Lobenthal.com

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Laura Jacobs straddles the sartorial and kinetic disciplines, as well as scrambling the time frames,  writing a preview/deja vu of Christian Lacaroix costumes for ABT’s 1988 revival of Massine’s Gaite Parisienne. It re-revives next week during ABT’s Met season.

But Robert Reich won’t let him.  He rebuts the .5%’s favorite Treasury Secretary’s blinkered definition of policy success–aka enrichment of guess who?

OK, you can read my piece on Balanchine’s Theme and Variations at playbill.com

OR

you can get tactile and sensory paging through it in your seat when American Ballet Theatre opens its Met Opera season tonight and at every subsequent performance through the end of the month.

from Marco Rubio.  He just doesn’t believe in the notion of climate change.

This is today’s GOP agenda, and it is apocalyptic.

Dems, go to town.

I’m waiting.

The New York Public Library WON’T be destroying the original 1913 stacks in the 42nd Street flagship and WILL be refurbishing the Mid-Manhattan library, housed in the historic ex-department store across the street.

Robin Pogrebin reports in the Times.

Josh Marshall reels at Talkingpointsmemo.com at the ramifications of a Federal judge commending Scott Walker for exploiting loopholes in campaign finance laws.

Do we now understand a bit more about why it is so crucial that Obama win approval for his judicial appointees?

And can Democrats find the mojo to say “Enough!” to the right-wing cabal running the Supreme Court?

It’s 6:00 p.m., Monday, May 5, 2014

You’ve got 90 minutes to get to the 92nd Street Y and catch the last of five performances of Ted Sperling’s Ziegfeld Girl: The Many Faces of Fanny Brice. It makes the theme-park stuff dominating Broadway seem even more sterile than it ordinarily does.

In March I took someone I’ve known since I was thirteen years old to a Paul Taylor performance during its closing weekend.  She’s someone who’s seen a lot of performances in her time. When Taylor himself came out for his customary bow at the final curtain the audience sprang to its feet and she said, as she did too, wasn’t it nice to stand up for something that really deserved it?  Because today, as she and I know only too well, audiences stand up at the end of almost every live performance you find yourself at –a reflection of the increasingly less discerning audience that can afford to patronize live entertainment.

Of course saying something like that means that media apologists for the ruling class could very well hurl the epithet “elitist.” Shucks, you could even be called an art historian.

And since I won’t fall into the occupational malaise of progressives and Democrats, i.e.  playing defensive, I won’t say a word to that–for now.

Wendy Perron wrote to tell me she liked what I wrote about Balanchine and the Lost Muse in the current Ballet Review. Wendy’s own response to the book is here.

And speaking of responding to books, the painful modesty of my character caused me to neglect posting earlier Wendy’s inclusion of Dancing on Water in her list of the best of 2013.

That’s where the U.S. government and “mainstream” commercial “news” media are taking us. . . . So says Robert Parry at his Consortiumnews.com, and he knows a hell of a lot more about what’s going on in the world than the “pundits.”

(A thought: Is so much in our society becoming sham that every single word will eventually have to be in quotes?)