Uptown Salon in Harlem, Please Come! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=61836517728&ref=mf

My wife, Asia, and I will be hosting a new artistic gathering in Harlem called the Uptown Salon-http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=61836517728&ref=mf

The concept is to draw artists to come and present their work in a venue conducive to aesthetic inquiry and discussion of the artistic process. The goal is to foster an appreciation of art and build a creative community in Harlem, with a nod to the Harlem Renaissance and the late 19th and early 20th century Parisian artistic salons. I hope you will be able to make it as well.

Here's the full blurb:

Happily, last month was a great success and we hope that it will continue. We will be holding this month's salon once again in our Harlem home.

We are looking for other performers and visual artists of all genres to do 10-15-minute
presentations. This could include singing a song, displaying and presenting a painting, reading and discussing a poem, or simply performing a monologue.

This event is FREE but because our apartment isn't terribly big (understatement), we only have room for the first thirty people who RSVP to come this month. This is not including seven to ten performers. Next month we are still considering relocating to a nearby café. We will offer light refreshments but please BYOB.

By the way, you don't have to be an artist to attend, just someone willing to seriously consider another person's work with an open mind.

Hope to see you at the Uptown Salon!

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During the early 20th century at Montparnasse and Montmartre, and later during the storied Harlem Renaissance, artists of all disciplines would congregate and share incipient ideas with one another and the greater public in an intellectual forum.

Though to our disappointment we will not be serving absinthe, we hope to create a similar forum in 21st-century Harlem, developing and sustaining an artistic community above Union Sq.

Artists need the input of others to help flesh out new projects and ideas, thus the Harlem Salon will be a forum for all artists-- visual, musical, literary and performance-based-- to come and present their works for the enjoyment and edification of their fellow artists, as well as the greater public.

This is a forum for discussing the experiences and catalysts of creative work in order to foster a greater appreciation of the arts and establish a creative community.

Battling Amalek

Somehow it must have escaped me that this is the most important time of the year to make t'shuvah (repentance). Sure I was painfully aware of the added blessings and word tags in my prayers during these aseret yamei t'shuvah, but I wasn't personally, spiritually aware of all of my shortcomings until receiving some terrible news this evening. A young lady, whom I barely knew but was an extended family friend, took her own life by jumping off of a building. She sang a song at our American wedding and we even had dinner with her about three weeks ago for my wife's birthday. Ostensibly at least, she had everything-- looks, a killer voice, youth, a new family as her mother just remarried-- but now she has nothing. Now she is nothing, but whatever we are in the first place--maybe only that primordial stuff, or dark matter.

Let's hope she has become whatever it is she was looking for when she decided to take her own life. And I only hope that there is a plan in this topsy-turvy world that I may trust more than is healthy for my own good. I often hear people say that life is nothing but chaos, amorphous and with no apparent order. Tonight, on the eve of the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom HaKippurim, I am the closest that I've ever been to buying in to such nihilism.