This Friday marks my first performance since October, when I’ll join thingNY to perform Jay Afrisando‘s [opera captions] at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan. I’ve also just completed my Master of City and Regional Planning degree! Read on for more.
This Friday’s 7pm performance at HERE Arts Center was dreamed up by creator-director-writer-composer Jay Afrisando and will bring together accessibility, inner and imagined voices, and improvisation. A semi-fiction, semi-translation, semi poetry, semi-film, semi-music, and semi-theater performance, [opera captions] reimagines what captions can do beyond functioning as a speech conveyor and a sound interpreter in audiovisual media. This live experience features captions as “an actor” interacting with and personified by bodily-diverse human beings – that is, us five performers and you, the audience! Tickets available here, I hope you can make it!
Now for the big news: last weekend, I graduated from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy at Rutgers University with a Master of City and Regional Planning degree. I received Academic Honors and the Mortensen/Voorhees Award for Achievement in Transportation Studies, an annual award given to the highest achieving student with a concentration in transportation at the Bloustein School. I also finished my time as an Eagleton Institute of Politics Graduate Fellow, although I will continue to work for the New Jersey Senate Democrats through June.
It’s been a very challenging and fulfilling two years. I’ve had some great teachers, but what really made the program was one of the most passionate and diverse groups of people I’ve been privileged to call classmates. I will truly miss this community and hope we continue to maintain our friendships as our professional lives disperse us across the US and beyond. I also have profound love and thanks for my partner Evie who stuck by me through all this, including moving house for the fourth time in our relationship to come live and work in Central Jersey. It’ll sure be nice to get back to our house in Philly.
In other news, since I last checked in, thingNY’s album Passover, which you can listen to and buy on Bandcamp and watch on YouTube, got some very nice reviews. Tristan McKay wrote in I Care If You Listen, “thingNY is no stranger to works that embrace various combinations of music, theater, and language, and with Passover, they show once again that they are masters of the genre.” Rounding up the best contemporary classical on Bandcamp in November 2022, Peter Margasak wrote, “thingNY has arguably become one of the most important and artistically fearless musical theater groups in the world…the mix of instrumental and verbal virtuosity with the composer’s gift for storytelling makes this all something quite special.”
On the planning side, the white paper I wrote as an intern at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission was published in March. Along with my supervisors, I identified 14 of DVRPC’s peer Metropolitan Planning Organizations, surveyed and interviewed their long-range planning staff, then wrote most of this paper on the State of the Practice of MPO Long-Range Planning. I think we learned some cool stuff!
Finally, those who spent time with me in the NYC underground performance scene might enjoy these interactive and static maps I made in Python for a class at Rutgers, showing how the spatial distribution of events featured in the newsletter Nonsense NYC changed from 2009 to 2016.
Happy Motorcycle Awareness and New Jersey Eyeglass Recycling Month to you all!
Jeff