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I thought I’d better give Violette Verdy’s full title at Indiana University, given that I knew how decorated she is:

And so I contacted Robin and she supplied it:

IT IS:

Violette Verdy

Distinguished Professor of Ballet

Kathy Ziliak Anderson Chair in Ballet

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Of course, she’s got all sorts of other titles and honors; I’m just giving you her IU stats.

As I said, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Jewels opens at the end of this month,

and let me add that Oct 2/3 are the dates for Indiana U’s Emeralds.

* Except if you saw it in 1967.

Violette Verdy’s uncannily efficient assistant Robin sent at my request a DVD of silent footage of Verdy’s performance in Emeralds. I’d heard about it and wanted to research the original cast. Verdy is dreamy and bacchic at the same time. A superb amalgam. In the finale, you can also see a few seconds of Mimi Paul. Stunning.

I’m not sure all this is at the Library for the Performing Art’s Dance Division although I have in the past seen some silent footage of Verdy’s performance there. Just in case, I’ve got permission from Robin to pass it on to the Dance Division.

Fast forward 47 years after the premiere: This week, Paul and Verdy are in Seattle, coaching Emeralds at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. PNB revives the complete Jewels later this month.

Also later this month, Paul goes to Indiana University, where Verdy is on the faculty, and together they will again work on Emeralds for a performance by the dance department.

It might as well be a decade ago: virtually the same U.S. foreign policy nightmare is now unfolding. The White House today primes us for another open-ended-unto eternity military conflict in the Middle East.

And they are priming us with double talk.

ISIS will not be destroyed by the bombardments, it will be engorged  by them. These bombardments that our government is addicted to kill lots of civilians and radicalize local populations.  (Notice, by the way, that the White House follows GW Bush precedent and refuses to tell us what the civilian casualties of the latest siege have been.)

Obama continues his campaign to throw the Senate to the GOP, ordering 350 more troops to Iraq and intensifying the bombing, while frothing-at-the-mouth Dems like Bill Nelson add to the apocalyptic fun.

And  people who actually know what they’re talking about and want peace say “You can’t bomb extremism out of existence.”

Read this:

http://commondreams.org/news/2014/09/03/senate-dem-pushes-air-strikes-syria-experts-say-no-military-solution

It used to be a staple of Connecticut and New York county lanes: great big naturalized clumps of orange day lillies. In the 1980s they started disappearing. The culprit: deer, but really humans. Massive development eliminated deer habitat and their panicked reaction was to increase procreation, thus creating larger and larger stock of hungrier and hungrier deer. Their solution: start foraging ornamental flowers.

Before long, threadbare straggler were all that was left of once-abundant day lilly beds. This summer, however,  it looks like there’s been a return to plenitude, at least relatively speaking.

Are home owners diligently sowing new crops and going out in force to their roadsides, deer repellent in hand? And returning after every rain?

It’s doubtful, but possible, that the deer have lost their taste for the lillies, but as I said doubtful. They are voracious and now will eat ornamental blooms regardless of how much greenery is available.

I remember when spotting deer was a rare and exciting occurrence!

Late last month Jack Anderson and George Dorris hosted a get together for friends and colleagues of Ballet Review’s late copy editor.  She enjoyed a long and varied career as serious student of music, as dancer, as librarian, writer and editor.

Barbara would query something in a piece of mine and as often as not I’d call her rather than email–all the better to enjoy a long and interesting conversation.

That’s apparently what we can expect from the foreign policy Hillary Clinton would pursue as president–an even more vid appetite for perpetual war than Obama has shown. She may even be on a par with George W. Bush. The Atlantic interview was disastrous, but she certainly gave us an honest look at who she is.

And of course on TV “news” shows we hear the euphemisms: Hillary wants the US to project a “more muscular” presence internationally, etc.

Whereas, Ralph Nader gives us the factual “Hillary-the-Hawk” at CommonDreams. Very interesting the way she militarized the State Department to the point where “Some career Foreign Service Officers found her aggressive language unhelpful, if not downright hazardous to their diplomatic missions.”

We need a new paradigm–a new paradigm for the Democratic party, for the way this country engages with the world.

Boy do we need a new paradigm.

We live in a country where, if you are a financial institution engaged in criminal misconduct that brings a national economy to its knees, not only do you suffer no punitive measures whatsoever BUT money collected from the coffers of taxpayer revenue remitted by the population you’ve screwed over goes to compensate you for any money you’ve lost and make sure you wind up with even more control over said national economy.

But, on the other hand, if the New York City Opera has a seven million dollar deficit, it’s painted as an irresponsible rogue element that is just getting what it deserves if it goes belly up.

And a pissy billionaire who happened to be mayor of New York City could give a great cultural institution the back of his hand and go blithely on his way.

How much money, speaking only in brass-tacks terms for the moment, does the demise of NYCO take out of our municipal economy?

Not to mention, of course, the hit to the city’s prestige, its artistic-quality-of-life.

I do not like the fact that at the Met Gelb is targeting (scapegoating?) the unions. I know, it’s the current thing. Everybody’s doing it. But if the unions are going to take a hefty pay cut, then the stars ought to as well. They need the Met as much as the Met needs them.

If the stagehands get a little less overtime, so be it. But the idea that we should be shocked, shocked, that a chorister or musician might make $200,000 a year is ridiculous. These people have invested years and untold amounts of money to train to the level of mastery they’ve attained. Both chorus and orchestra are highly improved from years past. They work extremely hard and they ensure that the Met maintains a standard of excellence.

And how many 24-year-olds on Wall Street make much more?

But the fact is, it’s not Gelb or the unions that are the culprit. It’s the Sisyphean task of putting on grand opera in this country, which is virtually the only one in which opera if almost entirely privately-funded. And no matter how many concessions the unions may eventually make, nor how much Gelb indeed may offer to cut his own salary, nor whether Juan Diego takes less money, those problems are not going to go away.

Nor is opera going to have an easy time surviving in a media environment in which it now receives almost no coverage from network TV or “mainstream” print publications.

Nor is it going to have an easy time surviving in an education environment which has eliminated music and art education from the public school syllabus.

Volume 4 will be available early next month.

Will be interesting to see if a single politician gets up and makes a peep about the Metropolitan Opera’s difficulties.  Hell, if that theater were torn down for condos you probably wouldn’t hear a peep.

In its boringly clichéd but undeniably successful campaign to divide this country, the right wing has stigmatized government support for the arts as well as the simple fact of attendance at a theatrical event like the opera. To advocate the one, to admit to the other brings on accusations of elitism lobbed by the economic elite and their fully-owned, “democratically” installed operatives.

As usual, the Democrats, our erstwhile and ostensible voice of opposition to an increasingly extreme Republican party, do nothing but play defensive. They have been deafeningly silent and passive in the face of this vicious  assault on a culture that encompasses all different forms of art, and a society that tolerates and celebrates diversity.