SOUNDS: Lynyrd Skynyrd

Legendary rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd return to New York City for a CD Release Party and Concert at the Beacon Theatre on October 1.

Beyond the tragedy, the history, the raging guitars and the killer songs, ultimately, Lynyrd Skynyrd is about an indomitable will. About survival of spirit; unbowed, uniquely American, stubbornly resolute.

With their first set of new studio material since 2003's Vicious Cycle, the band returns with God & Guns, due out September 29 on Loud & Proud/Roadrunner Records. Recorded in Nashville in 2008-2009, the project was interrupted (but, tellingly, not ended) by the deaths of founding member/keyboardist Billy Powell and longtime bassist Ean Evans earlier this year.

Driven by core members Gary Rossington (guitar), Johnny Van Zant (vocals) and Rickey Medlocke (guitar), along with longtime drummer Michael Cartellone, Lynyrd Skynyrd have recorded an album ("under duress, as usual," according to Van Zant) that very much lives up to the legacy begun some 35 years ago in Jacksonville, Florida, and halted for a decade by the 1977 plane crash that killed three band members, including Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines. Since then, the band tragically lost Allen Collins, Leon Wilkeson and Huey Thomasson, yet they rock on.

With the passing of Powell and Evans, "a lot of people probably expected us to say enough is enough," admits Medlocke. But that would not be the way of this Rock & Roll Hall of Fame powerhouse. With a catalog of over 60 albums and sales beyond 30 million, Lynyrd Skynyrd remains a cultural icon that appeals to all generations, and God & Guns is a fitting addition to the canon. The Skynyrd Nation awaits.(source)

BOOK: Floodmarkers

out now...

Yom Kippur

David Isay/Sound Portraits produced this piece a while back. I'm posting it here in honor of Yom Kippur today. Hope they don't mind...

Almost every Friday at about 7:45 p.m., auxiliary police officer Joe Erber calls in "Ten-Six" (or "busy") to his dispatcher. He cruises over to West Market Street on the outskirts of downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, and strides into Ahavath Rayim, the last Orthodox synagogue in the state. Erber grabs a prayer shawl off the rack, kisses it, and drapes it over his police uniform. Then he makes his way to the pulpit and begins the services: Hebrew with a drawl. For years, Erber has served as the de facto rabbi of Ahavath Rayim, spiritual leader to a once-thriving congregation that has dwindled down to almost nothing.

It's a story that can be found in small communities throughout the South. At the turn of the century, Jewish immigrants poured into towns like Greenwood, seeking relief from the stifling tenement life up North. They arrived as peddlers, saved money, opened up stores. By the 1930s, Jews formed the backbone of the merchant class in hundreds of these towns. Soon after, though, young Jewish people began leaving, opting for the larger cities. By the early 1950s, this small-town Jewish exodus was in full swing. Today, the exodus nearly complete.

Note: For the first time in well over 100 years, it appears there will be no minyan in Greenwood, Mississippi, to celebrate the high holy days in 2001; there are now less than ten Jewish men over the age of thirteen in the area. If you or someone you know can help Congregation Ahavath Rayim make minyan this year, please e-mail Joe Erber at joe_erber@hotmail.com.

STAGE: Blind Lemon Blues

Playing now thru October 4: Blind Lemon Blues celebrates the legacy of Blind Lemon Jefferson and his profound influence upon the development of American popular music. Jefferson was a blind street musician, who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling country blues singer in America.

Blind Lemon Blues is set in New York City in 1948 at the last recording session of the legendary Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, and combines elements of traditional blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, doo-wop, and rap to evoke the enduring legacy of Blind Lemon and his contemporaries, Blind Willie Johnson, Lillian Glinn, Hattie Hudson, Bobbie Cadillac, Lillian Miller and Lead Belly himself. (source)

STAGE: The Confidence Man

Playing thru 9/26: Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man is a colorful tale of a con man aboard a riverboat (on the Mississippi River en route to New Orleans) in the mid-19th century. The story follows the protagonist as he charms and then cheats his fellow passengers. As disarmingly relevant today as it was in the 19th century, The Confidence Man begs the question: in whom may we safely place our confidence?

The Woodshed Collective’s production of The Confidence Man will be composed of a series of interwoven and simultaneously performed vignettes, and will evoke the whirlwind of both a riverboat journey and the everyday urban chaos of New York City. The audience will choose what to see and which character’s story to follow just as one selects which newspaper stories to read, which YouTube videos to screen, or which online links to click. By allowing audience members to immerse themselves in the experience, the production seeks to blur the line between performer and patron, reclaim confidence in the power of live theater, and leave the lingering impression that the audience members themselves may not be immune to the confidence man’s charms or cons. (source)

BOOK: New Stories From The South

OUT NOW: In the twenty-fourth volume of this distinguished anthology, Madison Smartt Bell chooses twenty-one distinctive pieces of short fiction to tell the story of the South as it is now. This is a South that is still recognizable but no longer predictable. As he says, "to the traditional black and white recipe (ever a tricky and volatile mixture) have been added new shades and strains from Asia and Central and South America and just about everywhere else on the shrinking globe." Just as Katrina brought out into the open all the voices of New Orleans, so the South is now many things, both a distinctive region and a place of rootlessness. It's these contradictions that Madison Smartt Bell has captured in this provocative and moving collection of stories.

Here you'll find the well-known—Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Spencer, Jill McCorkle—alongside those writers just making their debuts, in stories that show the South we always thought we knew, making itself over, and over. (source)

STAGE: Memphis The Musical

Previews begin today (9/23) at the Shubert Theatre for Memphis: TURN UP THAT DIAL! From the underground dance clubs of 1950s Memphis, Tennessee, by way of hit runs at the La Jolla Playhouse and Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, comes a hot new Broadway musical - inspired by actual events - with heart, soul and energy to burn. He's a young, white radio DJ named Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball), whose love of music transcends race lines and airwaves. She's a black singer named Felicia Farrell (Montego Glover), whose career is on the rise, but who can't break out of segregated clubs. When the two collaborate, her soulful music reaches radio audiences everywhere, and the Golden Era of early rock 'n' roll takes flight. But as things start to heat up, whether the world is really ready for their music - or their love - is put to the test. (source)

PHOTO: Robert Frank @ The Met

Robert Frank - Trolley - New Orleans 1955

Frank was not Southern but many of his photos, including the one above, were taken there.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans
September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010

	Learn more about a special one-day lecture and panel event.

This exhibition will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition will include a full set of contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series. (source)

SHOP: Alabama Chanin @ Barney's

Fashion's Night Out

September 10, 2009
6 - 8 pm

Alabama Chanin @ Barneys New York

Join Natalie and all of us @ Alabama Chanin for a night of music, beverages, dress-up, conversation, play and sewing on the 5th floor @

Barneys New York.
660 Madison Avenue

New York NY 10065

BOOK: Traveling With Pomegranates

"In this wise and intimate dual memoir, Georgia-native Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Lives of Bees) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, chronicle their travels together, and offer their distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself, and rediscover each other." (source)

Sue and Ann read from Pomegranates tonight at Barnes & Noble Union Square @ 7PM.

HAPPY LABOR DAY!!

St EOM's Pasaquan is open for visitors tomorrow (9/5)!

I built this place to have somethin' to identify with, cause there's nothin' that I see in this society that I identify with or desire to emulate.

Here I can be in my own world with my temples and designs and the spirit of God. I don't have nothin' against other people and their beliefs. I'm not askin' anybody to do my way or be my way.

Although, when I'm dead and gone, they'll follow like night follows day."

St. EOM to his biographer, Tom Patterson, 1985

Pasaquan is located in Buena Vista (bit east of Columbus, GA) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Eddie Owens Martin died at Pasaquan in 1986 but his legacy and visionary environment lives on. You can support this project by visiting, volunteering, joining the Pasaquan Preservation Society and/or buying a copy of "the book."

SCREEN: Gospel Hill - may be closing tonight @ Quad

From the Quad website: In the small town of Julia, the residents of the black neighborhood of Gospel are being forced out of their homes to make way for a multi-million dollar golf course development. Dr. Ron Palmer (Giancarlo Esposito), an influential black community leader is supporting the project. As the confrontations get hot, the residents remember when, 30 years ago, Peter Malcolm (Samuel Jackson) , a black civil rights activist, was assassinated. The black community is now looking to Malcolm's son John (Danny Glover) to lead the fight. He's haunted by his father's assassination and is hesitant despite the pushing from his outspoken wife Sarah (Angela Bassett). Getting in the middle of this fracas is the new teacher Rosie (Julia Stiles) who sides with the blacks. Meanwhile, John Malcolm begins to realize that the fight for equality didn't die with his father. His wife Sarah continues to stir things up and expose the corruption until John is thrust into the position he shared with his father thirty years ago. (Running time 1:39 )

BOOK: The Year Before The Flood (tonight @ B&N)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Musician, musicologist and longtime New York resident, Sublette revisits his Southern roots and recounts a 2004–2005 pre-Katrina research sojourn in New Orleans in this blunt, eloquently humane and musically astute memoir—a worthy companion to his acclaimed The World That Made New Orleans, a music-laden cultural history of the city to 1819. Sublette delves into some quintessential dynamics of modern American popular culture—including racism and poverty as well as restive imagination and invention—through the prism of his childhood in virulently segregated, early rock 'n' rolling Natchitoches, La., and the fraught but idiosyncratic culture he finds in pre-flood New Orleans. If discussions of Elvis, early rock 'n' roll and hip-hop millionaires straight out of New Orleans's projects inevitably rehearse familiar narratives, Sublette carefully marks them out as part of a larger personal and social landscape. Sublette's sensitivity to the precariousness of a system that collapsed completely after he returned to New York is more than mere hindsight; his worldview dovetails movingly with his turbulent and alluring subject and its dogged rebirth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See Sublette live tonight Wednesday September 02, 2009 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble -

2289 Broadway (@ 82nd St), New York, NY 10024, 212-362-8835

STAGE: OOHRAH!

(Set in NC) Ron is back from his third and final tour in Iraq, and his wife Sara is excited to restart their life together in their new home. When a young marine visits the family, life is turned upside down. Sara’s sister is swept off her feet; her daughter Lacey trades her dresses for combat boots, and Ron gets hungry for real military action.

In this disarmingly funny and candid drama, Bekah Brunstetter raises challenging questions about what it means when the military is woven into the fabric of a family, and service is far more than just a job. (source)

OOHRAH! is at Atlantic Stage 2, September 1 - 27, 2009.