If you’re anything like us, you’ve spent time exploring the Museum of Modern Art’s selection of coffee-table photography books on the second floor. The man behind the photograph selection for most of them, MoMA curator emeritus John Szarkowski, will be stopping by the Y for a conversation with Robert Storr next Tuesday, February 7. A prolific photographer himself, a traveling retrospective of Szarkowski’s works premiered at MoMA this month.
Szarkowski was a crucial figure in 20th-century American photography and, more than anyone else, helped make Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander into art-world figures. There’s a good introduction to his career over at NPR that also includes a photo gallery and (extensive) audio clips, along with discussion of just why he named his dog ‘Matthew Brady.’
We just received the sad news that playwright Wendy Wasserstein passed away Monday after her struggle with cancer. The author of Uncommon Women and Others, The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, Wasserstein was a regular here at the 92nd Street Y and spoke twice in 2005 alone. One of her appearances, a conversation with Gene Wilder, is one of the best-selling recordings in our Audible partnership.
For more on Wasserstein’s works, there is plenty of information available at the Literary Encylcopedia. Wasserstein was a true talent and a great friend of the Y. She will be missed.
A few weeks ago in these pages, we blogged about the upcoming appearance of Avon CEO Andrea Jung. Attending her January 19th lecture was syndicated financial columnist Warren Boroson, who made her Y talk the subject of his latest article.
Jung commented on the persistence of the “glass ceiling” on women in the workplace, becoming a CEO without having a business background, Avon’s troubles in the stock market and the “Wal-Mart effect.”
We’ve been pursuing a lighter blog post schedule lately. But we haven’t been hibernating. The Makor March/April catalog we were working on all last week just went live last night.
And it’s a doozy. Steve Buscemi will be stopping by in March to introduce his new film Lonesome Jim. Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff will be hosting a screening of his John Malkovich co-production, Art School Confidential, in April.
Blues legend John Hammond plays a gig in March. Then we’re having a Purim celebration with the writers of The Daily Show. Chris Difford of new-wave band Squeeze will be doing a show in April. So is Yosi Piamenta, a Hasidic rocker whose band includes members of the Allman Brothers and the Derek Trucks Band.
· Strom’s Daughter:Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond and one of his family’s African-American maids. She’ll be here to tell her story on Monday, January 30.
· Novelists on Novels: The respective authors of Flaubert’s Parrot and How It Ended, Julian Barnes and Jay McInerney, read on Monday, January 30.
· Legendary Storytellers: It’s two household names for the price of one with Pete Hamill and Tom Wolfe on Tuesday, January 31.
· 60 Minutes Babylon: Ring in the new month with Mike Wallace, whose new memoir tells the story of tea with Richard Nixon.
· Super Sunday: Football + Open Bar = Genius. Watch the Steelers and the Seahawks on Makor’s two big-screen projection TVs and enjoy quality beer [PDF] at our XL Super Bowl XL Party.
Newsweek‘s cover story this week is on ”the trouble with boys” and the crisis facing boys in our school system. By and large they’re falling behind their female peers, and psychologists like Dr. Michael Thompson say it’s because our education system doesn’t take the biological makeup of boys into account. The American model of education has been transformed in the last few decades, driven partly by a feminist vision, and those changes have unexpectedly hurt boys. “Girl behavior becomes the gold standard,” Thompson says in the piece. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”
Clearly something’s going on as boys are now a minority on college campuses at 44 percent. And, startlingly, 40 percent of boys are raised without a biological father—something Thompson drives home in this video clip from his recent PBS special, Raising Cain.
Dr. Thompson’s lecture here February 1 on the emotional needs of boys sold out quickly, so we added another one the following day. Tickets are currently available.
This Friday marks the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth, and everyone’s still trying to figure out how he did it. How did this man create such incredible works, and so many incredible works? Who was this man who practically invented the piano concerto as we know it? The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Joshua Kosman took a look at the conundrum recently and threw up his hands. The music and the man are separate, he concluded.
The British Library in London hopes Mozart’s musical diary can provide some insight. They’ve created an interactive version of the maestro’s handwritten notes and included 75 audio clips.
We think our 12-session class on Mozart’s symphonies and concertos will prove enlightening. Then there’s the Tokyo String Quartet’s celebratory concert this Saturday, featuring some of Mozart’s most sublime work for small ensembles. And in March, Charles Rosen will begin a lecture/concert series on Mozart. You can choose your own path to understanding the genius of Mozart.
The blogger behind Hell’s Kitchen Dispatch was in attendance at our Lyrics & Lyricists tribute to Frank Loesser Monday night and found tears streaming down his face during David Yazbek and Julia Murney’s rendition of “The Inchworm,” from the 1952 children’s classic Hans Christian Anderson:
Now some of you reading this may do an online search to get a taste of the song or refresh your memory. And hearing it you’ll probably think to yourself, what a sap. But the thing is, I’m really not sentimental. Like most other adults, time and experience have pretty well beaten that out of me. I can’t tell you why I cried, or where those tears came from. Maybe it was another me, reminding this jaded and middle-aged “sophisticate” that I was once a kid who was a sucker for haunting melodies in three-quarter time. I guess this time around, the lyrics sunk in.
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy loves America, and is one of the few French philosophers to take such a position. The Wall Street Journal just published a profile of him, in which he tries to explain his native country’s growing anti-Americanism:
“In France, with the nation based on roots, on the idea of soil, on a common memory . . . the very existence of America is a mystery and a scandal.” This is a particular source of pain, Mr. Lévy says, for “the right.” Contrary to what is thought generally, he insists, anti-Americanism “migrated to the left, to the Communist Party, but its origins are on the extreme right.” America gives the French right “nightmares,” as the country is based on “a social contract. America proves that people can gather at a given moment and decide to form a nation, even if they come from different places.” The “ghost that has haunted Europe for two centuries"—and which gives fuel, to this day, to anti-Americanism there—"is America’s coming together as an act of will, of creed. It shows that there is an alternative to organic nations.”
Amerophile Lévy will sit down for a conversation with Francophile New Yorker editor Adam Gopnik here this Sunday, January 29.
Interesting article in the Times this weekend about the different ways audiobook producers render footnotes into sound. Audiobooks from footnote-heavy authors such as David Foster Wallace sometimes use a “phone filter” for the footnotes, so that they sound like someone’s reading them on the other end of a phone.
Speaking of audiobooks, Audible—the biggest audiobook seller out there (have you seen their recent ”Don’t Read” ad campaign?)—just added another 92nd Street Y production to its catalog: Katie Couric in Conversation with Gail Saltz. No footnotes needed to be rendered, thankfully.
· A few extra tickets have been made available for our conversation with Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts on Monday, January 23.
· Are the Jews a nation, a religion, an ethnic group or a race? Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz of Jerusalem’s Mayanot explores Rethinking Jewish Identity on Wednesday, January 25.
· We can’t think of a better documentary subject than Lew Wasserman, one of Hollywood’s most corrupt (and successful) hitmakers. Barry Avrich’s The Last Mogul screens at Makor on Thursday, January 26.
· Hear Ottoman-era kabbalistic hymns from Jerusalem’s Israel Maftirim Ensemble and ancient Byzantine chant from the Romeiko Ensemble on Thursday, January 26.
· The inimitable Bernard-Henri Lévy (pictured above) discusses America, France and the Jews and his 30th book with The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik on Sunday, January 29. Check out New York mag’s recent profile of him for a sneak preview.
The early 20th-century geologist Alfred Wegener was, in his lifetime, viewed as a crackpot. The maverick scientist pioneered the theory of continental drift—which, when it was accepted into the scientific canon in the 1950s, filled in the blanks geologists had been curious about for years.
This Sunday, we’re holding a Plate Tectonics class for kids. Children love science, and what better way to ignite their curiosity than with some Bill Nye/Mr. Wizard-style experiments and talk of volcanoes and fossils?
Speaking of Mr. Nye, his website is noisy but the “home demos” section has some great earth-science experiments for kids.
As part of this past weekend’s New York Guitar Festival, Newsday stopped by our Spanish guitar marathon and were full of accolades. Pepe Romero (pictured at right) performed and oversaw the event. And to believe Newsday, it was amazing:
The concert not only offered evidence of the instrument’s expressive power but showed beyond a doubt that classical guitar recitals can be pure, spine-tingling entertainment.
For more classical guitar, check out our upcoming concerts by musicians like Paul Galbraith and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. And be on the lookout for a video podcast of the Guitar Marathon on iTunes. We’ll let you know the second it’s up.
December 17, 2003, it was revealed that the late and longest-serving senator Strom Thurmond, a staunch segregationist, had fathered an illegitimate child with his family’s African-American housekeeper, Carrie Butler. Butler was 16 and he was 22. That’s one helluva skeleton in the closet for someone who launched a 24-hour filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and who ran for president as a Dixiecrat.
Their daughter is Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who waited until age 78 to confirm rumors she and her father had earlier denied. Thurmond’s family affirmed, offering no apology for shunning their relatives: Essie was whisked away to her aunt and uncle’s when she was 6 months old. Her mother died poor and silent to her last.
On January 30, Essie shares her story of Strom as a father and the cultural dynamics that compelled her to silence while bearing the racial oppression Strom promoted as a politician.
Just days after Oprah Winfrey’s book-club choice of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces caused so much controversy, Ms. Winfrey announced the latest addition to her all-powerful club: Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Night is Wiesel’s powerful, deeply moving account of his experiences in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. Winfrey said the book “should be required reading for all humanity.”
If you’re anything like us, you’ve spent time exploring the 
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A few weeks ago in these pages, we blogged about the upcoming appearance of Avon CEO 
We’ve been pursuing a lighter blog post schedule lately. But we haven’t been hibernating. The 
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This Friday marks the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth, and everyone’s still trying to figure out how he did it. How did this man create such incredible works, and so many incredible works? Who was this man who practically invented the piano concerto as we know it? The San Francisco Chronicle‘s 
The blogger behind 
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy loves America, and is one of the few French philosophers to take such a position. The Wall Street Journal just published a 
Interesting article in the Times this weekend about the different ways audiobook producers render 
· A few extra tickets have been made available for our conversation with 
The early 20th-century geologist 
As part of this past weekend’s New York Guitar Festival, 
December 17, 2003, it was revealed that the late and longest-serving senator Strom Thurmond, a staunch segregationist, had fathered an illegitimate child with his family’s African-American housekeeper, Carrie Butler. Butler was 16 and he was 22. That’s one helluva skeleton in the closet for someone who launched a 24-hour filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and who ran for president as a Dixiecrat.
Just days after Oprah Winfrey’s book-club choice of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces caused so much 
