The Funny Business of America: Jim Lehrer Walks into a Bar
Watch news anchor Jim Lehrer deliver the punchlines in the video above - duck! - and you’ll see why producer Michael Kantor and author Laurence Maslon will be joined by comedians Richard Belzer and Amy Sedarisat the Y on December 7 for a discussion on the history of comedy and a preview of the upcoming PBS series, MAKE ‘EM LAUGH: The Funny Business of America, a six-hour comedy epic showcasing the most hilarious men, women, and moments in American entertainment and why they made us laugh. Actually, Lehrer is pretty funny.
Related:Funny People Series at the Y with Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Carol Leifer, Jerry Seinfeld, Christopher Buckley and Tina Brown
The Russian Piano School: Dedicated to Alexander Slobodyanik (1942–2008)
Founded by brothers Anton and Nikolay Rubinstein, the legendary Russian piano school developed a signature approach to piano performance that is celebrated for its profound musicality and masterful pianism. These traditions continue to flourish by way of disciples such as Sergei Babayan, who studied at the Moscow Conservatory with renowned teachers Gornostayeva, Naumov, Pletnev and Vlasenko.
On December 7, Babayan will perform works by Ryabov, Rachmaninov, Rameau and Chopin at the Y, preceded by a presentation with David Dubal of the Juilliard School who will talk about the history and traditions of the Russian piano school. Dubal offers a preview in the video above.
Evolution and Innovation in Modern American Art, organized by the Whitney Museum of America Art: Daytime and Evening
Wed, Dec 3
Chef’s Chat: Eating and Cooking “Green” with Jay Weinstein, environmentalist and author of The Ethical Gourmet: How to Enjoy Great Food that is Humanely Raised, Sustainable, Nonendangered, and That Replenishes the Earth
Karen Heller reviews Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Amitav Ghosh, raised in Calcutta, educated in India, Egypt and England, now a resident of his homeland and Brooklyn, has long been inclined toward sweeping, panoramic novels such as The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide, works that successfully transport readers to densely rendered locales.
With Sea of Poppies, a work of astonishing ambition that was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Ghosh has widened his aperture to take in a larger landscape enlightened by discovery yet shackled by racial prejudice and immutable attitudes toward class and faith. It’s one of the best 19th-century novels of the year.
Set in 1838 on the eve of the Opium Wars, Poppies begins with the arrival of the schooner Ibis in Ghazipur on the Ganges, near the vaunted Benares poppy fields. A former slave ship, the Ibis embarks on a journey promising freedom for some of its human cargo and indentured servitude for others, setting out to Mauritius by way of the Andaman Islands.
The universe described here is one of unwitting subjugation. Opium, the Ibis’ other haul, proves an apt metaphor for the fate of many characters. The drug initially intoxicates, serving as a palliative from daily suffering, until ultimately forcing bondage upon the addict.
An Evening With Iris Bahr: Excerpts from Dai!, her critically acclaimed one-woman show and readings from her humorous memoir, Dork Whore: My Travels through Asia as a Twenty Year Old Pseudo-Virgin
On September 25, 2008, Cornel West and Susan Neiman appeared at the Y for a discussion on what roles race and religion play in the Presidential election, what they say about America today and how these roles affect the key issues concerning our country. The Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, West is one of America’s most provocative public intellectuals and the author of Hope on a Tightrope. Philosopher Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin and the author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. In the clip above, West discusses the tightrope act that Barack Obama would have to perform (and did) in regards to race to get elected.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
You can also download the MP3. [5 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Upcoming: Hazel Rowley on Richard Wright (Dec 14), Gwen Ifill in Conversation with Michelle Norris: Politics and Race (Jan 25), Black-Jewish Relations and the Future of American Liberalism (Jan 29)
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
92Y Video: Gloria Steinem and Patricia J. Williams on Sarah Palin
Previously, we posted an audio excerpt from the September 10, 2008 program with Marie Wilson, executive director of The White House Project, activist/writer Gloria Steinem and prominent law critic Patricia J. Williams on women and politics. The video above offers more from the same evening, specifically an interesting conversation about what to make of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s arrival on the national political scene.
On December 1, you can catch David on PBS (locally on WNET/Ch. 13 at 8pm in the tri-state area) in Finding Billy, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the nationwide search for the three actors who play the lead role in Billy Elliot the Musical on Broadway. We hear there might be footage of his training at the Y!
Related: In October, David and the other two Billys performed live for the first time on television and were interviewed on NBC’s Today show.
From 1995-1999, Robert Rubin served as our nation’s 70th Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and played a leading role in many of the nation’s most important policy debates. His influence will surely be felt in the Obama administration, as the New York Times reports today:
It is testament to former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s star power among many Democrats that as President-elect Barack Obama fills out his economic team, a virtual Rubin constellation is taking shape.
The president-elect’s choices for his top economic advisers — Timothy F. Geithner as Treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers as senior White House economics adviser and Peter R. Orszag as budget director — are past protégés of Mr. Rubin, who held two of those jobs under President Bill Clinton. Even the headhunters for Mr. Obama have Rubin ties: Michael Froman, Mr. Rubin’s chief of staff in the Treasury Department who followed him to Citigroup, and James Rubin, Mr. Rubin’s son.
All three advisers — whom Mr. Obama will officially name on Monday and Tuesday — have been followers of the economic formula that came to be called Rubinomics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, a combination that was credited with fueling the prosperity of the 1990s.
Of course, times have changed since the boom-boom ‘90s and our financial system is now suffering from aftershocks of another order. Rubin comes to the Y in January to talk with Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, about current economic trends and policies. Lawrence Summers, the next head of the White House’s National Economic Council, will appear at the Y in February with Thane Rosenbaum.
Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer has called Jayne Anne Phillips, “the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty.” Her books include Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter and the forthcoming Lark and Termite, her sixth work of fiction and first novel in nearly a decade. Comparisons to Faulkner are abound for the West Virginia native in this Bookforum review:
Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite. The relationship between Nonie and her promiscuous, more beautiful sister is exquisitely explored. At one point, for example, Nonie realizes that Termite “seemed the damaged mystery of everything I’d never finished with Lola, and the sadness of all that had gone wrong for her.” The importance of the women who are with Leavitt at No Gun Ri is vivid: One shoots herself and mistakenly triggers an American blitz; her relative, a young girl, saves Leavitt from the gunfire, pulling him away as the bullets miss him by inches. While Faulkner chronicled the decay of the South through its men, Phillips adumbrates the nobility of Appalachia, of Korean refugees, of the least of us, by taking us into the “shaky territory” of women and the “picture inside the roar, a tunnel inside the tunnel.”
92Y Video: Dr. Edward Hallowell at the Wonderplay Early Childhood Learning Conference
By all accounts, the 92nd Street Y’s 2nd Annual Wonderplay™ Early Childhood Learning Conference was a huge success with an international audience through the use of live satellite and webcast technology. The theme this year was “The Importance of Play, Imagination, Curiosity and Creative Thinking” and sessions were led by leading experts in the field of early childhood education. In the video clip above, Dr. Edward Hallowell, child and adult psychiatrist who specializes in ADD/ADHD and co-author of the book Delivered From Distraction, talks about the wide range of connections that are important to make with your children.
David Crary reports on the event for the Associated Press:
In one classroom, a group of preschool teachers squatted on the floor, pretending to be cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Next door, another group ended a raucous musical game by placing their tambourines and drums atop their heads.
Silly business, to be sure, but part of an agenda of utmost seriousness: To spread the word that America’s children need more time for freewheeling play at home and in their schools.
“We’re all sad, and we’re a little worried. ... We’re sad about something missing in childhood,” psychologist and author Michael Thompson told 900 early childhood educators from 22 states packed into an auditorium last week.
“We have to fight back,” he declared. “We’re going to fight for play.”
After his keynote speech at New York’s 92nd Street Y, the teachers dispersed into dozens of workshops, some lighthearted, some scholarly — but all supporting the case that creative, spontaneous play is both vital and endangered.
92Y Podcast: Comedy Writer Alan Zweibel with Susie Essman
Alan Zweibel, an original Saturday Night Live writer and a producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm, talked at the Y's Funny People Series with Susie Essman on September 15, 2008, on the eve of the publication of his new book, Clothing Optional: And Other Ways to Read These Stories. In the audio excerpt above, he talks about his early writing career with Catskills comedians and selling the $7 joke.
The full program will be broadcast on the weekly From New York’s 92nd Street Y program in a new time slot this Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm, 9pm, 11pm and Monday at 3am EST on the SIRIUS XM STARS Channel. If you're not a subscriber, go to www.sirius.com/freetrial for a 3 day free trial.
You can also download the MP3. [2 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Upcoming: Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America with Amy Sedaris, Richard Belzer, Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon (Dec 7) and Calvin Trillin in Conversation with Garrison Keillor: Politics in Rhyme (Dec 22)
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
MEACHAM: My view, and I have not drunk the Obama Kool-Aid, despite what Sean might think…
HANNITY: I didn’t accuse you.
MEACHAM: I know. I think that we probably are going to see a centrist administration because, and this is a slightly specialized theory, remember, Obama is a writer. He’s a storyteller. He’s a maker of myths.
COLMES: Like Lincoln.
MEACHAM: Well, like Lincoln, like others, like great politicians, like Andrew Jackson. I think he wants the story to end well. And I believe, and I’ve been criticized for it recently — I believe we are fundamentally a center right nation.
COLMES: Oh, come on. This election would have disproved that.
HANNITY: By the way, I think you’re right.
COLMES: Where people stand on health care, where they stand on education, where they are on a whole range of things.
MEACHAM: You have a Democratic president running who does not want to mandate universal health care. The rest is commentary.
COLMES: Well, he wants — doesn’t want to mandate it, but he wants to have health care, the government to compete with private, insure 47 million people. That’s not center right.
MEACHAM: I just think that — I think we’re going to have a centrist administration.
Meacham will be joined by the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson, former Chairman/CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, at the Y on Nov 23 to discuss how Andrew Jackson’s pivotal years in the White House shaped the modern presidency.
Nobel Prize winner 
Here’s Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek and author of 
