Bringing arts into campaign politics. In today’s (3/4) Los Angeles Times, Allan M. Jalon writes about the added emphasis on the arts in this year’s presidential election. “Linda Frye Burnham, well known in Los Angeles arts circles for starting High Performance magazine and co-founding Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, began hearing in January about Barack Obama’s support for the arts. … In Ohio, meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign worked to arrange a gathering at which her advisors hoped to win arts-interested voters with her commitment to the same ideas. Mike Huckabee has promised that should he be elected, he’d follow through on his devotion to arts education, especially. And last March, John McCain answered a New Hampshire theater manager who said he hoped the senator would support the arts by sending the man a personal check for $500. The statements and promises, as it turns out, reflect an initiative called ArtsVote2008 mounted by the political arm of a group called Americans for the Arts, or AFTA. ... Such political pressure ‘is pretty common among other advocacy centers, but for the arts it is somewhat new,’ says Rindy O’Brien, director of the American Arts Alliance.” Among other activities, ArtsVote 2008 keeps a log of all arts-related statements made by candidates in order to make their views on the arts more accessible to the public.
Here at the Y, we strive to stay engaged in relevant ways and bring people together through the arts and meaningful political discourse. We hit the “campaign trail” every day with diverse classes, dance performances, readings, concerts and lectures.
Last night at the Y, co-host of the Emmy-nominated reality show Project Runway Tim Gunn had an in-depth conversation with NY1 correspondent Budd Mishkin about fashion, design, childhood and career. Pop culture blogs were in attendance and you can find detailed (and glowing) reviews of the evening on Jezebel, Gawker and Radar. In the video excerpt above, Gunn talks intimately about the relationship with his father, a career FBI agent who worked directly for J. Edgar Hoover, and reveals a hilarious story involving Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy‘s Ethel Mertz, in the FBI Director’s office.
Video: Authors@Google with Clay Gordon, editor and publisher of Chocophile.com and founder of the New World Chocolate Society.
The urban travel blog Gridskipper recently published a feature on New York’s Top Chocolate Shops. From Martine’s on the Upper East Side to imported chocolate from Paris at La Maison Du Chocolat to the chocolate-covered pretzels of Jomart in Brooklyn, there’s something for everyone.
Setting the Stage: Zukerman, Isserlis, Grimaud, Verdery, Broza and more
The 92nd Street Y’s Tisch Center 2008-09 Concert Season went on sale today and Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Director of the Tisch Center for the Arts, writes:
Our 08/09 season promises an exploration into the music and poetry of Russia, a new series devoted to premieres, a focus on the Romantic generation by master cellist Steven Isserlis and the launch of a three-year cycle of Beethoven’s chamber music by the Tokyo String Quartet. We celebrate the creative collaborations of inspiring friendships between artists and the intricate symbiosis of words and music.
Video: Bernard-Henri Lévy State of World Jewry Lecture
All season long we’ve been honoring Israel’s 60th birthday with diverse and provocative programming. On March 5, esteemed French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke about Israel, Jewish Values and the New Global Anti-Semitism before a sold-out audience at the 92nd Street Y for the Annual Francine and Abdallah Simon State of World Jewry Lecture. In the video excerpt above, he discusses one of the flawed arguments against the legitimacy of the State of Israel.
After the jump, browse pictures from the private reception held for Mr. Lévy (abbreviated below as BHL for simplicity’s sake) after the talk which included actress Isabella Rossellini, former publisher of The New Republic Marty Peretz and foreign dignitaries among many others.
In the video above, Senator Chuck Hagel appears on CNN’s Last Word to talk about the Presidential candidates, Pakistan and the War on Terror. The Nebraskan Republican is known for being candid, talking straight and his independent thinking. On March 27 he comes to the Y to talk about America: The Next Chapter: Tough Questions and Straight Answers, two days after it hits bookstores.
“Food Maven” Arthur Schwartz, longtime food editor and restaurant critic for the New York Daily News and, for 13 years, the host of WOR radio’s Food Talk, has a new book coming out called Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisted. This Sunday at the Y, he’ll be giving a special visual presentation from his personal collection and here’s what he has in store:
Besides showing off some of photographer Ben Fink’s glamour shots—that’s actually what they call them in publishing, “glamour shots”—of beloved Eastern European delicacies, all from “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking,” I have, from my personal collections, photos of old kosher haunts and new Jewish shopping streets, and menus and postcards from famous, old-time restaurants and delis. Most are special to this lecture, not in the book; you shouldn’t think you’re being charged twice to look at the same pictures. It should go without saying that I have plenty of stories to go with the visuals.
As reported by the BBC, Motion recently composed a poem for the oldest surviving veteran who fought in the trenches in World War I, 109-year-old Harry Patch.
Motion creates a point of view that combines the boy’s powers of acute sensory and psychological observation with the adult writer’s rhetorical tact and verbal precision. The writing that results is superbly clear, intimate and evocative.
Film Screening and Discussion of the Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq with Charles Ferguson, Marc Garlasco, Nir Rosen, Paul Hughes, Sarah Leah Whitson and Larry B. Wilkerson
New York Poets on the Holocaust with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Sharon Dolin, Michael Heller, Stephen Herz, Eliot Katz, Yala Korwin, Stanley Moss, Anna Rabinowitz, Menachem Rosensaft, Mark Rudman, Yerra Sugarman, Marilynn Talal and Charles Fishman
92Y Podcast: Actress Kathleen Turner Talks Family Issues
Previously, we posted a video excerpt from a talk between actress Kathleen Turner and activist/author Gloria Feldt that took place at the Y on Valentine's Day. You can listen to more of Turner's thoughts in the audio clip below where she talks about the influence of her father, growing up abroad and her early passion for the theatrical arts.
Political commentator and Vanity Fair contributing editor Dee Dee Myers is currently a lecturer on politics and women’s issues and the author of the recently published memoir Why Women Should Rule the World. In February, she came to the Y to talk about these issues with media icon Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. In the video clip above Myers reveals the insider process of becoming Bill Clinton’s White House Press Secretary, the only woman to hold this post to date.
Tim Gunn with Anderson Cooper, John Bartlett and Simon Doonan at a charity event in New York. Credit: WENN.
Fashion guru Tim Gunn gets the 1 bold question treatment in this week’s Time Out New York:
Is it true that you don’t really do anything at your Liz Claiborne job?
I wish whoever says that would walk a mile in my shoes. I mean, it is true that I’m doing a lot of public appearances for the brand, but I’m creative director over the whole company! I’m not designing, I would never say that I am, and I’m not editing either. But I’m here as a sounding board, as a therapist, as a truth-teller, as a colleague, and really as the eyes and ears to the design community. The same people who say that also say that I’m in a creative dispute with Isaac Mizrahi. Ridiculous!
The online version has the extended interview. NY1’s Budd Mishkin will be designing the bold questions for Mr. Gunn at the Y on Mar 11.
Bilocale--come close please..., Yerushalmy’s duet with choreographic collaborator Toni Melaas, benefits from the intimate arrangement of its audience around the edges of the theater’s performance space. We feel the energy of the two women as they bound towards us or when one paints the other’s back in slashes or dots of scarlet and slams her down onto a sheet of paper--surely an alarming form of printmaking. Over 25 minutes, the movement involves quirky, rubbery effects and various clinches and entanglements, suggesting volatile inner states and external connections. Boundaries will be violated. There will be blood.
“There’s a lot of unhappiness on college campuses,” Harvard psychology professor Tal Ben-Shahar said. “Over 94 percent of college students nationwide are stressed and overwhelmed.”
Concerned with young Americans’ unhappiness statistics, Ben-Shahar began teaching a class called “Positive Psychology” four years ago. By far the most popular class on campus, it now enrolls nearly 1,400 students a semester - about a fifth of the entire undergraduate student body.
When asked by [Comedy Central’s] Jon Stewart if this was a “self-help class for college students,” Ben-Shahar answered, “Yes, and unashamedly so.” But it isn’t like one of those “5 Easy Steps to Happiness!” books you see lining the shelves of every bookstore. “There are no secrets, there are no easy steps,” Ben-Shahar told Stewart.
Rather, this revolutionary self-help movement is, as Ben-Shahar described it, the “science of happiness,” grounded in biology, neurology and psychology.
The popularity of his Harvard class drew national media attention and Boston’s alt-weekly The Phoenix calls him a “resident rock-star lecturer” who teaches “Ivy League therapy with a pass/fail grade!”
The urban travel blog Gridskipper recently published a feature on 
Freelance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa attended last night’s 
From a recent 
