2008 Annual Spring Gala: “Come Together” with music from The Beatles performed by artists including The Fab Faux, Peter and Gordon, Melissa Manchester, The Backwards and more.
The editor of Newsweek International since 2001, Fareed Zakaria oversees the magazine’s eight editions in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. His column, on subjects ranging from terrorism, national security and America’s role in the world to the global economy and the rise of China and India, appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and The Washington Post. His international best seller, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, explains how democracy has changed every aspect of our lives and his most recent book, The Post-American World, was published earlier this month.
On May 7, Zakaria sat down for a discussion with Foreign Affairs editor James F. Hoge, Jr. at the 92nd Street Y. In the video clip above, they discuss international perceptions of America, “anti-Americanism” and our dysfunctional political system.
Related Talks: Scott McClellan with Dan Rather: Inside the Bush White House (Jun 4), Bill Moyers in Conversation with Phil Donahue: On Democracy (Jun 10), Drew Westen, PhD, on the Political Brain (Jun 12) and Barbara Walters in Conversation with Frank Rich (Jun 17)
5. Do a bunch of local New York things: Hang out in Central Park, Explore Brooklyn, wear black, enjoy the free WiFi in Bryant Park (use the bathroom there—nice). Attend a lecture at the 92nd Street Y, go to Chinatown in Queens. Buy junk at a street fair, and eat street meat (don’t ask). Have a cigar at the Grand Havana Room (members only). Catch an author speak at a Barnes & Noble (use the bathroom while you are there).
Spend a weekend at Fire Island or the Hamptons (make arrangements first). Go to a designer sample sale. Do the NYT crossword puzzle on mass transit. Jog around the reservoir in Central Park. Go to a Woody Allen retrospective. See the Mets at Shea.
The ultimate New Yorker activity? Buy the Sunday NY Times late Saturday night; skim it, then lounge around early Sunday morning, with the paper—and a pot of strong coffee—in bed Sunday morning. Heavenly!
Music from the 92nd Street Y with Sara Fishko and WNYC
Music at the Y is now music on the air. 92nd Street Y and WNYC 93.9 FM have collaborated to present a ten-week series of concert radio broadcasts on Saturday nights at 8pm, from April 26-June 28.
WNYC’s Sara Fishko and the Y’s Hanna Arie-Gaifman went digging into the Y’s audio archives to bring us the greatest live performances from the stage of the Kaufmann Concert Hall. Curated and hosted by Fishko, the series combines elements from different concerts over the past few years, designed to highlight a particular theme or performer with the radio listener in mind.
Artists include: Tokyo String Quartet, Ensemble Wien-Berlin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Steven Isserlis, the Assad brothers, András Schiff, Marc-André Hamelin and many more.
Listen to past episodes and find out more information on all the programs at www.92Y.org/wnyc
Earlier we posted an audio podcast of the talk between Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska and WNYC’s Leonard Lopate at the Y in March. Get more insight from the evening with the video above which includes Hagel’s views on political pundits and their “patriotic” charges. He has a word or two for Rush Limbaugh and crowd.
Related Talks: Steve Coll in Conversation with Leonard Lopate: The Bin Ladens (May 15), Scott McClellan with Dan Rather: Inside the Bush White House (Jun 4), Bill Moyers in Conversation with Phil Donahue: On Democracy (Jun 10), Drew Westen, PhD, on the Political Brain (Jun 12) and Barbara Walters in Conversation with Frank Rich (Jun 17)
Spotlight: Eddie Dominguez, Visionary Ceramic Artist
“By combining ideas of contemporary painting, sculpture and crafts into multimedia forms my vision becomes realized. It is informed by my love of the land, a sense of nostalgia for home and ideas of culture. Themes of joy, sentimentality, celebration, loss, humor, environmental beauty and destruction imbue my work with content.”
—Eddie Dominguez
In the mid-Eighties Eddie Dominguez began examining the way household objects function in our culture. Not with “punny” ironies (which would have been so easy considering the ceramic work of that period), but with an open reverence for the ceremonial and symbolic potential for the most humble places, events and things in our lives. He has, over the years, “re-contextualized” just about every room in the house. And, in his own way, de-constructed: tacky tourist trinkets, minimalism, the vessel, the landscape, dinnerware, race, craft, main-street and the family home.
Eddie’s work has eluded the twin pitfalls of becoming overly formalistic or wallowing in ethnicity. The youngest of eight kids, Eddie grew up in Tucumcari, New Mexico between the cheap motels of old route 66 and the train tracks. But Eddie’s story is more than a cliché of a small-town-boy-makes-good. At it’s heart lay an infectious optimism and joy that baffles both the jaded post-modernist and confounds the categorizers. And while there is an uplifting quality to Eddie’s work, there is also an edge...an edge between art and craft, between cute and beautiful, between Anglo and Hispanic, between chic and kitsch and between the mundane and the visionary.
What You Missed: Mozart and Schubert With Pipe and Slippers
New York Times music critic Bernard Holland offers no small praise for pianist Paul Lewis’s emulative performance of Mozart and Schubert at the Y on Saturday:
Critics trying to deal with the idea of musical interpretation might keep in the back of their minds what Isaac Babel said, that “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” Something similar drew me admiringly to Paul Lewis’s evening of piano music at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday.
Listening to Mozart and Schubert was like listening to Mozart and Schubert, not like observing a man deciding how Mozart and Schubert should be played. Seemingly eliminated was the performer as middleman, as the wholesaler who takes goods from the composer’s warehouse and dresses them up for public consumption. Mr. Lewis is more “factory to you,” as the old cut-rate advertisements used to say.
Why did you choose to write about the bin Ladens? I grew up reading and liking books that had titles like “The Rockefellers” and “The Kennedys” that tried to use a single family’s multigenerational story to explain a time and place in America or elsewhere. I wanted to find a vehicle to write in a specific way about change and globalization in Saudi Arabia.
What’s one thing about the bin Laden family that you think most Americans don’t know? One theme is the role of aviation accidents. Osama’s father died in a plane crash in 1967 when Osama was 10 or 11 years old; it was a huge event in the family’s life. So many of the bin Ladens were private pilots, including some of Osama’s sisters, and they grew up in an atmosphere of adventures and also peril associated with aviation.
Do you think people in the United States really want to humanize and read about bin Laden? It’s seven years almost after 9/11, and most Americans understand this is a more complicated subject than it seemed Sept. 12. Nobody wants to explain Osama away or rationalize his violence, but I think humanizing him is a way of trying to deepen your understanding of where he came from.
The Westchester Journal News recently interviewed career-and-life coach Annemarie Segaric, who teaches classes at the Y, for an article on changing careers. The story was picked up by The Cincinnati Enquirer and ran online:
Going through a career change at any time is difficult, so trying to do it when the economy is shaky can be a little extra hard. Pelham, N.Y., career-and-life coach Annemarie Segaric said she is seeing a few more jobseekers these days at a course she teaches on dealing with job loss at the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community center in Manhattan.
At a recent class, Segaric had 14 students, all of whom had recently lost their jobs, with some eyeing a possible career change. They included workers from a variety of age groups and employment sectors. Many of Segaric’s students were more focused on just landing another job and apprehensive about whether it was the right time to switch careers.
If you’re looking for more personal growth direction, check out these upcoming classes at the Y with leading experts in the field.
What Color is Your Parachute? with Richard Bolles, author of the best seller about job hunting and career change which has sold over 9 million copies
The Path to Self-Mastery with Hugo Cory, private consultant to artists, television personalities and executives and author of two acclaimed books on the evolution of consciousness, The Actor and The Hero
Personal Finance 101 with Ann Diamond, owner of a financial counseling firm and author of No More Fear of Finance and The Let’s Get Real Financial Journal
David Ben-Gurion with Golda Meir at the Knesset in Jerusalem, 1962.
How does a New York law student apply for an internship at the Israeli Consulate and wind up writing speeches for Ariel Sharon during one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history? Gregory Levey answers the question and then some in his recent memoir, Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government. The book’s description sets the absurdist theater tone from his outsider perspective:
Shut Up, I’m Talking is a startling account of Levey’s journey into the nerve center of Middle Eastern politics at one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history. During his three years in the Israeli government, the Second Intifada continued on in fits and starts, Yasser Arafat died, Hamas came to power, and Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Levey was repeatedly thrust into highly improbable situations—from being the sole “Israeli” delegate (even though he’s Canadian) at the U.N. General Assembly, with no idea how “his” country wanted to vote; to nearly inciting an international incident with his high school French translation of an Arab diplomat’s anti-Israel remarks; to communicating with Israeli intelligence about the suspected perpetrators of suicide bombings; to being offered leftover salami from Ariel Sharon’s lunch.
If you want the scholarly native Israeli perspective, Professor Avi Picard will be appearing at the Y on May 15 for a discussion on the Israeli Political System: how Israel’s parliamentary democracy was built, how it has developed and the forces behind the shaping of the Israeli political arena.
The New York Post found out for their ”In My Library” feature, and discovered that it contains more than Mr. Shatner’s new autobiography, which he’ll be reading, discussing and signing tonight at 7:30pm here at the Y. Shatner’s favorites include:
Ragtime
by E.L. Doctorow
“Handles the passage of time better than any novel I’ve ever read. Doctorow was able to push us forward backward and stay in the present and keep it clear. He’s one of my favorite writers.”
Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money and The Madness
by Michael Drosnin
“Fascinating story about a man who started bad - and went worse.”
Riding Into Your Mythic Life: Transformation Adventures with the Horse
by Patricia Broersma and Jean Houston
“An interesting treatise about horses and mythology. Strangely enough, my daughter saw it and thought I might want to read it just based on the title. It’s a nonimpressive book except for the subject matter – having myth be part of your life, giving it a broader meeting.”
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
by Mitch Albom
“Recommended to me by Jon Voight during his interview on my new talk show, ‘Shatner’s Raw Nerve.’ I finished reading it in one sitting. It’s very spiritually stimulating.”
Read more about Shatner’s reading habits, including his favorite spy novel author, and come snatch up signed copies of his new book tonight before it hits bookstore shelves tomorrow.
WNYC and Sara Fishko offer more choice performances from the stage of the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. In this episode, hear members of the Ensemble Wien-Berlin (pictured) in music by Dvorak, as well as selections by Poulenc and Debussy from members of the New York Philharmonic and the Nash Ensemble. Listen to the show.
Jerome Joseph Gentes interviews leading wine importer Neal Rosenthal on his new memoir, Reflections of a Wine Merchant, for Publishers Weekly:
Your book is as much about relationships as wine and trade.
I became very involved in my business relationships, especially with grape growers. And their families and their children as well. I would never minimize the fact that you find a line of work to earn a living, but doing any kind of business requires that you cultivate relationships that are part of it. Honesty and integrity are essential components. The respect must be mutual, and not simply commercially. It’s necessary to conduct business this way whether it’s a multimillion-dollar corporation or a small-potatoes operation like ours.
How do you view the art of winemaking today?
We’re in the modern age, but doing work people have done for thousands of years. I have this image of someone in my family some centuries ago taking his wooden cart and his produce and going from town to town to conduct trade. Not as an exercise in nostalgia or sentiment, though. Now we’re at this potentially devastating crossroads. It’s very difficult for these small families to maintain these appellations. The interest isn’t there in the younger generations—the modern world calls to them. And the value of land is astronomical, so when an opportunity to sell comes, it’s almost impossible to resist. On the other hand, these family traditions are deeply grounded, so it’s hard for them to give up.
Author/playwright/director David Mamet, whose Redbelt film is now in theaters, appeared at the Y on March 25, 2002 for a reading of his manuscript version of Faustus, later published in 2004. In the audio clip above, Mamet takes questions from the audience and talks about his memories of Shel Silverstein.
You can also download the MP3. [1.3 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Related: The Lamentations of Ian Frazier (Jun 10), Listening Is An Act of Love: David Isay and Guests from the StoryCorps Project (Jun 24) and A Celebration of Maurice Sendak with Tony Kushner (Sep 15)
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
New York Times music critic Bernard Holland offers no small praise for pianist Paul Lewis’s emulative performance of Mozart and Schubert at the Y on Saturday:
The Westchester Journal News recently interviewed career-and-life coach 
The New York Post found out for their ”
WNYC and Sara Fishko offer more choice performances from the stage of the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. In this episode, hear members of the Ensemble Wien-Berlin (pictured) in music by Dvorak, as well as selections by Poulenc and Debussy from members of the New York Philharmonic and the Nash Ensemble. 
