Talk In New York

Talented Gallery Players Infuse Shakespeare Staple with Drama and Humor

Far From Broadway, the Lively Soulfulness of Dedicated Young Hearts

A stimulating performance of Henry V will run from Jul 17 Thu to Aug 3 Sun at the Gallery Players Theater at 199 14th St between 4th/5th Aves Park Slope Brooklyn (Subway R or F to 4th/9th) at 7.30pm Thu Fri Sat and Sun 3pm Adults $18 Seniors Children under 12 $14 directed by Padraic Lillis, Producer Dominic Cuskern, Peter Collier as Henry V. Call 212 352 3101 or ovationtix.com (Excellent poster designed by Performingpixel.com)

Those willing to venture into Park Slope Brooklyn for Shakespeare will be well rewarded by the Gallery Players current summer hit, Henry V. Directed by the imaginative indie director Padraic Lillis of Irish heritage, it’s an energetic, resonant production of the full three hour script of Henry V, as opposed to the splendid but heavily cut version in the British Hollow Crown series to be rebroadcast on Channel 13 later this week.

Henry V is the sixth summer presentation of the great Bard by the Gallery Players in their sizable but still intimate theater (at 199 14th Street, between 4th and 5th Avenues, in Park Slope) and will run from July 17 through August 3rd, reminding all who catch it how actors on a stage make words live and summon up the blood in ways that even master scriptwriter Shakespeare can not match on screen.

“We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us.” Henry is presented with tennis balls from the Dauphin, a mockery that he vows will cost lives. “For many a thousand widows Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands..”

An impossible victory won

Henry V has no complex plot, the story line merely following the inevitable political and military steps leading up to the battle of Agincourt. But on that memorable day the newly minted king achieves an astonishing victory over the vastly superior forces of the French, and his triumph sharpens the point of all that has gone before. How does Henry come to his miracle? The secret lies somewhere in his complex character as ruthless but young royalty. The one time dissolute prince Hal has turned into a man of steely mind and spine, whose seemingly brash bravado is alloyed with cunning, courage and unflinching determination, and whose complex embodiment of those and other qualities fit for a king leads his men on to prevail over impossible odds.

This is the Machiavellian theme of this richly worded play from 1599, first staged nearly a century after the Italian wrote his notorious handbook for rulers, The Prince. What does it mean to be a king, and lead men to success? Much of the action is verbal and presents one side or another of this fundamental question, often both. Is mercy a virtue in a monarch, or is cruelty? How ruthless should he be in dealing with trusted aides who plot against him? Should he execute a soldier and friend of his lowlife youth who is caught thieving against his army’s rules? Is it not villainous to threaten the burghers of Harfleur with soldiers run amok to dash their graybeard heads against the wall, rape their daughters and spit their infants upon pikes unless they give in to his siege?

The dynamic production has many male roles played by females, reversing Elizabethan practice with a 21st Century advance

In the hands of director Padraic Lillis the almost uncut play yields a full discussion of the age old moral challenge of royal power, yielding a kaleidoscope of angles on the topic without coming down on one side or the other, as so many directors like to do, when Shakespeare says it all. The ambiguity magnifies the chorus’ call for the audience to lend the play its best imagination, and we are set to wrestle with the paradoxes Henry personifies, just as the headlines fill with newly murderous power struggles in Ukraine and Gaza.

Giving words their due

Well played by Peter Collier as a Henry short of stature but tall in commanding presence, the king is firmly established as one who has left behind his rumbustious drinking bouts with amusing lowlifes led by Falstaff, who symbolically dies offstage here without ever appearing before us. But Henry is a young king, who embodies the tension between the sociable youth he was and perhaps still wants to be, and the morally questionable acts he must undertake as the wielder and keeper of ultimate power.

Time for the Archbishop to come to the point, if the words weren’t sounded so well that they linger favorably in the ear

As always in American productions this playgoer of British heritage listened for Shakespeare’s individual words to be given their poetic due and here this production showed its quality from the start. The long opening recap by the Archbishop of Canterbury on the lineage and the law that purportedly back Henry’s claim to the throne of France can be as tedious to an impatient audience as it is to Henry, who waits with yawns to know whether his claims can justify war. But Gregory L. Wilson unwinds his lengthy historical argument in measured but emphatic style as tellingly as any stretch of Shakespeare’s more poetic verse.

Henry woos Katherine but behind the velvet there is the iron demand that he must have her as part of the peace settlement – so is it abuse of power?

The less mature but highly charged Peter Collier at 26 is the same age as Henry in this moment of English history and plays the kingly role with increasing assurance, dispensing his lethal condemnation of the trio of traitors unmasked in the first act, thundering his answer to the Dauphin’s mocking gift of tennis balls, rallying his men urgently at Harfleur – “once more unto the breach dear friends! – and finally, climactically at Agincourt with the famous St Crispin’s Day speech – “gentlemen in England now a-bed, Shall think themselves accursed they were not here!” – with flair and without bombast, a difficult trick given the anachronistic flavor of battle fervor in these contemporary times.

Comic Fluellen may be, but there is much care and valor in this Welshman, engagingly played by Kevin Blackwelder

Padraic Lillis, who is founder and resident director of the Farm Theater and was voted NYIT Outstanding Director among three directing awards last year, assembled his cast of 24 from 190 auditions and all of them are vibrant with the youthful energy and dedication that imbues his production throughout. Lillis’ style is to let them have their heads, if they come up with the right direction to take, he said afterwards. Among his finds is tall curly haired and bearded Kevin Blackwelder in his fourth appearance in Shakespeare here (Lear, Othello, Merchant), who pulls off the mostly comic role of Fluellen with a rich and unforced drollery that entertains more and more as he reappears, sealing an accomplishment as one very memorable character. Also notable was the lively mischief of Princess Katherine (Laura Lassy) and her lady-in-waiting Alice (Bernadette Maass) in their language lesson, as always delicious vocal fun. All these set a standard for the rest which was not always met, with youthful zeal often overcoming sense with rush and stridency. As the Hollow Crown productions show, the unfair advantage of film is the close up, which allows the voice to relax and render its lines with full meaning more easily than from the stage, just as the recording mike freed Crosby, Sinatra and Billie Holiday to drawl their songs. As Shakespeare in the Park has often shown it can be hard to find actors on American stages who realize that the density of Shakespeare’s lines require poetic pacing and clarity that is kind to the audience’s ears, that seduces rather than declaims.

“D’hand, de fingre, de nayles, d’arm, ‘elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, le count!” Katherine has learned all these words including ones she is sure no lady of honor would use.

With 38 parts shared by the 15 men and nine women in the eternally young (since 1967) Shakespeare oriented company for this production (in a nice reversal of Elizabethan staging, five of the latter play male roles) all have individuality to match the roles they play on stage, varying much in shape and size and sound. Only the mild mannered king and court of France are uniformly tall, casting with which the director intentionally emphasized the overwhelming strength of the French court and army whose power and scorn Henry would flout with inspired fortitude, strategy, and help from God – not to mention their own foolish overconfidence.

But perhaps Lillis’ most striking coup as director is to invent a way of staging the unscripted battle scene which is startling in its evocation of the death dealing force and nightmarish cruelty that was the real experience of the great battle of Agincourt. The shouting combatants fill the red painted stage as black silhouettes who are suddenly frozen in place as a backdrop to the contrasting scene where Pistol extracts crowns from a kneeling, misguidedly terrified French soldier (ably played by Ewa Maria Wojcik, also Williams, and whose part in the group chorus was particularly well voiced).

Dark shadows of men fighting to their deaths contrast with the humor and humanity of Pistol demanding his ransom of crowns from an equally cowardly French soldier

Vile murder and carnage

For Agincourt was indeed a horrid massacre. There according to the play’s reckoning 10,000 French nobles and soldiers were killed by English longbow archers and men at arms. They were trapped in mud and heavy armor amid panicking wounded horses in between the wooded sides of a long depression, and their slaughter was matched by the loss of merely 25 English warriors noble and common (Shakespeare’s numbers are not so far off the true imbalance according to historians, who say it might well have been 8000 French dead to 125 English lost). If the cause be not just, as soldier Williams says, “the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopp’d off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, We died at such a place.”

And all of it was useless in the end, as Shakespeare has the chorus explain in a poignant Epilogue:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursu’d the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small most greatly liv’d
This star of England. Fortune made his sword,
By which the world’s best garden he achiev’d,
And of it left his son imperial lord,
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown’d King
Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed
Which oft our stage hath shown, and for their sake
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.

Conquering the balky Sunday subway system to arrive in the far reaches of Brooklyn to sit through three hours of dense poetic declamation indoors on a lovely summer afternoon may not sound like fun to some spoiled Manhattanites who imagine that their own borough is the axle of the theater world, but at this level of fresh and informed rendition of one of Shakespeare’s more stirring, provocative and relevant tales it was time well spent.

We’d say the personally modest but artistically distinguished Padraic Lillis has brought off another coup here in his demanding chosen profession of creating illusion with the most mercurial and independent minded raw material of all, other creative human beings, in this case almost all of them young in their career, passionate and ambitious to shine on stage with talent to spare.

All the passion, dedication and ambition of talented youth to feed into Shakespeare’s rich cast of characters from kings to knaves

Given the impressive fact, revealed in the bonus post performance discussion by the producer (Dominic Cuskern), director and lead compered by coordinating producer Sidney Fortner, that this nearly three hour long diversion was pulled off in just five weeks preparation and rehearsal by people with other jobs to go to every day, it has to be the talent and sheer intensity of those not yet fully embraced by commercial and award winning success which accounts for such an absorbing and stimulating achievement.

Like a jaunt from Paris to a four star restaurant deep in the French countryside to sup on fine French cuisine, this trip to a notable theater in Park Slope yielded an experience more lively and soulfully rewarding than many of the expensive Broadway musicals noticed by the Times. As the theater site announces, “The Players’ Shakespeare vision supports the idea …that telling the story — without undue embellishment or underscoring, relying first and foremost on the text and the skills of the artists involved –results in the kind of Shakespeare that fills souls. It supports the idea that anyone can understand and – more importantly – relate to this work.”

And so it did. – Anthony Liversidge

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For complete data on the theater, the play and the players, and the company, where it is and how to buy tickets, please go to Jul 17 Thu-Aug 3 Sun Park Slope’s Gallery Players Present Henry V

Henry V Additional Notes and Photos (Click Tab to Expand)

A Bonus Discussion – Why We Did It That Way (from left, co-producer Sidney Fortner, resident producer Dominic Cuskern actor of the Pearl Theater (upcoming Uncle Vanya and The Winters Tale), director Padraic Lillis of the Farm Theater, and Peter Collier, lead, of the Labyrinth Theater and the Actors Studio, just back from Singapore listen carefully to feedback

At a Sunday matinee, a good audience filled the tiered seats in the sizable but still intimate theater where at intermission soft drinks and candy are sold at last Century prices ($1 for tea, soda $2, beer or wine $5, $2 for Kit Kat) by volunteers. But the performance was the great bargain at $18 a seat ($12 for seniors and children under 12) – engaging, spirited, provocative and full of the attention getting zeal of players at the height of their youthful ambition, ambition to match the king’s, and well directed.

For more low grade snapshots before and after the performance, please go to Jul 20 Sun Gallery Players Stage Henry V With Fire and Wit at Talk In New York Photocalendar.

Another great advantage is worth mentioning – not too far off are small restaurants such as Sekt with its solid wooden tables and benches and delicious pirogis and omelettes at a saving over Manhattan prices enough to pay for a cab home – though the subway is easier and almost as quick.

We liked this quote from “What is Players’ Shakespeare? – a notice at the theater: The Players’ Shakespeare vision supports the idea …that telling the story — without undue embellishment or underscoring, relying first and foremost on the text and the skills of the artists involved — results in the kind of Shakespeare that fills souls. It supports the idea that anyone can understand and – more importantly – relate to this work.

The central Players’ Shakespeare purpose: to explore the world of Shakespeare simply, clearly, cleanly, illuminating the basic human truths that remind us we are kin.

The audience included concert pianist and Larchmont artistic salon hostess Nina Kuzma-Sapiejewska, the Polish born mother of Ewa Maria Wojcik, who played the roles of the French soldier and member of the chorus, the Governor of Harfleur and member of the Chorus, and who held the box containing the Dauphin’s gift of tennis balls. Nina Sapiejewska and her apartment were featured in the New York Times at Call Her Style Concert-Cozy accompanied by a video A Sense of History.

“It was absolutely fantastic!” Ms Sapiejewska told the panel. “Overwhelming, fascinating, dynamic -the energy was incredible. So much given to the audience. The spectator must walk outside for hours and absorb all this. People go to the theater for entertainment but this is so much more – people should come a few times!” Loud applause followed her remarks.

Also present was Tom Pedas, who taught Peter Collier in kindergarten.

Reunited – after two decades. “This guy got me my start – in kindergarten!”

Tom and Peter pose for a more formal shot of their reunion

Other photos

Ewa Maria Wojcik as the French soldier Monsieur le Fer begs for mercy from the not so threatening Pistol

Ewa Maria Wojcik as Williams endangers his neck threatening to strike the owner of the king’s glove, but is relieved to have it filled with crowns instead

The cast groups at the end to symbolize the joining of France and England as one happy family – for now

Cast takes a well earned bow

Producer Dominic Cuskern, flanked by co-producer Sidney (left) and director Padraic Lillis, takes a bow before joining Peter Collier in a panel after the performance

Ewa Maria Wojcik and Kevin Blackwelder chat after their performance is over

… and then pose for the camera

Hot opening in both senses in Chelsea

Russian and Eastern European artists displayed

Slawek’s wife Krystina and Kasia view his All About Sex photoreflections on canvas.

Is the Russian crowd the best looking in New York? We’d say Yes, judging from Margo Grant’s latest Russian and Eastern European artists flash art show opening at Highline Loft gallery at 508 West 26St last night, where both sexes seemed to us to combine beauty and individuality in record amounts.

So did their art, which isn’t fashion driven and although characteristically East of Berlin in approach strives to meld pleasing aesthetics with individual expression in unpredictable and very personal ways. So the variety of paintings, photos and statuary presented was as usual huge, and the quality consistent, understandably given Margo’s central role in this artistic realm in New York with her directorship of MORA, the Museum of Russian Art ( http://www.moramuseum.org) at 80 Grand Street in Jersey City.

Oksana with her Genesis of Form, one of the two colorful ‘crystal balls’ she showed

We liked Slawek’s (Stanislaw Goc) photoreflections (images captured from sidewalk windows which combine ideas in a mysterious way) and his new focus on All About Sex (“human desire is the fundamental motivation of all human action”); we particularly liked Oksana Prokopenko’s oversized soccer balls of colorful mosaic lit from within (“Genesis of Form” was the largest), not yet posted at her oksanapro.com site; and we admired Alex G’s excitingly 360 degree distortions of NYC landscapes (see orbvista.com).

The indomitable Margo takes a guest in hand

Social movers and shakers at the party included man about town Douglas Dechert, who will be assisting Margo in the future, Drew de Carvalho who runs his The Voice of Australia in America, Kasia Bucskowska who writes columns, reviews and articles for Nowy Dziennik and other Polish periodicals in New York, and has recently published In Prose, a collection of very short stories (Ungyve Press), Daria Gradusova, who ran the bar in her career role as a manager of community engagement at the Museum and elsewhere, and Yury Tatarinov, Muscovite and self described “adventurer” currently involved in real estate here. TV producer Patrick Clark, hitherto a staple of these events which he helped mount, was kept from attending by responsibilities attendant on his new country mansion in Poughkeepsie.

Yury poses in front of two frames from Slawek’s All About Sex series

The flash exhibition runs from Wed to Fri and will close tonight (Jun 20 Fri) at 6pm or later, so there is still a chance to review items one has one’s eye on without the crowds and the heat – the too weak air conditioning slowed serious buying during the event.

In that sense, acknowledged Margo, it was “too hot!” But we will return today to explore the show in calmer water, since there is more to appreciate at lower levels of excitement and temperature.

(All photos at this page at Photocalendar TalkInNewYork

Remarkable portraits by young Italian photographer at Italian Cultural Institute

Free To Roam Cafes Before Performance, None Flee

Clara Vannucci’s images record the spiritual liberation accorded Italy’s Volterra prisoners when they play different roles on stage

What’s the best way to rehabilitate hardened criminals? A striking set of portraits of Italian prisoners on show at the Italian Cultural Institute this month may hold the answer.

Photographed by a young Italian from Florence, Clara Vannucci, 29, the series focuses over the last seven years on an innovative program, the Compagnia della Fortezza, that is rehabilitating prisoners in one of Italy’s toughest prisons by giving them roles in a theatrical production which tours the country.

The exhibit opened last night (Feb 21 2014) as “Crime and Redemption Theater” curated by Veronica Santi at the Italian Cultural Institute. The well attended event included many young Italian friends of Vannucci, and there was even a local ex-prisoner of Rikers Island in attendance. It will run through March 13 weekdays from 10am-4pm.

Changing through acting

When she started the project in 2007 at age 22, Vannucci said, she had come from a sheltered background and had no idea why the prisoners were incarcerated or what life was like behind the thick walls, or even whether the program was successful. But while she interned in New York at Magnum she shot inside Rikers Island before going back to Italy to continue with the Volterra project.

The hard core “lifers” of Tuscany’s 15th Century Volterra fortress prison, equivalent to Sing Sing or Folsom prisons in the US, value the opportunity to act on stage so highly that while they roam unguarded through towns and cafes before their performances, none have attempted to escape. They are housed overnight in the local prisons. As one told Vannucci, “Why should I run? Where would I go? Twenty years I have lived in prison. Now I have something to live for. Life has meaning.”

Sympathy for the ravaged

Since the company was founded in 1988 by playwright Armando Punzo, the experience of adopting different roles and lives on stage and collaborating in a production reportedly has had a powerfully restorative effect on actor-inmates worn down and toughened after as long as twenty years or more in cells.

The faces in Vannucci’s sympathetic and often close up portraits seem to show both the ravages of long term imprisonment and the spiritual release of the opportunity given them to present themselves on stage differently from the harsh daily role they have been assigned by society for so long. She will continue with the project, she said. “I think I will never be finished.”

The prisoners involved leave Volterra able to rejoin society at a professional level, that of an actor. “They become like stars”, says Vannucci. One former Mafia killer, Aniello Arena, won the Palme d’Or for his role in Reality, a film at Cannes in 2012. Still in prison after two decades serving a life sentence for murder, he acted a fishmonger obsessed with winning a reality show.

Gourmet dining in the fortress

But then, Italian society has surely traveled far from the cruelty of the Coliseum in the past 2000 years, its appetite for violence and war notoriously diminished compared with other nations today. Prisons in different regions are coming up with similar projects, though none have a theatre project like Tuscany’s Volterra.

At Volterra they now have a second initiative which bespeaks the essential warmth and kindness at the heart of the modern Italian soul, and the national reluctance to cast criminals into the darkness of abandonment and despair notoriously suffered by inmates in the US.

The ancient fortress is now the site of a gourmet restaurant operated once a month on Fridays where tourists who have been checked by security dine by candle light on vegetarian meals prepared by chef prisoners. Call 39-055-234-2777 to reserve.

Sixty more photos of the opening see Photocalendar Talk In New York:Feb 21 Fri 6-8pm ICI – Photos by CLARA VANNUCCI – Italian Prisoners Redeemed Through Theater.

See also Maximum Security and a Starring Role

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The Bard Graduate Center is celebrating the work of William Kent, whose skilful and artistic hand designed much of Georgian Britain’s buildings, garden landscapes and furniture, with a small exhibition; and last night (Oct 31 Thu) Magda Salvesen, the garden and art historian at NYU who is the curator of her late husband the prominent painter Jon Schueler’s works, gave a lengthy, step-by-step slide tour on Rousham Garden titled Sitting in and Sauntering through a Pleasure Ground.

Kent is the man of whom Walpole said, he “was a painter, an architect, and the father of modern gardening. In the first character he was below mediocrity; in the second, he was a restorer of the science; in the last, an original, and the inventor of an art that realizes painting and improves nature. Mahomet imagined an Elysium, Kent created many.”

magda salvesen pic – for talk rousham

As Salvesen wrote in her flyer “the landscape at Rousham in Oxfordshire offers not only “still” views, but continually shifting perspectives. Walking through the varied topography where the cultivated and natural landscape intermingle, visitors experience the plantings while registering the lightness of the designer’s touch and his embrace of historic allusions in the structures and the sculpture.” She focused on Kent’s innovations of the late 1730s but also drew upon his other garden designs, highlighting similarities as well as significant departures.

Prize guide to North East gardens

Magda Salvesen’s Exploring Gardens is a glossy, detailed and expert guide to the top gardens of the northeast US

Salvesen is the author of the unique Exploring Gardens and Green Spaces: From Connecticut to the Delaware Valley (Norton 2011), the handy but handsome full review of 148 gardens along the northeast corridor of the US, including formal parks, estates and arboretums. Prettily laid out and lavishly illustrated on glossy stock with more than 300 photographs and 29 maps, the guide’s detailed entries equip the visitor not only with Savesen’s expert writeup of each viewing destination but provide all the data you will need, including nearby places to eat and visit, to round out a day’s outing.

Kent exhibition

The Kent exhibition is in the BGC Gallery at 18 West 86th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.

William Kent – Design for Isaac Newton Memorial in Westminster Abbey newton memorial design

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John Schwarz urges a return to more liberal shared values to enable a way forward to a viable economic future for the US

Restoration of lost values key to a better future, writes Demos fellow

But would his economic prescriptions save the day?

The small but well connected think tank Demos is one of the last places where the values of the last century still survive and liberal is not a dirty word, but a proud banner. One of their most thoughtful fellows is John Schwarz of the University of Arizona (jes@u.Arizona.edu 520-882-9847).

A thinker whose moral compass seems to point in precisely the opposite direction to those of the robber capitalists who currently steer the US, Schwarz has written a book, Common Credo (Norton), which nails the deplorable state of the US economy and society as it hurtles towards a Marxian divide between haves and have nots.

He suggests a way forward might be found by reclaiming the values of the past where red and blue, rich and poor were all members of the same system of political and social morality.

Going beyond that, Schwarz maps some practical measures which might help this return to firm ground, though whether his scheme would work in practical terms is a matter for more careful readers of his rather labored $30 book to decide.

FREE US OPEN TENNIS Aug 20-23 11am on

New York’s Top Freebie: Time to take a break, and head out to the US Open qualifying matches next week, where the titans practice and future racket royalty will play a few yards away from your nose and your camera as you wander from court to court along with other native New Yorkers in the know about this great week of free top tennis, this year in perfect weather throughout.

http://2013.usopen.org/index.html

A fine photo by Tim Clayton, but can you recognize her?:

New Doc at Workers Unite Festival Wins Top Prize

Last Line of Opposition to Global Insanity?

A striking new film won first prize at the recent (May 10-17th) Workers Unite Festival at the Cinema Village, at 12th ST and University Place.

A movie with little overt action, Women Workers War celebrates tenacity and patience when outrage has nowhere to go in modern capitalism

“Women Workers War” broke all the rules of movie drama with its slow paced recording of a 550 day workers resistance event, one without much real action at all. Most of the action, in fact, takes place in the heads of the women it puts on the screen, and in the heads of the audience.

Yet so strong is its theme – the oppressive and depersonalizing effect of modern production attitudes on the hearts and minds of workers – that it ended up the most admired work among an extensive selection of sometimes very dramatic, even heart wrenching entries, such as American Winter.

Time to think

Directed by Massimo Ferrari, the film, which premiered at the Festival, is a very slow paced, reflective study of 18 women workers in a tent factory in Italy who are laid off without back pay by a hands off owner who lives elsewhere. In a burst of resentful solidarity they occupy the premises for what turns out to be the longest such takeover by women in Italian history, 550 days of tedium and anxiety.

Amid the deserted sheds which house silent machinery they come slowly to realize how poorly they were treated even while they were at work, their skills and labor the only thing that interested management and owner. Their example becomes a cause celebre for women in Italy, who it turns out are often as badly treated as Third World workers, their humanity neglected by their managers and their social lives circumscribed by long hours and low pay.

As the women of the Tacconi Sud factory in Latina survive month after month of judicial delay and isolation they find a strong supporter in a businesswoman, Margherita Dogliani, who owns a biscuit factory in Carrara. She has already implemented policies in her own company to enhance the cultural and social lives of her workers.

A drama of ideas and ideals

The moviemaker caught up with the occupation only after it had started, and there is little overt excitement in the story he tells. Most consists of interviews with the leading player, Rosa, shots of Margherita visiting Rosa, and interested parties standing outside the bankruptcy court in Latina.

Really the only overt drama occurs at a couple of points where Rosa breaks down in tears, exhausted by the endless legal delays and the interminable hours spent in a deserted and dead factory inside its manager’s office, taken over for the duration. Children visit, but continually ask “Why can’t we go outside?”

A year and a half of looking out of the window at the bleak landscape of abandonment

Yet with the help of Rosa’s words drawn from a Facebook diary, or expressed in tearful interviews, the film tells an important story with global implications. Italy, long a nation where family life was strong and guaranteed a high level of social and moral integration, is now being corrupted by the same forces of extreme capitalism that are tearing the social and political fabric of the US.

The hapless group occupying Tacconi Sud are members of a much larger group of Italian women workers on factory floors and in other humble occupations that have been relegated to a slave status not much better than the workers of Bangladesh apparel companies, the film testifies.

A War Against Neglect

Dramatizing what is essentially a inaction movie would be a difficult task unless the film penetrated the battleground of ideas and ideals behind the standoff, but this it does. All Rosa’s complaints have wider relevance to the depredations of 21 Century capitalism in Italy and around the world.

Ferrari’s very lack of interest in dressing up his story with action sequences in the manner of news reporting serves to focus the mind on the political and philosophical lessons evoked by Rosa and her new friend Margarita.

These substantial yet devalued women who address business politics with their hearts as well as their heads knit a rich moral drama with their poignant hopes and unjust disappointments, naive assumptions and newly informed blame, and the rich rascals such as Berlusconi who evade responsibility and escape blame.

If capitalism off the leash threatens to take down Western civilization, as it turns much of the population into a domestic Third World, these women are sounding the warning.

A sad note is struck as Rosa points out that photographs of them when the plant was started show them as 20 year old. For these women, work has been the major investment of their lives – they have spent more time at the factory than at home. “Work means everythng to me”, says one, “I spent more than 20 years of my life here.”

As another says, this is not just a problem of wages, profit and GMP, but one of “the human condition.” Unlike the US, Italy is an old civilization, and if even there the rich have forgotten to look after their neighbor, we are in the global soup.

Sisterly solidarity

Marguerita,who comes to visit Rosa in a spirit of sisterly support, runs a family biscuit factory in Carrara. She has already introduced changes in the treatment of her own workers, after she was horrified to discover that they had no cultural or political life at all. Every summer her parking area is transformed into a cultural festival where as many as 300 actors, musicians and other performers have introduced them to their own national culture.

Traveling to the Latina tent factory she plans to brief them on the law and other practical matters, but immediately finds herself discussing the “human condition of women”. Together, she vows, they will change Italy, and the two start to address meetings and the media on the topic of releasing women from labor bondage.

A professor of labor relations visits the factory to expand Rosa’s understanding of the philosophy and politics of his field, but seems to be yet another patronizing male. He is anxious to warn her that she might wear a halo at the moment, but whistleblowers tend to suffer a sad fate. He compares her to the architect of Pharaoh’s pyramid, who was killed to ensure that he didn’t divulge the layout of its chambers.

She explains to him the root cause of failure of the company – they flourished with military orders but when these dried up and they had to face the tough competition of the private sector, they gave up.

In the film’s languid tale, we learn that the company’s hand made tents involved hard and skillful work. Rosa spends much time staring out of the window, underlining the inactive torpor the obstinate little group brave for so long. The suffering of Rosa extends to sleepless nights, with only two or three hours rest even with pills. She breaks into sobs on camera. The longer they are waited out, the more likely it is that they will break. Doubts gather: “Maybe our occupation is useless”. Rosa’s simplicity is part of her charm, and it is also evidence of her need for the paternal, responsible leadership which in earlier times used to be the noblesse oblige of the European upper classes. The US has lost this sense of accountability, the recognition of a moral and social obligation to look after workers, for the most part. Now it seems it is vanishing from Europe, as conscienceless corporatism overwhelms even the highly socially integrated society in Italy.

Rosa’s own motivation has never been heroic, she acknowledges. It seems she was driven to action from desperation, without any alternative if her self respect was to survive. Or, even, the validity of her life. The bad apples among the men in charge steal lives, not just labor, it must be acknowledged. Her sheer powerlessness of the individual in the face of the modern business system, and also the court system, where their case is postponed and postponed yet again, sees her break into tears again in front of her group of occupiers, who commiserate and encourage her: “Rosa, we are still here…”

As the bankruptcy court keeps postponing its decision, the pressure increases, with Rosa again in tears in front of her group, the people that she now feels responsible for. The truth is that as a leader she is highly vulnerable, and so are her followers. Her main vulnerability is her ignorance. Where the professor feeds her trite analysis and philosophy along the lines of comparing her with Pharaoh’s architect and tells her her halo is temporary, she laps it up like a sophomore hungering for advice. Such is her ignorance of the wider world, and her fears, that she is grateful for any confirmation from outside that her direction is justified.

Viewers might reasonably be asking themselves by the end of the first half hour of this film, Is there any action in this movie? Is there anything to take it beyond an interior monologue, something to justify it being a movie and not an article, say. Thus the film imposes something of the frustration and tediousness experienced by its subjects, especially when shown amid the urgent bustle of a New York City where the pull of competing attractions and errands is always felt. We are trapped in the Hurry up and Wait atmosphere of the sit in in our turn.

The imposed frustration of the film as experience is magnified by a subtitle translation which is often wanting, sometimes unfathomable, in the blithe Italian manner, though the gist is clear. Dreary and tearful in its portrayal of the pressure and damage perpetrated on the women over many months, the tale nonetheless celebrates the solidarity and humane sociability of their own inclinations. The core group is eventually joined by more women, some bringing their children, who play in the background. Thus family values are set against business values. The onlooker is tortured in turn by the slow turning of the spit on which they are impaled, but also uplifted by their human spirit, which survives .

Margherita, the businesswoman owner, as the more educated and sophisticated of the pair of revolutionaries articulates the issues best in her public talks. She frames resistance in terms of preserving rights and maintaining relationships, which is hard amid “a lack of trust in politicians, a lack of passion in politics and an economic crisis, all leading to a gradual impoverishment in the quality in human relations – a grey world. What is still wonderful in this grey world? Our lives. Our lives are wonderful, every life is wonderful, mine, yours, ours.”

Their call for valuing and respecting the lowly females on the production lines of her factory and other plants is heard around Italy, and many of these oppressed step up to express their gratitude for their growing realization that they deserve dignity and to share their successes with others at work. “I have learned that every single honest worker man or woman deserves respect” says one who comes to the microphone at a meeting. Margharita has successfully turned her own labor force into a family, it is clear. They revel in the expansion of self expression and the knitting together of their social fabric, so now they can share their interests and their sorrows. Work is more meaningful and rewarding, and they thank her for it.

Meanwhile back at Tacconi Sud, the women stare at the passing trucks and cars whizzing past on the road outside, and the slow takeover of the exterior of the plant by Mother Nature. The tedium overwhelms them so that they are unable to study or use the endless time constructively.

Rosa goes to visit the professor who runs a college to train people in how work changes and how they must learn new skills throughout their work life. He talks pap at her about how her new job when it comes will be a new experience for her, and she is in a fragile period where she must find the motivation to change. At this point the film begins to read a little like a satirical farce, but Rosa politely listens after her “Yes, but..” is brushed aside. The professor prefers to pontificate rather than listen to her, another example of how her supposed betters behave badly.

Finally, we hope, the dolorous lethargy, where the residual action consists of Rosa walking from room to room, and the deserted factory floors are revisited once again, is broken by news that there will a second Bankruptcy hearing on Feb 9 2012 in Latina. Rosa leaves her “sinking ship” hoping there will finally be a resolution, said to be expected in a week or two. She goes to visit Carrara and Margharita’s factory for the first time. She is delighted to find a working atmosphere where people not only work but “talk, stop and think.”.

While she is there a phone call from the lawyer. The court met and decided on bankruptcy. “We won,” she says calmly, her inflection hardly changing from its usual note of sadness. But she smiles, at least. The keys are put into a tray for the “new owner”. The camera follows her shoulder as she walks away talking of her new politics. “We have came to understand that there is nothing better than participating into our own lives here and now; than the awareness of sharing a common space where the others are not different in their needs, in their human condition. It is important to believe in law enforcement and o have our own rights protested, to take part in the political life of our country, no matter what our role or responsibility..our Republic is founded on the value of work. Now I know the meaning of the word ‘Resistance.’…the more they are attacked the more those values you are striving for must be defended and maintained.,”

According to the final notice on the screen, after negotiations with the union the women were reinstated in their jobs – another instance typical of the film, of how throughout we are never shown any action images of what the factory is like when it is working, either before or after the “war”. Moreover what is entitled a “war” is in fact a long drawn out study of inertia where all the action is internal. As it turns out this so called movie is not so much a film as a tract, with the words of Rosa quoted from Facebook or occasionally spoken in front of the camera serving as the teller of the tale. The effect is rather like shooting up and down a queue for fresh chicken in some Communist country post war and then failing to include the final rush into the store when it is opened.

Unfortunately, this matches exactly the feminine passivity that Republican capitalist barbarians of the new empire of economics probably count on, inviting just the kind of exploitation that the women are fighting. In the modern battleground where winners take all and the law and government stand ready to bail them out if they fail, if they are big enough, this pacifist, maternal social enlightenment which the film portrays probably appears as simply a matter of victims “asking for it”, in the minds of the people who exploit them.

But that reality is of course the mark of the civilization which we have lost, and which they are asking us to reclaim.

The trailer to the movie can be viewed here.

Books Get It On – Still Best Source Out There

Three Picks From New Titles

David Caron Publisher of Toronto’s ECW Press holds Tyler Hamilton’s Mad Like Tesla, a winning collection of breakthrough ideas he published in September 2011

Even with the galloping advance of e-books, the gigantic Javits Book Expo America 2013 next week remains the most important annual event at that venue, where the continuing supremacy of the physical book is celebrated. The trade event is for booksellers to meet authors, with some tickets available for consumers on Saturday, and is essential for editors and reviewers of books in every field.

Supremacy of the printed book

As anyone who works seriously with any area of research and scholarship knows, the physical book remains the finest source on almost any topic, an invaluable storehouse of the best ideas and data available.

There are two main reasons for this continuing reign, we suggest. Authors put their heart and soul into their books, and happily take personal responsibility for their quality and usefulness. The result is that printed books have higher quality content than other media in terms of breadth and depth of research and independent perspective on important issues.

Printed books also tend to be more novel and original in their approach and inhabit the cutting edge of their topics more often than group discussions on stage or television, where the demands of politesse and reputation – not to mention media politics – discourage too much novelty and difference in views.

Crowd sourced and group serviced Wikipedia entries do well enough if they are well maintained. Even so, Wikipedia entries may be up to date on basic information but rarely as new, comprehensive and well thought out as a book, which is almost always more than a collection of Wiki entries.

At Javits last year Chicago Review Press displayed this excellent guide to the chemical reactions of cooking, offering some of the best simple explanations of this newly burgeoning science/living topic, which they published in Nov 2011

Why books are still best

Needless to say, the information in a physical book is far easier to manage mentally except for searching for an individual name or phrase, the one thing for which electronic versions are ideal. The main thrust of an author’s determination is to produce a physical book, which the serious reader will prefer for reading, review and reference for myriad reasons.

One is that the hands on mode not only aids the memory enormously with its tactile and visual cues but also it enables markings of important or beloved portions with pencil, Post-It or a real movable and often pretty Bookmark which allow reference faster even than electronic search, in fact instantaneously.

Vast market though science boom fading

This manageability is undoubtedly why the printed book is not fading away in favor for the e-book but is still vast in terms of sheer numbers in most categories. Despite a huge falloff in the business of reprinting public domain titles the number of printed books from traditional publishers in the US rose in 2011 to about 350,000, according to Bowker, though the gain of 6% was entirely caused by the boom in self publishing. Self-published books totaled 211,269 in both ebook and printed form while traditional houses maintained print output level.

Sadly, science books declined 13 per cent in 2011 but nonetheless we found many exceptional titles at the BEA last year in finished or proof form, heralding the bumper crop of bestsellers in the present season. We expect the same this year, when the BEA runs from Wednesday May 29 to Saturday June 1st, with exhibits displayed from Thursday May 30 and accommodating consumers on the final day.

Titles in the pipeline

Here are three stellar picks from the proofs pipeline:

Breakpoint: Why The Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology is in Your Brain, by Jeff Stibel (Palgrave Macmillan Jul 23)

Stibel is a brain (neuro) scientist and chairman of BrainGate which uses chips to allow the disabled to control electronics with thoughts. He predicts that all networks reach a breaking point and collapse, like MySpace, and that will include Facebook and Google. Stibel (also CEO of the Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp and on the board of Brown’s Entrepreneurship program Tuft’s Gordon Institute and USC’s Innovation Institute) seems the right, realistic guide to the creative destruction of the Internet, and he makes some intriguing predictions, such as the emergence of megabrains fueled by crowdsourcing, all inspired by his study of ants and termite colonies, among other things which point the way to a future where networked quality will replace quantity.

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman (Norton, June 17)

One of Foreign Policy’s top 100 Global Thinkers, Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and an Internet activist who blogs at a high level on policy and trends. He maps the current state of the Internet and explains why it has yet to form a truly connecting community and what we have to do to establish one worldwide. Early blurbs by friendly colleagues include ““Weaving a rich tapestry of stories, data, and theories, Rewire challenges many of our core assumptions about globalization and connectedness and how the Internet affects us. It is a book well worth reading.” and “No one is in a better position than MIT and Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman to confront the Internet’s failure to connect us across cultures. Zuckerman’s astounding range, careful reasoning, and superb storytelling make Rewire an essential and urgent read,” but our copy indicates that his enlightened and wide ranging survey is a little long winded and its final conclusions too general to please an impatient reader.

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers by Curtis White (Melville May 28 2013)

White is a novelist and essayist and social critic stretching from Harpers to Playboy, whose previous book The Middle Mind was praised by the wide ranging literary bright light David Foster Wallace as acute, beautiful and true. He tilts at those who have rejected religion in favor of science as the answer to all questions on morality, creativity and the origin of life and existence, which he feels ignores the riches of philosophy that emerged in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and urges that we miove away fronm “scientism” and its material reductionism and take up Romanticism as something our technology obsessed society desperately needs.

Whether this is a justified argument for more humanity in our lives or whether it strays into the usual liberal confusion between the internal and external world in urging that we use our imagination more for solace and community remains to be seen, but the title is attractively provocative. Scientists have been known for a long time to be emotionally truncated, like doctors, in the service of their profession. Luckily emotions have entered the analysis of studies from economics to psychology over the last half century and even scientists now seem to generally understand that we share with other animals a brain body connection that can never be separated, and in fact should be emphasized and celebrated.

It is not easy to see that Curtis White goes beyond this truism from a cursory look at the proof, which demands a careful read to capture its gist. But he is billed as urging more poetry and philosophy in our public discussions, and no one educated would argue with that in an era where cost cutting is erasing the arts in many schools across the US.

Catastrophic Spiritual Consequences of New Economic Exploitation Made Painfully Clear

Docs on Fluoride, Food Reform, Porn Workers Coming Up

Two gentleman of the Social Enlightenment: Harry Gantz and Andrew Tilson, of American Winter and the Workers Unite! Film Festival, respectively.

Walk into the Workers Unite! Film Festival (at Cinema Village until Friday, when it moves to the Brecht Forum at Bank Street and the West Side Highway) and you enter a different world from the commercial insanity that grips much of US society today.

This is the second time the tireless Andrew Tilson with the able help of his wife Rose has mounted this exceptional tribute to the human spirit, which is now under assault from those who run late phase capitalism. Those ruthless bosses seem to value the ordinary worker and now even the middle class jobseeker less than ever before, and there are many tales of their predatory blindness in Tilson’s parade of our system’s obscenities.

Suffering of redundancy

One film chosen to illustrate this moral disaster is American Winter, a bitter saga which documents the panic and despair felt by families who until recently had no idea they would ever be unable to find work before their unemployment and savings ran out, leaving them and their children to starve if they didn’t have the blessing of food stamps and the fortitude to dwell in unheated garages or in their cars.

Sometimes it all begins when their credit rating is bust by the stratospheric cost of illness after they fail to pay their insurance premiums, or even when they do, and that failing alone will prevent them from getting a job of any kind, even at minimum wage.

The invisible millions

These and other films at this unique festival are the stories of the Second World, the people who form the invisible but growing portion of rich societies around the world who cannot ever escape poverty, because their wages aren’t high enough to allow savings. The competition of ultra cheap labor from the Third World means that once unemployed they lose the chance to get any job above minimum wage, and may not get that.

Such is the insanity of those inside the corporate fortress that they cannot see far enough outside their hermetically sealed windows to understand that paying labor decently is the only way to ensure there are enough consumers for the products they make. The health and success of the US economy has been founded on this principle for a hundred years, ever since Henry Ford made the first Model T and paid his workers enough that they could afford to buy one.

But this practicality, which argues that it is actually in the self-interest of the rich to pay the poor and the middle class more than the bare minimum of economic slavery, is ignored as boards and CEOs often pay themselves obscene sums even while their businesses founder. Meanwhile, some forty nine million Americans live below the poverty line, including over 18 million children.

It is more than economic logic which is being flouted. As the documentaries in this festival make clear, when societies are over commercialized and even art and education are increasingly matters of price rather than value it is the human spirit which suffers, and its humanitarian values are lost.

Where is the kindness?

Those values include such things as kindness and goodwill towards others, and a willingness to serve rather than exploit the weak. Despite the claims of such self satisfied Randians such as John Mackay of Whole Foods, who claim to balance their capitalistic role as owners by offering health insurance to their hard working staff, genuine communal concern is not widespread among the one per cent. Even the amiable Warren Buffett, who recognizes that his secretary shouldn’t pay a higher rate of tax than he does, merely hands over his excess riches to Bill Gates to dispense, rather than take his own time to help the needy.

The spirit of the Workers Unite! festival is precisely that kindness, however, as is pretty clear when you encounter Andrew Tilson and his wife Rose who run it. The photo above may show what we mean, since we believe that the faces of both Andrew and the filmmaker Harry Gantz, the co director of “American Winter” exhibit the kind of good humored, relaxed and gentlemanly quality we have in mind, which is becoming so hard to find among the wealthy and their highly paid managers, and other cogs in the capitalist machine.

Participants in the festival will enjoy the relief of this oasis in the City of Mammon which this spirit of kindness and concern brings, since it is the spirit in which most of the films to be shown are made, the spirit which seems to have mostly left US capitalism.

Remarkable high quality Web video streaming of Energy for Tomorrow

Jeremy Irons Discusses Options in World Garbage Crisis with Andrew Revkin

Jeremy Irons is depressed by his world tour of garbage and how its attempted disposal is adding to the horror, but he hopes that grass roots movements will turn the trend around before dioxins become a standard kitchen ingredient

Tonight (April 24) Jeremy Irons presents his new film on the global garbage crisis to attendees of the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference held at the Times building tomorrow. The public is invited to occupy any additional seats which may be available (55E59 St).

The film is presented by the actor in a measured voiceover as he tours the sites of horrors ranging from the huge beachfront dump that now decorates the seaside of a Lebanon city to the maimed and deformed children in Vietnam who still suffer from the effects of Agent Orange fifty years ago used to defoliate the jungles hiding the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The film, as the increasingly weary sounding Irons suggests, is a guide to the abysmal future in store for us if the mountain of plastic and toxic refuse continues to build worldwide, poisoning the whole food chain including human fetuses, as the gathering volume of autism allergies and other symptoms may indicate is already happening in the US.

Tomorrow the Times Conference at the Times building on Energy for Tomorrow: Building Sustained Cities will gather experts from cities around the US and the world to discuss new ideas in the field.

An impressive aspect of the $800 event will be that it will be streamed in high definition video accessible for free worldwide. Go to this link for the video either real time streaming or post conference reference.

Among the speakers will be Mayor Bloomberg, his Transportation CommissionerJanette Sadik-Kahn and Columbia professor Klaus Jacob.

http://www.nytenergyfortomorrow.com/#

UPDATE April 25: STreaming and playback operating perfectly today, save for one problem: the strip which allows going back and repeating is missing even on some filed videos.

Three premieres in evening of rhythm, striving, laugh out loud satire

Heart and strength in varied program by talented troupe

Annabella Gonzalez’ well established dance troupe outdid itself on Saturday night (Mar 23 2012) with a program of dance numbers ranging from evocative abstractions to highly readable riffs on themes as familiar as Adam and Eve, though always with new twists as in the finale, a fine amusing satire on New York runners warming up.

The audience was immediately stirred at the outset by the premiere of Path, a rhythmic study by a group of four dancers (Lucia Campoy, Jorge Fuentes, Marcos Emanuel de Jesus and Carolina Santos Read) in purple in a kind of conga line jerking and swaying their broad shoulders and pleasingly rounded bottoms to a warm and catchy Latin beat (specially composed by Peter Sivalia) while intermittently breaking apart to perform interactive dance sequences of uplifting, joyous spirit as they proceeded along their journey.

Three more essentially music driven pieces followed, the first in sharp emotional contrast, a solo by Ms Gonzalez herself in a reprise of her Tableau from 1985 which struck a more introspective note, as she emerged, to the music of a string quartet by Elzbieta Sikora, first toe and finally whole body from behind one of a pair of Japanese screens to portray internal anguish under pressure from without, a punishing struggle to stand up never quite achieved before quietly giving up and reaching stillness on the floor.

The premiere of Talk Back, created by choreographer-dancer Jinah Parker, gave us a couple (Shauntee Henry and Carolina Santos Reid) in broad black tops and bottoms accompanied by an ominous soundtrack (by Justin and Jade Hicks) of drumming music with hummed and growling words seemed to pursue the same escape from oppression of some kind, perhaps from each other, before the essentially abstract depiction gave way to Pastoral Latino (2012) with three couples (Campoy, Juan Echazarreta, Fuentes, de Jesus, Heather Panikkar and Parker) that suggested much the same search for substance amid turmoil, accompanied by a soundtrack of unresolved modernist rumination (a sonata for two cellos and piano by Seymour Barab), both dance and music without obvious narrative framing but rewarding as a sequence of interesting explorations of possibilities.

From Adam and Eve to Central Park, through guilt to fun

Post intermission, metaphor was reasserted with Genesis, a highly readable version in three parts of Adam and Eve and the Fall, where the lights turned up to reveal a large red bean bag all alone on the stage resembling a huge tulip from which emerged Eve (Panikkar), her struggle (to music by pre-Colombian instruments) to be born ending at her waist, until a naked Adam (Echazarreta) appeared. When he managed to strip away this concealment of her nether regions, their joyful dance (to bird songs arranged by Panikkar) was interrupted by an apple, plucked by Adam from the tree projected on the back wall of the stage, handed to Eve and finally rolled across the ground to Adam. The sequence culminated with Eve pulling Adam off stage left in gleeful anticipation of sexual mischief. After a minute, they appeared from stage right rear, parted, and then an unexpected turn – a solo Adam exploring the red bag, heaving it on his shoulder and staggering off stage with its heavy burden of puritanical guilt.

A brief performance by the often intriguing choreographer Maxine Steinman of her premiere of Upon the Air, where dressed in a loose cream top and long black pants she twirled lightfooted to Thai flavored gong music in a dance to the idea of floating in air on a ray of light, was followed by the piece de resistance of the evening, Joggernot, from 2005, the company’s irresistible study of a group of New York runners warming up, and occasionally even speaking up, as they humorously flounced and postured through a set of satirical routines fondly exaggerating the behavioral tropes of their subjects to a level of foolery that had Whitney, a suntanned young dancer sitting in the front row next to me, giggling and even bursting out in a laugh at one point.

This irreverent riff on runners in New York assembling, stretching, and interacting with a view to finding partners came unexpectedly with snatches of spoken script from the dancers (Campoy, de Jesus, Fuentes, Panikkar, Parker), in what is always a stimulating departure from conventional art dance. A superb Bach-like violin and harpsichord sonata (String Quartet #1 by the exquisite 17 Century composer Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre) played a continuous lively background as dancers briefly standing in a group stretching and chatting (Lucia Campoy coquettishly extended her straight leg over the shoulder of Jorge Fuentes from behind, provoking a hilarious level of exaggerated appreciation from that comic master) made remarks like “Where are you from?”, “Arkansas!” or even – a male to another using a cellphone – “Use text! You’re so in the past!”

Not only was it amusing satire as dancers pretended to wobble or flay their arms when they fast walked or stretched in splits far wider than possible for most real runners, but there was much about it that had the visual flavor of a Feiffer cartoon, a comparison we had noticed earlier – Ms Gonzalez’s earlier emergence from behind a screen into angst on the floor, and the hand of Eve slowly emerging from the red bean bag, had something of that witty cartoonist’s vein of observation about them. That sociological comment can be implied in an art of purely physical expression, even as in this case with voice added, is always illuminating, even if the anti-war The Green Table blazed this trail eighty years ago.

A key satisfaction of the last piece came from the paradoxical placement of poised and athletic performers in a context where they ape the clumsiness and dating distractions of the deskbound as the latter go for their daily run around the Central Park reservoir, a contrast in the physical realm which pointed up how beautifully dance tunes the bodies of those who dedicate themselves to the art, especially those with the heart and strength of these dedicated young performers.

Hard to describe effectively in words, this fine entertaining finale can be sampled in an FZ35 video excerpt of some six minutes (Talk in New York Photocalendar Mar 23 Sat Video #53) which conveys pretty well why such departures into full mimicry and voice from the conventional silent restraint of standard stage dance promise much for the art as it is expanded to touch musical theater, and even musical comedy.

Dance as essential art

After prolonged applause from the packed theater Ms Gonzalez and the dancers greeted all in the foyer where at one point we asked Carolina Santos Read what kind of description she would like for her dancing. “Dynamic, fearless artistry, and character driven!” she replied in a burst of enthusiasm characteristic of the company as a whole.

All in all, an evening of continuing achievement for a perennially young and talented touring group that may be limited by time and money from equaling the biggest international companies but who embody the dedication and passion for the art that allows them to work at a high level to inspire the same satisfactions and joys in their audience, and serve as a model of how important it is that dance remain a lively and productive element in schools and in society.

Disturbing Grotesquerie, Nightmarish Dreams, Varying Techniques

Stunning, Rich Collection, Launched by LA Museum, A First for New York

The Morgan Library is the supreme treasure house and exhibitor of the finest drawings in the US, but it seems that Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was apparently the first to come up with the idea of an important show of the drawings of the surrealists, which played a major role in the development of the strikingly provocative movement of the early 20th Century.

Whether that curatorial priority be the case or not, the Morgan’s Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, has fortunately brought the LACMA show (which ran from October to early January) in all its variety to New York with only a few changes. It is a stunning and rich exhibition. The 175 works form a revelatory account of how the seeds of Surrealism sprang up in the minds of its major practitioners. Drawings clearly took the lead in pushing the boundaries of conventional art and essaying new approaches and techniques in this Freudian, mystic, symbolic movement exploring the unconscious.

Love or loathe it, or both, at first sight, or simply find it as we do, after extended acquaintance, simultaneously intriguing and uncomfortable (and remarkably lacking in sanguinity – were these Parisians and others self-censorious in publicly excavating their innermost responses? there are not many provocative images of eroticism or lust in this collection), but always fascinating in its attempt to let the unconscious speak first without controlling mediation, this viewing is seminal.

One of its striking revelations is how far and wide the movement spread from Paris. Sheets from Eastern Europe, Tokyo, the US and Latin America are included. Works from the Morgan, LACMA, Tate Modern, the Pompidou Center and the Menil Collection join a number of items from private collections rarely accessible to the public.

There are over 160 works by Dali, Ernst, Magritte, Miro and many others in this must-see show which will run only from tomorrow till April 21 this year. Just how intriguing these are can be gathered from the pics in this post (either from the Morgan or from our Panasonic FZ35 in low exhibition light) which can be clicked to enlarge, or double clicked to super-enlarge for enormous detail. Additional pictures may be seen at Talk In New York Photo Calendar – Fabulous Morgan Surrealism

Meanwhile the Times today calls the show “sensational”, as indeed it is, repaying close attention endlessly with its extraordinary variety store of unexpected, stirring, often alien dissections of the strange unconscious visions which these artists might persuade us are always informing our emotional life:

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The New York Times (Pics added by AL)

January 24, 2013
Squiggles From the Id or Straight From the Brain
By ROBERTA SMITH

Surrealism was very, very good to drawing. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, shortly after a young poet named André Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 the movement and the medium — aided and abetted by a large cohort of talented artists and writers — joined forces, to extraordinary mutual benefit. That art continues to reap the fruits of this union is one of the many lessons of “Drawing Surrealism,” a sensational exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Drawing was an ideal art form for the Surrealists, with their initial opposition to painting as bourgeois, cumbersome and requiring too much skill. (Nearly anyone, after all, could make a decent drawing, or a few; several by the writer Georges Bataille, possibly scratched out during therapy sessions around 1925, are among the show’s high points.) And being the art medium connected most directly to the brain, it also fit with and furthered the Surrealists’ wide-ranging interests in the id, dreams and language; chance, speed and fun; and disturbing juxtapositions.

The Surrealists, like this show, defined drawing very broadly. They invented or breathed new life into drawing techniques like frottage (pencil rubbings) and the game of exquisite corpse. They commandeered collage and took it places the Cubists never dreamed of. They also tended to crossbreed such techniques (as well as photography) in all sorts of enriching ways.

But despite drawing’s centrality to Surrealism’s many explorations, there have been very few exhibitions devoted exclusively to Surrealist drawings. The Morgan’s survey is the largest yet, and also the most international. Organized by Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it had its debut last fall, and Isabelle Dervaux at the Morgan, the show is somewhat smaller than the Los Angeles version, with several substitutions because of the fragility of paper. Even so, it contains 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries, and is accompanied by a handsome catalog with an especially informative essay by Ms. Jones.

If some of the inclusions on view serve historical clarity more than visual scintillation, the show as whole nevertheless provides plenty to occupy the eye. The stage is set with four works by important precursors of Surrealism, all from before 1920: a dreamlike drawing by Giorgio de Chirico, a poem-drawing by Apollinaire and two collages that Jean Arp arranged using chance. After these the largely chronological show is arranged according to techniques, which changed and expanded over time as more artists joined the cause and as Breton’s edicts endorsed, dismissed and reratified various methods.

This approach makes “Drawing Surrealism” a great introduction to the movement and a valuable break with the fashion for thematic displays. It serves as a reminder that few things are more important to an artwork’s ultimate effect than the way it is made, while also giving the show a variety and briskness unusual to exhibitions of drawings.

(Click to continue)

Breton’s first manifesto was directed at writers, but its call for “pure psychic automatism” whether “by writing, or any other means,” which would take expression beyond reason and “all aesthetic or moral preoccupation,” was general. Drawing, clearly, was another means, and within months André Masson, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró were experimenting with automatic drawing. Still, the several works by them here suggest that absolute automatism was rarely achieved, if it was even desired.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most convincing example here is by that epitome of fussy drawing, Salvador Dalí. An untitled ink drawing from 1927, three years before he descended on Paris, is a superb tangle of lines and splatters that looks like nothing so much as an early Pollock. Also good is the fusion of sense and nonsense achieved in two drawings of Henri Michaux, with their lettucy rows of illegible cursive and symbols.

The show makes clear the importance of Max Ernst’s ingenuity to Surrealism. For example, he set in motion frottage, another way of introducing chance and avoiding conventional skill. Drawings were made by placing a paper on a textured surface — leaves, a wood floor — and rubbing it with graphite. Even before meeting Breton, in 1921, Ernst began using images from 19th-century store catalogs, medical textbooks and popular science magazines to fashion collages of Victorian interiors fraught with all kinds of disorienting warpings of space and behavior.

Both these developments reverberate and mutate throughout the exhibition. (The show includes works by two early adapters of Ernst’s old-fashioned images, Joseph Cornell and the Peruvian artist César Moro.)

The other echoing influence is the refined technique of Dalí, who single-handedly reversed the Surrealist aversion to meticulous realism and the old masters. His “Study for ‘The Image Disappears’ ” of 1938, in which the form of a beautiful woman doubles as the features of a bearded man, is echt Dalí. But the real gem is “Les 50 Secrets,” whose malformed creatures are seamlessly added to a page from a children’s reading manual.

The game of exquisite corpse offered new ways to embrace chance, downplay skill and avoid a unified style. This show has a clutch of the aberrant figures produced by the game, in which two or more players take turns drawing on paper folded so that most of what came before is invisible. Especially striking is a pink elephant head with a highly sexualized torso, boxy feet and a wandering tail, contrived in 1926 by Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise and Tanguy. Soon collage was added, with more hard-edge, mechanistic results.

A large 1930 charcoal by Miró merges aspects of the exquisite corpse and automatic drawing. Fringed with polyps, this gangly biomorphic creature concludes with a large toenail. It was inspired by the contention of Bataille (an early dissident, who disagreed with Breton’s idealization of the unconscious) that the big toe was the basest part of the body, farthest from the brain, closest to the dirt and often, as here, more than vaguely phallic.

A fertile bedlam prevails in the second half of the show, as techniques continue to be discovered and grafted, and other countries are heard from. The British artist Eileen Agar adds an automatist figure to a large photograph of a nude woman in a 1939 work that presages Sigmar Polke. The Japanese photographer Kansuke Yamamoto riffs on Dalí with photographs from around 1938 that combine drawing, collage and rephotography. Jindrich Heisler, a Czech artist, does something similar in 1943, but with softer, charcoal-like results.

In 1935 the Spaniard Oscar Dominguez started using decalcomania, which involves spreading ink over a sheet of paper that is then pressed with another sheet. When they are separated, strange, often geological textures result, inviting further fiddling. Proof positive of its rich potential comes in a beautiful, pink-spotted work from 1936 by Georges Hugnet, who also effectively merged frottage and collage.

In the mid-1930s both the Chilean Roberto Matta and a little-known British artist-psychiatrist Grace Pailthorpe created hairy landscapes that are a little too solidly fleshy in ink. Nearby Frida Kahlo dashes off a dense constellation of her motifs in pencil.

Soon we start seeing the early glimmerings of both Abstract Expressionism and its discontents: strong works by Pollock and Arshile Gorky; dissenting figuration by John Graham and Alfonso Ossorio (the latter presaging Mad magazine’s vehemence); and febrile strangeness from the delicate Wols, alone here in his debts to Klee and Bosch.

Among the surprises is a maplike drawing by Leonora Carrington that evokes Ree Morton and a fluffy yet glowering orb of black lines by Lee Mullican. It brings us full circle, back to Dalí’s automatist outburst.

“Drawing Surrealism” is on view through April 21 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

Here’s the press release from the Library:

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The Press Release (see end for Talks, Film, Dance program)(Pics added by AL or from PR disc):
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SURREALISM AND THE ART OF DRAWING IS THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR EXHIBITION AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

OVER 160 WORKS BY ARTISTS SUCH AS DALÍ, ERNST, MAGRITTE, AND MIRÓ OFFER EXCITING, NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DRAWING TO THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT

Drawing Surrealism January 25–April 21, 2013
**Press Preview: Thursday, January 24, 2013, 10–11:30 a.m.**
RSVP: (212) 590-0393, media@themorgan.org

New York, NY, December 14, 2012—Few artistic movements of the twentieth century are as celebrated and studied as surrealism. Many of the works of its best known practitioners—including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Leonora Carrington—have become touchstones of modern art and some of the most familiar images of the era.

Critical to the development of surrealism was the art of drawing. For those involved in the movement, it was a vital means of expression and innovation, resulting in a rich array of graphic techniques that radically pushed conventional art historical boundaries. Yet the medium has been largely overlooked in visual arts studies and exhibitions as scholars and institutions have focused more on surrealist painting and sculpture.

Now, for the first time in New York, the central role drawing played in surrealist art will be explored in a large-scale exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum entitled Drawing Surrealism. The show will include more than 160 works on paper by 70 artists from 15 countries, offering important new understanding of surrealism’s emergence, evolution, and worldwide influence. The exhibition is co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and will be on view at the Morgan from January 25 through April 21, 2013.

(Click to continue)

Occupying two of the Morgan’s largest galleries, Drawing Surrealism will be presented chronologically with interwoven thematic sections devoted to the surrealists’ principal drawing techniques and to international developments. Important drawings will be shown from countries beyond the movement’s Western European geographic roots, including sheets from Eastern Europe, Japan, the United States, and Latin America.

Drawing Surrealism includes works from the Morgan, as well as from the collections of LACMA, Tate Modern, the Musée national d’art moderne at the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection. It also includes drawings from a number of major private collections in the United States and abroad, which are rarely accessible to the public.

“Because the Morgan’s collection of works on paper is of such international renown, one of the principal goals of our exhibition program is to present new insight and fresh perspectives on the medium of drawing,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan. “Drawing Surrealism is an example of just such an exhibition. The show breaks new art historical ground by demonstrating the fundamental importance of drawing to the surrealist movement on the worldwide stage.”

ORIGINS OF SURREALISM

Surrealism emerged as a literary movement in Paris in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Inspired by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, nineteenth-century mysticism, and Symbolist art and literature, surrealists sought to liberate the imagination through an art that involved chance, dreams, and the unconscious, as well as the play of thought itself.

Almost at once, the movement’s proponents realized the potential of the visual arts for expressing the imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind. The practice of drawing, which offers the advantages of immediacy and spontaneity, became the most fertile medium of expression and innovation among the surrealists, allowing them to bypass the conscious mind and produce new ways of seeing.

AUTOMATIC DRAWING

Central to the exhibition will be examples of the diverse drawing techniques that the surrealists used in their efforts to bypass the conscious mind and access the subliminal realm. The first graphic process adopted by the surrealists was automatic drawing. In this technique, inspired by André Breton’s definition of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral concern,” the artist simply allows his hand to meander across the sheet. According to André Masson, who was the first to develop the process, “the hand must be fast enough, so that conscious thought cannot intervene and control the movement.” Afterwards, however, Masson would alter his drawings according to suggestions emanating from the original web of lines. Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy also practiced a form of automatism that combined chance with a more deliberate approach.

DREAM IMAGERY

Denouncing the passivity of automatism, a few surrealists relied on more traditional techniques to create dreamlike images and express their fantasy. Chief among them was Dalí, who sought to materialize his “delirious phenomena” and dream imagery with the utmost detail in the academic style of the old masters.

This illusionistic mode was predominant in American surrealism of the 1930s, notably in the work of Federico Castellon, one of Dalí’s most successful followers. Artists seeking to express the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and World War II also often adopted this style to create images as disorienting and destabilizing as the atrocities they represented.

FROTTAGE

Max Ernst was the main surrealist to explore the technique of frottage, which consists of rubbing graphite or other drawing media on a sheet of paper placed over a textured surface, such as a wood floor, strings, or leaves, in order to reproduce that texture on the paper. For Ernst, frottage was equivalent to automatic writing because of the mechanical and unconscious way in which the imagery surfaces. Several frottage drawings by Ernst will be on view, including Le Start du Châtaigner (The Start of the Chestnut Tree), 1925, recently acquired by the Morgan, which belongs to the first series in which the artist systematically explored this technique. Ernst later adapted the frottage technique to canvas in what he called “grattage.”

EXQUISITE CORPSE

Some of the most striking surrealist drawings were exquisite corpses, a game that involved collaboration and chance. In the game—the name of which derives from a sentence created when the surrealists first used the process to write poetry: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine—each participant made a drawing on a section of a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others’ drawings. The resulting hybrid creatures generated by the game influenced surrealist imagery, reappearing in artists’ individual works, as can be seen, for instance, in the strange anatomy of Victor Brauner’s figures on view. While the earliest exquisite corpses were drawn in graphite, ink, or colored pencil on ordinary writing paper, later examples could be in pastel or tempera on black paper. Beginning in the mid-1930s, collage was also used.

DECALCOMANIA

In the mid-1930s artists developed new automatic techniques to bypass the rational mind in the creative process. One of the most popular was decalcomania, which involves applying a wet medium (ink or gouache) to a sheet of paper and then pressing it against another sheet. When the sheets are pulled apart unexpected patterns appear on the transfer image. Originally a decorative technique—used notably in nineteenth-century ceramic design—decalcomania was rediscovered in 1935 in the context of surrealism’s exploitation of chance effects by Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez. Nearly ten decalcomania drawings by Dominguez and other surrealists who employed the technique—including Yves Tanguy, Georges Hugnet, and Marcel Jean—are included in the exhibition.

COLLAGE

Although collage was used earlier in the twentieth century by the cubist and dada artists, the technique took on particular importance with the surrealists. The odd juxtapositions and dislocated imagery it produced were particularly effective in conjuring a dream world or suggesting the irrationality of unconscious desire. Miró, Ernst, Ei-Kyu, Breton, and Arp are among the many artists whose works are featured in this section of the exhibition.

INTERNATIONAL IMPACT

The 1930s marked surrealism’s growing internationalization. Artists outside of Paris approached and adapted surrealist drawing techniques to their respective cultural and political contexts, and active surrealist centers developed in London, Prague, Tokyo, and Mexico. Although surrealism was envisioned as an international movement, rarely have works by these artists been presented alongside their European cohorts centered in Paris.

On view will be drawings by such masters as René Magritte of Belgium, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar of England, Gunther Gerzso and Frida Kahlo of Mexico, Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský of the Czech Republic, Federico Castellón, Arshile Gorky, and Kay Sage of the United States, Cesar Moro of Peru, and Yamamoto Kansuke of Japan.

LATE SURREALISM

In the 1940s automatism played a major role in the elaboration of new forms of lyrical abstraction. In Europe, Henri Michaux and Wols created fluid images in washes and watercolor in which barely recognizable shapes suggest a visionary world. In the United States, stimulated by the presence of European surrealists in exile during the war, artists such as Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock explored freer techniques to make drawings that fuse visions of nature and of an interior universe. These works on paper laid the groundwork for what would become abstract expressionism.

Although surrealism as a movement lost its vitality at the end of the forties, its tenets remained a springboard for several postwar developments, as can be seen in Ellsworth Kelly’s abstract compositions based on chance and Louise Bourgois’s expression of subconscious psychological states through symbolic imagery.

RELATED PROGRAMS

DANCE
Inner Landscape: Martha Graham and the Surreal
Thursday, February 7, 7pm
The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform three of Graham’s masterworks that touch on surrealism and demonstrate how the choreographer made the workings of the mind visible in dance. Every Soul is a Circus (with Katherine Crockett performing the lead), Satyric Festival Song, and “Moon” from Canticle for Innocent Comedians will be featured with commentary by the Company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Drawing Surrealism will be open at 6pm especially for program attendees.
Tickets
$20; $15 for Members
www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560
This program is supported in part by Alan M. and Joan Taub Ades.

FILM
L’Age D’Or
Friday, February 22, 7pm
(1930, 60 minutes)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Directed by a master of Surrealist cinema and co-written with Salvador Dalí, this avant-garde surrealist comedy is a gleeful fever dream of Freudian unease, bizarre humor, and shocking imagery. Starring Gaston Modot and Lya Lys, and the famed surrealist painter Max Ernst.
Free

FAMILY PROGRAM
Leave It to Chance: Surrealism 101 for the Family
Saturday, February 9, drop-in from 2–5pm
In a combination of games and art projects, artists and educators Nicole Haroutunian and Lisa Libicki will introduce the entire family to the most playful side of surrealism. Families will explore automatic drawing, frottage, collage, decalcomania, and collaborative chance drawing, all techniques made famous by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and many others represented in Drawing Surrealism. This workshop is limited to families with children. There is a limit of two adult tickets per family. Appropriate for ages 6 and up.
Tickets
$6; $4 for Members; $2 for Children
www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560

GALLERY TALK
Drawing Surrealism
Friday, February 1, 7pm
Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, leads this casual tour of the exhibition she co-curated.
Free with admission

TOURS
Between the Lines
Saturday, February 2, 11am
8
Saturday, March 2, 11am
Written or drawn, lines are to be read and interpreted. In this new series of interactive gallery conversations, a museum educator will lead participants in a forty-minute discussion based on a selection of works from Drawing Surrealism.
Free with admission

Stroller Tours
Wednesday, February 6, 10:30am
On the first Wednesday of each month, docents lead lively one-hour tours of the museum and current exhibitions for new parents and family caregivers and their children. In February, participants will explore Drawing Surrealism. For parents and family caregivers with children 0–8 months. Single strollers, tandem strollers, and front carriers are welcome.
Free with admission

ORGANIZATION AND SPONSORSHIP

Drawing Surrealism was organized at the Morgan by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the organizing curator was Leslie Jones, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings. The exhibition was on view at LACMA from October 21, 2012–January 6, 2013.

Lead funding for this exhibition is provided by the Ricciardi Family Exhibition Fund and by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, with further generous support from the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions.
The programs of The Morgan Library & Museum are made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Morgan Library & Museum

The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.

General Information
The Morgan Library & Museum 9
10
225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405
212.685.0008
www.themorgan.org
Just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station
Hours
Tuesday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; extended Friday hours, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. The Morgan closes at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
Admission
$15 for adults; $10 for students, seniors (65 and over), and children (under 16); free to Members and children 12 and under accompanied by an adult. Admission is free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop.
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Documents Include George Washington Order to Vaccinate Troops

Mystery of Why it Worked in Original Form Unsolved

The current wave of rebellion against vaccinations doesn’t seem to show any signs of weakening, but the new exhibition starting today drawing on the rich collection of New York City artifacts at the New York Historical Society might give adherents pause. It recounts how mass vaccination scored one of the greatest triumphs in medical history.

The documents and photos, along with models of the ghastly results of smallpox, also show that resistance to this public health measure is not new, but has plenty of historical precedent, although this City was the first to apply it in such gigantic numbers. Over six million were vaccinated against smallpox in 1947 in little over a month – that it became the first battle won in the complete eradication of that disease worldwide.

“Be Safe! “Be Sure” Be Vaccinated!” was the City propaganda theme at the time, and the Society has borrowed the title for a show about the progress of vaccination here from the eighteenth century till today, which pairs illustrative models of the grotesque symptoms of the once rampant disease with photos, portraits and letters of prominent people in the City and country who championed and in some cases resisted the antidote.

One paper is the order of George Washington in 1777 to inoculate all the soldiers of the rebel army, when he found he was losing more men to this debilitating and often fatal scourge than to the guns of the British. The rural Americans who made up the bulk of his army had rarely been exposed to a malady which the British had often survived, and they were felled as frequently as the North American Indian tribes who were also being decimated by the new biological threat to which they had no immunity.

The disgusting ailment left its victims permanently scarred, if they were lucky enough to survive it.

One remarkable fact the show records is that in the earliest days of do it yourself vaccination the method was to rub some of the pus from the pustules covering the skin of a victim into an open wound of the person to be protected. Why this direct blood infection didn’t result in a full blown case of the dread disease but only a mild infection is not explained. Considering the ailment was transmissible by mere contact with a sick patient, it seems inconsistent that a more direct method involving a high dose of the germ merely yielded a mild form of the disease.

While we intend to research this points further, the show can be recommended to all as a vivid historical reminder of how this appalling and disfiguring infection ruined the appearance of many prominent figures in history, including the great English author, literary critic and dictionary maker Samuel Johnson, who caught it as a babe in arms from his nursemaid.

Wide ranging OMNI editor turned author dies on trek

Longtime companion Douglas plays Faure

Niel Sloane mathematician and Susanna visit

At OK Harris’s opening today (3pm-5pm, Saturday, Jan 29. 2012), we ran into noted ex-Bell Labs mathematician Neil Sloane, rock climber and sphere packer extraordinaire, attending Mark Chester’s slice of the latest gallery serving, a display of Chester’s well composed parallels, double displays of two photographs in one frame of well wrought images which share a common, often whimsical visual theme.

Neil’s wife, the poet Suzanna Cuyler, told us shocking news – two months ago, Kathleen “Kathy” Ellen Stein, OMNI Magazine’s remarkable interview editor and author of The Genius Engine, a 2007 book from Wiley studying the strange ways of the prefrontal cortex, had been killed in a fall into a deep ravine while hiking in wooded Pennsylvania with her longtime companion Douglas Stein.

They invited me to join them in visiting Douglas at Kathy’s Bowery loft, where he was engaged in packing up and moving the grand piano to a new residence in New Jersey, so after saying Goodbye to K, I went along Spring Street to the Bowery, crossed amid the evening traffic clogging the street and faced a metal door, where a light on the fourth floor of the building suggested Douglas was in.

After a wait, Douglas finally opened the door and, tall and silhouetted against the light of the hallway, recognized us with surprise after more a decade since our last meeting. We both served as interviewers for OMNI Magazine’s legendary Q and A section, which Kathleen Stein edited for years. He led us up three long stairs back to the apartment with its floor painted red where Kathy had lived and worked, still graced with the brown grand, with Faure’s Nocturne #4 on the music rest, the $2000 large size iMac on the work table, the nine feet tall potted plants, and the shelved and stacked books of science and poetry, including one precious author’s copy of The Genius Engine: Where Memory, Reason, Passion, Violence, and Creativity Intersect in the Human Brain still present.

A fatal fall

Placing the mail on the table under the Tiffany lamp – the latest subscription copy of the National Association of Science Writers “Science Writers” – the still shell shocked Douglas told me the story of what had happened, the event which had suddenly ended Kathy’s life and with it, most of his own, he said. “She was my life”.

The New York Times carried the obituary on Dec 4:

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“STEIN–Kathleen Ellen. Born June 9, 1944 in Chicago. Died November 13, 2011, age 67, from a fall while hiking in the Delaware Water Gap. Stein lived in New York City most of her life. Preceded in death by mother Margaret Bruce Stein and father Benjamin F. Stein, M.D., of Sarasota, Fla. Survived by longtime companion Douglas Stein of New York City, sister Julia Long (Randy) of Weekie Wachee, Fla., and brother John F. Stein (Beth) of Nashville, TN, niece Kim Long and nephews Jonathan Long (Jaime) and Tyler Stein. Stein received a B.A. from Bard College with extensive PhD work at Rutgers University, where she taught literature and writing. She began her journalism career covering rock music for Circus, Creem and others before joining Omni magazine as a founding editor and writer. Former Omni editor and friend Keith Ferrell writes, Stein, during her long tenureat Omni, became one of the very best writers on science, and particularly neuroscience, in the country. Her stewardship of the magazine’s legendary interviews is the prime reason they are legendary. She followed science with the assiduousness of a good reporter, and pursued its explication for general audiences with the enthusiasm of an evangelist. A widely published science and technology writer, Stein wrote for the New York Times, Biotechnology Newswatch and UPI, among others. Her book, The Genius Engine, on the complex role of the prefrontal cortex of the human brain was published in 2007. It received praise as a laudable work. A tremendous effort brought out with natural ease and Stein for her ability to present technical information in understandable terms, without being pedantic or overly simple. In addition to her love of writing, reading and good conversation, Stein was an avid hiker and accomplished sailor. There will be a memorial service at a later date. The family requests memorial donations be made to The Nature Conservancy, Bard College English Department or Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).”
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Douglas explained that they had both set off separately in the morning at 9.30 am, because Kathy’s recent problems with her feet had made her even less willing than usual to suffer the awkwardness of holding back her athletic partner from his natural pace. A painful bunion among other damage had compounded the lameness which marked Kathy’s life since at the age of 12, when she had fallen from a palm tree into too shallow water, resulting in a foot dragging gait which she had refused to allow to compromise her life in any way.

When she didn’t return, he went in search of her, following along the route he supposed she had taken, but in vain. He had called in the Park Rangers, who had eventually found her hat at the edge of a steep cliff abutting the nearby stream, and finally her body face down in the bottom of the ravine.

A musical link

When Neil and Suzanna arrived, Douglas invited us to rescue what we could from the books and other possessions of Stein’s which he was going to have to abandon in her apartment, and after we did so he sat down at the piano and with a gentle touch played the Faure Nocturne #4 in E flat Op 36 in a poignant farewell to Kathy and all that they had shared for some thirty years.

He broke off his playing before the virtuoso middle of the piece to talk some more, of Faure – “I think his stuff is underrated…” – and how this Nocturne seemed designed for Kathleen. “Let me see if I can play the end.”

He played to the end, only for the second time ever, he said, and he thanked us for it. “That happened! That actually happened! Thank you!”

” So you can see why I wanted play it, ” he said. He gently closed the lid. ” A number of times when I was practicing it, she was just, so present…” he said.

There was sadness in Suzanna Culyer’s voice too as she gathered her things, and declaimed:

“She will always be present in our memories. Anybody who knew Kathleen Stein took to her, and she took… as you said…if Kathy Stein liked you, you were in like Flynn. She had an uncaring knack for friendship and she was a wonderful, wonderful laconic woman, private, interesting and she will live in our memories beyond, long beyond others.”

“Yes”, said Douglas. “Exactly.”

“Maybe it was best, “said Susanna. “I mean you know, I think it is better. I mean if she was a 90 year old woman…. I mean she had a very, a very full life for 68 years.”

“So glad you could come. Great,” said Douglas.

“Glad you played, ” we said.

“Sometimes you can play it,” said Douglas.”I kind of got it at the end, it wasn’t there… but I wanted to play the end, because it was so like her.”

Much later, going through old copies of OMNI to catalog them, we found that the first issue of that remarkable science magazine, which first infused science writing with the emotional color that the female of the human species is unafraid to include, had a piece by Kathleen Stein.

Dated October 1978, its title was Some Of Us May Never Die.

(More images, and a video of the above performance, are at Onlygoodphotos: In Memoriam Kathy Stein)

Claudio makes final appeal to judge in vain

Neighborhood pitched in to aid one of its own

As we have noted earlier, Claudio “The Barber” Caponigro has to vacate his storied East Harlem premises before the New Year, according to the agreement he signed last July, after his new Chinese landlord reduced his rent increase from $1650 to $1200, still double the rent that Claudio had been paying before his little building extension on 116St off First Avenue was taken over, unbeknownst to him, a year and a half ago. But yesterday he made a last ditch effort to stay longer, which failed.

The neighborhood rallied round and helped him move his stuff to his new premises, a frontage basement owned by a Mt Sinai surgeon, Alex Greenstein, who bought a nearby house recently on the same side of 116St but nearer the center of the block. A local carpenter and other neighbors helped undo the mirrors from the wall that had been dowelled there 110 years ago, when the barber ship first started up, eventually to become a gathering place for the wise guys of the neighborhood when it was mostly Italian.

Claudio came across from Italy when he was 19 63 years ago and two years later was working at the shop, which eventually became his when his partners retired. He has never shown the slightest desire to leave, his loyalty to his premises, his neighborhood and his clientele as high as that of his customers. It is not just that he has kept his price at the pre 1980 level of $10, clearly, but that he liked his way of life and became rooted in it.

After all, he was king of all he surveyed, in his territory. He could close down and sleep in his armchair during the day if he wanted; he could refuse and sometimes did refuse customers he didn’t like, sending them around the corner on some pretext that his scissors needed sharpening or somesuch. He could leave and come on his own terms, without having to coordinate with other barbers using other “chairs” in the same shop.

He formed his connections throughout the neighborhood and further, as the Italians started leaving for the suburbs, but would return for their haircuts as they checked in with other old friends. The network crossed generations, too, as fathers brought in their children as early as age one.

And given that the place became a social node for the East Harlem version of the Godfather, this led to an embarrassment – best forgotten as far as Claudio is concerned – of the Feds insisting that he identify from photos the customers who were involved. When he naturally claimed the professional privilege of barbers to keep the confidence of their clients as much as psychiatrists and priests they then included him in the trial, a dastardly act which resulted in Claudio standing his ground and being convicted and out on probation for standing in the way of law enforcement.

All in all, it seems that Claudio the Barber’s chief character virtue is immovability, and faithfulness to his past, a trait which has resulted in him becoming an oasis amid the tawdry landscape of cheap storefronts that have taken over his neighborhood, including a number of unisex hair salons where the tool of choice is the machine clipper rather than the skillful use of scissors. In this regard it seems clear that Claudio has now become one of the very few people in Manhattan outside a few hotels who knows how to give a man a decent, layered but conservative cut, suitable for people of high station such as bank presidents and Wall Street.

Add that to his anachronistic price and it is clear that his appreciative clientele will remain loyal even after the moves to his new, smaller, basement level but newly painted and cleanly installed and outfitted premises. But it didn’t prevent Claudio from making a last ditch attempt yesterday to save himself from moving from his current shop with its window sign in attractively traditional font visible from a hundred yards in any direction, even though even the huge candystick spiral red CKCK and white pole outside his door had been dug up and prepared for reinstalling along the street.

According to Tommy the owner of the pet store next door and also of Italian heritage, when Claudio returned from his trip downtown yesterday, he was “a beaten man.” After five hours, including a three hour recess taken by the judge before he would hear the case, Claudio pled his case without a lawyer and it was summarily rejected. He had already signed his agreement to move, and he didn’t know any lawyerly tricks to extend his time in his old place. Parking cost him $40, and eh spent $25 for lunch, and he lost all his afternoon business. But as Tommy advised him, he could now accept his fate, secure in the knowledge that he had done everything he could.

Today, we found Claudio in a much more cheerful mood. Charles Rangel had come by in support and to enjoy a last haircut in the old place before it was turned into a Chinese takeout, to join the 15 or so Chinese takeouts within striking distance (though opinion in the neighborhood is that its quality may be higher than the rest). Local news crews and reporters from NY1 and Channel 7 Eyewitness News had come and interviewed him at length, as well as the good surgeon who will be his new landlord (at $1050 a month, less than he is now paying).

He greeted us with a glad cry (having accompanied him uptown after his first cpourt appearance, we earned his undying respect and gratitude by showing him the Lexington subway Canal Street stop, which he realized would save him driving down and paying a parking fee (yesterday Alas he was unable to save because he had to carry a passenger down in the form of the customer who encouraged him to make a final stand). Would we like to see his new place?

He took us up the street and unlocked the grill (which will be done away with) and we took pictures of him with Felix, a young man who uses him every one or two weeks to keep his hair length the absolute minimum. Claudio, shorn of his space and some of the convenience of his location, will nonetheless stay in business until he decides for himself when enough is enough, and a man in his eighties, though young in spirit, perhaps doesn’t want to stand on his feet for ten hours a day.

But till then, he has been rescued by the neighborhood he served for so long.

ABC Eyewitness News Video and Transcript

Nice Op Ed piece in the Times today (Nov 24) by Herbert Gans (No, that’s not Herman Kahn) who points out that the old ways of getting rid of surplus workers in this extreme capitalist economy – wars, poverty, disease, prison, and other useful institutions – are not doing their job these days, as more and more activities need fewer and fewer workers, particularly in this country as more and more jobs flow overseas.

This is fits in with the contempt banks seem to have for the ranks of average depositor, who get more fees than interest whatever account type they choose, unless they have $10,000 or more to spare to sit getting the lowest interest rate possible short of zero.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Age of the Superfluous Worker
By HERBERT J. GANS
Published: November 24, 2011

AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it.

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.

The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count.

In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.

In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.

The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing. Decades of medical and public health advances, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, have reduced the number of poverty-related deaths. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed.

Over the past quarter-century, one very costly way of decreasing the surplus has been the imprisonment of people, mostly dark-skinned men, for actual and invented offenses. Felons are not often hired when they leave prison. Many, at least those who do not become recidivists, become surplus and then superfluous labor. As incarceration becomes less affordable for financially strapped states, inmates will reach surplus or superfluous status at a younger age.

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

When the jobless recovery ends and the economy is restored to good health, today’s surplus will be reduced. New technology and the products and services that accompany it will create new jobs. But unless the economy itself changes, eventually many of these innovations may be turned over to machines or the jobs may be sent to lower-wage economies.

In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones.

What could be done to prevent such a future? America will have to finally get serious about preserving and creating jobs — and on a larger, and more lasting, scale than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Private enterprise and government will have to think in terms of industrial policy, and one that emphasizes labor-intensive economic growth and innovation. Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers even as it would raise the quality of education.

In the long run, reducing working time — perhaps to as low as 30 hours a week, with the lost income made up by unemployment compensation — would lead to a modest increase in jobs, through work sharing. New taxes on income and wealth are unavoidable, as are special taxes on the capital-intensive part of the economy. Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well, and today’s polarized and increasingly corporate-run democracy will have to be turned into a truly representative one.

Whatever the costs, they would be a small price to preserve America as a healthy society. A society that has permanently expelled a significant proportion of its members from the work force would soon deteriorate into an unbelievably angry country, with intense and continuing conflict between the have-jobs and have-nones. America could become a very sick society, just when it needed to be stronger than ever to flourish in the global economy.

Herbert J. Gans, an emeritus professor of sociology at Columbia, is the author of “Imagining America in 2033.”

Who is Herbert Gans?

Herbert J. Gans (from Amazon)
Herbert J. Gans (born May 7, 1927) is an American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University since 1971, retiring in 2007. One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant’s attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with Martin Meyerson. Although Gans views his career as spanning six fields of research, he initially made his reputation as a critic of urban renewal in the early 1960s. His first book, The Urban Villagers (1962), described Boston’s diverse West End neighborhood, where he mainly studied its Italian-American working class community.

How precisely the corporations of this world are expected to stay in business when the consumers they seek are jobless, homeless, and bust is hard to fathom, especially since the great boom of the 2000s and earlier was based mainly on extreme spending by the same economic animal, which since their real incomes were more or less flat for thirty years were only enabled by ballooning credit card debt and massive borrowing against their houses, most mortgages of which are now underwater.

Do the rich plan to sell only to the rich?

Further reading: Herbert Gans Imagines America in 2033 (BroadStreetReview)”>

One of the most forceful personalities and minds in science was suddenly taken from us by a stroke today (Tues Nov 22 2011). Lynn Margulis was an unusually strong character and for a biologist she had an unusually muscular mind, and her early marriage to Carl Sagan was the least of her accomplishments. She was very young when she began to demonstrate the lame inadequacy of the standard idea of how evolution works and the origin of species, which is that random tiny mutations are converted by Darwininian competition to emerge as dominant features if these are advantageous to survival, and even give rise to new major forms or species if they are particularly helpful.

Margulis was one of the few scientists who immediately see that this theory is conceptually inadequate at the fundamental level and not much more than a silly biological version of modern capitalist thinking a la Ayn Raynd where nature is entirely a jungle where only the strongest survive, and that evolution at the level of creating new species (which standard Darwinism utterly fails to explain) was far more likely a cooperative venture of some kind.

This revisionism took shape in her ideas about symbiogenesis where at the most basic stratum of life in which single celled forms existed at the beginning, it was likely that such cells merged, and that explained the appearance of cells with a nucleus of which most larger life forms are now made up, including ourselves. From the Margulis point of view we are all essentially agglomerations of cooperating bacteria, and that explains also how new species can arise – from the merging of disparate cells which thus form new living entities with more powerful survival processes than either progenitor.

This obituary in the Times suggests that the details of her thinking are still obscure to the average Timesman and other non specialists, but it is very clear in giving her the credit she deserved after years in the trenches fighting for her truths. No less a fellow heretic than Richard Dawking famously complimented her highly on her determined resilience in the fact of the standard hostility and envy of lesser minds who occupied higher positions in the ruling system when she started out as a young woman of originality and superior sense.

In other words Margulis was a heretic of great ability who could be counted on to guide lesser mortals as to other heretics in science and which were or are bone fide future Nobelists and which are fueled by too much imagination. In this respect she was one of the first to recognize the distinction of one of the most eminent naysayers in science, Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, who has been subjected to political attacks for a quarter century for pointing out from the beginning that as the putative cause of AIDS HIV is in fact a non starter, as every year that passes confirms.

Margulis saw immediately that Duesberg’s analysis was correct and that HIV/AIDS is a nonsense from every point of view, and she had no compunction in saying so. How rare is her kind of unrestrained seeking after better truths in science and how sorely we need more of it was never better shown than in her life of great achievement in the face of mass conformity and political resistance in the new world of institutionalized and now corporate science that has grown into an almost immovable pyramid since the Second World War.

Now we have lost one more rare voice of skeptical creativity.

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

Further reading: Dick Teresis (ex OMNI editor) talks to Margulis, a neighbor in:
Discover: April 2011 issue; published online June 17, 2011

Discover Interview:
Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right
It’s the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.
by Dick Teresi; photography by Bob O’Connor

A conversation with Lynn Margulis is an effective way to change the way you think about life. Not just your life. All life. Scientists today recognize five groups of life: bacteria, protoctists (amoebas, seaweed), fungi (yeast, mold, mushrooms), plants, and animals. Margulis, a self-described “evolutionist,” makes a convincing case that there are really just two groups, bacteria and everything else.
That distinction led to her career-making insight. In a 1967 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Margulis suggested that mitochondria and plastids—vital structures within animal and plant cells—evolved from bacteria hundreds of million of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect in interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest—the protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals, including humans. The notion that we are all the children of bacteria seemed outlandish at the time, but it is now widely supported and accepted. “The evolution of the eukaryotic cells was the single most important event in the history of the organic world,” said Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the last century. “Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance.”
Her subsequent ideas remain decidedly more controversial. Margulis came to view symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, an idea that has been dismissed by modern biologists. The dominant theory of evolution (often called neo-Darwinism) holds that new species arise through the gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection. To Margulis, random mutation and natural selection are just cogs in the gears of evolution; the big leaps forward result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis. Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.

Margulis herself is a highly social organism. Now 71, she is a well-known sight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is on the geosciences faculty, riding her bike in all weather and at all times of day. Interviewer Dick Teresi, a neighbor, almost ran her over when, dressed in a dark coat, she cycled in front of his car late at night. On the three occasions that they met for this interview, Teresi couldn’t help noticing that Margulis shared her home with numerous others: family, students, visiting scholars, friends, friends of friends, and anybody interesting who needed a place to stay.
Most scientists would say there is no controversy over evolution. Why do you disagree?

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred—that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
And you don’t believe that natural selection is the answer?

This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
That seems like a fairly basic objection. How, then, do you think the neo-Darwinist perspective became so entrenched?

In the first half of the 20th century, neo-Darwinism became the name for the people who reconciled the type of gradual evolutionary change described by Charles Darwin with Gregor Mendel’s rules of heredity [which first gained widespread recognition around 1900], in which fixed traits are passed from one generation to the next. The problem was that the laws of genetics showed stasis, not change. If you have pure breeding red flowers and pure breeding white flowers, like carnations, you cross them and you get pink flowers. You back-cross them to the red parent and you could get three-quarters red, one-quarter white. Mendel showed that the grandparent flowers and the offspring flowers could be identical to each other. There was no change through time.
There’s no doubt that Mendel was correct. But Darwinism says that there has been change through time, since all life comes from a common ancestor—something that appeared to be supported when, early in the 20th century, scientists discovered that X-rays and specific chemicals caused mutations. But did the neo-
Darwinists ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!
So did Mendel miss something? Was Darwin wrong?

I’d say both are incomplete. The traits that follow Mendel’s laws are trivial. Do you have a widow’s peak or a straight hairline? Do you have hanging earlobes or attached earlobes? Are you female or male? Mendel found seven traits that followed his laws exactly. But neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
What kind of evidence turned you against neo-Darwinism?

What you’d like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record—and preferably in all three. Darwin’s big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of a sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin’s gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then—whoop—a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.
Gould used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe what he interpreted as actual leaps in evolutionary change. Most biologists disagreed, suggesting a wealth of missing fossil evidence yet to be found. Where do you stand in the debate?

“Punctuated equilibrium” was invented to describe the discontinuity in the appearance of new species, and symbiogenesis supports the idea that these discontinuities are real. An example: Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically. 

What about the famous “beak of the finch” evolutionary studies of the 1970s? Didn’t they vindicate Darwin?

Peter and Rosemary Grant, two married evolutionary biologists, said, ‘To hell with all this theory; we want to get there and look at speciation happening.’ They measured the eggs, beaks, et cetera, of finches on Daphne Island, a small, hilly former volcano top in Ecuador’s Galápagos, year after year. They found that during floods or other times when there are no big seeds, the birds with big beaks can’t eat. The birds die of starvation and go extinct on that island.
Did the Grants document the emergence of new species?

They saw this big shift: the large-beaked birds going extinct, the small-beaked ones spreading all over the island and being selected for the kinds of seeds they eat. They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species—ever. They would say that if they waited long enough they’d find a new species.
Some of your criticisms of natural selection sound a lot like those of Michael Behe, one of the most famous proponents of “intelligent design,” and yet you have debated Behe. What is the difference between your views?

The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.

You claim that the primary mechanism of evolution is not mutation but symbiogenesis, in which new species emerge through the symbiotic relationship between two or more kinds of organisms. How does that work?

All visible organisms are products of symbiogenesis, without exception. The bacteria are the unit. The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park (jpg). Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.
How could communities of bacteria have formed completely new, more complex levels of life?

Symbiogenesis recognizes that the mitochondria [the energy 
factories] in animal, plant, and fungal cells came from oxygen-respiring bacteria and that chloroplasts in plants and algae—which perform photosynthesis—came from cyanobacteria. These used to be called blue-green algae, and they produce the oxygen that all animals breathe.
Are you saying that a free-living bacterium became part of the cell of another organism? How could that have happened?

At some point an amoeba ate a bacterium but could not digest it. The bacterium produced oxygen or made vitamins, providing a survival advantage to both itself and the amoeba. Eventually the bacteria inside the amoeba became the mitochondria. The green dots you see in the cells of plants originated as cyanobacteria. This has been proved without a doubt.
And that kind of partnership drives major evolutionary change?

The point is that evolution goes in big jumps. That idea has been called macromutation, and I was denigrated in 1967 at Harvard for mentioning it. “You believe in macromutation? You believe in acquired characteristics?” the important professor Keith Porter asked me with a sneer. No, I believe in acquired genomes.
Can you give an example of symbiogenesis in action?

Look at this cover of Plant Physiology [a major journal in the field]. The animal is a juvenile slug. It has no photosynthesis ancestry. Then it feeds on algae and takes in chloroplasts. This photo is taken two weeks later. Same animal. The slug is completely green. It took in algae chloroplasts, and it became completely photosynthetic and lies out in the sun. At the end of September, these slugs turn red and yellow and look like dead leaves. When they lay eggs, those eggs contain the gene for photosynthesis inside. Or look at a cow. It is a 40-gallon fermentation tank on four legs. It cannot digest grass and needs a whole mess of symbiotic organisms in its overgrown esophagus to digest it. The difference between cows and related species like bison or musk ox should be traced, in part, to the different symbionts they maintain.
But if these symbiotic partnerships are so stable, how can they also drive evolutionary change?

Symbiosis is an ecological phenomenon where one kind of organism lives in physical contact with another. Long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures, new organs and organ systems, and new species as one being incorporates another being that is already good at something else. This major mode of evolutionary innovation has been ignored by the so-called evolutionary biologists. They think they own evolution, but they’re basically anthropocentric zoologists. They’re playing the game while missing four out of five of the cards. The five are bacteria, protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants, and they’re playing with just animals—a fifth of the deck. The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web—the branches fuse, like when algae and slugs come together and stay together.
In contrast, the symbiotic view of evolution has a long lineage in Russia, right?

From the very beginning the Russians said natural selection was a process of elimination and could not produce all the diversity we see. They understood that symbiogenesis was a major source of innovation, and they rejected Darwin. If the English-speaking world owns natural selection, the Russians own symbiogenesis. In 1924, this man Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky wrote a book called Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, in which he reconciled Darwin’s natural selection as the eliminator and symbiogenesis as the innovator. Kozo-Polyansky looked at cilia—the wavy hairs that some microbes use to move—and said it is not beyond the realm of possibility that cilia, the tails of sperm cells, came from “flagellated cytodes,” by which he clearly meant swimming bacteria.
Has that idea ever been verified?

The sense organs of vertebrates have modified cilia: The rods and cone cells of the eye have cilia, and the balance organ in the inner ear is lined with sensory cilia. You tilt your head to one side and little calcium carbonate stones in your inner ear hit the cilia. This has been known since shortly after electron microscopy came in 1963. Sensory cilia did not come from random mutations. They came by acquiring a whole genome of a symbiotic bacterium that could already sense light or motion. Specifically, I think it was a spirochete [a corkscrew-shaped bacterium] that became the cilium.
Don’t spirochetes cause syphilis?

Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I’m right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria are already optimized for sensitivity to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I’m right, the whole system—called the cytoskeletal system—came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?

And yet these ideas are not generally accepted. Why?

Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.
We usually think of bacteria as strictly harmful. You disagree?

We couldn’t live without them. They maintain our ecological physiology. There are vitamins in bacteria that you could not live without. The movement of your gas and feces would never take place without bacteria. There are hundreds of ways your body wouldn’t work without bacteria. Between your toes is a jungle; under your arms is a jungle. There are bacteria in your mouth, lots of spirochetes, and other bacteria in your intestines. We take for granted their influence. Bacteria are our ancestors. One of my students years ago cut himself deeply with glass and accidentally inoculated himself with at least 10 million spirochetes. We were all scared but nothing happened. He didn’t even have an allergic reaction. This tells you that unless these microbes have a history with people, they’re harmless.

Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?

Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the Treponema of syphilis or the Borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you’re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don’t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant “round bodies.” What’s that debate all about? 

Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person’s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.
Wait—you are suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?

There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis [winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”

Syphilis has been called “the great imitator” because patients show a whole range of symptoms in a given order. You have a genital chancre, your symptoms go away, then you have the pox, this skin problem, and then it’s chronic, and you get sicker and sicker. The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.

Is there a connection here between syphilis and Lyme disease, which is also caused by a spirochete and which is also said to be difficult to treat when diagnosed late? 

Both the Treponema that cause syphilis and the Borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease Borrelia and syphilis Treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive. These Borrelia and Treponema have a long history inside people. Syphilis has been detected in skull abnormalities going back to the ancient Egyptians. But I’m interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I’m not interested in the diseases.
When you talk about the evolutionary intelligence of bacteria, it almost sounds like you think of them as conscious beings.

I do think consciousness is a property of all living cells. All cells are bounded by a membrane of their own making. To sense chemicals—food or poisons—it takes a cell. To have a sense of smell takes a cell. To sense light, it takes a cell. You have to have a bounded entity with photoreceptors inside to sense light. Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life and still are running the soil and the air and affecting water quality.
Your perspective is rather humbling.
The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans? You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? 
The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.
Do we overrate ourselves as a species?

Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.
Why do you have a reputation as a heretic?

Anyone who is overtly critical of the foundations of his science is persona non grata. I am critical of evolutionary biology that is based on population genetics. I call it zoocentrism. Zoologists are taught that life starts with animals, and they block out four-fifths of the information in biology [by ignoring the other four major groups of life] and all of the information in geology.


You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?

When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. 
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?

I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.

Insofar as the so-called AIDS virus HIV has been shown by Nancy Padian to be utterly uninfectious, and yet HIV/AIDS researchers happily produce surveys and studies year after year which use infectiousness as a premise and seem to show it as a result, in changing rates of infection, Margulis is the only major HIV skeptic who has come up with a possibility in syphilis as a cause which accounts for this phenomenon, which otherwise has to be explained by the wide ranging cross reaction achieved by multiple versions of the HIV test.

But though everything else she believed about HIV/AIDS was quite right according to our own research in the literature over a quarter decade, we never quite saw her point on syphilis as being the best answer as to what causes AIDS, since although it might be sufficient it wasn’t necessary, ie the symptoms of syphilis were not as far as we know common to all or even many AIDS patients. Nor has AIDS ever shown any sign of being infectious in the general population. Now at least we have her public answer to this objection, in this exchange.

We congratulate Teresi however on making sense of her ideas in his interview, which we would have liked to do ourselves, and planned to do, but Alas found Margulis too preoccupied on more important research when she visited New York, research which was changing biological theory as she did it.

Monday night bash hottest in New York

Open mike adds talent and surprise

The hottest spot in New York on Monday night is a well kept secret from all except blues aficionados, and the few tourists lucky enough to stumble upon it deep in the underground space of the great 42nd Street jazz/blues/rock/reggae/dance club B.B.King‘s (www.bbkingblues.com 237 West 42St 997 4144), between 7th and 8th Avenue on 42nd.

Amid the garish daylit power of the neon extravagance of this modern mall, whose central 42nd street strip between Broadway and Eighth Avenue might well seem to hold nothing but tawdry tourist attractions and services, from the sparkling Macdonalds housed in an old cinema to the Hard Rock Cafe to skyscraper hotels to the fast moving news announcement necklacing the central Times Square tower, a funfair long abandoned by the New York Times to its noisy crowds, we found a slice of blues paradise.

The blues mountain peak found amid these cultural lowlands is the Lucille Grill. Running into bass guitarist and blog virtuoso Amy Madden (www.writerless.blogspot.com) last night on the crosstown bus on 96th, and being apprised that her famous Monday session was going to be in full swing from 8pm to 1am at BBKing’s intimate Lucille Grill, I dropped down to Times Square at 20 min past eight, walked through the surging crowds and down the stairs to the Lucille Grill, briefly visiting the main stage space to watch Yellowman performing on the big stage, his standard dancehall post reggae loud enough to cover a nuclear explosion. But a few steps across the way and down was a blues paradise.

A mighty blast from a musical locomotive

With an $8 beer I commandeered a ringside seat for what proved to be a mighty blues blast that was still going strong when I left three hours later. Endlessly rolling locomotive blues had warmed the crowd into a slow frenzy by the time a late open mike drew vibraphonist Charles Thompson (845-249-9064) whose miniature silvery notes cut clear thru the roar of drum and guitar, along with a hot guitarist straight out of the current TV ad featuring the caveman, namely the great Joe Berger (646 537 1569), a Monday evening regular, and a splendidly round youthful Big Mama belting out the blues with the best of them – all together, in the finale which climaxed my evening.

As an unexpected American Idol moment the open mike session was led off by a young black singer from Rochester, Josh (585 503 8996) 23, singing “Falling in love with you is the best thing that Happened to me”, his own tribute to a love lost to death. He afterwards grabbed mid-Western Erica for a nice demo of jive loops and turns.

Blues super trio pulses

But the great and reliable star talent at Lucille on Mondays is the house trio. Alan Child’s seasoned, generous drumming and Amy Madden’s throbbing, warming bass render endlessly satisfying propulsion for Jon Paris’s guitar and harmonica riffs which Paris, it seems, can take as far out as Hendrix’s riffs if he feels like it, yet without ever leaving the firm ground of classic blues forms.

There are few players who can match Paris’s feel for and mastery of this heart rending and gut shaking music, which hand in hand with America’s other classic form, jazz, endures as America’s greatest contribution to world culture (www.jonparis.com).

And all you have to do to hear this supremely entertaining soul food is to drop down to the Lucille Bar any Monday night. No cover, no minimum, beer from $8 and food good enough if you’re hungry. And a stage, bar and table layout of the perfect scale and shape for blues listening – and a bit of dancing, if you feel like it, see below.

The dancers are Josh the a capella singer and Erica, whose favorite drink is a Mabylene (pictured), which at the Lucille bar is Absolut Wild Tea Vodka, St Germain eidenflower liqueur and Rose’s Lime Juice.

Other visitors from faraway included anaesthiologist Augstein Svedahl and neurologist Kanna Svedahl from mid-Northern Norway, who like Erica had stumbled across this little musical paradise more or less by serendipity, in the form of a recommendation to visit BBKing’s, with no special instruction to make it Lucille’s Grill.

But that’s the free ticket to look for at BBKing’s, at least on Monday nights. While the food is more heartwarming than fine dining, it goes with beer and blues for a perfect New York experience, the Svedahl’s agreed. In other words, a little corner of blues heaven.

Excellent British author on WWII again

Rose asks pertinent questions

Charlies Rose had a fine British type on tonight, Jun 16, an amiable military historian and author so well versed in his topic that his voice never rose above the cheerful reasonableness of his pleasingly Oxbridge patrician background. That’s what one discerned, anyway, as Andrew Roberts answered some very good questions from Charlie, who was either very well briefed or, it seemed more likely, a student of the topic himself who knew the key questions to ask – such as Could Hitler have won the War? Who was the greatest general of the War? (the brutal Marshal Zhukov, who defeated the Germans, killing four out of the five the Allies killed in total). Did Hitler resent his failure as a painter? Enormously, it seemed.

The key question is why after his early successes, including the Blitzkrieg across to the Channel which put France out of the War in six weeks, which Hitler approved of despite the reservations of most of his generals, did Hitler end up failing, primarily by opening the Eastern front, his big mistake? According to Roberts, whose The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, is obviously a fine guide to the best thinking on the topic, because he kept putting his ideology first rather than the best military strategy. In the early phase, there was every reason to believe he would have won.

If he had just left the Russians, and the Jews, alone, he would have, it seems clear. One wonders what on earth Europe would have looked like today.

Here’s Robert Service in the Observer:

It is a safe bet that at any given moment there is someone in the United Kingdom writing a general history of the Second World War. Andrew Roberts’s latest offering is a sparkling addition to the groaning shelves. The British have almost a monopoly in the subject. Go into any bookshop in Italy and there are always plenty of publications about the fighting in the Apennines. In Warsaw, the same is true of the Soviet massacre of Polish troops in the Katyn forest. Russian military historians produce an annual stream of books on the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. American authors write endlessly about FDR, Patton and even Churchill. But it is in this country that most accounts have appeared about the war as a global phenomenon from September 1939 right through to the Japanese surrender in August 1945.

There is an obvious reason for this. Once Hitler had invaded Poland, it was the British and the French who opened hostilities against him. In less than a year, France had fallen. The United Kingdom fought on alone against Germany and Japan (sic – corrected later) at a time when the USSR had a near-alliance with the Third Reich and American internal politics prevented Roosevelt from entering the conflict. This changed in 1941 after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Japanese air force attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour. Immediately, the “Big Three” – America, the Soviet Union and Britain – came together to smash militarist imperialism west and east. Russian rulers to this day have dealt with their country’s less than glorious history before Operation Barbarossa by focusing on the “great patriotic war” of 1941-1945 to the exclusion of the years of collusion with German power.

Roberts offers refreshing judgments on the politicians and commanders in lively prose and his denunciation of the murder of millions of Jews is as measured as it is moving. His pride in the British national performance is frequently on display, but he is not shy about puncturing the bubble of reputations. General Montgomery’s foibles are exposed alongside his virtues as a field commander. Roberts also freely acknowledge the importance of the American military contribution without failing to point out the scary vanity of General Patton. He also refrains from the conventional praise for Marshal Zhukov, instead highlighting how brutally he and fellow Soviet commanders treated their troops.

The thread binding the book together is the question of historical contingency. Roberts indicates how often Hitler would have done better, and even won the war, if he had made different choices. This is not an original thought, nor is it claimed as such. No one in 1940 needed to tell Churchill that the Germans stood a good chance of crushing the United Kingdom. In the long summer of 1941, as the German armies streamed as fast as their tanks could carry them towards the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, it was the belief of nearly every Soviet citizen that the USSR was on the brink of complete defeat. Such was Roosevelt’s feeling that the Third Reich was about to gain definitive victory in Europe that he twisted arms in the Washington political establishment to send food and armaments to the United Kingdom even before America’s entry into the war.

Hitler as a military leader was Stalin’s blood twin. He accepted only forward movement from his generals and regarded tactical withdrawal as a shameful betrayal of the Fatherland. When advancing, he often lost his sense of strategic realism. Thus he foolishly fiddled around with the planned distribution of his forces on the Eastern Front in August and September 1941, when a more sensible idea would have been to amass German strength for a decisive thrust against Moscow. If Stalin had had to evacuate his capital, the damage to Soviet morale, communications and industrial capacity would have been tremendous.

Then there was Hitler’s disastrous handling of operations around and in Stalingrad. His insistence that Paulus’s army should fight on and die rather than save themselves and their equipment by effecting a temporary retreat consigned hundreds of thousands of Germans and their allies to their graves or to the gulag.

As Roberts emphasises, Churchill could not resist poking fun at “Corporal Hitler” for his ineptitude. Hitler had form as an inflexible commander. When Rommel, outnumbered in men and tanks, wanted to undertake a strategic withdrawal in North Africa in 1942, he got short shrift from the Führer. Large quantities of experienced German and Italian soldiers fell into captivity who could otherwise have fought the enemies of the Third Reich in Italy.

Hitler also damaged his cause through his political management. The book makes the interesting point that German Jews would probably have fought patriotically in his army if only he had not spurned them. A feeling that Germany, after the Versailles treaty of 1919, deserved to expand its territory again was not peculiar to the Nazi party. The scientists who invented the American atomic bomb included several Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. It is also well known that many Ukrainian villages in 1941 greeted the German invaders with the traditional welcome of bread and salt. The Germans allowed churches and private shops, closed under Soviet rule, to be reopened. For a while, it looked as though the Third Reich was exploiting “the national question” in the USSR to great advantage. But Ukrainians soon learnt the truth about Hitler. Grain requisitioning by the Germans was as ruthless as under Stalin. Young, able-bodied people were conscripted for labour service in German factories. Mass executions of Jews, Roma, communists and other suspect groups became a routine affair.

Whether it would have been possible to govern Ukraine gently while continuing to impose a brutal occupation of neighbouring Poland is not clear. But Roberts makes a strong case that Hitler’s interventions turned eastern Europe against him. He puts the same arguments about the Japanese army in the Asian territories it conquered from the north Pacific down to Burma. Colonial peoples who might have welcomed them as liberators from white imperial rule were savagely suppressed and exploited.

The British, French and Dutch did poorly in the initial stages of the war in the east. But American manpower, technology and guts proved greater than anyone in Tokyo or Berlin had imagined possible. After Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt had little difficulty in carrying his people with him in aiming at a total triumph over Japan and its ally Germany. Although his health declined in 1944-1945, he never lost sight of this objective. He made mistakes, especially by failing to deal more robustly with Stalin, but he played a crucial role in enabling Britain to survive its ghastly isolation in 1940.

The central character in the book’s drama, inevitably, is Hitler. Roberts’s suggestion seems to be that he could only have won the war if he had not allowed it to spiral into a global struggle. Hitler missed his chance to knock out the USSR early on and provoked the US into entering the ring on the side of the opposition. He may have won the war if he had kept it as “the First European War”; the gamble that did not pay off was to make it global.

Reuben Wilson, Billy Kaye and Kevin McNeal form star trio to surprise and delight crowd in Friday jazz series

Only in New York!

When Dave Colding, the scheduled performer at this week’s Whole Food’s Columbus Avenue weekly Friday jazz session from 5-7pm couldn’t make the gig, a remarkable trio of exceptional musicians arrived in his stead, including two old timers who might have stepped down from jazz heaven, given their renown and the laid back panache with which they played.

Both jazz elders were very much alive personally and musically, for sure. On keyboard was the princely giant (in both senses) blues-jazz organist Reuben Wilson, whose warm cool and effortless imagination was joined and encouraged by the nobly great (though considerably shorter) drummer Billy Kaye, now 80 years old.  These two familiar names from the pantheon of jazz formed in the first half of the 20th century were ably complemented by the younger but equally resourceful guitarist Kevin McNeal, clearly very happy to be in the company of the two old timers.

It was quite a pleasant shock for all.  Suddenly those lucky enough to be there who weren’t friends of the performers – or otherwise been alerted to this unique occasion through the grapevine – found themselves in a sizable though casual space with front row seats at a concert which they would have been happy to pay $100 for in a formal setting, if they could afford it, a ticket price which would have been no more than the players deserved.

What they heard for two hours was the beating heart of classic organ jazz trio with its fresh melodic explorations played not only by consummate musicians familiar over decades with the greatest stages and the hippest clubs of jazz history – Billy Kaye was playing in London, he told me, before Ronnie Scott even had his club – but jazz royalty in a relaxed mood whose emotional warmth and casual joy in their shared, easygoing creativity passed their graceful mood right along to the delighted audience, who sent their love right back with rhythmic clapping, finger snapping and, as one lady who came up to Reuben when the music was over put it, heartfelt thanks for “a very good time!”

Hear two numbers right now!

We captured two numbers on video and you can find them along with a few stills at OnlyGoodPhotos at  http://www.onlygoodphotos.com/Music/Jazz/Reuben-Wilson-and-Friends-Jazz/16162468_8gv3Z#1213909167_V4Yxg.  Unfortunately the FZ35 proved to have deficient bass so this most important part of jazz organ needs to be turned up when playing them. but they give some sense of how Reuben Wilson’s long fingers on a keyboard typically created a bluesy rolling 4/4 bass walk underpinning melodic riffs to intrigue, satisfy and cut through to the heart of the matter in Henry Mancini’s Days of Wine and Roses and Ellington’s Satin Doll.  These familiar classics were fully accounted for in about eight minutes each, but when they were followed by Ellington’s Take the A Train for a fine finale our too full camera card ran out of space before it could preserve the moment.

“Hey that was great, Reuben” said Kevin McNeal as they were packing up. “We’ll have to do that again sometime!”

Their listeners should be so lucky.

Social Media Week talk tips Brand Content Managers how to play the biggest game on the Net

Style not as salesmanship but “conversation” to win friends and influence people

How to avoid pushback and placate regulators by being upfront as brand soldiers

Following the shift of the center of Web crowd activity to social media sites, the biggest overall trend on the Web right now is the corporate invasion of personal social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.     Corporations have discovered that it is more important and effective to have a Facebook page than to draw customers to their own site.  Some worry that the commercial invasion is destroying the original nature of the sites.

In this connection the key talk of Social Media Week (http://socialmediaweek.org/newyork) in Manhattan had to be yesterday’s (Feb 10 Thu) lesson in “Content Management” given on the top floor of the Roger Smith Hotel by Mark Grindeland, chairman of She’sConnected. (http://www.shesconnected.com/) and co founder of that Facebook rival “site for busy women” with Donna Marie Antoniadis, its CEO.

What Mark told corporate minions was exactly how to do it.

Social media mushroom cloud

The stats of the vast blossoming of social activity on the Net quoted in slides by consultant Mark to introduce his topic  were staggering.  The pace of expansion is so fast that we had to update some just writing this post.

Facebook now claims it has hit 620 million users worldwide, up from 500 million only two or three months ago.  300 million are logging on daily, 150 million of them using mobile devices to do it.   The average user is posting content 90 times a month, for a total of 30 million tips shared each month with 130 friends.

Twitter has nearly 200 million registered accounts and is adding 15 million a month, with users.posting 110 million tweets daily.  During the final moments of the Super Bowl, fans sent a record 4,064 tweets per second.  YouTube passed 2 billion views a day in May last year, 1 in 10 on mobile devices, and 46 years of YouTube video are watched each day on Facebook.

Added to this mushroom cloud of social activity, blogs are still booming.  133 million blogs have been indexed by Technorati with 15% of bloggers spending more than ten hours each week and the rate of blog updates is most commonly 2-3 times a week.

So now “CEOs are starting to see they can make money from social media”, Mark explained.  Corporations are rushing in to join the party with their own Facebook pages and display ads  on You Tube rose tenfold last year.  Many brands are starting to get more traffic on their fan page than their main website.  By last August Starbucks for example had 12.7 million fans on Facebook and was adding 90,000 daily.  Coca Cola had 10.7 million, Victoria’s Secret had 4.6 million.

How companies can join the party

Dividing up this pie and explaining how to eat it was Mark’s task at the session crowded with young and aspiring “Content Managers” which is the term in use by consultants such as Mark for staff assigned to lead the Panzer assault into this once foreign territory.

Apparently there is a job category of Community Manager where Content Managers can hire you to work two to four hours a day  to “engage in dialogues” on sites in one of the active roles – creators, critics, connectors – ordinary participants play.   Operating 24/7 these brand driven contributors can seed content by blogging, posting comments and pictures, videos and bookmarks and can “drive SEO” ie optimal search engine placement for a brand by “listening, engaging, and building buzz” to stimulate conversation and drive communities.

Not interlopers, helpful facilitators

Meanwhile those who deploy them can attend to connecting with the marketing, product development, public relations, market research, customer care and competitive intelligence departments of their company by feeding data to and fro.  A complaining customer may be turned from hostile to enthusiastic if referred to the right customer care staff, for example.   Potential customers bewildered by the demands of credit cards can be enlightened and reassured, or directed to “cool offers or contests”.

For anybody concerned that there might be a pushback from users who resent contributors who might be viewed as wolves in sheep’s clothing, Mark hurried to emphasize that the corporate motivation was not to sell but to inform ie to increase understanding of and connection with a product.

“If you are at a party and someone starts to sell you something that might be objectionable,” he agreed. “But this is conversation.”   Moreover, all brand promoters were upfront about their jobs and affiliations.  If they weren’t regulators would clamp down.

In the audience, in fact, was Kirsten Gronberg, Community Manager at CMP.LY, a company which specifically helps corporations ensure they act on the Web only in line with the regulations which ban underhand strategies.

Psycho-sociological dangers seen

Of course, some might still view the underlying motivation as impossible to deny and the invasion as just one more example of how commerce takes over every element of social life in America sooner or later if it possibly can.  To some Europeans it appears that Americans spend more time selling themselves and their ideas and products to each other than any other nation, both in public and in private.  Since the advent of TV even small children have been subject to a barrage of sales claims daily, and now we have the Internet growing more commercial every second.

In this jaundiced view the penalty we pay for this long time creep of salesmanship into every aspect of life  - which admittedly probably predates the Internet by about 300 years – may be the longstanding complaint of lack of authenticity in social relations in our great democracy.    And given the cut throat social values of so many corporations today do we really need their influence in social media? they ask.    One example is how even senior employees are treated when they are “let go”, which reportedly is now often a matter of  them being kicked out of the building with barely enough time to collect their family photos from their desks.   The days of three months notice and generous severance pay – in other words, mutual personal loyalty – are long gone

In this regard it is perhaps ironic that Mark and Donna are the founders of a social media site which offers Facebook facilities to women but with a huge additional advantage. Subscribers to shesconnected.com can have two separate personae where their business data is fenced off from their personal data, rather like the two screens on a Nokia E71.  In other words, they benefit from a firewall of privacy between business and personal.matters.

On the other side, CEO Donna explained, the all female base at this social media site is much more willing to converse about every detail of their buying and consuming than men generally are.

Finally, though, escape from voice mail jail

Whatever reservations some people may have to this corporate social buy-in,, which seems to promise to turn social media into corporate playgrounds without much room for those who want to keep them unsullied by Mammon, the final outcome seems inevitable, given the array of weapons portrayed in Mark’s expert analysis in his slides.  Just as happened with eBay, business will become a major player and perhaps dominant on Facebook, a site which was originally started by Mark Zuckerberg to get Harvard men dates, as well as Twitter, which has given us all direct access to the sometimes trivial chatter of VIPs..

On the positive side, the entry of business is certainly empowering for consumers who have been used to rarely dealing with corporate executives directly, and who are tired of impossible wait times on Customer Care(less) voice mail.

The best example of this, according to Mark, is Cadbury which  discontinued a chocolate product called Wispa until 22,000 fans petitioned them to bring it back, when they sold out 40 millions new bars in 18 weeks, or 4 per second.

Coming soon, a solution for all of us

Could be, moreover, that Mark and Donna have something very useful to consumers themselves, if they ever get around to it.  After the session, Donna, who seems to carry around not one but two iPads, explained that just as they have systematized the strategy for corporations to share in social media space, they have also worked out a system to keep up with the deluge of email, posting, monitoring, meetings, lectures and other demands of their work, and also have time for family and other non-work life.

A while back they even initiated a web site for others to put the system into effect, called Social Media Makeovers (http://www.socialmediamakeovers.com).  If this works out, it will solve what has become the paramount problem for all busy contributors on the Web, whether Tweeters, bloggers, researchers, consultants, or corporate workers: finding time to get it all done and have a life besides.

The problem is that the site is still in beta, it turns out, with the last news update a month old.  Could it be that Mark and Donna have been too busy delivering paid services to have any spare time to help the rest of us?

On the sleetiest, slushiest day ever the hardiest Dutch Treat members and their guests turned out Tuesday undaunted for a good lunch (salmon after superb Vichysoisse, open bar), lively songs with wit and feeling from the brave Barbara Brussell with Jon Weber at his bouncing keys, and finally, cheerleading for the arts in education from the speaker, Aldon James of the National Arts Club, where the lively weekly gathering of arts performers and lovers has found its home for the past decade.

In the videos of Barbara singing you may see the extraordinary way in which her face reflects the emotions in her song, very like the clouds or the sun reflected in the surface of a lake.

All  pics and videos are at  this link http://photogenie.smugmug.com/Clubs/DutchTreat/Dutch-Treat-Jan-18-11-Aldon/15506305_xih6Q#1161453028_CtcWX

You can also glimpse in video her high energy acting out and the sheer vivacity of her presence on stage, well complemented by Jon Weber’s vigorous and  inventive backing, and all the more winning because it showed no trace of the heavy burden of the double bypass that felled the Sacramento lass for much of last year.  In an interview afterwards (see same SmugMug pages) she tells how she recovered her momentum in eight months, helped by massage which so helped to reinvigorate her that she took up the training herself.

After this rousing and moving introduction Aldon assumed the lectern to give a hooray for the arts as the vitamins of culture and in particular their vital role in our schools, too many of which have responded to budget pressures by cutting them out entirely.   Acknowledging the contributions of the Dutch Treat and many present from Nobles Lowe, one of our older members at 98 last September, to the sculptor who fashioned the fountain in Gramercy Park outside its front doors, now the only private park in the City, Aldon presented a film by Carol Wilder about Malcolm Sidney, the black pug bequeathed to the Arts Club by her film star owner, who immediately became a fixture at social events even though the aging canine had extreme difficulty in mounting the stairs (see clip).

Against the neighborhood trend exemplified by the Zeckendorf conversion of the Salvation Army building into a tall condo in which the real estate magnate planned to reside, Aldon vowed that the Club would remain its own master and always “only belong to the National Arts Club”, and remain dedicated to “educational and cultural purposes.”

Steve Downey, husband of KT Sullivan the DT president, wondered if the original promise of provincial chapters of the Arts Club could be realized as a way of fighting the trend to remove art teaching from schools . “Couldn’t we have state chapters?”   he suggested, and Aldon allowed that “You’re right. We do need to expand and reach out.  We were never intended to be a Lincoln Center.  It’s the immediacy that counts here. We are here to enable our committees to do what they do. We had motorcycles here before the Whitney had them, we had tattoos done in front of 300 people, we had the Art of the DJ”.

A new committee has been formed on Art and Technology, Aldon added, and “this year we will be at Burning Man!”  The Burning Man’s founder Larry Harvey has appeared at the Club, which has held benefits for the uniquely way out, participant driven California desert arts costume dance and sculpture bash. (Ten minutes of Aldon’s talk can be viewed in the SmugMug link pages.)

Sat Jan 15 2011:  OK Harris rounded up five artists for its New Year show, which opened yesterday afternoon as crowds thronged Soho streets.   If any wondered what the name of the gallery meant, the answer is nothing more than a label for the legendary gallery: it was pulled from the air by founder Ivan C. Karp of Leo Castelli in 1969, when he founded what has long been Soho’s most notable showcase.

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We found Elke Albrecht‘s ultra subtle abstracts particularly compelling, with her rows of four small red and white tiled collages against a grey background and framed, and of eight or nine large white canvases, emanating a palpable aesthetic force from their subtle, sotto voce variations.   All of them spoke for the nature of this artist as one driven (“impelled” in the word of gallery owner Karp) by an ineluctable inner force to create these external voicings of her intriguing psychological interiors.   The delicacy of the light grey and white tones of the row of larger canvases proved hard for a small camera to capture with the right white balance and contrast against the white walls of the gallery (click to enlarge for a slightly improved viewing).

Here is Elke standing in front of one of her larger canvases, which need to be mouse clicked to enlarge the image and discern the details of the canvas, though barely:

At the opposite extreme were the disturbing scenes of incipient gun violence disrupting the domestic lives of Iowa farm workers in Richard Hanson‘s bold watercolors, whose vibrant, realistic textures enhanced compositions which started out as posed photographs acted by himself and his son.   As we imagined, Richard, a tall, ruddy cheeked Iowan who teaches art in his home town of 25,000, and paints on a table rather than an easel, confirmed that his own family life and sanguine temperament bore no relation to the intense dramas  that sometimes arise from his palette (the theme of this selection was chosen by the gallery) .  How did the gallery learn of his work?  He sent it in, he said – and got a phone call next day.

Here’s another striking domestic nightmare by Hanson, featuring his son Rob emerging from a clothes closet, gun in hand (click to enlarge):

Bruce Thurman chose an ingratiating form to work in with his latest compositions in collage binders, mounted in a row on the wall each with one stiff page loose  on the metal rings for viewers to turn.

The corridor was crowded with friends and well wishers of the sociable artist. Unlike many others, Thurman told us, he does not keep his friends at arms length to preserve his artistic independence or exploit them ruthlessly in the Picasso manner, but draws on his friendships for stimulation and support. His studio is on Wall Street with a window looking out at the New York Stock Exchange.

For all 89 images of the event – including more of Thurman’s vivid action watercolors, such as those above and below, go to Photogenie at SmugMug or click this link:  http://photogenie.smugmug.com/Art/OK-Harris/OK-Harris-Sat-Jan-15-2011/15465154_mBtPg#1157867652_Q6uWK Feel free to take whatever pictures you wish by copying directly from the site, or if you wish to avoid the dollar or two charged by SmugMug, email Anthony@OnlyGoodPhotos.com

Ken Norman continues his work after suffering a stroke two years ago with a wall full of ink drawings and four larger works of mixed media on paper hung separately on the facing wall of the major gallery space.

Matthew Murray presented a striking collection of photographs of crumbling industrial and theater architecture and other relics of a past age, in his series Abandoned America:  Dismantling the Dream, which evokes nostalgia for a time when products we used and spaces we inhabited were intelligible in hands-on, real time where material shape and tactile experience were part of work and recreational activity, a sense texture now increasingly lost as work and play moves into the virtual realm of the Internet.

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