Lobenthal.com

For Capital New York, I write about three of the biggest.

I told you I was going to last February.  But I didn’t do it. Watching Veronika Part and Roberto Bolle’s emotional performance in Ratmansky’s Symphony No.9 made me think of Inna Borisovna.  To start with, Zubkovskaya was Part’s senior teacher at the Vaganova Academy.  But more in a moment.

Perhaps what made their emotional tenor so right was that the work wasn’t something expressionist, like a MacMillan ballet, and so what they did couldn’t seem excessive.  They weren’t hyping what starts off already superheated.   The overall tone of the ballet was intentionally, or at least ostensibly ironic, and a little flippant in the Ratmansky manner.   On the other hand, what they seemed to be doing was unlocking the potential of the work; I didn’t feel that they were imposing something inappropriate.

It was very interesting for me to watch a tape of Zubkovskaya rehearsing Nikiya with a Japanese company in late 1994-early 1995, when she and several ex-Kirov colleagues made a couple of trips to prepare the company’s Bayadere.  (I’ll find the tape again and give you the company’s name later.)  As Zubkovskaya demonstrated acting parts of the role, what was clear– and this relates to the Wendy Whelan Seven Deadly Sins performance that originally sparked my Zubkovskaya citation–was how potent the positions and attitudes were inherently,  shown perfectly by the 70-plus-year-old ex-ballerina.  How she actually performed these poses and stances on stage I can’t say with any first-hand knowledge.  I think that Zubkovksaya herself was considered a rather cool and very beautiful ballerina until she began to work with choreographer Leonid Jacobson in her late-20s, which would be around 1950.

A Mariinsky ballerina told me that after a Swan Lake she’d danced before Zukovskaya died in 2001, she complained about pirouettes that didn’t work, and Zubkovskaya corrected her, telling her that it didn’t matter; the performance was successful because she had conveyed something meaningful to the audience. . .

Zubkovskaya died in 2001; I interviewed her in New York in 1999.  As far as movement is concerned, it was interesting to watch her make her way to the front row of the Mariinsky, where ex-stars were traditionally given seats in perpetuity.

But so often ballet dancers think the more emotion they generate within themselves, the more impact they make on the audience.  Not necessarily true, and perhaps a little more belief in the acting lexicon itself might help.  Doing more sometimes achieves less.

Talkingpointsmemo describes the way that “Turmoil Follows as Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Meets Reality.”

No shortage of that these days, is there?

Paul Krugman in the Times blogs about the way that “many of the ‘analysis’ articles being published in these final days leave readers worse informed than they were before reading.”

Laura Jacobs in The Wall Street Journal reviews the de Young museum in San Francisco’s exhibit of his costumes, describing the way they all added up to quintessential Rudi: “cultured historicity above and eros below, an aesthetic fantasy on top and animal fact on the bottom.”

Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo,com

“the real coin of the realm of talking or writing about politics should be insight, not saying I just talked to this person who doesn’t know anything either and so I must know more than you do.”

After all that dire stuff. . .

Try Benedetta Barzini on for size. . . I’m just now reading through the transcripts of my 1988 interview with Barzini, the fabulous Italian fashion model of the ‘60s who subsequently became liberal activist and journalist and is now teaching.

I wanted to interview her for my Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties.  I somehow got in touch with her in Milan.  She didn’t know me from Adam, but we talked on the phone and she invited me to stay with her and her four lovely children.

I used some of the interview in my book, but there’s much more fascinating material in the interview which needs to be published.  She’ll get her own chapter in an autobiography of sorts that I’m working on, which will contain portraits of some of the extraordinary people  I’ve known in fashion, the arts, among family and friends.

I haven’t spoken to her in years and have misplaced her phone number.  Yesterday I put a message on her facebook account; I hope she reads it.

Amy Goodman on truthdig reminds us that “We are Not Powerless to Confront Climate Change”

And if most of the “mainstream” commercial media refuses to acknowledge these and other crucial issues that impact people’s lives, it will continue to implode

“ThinkProgress did an analysis of the 94 stories in major newspapers in the week leading to the superstorm. Not once was climate change mentioned.”

Jim Hightower at Nationofchange, calling out “The Corporate Mad Dogs of Citizen United,” detailing another way an extermist, ethically-challenged right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has radically remade our country.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes at Ecowatch:

“I have no problem characterizing these corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous.”

This is how I felt about the willful, myopic malice of the climate-change deniers as I drove yesterday through upper Westchester and saw the appalling tree damage.  Gigantic trees  snapped  in two like twigs.  It was the worst damage sustained since in these parts since. . . well since only a year ago, in fact.  That Halloween 2011 snowstorm.  And as if that wasn’t freaky enough, it was just two months after Hurricane Irene.  And that was five months after a terrible ice storm further north. (which did offer ravishing visuals, however.)