Celebrate

Big weekend for NYRA was certainly cause for celebration with total attendance of 25,839 for the three days. That might have been a typical Saturday crowd in the past...and it was only 1600 more than Monmouth had on Father's Day alone. But it will more than do for now. Particularly impressive was the nearly 8,000 who turned out for the first twilight card of the season on Friday; that despite.....due in part to a Billy Joel cover band that played after the races. Just goes to show you....something...not quite sure exactly what. It wasn't about the racing itself this weekend as we enter the usual doldrums between the end of the Triple Crown and the beginning of Saratoga. But if you have a nice place for people to spend the day at the races, they do come, as we see at Saratoga and Del Mar (even though the racing itself is not the same as in the past either), and, sometimes, at Belmont and Monmouth too,

Even in the best of times, the racing at Belmont would start to wilt in July as the weather grows oppressive and the fields thin out as connections await upstate. Of course, July at Belmont has grown even shorter this year with the extra weekend tacked on to Saratoga. With the competition from slots-rich states, and four more days added to a meet which was already at least a week too long, this could be the year that even the most ardent Saratoga devotees concede that enough is enough. I mean, the meet starts on July 23, and they race six days a week; come September 1, there'll still be six days of racing left! When it begins, most NFL training camps will not even be open; by the time it ends, the regular season will be about to begin. That's a lot of state-bred maiden claiming races folks, and those races can be just as tedious downstate as up.

One sport that is probably actually even less popular in this country than horse racing is soccer. Yeah, I know, it's World Cup time, and we're reading the usual stuff we do every four years about how a successful run by the US team could help popularize the sport, but I don't buy that; take a look at hockey in the Olympics for example. Soccer is just not a game which I think will ever appeal on a long term basis to Americans - it's too technical, too slow, not enough scoring, and the clock never stops running. I believe it's far more likely that horse racing will enjoy a renaissance here than soccer ever will.

But if you're like me, and enjoy watching it and would be happy to watch the U.S. team play in the World Cup if the games weren't being played at 9 AM on weekdays, you might enjoy this column by George Vecsey in the NY Times on the team's controversial tie against Slovenia last week. In the space of this single piece, Vecsey not only convincingly backs his case as stated in the column title U.S. Shares the Blame for Feeling Cheated, but it gave me a bit of a feel for some of the dynamics and personalities on and of the team; nice work here.

- Speaking of celebrate, the Celebrate Brooklyn series of free music in Prospect Park is under way, and on an absolutely perfect Saturday night, we saw Bitches Brew Revisited, a tribute concert to Miles Davis' groundbreaking (so it's said....I never really got it) album released some 40 years ago. This was a similar concept to the On The Corner show we saw on the Hudson River last year. Lucky for you, I managed to shoot some crappy video.



Also underway at this time is the Vision Festival, an annual event which features so-called "free" or "avant-garde" jazz, and which is 100% artist-run, with no corporate sponsorship whatsoever. It's the 15th year of this festival, and I actually remember the first one pretty well. On Monday evening, there was a free show at a playground on the Lower East Side, and, getting into the spirit of the setting and the Make Music New York festival on the same day, a group of kids were invited to join in with William Parker's Little Huey Sextet. And as you can see from this video, they attacked their chore with varying levels of enthusiasm.



Then they kicked the little brats off the stage and got down to business with the Roy Campbell Trio.



We then headed west to Le Poisson Rouge where I had actually won a couple of tickets for a contemporary classical show. But when the featured performer, quoting the composer whose work he was about to play, noted that "if music isn't about drama, pathos, and death, then it's about nothing," I knew we were in trouble. Indeed, the spare and apocalyptic composition had me contemplating suicide more seriously then at any time since JP Parise's overtime goal against the Rangers in 1975. Hopefully I'll recover and someday post here again.