Critical Exponent

The months of painstaking work and artistic obsession have come to fruition. Knox’s art show, whichever stone you lift–, finally opened. If you’re in Boston, check it out at the Brookline Arts Center.

And if you’re not in Boston, get in touch. We’d love to take this show on the road.

Cumulative advantage, a.k.a positive feedback.

An interesting read from Salon. I don’t follow Oprah or her reading list, but a lot of the facile self-help, intellectual laziness, and emotional insularity described in this article jibes with anecdotal observations of prominent aspects of popular culture. Whether this is a new trend is debatable; self-improvement has always been a part of the national ethos, and is often made to sound easier or more effortless than it truly is.

She wanted to turn the world into a giant dance floor, and that she did. Madonna had everyone rocking as she packed the Garden on the first Boston show of her Confessions Tour. “C’mon, Boston, let me see you dance!”

The show included everything from riding crops to disco-ball-style crosses, from parkour to roller skates. She mixed some old favorites with new hits, and threw some social messages into the mix: celebration of gay love, impatience with demagogues, a call for help with the AIDS crisis in Africa. Our seats were great: up in the first balcony, we had a commanding view of the entire stage, but could see quite a lot of detail thanks to the powerful birding binoculars we made sure to bring. There are few things as frustrating as not being able to make out the performer’s face in your line of sight and having to rely on the Jumbotrons…

Madonna is as energetic as ever, though the most extreme stunts were carried out by her oh-so-fit backup dancers. Knox and I decided that would be a perfectly suitable second career choice for us, but perhaps we have further to go than we like to admit. You see, there was nary a teenager in sight. The audience were all people who had grown up with Madge, folks ranging from their late twenties into (gulp!) middle age. Though we may not all have three nannies, an assistant, and a driver and a jet, we did our best to keep up with the dancing dervish.

Disappointed as we were that the Garden was not playing warm-up Madonna music as we waited for the show to begin, all was made right when we left and walked along Canal Street: all the bars had her hits blaring to lure in the concert-goers. “What the hell!” we said, and went in to one. As Knox downed a beer, I danced and vogued and boogied-woogied to end my fabulous Madonna evening. She, I’m sure, was well on her way back to New York by then.

UPDATE: This is the second Madonna concert I’ve attended; the first was the Reinvention Tour. Rebecca Traister at Salon does a good job of describing what it feels like to see Madge in concert for the first time as an adult.

Today is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust remembrance day.

Honor the fallen by taking action against today’s genocides and urging others to do the same.

Listen to Pink’s new song, Dear Mr. President.

Willie Nelson does Brokeback. (audio, lyrics, Reuters story)

In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., here’s an annotated version of his “I have a dream” speech, highlighting Judaic references.

Credits

Knox was sweet enough to get me the new Madonna CD last night. So far, Confessions on a Dance Floor strikes me as, well, disappointing. The first track, “Hung Up”, is catchy and danceable. But the other tracks? They’re just not getting me.

It pains me to admit this, since I am a big Madonna fan and have been since I first heard “Like a prayer.” I’ve consistently liked her albums, even if some songs here and there took a while to become familiar and likable.

Maybe this album will grow on me, too.

The Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and West Roxbury once hosted thriving Jewish communities. The people there were mainly orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who immigrated in the late 1800s and moved to the area from their first Boston homes in the tenements of the North End. This southward displacement criss-crossed that of earlier Jewish immigrants from Western Europe who, having reached middle class, were already moving from their homes in the then-South End to Brookline and Newton.

Knox and I learned all this today as we were biking around the city with Dick, a guy we met through the folks at Hub on Wheels, who is also interested in designing a bike tour of Jewish Boston. Dick has already thought a lot about what such a tour would include, and today was all about going to see the sites on his list.

It’s amazing how much history one can glean if one looks in the right place. These neighborhoods are currently populated by working-class African-American communities. Many of the churches, however, were once synagogues, and magen Davids and menorahs still adorn the façades. Hebrew schools have found new life as parochial schools or community centers. The G & G Delicatessen, once the hub of neighborhood life and local politics, is now a hardware store, yet its old name is still laid out in a floor mosaic at the entrance.

I’m just beginning to learn about this whole topic; at the moment I’m working my way through Hillel Levine’s and Lawrence Harmon’s The Death of An American Jewish Community: A tragedy of Good Intentions, a book that appears to lay blame for the fragmentation of the Jewish neighborhoods on the notorious policy of redlining and unscrupulous practices by some real-estate brokers. I’d also like to read Gerald Gamm’s Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed for a different take on the same subject.

If you have any ideas for sites and history we can include in this bike ride– and particularly if you can recollect what Jewish life was like in these neighborhoods– we’d love to hear from you.