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Mimi Paul and Violette Verdy work on Balanchine’s Emeralds at the Sarasota Ballet January 20 – 30.  It’s part of a triple bill there that premieres on the 29th.

Throw out all the furniture, then have two dancer guys from New York City Ballet go all agile up and down the multi-levels.

That’s what NYCB’s Emily Kikta does in her new short “W 73rd,” a collaboration with NYCB’s Peter Walker, starring Walker and Lars Nelson.

She’s put it up on youtube.

Norman Solomon at commondreams translates for the President.

Had he been leveling with the public, Obama would have admitted that:

“In the name of defeating terrorist forces, our air war has the effect of recruiting for them. Meanwhile, in Syria, our obsession with regime change has propelled us into closely aligning with extremist jihadi fighters. They sure appreciate the large quantities of our weapons that end up in their arsenals.”

Robert Parry at Consortiumnews writes that the President “seems to want so desperately to be one of the elite inhabitants of Official Washington’s bubble that he keeps pushing narratives that he knows aren’t true, all the better to demonstrate that he belongs in the in-crowd. It has reached the point that he speaks out so many sides of his mouth that no one can tell what his words actually mean.”

“I’m not even from this branch,” a librarian tells me. “Send some of it our way!”

“It” is of course $. The line was long at the branch I was taking out books from, which is why that visiting librarian was having to staff the service desk.

Like everything that is life-affirming and allows people to self-actualize, public libraries are severely under-funded in the U.S., as I said to the librarian when she apologized for the wait.

And yes, indeed, we do need to throw money at the problem.

OK, I interviewed Estelle Winwood when she was ninety-nine, but Alex Ross interviewed now 101-year-old Norman Lloyd last May in Los Angeles and in the process “stepped back eight decades in time.”  On the New Yorker website, a companion piece to his overview of a number of Welles bios.

I love it when people get to that age with some/most/all of their marbles. . .

Recently I’ve been watching 1966’s Our Man Flint, a 007-spoof in which the Bad Guys raise the world’s temperatures in order to create mayhem.

And now, fifty years later, it’s happening for real!

My brother Nick, who was hosting, decided we had to eat outdoors the same way the Pilgrims did–rather global-warming weather,  so that didn’t prove onerous–and we would have a mock-trial, presided over by my cousin Merle, about whether Michael Dukakis’ pardon of Anne Hutchinson should stand or be struck down.

Hutchinson was a Puritan expelled, together with her followers, from the Massachusetts  Bay Colony for her free-thinking. In 1987, then-Massachusetts governor Dukakis issued his pardon, 350 years after her expulsion.

Watching Merle adjudicate I kept thinking of Portia in the trial scene of Merchant of Venice!

She laid down the law: the pardon should stick.

On a Berlin street in September 1952, she’s lofted to kinetic (and literary??) immortality by a choreographic genius as a sister great-ballerina watches with enthusiasm.

All this on the cover of University Press of New England’s spring 2016 catalog.

“Bombing Doesn’t Kill an Ideology

It Feeds it”

So reads a sign held up by a young man photographed at a demonstration in London last week.

Taken by Alisdare Hickson/flickr/cc, it’s reproduced at CommonDreams.

It’s encouraging that the other faces in the photo are young, too.

These are the people who are inheriting the disastrous and reckless belligerence of our so-called leaders.  It’s their future at stake. Perhaps they can sway the hand of David Cameron, as he prepares to send Britain down another bottomless pit of war.