26, he began his tenure as the musical director of the los angeles philharmonic.


(the nj all-state children's band, circa 1980, could offer up a solid version of macarthur park and the liberty bell. but we didn't sound like this.)




this is the finale, that made me go bananas! love everyone whooping it up at the end.

see a...something

what the whaaaat?

i am thunderstruck.

next up: a guest spot on private practice? because kate walsh has sure looked ready to devour him...

hear a little song: let my love open the door

my mom isn't a football fan but yesterday she watched the big game and cheered for my colts, which was nice and mom-ly of her.

just after halftime she called to offer a little encouragement and ask a few questions. the first was about downs and yardage. then she wanted the lowdown on drew brees--"he's cute. how old is he? is he married?" and the last (maybe my favorite question of the night): "who are these guys, the who? they're pretty good, but they're kinda old..."

they are, indeed.

i couldn't offer her much more--i didn't really have the heart to go into all the drama i learned from the "behind the music" special--i was distracted by the game. i never gravitated toward their sound, but my mom is kind of a "british rock" lady, after a fashion (eric clapton, dire straits) so she might like some of their songs. maybe she and i will have a listening party next time i'm home.

i'm more inclined toward this cover of the townsend tune, which might be a tad mellow for her.

but oh when the strings swell, i swoon.

hope you like...

how i spent my summer vacation (and the fall season, too)

as some of you know, i've spent a (very) good part of the last several months working on an online comedy series, called chaos theory. it's been live for about a month at phoebetv.com. so far the word is good! people seem to be finding it as funny as it was fun for us to shoot.

there are 11 episodes up now, and we'll be premiering a new one every tuesday for the the next few months. i'll likely be posting links here but there are plenty of ways, if you're so inclined, to keep up: become a fan on facebook, follow the show on twitter, sign up for email alerts, bookmark phoebetv...

and as of tonight, we're on youtube, though there are only a couple of videos up at the moment...

we also now have a little "bonus material" in the form of still photos (which i took) and a gag reel.

***

who doesn't love a gag reel? this one is funny and, dare i say, sweet?
i was hovering around behind the camera for almost every one of these bloopers, and i laugh just has hard now as i did then. and i sort of well up a bit, remembering how much fun it was.

lauren and casey (from city and the sex)

paul and lauren from office politics (one of my favorites)

rachel seducing paul (episode forthcoming!)

deleted scene from "dinner parties"--emily, eating chocolate cake that i picked up from sarge's deli...doug and kari on the couch--my couch.
the shoot was a nice distraction from that day's sporting news --nadal had just lost at the french. oof.

the blanketed fellow (with the dress shoes) disrupted the shot on lex but it was worth it, just to see his get-up ("homeless" episode forthcoming)...

check the bloopers on youtube or on the phoebetv site...

***

here are a few stills (MANY more on flickr or on the phoebetv site. and more to come).

cara (dinner parties)

rufus (dinner parties)

rehearsing the dance sequence (old married couple)

the dancers, after the shoot (old married couple)

assistant choreographer, gabrielle (old married couple)

mike, lauren (cupcake)

lauren and kenneth, who wowed us with his "crying" (cupcake)

lauren and all the stuff you need when you're getting over a bad breakup (jess grows a pair)

emily (jess grows a pair)

lauren (jess grows a pair)

casey, lauren, and jim (city and the sex)

jim and lauren, reliving the magic (city and the sex)

all photos © anita aguilar

thank you (george)

i've spent the last couple of hours sitting in our family room (the basement) with my dad, half-watching a college basketball game (sun devils vs. blue devils) and half-looking for a good thanksgiving poem to post. I had with me on the couch the thickest poetry book I could find –a good old norton anthology--but not even part of one, from yeats to baraka, seemed right.

admittedly, the ambiance i chose for this exercise wasn't really poetry-friendly (dick vitale's "alliterative commentaries,” even though i've heard them all before, are still pretty distracting).

i could have gone to my room, re-started the search in relative silence and with several other books to peruse. but i wanted more to just sit in a room with my dad, to be around in case something came up that we felt like chatting about. or he thought of a good joke. i decided to save the poetry for another time.

after both my parents called it a night, i got my second wind and started singing a favorite george harrison tune (remember, the family is asleep, so i can do this out loud) and it occurred to me that this song fits the giving/grateful theme as good as any poem. or maybe it’s late and i’m crazy. anyway, it’s where my heart is. hope you like it.




i’ve been on a george jag for the last couple of weeks so here’s one more. it's really quite good live.



happy thanksgiving.

hear a little song: lovely day

this song, lovely day (aka dan and liz's wedding song, and "the ricky ledée song"--hear it? loveledéeloveledéeloveledée love le-dée) is one of the most played on my ipod.

the bass line, and the cymbals? oh, those cymbals.

feeling blue? it might help.

and here's 30-more seconds of joy, via the gap khaki soul commercial, directed by hype williams and choreographed by fatima robinson.




i've spent part of the morning looking at the series of spots from this campaign--
will post more later...

tgtt (too good to title)

while searching for information about a "great teachers" event that i'm supposed to attend uptown on thursday, i found my way to the jazzman testifies, an article about one of my favorite teachers, professor robert g. o'meally. professor o'meally is the zora neale hurston professor of literature at columbia university and the founder of the university's center for jazz studies. it's fair to say that barnard and columbia had its share of celebrated professors, some who strutted through bi-weekly lectures and others whose amazing dullness belied their stellar scholarly reputation.

but professor o'meally was of a different class. the kind of person who made you relax, but also sit up straight. he was smooth--quietly elegant in every manner, from the way he dressed to the way he addressed us. his lectures were instructive of course, but he seemed to want more to guide and inspire conversation. the class wasn't merely about listening to music-- it was about a culture that was alive. and he presented it with an urgency and earnestness. if you listen to this npr interview, "the intersection of jazz and social protest," conducted by farai chideya in 2008, you'll have an idea of what he's like.

i remember how well he listened--leaning in, ear-first, sometimes nodding, as if we were musicians trading fours. i loved that he often said "agreed!" instead of "yes!" (for a time i tried to adopt that exclamation as an o'meally homage.) i don't know how much i excelled in that class, but i felt encouraged in the inquiries i attempted (not surprisingly, sometimes about sports and photography and improvisation).

***

i've spent that last couple of nights looking though my notebook (yes, i still have it. and boy, was my handwriting nice back then). i'll need to refer back to the texts for a proper de-coding of some. i do wish i had taken better notes about the music that he played for every class intro.

t.g.t.t. (too good to title), performed by alice babs, one of duke ellington's favorite singers, has been a favorite since he played it for us (unfortunately, i don't seem to be able to find a link with the full track). so, too, with heaven which ellington wrote expressly for her. i teared up the first time i heard it--and i still can't comprehend the notes she hits for this number. she may be just a touch off in the live recording. sadder to me is this video doesn't show the full performance of johnny hodges on alto sax. you can hear him on the cd recording of the second sacred concert.

"stop being a baby"

i am not really going to sit here before you and start bleating about work because a) it is work (and "work is good") and b) there's really nothing SO bad about it that would be worth going into with you tonight (i.e. "no one will die" except maybe me, a little bit, inside, every day until this project ends).

but let's just say, of late, what has transpired between the hours between 9:30 and 6:30...and then 7:30 to midnight has left me dumbstuck and directionless. i'm doing my best to hoop-jump and juggle but i'm losing my footing and my grip. everyone is unsatisfied, including me.

i''ll be working from home the rest of the night. that's not too bad a thing. 30 rock will be on later...and i can listen to music all night too.

in lieu of a happy pill, i'll be listening to happy music...

how about some english beat? some special beat service?

***
my sister wore deep grooves into one track on the lp :"i confess." i don't think I fully appreciated that ultra cool song at the time, in part because it was hers. if i was gonna like the english beat at all, i needed my own songs. the sweet "tears of a clown" and the frenzied "sole salvation" were really the only two tracks i bothered with.

but in listening to "the best of" on the ipod, i've discovered the charms of others.

especially "best friend." this brings out the teenager in me.



how about saxa in this video? love him...



and this is sweet:



***
finally...back to "sole salvation." i fell in love with the tempo changes, the bass, the horns... but i have never really known the lyrics (except "we never feel the power of our own hands...do it right, do it now here there everywhere shouting out i'm as mad as hell...stop being a baby!...stop! ... have a heart but don't take mine" and something later on about "a woman's understanding." and obviously, "sole salvation"). i just dance around to it.

but it turns out there are a hell of a lot of words in between, so many more than i could have imagined, so this little video was informative AND entertaining. love that the producer even added caveats about spelling, technical credits and citations.

enjoy! (and i'll stop being a baby)

"too hot" (and read a good poem/wild for my melon toddie)

i like the groove of the original track but this live version is fun...

i've been spending most of these last few dog days indoors, practicing my picture-taking, summer cleaning, and reading "hot, flat, and crowded"-- which i thought would be the super-clever title of a post that i planned to write from (or about our family trip to) the philippines. but it was really not so very hot there at all. and it was not really so very crowded as, at least for the first week, we were virtually the only guests at a sprawling golf resort...

the pool at malarayat golf resort...july 2009...

i did make it out to greenpoint on saturday to share some birthday cheer with my friend, reid, aka "rad reid," a bona fide philly soul if there ever was one. i indulged in a few refreshing servings of watermelon soaked in vodka. sweet! and no hangover. though i did have a crazy two-part dream that involved one very handsome writer/editor friend...and i woke up with my bedsheet wrapped around me like a toga...

***
in the spirit of that melon "toddie," i'll share a poem from virginia hamilton adair.
i've re-printed one of her poems here once before and i'll happily re-link to the pbs online newshour interview that introduced me to her work. enjoy.

Ants on the Melon

Once when our blacktop city

was still a topsoil town

we carried to Formicopolis

a cantaloupe rind to share

and stooped to plop it down

in their populous Times Square

at the subway of the ants

and saw that hemisphere

blacken and rise and dance

with antmen out of hand

wild for their melon toddies

just like our world next year

no place to step or stand

except on bodies.

the road, and ruby blue

one of the highlights of my last weekend was hanging out at my sister's house, sifting though her piles of design and fashion magazines (fell in love with a spread of stella tennant in damascus):

photos of stella tennant, photographed by tom craig, which appear in the may 2009 print edition, via vogue.co.uk.

(see the behind-the-scenes video from the shoot here...)

and then, she caught me up on SYTYCD?! i do love that show, but i missed the first few episodes of this season and never managed to catch up. it's a lot of hours of programming every week. but my sister is a brilliant curator, and i trust her to show me only the best of the best dances. i finally got to see the mia michaels "addiction" routine . and there was a great disco routine, which she said reminded her of me. which i thought was highly flattering-- have i missed my calling? disco dancer? we did laugh that if it involves some crazy head shaking and ass shaking, i could probably pull it off. but what i would LOVE to be able to do, which is really pretty far beyond me is this:



SO fun...

summer fling: phoenix

i'm having a summer fling with this song.




i have no idea what they are saying. ("gentleman only"? lisztomania? the film?) but does it matter? it just makes me feel so good when i hear it. i'm not going to think much beyond that.

(fling, remember?)

i have a thing for the gentle groove in this one too. (i'm going to totally date myself by asking if anyone else hears a little leo sayer goin' on here?)

surfer girl

in a few days, i head over to the mother-island--the philippines-- for two weeks.

and i'm flipping out a little.
think it's the 22 hour flight?
or, manila's real feel temperature of...114.8?
the 83% humidity?

hell no. i can't worry about that til TUESDAY.

it's all the work i have to do from now til then.
hooray!
(is it possible to feel your hair graying?)

but you know what? i've got a nice glass of white wine, some nice beach-y music on, and so far tonight i've been surprisingly productive. i feel like i can go for a few more hours.

and...here are a few of the many tunes that will keep me going...

"roda" (try not snapping your hips to this one)

"batucada"

and 2 versions of "wave":

the first is the sergio mendes version, and then a very nice jobim...

"just catch the wave don't be afraid of loving me"






***
and because tom jobim's lyrics are so beautiful, here's the translation:


so close your eyes
for that's a lovely way to be
aware of things your heart alone was meant to see
the fundamental loneliness goes whenever two can dream a dream together

you can't deny
don 't try to fight the rising sea
don't fight the moon, the stars above and don't fight me
the fundamental loneliness goes whenever two can dream a dream together

when I saw you first the time was half past three
when your eyes met mine it was eternity
by now we know
the wave is on its way to be
just catch the wave don't be afraid of loving me
the fundamental loneliness goes whenever two can dream a dream together

the way you make me feel (a cappella)

this track is too fun not to share. this a cappella version came out right around my freshman year of college. for a long time, it was only available on the bad cassette. yeah the cassette. my best friend, katie, and i played it all the time, and searched high and low for it in a format that wouldn't require rewinding, and rewinding, and rewinding. (plus, back then, you were wise to have back-up copy of your favorite songs, a pristine record or multiple copies of the tape.)

i still haven't seen it on any cd, but i'm sure its available somehow, somewhere.

enjoy.

michael jackson: never can say goodbye

friends have been sharing, via facebook and twitter and text, sadness over michael jackson's death at the too young age of 50. and friends who i share a long history with remember me as someone who was crazy enough to collect--and save--all the billboard magazines that chronicled the record-breaking sales and accolades for "thriller" and spend hours learning the choreography from all the "thriller" videos (and then actually perform them for people! ha) and they are sending nice notes to me, thinking that i would be devastated. but i have been sad about him--and for him--for years. he seemed so very soul-sick...

his exceeding strangeness nearly soured me on the music--but so much of it is too good to try to forget, isn't it? "off the wall," is in regular rotation here at home (more than "thriller") and since re-discovering the jacksons' "triumph" a couple of years ago, i've been playing that a lot too. i cue it up on the ipod just about every other day. maybe you've seen me dancing in the streets to lovely one? can you feel it? and this lesser known, but great disco track? it's a real pick-me-up on a slow day:



***
someone posed the question once of "my favorite jackson 5 song." so many good ones, got to be there...who's loving you...

but mine is, without question, never can say goodbye.

i love how he breaks it down at the end of the album recording--the way he sings "don't wanna let you go-oh..." "ooh ooh baay-be..." and "no no no, oooh aaw..."

this version doesn't quite have the same yearning, but the early performances are always worth a look.




remember the time, indeed...

read a good poem, or hear one read by nadal and fed

I found this 2008 wimbledon video of roger federer and rafael nadal reading kipling's "IF," via a post by thomas lin, on the straight sets blog, on the nytimes.com.

tonight i will be heading out to jla studios in dumbo for something called the gelf's varsity letters sports reading series--si tennis authority and tennis mag contributor l. jon wertheim be there to chat about his book, strokes of genius: federer, nadal, and the greatest match ever played.

IF you don't already have plans, i suggest heading out there. it's a great lineup of writers, and brooklyn is beautiful in the rain.

***
IF

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling