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Leaving Bard College’s Fisher Center after a performance last month, I was going east on 199 through the town of Red Hook.  It was around 10:30 p.m. on a Friday and nothing seemed open.  All lit up on a dark street, the restaurant Mercato was an unfamiliar but welcome sight.  As it turned out, Mercato’s official closing time is 10:00 p.m.  But I asked a waitstaff if I could bend the rules a bit and was told to speak to the manager; she said sure.  That was the first of many nice things about this place.

The restaurant is housed in one of those wonderful old buildings that seem to have grown by asymmetrical stages.  The style is farmhouse plus Gothic bargeboard.  There seem to also be apartments in the building and a little balcony.  At one time the main wing looks like it must have been turned into a store, as evidenced by the large open room you eat in.   And you can also eat on the front porch. 

As it turned out, I didn’t have much to eat but what I did have was superb: troffie genovese – the string-bean shaped pasta traditionally served with pesto sauce.  That’s the way Mercato did it, using its own pesto, which was tangy but not too salty.  Into the mix also went local potatoes, as well as string beans – a visual pun vis a vis the pasta shape, but adding contrasting texture and taste. Since the potatoes were diced the starch factor wasn’t oppressive.  Call it, in fact, appropriately post-Bard symphonic: the way all the different.ingredients complemented and enhanced each other. 

There are daily specials and the menu changes frequently.  I want to go back again soon.

Do buy the current, Spring 2011 issue of Ballet Review, which is on the newstands for a little bit longer.   And do read my “Conversation with Cynthia Gregory,” and enjoy, as I did, the way that Gregory analyzes and appraises herself with honesty.  

I first saw her dance almost thirty-five years ago!  She danced Fokine’s Firebird with American Ballet Theatre.  She and the performance were magical.  I went to school next day in a daze.

Today’s my birthday.

Looking back on who I am. . . in a strange way I’ve always been “myself” dating back to my earliest memories.  And many of the same interests I had as a child are the same ones I have today.  Going back through some elementary school paraphernalia I found a book report I’d written about Catherine the Great!

One of the things that’s always bugged me is people being coerced into uniformity.  I always wanted to be myself.  And in my own way I fought what ever was in the way of letting that happen.

That’s one reason why the state of our media bothers me so much.  I picked up Time at the dentist’s the other day.  The book review was of Stephen King’s latest.  There was a pages-long preview of so-called major cultural events, in which, unless I missed something, not one word was breathed about dance, or classical music.

Something that the “legacy” media very rarely wants to talk about: one reason why it is circling the drain is subject matter that is homogenized and restricted, and content that is often sub standard or just generic. 

Of course to talk about that would mean to break rank, and the inability to do so is one of the reasons they’re in such dire straits.

As  I suspected, the Mariinsky’s Andrian Fadeyev will not continue to dance as he moves into his new position as artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Yakobson Ballet.  This was the company established in 1971, by Leonid Yakobson.   They perform one-act classics like Les Sylphides, full-length classics like Swan Lake, as well as Yakobson’s own works.  

Fadeyev joined the Mariinsky in 1995.  I first saw him dance in 1999 in St. Petersburg, on the opening night of the Mariinsky’ restoration of the 1903 text of Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty—an unforgettable production and performance by all concerned.  

Fadeyev was not in prime condition when the Kirov performed at City Center in 2008, so it was fortunate that his last two performances here with them were outstanding: Albrecht last February at the Kennedy Center, which I reviewed for City Arts, and First Movement  Symphony in C at the Met in July.  He danced Symphony in C the way it should be danced—with dignity as well as alacrity and attack.

Yuri Soloviev is infinitely interesting both as a dancer and as a man.  His friend Lisa Whitaker and I are moving ahead with our plans to do a book on him, an idea we’ve considered for the last half-decade.  I met Lisa after my Ballet Review profile of Soloviev appeared in 2003.  Tatiana Legat, Soloviev’s widow, asked her to get in touch with me to share the remarkable story of her befriending Soloviev in Australia in the depths of the Brezhnev era, and the events that ensued.  Daughter of a French diplomat, Whitaker was a Russian Studies major in college at the time, working as a translator for visiting Russian culterati.

The book will incorporate the vast amount of research that she and I, individually and together, have done on his life.  Soon after Peretstroika, Lisa sought out his family and his subsequent history, and she is godmother to his namesake grandson.

I was recently talking to a dance publicist: together we fretted about the continued existence of dance as a viable theatrical concern.  I said that I thought it was easier for the smaller groups to survive, given that they don’t have the huge overhead of the big ballet companies.  She thought that it was the smaller modern companies that have the harder row to hoe, as they have smaller audiences, are less accessible to mainstream, have fewer funding possibilities.

But fundamentally, the reality is  that in all likelihood the answer to her lament about how this or that choreographer will continue to make new works, is that they WON’T.  They’re not going to be able to.  There is going to be a massive attrition.

A country that refuses to cut a yearly outlet of one trillion dollars on military, that taxes the rich and the now colossally super rich at the lowest effective rates since before the Depression (the first one, I mean), that is avid to slash funding for the most vulnerable  in the middle of the greatest economic distress, is certainly not going to have either the cash reserve or political will to fund art.

And private patrons?  Well the rich tend to recede when they sense need.  Importunacy is a turn-off.  They generally want to contribute to the already anointed, to what is perceived as blue chip.  Thus the fact that people are, according to another dance world insider I talked to recently, “lining up” to give money to Benjamin Millepied after that Black Swan hustle that he and Darren Aronovsky laid on the ballet world.

And of course middle class audiences are strapped and will only become more so now that a draconic debt deal is upon us that will turn the recession into the “lesser Depression” that Paul Krugman has been warning about. 

Except for the AIDS crisis, the dance world has been pretty much apolitical for a long time, and that, too, is another cautionary lesson that we can take away from the current decline.

Watching American Ballet Theatre dance Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading in a 1984 performance, broadcast over Japanese television during ABT’s season there in the fall of that year. 

I’d forgotten what the full impact of this ballet can be.  It’s not that the dancers are more talented than today’s.  It’s not that everybody there gives my ideal performance.  It’s that without being pompous, they present themselves as figures of importance, and the entire ballet acquires an extra increment of seriousness.   The cast is drawn  from dancers at every stage of their careers, but they are unfailingly adult.  There’s nothing cutesy or sentimental about it, even the first younger-than- springtime duet.  The underlying somber, bittersweet quality is always manifest.  The dancers’ carriage is so vibrant, so fully engaged that every step they take becomes meaningful.

In May 2010, Mikhail Baryshnikov gave me what is probably the best interview of his life.  MB is not only a great artist but was a personal fixture during my formative years in dance and ballet. I watched him up close during most of the decade he ran American Ballet Theater.  I read everything on him that I can.

Parts of our interview relating to his solo concert later that May went into my City Arts piece on him.  But realizing how extraordinary the material was, I immediately asked his permission to write up the entire interview for Ballet Review.  He agreed enthusiastically, but said he wanted to check his remarks on one specific subject.  When I put the interview together, I wound up excising that topos completely from the interview but still sent it to him.  That was last January.  Soon after, Kristin Miles from the Baryshnikov Arts Center told me that he might want to sit down and go over some things in the piece.  But I have been waiting in vain for this to happen.  Two months ago I emailed her:  “Will you please tell him for me that our interview is the best one with him I have ever read, and he is doing himself a disservice if he doesn’t see it through into print.”

And that is the truth. 

I haven’t heard back from her.  I’m under no legal obligation but I wouldn’t want to publish it cold because  a lot of the piece concerns things he doesn’t often talk about.    

Why don’t people contact BAC and urge Baryshnikov to sign off on this piece?

Boehner’s latest hissy fit has had, at least for the moment, the effect of saving Obama from himself.  Reading his weasel words today at the town hall–I didn’t have the stomach to watch–about how we couldn’t afford good programs that benefit people, while he left completely unsaid that we apparently can afford an easy trillion a year on military–I thought to myself, “This man is the Auctioneer-in-Chief.”  Madly in pursuit of a deal.  Any deal at all. 

Perhaps what stiffened Obama’s spine, if it has been stiffened, is the fact that Bernie Sanders is now considering a primary challenge to the President (or advocating one–not entirely clear from his remarks on Thom Hartman’s show.)

I believe that the only thing that can change the President’s calamitous course is a primary challenge, and yes, I’ve read the Serious People who insist that primary challengers don’t work, and you just have to suck it up.  No.  Not in these quantities. 

And let us not forget that Obama’s approval ratings–based on polling two weeks ago, before his latest round of attempted derailing of the Democratic party–had gone down three points because of liberal disgust.

But Joel, I hear you mewling, didn’t you have any aesthetic or journalistic experiences today, or was it all political? Please. ..aesthetic and journalistic are my middle name.

I’ve watched politics since I was a child–we’re talking Lyndon Johnson here–and I cannot quite recall a President selling out his own party as Obama has.  Far-fetched as this may seem, I think that the Dems have two options at this point: to stage an intervention and persuade him not to run in ’12, or to begin a process of countering and containment, somehow erecting a firewall around the conflagration he’s unleashed on the core Democratic platform.  This might at least allow them to limit Congressional losses in the election.