On weekends, Sheryl and I seem to end up in LA’s Little Tokyo more often than not – and not just because of Madeleine’s precocious love of sushi. There often seems to be something interesting happening there and this Sunday it was, of all things, the Yiddishkayt Festival. Well, that’s my culture and I’m always up for a little klezmer music, so we headed down. But we weren’t prepared for the group below led by Josh “Socalled” Dolgin on the accordion. His band played a mixture of gospel, hiphop and klezmer – and it worked! But there’s no surprise, really. Blacks and Jews have been piggy-backing off each others’ music since the beginning of the last century – although I have to admit we got more from them than vice-versa. Still, Gershwin didn’t do so bad with it. I wonder what he would have made of the Socalled Band. I bet he would have dug them. I sure did.
When the music wound down, we found more to do at the Festival, discovering this fascinating expostion of how some Jewish-American authors worked in Los Angeles thirty or forty years back… You know, back during the Vietnam Era. Here’s Madeleine demonstrating how to write a National Guard memo on an original Olympic Typewriter.
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12 Comments
1. Connecticut Yankee:Sounds like a wonderful musical hybrid– klezmer and Gospel music! You didn’t by any chance tape the band, did you?
Oct 11, 2004 - 12:06 am 2. Yehudit:I’ve seen Josh here in NYC. He did somehing called the “So-called Seder,” which was a mix of rap, old-time Yiddish radio favorites, and well-known Passover kid’s songs. Weird, but fun.
Oct 11, 2004 - 12:23 am 3. Buddy Larsen:AHA !!! Down there on the bottom, that last photo, THAT’s who wrote the CBS memos! Somebody oughtta go tell her mother.
Oct 11, 2004 - 12:27 am 4. Buddy Larsen:Once again, I reed Roger’s caption after I make a post announcing discovery of same! More chagrin! Well, anyway, what a darling picture!
Oct 11, 2004 - 12:41 am 5. Buddy Larsen:Quick Off Thread: Remember this? http://www.cs.utk.edu/~zhang/movies/big/superman.jpg
Oct 11, 2004 - 4:32 am 6. Lola:Do I see a budding author there?
Oct 11, 2004 - 6:48 am 7. richard mcenroe:Mixing rap and Klezmer?
“Baby Got Latkes”?
Oct 11, 2004 - 7:22 am 8. Jamie Irons:Roger
Madeleine has a kind of furtive, “Mapes-like” expression as she types out that “Killian” memo.
Roger, I will “stand by” whatever she comes up with. I regard her as an unimpeachable source.
Jamie Irons
Oct 11, 2004 - 7:38 am 9. Charlie (Colorado):The Yiddishkayt Festival is in the Nihonmachi?
What a country.
Oct 11, 2004 - 9:54 am 10. SWLiP:That last caption gave me my “guffaw” of the day! Thanks for a great laugh, Roger!
The picture is adorable, btw.
Oct 11, 2004 - 11:10 am 11. bkochba:She’s adorable.
You’re giving Lileks a run for the money.
Oct 11, 2004 - 6:25 pm 12. richard mcenroe:Remember that old parody of Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue” — “Fairfax Avenue”
Ve gotta rock onto
Fairfax Avenue!
You never saw such knishes!
Ve gotta rock onto
Fairfax Avenue!
It’s where I get my salted fishes!
Oct 12, 2004 - 9:39 pm