Mets media guru Jay Horwitz will be honored with his own Mini Me bobblehead at Social Media Night benefit for Shannon Forde
NEW YORK METS vs. DETROIT TIGERS
Citi Field
123-01 Roosevelt Ave. at 126th St.
Friday, August 23, $35, 7:10
www.newyorkmetscom
When we were at a Mets spring training game in Port St. Lucie back in March, we saw a surprising sight. A large group of autograph seekers were gathered around a schlubby older man, thrusting baseballs, photos, shirts, hats, and other items at him for his John Hancock. Two men approached us and asked who the guy was. We told them that it was Jay Horwitz, the team’s longtime PR guru, and they got all excited and immediately sped over to join the crowd like they were Mookie Wilson dashing for home. Horwitz, the Mets’ vice president of media relations, has been the team’s mouthpiece since April 1980, and he is now a Twitter sensation, with more than twenty-five thousand followers. He posts numerous times a day, writing about how the team is doing (“Gonzalez Germen impressive on and off mound. First save and did great job in doing his post game interview in English.”), pointing out odd stories (“Meet the only elephant who is a Mets fan at the San Diego Zoo. His name is Horace. Big fan since 1978. pic.twitter.com/0TeUYyF3d1”), answering questions directly, and joining the debate about recently being caught on camera with his finger in his nose (“Plan to appeal my nose case to Supreme Court. Judge Roberts saw game and said it was a scratch not a pick. Says I have the votes.”) On August 23, the Mets will honor Horwitz, who just turned sixty-eight, with his own bobblehead as part of Social Media Night, which is also a benefit for Shannon Forde, the team’s forty-one-year-old senior director of media relations and married mother of two who has been battling Stage 4 breast cancer since last August. Fans who buy $35 tickets through this link will receive the bobblehead, which Horwitz has dubbed Mini Me (“After an extra inning game and a two hour bus trip to SD, Mini Me sleeps in today. Have to get up soon. pic.twitter.com/fLcuyjNfBU”), with a portion of the proceeds going to Hope Shines for Shannon. In addition, the interleague game against the first-place Detroit Tigers will be followed by a concert by Third Eye Blind (“Semi-Charmed Life,” “Graduate”). When asked by NY Sports Dog back in 2008 what his secret was, Horwitz said, “Never lie. You can’t lie in New York with all the exposure here. Be up front with people even in the worst of times.” Clearly, it also helps to have a wacky sense of humor, especially as a member of the Mets franchise.
“He created a new language, modally speaking, harmonically speaking,” Pete Townshend says about guitarist and composer John Fahey at the beginning of In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey. “And if that’s not an iconoclast, I don’t know what is, really,” the Who axman continues, comparing Fahey to William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. Those are apt comparisons for the so-called American primitive guitarist who did things on his instrument that no one has done before or since. Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk then calls the multifaceted Fahey, who was born in Washington, DC, in 1939, an “independent label owner, like maybe the first; record collector, musicologist, alcoholic, hobo, thrift store master.” Unfortunately, the documentary, directed by James Cullingham, spends the rest of its nearly sixty minutes cutting between amazing archival footage of Fahey, particularly in an early television interview with Laura Weber in which he shyly talks about his work, uses his guitar as an ashtray, and plays, which is mesmerizing to watch, and various experts trying to describe what might just be indescribable. The documentary never quite flows like a Fahey composition, instead going through fits and starts as talking heads (including Fahey college friend Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento) discuss his influence, which turns out to be more interesting, perhaps, for Fahey purists than for general music fans. However, the scene with record collector Joe Bussard is a riot. Throughout the film, Cullingham, who met Fahey in 1982, dryly reads from Fahey’s writings and regularly returns to images of a turtle, a major Fahey symbol, but the director might have been better served by incorporating more archival footage of Fahey, who never did what was best for his career and today languishes in relative obscurity, twelve years after his death at the age of sixty-one.
In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey is part of a “Guitar Innovators” double feature that also includes Steven Okazaki’s lovely little Approximately Nels Cline, in which the multinominated director goes inside the studio to capture guitarist Nels Cline reimagining a pair of Irish folk songs with an eclectic group of musicians. Cline, a philosophy major who has played with Wilco, the Bad Plus, Mike Watt, Thurston Moore, Elliott Sharp, and his own Nels Cline Trio and Nels Cline Singers in addition to so many others, speaks eloquently about his process in a friendly, personable manner that makes him instantly likable. The sessions are a joy to watch, performed with violinist and vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, bassist Devin Hoff, trumpeter Ron Miles, Cibo Matto keyboardist Yuka Honda, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and drummer Matthias Bossi. Oscar winner Okazaki (Days of Waiting, Troubled Paradise) primarily lets the music do the talking, from experimental noise to jazzlike improvisation to carefully orchestrated sections. “It’s really important if you feel something that’s really sensitive, and that’s really transporting, whether it’s a chord or if it’s a sound, I just try to process that and manifest it in a way that’s personal,” Cline explains. The only drawback is that the film is a mere twenty-seven minutes; we would have loved to see and hear more. In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey and Approximately Nels Cline open August 16 at Cinema Village, with Cullingham and Nels Cline producer Jeff Wood participating in Q&As following the 8:45 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.
