| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 9:41 am Post subject: |
 |
|
From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Children's Literature:
Poetry for Young People
Langston Hughes
Hardcover
Edited by David Roessel & Arnold Rampersad
Illustrated by Benny Andrews
| Quote: | The Weary Blues
Hughes called this "my lucky poem" after it won first prize in a literary contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine in 1925. The poem includes the first blues verses he'd heard as a child growing up in Lawrence, Kansas. It is also one of the first poems where Hughes began to experiment with how to incorporate African-American musical motifs from the blues, jazz, and spirituals into his verse.
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway...
He did a lazy sway...
To the tune 'o those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan -
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more -
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied -
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singe stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
(-- p. 24) |
Listen:
Weary Blues
With Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather
Audio CD
Contains 33 of Langston Hughes' poems set to music composed, arranged and conducted by Mingus and Feather, recorded in 1958.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4303#4303
Last edited by editor on Wed May 27, 2009 12:57 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 9:59 am Post subject: |
|
|
New York Exposed
Photographs from the Daily News
Hardcover
Edited by Shawn O'Sullivan
Captions by Richard Slovak
| Quote: | | Refined Sugar? After retiring from the boxing ring for a time, former middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson works on a new routine at the French Casino nightclub in late October, 1952, as he makes one of the biggest transitions in the entertainment business. He returned to the ring and regained his title in 1955, holding it on and off until 1960. (Cutline below the photo of a dapper Robinson in 'soup and fish', easily holding his own with the equally regal dancng girls, p. 153) |
| Quote: | | In this beauty parlor, customers spurn the usual women's magazines. Instead, they read racing forms and exhcange tips while under their hair dryers. (Cutline above a photo of two tough palomas in hair rollers, poring over the Daily Racing Form against a surround mural of horse races in progress , p. 161) |
About French Casino:
Nightclub City
Politics and Amusement in Manhattan
Hardcover
By history prof Burton W. Peretti
| Quote: | | The French Casino was the most lavish high-volume club New York City had yet seen. This enterprise was developed by the owners of the Earl Carroll Theatre at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue, just above where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue. Louis F. Blumenthal, Jack Shapiro, and Charles Haring needed to fill the theater after the demise of Carroll's revues and a failed effort to show films. (Carroll, meanwhile, relocated to California, where he opened a successful new nightclub). the scale of the French Casino was unprecedented. The partners spent over $200,000 in an effort to create a restaurant-cabaret for fifteen hundred customers. Clifford Fischer, who was hired to manage the club, took the French cabaret theme to a new level and spent $60,000 to hire an actual troupe from Paris's Folies Bergères; the Casino's scarlet and silver paneling and Art Nouveau murals overlooked terraced floors and a balcony for diners. A large dance floor bordered the old theater stage. Here a company of acrobats, comics and dancers put on revues, interpsersed with the Folies show, to the accompaniment of the Jack Denny and Vincent Travers orchestras. Musical revues sometimes featured the popular ocean-liner motif, but evocations of continental Europe predominated. Tableaux mimicked compositions by Picasso and Matisse and dance numbers made use of both traditional and modernist materials and styles, for example justaposing a flamenco dance with Renita Kramer's startling patomime (in which, costumed as half man and half woman, she made love to herself in an expressionistic moonlit scene). Female nudity was also prominently featured. All of this, and a five-course dinner, was offered by the French Casino for $2.50 per customer. (footnotes omitted) (Chapter 9, Billy Rose, pgs. 199-200) |
About the popular ocean-liner motif:
Anything Goes
Legendary Broadway musical based on the book by Guy Bolton and, of course, P.G. Wodehouse
Music by Cole Porter
Audio CD
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4304#4304
Last edited by editor on Tue May 26, 2009 10:01 am; edited 5 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 2:01 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Brendan Behan's New York
Hardcover
By Brendan Behan
with drawings by Paul Hogarth
| Quote: | I went racing many times with Jim Downey at the Aqueduct Race Track, or the 'Big A,' as it is generally called. It is a beautiful course and the only way I can describe it is by calling it a luxury racecourse compared to anything we have in Ireland. It is all escalators and coffee bars and bars. I found the place betting at the window was the best way to win money, though you can only bet at the par-mutuel windows in America for they do not go in for bookies.
I was given several winners however by Eddie Ginevan, a friend of Jim Downey's, whom we used to meet, either at the 'Big A.' or the Belmont Race Track, and he would introduce me to the various peple in the racing business. As far as I know, his son trained horses or rode them and I think he trained some for Jim. (From What are they at round Broadway and the bars?, p. 45) |
But a little while and possibly a few tipples later...
| Quote: | Coney Island, like a great number of things in New York, is hard to compare with any place else. It is a terrific, fabulous and an extremely proletarian institution - I hope I don't offend the State Department - where thousands upon thousands of ordinary folk get out on the subway for fifteen cents and thoroughly enjoy themselves. I would say they enjoyed themselves as much as the class of people who are able to go to Las Vegas.
Now I am not knocking Las Vegas for I was in the place and I hope to go there again. One of the vices I haven't got, however, is gambling. I left having neither won a cent nor lost a cent. (From Down-Town Up-Town and In and Out of Harlem, p. 88) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4307#4307
Last edited by editor on Wed May 27, 2009 1:52 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 9:05 am Post subject: |
|
|
Nightclub City
Politics and Amusement in Manhattan
Hardcover
By history prof Burton W. Peretti
| Quote: | Nightlife was one of the most colorful and well-known service industries in this colossus. Generations of leisure establishments in New York City had variously provided drink, food, entertainment, and social mingling. Pre-Civil War stages and tavern floors featuring song and dance were succeeded by concert saloons, which began to standardize the integration of performance with dining. Meanwhile, vaudeville, genre theater, and circus-like spectacles made Broadway the national capital of live entertainment and the home base of national touring companies. Massed electric lighting, pioneered at amusement parks on Brooklyn's Coney Island, transformed Broadway into "the Great White Way." The dens of gambling and prostitution that thrived in the shadows of Coney Island and Broadway illustrated the early association of socially disreputable practices (or "vice") with nightlife. Songwriters based in Tin Pan Alley, south of Times Square, provided rich and increasingly idiomatic musical material for stage shows. Early film studios competed with live entertainment, but the movies also reinvigorated some theaters and infused show business with a new concept of glamour.
By 1920, though, the term "nightlife" especially referred to specific kinds of places for dining, drink, socializing, and intimate entertainment. These were first known as cabarets, a hybrid of the exclusive Broadway restaurant (the "lobster palace") and the working-class concert saloon. By 1915 black ragtime musicians and Latin American dancers mixed informally in cabarets with white Anglo-Saxon socialites. That same year, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., who earlier had imported the Parisian chorus show to the Broadway stage, created his Midnight Frolic revue and made female display an integral part of the cabaret formula. Some cabaret owners bought up New York state charters that had been issued to now-defunct voluntary associations,, to evade the city's closing time laws. The concept of the "nightclub" thus was born.
The arrival of Prohibition caused convulsions in the nightlife business. Restaurants and cabarets tried to adapt to the ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages that began in January 1920, but dwindling patronage forced most of them to close. The leisure economy was drastically reconstituted. Illicit liquor traders sold their wares in thousands of so-called speakeasies, which could be found in every kind of space in Manhattan. The liquor distribution network created a new source for capital and a new class of entrepreneurs in nightlife. Arnold Rothstein, one of the major investors in the Club El Fey, was a famed gambler who had positioned himself adroitly to become the principal lender of funds to underworld capitalists. Emulating Larry Fay, other bootleggers borrowed from Rothstein to make their own entrances into the nightclub business. In later years the occasionally violent exploits of gangland club owners and investors such as Owney Madden, Frankie Marlow, Jack "Legs" Diamond, and Dutch Schultz provided colorful notoriety for their clubs. Nils Granlund, though, characterized gangsters as "essentially ... just a tough breed of businessmen," and in any event less colorful investors - some of whom were bootleggers, some of whom were not - dominated the new nightlife business community. (footnotes omitted) (Chapter 1, The 1920s, pgs 3-4) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4312#4312 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 7:32 am Post subject: |
|
|
Steppin' Out
New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930
Hardcover
By Lewis A. Erenberg
| Quote: | | As the famous Stanford White murder case attests, however, much stepping occurred the other way. Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, a chorus girl in the Floradora Girls, wife of Pittsburgh steel heir Harry K. Thaw, and the former paramour of married society architect Stanford White, was the central personage in a scandalous murder case. The deranged Thaw shot and killed White for seducing his wife several years before their marriage. As it turned out, White had been intimate with a number of actresses, whom he often met in the lobster palaces, while his own wife lived on Long Island. He separated the Broadway world distinctly from his own home life. White was apparently not unique, for in her autobiography, Evelyn Thaw described how members of exclusive Fifth Avenue men's clubs took her and other chorus girls to the lobster palaces but showed a distinct unwillingness to introduce them to the more refined women of their own society background. This fast set, thus, was party to the double standard. The doube standard also permitted men to utilize the restaurants as their province for late-night card playing and drinking. The main dining room of Rector's had a special Yacht Club table for rich sportsmen, among them Howard Gould, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Colonel James Emerson, Lloyd Phoenix, Harry Harkness, and Commodore Mills. Upstairs the management provided food and service for the private and exclusive male gambling parties. Young and old might visit Broadway, but because of the lobster palaces' questionable character, wealthy women went only in guarded fashion. If a fashionable woman visited Rector's after theatre, she went incognito, having first returned home to change her low-cut dress. It was not considered proper to be seen in such a place in revealing clothing. Her escort sequestered her in a distant part of the room so that she would not be mistaken for a woman of the town." (From After the Ball, p. 53) |
| Quote: | | Other representatives of the urban community made the rounds of the cabarets. Arnold Rothstein was a fixture of cafe nightlife, and he bridged the period from the 1910s to the 1920s. One of the most prominent gamblers in the nation, Rothstein was known as the man who fixed the World Series and brains of the underworld. Starting out as a gambler, he also made money supplying thugs to the garment district, bankrolling theatrical productions, and loaning money to a variety of illegal operations during Prohibition. From a religious Jewish family, with a father who was a well-respected businessman in the Jewish community and the garment district, the younger Rothstein married out of the faith and found his existence in the fast life of a gambler's world. As a prominent man-about-town, he visited the cabarets with other gamblers, his wife, or a number of girl friends. There he found an easy-going cosmopolitan crowd, interested in a man who lived to all outward appearances by the laws of chance rather than the laws of the clock or routine. In the cabaret and night world of New York, the gambler could easily fit into a crowd that was learning to spend impulses more freely. (From Action Environment, p. 139) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4313#4313 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 10:49 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
A New York Life
Of Friends and Others
Hardcover
By the simply poisonous Brendan Gill
More others than friends, we'll wager ...
| Quote: | In those late years, there was no praising her - her life had failed, and so her work had failed, and it was equally the case that the work of all her early colleagues (Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Donald Ogden Stewart) must also be seen to have failed. ...
If it was true, for example, that she had been hailed as one of the leading lights in the literary world of New York in those far-off days, people like me should remember that it hadn't been a world at all - it had been only a province, or maybe no more than a parish, made up largely of second- and third-raters. To be a leading light under such consitions it would have sufficed to be a glowworm. None of the major American writers of the period had been members of a set; they had lived and worked far from the coterie of self-promoters who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel. Hemingway, Faulkner, Lardner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cather, Crane, and O'Neill were not to be found cracking jokes and singing each other's praises or taunting each other into tantrums on West Forty-fourth Street. ...
Parker was one of the wittiest people in the world and one of the saddest; if even now we go on laughing at something she happened to say very late at night in some long-since-vanished bar, we do so at our peril. Man is the animal that knows he dies, and the death's-head grinning in the mirror back of all those lighted bottles is our own. There is nothing good in life, Parker held, that will not be taken away. One of the things she admired most in Hemingway was how he had struggled to face this problem both in his life and in his writing. He had been so sure in youth that he would not choose his father's way out of life, by suicide, and Parker had been so sure in youth that she could find no other other means of dealing with the pain of being; and so Hemingway had killed himself and she had lived on, and toward the end there were only ghosts in the corners of the hotel room, silently reproaching her for having had the cowardice to live. It was no use asking them when she had ever claimed to be brave. If, as she said, she had always been the greatest little hoper in the world, she had known that hope was a form of folly and had nothing to do with courage or wisdom. "People ought to be one of two things, young or old," she had written. "No; what's the use of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead." ...
Even in death that doom may be said to have prevailed; the messiness that characterized her life was manifested in the circumstances of her cremation. ... Afterward, it was unclear what disposition should be made of Parker's ashes. ... they were mailed to the law firm of O'Dwyer and Bernstein, which had drawn her will and which represented her sole heir, Martin Luther King, Jr., as trustee for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Parker's estate amounted to approximately $20,000, which the NAACP was surprised and delighted to receive.
For 20 years the Parker ashes remained in a filing cabinet in the offices of O'Dwyer and Bernstein. ... the Algonquin ... declined to accept them. So did The New Yorker .... In the fall of 1988, the NAACP headquarters in Atlanta agreed to accept the ashes and secure for them an honored place in an agreeable setting. One of Parker's early witticisms had been that she wished the epitaph on her tombstone to read "Excuse my dust." As usual, the note of mingled apology and mockery had proved accurate. (From Dorothy Parker, pgs. 146-150) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4319#4319 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 2:04 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Omens and Lucky Charms:
New York Underground
The Anatomy of a City
Hardcover
By Julia Solis
| Quote: | In early February 1935 it was snowing heavily in New York, and on 123rd Street near the Harlem River several men were busy with their shovels. One of them, Salvatore Condulucci, saw an open sewer manhole and decided it was an ideal place to dump the snow. After a while he peeked into the opening to see if it was filling up and noticed that something was moving down there. ...
... It was an authentic alligator - and a large one at that. Unfortunately the reptile was not used to the cold New York climate. Starved, almost frozen, it opened its mouth and snapped its jaws. The sight of the sharp teeth scared its rescuers; they took their shovels and beat the animal until it was dead. ...
... It was almost eight feet long. ... it was decided that it had fallen off a steamer from Florida and crawled into one of the sewer conduits toward the city. ...
This was how it was reported by the New York Times the next morning - and it is still the most famous story about the city's sewers. Since then the urban legend of alligators roaming beneath New York City's streets has flourished, occasionally beefed up by unverified reports of further sightings. It was not until more than half a century later, in the summer of 2001, that another alligator made an unexpected public appearance in the waters of Manhattan, yet the myth has persisted in various manifestations; in novels, such as Thomas Pynchon's V, movies, comics and other pop culture media. The novelty store Archie McPhee's sells a pale New York Sewergator and the Web site sewergator.com has compiled an entertaining variety of material on the subject. (From Chapter Five, An Alligator Marks the sewers, pgs. 41-42) |
| Quote: | V.
Paperback
By Thomas Pynchon
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4337#4337 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
