Tag Archives: Chris Knapp

Roundup: Field Hockey, Jeremy Schaap & Pat Tillman, Jeff Scher & Tom Petty …

Posted on November 17, 2024 | 3 comments

It’s getting routine.

But it never gets old.

The Staples High School field hockey team won their 6th state championship — and 2nd in a row — yesterday.

The Wreckers beat Darien 5-2, at Wethersfield High School. They put the game away with 3 straight goals, breaking a 2-2 draw. Goals came from Leah Larit (2), and Emma Larit, Alex Hackett and Sofia Fidalgo.

It was a clash of titans. Staples was seeded first in the class “L” (large schools) tourney. The Blue Wave were second.

They’re longtime rivals. The Westporters — ranked number 8 nationally — lost only once all year, to out-of-state Camden (New Jersey) Catholic. Darien had only 2 losses before yesterday. Both were to Staples.

And … the Blue Wave were victims of the Wrecker juggernaut in this year’s FCIAC final, and last year’s championship game as well.

Well done, coach Ian Tapsall and all the girls. Now, Darien and the rest of Connecticut: Get ready for a three-peat!

Staples field hockey: once again, state champs! (Photos courtesy of Staples High School Athletics)

==================================================

Speaking of sports: ESPN journalist — and Westport resident — Jeremy Schaap hosts a special screening of his new E60 documentary tomorrow (Monday, November 18, 7 p.m., Westport Library).

“Pat Tillman: Life, Death, Legacy” highlights his career as a football star with the Arizona Cardinals, followed by his life as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. His death (by friendly fire) received national attention.

After the film, Schaap will lead a discussion about it, and Tillman’s legacy.

==================================================

Chris Knapp has just published his first novel.

And the New York Times — no easy reviewer — loves the first effort, from the 2002 Staples High School graduate.

Hilary Leichter writes:

Public and private moments of upheaval are the catastrophes in Chris Knapp’s fantastically dense and omnivorous debut novel, “States of Emergency.”

Climates both marital and global, existential terror and immediate terror, the dissolution of borders between countries and also people — such a list only simplifies the vertiginous simultaneity achieved in these pages.

Knapp doesn’t just tighten the perceived distance between our inner lives and the world around us; he erases it.

The result is a masterfully digressive story that moves across perspectives, time zones and time periods.

Imagine a 24-hour news cycle that name-checks Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, the New York City water supply, the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges and Chris Martin’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, and you’ll have something approximating the serious and often playful intellectual terrain of this novel. Knapp’s narrator is a flâneur with push notifications.

Click here for the full review. Click here for more information, and to order “States of Emergency.” (Hat tip: Jeff Wieser)

Chris Knapp

=================================================

1972 Staples High School graduate Jeff Scher is a filmmaker and animator. He works in a Cross Highway studio, a few steps from his house.

He says: “In the pursuit of tiny post-election joys, here’s a new video I made for the Tom Petty estate. It premiered Friday.

“It’s an unreleased song from the ‘Long After Dark’ album that’s been re-released, with new songs from the original session.”

The video includes a couple of shots based on Compo Beach.

==================================================

The Heida Hermanns Piano Competition never gets the local attention it deserves.

But the event — set for November 22 and 23, at MoCA CT — is one of the most prestigious in the piano world. It celebrates emerging talents, ages 18-35.

This year’s 3 international finalists — Nick Bai, Carter Johnson and Yongqiu Liu — were chosen from over 70 pianists, who submitted videos of their performances. The trio will premiere a new commissioned work, by composer Lowell Liebermann.

Chair of the jury panel is Frederic Chiu, the local resident, internationally known pianist, and a previous Hermanns winner. The winner receives $10,000.

Click here for tickets, and more information.

2024 Heida Hermanns finalists.

==================================================

Speaking of music: On November 24 (The Klein, Bridgeport; 6:30 p.m.), longtime Westport resident and nearly as longtime  instructor Bernice Friedson will receive the Greater Connecticut Youth Orchestras’ inaugural Inna Berson Wetmore Excellence in Teaching Award.

Friedson “demonstrates a commitment to the highest standards of music education, inspires young musicians, and makes meaningful and lasting connections to their students and our community through their teaching,” the honor says.

Friedson grew up half a block from Carnegie Hall. She gave her first recital at age 7, and later performed on WQXR and WNYC.  As a teenager, she played with the New York Philharmonic and NBC Symphony.

She studied at Juilliard and Mannes Schools of Music. At 18 she auditioned for conductor Leopold Stokowski, and was accepted into both the City Center Opera and RCA Recording Orchestras.

After moving to Connecticut, Friedson played with the Norwalk, New Haven and Stamford Symphonies, and served as concertmaster for the Greater Bridgeport, Danbury and Ridgefield Symphonies, Connecticut Ballet, and Connecticut Grand Opera. She was concertmaster, violin soloist and assistant conductor of the Connecticut Chamber Orchestra, and founded the Connecticut String Quartet.

Friedson helped found the Greater Bridgeport Symphony Youth Orchestra (now GCTYO) in 1961. She was also a founding member of the Fairfield County String Teachers Association, and a specialist at Neighborhood Studios of Fairfield County.

She continues to teach violin and viola, coach chamber music groups, and prepare students for auditions at at her Westport studio.

Bernice Friedson, with instruments created by her violin-maker father.

==================================================

Looking for activities, entertainment, volunteering, resources?

These ideas come from Westport’s Department of Human Resources.

Today (Sunday, November 17):

Also ahead:

Local Programs and Resources:

Westport Human Services links to programs and services:

Donate to food pantries:  Homes with Hope and the Westport Woman’s Club, or reach out to Westport Human Services for food resources.

Click here for information on foster families.

==================================================

“06880” photographers can’t get enough of this full moon.

Matt Murray snapped today’s “Westport … Naturally” image yesterday, as it rose over Sherwood Mill Pond.

(Photo/Matt Murray)

=================================================

And finally … on this date in 1973, President Nixon told 400 Associated Press managing editors, “I am not a crook.”

(Sports, music, literature — and everything else going on in town — are all part of today’s Roundup. Just like every day. If you enjoy our hyper-local blog, please click here to support our work. Thank you!)

3 Comments

Posted in Arts, Entertainment, Library, Sports, Staples HS

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Chris Knapp: The View From Notre-Dame

Posted on April 21, 2019 | 8 comments

Chris Knapp graduated from Staples High School in 2002. He went on to Middlebury College, then earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Virginia.

He now lives and writes in Paris. Two days after the devastating fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Paris Review published this insightful story of his. It begins:

In September 2016, police found a Peugeot with missing plates parked just steps away from Notre Dame; inside the car, they found seven cylinders of gas. The following week, four women—one of whom was carrying a letter declaring allegiance to ISIS and describing the planned attack as a deliberate act of terror and vengeance—were arrested and charged in connection with a plot to destroy the cathedral.

As it happened, the eldest of these four women, Ornella Gilligmann, a 39-year-old mother of three, had been a close acquaintance of my wife’s from childhood, for which reason these events became especially vivid in our minds. If the women hadn’t removed the license plates, we agreed, no one would have noticed the car, and the plot might have come off without a hitch.

Chris Knapp, in the 2002 Staples High School yearbook.

“Can you imagine if they got the Notre Dame,” my wife kept repeating. I understood this as a rhetorical question, posed in the same spirit we often invoked at the prospect of a Trump presidency: it was impossible precisely because it was too horrible to imagine.

The fire that nearly destroyed the eight-hundred-year-old cathedral on Monday (which French authorities are investigating as an accident) is not, of course, a catastrophe in the order of the 2016 election. But looking on from the banks of the Seine, it was hard not to experience the fire as a nontrivial data point on the timeline of a slow-motion apocalypse, which from a Western perspective stretches back (depending on whom you ask) to the 2016 elections, to the Brexit referendum, to 9/11, the paroxysms of the early twentieth century, to the intractable dependence on fossil fuels, to Napoleon’s campaigns in Europe, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment—through all of which, the Notre Dame cathedral stood intact. What would it mean, at a time when civilization itself was starting to seem like a failed idea, for one of civilization’s signal achievements to burn to the ground.

When news of the fire reached me, at quarter past seven, I was at work in the seventh arrondissement, and it was not yet clear how extensive the damage would be. By the time I went outside, at eight o’clock, the spire had just collapsed, and on the Pont Royal a crowd had gathered in silence to watch the massive tongues of flame that rose in its place, high above the rooftops about a mile upstream. Along the right bank police had cordoned off the bridges onto the Île de la Cité; cars, buses, and trucks stood hopelessly gridlocked as a thickening stream of bikes, motorcycles, and electric scooters wove its way east, and foot-traffic overran the sidewalks and spilled into the street.

Fire consumes the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The smell of smoke was distinct. Endless lines of police-personnel vans nudged their way along, and inside them fresh-faced young cops pressed their noses to the glass. More than a few times, I heard people around me, astonished by the magnitude and violence of the fire, ask each other in whispers whether this could be the work of terrorists, though officials had been quick to indicate that it appeared to be an accident. In front of Hôtel de Ville, closer to the cathedral, hundreds of people had crowded onto the various tiers of the large, rectangular fountain that flanks the square, so that it seemed almost as if bleachers had been set up for the express purpose of watching the cathedral burn.

Some of these people’s eyes were locked on the flames across the river; many of them held phones and cameras overhead, and many others were following the news on their screens. Some had their phones pinned to their heads, urgently describing what they could see and what they knew. Only a very few of them were crying: a man in paint-stained sneakers with his arms folded across his chest, perched on the saddle of a mountain bike, rocking himself back and forth; a woman in her twenties who let her boyfriend drag her by the hand through the crowd like a child, while she twisted herself backward in order to keep her eyes riveted to the glowing plumes of smoke. But almost without exception, their faces were graven in dismay, their mouths hung open, and their voices observed a general hush, creating a soothing walla from which could occasionally be distinguished a catch-all French expression of dismay: c’est pas possible.

Chris goes on to write about life in France, Catholicism, and explaining Paris to a Staples High friend. Click here to read the full story.

Chris was not the only Westporter to personally see the fire. 2009 Staples grad Rebekah Foley lives next to the cathedral. She was there from beginning to end, and gave a long interview to Sky News. Click below to see:

(Hat tip: Jeff Wieser)

8 Comments

Posted in History, Media, People, Staples HS

Tagged , ,