From the Civic Center:
The Championship Ice Racing event scheduled for Saturday, January 28 at the Glens Falls Civic Center has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.
All ticket holders who purchased their tickets via credit card through GlensFallsCC.com will be automatically refunded the ticket price. All other refunds are only available at the original place of purchase.
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By Tresca Weinstein, Special to the Times Union
Melissa George and Laura Teeter, dancers with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company, have been living parallel lives for quite some time now. Both women graduated from the Boston Conservatory in spring 2004, joined Sinopoli’s company that summer, and have been with her ever since.
“I didn’t anticipate being here this long, but the longer I stayed, the more confident I became, and the more I felt my artistry growing,” Teeter said recently. “I was pretty lucky to land the perfect job for me right out of college.”
In their time with Sinopoli, Teeter and George have seen the company’s public profile grow as well, along with its reputation and base of support. This year, the troupe celebrates its 21st anniversary as the resident company of The Egg. Its annual “home” performance is slated for 8 p.m. Friday.
What accounts for the longevity of the company and its dancers’ long runs? (A third dancer, Claire Jacob-Zysman, has been with the troupe for six years, while Marie Klaiber, Andre Robles and Sara Senecal are newer additions.) George sums it up in two words: “Ellen’s passion.”
Martin & Joan at The Egg
The Egg in Albany has two new concerts from artists about to release new albums – imagine that. First up on Saturday, March 3, Syracuse native Martin Sexton takes the stage solo and acoustic. If you’ve already seen him, you know the singer-songwriter’s voice can go from a blues growl to a soulful croon to a gospel-tinged falsetto, often within the same song. Get a primer when his five-song EP “Fall Like Rain” drops next Tuesday.
Speaking of the blues, Joan Osborne has a CD full of blues covers due on March 27. That will give you a few days to listen before her show at The Egg on Sunday, April 1. Osborne’s breakthrough album “Relish” with its hit single “One of Us” came out 17 years ago, but she’s been working toward this one her whole career. As she puts it, she was waiting until “someday, when the time was right and my voice was ready.” About to turn 50 – gulp! – the time seems to be now.
Tickets for both go on sale Friday at 11 a.m.
“Idol” hands at Palace
In a week when “American Idol” returns to the airwaves, it seems fitting that there is news of one of its biggest alumni – if not one of its winners – is coming to town. Season five fourth-place finisher Chris Daughtry brings his band Daughtry to the Palace Theatre in Albany on April 28, in support of their current release, “Break the Spell,” and the Malaria No More foundation. Get tickets beginning Saturday, Jan. 28. Continue reading →
The complete listing of the Visiting Writers Series and Classic Film Series schedules follows.
February 2 (Thursday): Alan Lightman, novelist and science writer
Seminar – 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading – 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Alan Lightman, theoretical physicist and bestselling author, is renowned for accessible works of fiction and nonfiction that explain the “grand ideas” of physics. His most recent book is Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation (2012), which Publishers Weekly called, “a touching, imaginative rendition of God’s creation of the Universe.”
February 10 (Friday): Teju Cole, novelist and street photographer
Seminar – 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading – 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus
Teju Cole is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Open City (2011), the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist who wanders the streets of Manhattan exploring the city’s landscapes, people, and his own feelings of isolation. The New York Times named it a “2011 Notable Book” and described it as “an indelible novel [that] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.” Continue reading →
The Story Prize announced today the three finalists for the annual award for books of short fiction.
The three short story collections were chosen from among a field of 92 books submitted in 2011.
The finalists are:
• The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner)
• We Others by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)
The finalists were selected by Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark. The judges for this year’s award will be award-winning author Sherman Alexie, Indiana University comparative literature professor Breon Mitchell and Louise Steinman, the curator of the award-winning ALOUD reading/conversation series for the Los Angeles Public Library, and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.
Lots of people responded to the news. Check out what they had to say.
Continue reading →
[ cloud overview | get your own cloud ]
This is a Tumblr Cloud I generated from my blog posts between Jan 2009 and Sep 2010 containing my top 20 used words.
Uber-best-selling mega-author James Patterson has announced the winners of his second Page Turner Awards.
The 39 winners of the 2006 James Patterson PageTurner Awards will receive cash prizes totaling $500,000. Among the winners are libraries, schools, bookstores, and innovative individuals and organizations that go to extraordinary lengths to spread the joy of books and reading across the country.
The Guardian has a fun story about a great cookbook collection.
Housed in his chefs’ academy in a quiet south-west London backstreet, the library is a modern space, lit by huge windows and with a ceiling high enough that you could imagine clouds forming. Nearly 6,000 cookbooks stretch along the shelves, taking in seven languages, half a dozen centuries and a staggering diversity of subjects. Some of the ingredients in Mosimann’s older books are fairly unappealing. Boiled cow’s udders jump out from Meg Dodd’s 17th-century book, Cookery: A Practical System of Modern Domestic Cookery, sliced and served with tomato or onion sauce, unless you would prefer them simmered and salted, served cold with oil and vinegar.
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Among the earliest handwritten recipe collections in English was The Forme of Cury (cury meaning cooked food, derived from the French cuire – to cook), compiled around 1390 by a master cook to Richard II to show readers how “to make common pottages and common meats for the household, as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely”. A decade earlier, Guillaume Tirel, chef to the French royal family, produced the first known French cookbook, Viandier. Original copies no longer exist, although an 18th-century version of The Forme of Cury is available on Amazon and you also can download it free from manybooks.net.
England’s entry into the printed cookbook stakes occurred in 1500, when Richard Pynson – one of the first English printers – published The Boke of Cokery [sic], though it was thought to be lost until a copy reappeared in 2002 during a clearout by the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House.
