Orel Family

Earlier today, Bruce Springsteen's latest album, High Hopes leaked far and wide across the interwebs. The official release isn't due until January 14th of the new year. The album is a hodgepodge of "our best unreleased material from the past decade," as Springsteen explains in the liner notes (already published at brucespringsteen.net ), where he adds, "I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing." Bruce previously wrote liner notes for Devils & Dust , which perhaps not coincidentally was also an album mainly of older unreleased material. As with the notes to that album, there are some poignant notes here: The Wall, a song that Bruce premiered in concert in 2003, was inspired by Walter Cichon, a member of a '60s Jersey Shore band called "Motifs." This is the best part of the liner notes, and arguably the best of the previously unreleased songs on the album. Much of the album has been heard before. Springsteen recorded  High Hopes,  w...

The first thing I noticed, when launching in to the introduction for Debra Rothenberg's book Bruce Springsteen in Focus 1980-2012 was the instant potential for a good old game of Jewish geography. Ms. Rothenberg and I were born less than 10 weeks apart and grew up a few miles from each other in suburban Northern New Jersey. Her school friends were my camp friends. Her college acquaintances were my relatives. We each saw out first major concerts at the Garden States Arts Center in the mid-70s, were turned on to Bruce Springsteen's music by mentors who preached the Springsteen gospel and knew not to let up, and saw Southside Johnny at the same shows near our homes before finally seeing Bruce perform for the first time during The River tour. Rothenberg's first published photo: September 1981 issue of New Jersey Monthly magazine Rothenberg combined her love for Bruce Springsteen with her dream to become a great photographer, and over the course of 3 decades has chro...

Hanukkiah on the Thanksgiving table! Right next to the... mashed potatoes! Did we? No. I wanted to. What better than to replace yams -- I don't like yams, anyway -- with good old fashioned latkes? But this was an over-the-river-and-through-the-snow year, and grandma was already making the yams and mashed potatoes. Who could argue? The mashed potatoes were really good. Much has been written about the coincidence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah this year. It has been given the lame name Thanksgivukkah  (what did they call it when Hanukkah coincided with Black Friday, just 11 years ago? Shopukah?). Some sites have proclaimed that it has never happened before won't happen again until the year 79811, due to how the two calendars work. That's not quite true, as an excellent recap by the calendar-heads at Chabad shows. Mostly, it was cool to have a menorah on the Thanksgiving table, and to give out gelt after the pies. As for the latkes, we stopped off at friends in...