Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party is back for a return engagement (photo by Jacob Burckhardt)
GARDEN PARTY
Douglas Dunn Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts., third floor
September 6-10, $20 floor cushions, $25 chairs www.douglasdunndance.com
This past April, Douglas Dunn + Dancers presented the world premiere of Garden Party at the company’s third-floor Soho loft studio. The sixty-minute piece is now returning for an encore run September 6-10; tickets are $20 for floor cushions or $25 for a chair.
Longtime Dunn collaborator Mimi Gross designed the colorful costumes and scenery, bathing the space in lushly painted trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling and a long horizontal mirror covered with pink, yellow, and green flowers, plants, trees, clouds, raindrops, and other natural elements. The work is performed by Dunn, Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, Grazia Della-Terza, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Paul Singh, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Timothy Ward, and Christopher Williams, with lighting and projections by Lauren Parrish, sound by Jacob Burckhardt, and preshow live music by guitarist and composer Tosh Sheridan.
The soundtrack consists of pop and classical tunes (Robert de Visée, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bach, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, more), birdsong, and poetry (by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Molière, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton, Stephanie Jacco, and others, read by Dunn, Waldman, Jacco, and Della-Terza). In an April twi-ny talk, Dunn noted, “The feel of this evening was clear to me the day the title hit me (about three years ago, the pandemic postponing the project). The lavish beauty of Mimi’s set completely fulfills my initial intuition . . . as if she’d read my dancing mind.”
Tickets are limited; the show sold out its April premiere, so don’t hesitate if you want to be part of this intimate experience.
“There is no longer any scent of what was. Thankfully, though, there is Barbara G. Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain,” journalist and author Dan Barry writes in the foreword to Barbara Mensch’s latest photography book, A Falling-Off Place (Fordham University Press, September 5, $39.95). “She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city’s inexorable evolution, the obliteration of the past by gentrification, the irreversible dominion of profit over preservation.”
The Brooklyn-born Mensch initially took up drawing and worked as an illustrator at Ms. magazine after graduating from Hunter College. She soon found that photography was her calling, documenting a changing New York City. She has spent nearly fifty years using a Polaroid SX70, a Rolleiflex, and now an iPhone, focusing primarily on Lower Manhattan. During the pandemic, she looked through her archive of unlabeled boxes of photos and gathered together black-and-white shots of the Fulton Fish Market, Chinatown, Peck Slip, and the Bowery, of demolition and decay, of a different era. She added shots of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy to construct a powerful narrative.
“They became my personal visual timeline,” she writes in the introduction to the book, a follow-up to 2007’s South Street and 2018’s In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Creators. “What did the passages of decades reveal to me? What dynamics were at play in my images of the same streets that I walked repeatedly for years? What fell off as the old was swept away by the new?”
A Falling-Off Place is divided into three chronological sections: “the 1980s: making a living on the waterfront,” “the 1990s: setting the stage for a real estate boom / fires, floods, and neglect,” and “the new millennium: managing change / anxiety, optimism, and the uncertainty of historic preservation.” There are photos of the old Paris Bar, a dilapidated section of the FDR Drive, the Beekman Dock icehouse, and Pier 17 being torn down, along with portraits of such characters as Mikey the Watchman, Mombo, Vinny, and Bobby G., supplemented with quotes from Jane Jacobs, fishmongers, a retired boxer, and Robert Moses.
Many of the photos can also be seen in Mensch’s site-specific permanent installation, “The Nobility of Work,” in the restored and rehabilitated Tin Building on South St., which was originally built in 1907 on the space where the Fulton Fish Market began in 1835. The market moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005; the new Tin Building, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary in September, was commissioned by the Howard Hughes Corporation and features a 53,000-square-foot high-end food court and marketplace run by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
On September 6, Mensch will be at the powerHouse Arena, in conversation with culinary documentarian Daniel Milder (Chef’s Table,Street Food Asia); she will also be leading an Untapped Cities tour on October 7. Below she discusses living downtown, being a woman in what was a man’s world, upcoming projects, and more.
twi-ny: When you first began photographing at the Fulton Fish Market, the men there were suspicious that you might be a government plant. What was that like?
barbara mensch: Well, what can I say? When I first began taking photos in the early 1980s, it was horrible. I would be taking photos and lo and behold, sharp (and I mean very sharp) pieces of ice would repeatedly be hurled at me. The fishmongers would use ice to preserve the seafood as it was stored in crates, and later in the early hours of the morning in coolers. I remember that the sharp pieces of ice could really hurt if thrown with tremendous velocity. Also, in the beginning there were many threats to my life, which were at the time palpable. Although the origins of this project were challenging, where I photographed the Fulton Market and the East River waterfront below the Brooklyn Bridge, I was intrigued and kept going forward.
As a side note, I was always very competitive with men and wanted to prove my worth. As a result, in the male-dominated world of the waterfront, the challenge was provoking. In order to create this project, a sense of gradual time had to be taken into consideration. Convincing men, who were hardened and determined to make a living within a certain number of hours in the harshest of conditions and had no room for me or my pictures. Working in this environment was a daunting task that was only achieved with a gradual, mutual feeling of trust. That came with years of interaction.
twi-ny: You have a permanent, site-specific exhibition at the Tin Building; how did that come about?
bm: After the Howard Hughes Corporation, which operates the new Tin Building, considered several different major artists for the space, they determined that I had the best understanding of the area and the strongest commitment in my pictures to the historical record.
twi-ny: The photos there and in your new book are both quintessentially New York and at the same time universal. Which photographers inspired you? Do you seek that dichotomy when you peer through the lens?
bm: My influences as an artist are vast and consequential. Although I am a photographer and have worked hard to perfect the art of printing and creating images, there are truly so many “heroes” that I have come to know over the years and try to follow their practices. One of my mentors was my friend Bruce Davidson, a legendary photographer who influenced me with his extraordinary wisdom into the creative process.
And I have also been influenced by countless other artists, primarily filmmakers, including Ingmar Bergman, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and more. Each artist, in his or her masterful way, chose to depict humanity in a raw and gritty reality. Rudy Burkhardt also comes to mind as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker whose images evoke a sense of New York as it passed into a new era. Many of these artists continue to resonate with me.
twi-ny: It’s hard to believe some of those pictures go back only forty years; things now seem so different from then. I can’t get the 1999 photograph of a security guard on Schermerhorn Row out of my head; it looks like it’s from a 1940s British noir. What kind of image instantly catches your eye?
bm: To answer your question, I always shoot “reflexively.” When I saw the security guard walking back and forth, blanketed in smoke and fog, I believe my unconscious was at work. Cinematic art has deeply influenced my work, so Frank Capra’s film Lost Horizon and Michael Powell’s captivating films where mystery is created in light and shadow impacted me greatly and often influence my work.
twi-ny: At the end of the book, instead of you being interviewed, you interview someone who tracked you down because of your photographs. What made you want to reverse the tables?
bm: Well, just to be clear, she found me. I thought that interviewing an individual who had some inside perspective on mob activities during the Giuliani investigations against organized crime during the 1980s would be provocative.
twi-ny: It certainly is that. In that interview, the two of you discuss gentrification and land grabs as well as Rudy. At one point, your subject says, “Men’s egos and thirst for power drove us off a cliff. That is the real ‘falling-off place.’” Do you see us ever climbing back from that? You spend much more time photographing deconstruction than reconstruction. Are you worried about the future character of the city itself?
bm: Photographing “deconstruction” for me was unconscious. I was merely trying to capture the beauty inherent in many of the images that I made of the places that we lost.
twi-ny: You’ve lived downtown for forty years. How have the myriad changes affected your daily life in the neighborhood, outside of your work?
bm: Well, New York is . . . New York! It is the quintessential experience of life in a great metropolis. As one walks down the street, we have a blending of cultures, of aspirations, and of course the “zeal” in which new commerce replaces the old.
twi-ny: Can we ever have another Fulton Fish Market in New York the way it was, with the same kind of fishmongers and overall feeling, or has the time for that passed?
bm: Unfortunately, I think that time has passed. Sorry if I sound cynical.
twi-ny: You’re a lifelong New Yorker. Your previous book was about the Brooklyn Bridge. So many people leave New York; what are some of the things that keep you here, besides your photography?
bm: Honestly, I love my loft, which is situated in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. I have gained so much inspiration by exploring the bridge’s origins. But as it has been said, “All things must pass.” That means I, too, think about the future and wonder what’s next. Looking out at the Brooklyn Bridge, however, keeps me forever engaged.
twi-ny: You are so inextricably tied to New York City. When you travel, what kinds of places do you like to go to? Do you take color photos like a tourist, or is it always a busman’s holiday?
bm: If you are a serious artist, every place you go on the globe warrants an intense “staring contest” between you and your vast subject matter. I find stories everywhere I go. The problem is finding the time to put them all together. Art and photography are a serious business, and each project one does merits intense thought and consideration, and of course the consequences of making it available to the public.
Recently I have been making trips to South America, to Colombia. It is a country struggling to emerge from years of violence and corruption. I traveled to Chocó province on the Pacific, where rainforests and jungles remain uninhabited and many of the locals are among the poorest in the country.
I have embraced the iPhone, and once I am away from New York, shooting in color seems natural!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor who used to live near the Fulton Fish Market and shares a birthday with the Brooklyn Bridge; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), Robert Shaw (Ian Shaw), and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell) find plenty of downtime in The Shark Is Broken (photo by Matthew Murphy)
THE SHARK IS BROKEN
Golden Theatre
252 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 19, $58-$215.50 thesharkisbroken.com
The first two adult books I read were Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, when I was in fourth grade. (I discovered only when I was in college that the latter was actually the Reader’s Digest Condensed version; I should have realized that by the opening sentence, which was “Call me Ish.”) A few years later, I devoured Peter Benchley’s Jaws, at least in part because the novel took place on Long Island, where I had spent most of my childhood. Not yet a teenager, I then saw the movie, which was actually filmed on Martha’s Vineyard, when it was released in the summer of 1975. It scared the hell out of me, and I loved every second of it.
I might not have loved every second of The Shark Is Broken, the Broadway play that goes behind the scenes of the making of the film, but I enjoyed enough of it to make it more than seaworthy.
English actor Ian Shaw was four years old when his father, Oscar-nominated actor, novelist, and playwright Robert Shaw (From Russia with Love,A Man for All Seasons) was on set alongside eventual two-time Oscar nominee Roy Scheider (The French Connection,All That Jazz) and soon-to-be Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss (American Graffiti,The Goodbye Girl). Robert died in 1978 at the age of fifty-one, when Ian was only eight. In 2017, Ian read his father’s drinking diary, which, he explains in an online letter, he found “painful and very brave.” That was the impetus for The Shark Is Broken, which he cowrote with Joseph Nixon and premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe.
There is no curtain at the Golden Theatre, where the play opened August 21. Onstage is a cross-section of the Orca, the ramshackle lobster boat owned by salty shark hunter and WWII veteran Quint, Shaw’s character. Scheider (Colin Donnell) is playing new police chief Martin Brody, a former New York City cop who has moved to the supposedly much quieter beach community with his family. And Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) is portraying oceanographer Matt Hooper, who has been brought in for his expert advice.
The three men sling testosterone around for ninety-five minutes as they wait for Bruce, the mechanical shark, to be repaired yet again; it keeps breaking down, giving the actors time to talk about their careers and for Shaw and Dreyfuss to lace into each other, with the cool and calm Scheider as referee.
The Shark Is Broken goes behind the scenes of the making of Jaws, storms and all (photo by Matthew Murphy)
The neurotic, Jewish Dreyfuss, who is from Queens, declares, “What a god-almighty fucking waste of time! This whole thing is a disaster.” New Jersey native Scheider, who spends most of the downtime reading the newspaper and catching rays, closely following the Nixon-Watergate story, says, “Well . . . it’s not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time. . . . It’s the time it takes between the takes that takes the time to take the take.” Dreyfuss responds, “How much time did that take you?”
Complaining about the way Steven Spielberg is directing the film, shooting on the ocean and constantly making changes to the script, Dreyfuss argues, “Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water.” Scheider asks, “Didn’t Jesus walk on water?” Dreyfuss concludes, “Yeah! Look what happened to him!”
Meanwhile, Shaw preys on Dreyfuss’s lack of worldly knowledge. “You’re a philistine, boy!” he declares. When Dreyfuss admits he has never heard of Damon Runyon, saying “You can’t expect me to know everything,” Shaw barks back, “I think our mistake is expecting you to know anything.” A few minutes later, Dreyfuss asks, “What, you think I’m an idiot?” to which Shaw replies, “I presume that’s a rhetorical question.”
The interplay among the three is like the scar scene in the film, when the three men show off their scars and share other intimacies, including discussing their relationships with their fathers, ultimately bonding if not exactly becoming best buds. Shaw has hidden bottles all over the boat, Scheider can’t get enough of the blazing sun, and Dreyfuss is a young, highly ambitious nervous wreck. Certain that he was a failure in American Graffiti and that his lead role in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz will not get him the respect he craves, Dreyfuss yearns to do Shakespeare and Pinter, just like the grizzled Shaw has done, all the while both seeking Shaw’s approval and desperately wanting to best him.
The structure of the play, directed with a loose hand by Guy Masterson (Morecambe,One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), is as rickety as the Orca; the narrative centers around the most poignant moment in the film, Quint’s speech about having survived the July 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the ship that delivered components for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the scene doesn’t involve Bruce at all, so it is never quite clear why they are waiting around for the mechanical shark to be fixed before proceeding with the shooting. Jaws is essentially a character study constructed around greed, from the Amity mayor’s refusal to close the beaches as the great white attacks continue during the profitable July 4 weekend to humans’ belief that they have any power at all over the natural world. The Shark Is Broken is a vastly entertaining character study as well, but there’s not a whole lot more meat on its bones. In the play, Dreyfuss asks, “What do you think it’s about?”; he’s referring to the movie, but the same can be said of the show.
Ian Shaw cowrote and stars as his father, Robert Shaw, in The Shark Is Broken (photo by Matthew Murphy)
In addition, the dialogue is filled with bons mots that wink at what happened after the film; some of them are funny, but others are too obvious. “One thing’s for certain — if there is a sequel, I will not be in it,” Scheider says; he was back for Jaws 2. Reading the paper, Scheider remarks, “Christ! There will never be a more immoral president than Tricky Dicky,” a cheap laugh no matter what you think of 45. And when the three men talk about their families, Scheider asks Shaw about his children (the English actor had ten with three wives), “Do any of yours want to be actors?” Shaw replies, “Christ, I hope not! It’s a shrivelling profession, isn’t it?,” a sly reference to Ian.
Duncan Henderson’s set and costumes put the audience right on board the cutaway Orca, surrounded by Nina Dunn’s effective projections of the sea and storms, enhanced by Jon Clark’s lighting and Adam Cork’s sound and interstitial music.
Donnell (Anything Goes,Love’s Labour’s Lost) is steadfast and hunky as Scheider, who is a calming influence among the three actors. Brightman (Beetlejuice,School of Rock) is uncanny as Dreyfuss, looking and sounding so much like him that you will sometimes forget it isn’t Dreyfuss himself. And in his Broadway debut, Ian Shaw (War Horse,Common) pays wonderful tribute to his father, capturing his essence in every word and move while depicting his virtues and his flaws.
“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men,” Ishmael says in Moby-Dick. It’s a line that also relates to a trio of actors portraying three very different men, each with his own unique form of madness, hunting a mechanical shark in a make-believe Hollywood movie.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
VAN GOGH’S CYPRESSES
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
Gallery 199
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through August 27, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710 www.metmuseum.org
In his “Illustrated Letter to Willemien van Gogh (Reminiscence of the Garden at Etten),” Vincent van Gogh writes to his sister, about a painting of the Garden at Etten, “Now here are the colors. The younger of the two women walking is wearing a Scottish shawl with green and orange checks and carrying a red parasol. The old one has a blue-violet shawl, almost black. But a bunch of dahlias, some lemon yellow, others variegated pink and white, explode against this sombre figure. Behind them a few emerald-green cedar or cypress bushes. Behind these cypresses one catches a glimpse of a bed of pale green and red cabbages, surrounded by a border of little white flowers. The sandy path is a raw orange, the foliage of two beds of scarlet geraniums is very green. Finally, in the middle ground is a maidservant dressed in blue who’s arranging plants with a profusion of white, pink, yellow, and vermilion-red flowers. There you are, I know it isn’t perhaps much of a resemblance, but for me it conveys the poetic character and the style of the garden as I feel them.”
The 1888 letter is one of several such dispatches in the revelatory show “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” a collection of nearly fifty paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters in which van Gogh focused on what Met director Max Hollein calls “the artist’s most enduring, expressive motif. . . . This exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to revisit the most famous trees in the history of art.” The centerpiece is MoMA’s The Starry Night; you’ll have to wait in a long line to be able to see it. Most people chat away on the queue until they have their own moment with the painting, snap a few pictures, then walk away. And that’s a shame, because the gallery is filled with small and big gems, familiar masterpieces and sweet surprises, including the glorious Wheat Field with Cypresses right next to The Starry Night, a stunning canvas that so many don’t see as they wander away, checking the photos they just took on their phone.
The show is divided into three chronological sections: “The Roots of His Invention: Arles, February 1888 – May 1889,” “The Making of a Signature Motif: Saint–Rémy, May–September 1889,” and “Branching Out in Style: Saint–Rémy, October 1889 – May 1890.” Drawbridge and The Langlois Bridge offer two renderings of the same bridge; oddly, the pen-and-ink drawing was done after the painting. Still Life of Oranges and Lemons with Blue Gloves, made shortly after his release from the hospital, features cypress needles behind the title objects. There’s a loneliness to Stairs in the Garden of the Asylum, which has no human figures in it, while The Public Garden explores solitude by having three people sharing a bench off to the left and a long path leading to a single person by themselves to the right. Window in the Studio was painted in van Gogh’s hospital studio; the artist used chalk, brush and oil paint, and watercolor on paper to depict a barred window with empty bottles on the sill, loosely drawn paintings on the wall, and a garden outside, all bathed in a yellow-gold tint.
At the asylum, van Gogh told a soldier, “It’s difficult to leave a land before having something to prove that one has felt and loved it.” The master, who died in July 1890 at the age of thirty-seven, proved more than he would ever know with these paintings.
The final two works, A Walk at Twilight and Country Road in Provence by Night, each features a pair of people in the foreground; looking intently at the works, the man next to me wondered which one he would most like to enter.
In order to enter the exhibit, which concludes August 27, you need to first go to the gallery and scan a QR code that will give you the time you can go inside and experience this amazing garden of riches.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Renée Fleming takes viewers backstage at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Renée Fleming’s Cities that Sing: Paris (photo courtesy IMAX and Stage Access)
RENÉE FLEMING’S CITIES THAT SING: PARIS / VENICE (Francois-Rene Martin, 2022/2023)
AMC Empire 25, IMAX Laser
AMC Kips Bay 15, IMAX Laser Paris: Saturday, August 26, $32, 3:00 Venice: Saturday, September 16, $32, 3:00 www.fathomevents.com imax.com/reneefleming
Here in New York City, we’ve been spoiled when it comes to superstar soprano Renée Fleming. The Grammy-winning Rochester native has been performing at the Metropolitan Opera House since her 1991 debut as Countess Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro; this season she appeared as Clarissa Vaughan in The Hours. Fleming has also been on Broadway twice, in Living in Love in 2015 and Carousel in 2018, as well as the Shed in the 2019 drama Norma Jeane Baker of Troy.
Now we get a chance to see another side of Fleming as she visits two of the great international cities, exploring their music and culture in two one-day-only IMAX screenings. On August 26, you can immerse yourself in Renée Fleming’s Cities that Sing: Paris, followed September 16 by Renée Fleming’s Cities that Sing: Venice.
“My career has taken me to stages all over the world singing repertoire that is so virtuosic, so beautiful and enriching, and now I get to bring some of that experience to movie screens through this spectacular pairing of IMAX and Fathom Events,” Fleming said in a statement. “This is an extraordinary combination that allows these two special films to be seen by the largest possible audience.”
In Paris, Fleming, focusing on chamber pieces and arias by such composers as Reynaldo Hahn, Gabriel Faure, Léo Delibes, Jacques Offenbach, Georges Bizet, and Giuseppe Verdi, is joined by tenor Piotr Beczała, soprano Axelle Fanyo, baritone Alexandre Duhamel, pianist Tanguy de Williencourt, and the Orchestre Victor Hugo Franche-Comteat, conducted by Jean-François Verdier, at the Théâtre du Châtelet as they take a musical journey through the City of Lights; she also sits down for a conversation with French couturier Alexis Mabille and Canadian opera director Robert Carsen.
In Venice, concentrating on classic works by such Italian composers as Verdi, Gioachino Rossini, and Giacomo Puccini, Fleming performs at the Teatro La Fenice with tenor Francesco Meli, baritone Mattia Olivieri, mezzo-soprano Paola Gardina, and the Orchestra Del Teatro La Fenice conducted by Riccardo Frizza; she also discusses the City of Canals with Frizza and La Fenice artistic director Fortunato Ortombina.
Renée Fleming guides viewers through the City of Canals in Renée Fleming’s Cities that Sing: Venice (photo courtesy IMAX and Stage Access)
Presented by IMAX, Fathom, and Stage Access, the films are directed by Francois-Rene Martin (Baroque Odyssey: A Birthday Concert in the Gardens of William Christie,Edward Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius) and lavishly photographed and lit by Julien Jaunet as Fleming sings in the gorgeous theaters, visits local shops, takes a gondola ride, and engages in outdoor conversations about art and culture.
“Opera is called grand opera for a reason: It’s larger than life, incorporating every art — instrumental music, singing, drama, poetry — into one major art form that is a wonderful experience on the big screen,” Fleming added.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Lou Reed, Run-D.M.C., Salt-N-Pepa, the Ramones, Count Basie, Beverly Sills, Pat Benatar, Louis Armstrong, Kurtis Blow, Blue Oyster Cult, Joan Jett, John Coltrane, Aaron Copland, Neil Diamond, George Gershwin, Stray Cats, Barbara Streisand, Billy Joel, Taylor Dane, Simon & Garfunkel.
Those are only some of the artists who have been inducted into the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF). The next to join that prestigious roster is Robin Wilson, lead singer of the Gin Blossoms, who will be inducted on August 25. Wilson was born in Detroit and raised in Arizona, but he moved to Valley Stream on Long Island more than twenty years ago to spend more time with his son, Grey Wilson, and his ex-wife, Gena Rositano, a longtime stage manager at Saturday Night Live. On Valentine’s Day, 2021, Wilson had a serious fire in his home, forcing him to temporarily relocate to Hicksville, but he returned to Valley Stream, where he played a series of free house shows during the pandemic.
Robin Wilson and Gena Rositano with their son Grey at SNL (photo courtesy Gena Rositano)
I grew up in Malverne but went to high school in Valley Stream with Rositano and have closely followed Grey’s development as a musician in his own right; he is now part of several bands, including the Mercurys, the Afternoon Grifters, and Theo & the London Outfit.
Wilson, fifty-eight, became a Gin Blossom in 1988, one year after the group formed. The band’s major label debut, 1992’s New Miserable Experience, was packed with hits, including “Hey Jealousy,” “Until I Fall Away,” “Found Out About You,” and “Allison Road,” and has sold over five million copies. The follow-up, 1996’s Congratulations I’m Sorry, featured “Follow You Down” and “Til I Hear It from You,” the latter recorded for the 1995 film Empire Records. In addition to performing with the Gin Blossoms, Wilson joined the Smithereens after the 2017 death of Pat DiNizio; he writes songs with the band and alternates on lead vocals with Marshall Crenshaw.
Heavily tattooed and wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, a black T-shirt, and black shorts, Wilson zoomed in from a hotel gym in Indianapolis, where the Gin Blossoms were scheduled to play the penultimate show of their summer tour at the Indiana State Fair that night. After a short break, they’re going back out on the road, stopping at the Paramount in Huntington on September 12.
At the LIMEHOF induction ceremony on August 25 in Stony Brook, Wilson will play a set with a pair of fellow Smithereens, guitarist Jim Babjak and drummer Dennis Diken, along with Joe Jackson bassist Graham Maby and special guest Grey Wilson.
During our talk, Wilson was generous with his answers, giving them careful consideration while being open and direct. Below he discusses fathers and sons, the modern concert experience, cover songs, living in Valley Stream, and more.
twi-ny: We met briefly when your son Grey’s band the Mercurys played the Klub 45 Room in Times Square and you joined them onstage. You played the Gas Giants’ “Quitter,” which was a blast.
robin wilson: It was such a blast.
twi-ny: Grey has also played with the Gin Blossoms. What are those experiences like to have either you jump onstage with him or him jump onstage with you?
rw: Well, it’s a thrill for me because music is the predominant force in my life. And for it to become equally so in my son’s means a lot. It fills me with pride to see him take my lead and to try to follow in my footsteps.
My father was a stuffy Republican accounting professor who wanted nothing to do with me, and we had nothing in common. I never had a moment like that with my dad. There’s no parallel experience that I’ve had with my father. So it means a great deal to me to be able to perform with Grey from time to time.
twi-ny: You went to school where your father taught.
rw: We lived in Tempe. He was a professor at Mesa Community College. Which was nearby. He started teaching there in 1971 when we moved from Detroit to Arizona. And so I grew up on that campus and that was one of my first jobs, working in the cafeteria there. When I got out of high school, I was a student at Mesa. For a long time.
Since my dad was a professor, tuition was free. I went to school there for five years. I never quite got an associate’s degree. For the first few years, I changed my major a bunch of times and kind of floundered around. But by the time I finally found direction, I was studying physics and other of the physical sciences, like chemistry and calculus and geology. And then the band took off, and so I never got to finish my degree. I was very proud to walk into my physics professor’s office one day and say, I can’t finish this semester. Our band is going on tour.
twi-ny: That’s a great excuse.
rw: You know it; it was great. And I remember when I dropped out of college for that first tour, my dad told me, “Robin, you’re a fucking idiot.” [ed. note: After New Miserable Experience went gold, Wilson’s father conceded, admitting, “Robin, I feel like a fucking idiot.”] So I know what it means to my son to pursue music and what it means to dream of a life creating and performing music. I want him to succeed, and I want to give him the tools that he’ll need to accomplish his goal.
twi-ny: I’ve seen Grey play live and on YouTube and Instagram. He’s quite accomplished. He’s got a great stage presence, and he can play that guitar.
rw: Yeah, he can really play. And so I’m always really proud to have him join us onstage with the band. It’s gonna be great to have him performing at the Hall of Fame induction, too.
Bill Leen, Scott Hessel, Robin Wilson, Jesse Valenzuela, and Scott Johnson of the Gin Blossoms (photo courtesy the Gin Blossoms)
twi-ny: The Gin Blossoms have been together for about thirty-five years now, including four core members who have been together since 1992. What is the secret to the longevity of the group?
rw: Well, it’s a combination of factors, the most important of which is compromise. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut and just do your job. That goes a long, long way in the rock band environment. That combined with the fact that we have really good songs and we can go to any city in America and sell a thousand tickets and people can sing along with our music. It’s just such a gift to have been able to accomplish that sort of commercial success that it would be stupid just to turn your back on it. You’d have to be really, really unhappy and miserable to want to just blow the whole thing up just because you don’t want to go do rock shows.
It’s not easy. Most of what we do is the traveling. There’s at least ten or twelve hours of travel for every hour we spend onstage. But that ninety minutes a day onstage makes up for all the other bullshit. And my bandmates and I have been able to put our grievances behind us for the most part and accept that everyone in the band is allowed to have their own experience. So we just try to do our jobs and stay out of each other’s way, not create trouble. And we’re grateful that we could still do it at this level,
twi-ny: Touring has obviously changed since the band started. What are one or two things that stick out to you that are either better or worse than they were in the late eighties, early nineties? Fans are throwing objects at lead singers for TikTok. Have you encountered anything or like that?
rw: Well, that kind of thing has happened randomly throughout our career, but it’s just a random occurrence. It’s not a part of any sort of trend. The main force that makes it different now than what it used to be is this device that I’m talking to you on, the smartphone. When we first started touring, we didn’t have GPS. We had a road atlas that was about this thick.
twi-ny: I remember those.
rw: And that would go underneath the driver’s seat. When we would pull into a new town, we would have to pull that out and look through a map. You had to be able to read a map and find your way through a new city to get to the gig. There wasn’t a way to just pull up Yelp and find someplace to eat. You had to ask if there was a restaurant nearby or physically drive around looking for somewhere you could eat.
And then, of course, the worst thing about the phone, this new media, is social media. It’s just a fucking cancer. It makes everyone think that they’re the star of their own reality show and that everything is about them. I don’t mind people taking pictures of the band while we’re performing. I don’t mind video of the band while we’re performing. But what I cannot stand is when someone will stand right in front of me and take a selfie of themselves. That’s just so incredibly rude and so self-absorbed, and it takes you out of the moment, you know? Here’s a picture of me not listening to my favorite Gin Blossoms song.
I just don’t get it. And again, it’s just so rude. The way I think about it is, imagine if your child was onstage in the school play and someone stood up in front of your child while they were delivering their lines and started taking selfies of themselves and started distracting your child. How outraged would you be? Because this person is doing that. It would make you sick to see someone do that.
We didn’t enjoy concerts any less in the eighties and nineties before everybody had a camera with them. We enjoyed concerts just as much when we were forced to use our brains to remember them. And these people who say, Well, I’m entitled to capture the moment. Well, capture it with your brain, you lazy asshole. It’s so stupid. So that’s maybe the main thing. Like I said, I have no problem with people taking pictures or video of the band, but it absolutely disgusts me to see people taking pictures of themselves while standing in front of the band.
The Gin Blossoms’ most recent album is 2018’s Mixed Reality
twi-ny: As someone who goes to a lot of shows and often is up front, I can tell you it’s also distracting for the audience. If I’m standing behind someone and they suddenly turn around and their face is in my face so they can take a picture of you behind them onstage, it takes me out of the concert for that split second. And so it’s also annoying on that end.
rw: Yeah. But virtually everything else about the concertgoing experience is the same. I mean, how people react to the music and the performers, what the music means to them, the way it inspires genuine emotion. All of that is the same. The thrill of the light show and the sense of community and all of those things. None of that has changed. The only difference is that everybody’s got the phone, and the phone is a way to take you out of the moment.
twi-ny: Over the years, the Gin Blossoms have developed that real sense of community you just mentioned. Your songs really touch people. And I think that reaching them on an emotional level is really part of what’s kept you guys going so strong. I’ve also noticed on the current tour, you’re playing some great covers: Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and then one of my favorite old songs, the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away”; I saw them play that at the Whiskey a Go Go back in the early eighties.
rw: It’s just great music. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed those songs. And those are all certainly songs that I love to play. I like to play cover songs; I wish that we actually played more covers. I don’t necessarily want to do more covers per show, but I wish we had a larger repertoire of covers we could dip into. But not everybody in the band really loves playing cover songs. They prefer to play original music. And I can appreciate that.
And so, again, what I was saying earlier, the most important thing is to compromise and not make it so any one person in the band is absolutely miserable about the way the shows are done. Everybody’s entitled to have some fun during the show. So if one guy doesn’t want to play a lot of cover songs, well, his feelings are very important to me. So we try to keep it to a minimum. We find the place where we can compromise on these types of issues.
twi-ny: Which doesn’t always happen in a band.
rw: Yeah, it’s very, very difficult to find that. And it’s especially hard when you’re a young band and you’re just coming up and you’re on the charts for the first time. But part of keeping a band together for thirty-five years is learning how to communicate with each other and learning how to find those compromises and the middle ground.
twi-ny: Speaking of original songs, your last album came out in 2018. Anything you guys are working on?
rw: Yeah, at some point. We haven’t got a firm date set to record a new record. But I would suspect that we are going to be in the studio sometime in 2024, have something done by the end of the year. You know, we’re not super anxious, but some of us already have songs that we want to record, and we know we can’t really go much longer before we start to feel bad about it. We don’t owe anybody anything.
It’s not like we sell a lot of records anymore. But as musicians of a part of a certain generation, we feel like we owe it to ourselves to create new music from time to time to challenge ourselves, to create something that we feel holds up with the rest of our catalog. So we know we’ll do it for our own reasons on our own schedule. There’s no record company hounding us to get it done or anything. We’ll just do it when we feel like it. I suspect that it won’t be too long from now before we get another record done. [ed. note: The Gin Blossoms sold a majority stake in their music publishing rights and artist master royalties in 2021 to Primary Wave.]
Robin Wilson and Willie Nile join Theo & the London Outfit for a Valley Stream house concert under the Arizona state flag (photo courtesy Theo & the London Outfit)
twi-ny: So getting back to August 25, you’re being inducted into the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. What was it like getting that notification?
rw: Well, it was really amusing. I mean, of course I’m filled with pride and it’s very gratifying. But I’ve had such a contentious relationship with Long Island; my being there, my living there is just such a strange, unlikely circumstance. And it took me so long to get used to it. If you knew what my bandmates have heard me say about Long Island over the years, we’d be laughing as hard as we were when we found out about this, because it was just very difficult for me to get used to being and living on Long Island.
But eventually, it did take, and I’m proud of my home there in Valley Stream, and I’m proud to be the only guy on Long Island who flies an Arizona flag on the front porch. I think it’s really funny when my neighbors come by while they’re walking their dogs and they say, “What is that flag?”
twi-ny: What country is that?
rw: What’s funny to me is, that’s Arizona, that’s the forty-eighth state, you know? So I’m there on Long Island representing my home state of Arizona, which I miss terribly. And now I’ve become a big part of this community.
The company that I’m in with this honor is incredible. It’s humbling and very gratifying. And I’m especially proud for my New York family, the Rositanos, all of my nieces and nephews, my ex-wife and my son, my sister-in-law, my brothers-in-law, and their families. I’m really proud for them, of all the Christmases and holidays we’ve spent together, and now they get to take pride in this, and their pride in this means more to me than anything else about this honor. So I’m very excited for my family, the Rositanos, and I hope they can all be there for for the ceremony.
twi-ny: Is that what brought you to Valley Stream in the first place, family?
rw: Yeah. My ex-wife, Gena, is from Valley Stream. She and I met at MTV. She used to work at MTV.
twi-ny: Yes, I remember.
rw: That’s right. You know Gena. And so she and I met doing The Jon Stewart Show on MTV. [ed. note: You can watch that full episode, also featuring Long Islander Howard Stern, here; Gena was one of the stage managers on the program.]
twi-ny: They just had a reunion, with Jon and everyone.
rw: Yes, that’s right, for the cast and crew. In 1996, Jenna and I had Jon Stewart ordained as a minister, and he performed our wedding ceremony in Valley Stream. It was my connection to Gena and specifically my son, Grey, that kept me there in in Long Island. I could have moved home to Arizona. I always thought I would, but when it came time to actually pull the trigger, I couldn’t leave and I wanted to be there for my son.
And so I’m a Long Island guy now, go figure. And my son, he is in a couple of bands that play around Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and whatnot. And then he’s also a DJ on the radio station at Nassau Community College, WHPC 90.3; his show is called “Alternative to What?” It’s Tuesday nights at 7:00, so everybody tune in and hear my son on the radio spinning the alternative hits. That’s 7:00 on Tuesdays, WHPC 90.3.
twi-ny: Excellent. I do want to ask you one other thing, and it has to do with Valley Stream. I was born in Brooklyn and went to school in Valley Stream. And so my wife has listened for decades to all the things I’ve said about Long Island, probably some of the same things that you would tell your bandmates about Valley Stream before you moved there. As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get out of there to come to New York City. But a lot of my friends still live in Valley Stream and the surrounding area and love it. You’ve really settled in, huh?
rw: Yeah, I really have. You know, It’s a great little town. It’s got tons of great pizza; Ancona’s would be my favorite. There’s really great Pakistani food everywhere. It seems like we have a really large community of really good immigrant cooks everywhere. It’s a very diverse community.
twi-ny: That was not the case when I went to school there.
rw: On my block alone in Valley Stream, there are three families from Guam. You know, I went my entire life in Arizona without ever meeting anyone from Guam. And there on my street in Valley Stream, there are three families from Guam. So there’s something about it. My theory is that these families are moving to America, and they land at JFK with all their bags, and they get out to the curb and they look around and they go, Well, let’s buy a house. And they end up there in Valley Stream.
And I think that’s part of the strength of our community, the diversity and the variety of food and of viewpoints and such. I know that it wasn’t always like that; when I first moved to Valley Stream it was a very different place, in terms of the racial makeup. I very much enjoy how diverse and cool it is now, and how many different cultures are represented just on my block alone.
It’s great to be part of the community. I love my neighborhood. I love all my neighbors. I got to know everybody during the pandemic. I was doing shows for my neighbors during the pandemic; I would be out in my front yard and I would put on concerts. I am really happy. I’m really proud to live there. And so I hope that they can take pride in this honor too.
twi-ny: You recently played a show with Willie Nile and Grey at your house.
rw: Yes, indeed. That was the first one I had done in a while. And so if anyone’s interested in seeing the livestream performances that I’ve done from my home studio or in my front yard, you can go to the Gin Blossoms official YouTube page and see the shows I was doing for my neighbors during the pandemic.
It was the best part of the pandemic for me, performing for my neighbors; it really meant a lot to me that I was able to bring the neighborhood together in a time of isolation. I really enjoyed the pandemic. I mean, obviously it’s not something you would choose to happen, but I managed to make the most of it.
I enjoyed being home for the first time in my adult life. I enjoyed being home for more than a few weeks at a time. I really enjoyed getting to know my neighbors and performing for them, and spending time with my son. I made a lot of carnitas and I played a lot of video games, and I created a lot of content for the Gin Blossoms YouTube page. That’s really kind of when I truly became a citizen of Long Island, during the pandemic.
So, hi to Gena and Grey and all the Rositanos. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys soon. I’m gonna be home for a couple of weeks, for the first time since last winter. I actually have more than five days off starting next week. So I’m looking forward to spending some time in the studio with my son and riding my bike in Valley Stream State Park, just relaxing and enjoying my home.
twi-ny: Well deserved. And congratulations again on the Hall of Fame. I don’t know who’s going to have more fun, you or Grey, but it’s great for both of you.
rw: Definitely Grey; everything’s more fun for Grey than it is for me.
twi-ny: Thanks, man. This was great.
rw: No, thank you. Peace and love for everybody on Long Island. Rock away!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The end of How To with John Wilson is being celebrated with several special film programs
JOHN WILSON SELECTS
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
August 19-29
212-505-5181 www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
No one captures the minute foibles of everyday life in New York City like John Wilson does. On his HBO series How To with John Wilson, which concludes its third and, sadly, final season on September 1, New York City native and documentarian Wilson incorporates a treasure trove of background shots he and his team have collected over the years into new interviews with New Yorkers as he tackles such subjects as “How To Make Small Talk,” “How To Put Up Scaffolding,” “How To Find a Spot,” “How To Throw Out Your Batteries,” and “How To Find a Public Restroom.” In each episode, the ever cool, calm, collected, and wonderfully deadpan Wilson veers off on fascinating and hilarious tangents that are quintessentially New York.
In honor of the end of the series, Anthology Film Archives invited him to curate “John Wilson Selects,” which runs August 19–29 and kicks off with “John Wilson & Crew,” a collection of short works made by many of his collaborators. “When I started to put together the team for How To, I wanted to hire camera people and editors whose vision I really admired. This program showcases original work by a handful of crew members on the show who are all amazing artists in their own right,” Wilson said in a statement.
The evening consists of Nathan Truesdell’s When the LAPD Blows Up Your Neighborhood, Nellie Kluz’s The Sunken Smile and DD, Chris Maggio’s Even a Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day, Leia Jospé’s No Delay and Let Me Luv U, Britni West’s Tired Moonlight, LJ Frezza’s Nothing and Is It Us?, Jess Pinkham’s PanoptiJohn, and Wilson’s My Morning with Magic Mike. Wilson and several crew members will be on hand for a discussion on August 19.
William H. Whyte documentary is a major influence on John Wilson
The festival continues with works by filmmakers who have inspired and influenced Wilson, beginning with Mark Lewis’s Animalicious, which Wilson pairs with his own Looner, a college film he made about balloon fetishists in Binghamton. Bruce Brown’s On Any Sunday is the follow-up to the surfing classic The Endless Summer. Les Blank, Vikram Jayanti, and Chris Simon’s Innocents Abroad tracks American tourists on a bus tour in Europe. Bronx native George Kuchar’s Weather Diary 4 has a unique soundtrack; it’s being shown with Kuchar’s Low Light Life and Award. Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin’s The Last Party is a political film in which, Wilson says, “Robert Downey Jr. is insufferable . . . but it still manages to be one of the most beautiful documentaries I’ve ever seen.” Wilson calls Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith’s Overnight “a cautionary tale about creative hubris.”
And William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces might have the most impact on Wilson, who says about it, “William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting. It all feels very scientific but he has a little fun describing human behavior, like when he identifies the ‘girl watchers’ hanging out in a midtown plaza. My favorite part is when he studies the way that people use chairs.”
HOW TO NEW YORK
Rooftop Films
Gansevoort Plaza, 38 Gansevoort St. at Ninth Ave.
Wednesday, August 30, free with RSVP, 7:15 rooftopfilms.com
Rooftop Films is celebrating How To with a special evening in Gansevoort Plaza on August 30, beginning with live music at 7:15, followed by screenings of five shorts at 8:00 and a Q&A. The films begin with an advance preview of the final episode of the series, How To Track Your Package, about Wilson trying to locate a stolen delivery. In Joe Bonacci’s Cat Stickers Trilogy, someone is affixing cat stickers to walls and objects throughout an apartment complex. Alex Mallis and Travis Wood’s Dollar Pizza Documentary is about the prevalence of the ninety-nine-cent slice (which has gone up to $1.50 at some joints). Mike Donahue’s Troy finds a couple who are harassed by a neighbor’s loud sex. And in Jarreau Carrillo’s The Vacation, an overworked Black man wants to do more than just go to the beach with his friends on the last day of summer.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
