Lobenthal.com

Watching VAI’s new Legends of Ballet CD, it’s all interesting, all the Bell Telephone Hour performances by NYCB and ABT stars. But writing about Patricia Wilde, I’ve been watching the Square Dance excerpts more than anything else. It’s worth noting what she does with the monkey-wrench moments of weird, turned-in, showgirl that Balanchine tosses in. They don’t faze her.  They don’t make her tighten up. She doesn’t make them needlessly accentuated. It all flows, and she brings out the sexiness, the nobility, the arresting oddity in the most playful and seemingly effortless way.

Columbia’s Susan Boynton writes at Talkingpointsmemo about the way that “with each passing year, it becomes clearer that cheap labor has become the hidden foundation of American higher education. According to the American Association of University Professors, more than 50 percent of all faculty hold part-time appointments.”

Dr. Boynton is tenured, so she can speak out–another reason, from the administrations’ standpoint perhaps, not to give tenure!

Most of today’s academia as well as America-en-masse  is too economically imperiled to free free to speak out about anything–and that’s part of the reason for the economic realignment.

Unlike the shameless, rabid exhortations of the Two Ongoing Wars Isn’t Enough, Let’s Have Three or Even Four, While At Home Our Infrastructure Crumbles, California Sizzles, ETC. crowd–the Metropolitan Opera’s Ernani is a bona fide, legitimate exemplar of performing art!! I went last night.

I’ll have more to say about it, but writing commitments press at the moment.

The last Ernani of the season is Saturday night, so I wanted to get this up and urge people to catch it.

Brave New Films has prepared a short, “Wrong About Iraq, Wrong About Iran,” which juxtaposes the hysterical, brazenly false statements made about Iraq at the turn of this century with the hysterical, brazenly false statements now being made about Iran by the very same cast of utterly shameless war mongers.

We already are one !!

Ellen Brown at Common Dreams explains (courtesy her Web of Debt blog, ellenbrown.com) how we reached the point that we’ve reached,and what we can do to return to actual democracy.

At the Seder last night I told Cindy how DARE she not let me know she’d just written about Wagner and the Jews!!!

Here’s her interview with Leon Botstein for the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, occasioned by the new documentary Wagner’s Jews, directed by Hilan Warshaw.

Can you believe this woman also has a master’s degree in landscape architecture?

Watching on youtube Anna Moffo–enchanting in voice, face, figure, presentation–at the Bing farewell gala in 1972–astonishing vocalism considering that her vocal travails had already begun.

And when she’s finished the Gavotte from Manon–the applause reminds me of the sound you once heard at the Met: an engaged, informed, passionate audience. The applause builds, it doesn’t fade quickly, and she in fact cannily and diplomatically leaves the stage while it’s at it’s crest and before she could be accused of milking it.

Nowadays you hear a different kind of applause–often wildly enthusiastic, but certainly exhibiting an enthusiasm born of credulity born of inexperience with the art form  And certainly there’s nothing wrong with being a newcomer, or an occasional visitor to the opera. We NEED more newcomers to the opera. But today’s kind of applause–and the instant, inevitable standing ovations and then leave quickly when it’s over syndrome–is a sign of the art form’s increasing marginalization over the last forty years.

Can you imagine, in 1972, a NYC mayor saying he didn’t like the New York City Opera’s business plan and so he was going to let it close?

Reading about the way that Republican presidential contenders defend the Indiana law that imposes theocratic values on the population-at-large, you can only surmise that the common campaign thread among GOP presidential-aspirants is “We will make as many of your lives as miserable as we can. Vote for us.”

At Alternet, Tana Ganeva supplies the sickening details.

When the Republicans do something treasonous and unprecedented, like their letter to the mullahs,  when they strike a direct hit against civil society and a political order that runs with a modicum of stability, they accept no responsibility, acknowledge no culpability. They simply practice their usual rhetoric of projection, accusing the people who would attempt to bring them to justice with committing whatever transgression the GOP has just committed.

And it works. They keep repeating the outrageous act until it becomes normalized in the public consciousness and the political process. And the hapless, clueless, spineless Democrats make a little noise and then forget about it, allowing the Republican flame-throwing to be accepted as well, acceptable.

For proof look no furher than Mitch McConnell and his follow-up to the Iran outrage, his attempt to sandbag the White House’s cllimate proposals with another seditious shout-out to foreign governments.