Lobenthal.com

Katharine Kanter’s interview with Dayde can be found at www://augustevestris.fr.

That’s how Greg Mitchell responds to Niall Ferguson’s cringe-making statement in Newsweek that when he and Paul Ryan dined together in 2010, “Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.”   As so many have commented by now, Ferguson’s piece is a catastrophe for his reputation and for Newsweek’s credibility.  The fact that they would go on the record with a piece as shoddy and dishonest and vicious as this one tells you something about today’s “mainstream” commercial media.

But all that pales before my real question today: at the Ferguson-Ryan tête-à-tête, was the wine as expensive as the $350 a bottle stuff that Ryan was seen quafing last summer with a hedge fund manager and an economics professor at a DC restaurant, sort of in the early stages of his campaign to destroy Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid?   And right, I may add, in the middle of the Republican budget-ceiling shakedown to which Obama shamefully capitulated, making massive cuts to essential services for people who’ve never seen a $350 bottle of wine in their lives.

Once again, Talkingpointsmemo.com gave us the real deal.

The weeks went by. . .then months. . .months turned to years. . .But finally it happened. . . I was edited again by David Propson!

David was culture editor of the New York Sun when I started writing there in 2005.   And we did a couple of fun lunches or refreshments.

But he left the Sun at the end of that year.  Now, after seven long years. .  what can I say!?

of the way that market censorship continues to atrophy culture in the U.S.: NBC’s refusal to broadcast the dance piece that Akram Kahn created for the Olympics.

Jean Davidson writes on the Huffington Post about the evaporating funding possibilities for modern dance in the U.S., and what she thinks can be done about it.

David Carr posing the not-just-rhetorical question about how far magazines must fall today in the Times is a lot sharper than his rather credulous hoo-ha about those oh-so-“shocking” magazine covers.  But where the tailspin of the magazine sector is concerned, the elephant in the room, which the “mainstream” commercial media by and large just does not want to acknowledge, is the drastic decline in content offered.  

Remember content? 

I give Carr credit: he does venture gingerly where so few dare to tread, pointing out some of Tina Brown’s editorial mistakes at Newsweek—one thing he doesn’t say, and I will, is that her cultural coverage has been abysmal.

But the larger question is: when every magazine reports on the same sliver of topics in basically the same way, what indeed is the point?

 Only in today’s media environment could the fact that Newsweek and Time went for the old tits-and -blow job cover playbook be treated as “shocking,” a bold, major departure–they actually didn’t put a celebrity on the cover.  Cultural literacy may not be running too high at either publication, but at least the Newsweek team gives evidence of having seen Garbo’s 1933 Queen Christina.

How is it that that global warming deniers still retain a shred of credibility? 

Welcome to July, 2012–hottest month in the U.S. since record keeping began two centuries ago. 

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/08-7

Interesting that in the mostly-anti, but now somewhat more balanced critical response to Lifar’s 1943 Suite en Blanc, and its recent performances by POB in New York, I haven’t read an acknowledgment of the cranking arabesque penches in the adagio and the way they turn up in Balanchine’s 1967 Emeralds.

Mimi Paul, the ballerina who cranked those penches at the Emeralds opening night, (with some support from Francisco Moncion) alerted me to this two years ago as she was watching excerpts from Suite en Blanc on youtube.

Really, we’d expect him to be no less, but his role in the Ivan Bunin adaptation In Paris gives us a rare opportunity to hear him in his native language.  I review it for Capital New York.

One of the ironic and damning things about the Paris Opera Ballet’s visit was that, if you rely on TV for reality depiction, you would never have known that it happened.  The company was returning to New York after an absence of 16 years–one of the world’s great cultural institutions.  And every preformance was sold out or nearly so, so it certainly was something for which there was an audience.  And yet as far as the “mainstrem” electronic media was concerned, it simply never happened.  

TV’s refusal to report on any culture that isn’t pop and enormously revenue-producing is not criminal negligence the way it’s refusal to ackowledge global warming is, but it’s an impoverishment of our culture.   It’s an alarming example of market censorship