Lobenthal.com

Can a male be a muse? The Helicon gals were gals. This occasioned by my Hugh Laing tag of a few posts ago.

At Thanksgiving, a second cousin who is one of the less wealthy inhabitants of a posh Connecticut town, told me she was nevertheless going to start tithing her income. Which organizations did I recommend she contribute her ten percent to? There are so many deserving and essential ones I was almost at a loss for words. Where to begin?

And a cousin who’s going to spend the winter months at her vacation home down South, is now enrolled in a training program for courthouse child advocacy–and will be volunteering in that important function while she’s away.

And systemic injustice must be cosseted. Did you know? While the safety net tatters, 33 cities have banned or are considering banning people giving food to the homeless. . . . because allegedly, that would dilute the municipal programs–inadequate as they have been and increasingly inadequate as they become. Go to act.watchdog.net and sign their petition crying foul.

That’s how I felt when I realized that instead of linking to the Daily Kos NPR petition, it looked like somehow a freaky (malicious?) cross-wiring happened and if you activated the link you went into my google mail account.

First reaction: paranoia! How gleefully would my enemies (and I have them!) be as they picked through my correspondence. . .

Second reaction: WTF. . .(the resigned kind, not the outraged expostulation) and so what’s new?

Wasn’t Google mail’s entire list hacked not too long ago, and hasn’t my own aol account been hacked?  A friend of mine in Russia is sure that her fun is bugged just as in the old days, and still we chatter away uninhibitedly.

This is not to say that I would not begin suit against anyone who was reading my stuff without authorization. But of course, we almost have no legal recourse any more to forestall the government from reading every single email we send/receive.

It kind of put me almost in the position in which my biographical/interview subjects are. The tables were turned, and I’m all the more appreciative of the honesty, or at least the attempt at honesty, that most of them make.

And some performers do this on stage more readily than others. As much as Diana Adams, for example, was an Antony Tudor protégé–and for a while married to his long term lover/muse Hugh Laing–her ex-colleague Patricia Wilde told me she could not have imagined Adams dancing Hagar in Pillar of Fire–and Adams never did–she was too much invested in pushing the public and her colleagues away from her.

A bedrock aesthetic philosophy of mine is that there’s never a best, but when Eliza Minden asked we Flies for a dancer-to-watch, I threw caution to the winds (hardly) and happily made my pick. Thebarreflies.com.

Evgeni Scherbakov was really an extraordinary person. I first met Genya in February 2001. His nephew Vasili was already my favorite of the Kirov’s male roster.

Tchernichova and I attended the inauguration of the annual winter international ballet festival at the Kirov, which I covered for The New York Times. We were waiting inside the stage door–we were going to watch a dress rehearsal of the company’s new Nutcracker. A dark-haired woman bustled in–impossible not to notice that energy and that gypsy-like face. “Alisa Strogoya!” Elena cried, and pulled her over. That was Genya’s wife, who survives him. Elena had not seen her since 1976! 

Alla Sizova and Evgeni Scherbakov, two ex-Mariinsky principal dancers of enormous talent and dedication, both died last Sunday.

I didn’t know Sizova. I interviewed her in 2002 and watched her class at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C. that same day. Scherbakov I knew well and I will write about him. He was a divine man.

On youtube you can see him dancing with Valentina Gannibalova in George Cukor’s The Blue Bird, filmed in Leningrad in 1974-5.

And you can see quite a few things with Sizova as well.

All good–all magnificent!

VAI aiming to ship Volume 5 next week.

And you should see what’s on their docket!!

In the Nation, William Grieder describes exactly what’s going on in our Supreme Court: “Step by step, the five right-wing justices are transforming the terms of the American political system—including the Constitution. . . . The Republican justices are not finished with their undeclared revolution. They will continue unless and until people rise up and stop them.”

I don’t know why so many (formerly) middle-class, (now probably, due to the economic realignment, bottom of the 1%), I know consider NPR an alternative to the corporate-owned commercial media.

Increasingly, it ain’t.

Consider its decision (at a time like this!) to drastically downsize its environmental reporting.

Daily Kos has a petition going to protest one more stupid and repressive media fail.