A Bleg: Ideas for Radio Hong Kong?

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 10:09 pm

1268863754 A Bleg: Ideas for Radio Hong Kong?

Shopsin’s (120 Essex Street) is a new York institution, a restaurant that began as a grocery store; its owner, Kenny Shopsin, is colorful, irascible, and talented. Shopsin’s is famous for breakfast but also for its vast, unusual, common-sense menu. Shopsin has just written a book that is half cookbook and half memoir, entirely fascinating. I had never sat down and read a cookbook from cover to cover but that is what happened with Shopsin’s book (co-written with Carolynn Carreno). It is called Eat Me. the introduction is a reprint of a New Yorker article by Calvin (Bud) Trillin, a Shopsin’s regular. if you do go to the restaurant, do pay attention to Shopsin’s idiosyncrasies, because he allegedly has a Soup-Nazi-like intolerance that may earn you permanent exile from his restaurant. (SJD)

I recently took the kids to see a performance by Jim Dale, the longtime British stage actor (he won a Tony for Barnum) who is best known these days as the wildly entertaining reader of the Harry Potter books on tape. he was reading an adaptation of a Eudora Welty story called “The Shoe Bird,” which he recently recorded with the Seattle Symphony. (It was wonderful, and I encourage you to give it a listen.) Afterward, Dale took questions from the audience — which, predictably, were about the Harry Potter series. Items of interest that emerged: Dale was given only 100 pages of manuscript at a time to read and then record, so he never knew what was coming; and in order to keep track of the 146 voices he’d created for all the characters, he often pre-recorded a bit of the characters’ voices and then held a tape recorder up to his ear in the studio to remind himself. (SJD)

If you live in or are visiting new York and have children, do everything you can to take in one of the Young People’s Concerts at the new York Philharmonic. even if you don’t love the music on that day’s program — we recently attended “Ravel’s Paris,” not my favorite by a long shot — all the extras in the program are terrific: the dancers, composers, instrumentalists, and explainers who are paraded out by conductor Delta David Gier to put the music in context for the kids. (SJD)

A Bleg: Ideas for Radio Hong Kong?