Lobenthal.com

To anatomize domestic dysfunctionality, is there?

I mean, where would Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf be without Strindberg’s Dance of Death?

But Hasse Ekman’s 1948 film The Banquet, which I saw yesterday evening at the Museum of Modern Art, doubles down on perversity and adds a significant dose of macro, societal implication. It’s way more raw than anything Hollywood could have permitted itself at the time. Ekman also acts in it, superbly. His father was a great stage and screen star.

MOMA has been running a series on Ekman, “The Other Swede in the Room,” so named because Ekman’s reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by contemporary Ingmar Bergman. I’d never seen anything by Ekman before, and I didn’t know anything about him. He made all sorts of films, not all of them dark by any means.

The MOMA series runs through tomorrow–make a point of it!

Peter Gelb’s admission to Michael Cooper in the The New York Times that he’s open to selling naming rights to the Met is appalling but not unexpected.

But why doesn’t Gelb decide to make the oligarchs really pay? After all, what they’re giving to get their names all over these major cultural institutions and facilities is–for them–chump change. Let’s get real: these people have TENS of BILLIONS of dollars. They  don’t feel the slightest pinch from $100 million. The fact that the institutions are willing to undersell makes them look like saps–and who wants to give to a sap?

And why doesn’t Gelb, in every interview he gives, mention the fact that our government gives almost nothing in arts funding. The small amount that our national government was giving basically went down after one of the GOP’s habitual sting operations, this time on the National Endowment for the Arts, in the early 1990s.

Perhaps if Gelb did keep insisting that be part of the conversation, we might find a single national politician willing to advocate for the arts in a muscular way.

And if Gelb wants full houses, the first and main thing he needs to do: get those ticket prices down.

As the used Bentley salesman’s henchpeople threaten massive funding cuts to public broadcasting, the BBC is apparently panicking: it  won’t identify Cameron as” right wing,” but invariably adjectifies Corbyn “left wing.”

In 10 hours, 30,000 Britishers just signed a petition demanding that the BBC play fair.

Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams discusses the BBC’s accomodation and the responses it’s eliciting.

Presents  of cash or jewels should NOT be left by the mailboxes!

Along with harvest festivals and wine-making (I know a couple who do it every year on the roof of their townhouse and invite family and friends) it’s time for the fall issue of Ballet Review.

This fall, read me on the Mariinsky’s BAM season–or just read whatever floats your boat. There’s something for everyone!

Driving up the Saw Mill River parkway I remember my father telling me what his father asked him when they drove up together a long time ago–when he was a child.

“What do each of these bridges have in common?” his dad asked about the many little bridges, mostly roadbed, that surmount the SM at regular intervals.

Well, my father couldn’t quite say. And so his father told him: “Each one is different.”

August 26, 2002 was the day I heard Cheney on the car radio as he conducted his lying spree about Iraq’s WMD capabilities at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. And I nearly coughed up my research.

Not September 8, 2002.

On September 8, 2002, Cheney and war-criminal-colleague Condaleeza Rice (the one punished with a cushy job at Stanford) made their infamous appearance on Sunday TV “news” shows to spout gibberish about smoking mushroom clouds.

I called my Councilperson Corey Johnson today to register my disgust at the proposed torpedoing of the landmarking process in this city via a new bill that would curtail the amount of time the already extremely underfunded Landmarks Preservation Commission can take to consider a designation.

If you want to speed up the designation process–which can and is delayed by owners again and again–fund the Commission properly.

Johnson’s staffer told me that the Councilperson is opposing the law.

Well, I wouldn’t want to make any grandiose pronouncements, but the White House was finally done what Obama has been so unwilling to do: call out by name the people who are most viciously opposed to his presidency–and in the case of Cheney, most vehemently working to destroy this country through imperial overreach (and take down a lot of the rest of the world as well).

Unbelievably, on the White House home page they’ve put up a direct take down of Cheney’s remorseless dishonesty, his refusal to accept the empirical evidence of his catastrophic fuck ups, and his shameless shilling for more war and  more profit for Halliburton and himself.

And thus something of a lone voice of truth, details at Consortium News.com the complicity of Cheney and his neo-con accomplices in the current refugee crisis.