Latest news with #Gatz
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Oklahoma-Texas passenger train route could be in jeopardy
The Heartland Flyer pulls into the Norman Station, Sunday, Aug. 6, 2023. (Photo by Kyle Phillips/For Oklahoma Voice) OKLAHOMA CITY – Passenger rail service between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth could end if Texas lawmakers decline to fund that state's share, the Oklahoma Transportation Commission was told Monday. 'Texas is having a little bit of trouble working that into their legislative budget, and we're optimistic that will happen, but we are going to continue to very closely monitor it,' said Tim Gatz, Oklahoma Department of Transportation executive director. The Heartland Flyer, an Amtrak route between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth, is a jointly funded partnership between Texas and Oklahoma. Oklahoma's portion for 2025 is $4.5 million, according to the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. If Texas was unable to fund its portion, the Heartland Flyer would cease operations, as early as June, Gatz said. 'We've been through a few other times with similar conditions with Texas, and they've always come through,' Gatz said. 'So, we're not necessarily in a panic yet, but we are monitoring closely.' A spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation said his agency does not comment on pending legislation. The Heartland Flyer is extremely important to a growing state and growing metropolitan area like Oklahoma City, Gatz said. It offers an alternate mode of transportation for people that may choose not to fly or drive or may not have the means to travel to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Gatz said. If the route is shut down, it will impact ongoing efforts to expand the passenger train route between Fort Worth, Oklahoma City and Newton, Kan., Gatz said. 'I think it changes that dynamic dramatically to the point that if the Flyer didn't exist south to Dallas, Fort Worth, then it pretty much negates all of the work that's been done so far on projecting what that route might look like,' Gatz said. Expanding the line into Kansas would allow travelers to connect with other major passenger train routes. Extending the route into Kansas and connecting it to other locations would require funding through the Federal Railroad Administration, Gatz said. The Heartland Flyer makes stops in Norman, Purcell, Pauls Valley, Ardmore, Gainesville and Forth Worth. It travels 206 miles between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. The service was reestablished in 1999 after ending in 1979, Gatz said. Ridership has fluctuated over the years, but last year it was 81,918, according to ODOT. Prices vary depending on travel times, but a round trip ticket from Oklahoma City to Forth Worth on Saturday costs $64. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
New State Highway 20 opens
The new State Highway 20 opened on Good Friday in Claremore, but City Manager John Feary considered it better than "good." "What a glorious day," Feary said to the crowd of about 100 people who had gathered that afternoon on the new overpass over State Highway 66. They had come to watch the Oklahoma Department of Transportation and Oklahoma Turnpike Authority cut the ribbon on S.H. 20, opening up a more direct route between Claremore and Owasso than the old alignment granted. ODOT, OTA and local government officials cut a long, green ribbon stamped with "SH-20/Flint Road" around 2:30 p.m.; the first drivers began using the new route about an hour later. "It certainly is a great day today," Feary said. "The city of Claremore has looked forward to an overpass for many, many years, and while it's a little south of town, it will absolve a lot of the issues that we've had. We're very grateful today." Tim Gatz, executive director of ODOT, said that Friday was decades in the making. Gatz said the $64 million project, jointly funded by ODOT and OTA, is an investment in Oklahoma's future. Gatz said the new five-lane stretch of S.H. 20 will keep drivers safer than the two-lane, shoulderless Old Highway 20. "I've been with the Department of Transportation for 35 years," Gatz said. "I have a clear recollection of what Highway 20 was like between Owasso and Claremore a couple of decades ago: the highest fatality corridor in the state. ... We have come a long ways." Gatz said a little construction on the new route still remains; contractors will soon install a black vinyl fence along the bridge over S.H. 66. He said this will require temporary lane closures on the bridge. Big "Route 66" shields emblazon the bridge's sides. District 3 Commissioner Ron Burrows, whose district encompasses the overpass, said he's proud of how the bridge looks. It's a fitting gateway into Claremore, he said. Debbie Long, mayor of Claremore, said new Highway 20 will promote growth in south Claremore by giving drivers easier access. The alignment avoids downtown and ferries drivers directly to S.H. 66 and the Will Rogers Turnpike, via the interchange OTA opened in March. Long said she was glad ODOT has committed to resurfacing parts of Holly Road and Will Rogers and Lynn Riggs boulevards before it hands maintenance responsibilities over these roads back to the city. "Understand that this is our tax dollars at work for the betterment of Claremore," Long said. A couple of curious Rogers County residents came to see the new road open; Shelley Ramsey and her grandson, Hunter, were two of them. Ramsey said she's lived in Claremore since 1984 and has commuted nearly all that time to Ascension St. John Medical Center in Tulsa. Ramsey, who lives in a neighborhood near Walmart, said the Flint Road turnpike exit has cut a few minutes off her commute each day since it opened last month. She also often shops in Owasso and has long used Country Club Road and Old Highway 20 to get there. She expected the new route would shorten that trip by 10 minutes. "I've been watching it come along for years," Ramsey said. "... You always think about all the promises that you think government makes that are empty, but it came. It took a long time, but it came."
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
I'm Not a ‘Gatsby' Scholar. I'm a ‘Gatsby' Weirdo.
'The Great Gatsby' turned 100 this week. Probably, like me, you first read it in high school. My true engagement with the novel, though, began five years ago, when I was in my 50s and a writer and college teacher, and I started listening to a portion of the 'Gatsby' audiobook every night. I started on March 17, 2020, which was the day the province of Ontario, where I live, declared a state of emergency because of Covid. My wife and I had listened to Jake Gyllenhaal's rendition of 'Gatsby' during a 2015 road trip, liked it and thought it would be a diverting bedtime story to get us through the lockdown, which we expected to last about three or four weeks. We set a sleep timer, pressed 'play' and listened for 45 minutes, and the lockdown wound up lasting nearly two years. 'Gatsby' for me has grown from a novel bedtime story to a nightly ritual to a kind of compulsion. It's hard for us to imagine going to bed now without the compelling timbre of Mr. Gyllenhaal in our ears. In 2023 alone, I listened to 'Gatsby,' which runs in its entirety for 289 minutes, just over 48 times. I broke that record in 2024 when I stopped setting the sleep timer and began listening to the entire book overnight, letting it unspool into my ears while I slept. 'Gatsby' has now laid down roots in my brain — even into my dreams. In a way, that's not just true of me but of the entire culture. The literary critic Maureen Corrigan once wrote that 'Gatsby' contains some of 'the most beautiful sentences ever written about America,' and it persists as a book that is nearly 'perfect despite the fact that it goes against every expectation of what a Great American Novel should be.' Not only has it inspired at least five movies, an opera and a Broadway musical, 'Gatsby' also has a habit of popping up in the strangest places: When the comedian Andy Kaufman wanted to subvert his stand-up by reading from a novel onstage, including on an episode of 'Saturday Night Live,' he chose to read from 'The Great Gatsby.' His prank inspired the New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service to create 'Gatz' in 2004, a six-and-a-half-hour performance that involves actors reciting the entire book, word for word. And, yes, I've seen 'Gatz.' Twice. There is a certain look I get when I tell people about my 'Gatsby' ritual — call it 'curious concern.' If I explain that during Covid I started listening to 'Gatsby' as a comfort before bed — and have been listening to it almost every night since — I can hear how strange these words sound even as they trip out of my mouth. Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat? Maybe 'Pride and Prejudice' would be a more acceptable obsession. It's also a masterpiece and it has a happy ending. But only 'Gatsby' can hold my attention. By now, I'm steeped in it. For all this, I am not close to being an F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar. If you had to stick me with a title it would be 'Fitzgerald Weirdo.' But I do know this: for a 100-year-old novel written by a 28-year-old, 'Gatsby' ages remarkably well. When I first read it as a teenager, I saw myself in Jay Gatsby, with his grand aspirations, mysteriousness and romantic frustrations. Throughout my 20s, I found new meaning in its examination of ambition and reinvention, and by the time I got to my 30s, I was convinced I was Nick, an observer of life 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled.' Now, in my 50s, I've come to realize that, if anything, I'm 'Owl Eyes,' the minor character who lurks about on the sidelines and admires Gatsby's library, looking through the bookshelves while throwing around words like 'ascertain.' The Owl Eyes in me wants to tell all the characters just to enjoy themselves more, and I'm particularly annoyed at Nick for blowing his relationship with Jordan. I get it: When you're young, the fact that Jordan is 'incurably dishonest' and deals in subterfuges to 'satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body' may feel like a problem. By your 50s, it's more like, 'Hey, nobody's perfect.' In his 1934 essay 'Sleeping and Waking,' Fitzgerald, a famous alcoholic and occasional insomniac, observed that insomnia arrives when 'seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the 'first sweet sleep of night' and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval.' When I am stuck in such a widening interval, I turn to 'Gatsby.' Listening in the dark with my eyes closed, nothing obstructs Fitzgerald's prose. I cannot skip a word or line; each one plays into the other, and I lay in bed like a spellbound child who has heard his favorite story a thousand times. One night last summer, I fell asleep to 'Gatsby' and dreamed I was at my uncle's sparsely attended funeral. My uncle was a self-made man; we had grown close, and I came to think of him like an older brother. He was someone I admired and relied on. He died by suicide in 1991, and it changed my life forever — just as, in a way, Nick's life changed after Gatsby's death. Like Nick, I 'closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.' After 50,000 minutes, the novel has become many things to me: an epic poem, a hard-boiled chivalric fable, a tale in which all the heroic and extraordinary deeds seem modern for being ironic, including the lesson that greatness lies in the past — beginning with the 'vanished trees' that 'made way for Gatsby's house' — yet all the heroic efforts to recapture it are doomed. 'Gatsby' is populated by people driven, to one extent or another, by dreams of what they have lost or what they have never found, and I relate to that. 'Waste and horror,' as Fitzgerald once wrote; 'What I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.' When will I stop listening? Not any time soon. Listening to 'Gatsby' for five years has allowed me to feel that I have come to know Fitzgerald better, and myself, too. Besides, even after 100 years and 200 listens, I don't want to say goodbye. None of us do.
Los Angeles Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Who's afraid of James Joyce? Elevator Repair Service takes a tour of ‘Ulysses'
'Ulysses' may not be James Joyce's most difficult novel. That distinction would have to go to 'Finnegans Wake,' a book that has been described as unreadable even by its most fervent admirers. But 'Ulysses,' the modernist novel that changed the course of 20th century literature, is notoriously demanding. The book bested me when I first gave it a go in my student days. I expected to sprint through 'Ulysses' in a couple of weeks but found myself running uphill in a race I feared might never end. I finally did make it to the finish line, panting and red-faced. But I knew Joyce and I would have to have another rendezvous when I wasn't in such a rush to check a canonical box. It took more than 35 years for that reunion to happen. The book came back on my radar because Elevator Repair Service, the offbeat New York performance troupe best known for 'Gatz,' a marathon rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby,' was coming to town with its stage version of 'Ulysses.' (The production, presented by Center for the Art of Performance, had a brief run last weekend at UCLA Little Theater.) But something else was drawing me back to Joyce, a need to breathe purer air. I could spend my free time doomscrolling, or I could challenge myself to a higher pleasure. This time around I imposed no deadline. I would read 'Ulysses' for the sheer pleasure of reading. It didn't take long to be reminded that pleasure isn't necessarily pain-free. I struggled past the roadblocks, cursing at what I took to be Joyce's willful obscurity as I consulted Terence Killeen's 'Ulysses Unbound,' a user-friendly reader's guide, as well as myriad online resources, including Google Translate to contend with the polyglot author's staggering range. I extemporized a program of reading a chapter on my own and then listening to it via the excellent RTÉ recordings of 'Ulysses' (available as a podcast) that bring to life the novel's symphony of voices. The exhilaration I came to experience entailed a fair amount of exasperation. The exertion that was required seemed to belong to a pre-internet age. Joyce, allergic to exposition, plunges the reader into sink-or-swim situations. The architecture of the book follows the plan of Homer's 'Odyssey.' Leopold Bloom is the unlikely modern-day Ulysses (Odysseus' Latin name), a newspaper ad salesman with an adulterous wife who is making his circuitous way home to see what remains after his tactical daylong absence. Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego from 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' is thrust into the role of Telemachus, Odysseus' son, recast as a lofty aesthete grieving the death of his mother while keeping his distance from his overbearing, dissolute father. Into this complex scheme, Joyce incorporates all sorts of radical literary experiments. The most important of these is the stream of consciousness technique that's developed in ways that had never been attempted before. Joyce tunes into the inner musings of his characters as easily as he samples the collective consciousness, past and present. The novel, Edmund Wilson writes in his super-lucid chapter on Joyce in 'Axel's Castle,' moves from the ripest naturalism, awash in bodily secretions and pungent smells, to the most feverish symbolism, where dream logic liquefies objective reality. What I derived from the novel in my late 50s is not what I took away in my 20s. I was amused at what I had underlined as an overeager student, always on the lookout for the explanatory phrase. But I'm sure in time my latest markings in the book, like photos of an old hairstyle, will also elicit an eye roll. A literary work as dense as 'Ulysses' can't help but serve as a mirror of one's mental life. My experience of this ERS production is unique to the moment of my encounter. Had I not just cohabited with 'Ulysses' for the last month, I no doubt would have spent the intermission reading chapter summaries on my phone to get a deeper understanding of the story. I was relieved that this version of 'Ulysses' wasn't an eight-hour affair like 'Gatz,' which offered the complete text of 'The Great Gatsby.' (Joyce's novel would take at least 24 hours to read aloud, or all of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the author.) The novel's 18 chapters are served cafeteria-style, a little from this section, a little from that, to provide an overview of the main action. The focus is on Bloom's wanderings through Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day his wife, Molly, a noted singer, begins an affair with a professional colleague named Blazes Boylan. Subsidiary but no less integral is Stephen's crisscrossing path through the city. When these displaced, grief-laden men lingeringly intersect late in the novel, nothing really changes in terms of the plot but everything changes in terms of the book's spiritual design. In the intimate confines of Macgowan Hall's Little Theater, seven actors took their seats at conference tables lined up for what looked like a panel discussion. An institutional clock kept track of the fictional time of day. Scott Shepherd, an ERS mainstay who was not only part of the ensemble but also co-directed with John Collins and served as dramaturg, introduced the proceedings in an impishly folksy manner reminiscent of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.' He explained that the text would be fast-forwarded regularly. When this happened, the sound of a screeching tape catapulted the company to another passage in the book. Joyce's words rang out mellifluously at the start of the production, but as the main characters emerged from the reading, some of the musicality of the writing was lost. ERS doesn't traffic in emotional realism or literal re-creation. The company's aesthetic mode is wayward, oblique, loose and jocular. In 'Gatz,' the novel's narrative texture was conveyed through zany approximation — the troupe finding Fitzgerald not by effacing itself but by embracing its eccentric difference. The same eventually happened here, but I had to resign myself to what was missing. What I find irresistible about 'Ulysses' is the clarity with which the interior lives of Stephen and Bloom come into view. Amid all the rhetorical puzzles and literary pyrotechnics, these characters reveal to us their longings and insecurities, their preoccupations and rationalizations, their alienation and sociability — in short, their souls or, as Bloom more scientifically defines this mystical human substance, 'gray matter.' Hamlet-figures dressed in inky black, they are both processing loss. Bloom, whose day's journey takes him to the funeral of a friend, is still mourning his son, Rudy, who died shortly after birth. Stephen, called back from Paris as his mother was dying, is tormented a year later by his refusal to pray over her as she entreated him to do. Estranged in different ways — Bloom as a Jew (with a wife with a loose reputation) and Stephen as a freethinking young artist in Catholic Ireland — they have complementary needs. Bloom to love and to pass on some of what he has learned, Stephen to become secure and stable enough to realize his enormous potential. On stage, Stephen (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), wearing the suit jacket and short trousers of a schoolboy prince of Denmark, was a strangely recessive presence. Stevenson seemed to deliberately deflect attention from Stephen's words, mumbling lines as though they were the character's private property and not meant to be spoken aloud. (A defensible literary interpretation but a theatrically deadening one.) Stevenson actually created a more vivid impression in his brief appearance as Bloom's cat. Vin Knight was more dynamic as Bloom, the adaptation's clear protagonist. Costume designer Enver Chakartash dressed the character, described at one point in the book as a 'new womanly man,' in a mourning jacket and complicated skirt, with green socks adding a fey accent to the gender-fluid ensemble. Knight found the gravity of the pragmatic, rational Bloom while preserving his essential nimbleness. The surrogate father-son flirtation between Stephen and Bloom accumulated power more through the staging than through acting. Scenically, the narrative built as it proceeded. The conference tables were imaginatively reconfigured by the design collective dots for the surreal brothel scene, and the lighting of Marika Kent made wild magic without disrupting the minimalist scheme. The production was somewhat more adept in telling than showing. (Stephanie Weeks, Dee Beasnael and Kate Benson, in addition to playing numerous supporting characters, helped keep the narration smoothly on track.) I wish everyone had Shepherd's command of the company's house style. His cameos as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging across the stage with the self-satisfied air of a country rake, were not just enlivening but renewing, capturing the character in a new idiom. Maggie Hoffman delivered Molly's stream of erotic consciousness that ends the novel with just the right touch of unabashed earthiness. If I hadn't recently listened to the brilliant rendition of Pegg Monahan in the RTÉ Broadcast, I might not have missed the ferocious Irish lilt that animates the animal lusts and petty grievances of Joyce's character. I should confess that I turned to the novel as an escape from my disgust with our political situation. But politics runs through the book. Ireland is under brutal colonial rule, and partisan conflict is as inescapable as religious strife. But Stephen and Bloom don't want to be dominated by ideology. Stephen resists having his intellectual freedom ensnared by patriotic sanctimony: 'Let my country die for me,' he drunkenly tells a British soldier. Bloom contends that 'Force, hatred, history, all that' are 'not life for men and women, insult and hatred.' It's the opposite of these things 'that is really life,' by which he means 'love.' Joyce gives us this insight in a book that understands that it's no more possible to dismiss politics than it is to do away with the demands of the body. We exist in concentric realms, and our multifarious lives can only be lived. The same is true for art. There are things I wanted from this stage production that I didn't get. But there were unexpected rewards, and my view of 'Ulysses' expanded. We must make room on the bed of life and say, as Molly does in the book's last word: 'Yes.'
Chicago Tribune
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
With a major new donation, the MCA will ramp up live performance in its theater
Thanks to a $10 million gift from an anonymous donor, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art says it plans to greatly expand its live performance offerings in its 300-seat Edlis Neeson Theater, a much-admired performance space with a substantial seating capacity and an enviable location off the Magnificent Mile at 205 E. Pearson St., the northwest corner of the museum. Deputy director and chief curator Joey Orr said in an interview that the gift will establish a new MCA Performance Fund that will allow the museum to expand its offerings in the live arts. He declined to provide more specific information about the donor, citing their wish to remain anonymous, but described the gift as large and transformational. 'It's going to make a lot of new things possible, he said. To that end, he said, the museum has hired Moira Brennan, a former Chicagoan who became a noted administrator in the worlds of arts philanthropy and presenting. She will be the MCA's director of performance and public programs. The MCA had a rigorous performance program under former director of performance programming Peter Taub, a man known for excellent artistic taste and a desire to present eclectic work from top-tier performers including such artists as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Laurie Anderson, the Elevator Repair Service (whose hit show 'Gatz' was seen at the MCA months before New York), and Spalding Gray, as well as South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company and numerous dance companies with global reputations. Some performances have continued. But by the time of Taub's departure in 2016, following a 20-year tenure, the museum had come to see the space more as an adjunct to its visual arts exhibitions, and diminished resources further constrained independent live performance at the museum, a situation that the new grant clearly has the potential to change. Orr said that the MCA had, in essence, re-created its performance department and planned to present local, national and international work as well as to return to the business of commissioning performance artists, one of Taub's signatures. Precisely what will be presented remains to be finalized. 'We don't feel everything that happens in the theater has to be directly related to the galleries,' Orr said. 'Our perception is that our community is looking for deep support of local groups, as well as things that come from far away from home that they could never get their hands on without the support of a presenting organization.'
