Have gone over my itinerary for Boise ID (Feb 5-9), of performances, school/university talks/shows and appearances on local TV and radio…and it’s going to be pretty hectic. Doubt if I’ll get to see much of Boise etc, but am really looking forward to this. I’ll be playing at the city’s original 1927 Egyptian-style movie theatre, which has its original installation Robert-Morton theatre organ. Was interviewed last week by a reporter from the Idaho Statesman for a piece which will run in the paper this weekend.
Preparing my talk for students at Bard College at Simon’s Rock which will be on Thurs. Need to finalize which shorts/clips to use. The course is about the relationship between music and film, so I’m not doing my usual talk/demo on the history and tradition of silent film music. Should be fun. Was at the college two years ago to do a show of Nosferatu. They’ve got a real nice auditorium and the Miditzer organ sounds great on their sound system.
Played for two shows of The Immigrant out at the Museum of the Moving Image this morning. The Roland keyboard they have in the theater (no acoustic there for many years) is starting to misbehave a little, and a few of the notes in the center of the keyboard “trigger” (sound full force regardless of how hard or soft you’re playing them). Hopefully this will get fixed; am hoping the museum’s multi-million dollar expansion and renovation that will start in the next couple of months will include the purchase of acoustic pianos for their new theaters.
Played for Safety Last at the Riverdale YMHA on Saturday. The piano, a nice Samick (whose D above middle C stopped working during the show) had a nice feel and sound to it. It’s a real nice Y, and the theater is really nice as well. It’s been newly renovated and they are really dong some great programming there. Found it interesting that Swank sent them a VHS of the film when they licensed it, and not the DVD. The show went really well and hopefully there will be another silent show there in the fall.
Am introducing a showing of City Lights in a couple weeks (Mon Feb 11, at the Greenwich Classic Film Series), and realized I better take another look at the film (it’s been a while). The NYPL is an amazing resource for someone like me who has never bought a silent film DVD; the various branches have just about everything (including a few dozen Grapevine Video releases) and so I put in a hold on whatever I need to screen for a show. Which reminds me…that DVD of City Lights has come in to my local branch and I need to go pick it up.
The next two weeks are going to be rather busy…stay tuned…