Lobenthal.com

The Thom Hartman Program documents the way that Reuters “news” service suppresses reality-based reporting on catastrophic climate change, referencing studies by Media Matters for America and the Columbia Journalism Review.

When La Valse came back to New York City Ballet Friday night, everyone in the cast–from lead couple Janie Taylor and Sebastien Marcovici to Ralph Ippolito as Death’s insidious little assistant–existed on stage as if they knew what they were supposed to be doing.  It was an exciting and stylish performance. The white-gloved men were dashing without being too much.

Interesting the way that the relationship of the two leads, tentative, testing in the Eighth  Waltz of Part 1, seems by the time of La Valse itself to have flared into something more.

When Death enters, everyone at the ballet sinks to the ground and turns away, leaving Tayor’s Girl in White completely and helplessly in his thrall.  It’s sort of the same way that in Giselle, the Wilis turn away when Myrtha’s sceptre is foiled–but then again it’s not.  By their heedlessness, Balanchine indicts the ballroom spectators in the Girl in White’s fatal dalliance and by extension, we, too in the audience are indicted. We in our seats are, let’s face it, the complete onlooker. It’s only when she falls limp in his arms that everybody else on stage notices that something terrible has been going on.

As I wrote here in 2012, you feel that Balanchine must have been responding in some way to the societal apocalypses through which he’d lived. And watching humanity today turn its gaze away from the encroachment of climate change and so much else, his message is as relevant as ever. I wonder what, if anything–when all is said and done, he did live largely enclosed in the balletic microcosm–he would have to say today.

What he said in La Valse was a chilling depiction of–and a shake of the head at–human folly.

You don’t include cuts to Social Security in the middle of an ongoing retirement crisis, in the middle of an economic “recovery” that has benefited the very same people who caused the economy to collapse, so that you can appease the people who benefited from that collapse, in the vain hope of getting a few tax loopholes closed so that others can immediately be opened.

Now do you?

Thinking creatively–in Rubio’s world-view, that’s ni nada, as you’d say in Russian.

And it certainly won’t help Rubio’s advoacy on behalf of the .5 percent.

Rubio lets it be known that art history’s not a subject worth study. And he tries to posit that study as something opposed to jobs creation, a subject he shows no aptitude or interest in.

Rubio and his GOP-cohorts will continue their politics of division until the Democrats–or someone–stand up and expose them.

One reason the U.S.  government is so ineffectual countering foreign human rights abuses is our own record. Andrea Germanos at Common Dreams reports on the 84-year-old nun who’s going behind bars.

My mother’s great-uncle Ward went to Yale as an undergraduate in the 1890s; we have his letters discussing the plight of those denuded by that decade’s Panic/Depression. And he writes about attending concerts by the great entertainers who toured to New Haven.

As a graduate student, he converted from Presbyterian to Unitarian and transferred divinity schools. “How could you?” asked his sister Rhoda, my great-grandmother (the one married to a missionary with whom she lived in South Africa for 25 years and raised four kids.)

But Ward had strong beliefs, as well as a wide range of cultural interests.  “If one looks for heroes in a family–which one shouldn’t–he was my hero,” Mom says.

In 1956-57, my mother had just graduated from Tufts and was working in a research lab run by Harvard Medical School. Coming home from work, she ran into the octogenarian retiree, racing down the subway steps.  “Oh, Shirley I can’t stop to talk—I’m going to a Pete Seeger concert!”

Kyle Stock at Business Week writes about how Under Armour discovered ballet and Misty Copeland.

I mean, it’s nice that they finally did a tribute to Tallulah, (they’re really not good about saluting stage stars who made movies), but this statement in their wwebsite bio makes you wonder if anyone’s home over there.

“it was the idea of Tallulah Bankhead – with her uninhibited nature, hard-drinking lifestyle and sultry come-hither voice calling everyone ‘Daaahling’ – that became her claim to fame.”

I mean, for one thing, some of us have spent a lot of time and effort researching her acting  career, and it certainly did provide a substantial claim to fame.

For another, as a Southern woman not exactly raised to wave-slave, she really does deserve more respect for, at the least, punching that time-clock eight times a week. (She said she’d love to act if she could do four shows weekly instead.)

Advertising campaigns by American Ballet Theatre’s Misty Copeland and Polina Semionova  — Do they presage a renewed recognition by fashion and commerce (after keeping ballet in the doghouse for quite a while) that ballet dancers are panachefully graceful, lithe and lanky?

The humanities shouldn’t have anything to prove, but these days they certainly do.

You sure don’t hear Obama or the education “reform” (privatization) technocrats talk about anything but math and science and tests for  same.

All the more reason to welcome the New School’s February 20 program: Speaking for the Humanities. It’s held to coincide with the publication of Fordham U Press’s The Humanities and Public Life.

Surely studying the arts is a worthy aim in itself, but  if you needed further means-to-an-end justification for their curriculum presence, study after study has of course shown the way that arts education increases students’ abilities to learn in all subject areas.