this was made by my 15 year old friend J_ but the actual performers are for reals and serious
And1: My only previous show with Tammy Hall was at Johnson Park in September, 2022 although I saw her recently at the Abdullah Ibrahim show in San Francisco:
Delbert Anderson, Rabiah Kabir Jon Lagunte
Nefesh Mountain
Levi. Brothers w LaBarberas, Rabiah Kabir
Lizzie No, Fumi Ben Ben Jordan, Beti Masnqo
…I was on hiatus while coaching hoops at Gunn:
Eight piano shows in eight days, three weeks from now
All three stages of Cali Ave night fair…April 18
more to come this spring lord willing and the creek don’t rise
and1:
Noa Levy doing Fields at The J:
thank you music writer and ukulele wizard Sylvie Simmons for a gift of a John Cohen photo book that included grandma Kerley Davis roaring River North Carolina 1961. Also available Getty image or at Smithsonian for $.99 Lord willing in the creek don’t rise….
https://folkways.si.edu/pearly-grandma-davis/its-these-hard-times/old-time/music/track/smithsonian
I ran for Palo Alto City Council three consecutive times, 2009-2014 and garnered more than 8,000 votes cumulatively while spending less that $2,000 combined. I am, arguably, the most popular local pol on a cost basis (although I still describe my self as “dissent” rather than leadership).
Pete Dixon, who I met twice on the campaign trail, got 7,538 votes while spending $4m of his or a superPAC budget to replace Anna Eshoo (and Joe Simitian and Sam Liccardo will run off in November).
So Pete the former marine, who we know a lot about for his commercials during the 49ers game spent $5,000 per vote; I spent, if you do the math, two bits.
So I am two thousand times more electable than him on a cost basis. That is the difference, of course between a billionaire and a millionaire or between a millionaire and the regular person.
I respect that he served our country or has a better answer to Hamas the terrorist group than most of the candidates. But it still seems like — and I asked him something very near this — he is a rich guy trying to compensate for life’s disappointments by throwing daddy’s bucks at it or us or the mirror.
(I asked him, when he said his younger brother was the quarterback for Princeton, what it was like to be outclassed by his sibling…)
I repeated a version of this to Mary Hughes who is the life partner of Joe Simitian, in between sips of a vanilla milkshake and she laughed and said she’s thinking what I’m thinking and saying but cannot say such. Speak friend and enter is what Tolkien said.
Makes me wonder what Alex Dixon is working on.
(Also reminds me of my Dartmouth school mates Brian Joseph Stretch a former USA, Colin Stretch of counsel for FB, and Tim Stretch the black sheep who flew fighter jets and is a reserve commander. Go, Cats, go big green — and I think I wrote about Vic Goering of the 1944 Dartmouth basketball champs who I interviewed at the end of his life, in Philadelphia or Camden NJ in 2004….sic transit gloria or brother can you spare a billion or trillion dimes?
and1: I saw Ben Clements in the news, about Donald Trump and SCOTUS. Ben argues that now Congress can vote on whether Trump’s criminal indictment could keep him from being seated as president. Why do Americans want a gangster capitalist as our leader?
when Harry Hillman started this book he was a normal person, a young person, the handwritten log of races, results, and prizes; Winnie finished this book he was immortal— an Olympic champion and Ivy League coach. Settled. Immortal in the sense that I am talking about him 100 and pause 20 years later— the book survives him it gives life to him as Shakespeare once said. And the Internet preserves him. And this blog post.
I certainly did not know Harry Hillman he died in 1946; had a corresponded with his protégé Dr. Donald Burnham, who was one of only two dartmouth, national champions and athletics; Burnham won the mile; he was not an Olympian, because the war World War II got in the wat; he was a navy psychiatrist at Bethesda and hissed Orion for his tribe. The dartmouth athletics. he sent me a list named more than 20 of his generation or between the 1920s to the 1950s. Coincidentally I met at least a classmate of Adam Nelson 97 last night man named Schmid, who was a rugby player. He’s an attorney and a father and a husband. More well-rounded than jockey by dartmouth standards I’m sure. I was a sports writer not an athlete for dartmouth standards. I drink with rugby players and my parents hosted them on spring tour. This was 40 years ago now. And I really digress from Hillman and Brooklyn 1900 or 1899 and then St. Louis Olympics 1904 three gold medals; and then 1906 a silver—- also remembero
| ETHAN IVERSON | MONDAY APRIL 1; TUESDAY, APRIL 2 |
| MARTA SANCHEZ | MONDAY, APRIL 1; 20 TUESDAY, APRIL 2; WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3; THURSDAY, APRIL 4; FRIDAY, APRIL 5 |
| DICK FREGULIA trio | THURSDAY, APRIL 4 |
| DICK CONTE trio | THURSDAY, APRIL 4 |
| MOTOKO HONDA group | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3 |
| TAMMY HALL | SATURDAY, APRIL 6; SUNDAY APRIL |
This is a screen shot of opening credits of “The Gay Divorce” which plays tonight thru Sunday at Stanford Theatre. When I attended “The Wizard of Oz” in December, I and hundreds bought our tickets under a sign that falsely accused Israel of war crimes, and is antisemitic. I accosted Patti the facility manager about leaving those signs intact and she claimed she was stumped on how to remove them, while getting her show going, her house opened, hew kernels popped. I said to cover them up, the offensive posters, and she did. Later a counter-person said she thought the signs were “cool”. I now think of that person as guilty of harassment. If she is there tonight I will tell her so.
In Berkeley last week, pro-Hamas hooligans broke down a closed door and shattered the window of a theatre, where an Israeli was speaking. The speaker and the event staff had to be evacuated by the police.
If you have opinions on how US should spend its foreign policy budget or chose its / our allies, that is great. The First Amendment of our constitution gives you the right to express yourself. And to vote. But that is distinct from shouting down speakers, harassing people who disagree with you, or targeting people because of how they look or what you know or think you know of their family heritage and religion. Ninety percent of what American protesters shout about Israel is false. Their intent is to suborn violence against American Jews, not to help women and children 7,000 miles from here.
Unless you are a former military commander, you don’t know jack shit about how to fight terrorists. You are a Nazi without thinking you are, if you are yelling “cease-fire”. Putin and Iran are high living themselves for their ability to manipulate you.
Zion Myers I am guessing is Jewish. The record shows he was born in SF and died at age 49. He is cousins with Mark Samdich – he may be my cousin, too.
The musical The Gay Divorce was based on the unproduced play An Adorable Adventure by J. Hartley Manners. The working title of the film was The Gay Divorce. According to a Jul 1934 NYT article, RKO changed the title to avoid censorship problems with the PCA. Modern sources contend, however, that the title change was instigated not by the Hays Office, but by RKO itself, which offered fifty dollars to any employee who could come up with a better title. In his autobiography, Fred Astaire claims that director Mark Sandrich told him that the title The Gay Divorcee was selected because the studio “thought it was a more attractive-sounding title, centered around a girl.” Modern sources claim that studio executives changed the word “divorce” to “divorcee” because, while they believed that a divorcee could be gay, a divorce could not. The original stage title was restored for British release prints.
Astaire, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore appeared in the Broadway production and recreated their roles for the film. Only one song from the stage musical, “Night and Day,” was used in the film. According to a Mar 1934 HR news item, RKO executive producer Pandro Berman approached Fox’s Roy Del Ruth to direct, but refused to pay Ruth’s $40,000 a picture salary. A HR news item announced that Sandrich filmed shots for the English countryside scenes in Clear Lake, CA, and RKO production files indicate that additional exteriors were shot in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, CA. According to a HR news item, Brandon Hurst was cast in the film, but his participation in the final film has not been confirmed. According to files contained in the MPAA/PCA files at the AMPAS Library, in a 22 Jun 1934 letter, James Wingate, Director of the Studio Relations Office of the MPAA/PCA, warned Berman that “considering the delicate nature of the subject upon which this script is based…great care should be taken in the scenes dealing with Mimi’s lingerie, and… no intimate article should be used.” Wingate added that the word co-respondent should be replaced with “something less pointed,” and insisted that none of the actors appear in pajamas in the film. In a 2 Jul 1934 letter, Wingate noted that the song title “Let’s K-nock K-nees” had been rejected by his office and suggested that the phrase also be delected from the lyrics. (It wasn’t). In a studio memorandum, music soundman Murray Spivack advised the producers that “due to censorship, it was necessary to change [the] lyrics to ‘Let’s K-nock K-nees,'” but added that because songwriters Mack Gordon and Harry Revel were busy working on a production at Paramount, another writer would have to be hired to do the rewrites. The identity of the songwriter has not been determined, but according to a 4 Aug 1934 letter from MPAA/PCA director Joseph I. Breen, the second chorus of “Let’s K-nock K-nees” was altered and approved “from the standpoint of the Production Code and censorship.” Breen cautioned in a 31 Jul 1934 letter that “the scenes having to do with Mimi’s skirt being caught in the locked trunk should all be handled with great care to avoid any objectionable exposure of her person.” Con Conrad and Herb Magidson won the first Academy Award for Best Song for their composition “The Continental.” (The song “The Carioca,” which was the big Astaire-Rogers number of RKO’s 1933 musical Flying Down to Rio, was also included in the balloting.) The film was nominated as Best Picture but lost to Columbia’s It Happened One Night. Other Academy Award nominations included Best Art Direction (Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark), Best Score (Max Steiner) and Best Sound Recording (Carl Dreher, head of RKO’s sound department).
Modern sources add the following information about the production: After the success of Flying Down to Rio, the first RKO film to team Rogers and Astaire, the studio planned a follow-up film, in which Rogers and Astaire would be the stars, called Radio City Revels. When RKO’s acting production head, Pandro Berman, suggested that The Gay Divorce, then a hit play on Broadway, be used as a follow-up to Radio City Revels, Lou Brock, who had produced Flying Down to Rio and was slated to produce the follow-up pictures, ridiculed the idea. Although Brock disliked the play and its libretto, which he thought was antequated, Berman went ahead and purchased the screen rights for $20,000 after seeing the play in London. Plans for Radio City Revels were eventually dropped, and Brock went on to produce another film, Down to Their Last Yacht, which had been considered briefly as a replacement for Radio City Revels. (In 1938, RKO made a film called Radio City Revels, but that film had no connection to the Astaire-Rogers project.) After Berman chose to produce The Gay Divorce himself, he asked Cole Porter to write new songs for the film but was turned down. Berman hired Mark Sandrich and then assigned Zion Myers, Sandrich’s cousin, to supervise the production. Before Flying Down to Rio had established itself as a hit, RKO considered hiring Claire Luce, Astaire’s stage co-star, to appear as “Mimi” in the film. When Astaire balked at the idea of casting Rogers, who he felt would not be right playing the refined English woman of the stage show, Berman supposedly offered him ten percent of the film’s profits as incentive to concede. The studio originally wanted Helen Broderick to play “Hortense,” but the actress was unavailable for the part.
According to Astaire’s autobiography, the cast “rehearsed for about six weeks on the dance routines, those tricky ones like ‘Night and Day’ and the table dance I brought from the stage show.” (Astaire at one point wanted to drop the “Night and Day” number from the film because he felt the song had been overexposed.) Choreographer Hermes Pan acted as a liaison between Astaire, who was adapting his stage choreography, and credited choreographer Dave Gould. While Pan planned the majority of the group choreography for the film, Gould worked on the cinematic aspects of the dancing, planning camera angles and creating the look of the choreography. As part of the film’s promotion, RKO organized “Continental” demonstrations and parties and encouraged dancing instructors and ballrooms to teach and highlight the dance. Although the film was a success, “The Continental” failed to catch on as a popular dance. However, Polglase and Clark’s set design in the “Continental” sequence reportedly caused an increase in the sales of venetian blinds.
Modern sources credit Ben Holmes as dialogue director, Hal Borne as Astaire’s rehearsal pianist, Mel Berns as makeup artist and Elizabeth McGaffey as researcher. In addition, modern sources credit actors George Davis and Alphonse Martel as French waiters. For more information about the Astaire-Rogers RKO films, see entry for Top Hat The local paper, inside the cover, has news of a suicide of a Gunn student. They gave her name. I will call her A_.
I doubt I knew her. I’ve met a lot of Gunn families in recent months.
The valedictorian of my class, John Neumann, suicided in 1984. He was in New York. He jumped from a tall building, part of the justice department. Some said there was a message there. The site of his death, and his final judgment. The Times Tribune wrote three or four stories about John. Ruthann Richter wrote most of them. I was a source, or I encouraged her to write about him. I’m sure friends of the deceased think that the story is more complex and nuanced than what makes the papers, in the case of John, in 1984, and of A_ in 2024.
The first story about John was spot news that said a 20 year old man from Palo Alto had died in New York City. We heard about it because a reporter from a daily in New York called us. I say “we” because I had just complete a 10 week stint at the Peninsula Times Tribune. I knew most of the editors and reporters. Also, I knew Ruthann personally because of her friendship with Karen Kaplan, Mort Kaplan’s daughter. I also, if you excuse the sidebar, remember playing tennis with Mort Kaplan in Hawaii, and he reported that he had a side ache or back ache, which impacted his play; it was later revealed to be cancer and he died from it.
I called Ruthann and said that John was a friend of mine, a basketball teammate and was number 1 in our class. I may have added that he was known as the “4 Point Oh Burnout” because he had perfect scores despite smoking a lot of pot. I used to get high with John and: Tim Hart
According to a news blast from NPR, more that 100,000 Michigan Demo voters marked their primary ballot “uncommitted” as a sign of support for the terrorist group Hamas who murdered 1,000 women and children in Israel on October 7, 2024 — sometimes stylized as 7/O — and they also cut off their tits, played hockey-sack with such.
This is what I call a “soft pogrom”. How much longer until there are similar attacks against Jews in America?
“Cease-fire” is dog whistle for condone the terrorists and kill more Jews (here).
I’ve experienced more antisemitism in the last 12 weeks than in the previous 12 years combined. Plus the gaslighting of little weird ambiguous things that happen. Yesterday at Books Inc the Black or mixed young female clerk was wearing the pro-Hamas scarf — like above in the picture – -so I would not make my $20 transaction for The New York Times, San Jose Mercury and SF Chronicle – plus The New Yorker which had an article on Thelma Golden of Studio Museum of Harlem – I digress but: I tried to host a Dartmouth press meeting reunion at Studio Museum of Harlem but we went to Becco’s instead; I met Thelma in Philly at Fabric Museum, she was barefootin’.
An older and white clerk perhaps noticed my misgiving and offered to help me at another register. Then at the San Ramon game a retired teacher started talking to us about his faith and made a point to single me out as a Jew but said he didn’t mean anything derogatory about it other than singling me out as a Jew. Because of my big nose and Curley hair of course. I forgot to wear my hat — although actually I was on bike before my ride came – so it was not ambiguous whether I had horns.
Stanford Theater reopens with a Fred Astaire series. I wonder if the clerk there who said she thought Hamas was “cool” will be there. Also, I wonder if there is a bureaucratic response to the fact that Stanford Theatre let the antisemitic posters around Christmas stay intact (and not covered) for three hours as 500 people filed in to see “Wizard of Oz”. Also, another digression I would hereby like to offer a big FUCK YOU to the law firm Gibson Dunn and its general partner Michael Celio who, when I inquired about whether or not the firm or its landlord had reported the vandalism and possible hate crime to police, rather than simply asking my question instead pivoted to a cover up and ad hominem by accusing me of harassing their female door-person (who apparently — or their are two of them.– wear head raps and are possibly Muslim — one of them did cooperate with me the Tuesday or Wednesday during the holidays and said she had cleaned up the wheat-paste broadside. She was fairly cooperative at first — I would say “warm” — in that she played with my dog, who is a great ambassador. I called the police when I saw this coming and so did Gibson Dunn. The police said that although I had legitimate business — and in fact, had a meeting with Chief Andrew Binder on the topic — they advised me to stay away from 310 University – which is at Bryant, and I live on Bryant. (Gibson Dunn I just realized, fact-checking my story from weeks ago, is announcing a Saudi Arabia office with severn attorneys – so their stance is clear –Arabs equal big money, fuck the Jews. In the middle east or if push comes to shove — or as Justice Holmes once wrote “You ability to swing a scimitar ends an inch from my dead bubba’s boobies”– here.
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Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 