Excerpt of the Week

I've posted this beautiful passage previously--in the Decade by Decade series--but I came across it again this week and feel compelled to share a second time. 

Russell Shorto, writing about the 1664 English takeover of the Dutch colony in The Island at the Center of the World:

"The seed that Henry Hudson transported to a distant island rooted and grew, and, really, outgrew the mother plant.  It was the luckiest thing in the world for Manhattan--for America--that the English wanted it so badly, because, though no one could see it at the time, the Dutch empire was already on the wane, and the English one was only beginning its rise...the system that fueled the Dutch Golden Age wasn't built to last.  The English, meanwhile, especially those in America, would begin experimenting ornately and obsessively with ideas of liberty, unfettered reason, the rights of man.  Put elements of the two together--seventeenth-century Dutch tolerance and free-trade principles and eighteenth-century English ideas abotu self-government--and you have a recipe for a new kind of society.  You can almost see the baton passing from the one seventeenth-century power to the other, and at the very center of that changeover is Manhattan."

 

Little Bytes Recommends "OVERCOMMITTERS ANONYMOUS"

My colleague and friend, Becky Brewer, has just launched a blog helping readers plan their city hopping.  She will have monthly newsletters and fabulously informative features like the one she furnished for Fashion Week.  Check it out at:  OVERCOMMITTERS ANONYMOUS

Little Bytes Recommends: The Silk Road at the American Museum of Natural History

Until August 15th, you can travel the historic Silk Road in an interactive exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.  Here are just a few little bytes of trivia I found interesting on my last trip on the museum's Silk Road:

--The Silk Road stretched between Xi'an and Baghdad, ran 4600 miles and took a traveller about six months.  The temperatures along the journey could dip down to -50 degrees Farenheit and rise to 122.

--1000 years ago, Xian was the capital of China and the largest city in the world.  1 million lived inside the walls and 1 million lived outside.  It was a grid system with 108 walled neighborhoods.  The largest street was Heng Street and was as wide as a 120-lane highway.

--The secrets of silk were guarded for centuries.  5000 years ago, a small cocoon dropped into an empress's tea cup.  When it was removed, it unwound into a glistening strand. The empress dropped multiple cocoons into hot water and the silk industry was born.  A single cocoon can unwind into a silk filament about 3000' long (or, in modern-day measurements, 10 football fields).  2500 silk worms are needed for one robe.  Other animals that spin silk are spiders, some bees, ants and wasps.

--Paper was another guarded secret.  The Chinese were using paper as early as 50 BCE.  At some point in 794, the secret was smuggled west and Baghdad built a paper mill in 795AD.  The oldest existing paper book dates to 868 A.D.

Little Bytes Recommends...Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

I posted this in December but am reposting now in celebration of the book's first year in print.

People on my tours often ask me to recommend a good book with a general overview of many of the places they've seen.  (It's one of the main reasons I launched this website.)  Sadly, until this year, there was not one perfect book that would satisfy someone on the hunt.

My #1 recommendation is now Inside the Apple:  A Streetwise History of New York City by Michelle and James Nevius, one of the best books published on New York in the last decade.  It is full of information that out-of-towners, New Yorkers and guides themselves will find fascinating. 

Its ingenious structure is the first thing I need to rave about.  The 294-page book (not including the credits, the index and the additional fifty pages of walking tours) is divided into seven parts and 182 chapters.  The chapters are usually just one or two pages (in column form) and are laid out chronologically, beginning with the region before the Europeans and ending with the newest skyscrapers in our skyline.

Michelle and James Nevius also employ a brilliant cross-referencing system--when Horace Greeley's Tribune is mentioned in the chapter about the Civil War Draft Riots, a parenthesis sets off the chapter number where Horace Greeley's Tribune is discussed in greater detail.  These function like hyperlinks--click through if you wish.

Another significant achievement of their book is its accuracy.  Their history is well-researched and lucidly expressed.  They make it a point to identify the myths and tall tales that guides and tour books frequently pass off as fact.  They often go further and explain why the story is impossible before conjecturing, like trained historians, what the reality probably is.  There are numbers I might dispute--numbers and stats vary from source to source--but the Neviuses do such a great job proving their attention to detail throughout their publication, I'm inclined to trust them.  Besides the numbers, I spotted only two or three errors, but for each of their mistakes, I had to correct two or three of my own.

If you're still looking to stuff a stocking for a lover of NYC, or if you are a lover of NYC with a gift certificate, I suggest you pick this up--it's chock full of knowledge, it's portable, it's user friendly, it's brilliant.  Buy it!

Little Bytes Recommends: YOU ARE HERE...Now in Paperback

(This was posted last year when the hardcover was originally posted.  Little Bytes still highly recommends!!!)

Sometimes I think that the more I research New York, the harder it gets to give a tour of the city.  How do you cover it all in four days, let alone four hours?  How do you do justice to the history of Madison Square while speeding by it on a bus?

This is one of the reasons why I so admire admire Christopher Potter's first book, You Are Here, wherein he presents the history of the entire universe in only 271 pages. 

Many have raved about Potter's lucid, enjoyable and conversational tone.  I agree with their praise, although by conversational, we're not talking about a chat you have with a stupid person on an airplane.  This is more like the kind of conversation you have at a dinner party where you push your wine glass just out of reach because you realize you're going to need all of your remaining faculties to follow each thread of your neighbor's narrative.

The dinner party analogy isn't too far off.  You Are Here is filled with fun anecdotal trivia (from Dolly Parton's uniqueness in scientific history to a $125 million mistake resulting from a confusion between miles and kilometers) and has the feel of a dinner companion, who has read all of the most recent scientific journals, bringing you up to speed on what's happening in the increasingly removed world of the modern laboratory.

What I love most about the book, however, is that Potter employs an ingenious structure, which leads the reader on a series of well-ordered sightseeing excursions.  He first takes us on an ever expanding tour that begins with the tallest human known to exist (in the 1 meter-10 meter range) and ends 13 billion light-years away.  Later, he takes us on a reverse tour, a tour of diminishment, that starts with the smallest human and ends with quarks and electrons deep inside the atom.

Other chapters are histories of scientific inquiry that resulted in our removal of ourselves from the center of the universe, and explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics.  Then he takes us on a tour of the birth of stars and our galaxies and our planet and moon before giving a time line of life on earth (as bacteria 4 billion years ago) that eventually brings us to our bipedal ancestors in the Pliocene epoch (between 5 and 3 million years ago) and finally to our own Holocene epoch when our ancestors begin to farm for the first time.  He concludes with what we know today about human development and global migration.

And that concludes his tour.  Feel free to visit the gift shop. 

An amazing accomplishment!

See the review of You Are Here in The Guardian.

Read the article about the author and book by Stuart Jeffries.

Hear an interview with the author on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Little Bytes Recommends: MARTA SANDERS AT THE TRIAD

Marta Sanders sang her way through several Little Bytes including Broadway with Marta (A Walk across 46th Street); Madison Square, Part One (From Bowling Green to Columbus Circle); Tranquilizing a Tourist (A Walk across Wall Street); and The Cathedral in Central Park, Part 2 and 20 Million Visitors, How Many Crimes (Hoparound Tour).

One of the city's most talented cabaret singers, Marta is performing her show With a Song in My Heart at the Triad this weekend--Saturday at 9 and Sunday at 7.  Visit her new site for more information and tickets or to purchase her beautiful Corazon del Alma recording. 

And if you can't make it to NYC this weekend, realize she'll be in Bogota starting Tuesday!

Little Bytes Recommends: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In these sad times full of the fear-mongering preachers of hate, take an hour to be inspired by a program that includes not only Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial but moving performance of the song King mentioned as he lay dying and which was performed at a rally in Memphis that night.

A Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Listen today at 3pm on 93.9FM or listen online:

From the WNYC site:

Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up listening to and singing church songs, and saw gospel and folk music as natural tools to further the civil rights movement. In this hour-long special from WNYC, host Terrance McKnight interweaves musical examples with Dr. King's own speeches and sermons to illustrate the powerful place that music held in his work--and examines how the musical community responded to and participated in Dr. King's cause.

Little Bytes Recommends...A Bicycle Tour

Maybe not this week with the frigid temperatures... but spring is right around the corner.  In November, my friend, Sarah, and I went on a bike tour into Brooklyn with a client who is bringing a large group of potential bike riders to the city next August. 

Our tour was operated by Bike the Big Apple and led by Jesse McDonough, an experienced cyclist and guide whose commentary on the city was interesting, articulate, and, above all, accurate. 

If any of you, like me, have resisted riding bicycles in New York--because of the taxis, the New Jersey drivers, the buses, the trucks, the odd door swinging open, the Rhode Island drivers, the ipod-budded pedestrian who steps out between parked cars, the horse-drawn carriages, the wheeled hot dog carts, and the Connecticut drivers--a bike tour is the perfect opportunity to ride and feel safe.  On a tour, you travel in a pack--the larger, the better. Six bikes riding in a group are treated like a car.  Twenty in a group are treated like a truck.  For big groups, one guide leads, one guide brings up the rear, and they usher their riders through streets that no longer seem as frightening.

And what an amazing way to relate to the city!  Fifteen minutes before the end of our tour, we were still on the Brooklyn Bridge, but we were soon coasting into the court district, riding on a plaza between courthouses, zipping through Columbus Park, turning up Mulberry, crossing on Jersey Street (a two-block street just south of Houston that, according to Jesse, tests the knowledge and patience of every bike messenger), and heading up Lafayette and Third to Union Square where we hung a right and arrived back at the bike store right on time. 

Riding down the east side towards the Manhattan Bridge.  Spending most of the first ride away from traffic gives you the chance to familiarize yourself with your bike and the skill of your fellow riders.

View north from the Manhattan Bridge.

The Manhattan Bridge, which partially opened for traffic one hundred years ago this month.

Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park between the bridges in DUMBO.

(I just read on their website that this state park forbids pets, alcohol, and bicycle riding.  Oops.)

Robert and Sarah with that amazing Brooklyn Bridge. 

 

Robert and Sarah ON that amazing Brooklyn Bridge.  Minutes later we would be shouting at tourists who were walking in the bike lane.  (Actually I wouldn't have to shout.  I deliberately rode in the back and let the riders in the front risk their lives to clear the path for me.  Sorry, Sarah.)

Little Bytes Recommends...Telling Stories and After the Storm

James Lecesne, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, performer, activisit and all-around inspiration, is one of my favorite New Yorkers, and if you're in the city next week, you have two chances to be changed and illuminated. 

The first event is Telling Stories, a six-hour workshop at Cap 21 designed to introduce you to the basics of story, whether your project is a play, a movie, a novel or T.V. pilot.  James is truly a remarkable teacher.  His early advice and encouragement after reading an early draft of my first novel were instrumental in making Suspension the book it became.

If you're free next Saturday, October 10th, do yourself a favor and sign up for your spot now.  For more information, click this link.

The second chance to be inspired takes place throughout next week.  After the Storm, the documentary about the successful post-Katrina effort to reopen the St. Mark's Community Center in New Orleans, will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art starting this Monday.  James Lecesne was one of the originators of the idea to travel to New Orleans and mount a production of the musical Once on This Island with thirteen teenagers from the neighborhood. 

Their production, as shown in the documentary, was later restaged in New York and I was honored to give the cast (and film crew) a tour of the city atop a double decker bus.  I will be eagerly attending Monday's screening at 7pm.  Come join me!  Click here to visit the MoMA page for screening times.

Little Bytes Recommends...an Afternoon (Maybe Even an Eternity) at Green-Wood Cemetery

As reported yesterday, Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838.  Inspired by Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Green-Wood was landscaped by David Bates Douglass as one the country's first rural cemeteries.  Initially, people still preferred to bury their dead in churchyards and on family land, but in 1845 the widow of DeWitt Clinton, one of the most important New Yorkers in our history who died in 1828, had his remains transferred from a graveyard near Albany to Green-Wood.  For the rest of the nineteenth century, many of the most famous New Yorkers chose Green-Wood for their final resting place and visitors from across the country made it one of the most visited attractions in the United States.

Green-Wood was also an inspiration for Central Park and it probably wasn't coincidental that the winning proposal put forth by Olmsted and Vaux was called the Greensward Plan, a name that would surely evoke pleasant associations.  Green-Wood is 478 acres of rolling hills and valleys, thousands of trees, four lakes, and a myriad of avenues and pathways with names like Glade, Birch, Sassafras, Marigold, Vernal, Jonquil, and Garland. 

Besides the landscaping, the cemetery is home to some of the finest sculpture and mausoleums in America.  Sometimes called the Pere Lachaise of Brooklyn, there is stunning artistry almost everywhere you turn.

Green-Wood is huge (more than half the size of Central Park) with so many twists and turns and ups and downs, and almost 600,000 buried, you can't expect to see it all.  A friend and I were lucky to have had a security guard pick us up while we were walking along Sylvan Lake and took us for a tour in his air-conditioned car, showing us graves and remarkable sculptures we never would have reached on foot.  

On Wednesdays, at 1:00, the cemetery offers a tram tour for $15, which can be booked online here.  I'm actually planning to take that tour next Wednesday, 09/09/09.  Join me!

What family tomb is the largest private mausoleum at Green-Wood?  ANSWER AFTER THE JUMP...

Little Bytes Recommends: The New American Wing at the Met

For me, the new American wing at the Met was even more of a surprise than the opening of the spectacular Roman galleries two years ago.  Much of the Charles Engelhard Court is now floored with yellow marble.  A sunken area was retained on the northern end that allows visitors to examine some of the collection's marble statues before stepping up through the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States (which was first erected on Wall Street in the 1820's) to explore the newly renovated and refurbished period rooms, which look better than ever.  There's a glass elevator on the eastern side of the rooms and a brand new mezzanine-level balcony that literally adds another level of display space on the western end of the court.  One of the museum's better cafes still remains, tucked away obscurely below the new balcony, and the Visual Storage seems more welcoming and user friendly. 

If you can, visit this weekend.  I can also vouch for the amazing (beautifully disturbing) Francis Bacon retrospective.

Sadly, I can't vouch for the Roxy Paine installation on the roof, since the roof has been closed due to rain each of the last FOUR times I've been there.

Pictured:  Judy Krauss imitating Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Tiny Tidbytes...Cayce Recommends:

A lesson learned about books and their covers.
If you haven't seen it yet, you may shed a tear.
Not sophisticated, but moving.

Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent

Demi Moore said on Twitter.com that it reduced her to tears as well.

Little Bytes Recommends...MURDER AT THE MET

For my birthday last week I wanted to check out one of the scavenger hunts run by Watson Adventures.  They host hunts in New York, LA, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia and I had heard raves about their most challenging:  Murder at the Met. 

I invited eleven I felt would love the game to join me.  (Apologies for the blurry pictures, but, remember, you're not supposed to use flash inside the museum--not even for a special occasion.)  I thought that twelve players divided into three teams of four would be ideal.  A team of two would have a difficult time since there's so much ground to cover, items to find, and codes to break, while a team of five or more might get in each other's way or leave a few people out of the fun. 

For the sake of your own potential hunt, I'm not going to divulge any of the details other than to say that in Murder at the Met, you have two hours to loop through the museum locating objects, filling in clues and then using the clues to solve the mystery. 

There were nine other teams playing that night and I'm proud to say that two of our teams tied for third and for second, and one of our teams won with a perfect score.  (I have very smart friends.)  Mine was one of the teams in second place, short of a perfect score by only one measly point.  We couldn't find the thingamajig in the whatchamacallit room.  This was one of the hardest items to find and since it was early in our loop (every team follows the same route but starts in different locations), we expected all the searches to be that difficult and forced ourselves to move on.  By the end of the game we convinced ourselves that the temporary answer we had put down was probably the right one.  It wasn't.  And apparently, according to the other teams, the correct item is "really, really beautiful."  (I look forward to admiring the "really, really beautiful" thingamajig on my next visit.)

The scavenger hunts are designed as team-building projects and I was fascinated to see and hear how each individual took a specific role in the hunt.  Consider my group.  Since I knew the floor plan very well, I became the navigator, moving my group from gallery to gallery and to a few of the objects without a single false turn, but I could not for the life of me get my mind around the mystery we were supposed to solve.  "I know who was murdered!" I proclaimed at one point even though the murder victim was stated in the opening line of the handout and was never, at any moment, in question.  Becca turned out to be the story sleuth, keeping track of every suspect, relationship and motivation; Doug was the code breaker; and Sarah was the voice of reason, bringing us back to earth whenever our rationalizing got too complicated.  (What's most interesting is that these aren't necessarily the roles we would have played if the teams were different.)

Pictured on the right--Laura, Tessa, Marc and Chris:  the winners of last Friday's Murder at the Met:

To solve the Murder at the Met or to find another scavenger hunt near you, visit Watson Adventures.

Little Bytes Recommends THE BAGEL...The Book and the Bread

On our walk across 46th Street, when the absence of the Intrepid forced us to talk about bagels (Twelfth Avenue, Part Two), I said, "Bagels are first mentioned in municipal records in Poland in 1610.  The same year that Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was produced.  They have nothing to do with each other!"  Then I moved on to discussing the Hudson.  Had no choice.

But back to bagels! 

A month or two ago I heard an interview with Maria Balinska, the author of The Bagel:  The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, who discussed the role of bagels as a fasting bread in Poland.

Recently, I found a great review of the book at Moment Magazine by Joan Nathan, author of seven books on Jewish cooking.  In the review, Nathan offers up two reasons why bagels came to be:

"Remarkably, Balinska found evidence from the 9th century that might explain why bagel dough is boiled before it is baked. A Polish decree of the time forbade Jews to bake bread because of the connection between bread and the body of Jesus Christ. But if dough was boiled first and then baked, it didn’t fall into the same category as bread and could be made and consumed."

"An alternative explanation that I heard from a member of the Beigel family holds that Jewish merchants from Krakow who traveled the countryside to sell their wares needed to take food with them to keep kosher on the road. According to Jewish law, eating bread at a meal requires a ritual washing of hands and a blessing over the food before eating. But in the countryside, that was difficult because of the risk of contracting typhus from impure water. The Beigel family, aware of this predicament, ingeniously decided to first boil the dough and then bake it, thus putting it in the category of noodles."

Read the review for more information on the bagel and the book...and to learn what city's bagels Joan Nathan believes are "probably the best...in the world."  (It's not New York's!!!)  Follow the link.

Little Bytes Recommends...State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

Inspired by the remarkable guide books of the Federal Writers' Project published during the Great Depression, the editors of State by State asked fifty of our country's greatest authors to bring their talents, memories and observations to this brand new anthology.  The remarkable roster includes Jhumpa Lahiri on Rhode Island; Jonathan Franzen on New York; William T. Vollman on California; Louise Erdrich on North Dakota; S.E. Hinton on Oklahoma; Ann Patchett on Tennessee; John Hodgman on Massachusetts; Anthony Bourdain on New Jersey; David Rakoff on Utah; and Alison Bechdel on Vermont.

Every state is covered and a conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner, Edward P. Jones, ensures that Washington, D.C. is not left out.  And just think:  if you read one essay a week, you will have gone on a virtual road trip of the entire country by the end of 2009.

Each entry is prefaced by facts and figures about the state in question, and there are, in the center of the book, fifty photos submitted by the authors.

BUT WAIT!  THERE'S MORE!

Included in an appendix are thirty tables where states are ranked according to various criteria ranging from population, incarceration rates, obesity and toothlessness to violent crime, unemployment, voter participation and roller coasters per capita.  Where does your state rank?

At a New Year's party last week, I used these tables to create a trivia competition (with an overly complicated scoring system) gauging how well players knew the states they were assigned.  Jason won handily while representing Florida, although Katie from Rhode Island staged a major comeback in the last three rounds.

For today's trivia bytes, the state of New York ranks first or last in four of the thirty tables.

It turns out that Empire State has the lowest suicide rate in the nation (only 6.2 out of 100,000 residents) even though it also has the longest mean travel time to work (30.9 minutes).

New York pays $14,119 per pupil, which is the highest expenditure for public education.

But the most surprising byte:  New York has the lowest percentage of population born elsewhere in the United States--only 17.7% of its residents were born in another state.  (21.6% were born in another country--second only to California--but that's another table.)

For more information on the book, to see a list of all the writers and their respective states, or just to browse inside, visit the State by State page at HarperCollins.com.

And now I'm off to visit Colorado with Benjamin Kunkel.  Peace!

Little Bytes Recommends...Before They Close

It's a crazy time for every industry.  CEO's of car companies are acting humble, publishers are taking a break from buying books, and the world of Broadway is being turned upside down.  The existence of Wednesday matinees is being seriously reconsidered and producers are having to shutter some very popular productions, including several Tony winners for Best Musical.

By the end of January, the following Broadway shows will be gone:  Hairspray, Spring Awakening, Spamalot, Young Frankenstein, 13, Boeing Boeing, Grease, and Gypsy.  (This doesn't include the limited engagement productions like The Seagull and All My Sons or the holiday shows like Irving Berlin's White Christmas which will also be gone by February.)  A number of shows closed in the last few months--Legally Blonde, title of show, A Tale of Two Cities, Xanadu, American Buffalo, and the groundbreaking musical Rent, which ran for twelve years.

So if you can only afford the time or money to see one, which would be the show to see?  Well, 18 Little Bytes alumni voted.  Our recommendations after the jump.

Little Bytes Recommends a DVD

MAN ON WIRE

I saw this documentary during the Tribeca Film Festival and wanted to share my enthusiasm now that it’s out on DVD.  Thirty-four years ago, Philippe Petit, walked and danced in the sky between the newly built Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.  Seven years earlier, in the waiting room of his dentist, Petit saw a rendering in a magazine of the future World Trade Center.  He tore the pages out and left before his cleaning, obsessed, dreaming and planning how he would undertake a tight rope walk between the towers that had yet to be erected.  This documentary follows the story from the dentist’s office until  today, combining archival footage from the sixties and seventies, talking head interviews with Petit and his associates, and scenes of reenactment (many of which were shot in the new 7 World Trade Center) in the tradition of the great heist films.

 

 We hear the participants remember the tense moments in detail—sneaking into the two buildings and maneuvering their way to the top on the eve of the stunt, hiding from the security guards, in one case under a tarp a few feet away, spending the night preparing, connecting the buildings through archery, climbing to the edge to retrieve the arrow and wire, and then securing the tight rope.  By the time Petit takes his first steps 1350 feet above the city, we feel like co-conspirators standing on the roof bearing witness, and we are only more inspired and moved when he makes not just one but several crossings, walking, dancing, even lying down on his back with one leg hanging lazily below him.

 

Admittedly, there are times while watching the acts of this conspiracy unfold, as the two teams evade security with fake id’s and costumes, when you can’t help but think of the terror cells who spent years plotting their own interaction with the Twin Towers, but that gives Petit and his team an aura of nobility—as artists creating something beautiful and empowering.  When these buildings were brand new, architectural wonders, two monoliths rising above a city, a man somehow overcame them, humanized them.  And now that the towers are no longer there, that feat is rendered even more magical, because it happened only once and can never happen again.

 

Photos ©2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images.

Recommended Reading--Who Are You Callin' Lonely?!

I highly recommend the fascinating cover story, The Loneliness Myth, by Jennifer Senior in last week's New York Magazine.  It leads with a surprising statistic:  More than half (50.6%) of all households in Manhattan are occupied by only one resident, which is a higher percentage than you'll find in Brooklyn (29.5%), Queens (26.1%) or in the other 3,138 counties of the United States. 

Much has been written about the profound alienation experienced by individuals moving to a city, the shock of feeling lonely in such a populous environment, but this alienation might have more to do with the transition, the novelty of urban life in the first few months.  After living here for some time, the number of social networks, of strong and weak ties, quickly outpace those in smaller communities.

People consistently claim that they feel less lonely in New York.  Statistics reveal that our suicide rates are among the very lowest in the country and living here also seems to stave off divorce and Alzheimer's Disease.  Read The Loneliness Myth for details. 

Little Bytes Recommends...

..."Black Watch."

After an all-too-brief, sold-out run at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO last year, the National Theatre of Scotland returned this fall for another limited engagement.  Following more critical raves (the kind that urge you to do anything short of murder to snag a ticket), the show was extended and is now playing through December 21st.  It's a riveting, hyper-theatrical production improvised from interviews and full of high octane physicality that tells the history of Scotland's most celebrated regiment, focusing on their most recent deployment in Iraq (their last tour of duty under their historic name).  Much of the emotion comes from the stylized, choreographed sequences set to music, all of which build to the theater company's own version of a military show parade, an unforgettable finale.

Watch another preview video after the jump.

Little Bytes Recommends...

...The Bowery Boys, which hosts an informative, entertaining blog and series of podcasts which you can hear on their site or download from most podcasting services.

In the last week alone, the Bowery Boys have posted four fantastic and timely features/podcasts:

PODCAST: New York City Marathon;

Polling New York City's voting history;

Know Your Mayors: Philip Hone, the party mayor;

Barack Obama's New York City...a tour of the President-Elect's life in New York (1981-1985).  

 

A photo of a young Barack Obama with his grandparents on a visit to Central Park.