Everything happens for a reason. A cultural commentary with a lotta rock-n-roll, semitism, and parenting. See our Etsy Shop! Buy HeadyBands, Hoodies and more at www.wholephamily.etsy.com
For whatever reason, I just didn't get into DMB. It's not that I didn't listen and enjoy when he played on the radio in the '90s, no, not at all. I just didn't go to any of his shows. Nothing against him or anything, just wasn't my thing. Who remembers those "white hats" that DMB fans wore?
But check out Dave who performed this past June at SPAC (Saratoga Performing Arts Center: if you haven't been there for a show, get yourself there! And in August you can go to the track!) with the fabulously talented Nigel Hall.
It's my opinion that Nigel is the real star here: he is the best voice of soul and funk out there today.
Click forward to 4:05 to see Nigel at the mic and really RAGE it out.
now *this* is a fun, chill, inexpensive phamily phun event in philly! Sadly, the Whole Phamily will be unable to attend but I encourage each.and.every.one.of.you who lives in Philadelphia and is looking for something to do in a week or so to GO GO GO!!! DJ Scribe looks fully funkadelic. Check out DJ Samson, too, cuz word on the street, yo, is that pisher can spin some mad wax!
While we currently have no plans on attending, I saw this ad in Philadelphia's The Jewish Exponent for the upcoming Jewish Heritage Night at a Phillies game which jumps on the"PH" bandwagon. I can't speak to previous years since I am a recent New York transplant, but did they market the event this way in the past?Or, did a wise person at Philadelphia Federation (ahem, Phederation) stumble upon this blog and dig my vibe? In all of my humble modesty, though, I am currently humming the words of Carly Simon to the tune of "You're So Vain."
My sister Reba calls me an internet jewish cosmic freakazoid. Would anyone else pick up on this advertising detail other than me?
pre-game phamily phestival. The Whole Phamily is happy to join you if we are invited. Partnerships are good. Laminates/guest lists/VIP treatment are even better.
I have my feelers out already with their marketing folks, so I am curious what the story is...
Meantime, check out Carly from 2 years ago.
Remastered/remixed classic song from the excellent year of 1972.
Now, that is one very fine vintage.
I speak from personal experience.
Dig the whole Morningside Heights and Columbia University vibe.
If that isn't Butler Library, I don't know what is.
And a chassid vibe, to boot!
The fever is spreading.
We just got back from our lovely July 4th celebration. They had fireworks. There were a lot of tarps and blankets. There were a lot of glowsticks for sale. Preferring to save money, the boys got to enjoy collecting them as groundscores after the event. For those of you who don't share my musical interests, you likely have not seen what is known in show-parlance as a "glowstick war." Individuals who love glowsticks will bring in huge tubes of them and gather them together to throw into the air all at once. Or get them sent to the venue for pick up inside. But we're talking big numbers here, like 400 at a time. This distribution of the glowsticks happens all at once and it is a free-for-all. Good folks doing good things for the greater community.
A few weeks ago a video was made of how they launch 2,000 glowsticks all at once. Many people and a large tarp are involved. As well as inspiring music.
Nora Ephron's loss is tremendous. Upon finding out the news just now at 11:15 pm, my husband's reaction was, "oh?!" Typical somewhat benign/bland reaction.
So, I called my mom. What else was there to do?
Screams, shrieks, and great sighs of sorrow. (And validation for my own deep pit of the heart emotion felt).
My dad, yelling from the other room, said, "Oh, did someone die?" Upon finding it it was "just" Nora Ephron, he was only blandly annoyed. Benign at best. "I wanna go to sleep."
But us women, and the men among us who have worked with her like Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Billy Crystal, all have expressed their deep gutteral pangs of sorrow. Nora Ephron was a giant. A great of our time. She could write, sure, but she was more than just a writer. She was the voice of women, crossing generational gaps.
Is it coincidence or not that just a few weeks ago at my local JCC I picked up an original copy of her 1971 book Crazy Salad, complete with yellowed pages and falling-apart spine. I wasn't terribly impressed by the writing, her being somewhat early in her career. It wasn't as witty and sharp as I loved in Heartburn. Last week I ordered her latest book from the library I Remember Nothing, thinking I am two years behind schedule with reading one of the funniest, wittiest, smartest women of our time. I even as recently as a couple of weeks ago tweeted her sister Delia, as I have ramped up my Twitter life and searching for those folks important to me such as Nora Ephron only to find her not on Twitter, but Delia is also a great woman and tweeted me back.
Nora Ephron could write, boy could she write. Always a source of inspiration: everything is copy, she said famously. Wanting so much to emulate her style, Nora has often been a lurking existence in my brain.
May her memory be a blessing, and may we continue to use her writing as fuel for all of our inklings to be go-getters. She was one of those rare gems and will be tremendously missed.
I thank my sister Reba for reminding me about this scene, which, when I first saw it in high school in 1989 was completely mind-blowing and truth-revealing. At the time, I just wanted to be friends with my junior prom date, a nice, good guy who I simply wasn't attracted to and couldn't view as a boyfriend. I couldn't understand why the feeling wasn't mutual until I saw this scene, which explained it all.
With summer vacation in full swing, I loved hearing this 2009 remix of the Jackson 5's ABC from their Remix Suite. With the reggae beat, this got me in the happy mood for summer.
Then again, Boogie on Reggae Woman is pretty good, too.
As the mother, naturally I kvell and admit that I am biased: everything my children do is great. But trying to remove myself from the parental role, I gotta admit this is pretty good. Wacky and fun, Concealed Light has written a great poem. Way better than I ever did in 3rd grade. It was published in her school's first-ever literary publication, and while the town library judges made a grave error by not awarding her a prize for its entry in this year's poetry contest, there is more great stuff where that came from. She says she wants to be a writer. Oh, how I would love to send her to a writing workshop. One day maybe that will happen. Until then, I encourage her to keep on reading and writing.
Perhaps one of my greatest pet peeves resulting from the proliferation of technology use today via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the like is the misuse of the apostrophe in the word "it." A college professor told me many moons ago about a peril of email: spelling errors would will increase exponentially, and he had little tolerance for such mistakes. This is when, if we wanted to use email, we had to go to the computer cluster. There was no such thing as dorm rooms being connected to the Internet. This is also when I didn't know how to properly spell liaison. Jump forward twenty years, and autocorrect and spell check are partially to blame. Granted, people are busy and lazy and simply either don't have the time or desire to go back and make a correction.
But still.
Come on, people.
We all make spelling and grammatical errors more frequently online, and I am certainly not exempt from making this mistake.
And for that reason, I thank my brother for reminding me that the spelling of the famous cymbals is Zildjian, and not Ziljan as I previously wrote.
Let me introduce you to Led Zeppellin IV, if you haven't already been introduced. If you don't know your Zosos from your Ziljans, stick with me, keep it nice and sticky, and I can show you a thing or two.
We all know Chicago is where Obama is from, and we know here at the Whole Phamily it is important to keep a happy home as well as be mindful of mountain men who wander.
If you have seen the light of a reverberating Ziljan cymbal, you will understand why I feel that this song explains the winner of this year's Presidential Election. Question my reasoning, fine, but at least acknowledge I am onto something.
And that is the way it is for 2012.
What shall be in 2016 is the question. If you're experienced like me, you will agree that none of this and yet all of this is truth even unto its innermost parts. Meaning, how can Rachel use a classic rock tune to validate the result of the upcoming election?
I can't explain it, truthfully. Too complicated.
Be prepared, keep everything in their own pockets, have propergear, and stick together with your family, or you can stick with the Whole Phamily and see better, happier days of goodness and love and ultimate redemption.
In the meantime, you can rage with our machine of the Ganse Mishpucha (Whole Phamily).
If you want to talk Grapes of Wrath, dudes, (aka Tom Joad, the Cats, and all that Dust), perhaps you should look for purple glitter rather during this post-9/11 era than dust of the bowl (better to be two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year than a bunch of red dust flying around the air during the Great Depression). Or just watch Henry Ford playing Tom Joad. That's easier. Even if it's just a 4 minute clip. You can handle a brief clip, kids, can't you?
My take away from all of this is to grow my own food.
And that's exactly what we're starting to accomplish this year with our organic garden.
My writing skills and ability to express myself could never, ever give proper way to a discussion of Moonrise Kingdom. They say it's not good to start in the negative. So let me start over.
The newest film by Director Wes Anderson is yet again a perfect world of great design, conversation, sound, music, placement.
Just watch the trailer!
This is good. This is very, very good. I love you, Wes Anderson. Well, not really you as a person. I don't know you. But I love Wes Anderson. I love him, yes I do. But I don't know you.
I love your movies. I love them a lot. I love them like all of your disciples love them. The style. The music. The dialogue. The message. The story-line. The clothing. The imagery.
I love it/you like the way I love wide wale corduroy on men who listen to the Kinks.
And Charles and Ray Eames.
But I really love my husband who is accompanying me to Mountain Jam this weekend since I really want to go. This will be such a good thing for our whole family.
While all of my observant Jewish friends are still popping their Lactaid pills after last week's dairy-laden Shavuot holiday, I am packing for the next adventure. We reenacted going up to that humblest of mountains, Mount Sinai, where we received our holy Torah thousands of years ago. All the while eating a lot of blintzes.
The journey to another mountain continues, this time to Mountain Jam at Hunter Mountian, New York. My family which as you know include my husband Stango and our children Concealed Light, The Wolfman, and the Wolfman's Brother, has been long-looking forward to this weekend-long music festival. So much so that we temporarily suspending cleaning help to save funds for tickets.
I'll be experiencing first-hand a music festival with three children under the age of 10 in tow. We are camping on the grounds and shlepping everything up the mountain by Radio-Flyer cart. Stango and I have never camped at a music festival together, so this is all new territory. But since live music is the one thing we simply love to experience together, what could be better as a family outing? The kids want us to take them to music that we like, but the shows all run too late and aren't kid-friendly. Mountain Jam is different. Lucky for us that we also have an extended network of friends to enjoy the weekend with. The Nunever is coming, and he has graciously offered to wear my new Whole Phamily t-shirt. Delights such as Awareness Village, Karma Wash and an entire area dedicated to family activities await.
Hopefully my experience as a mama bringing her children to their first music festival will not only be recorded here. Time will only tell.
