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Arts Hawk

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Elvin Hayes

Elvin Hayes (12/123)

  1. Good points all around. For the record it was $120 for large not jumbo, but as previously noted, it was the best part of the meal. As for oysters being the food of the poor, true, if your calendar is stuck in 1879. These days, it is a currency like any other perishable, where you can leave $40-60 for a dozen depending on where they come from. All I can say is the entire experience was like a Restaurant Impossible episode, except I doubt they are failing! Maybe it is the Starbucks model - shitty product, but the brand recognition gets the proletariat to go.
  2. I'll wise up next time. Short list of requisite items for the next meal: 1. Stemware (plastic cups tip over in the wind-what a shock) 2. Pellegrino 3. Napkins that don't disintegrate upon contact with seasoning. 4. Lobster picks (real sturdy metal only) 6. Actual beer (Miller does not count) 7. Liquor- so that when someone orders a vodka martini it has vodka in it.
  3. So with a sudden night free, a crab fix was in order. By overwhelming recommendation, Nick's is the place to go. A dive, they say. An understatement, I say. Upon arrival, I got a disapproving glance from the woman manning the front. This must have been because they don't like my NYC cadence. I asked for a table near the water and was told there would be a 45 minute wait. When we took another table, three tables in the exact area we asked for became available in 10 minutes. Starting out with oysters, they were quite fresh and came swimming in melted icewater. The ritz cracker as an accompaniment was bizarre, but may be something the locals like. A salad my companion had was devoid of any flavor though it came with what they say was calamari. It was so breaded and salty, it may as well have been cooked Good Year Radials. The crabs arrived at the same time as the appetizers. When asked, the runners informed us there are two kitchens and they don't communicate with each other. Why is this such a source of pride, I am wondering? Our waitress was just charming and clueless, but I forgive her because I found her work ethic commendable. She wanted us to have a great time, even if she forgot some of our order. The crabs themselves were wonderful and worth the trip. At $125/dozen, they were pretty pricey, but given the level of cooking with everything else, I thought it was worth it. Plastic cups, forks and napkins is, I guess, the speed the locals are used to, but why is this necessary? It gives this diner the distinct feel of a beach diner, when they do serious seafood. Place was packed and no-one seemed to mind any service issues at all. Would we come back? Only for the crabs, ordering nothing else.
  4. Coincidentally this very topic came up last night with a prominent conductor residing in NYC. He assured me that despite the efforts to revive City Opera, the company is dead. Will it remain so? Maybe you can entice Tony Tommasini to comment on where opera managements are with respect to training the next generation of executives. What I see is the great success of the Miami Opera, Santa Fe Opera, SF Opera. Kennedy Center is cruising along nicely. What are they doing right? Opera should not be the hard sell orchestra and chamber music are because of sets and costumes. The question is what to do with new music, nationalism in opera, etc. The Klinghoffer production was quite polarizing for the Met, yet I bet it netted more opera buffs than it lost. So, as with everything, one needs to balance new productions with old favorites. The key is not to confuse freshness with novelty.
  5. Just worked with Gil - Bach concerti 1041 and 1042. Wonderful player, beat cancer and also just recorded the six solo sonatas and partitas. I'd go preorder those right away
  6. Actually I am not certain we disagree as much as it may appear. I would love to know what your definition of "help" is with respect to NYCO and Lincoln Center. LC, as a non profit, oversees a conglomerate of other non profits for, presumably, the greater good of the city. Keep in mind, the deal between the Rockefellers and the city, was part of a West Side redevelopment project with huge tax benefits to LC. It is possible that part of the agreement has to do with what is in the best interests of the city, not one individual constituent. Less obvious is that a prudent LC director, even in the post Beverly Sills era, would be ill advised to "bail out" NYCO without a rock solid managememnt team, 3-5-7 year business plan, board support, artistic leadership and an endowment drive. Again, see Art of the Turnaround by Michael Kaiser - when all the pieces in the puzzle are not in place, the organization will fail (I am paraphrasing). We know that was precisely the problem with NYCO and the loser is the community. You don't go into unusual venues without prepping the appearance and doing a true outreach campaign, which is what they did. And I will bet you that none of that executive team stayed out of work very long, again, to the detriment of the NYC arts community at large.
  7. Keep in mind, Vienna is kind of a unique place - steeped in the Habsburg tradition, eschewing progress at practically any cost and is hardly the model of 21st century reality. The place in Europe for art and music is Berlin. And food is quite spectacular, not the old sausage and sauerkraut culture which is also awesome, but gets old fast if you have no choice. Berlin is an incredible metropolis.
  8. It's true that, when first built, NY State Theater (renamed David H. Koch Theater in 2008) was an acoustical disaster. However, this is true of every constituent of Lincoln Center, except the Met and to a lesser extent Alice Tully Hall. I would not give the administration of City Opera a pass because they failed to get a good sound engineer to sweeten the acoustics the way Wolf Trap, Hollywood Bowl, Bravo! Vail and countless other venues do all the time. Sure, they are outdoor venues, but a top sound engineer can do a great job, and it is a one time, permanent fix, expense. Then they failed to work out a suitable venue to keep their core audience engaged, relying on voodoo economics and cover your butt poilcies instead of trying to have venues like the Armory, Academy of Arts and Letters or the Hammerstein Ballroom be a destination for a year while renovations took place. The true analysis of NYCO mismanagement is taking the easiest way out rather than having the courage to power through the cards they were dealt with a clear message of maintaining and expanding their audience base. BTW, taking a page out of the Met's playbook and presenting summer operas in boroughs the Met would not go to, would have immediately brought free publicity and good will which always (if of course you see it through) translates into money, just check out any of Michael Kaiser's books.
  9. Let's be clear on our terms. Perhaps the word "separated" should have been qualified as "showed their product as separate from the Met". Lest it seem like splitting hairs, one needs to estabish a reason the patron comes to your opera house rather than another. Thus it is necessary to have a compelling reason such as a clear mission statement using which you actually follow and cultivate donors on the basis of that mission. In case you may not be aware, ticket sales account for between 20 and 33% of most non profit budgets. The rest is donations - corporate, foundation and individual. So if management fails to delinate the difference between your biggest (and arguably best) competitor, the organization will die. The other curious thing in non profit management is this unspoken tenet that essentially says, "we are here, therefore help us prosper". Why? Did the Edsel prosper because they were "here"? Or the AMC Pacer? Pan Am and Eastern Airlines? Yes, they were for profit, but I would put it to you that the non profits also must make a compelling case for why anyone needs to support them besides just taking up space on the IRS non taxable list.
  10. It will be interesting if there will ever be an honest analysis of where they went wrong. In this observer's mind, they never separated themselves from the Met, which is the platinum standard for all opera houses, if not for all non profits. Instead they went for one bandaid after another and eventually bled to death.
  11. Hi, I am Gary. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an old friend of Don's and a big fan of this site. I am not in the food or wine business but consider a great many in the industry good friends. I am also a New Yorker so my sojourns in the DC area are somewhat rarer than the MD/VA crowd.
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