Lobenthal.com

University Press of New England/ForeEdge did a great job with the catalog copy:

“At eighty-seven, Patricia Wilde remains a grande dame of the ballet world. As a young star she toured America in the company of the Ballet Russe. In her heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, she was a first-generation member and principal dancer of New York City Ballet during the uniquely dramatic Balanchine era—the golden age of the company and its hugely gifted, influential, exploitative, and dictatorial director. In Wilde Times, Joel Lobenthal brings the world of Wilde and Balanchine, of Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, Suzanne Farrell, Maria Tallchief, and many others thrillingly to life. With unfettered access to Wilde and her family, friends, and colleagues, Lobenthal takes the reader backstage to some of the greatest ballet triumphs of the modern era—and some of the greatest tragedies. Through it all Patricia Wilde emerges as a figure of towering strength, grace, and grit.

Wilde Times is the first biography of this seminal figure in American dance, written with the cooperation of the star, but wide-ranging in its use of sources to tell the full and intertwining stories of the development of Wilde, of Balanchine, and of American national ballet at its peak in the twentieth century.”

As it’s currently practiced in Washington: Democrats selling the store.

After what he’s seen the GOP do to Obama over the past seven years, Biden extolling bipartisanship immediately puts him out of the running.

“TomP” at Daily Kos points out the absurdity.

And we thought Obama didn’t get it. . .

There is a country and a democracy–not to mention a planet–at stake, and Biden obviously is clueless.

Or brilliants or rhinestones or paillettes or bugle beads or whatever was laid down on her little gored dress in Myles Thatcher’s new Polaris at New York City Ballet.

Not that she didn’t look fetching, but man, Zuhair Murad’s costumes glittered!

In the ballet, Peck was often isolated from the group, moping around a bit on the sidelines. So going along strictly with the  movement character she’d been assigned, no, glitter was a little inappropriate.

But wait, I told myself–

What if the designer was simply seeing the piece as an exercise in moving bodies to be hopefully complemented, if not enhanced by his creations, the more shiny and thus theatrically potent as possible??

Thus the justification for putting Peck and her fellow dancers in glitter.

Mmm.

A matter of perspective, as is so much else.

That’s what we’re seeing upstate today. Beautiful, but completely freaky, and yet completely freaky is the new normal where weather is concerned.

Will the GOP stage one of its idiotic snowball stunts again?

Mark Karlin at Truthout describes the skewed calculations that produced a zero cost-of- living increase in Social Security–depriving 70 million Americans.

By his own admission, Obama has wanted to cut Social Security–the euphemism is “reform”–since before he took office.  Perhaps this is the stealth way to do it.

Announced almost to the day that he told us we’re not going anywhere in Afghanistan.

For their roles in harassing rent-stabilized and rent-controlled tenants?

Unlike Bloomberg, De Blasio appears to understand how alarming the housing crisis in NYC is, and is now allocating more funds for legal representation to combat tenant harassment.

But given the fact that vacancy decontrol has not been repealed, which means once rent-controlled and stabilized tenants leave, so does the rent protection, harassment is only going to get worse for the time being.

My landlord’s behavior has become considerably more vicious since he allied himself with a well-known management agency. They practice time-honored harassment and intimidation techniques on my rent-stabilized self as well as my rent-controlled neighbor. They lie, deflect, obstruct, and stonewall.

It’s interesting because my father says he won a case a against another landlord represented by this same agency yeas ago. They never change–but they do seem to get ever worse.

You don’t really think about Wagnerian tunes as you might with a bel canto composer,  but of course he began writing in the era of romanticism and bel canto. His 1842 Tannhauser has some great tunes indeed. It’s totally listener-friendly and not that long. It returns to the Met tomorrow night after a decade’s absence.  I saw it then–I plan to see it now!

It runs through the 31st.

The most fun is writing about the fun parts:

Venice, 1966:

“. . . Kurgapkina accompanied them when they went to a party given by the wife of a prominent artist. She had approached Osipenko in the wings of the theater and extended an invitation. They lived in a palazzo that once been occupied by Gabriele d’Annunzio.

Osipenko, Kurgapkina, and Makarova boarded a crowded vaporetto. The three ballerinas chattered in Russian. Sitting across from them was a heavy man wearing a white suit. “Look at that man,” Kurgapkina whispered, “he’s sitting with his fly open!” They all had a good laugh. Where were they supposed to go once they got off? Kurgapkina asked. They’d been told to ask where d’Annunzio’s villa was.

“Dear ladies,” a voice behind them remarked in Russian, “can it be that you are looking for my villa?” Osipenko stood rooted to the ground as she realized that this was the very same man whose fly had occasioned hilarity. . .”

In the comic first movement of Bourree Fantasque, the man asks for a kiss. The woman says no. He asks again. Still no. Then once more. Now she says yes, and now he’s not interested.

I thought about that watching today’s all-Balanchine program at New York City Ballet, and the entire array of emotional/spatial connections & disjunctions (no Bourree F, however] that projected from the stage.