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You never really know (unless you actually do know) why two performances of the same ballet in close proximity in time turn out so differently, particularly when key personnel are consistent in both.

Ormsby Wilkins conducted ABT in Symphonie Concertante last month and the performance I saw was rushed and cold musically, which of course dictated how the kinetic response unfolded.

Last Saturday night, Wilkins conducted Symphonie Concertante, played by NYCB’s orchestra  this time, but again danced by ABT, this time at Balanchine: The City Center Years. The breath and respiration of the ballet returned.  With immeasurably beneficial results to the dancing.

of existential peril for American democracy, there’s no time like the present to revive Beckett’s existential benchmark Waiting for Godot, on stage for a few more days at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.

“It’s a magical play,” says a friend of mine who went. “I don’t know where the  magic is hidden, but I want to investigate.”

The Democrats’ victory panics Trump, and he moves to shut down the Mueller investigation w/Sessions’ “resignation” during the lame-duck Congressional term.

Watch for aspiring-dictator Trump to do more dictatorial things before the end of the year.

astonishingly spry Joy Williams Brown, who’d danced Calliope with Balanchine in Mexico City in 1945, at last Saturday night’s Balanchine: The City Center Years. The program opened with–that’s right, Apollo, performed by the Mariinsky. I liked Xander Parish’s interpretation because it was an interpretation.  There are many ways to be Apollo. Nicholas Magallanes, who danced Apollo opposite Joy in 1945, would have been entirely different. Viva all the differences. . .

John Taras told me something interesting about Apollo. He’d seen Lew Christensen perform it frequently during the 1941 tour of American Ballet Caravan.

“I know there’s a tape, video  somewhere of Conrad Ludlow doing Apollo, who I’m sure was taught by Lew. Well, you wouldn’t recognize it. It’s quite different from what we do. . . the way it was done when I was ballet master.”

“Oh, my God. . . what IS that?. . . That’s disgusting,” someone said to me when I pointed out the latest monster tower rising on Bloomberg’s dystopian nightmare cityscape, 57^th Street’s Billionaire’s Row. Last year, Nan Victoria Munger in the West View Times reported the way that “The Department of Buildings Shrugs as Megatowers Take Over New York City.”

A report by Landmark West records that 217 West 57th Street was originally approved to be 64 stories, after which an additional THIRTY stories were simply tacked on– well after, of course, the window for public comment has closed.

The Mayor, his City Planning Commission, the Dep’t of Buildings are doing everything they can to cut the public out of the development review process. Thus the Midtown East scam earlier this year, with its fast-tracking of air-rights transfers. We are losing democracy at the municipal level as much as at the federal.

Trump’s frightening, incoherent, defiantly ignorant babble to Axios about climate change tells us that we are looking at a presidency and a party that has not only gone rogue, it has doubled down on curtailing humanity’s future.

And the Democrats’ refusal to bring environmental issues to the forefront of the party’s agenda just brands them, once again, as enablers.

Julia Conley at Common Dreams reacts to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index, which shows that 60 % of the world’s fauna have been wiped out since 1970.

And that has apocalyptic implications for humanity, as the Democrats continue to be so miserably lame in making clear to selfsame affected humanity.

Animals Gone = PEOPLE GOING

As I follow my customary movement patterns throughout the city, as well as divert into neighborhoods I don’t visit that often, I’m photographing all the wonderful nineteenth-century buildings I see being leveled or about to be leveled in the neighborhood-and-history destroying demolition debauch roiling this city.

A nonstop barrage of violence, hatred and fear, endorsed both explicitly and covertly by the aspiring dictator in the Oval Office.

Trump’s response to every spasm of violence occasioned by his inflammatory rhetoric is to call for more guns, more violence.

This is what a vote for the GOP will condone and support.

On a nightly basis, Carlson is attacking America, undermining American democracy and national unity.

So when he face plants about why, oh, why, the country is so divided, it’s time to expose his Goebbelsian methodology.

Shame on S & S for publishing his filth, and believe me, once the NYT best-seller list is no longer factoring in store orders but tabulates sales, Carlson’s mind-fuck isn’t staying on the best seller list.