Sunday in the Park

April 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Walking from the subway exit to your place,” said my brother once when he came to visit, “in that one block, I saw a greater diversity of people than I see at home in a year.” He lives in a small town near Princeton.

He should have been in Central Park last Sunday. The first beautiful spring weekend day – it was as though the weather had sent a text message to everyone in the New York metro area telling them to come to the Park. It was Sunday in the Park with Georges and Marisol and Byong-suh and Dmitri and Shlomo and just about everyone.

Here is the Imagine circle in Strawberry Fields, just inside the West 72d St. entrance. If you want diversity, stop here for a minute (take a close look at the people in the picture). Listen to the conversations, and you’ll hear a half-dozen different languages. You’ll also hear Beatles music. Yesterday, it was these four men of a certain age. Here they’re doing “Eight Days a Week.”

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Later they were joined by three other guys – same certain age – who asked to sit in and then sang a perfect cover of country harmony on “What Goes On?”

The Park had much other music to offer. One group was singing something that sounded like medieval church music, with the tunnel giving an echo effect like that of a cathedral. Not far away, these girls were playing a classical tango.



They were at Bethesda Fountain. But the big attraction there are the AfroBats. They do some impressive flips, but it’s their comedy that entertains the crowd, who fill the steps and the plaza above and stand five or six deep at ground level.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

To make themselves heard, the AfroBats deliver their lines in unison – three guys speaking in perfect unison and with great comic timing.

I love street entertainers. This kid was trying to pick up some spare money with his juggling.



People use the park for all kinds of purposes. Koreans do wedding photography there. This guy, in addition to the usual posed shots, was having the bridal couple run up a low hill while he followed with his videocamera. (The bride has shed her shoes, which are out of their picture, but not mine.)


The roadways are filled with bicycles, the casual pedalers and the serious cyclists in their bright spandex. Certain venues have become the turf of roller skaters and roller-bladers doing their graceful dances while their boom boxes boom.

The cherry trees were not quite in bloom. But there should be full of pink and white blossoms for Easter, today.

Private Schools or Private Students

April 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Washington DC voucher program gave kids from poor families up to $7500 to cover the costs of attending private schools. The program, OSP (for Opportunity Scholarship Program) was started in the recent Bush administration, and it’s based on an idea much cherished by conservatives: private is good, public is bad. Programs run by the government (like public schools) are not as good as similar programs run by private entities (like private schools).

The results three years out have now been published (here). In reading, the voucher kids were 3.7 months ahead of their public school counterparts. In math, there was no difference.

Click on the table to see a larger version.

The Washington Post story ran with the headline

Study Supports School Vouchers
In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests

But does this mean that private schools do a better job of educating poor kids? If so, they should do a better job at teaching math as well. But they don’t.

I don’t really know what’s going on, but I have a guess. Reading is not just about decoding strings of letters. It is part of a general verbal ability. Kids learn verbal skills in school from teachers, but they also learn them from everyone they hear. For most of our time on this planet, we humans did not read or write or go to school, yet we learned to speak the language of our respective cultures. We learned from those around us. We still do.

If you send a kid to a school with children whose parents are willing and able to spend $6600 a year or more (sometimes much more*), that kid will be talking with kids whose verbal skills – vocabulary, grammar, syntax – are more sophisticated than what kids might hear in the public schools of Washington DC. That affects reading scores because among schoolchildren, at least when the teacher isn’t insisting they be quiet, verbal interaction is constant. Mathematical interaction, not so much.

So, at least when it comes to verbal skills, it’s not the kind of school that you go to that makes a difference. It’s the kind of kids who attend that school.

* The tuition at Sasha and Malia’s school, Sidwell Friends, is $28,000. Most of the OSP students went to much less costly schools. Over half the OSP kids (59%) went to Catholic schools, another fifth (22%) went to other faith-based schools (a category that may include Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school). The average income was about $22,7000, slightly above the poverty line; virtually all the kids were black or Hispanic.

Famous but Anonymous

April 7, 2009

Posted by Jay Livingston
Bud Shank, whose obit is in today’s New York Times, was a working musician for sixty years. His principle instrument was the alto sax, and he was best known for his work in the 1950s in the West Coast jazz scene, particularly as a member of the combo in the 1958 film I Want to Live. This clip, from the opening scene, shows Shank briefly. The solos you hear are by Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, and Shelly Manne.



As a comment on the Amazon page for the album put it, “Any Jazz lover who is over about 45 yrs of age probably ‘cut his/her teeth’ on listening to the soundtracks of I Want to Live and to The Hustler.” I’m over 45.

But Shank’s most widely known musical moment was not in jazz, and it didn’t have his name attached to it. It was his flute solo on California Dreamin’, the hit by the Mamas and the Papas. They got the royalties, of course. Bud Shank picked up his studio fee and went home.

Phil Woods has a similar story. Woods, also an alto player, is still going strong at age 77 and has been helping to keep bebop alive for about sixty years. He’s been the leader on dozens of albums, and he’s won several Downbeat polls over the years. Yet his best known work is, to most people, anonymous – the alto solo on Billy Joel’s huge hit and Grammy winner Just the Way You Are.

AKD 2009

April 5, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thursday evening, we (the Montclair Sociology Department) had our annual Alpha Kappa Delta induction ceremony. Sixteen students joined the sociology honor society.

• Daniel Ahearn
• Matt Barraro
• Mari Chela Bien-Aime
• Ashley Blount
• Kristin Bobenko
• Marissa Caruso
• Shaylene Connors
• Tehresa Fallon
• Matt Grogaard
• Megan Hatem
• Helen Kane
• Burcu Korkut
• Joed Lopez
• Claire McEwan
• Lou Pacifico
• Jessica Pescatore
• Katherine Spargo
• Lee Tedeschi

A few were no-shows – such good students that they wouldn’t cut an evening class in favor of AKD. And unfortunately, many of them left immediately after our speaker, David Grazian, finished, so I managed to get photos of only four of the honorees.

Lee, Joed, Shaylene, Matt B.

David Grazian talked about his research on Philadelphia night life.* He takes a dramaturgical approach, looking at the restaurants and clubs as stages where the staff and the customers are performing. Which is the way they look at it too. Restaurants put much thought, time, and money into creating their look – the decor, the lighting, the music – using the same strategies and often the same superficial materials used in movie sets. Cuba Libre, for example, is basically a movie set for a film set in pre-Castro Havana. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Managers also instruct the staff how to perform, and just before opening for the evening they have something like the cast meeting for a play, where the managers give the waitstaff “notes” on the previous evening’s performances.
The customers too are performers. They spend hours on their costume – men as well as women trying on several different pairs of jeans before deciding – and planning their roles with fellow cast members (wingmen, girlfriends, et. al.)

But what is it all for? The restaurants and bars are in it for the money. They count the receipts at the end of the night. But what about all those men and women? According to Grazian, guys want to get laid, of course, but rarely do. So they turn instead to a sort of contest to see who can get the most phone numbers.** The women mostly just want to be with their friends, look good, and get men to buy them drinks. The ostensible goal is fun, to have a good time, but it all sounds a bit grim. Everyone is on the same set, but they’re in two different movies. The guys are in a Judd Apatow film while the women are in Sex and the City.


* During the Q&A, someone asked why not New York or Los Angeles. To his credit David did not say, “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

** The masculine competition can turn ugly. Grazian says that the rule of thumb for bars is that when the male-female ratio reaches 2-1, it’s almost certain that a fight will break out.