This month’s Metalsmith magazine, not yet online, features one of Jonathan Wahl’s drawings (above) in an article called: Objects of Remembrance: Contemporary Mourning Jewelry.
Jonathon, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient this year, is the Director of the Jewelry Center at 92Y. As it happens, the article was written by Marjorie Simon, a regular contributor to Metalsmith and former Jewelry Center student. And if you didn’t catch it when it aired on television, here is PBS’ Craft in America segment featuring Jonathan!
Priority registration for classes and workshops at the Jewelry Center begin Nov 19.
This summer, the First Lady Michelle Obama and the White House celebrated Jazz music with a Jazz Studio session/ The concert was one of a series of student workshops the First Lady has been hosting. Next week another workshop will be held in the East Room, this one a classical music session.
The New York Times’ Caucus blog reports the session will: “...feature Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell, Grammy-award winning guitarist Sharon Isbin, along with the cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the pianist Awadagin Pratt. The concert will also include child protégés Sujari Britt and Jason Yoder, who will accompany Ms. Weilerstein in duets.
Fans of our concert programming at 92Y have most likely seen some of these artists here on our stage.
Israeliness™: Israeli Family Programs: A bi-weekly program for families with young children, focusing on Israeli culture and conducted entirely in Hebrew.
You can watch Deborah Reed, ceramics student at the 92nd Street Y, talk about her love of clay. Or see “talented young jewelry artist,” Nathan Bergelson, as he creates a bangle bracelet under the guidance of jewelry instructor Amy Haskins.
Left to right: Alexandra Wilder (winner), Libby Burton (winner), Genevieve Burger-Weiser (winner), Paula Trachtman (sponsor of the award in honor of her daughter Amy Rothholz), K.D. Henley (winner).
Poets & Writers is pleased to announce that Genevieve Burger-Weiser, Lisabeth Burton, K.D. Henley, and Alexandra Wilder are the winners of the 2009 Amy Award.
The 14th Annual Amy Awards featured winners reading from their work as well as a guest poet. It happens that past and present individuals associated with 92Y were well represented.
Alexandra Wilder, Managing Director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, was an award winner, as was Libby Burton, 92Y Poetry Center intern last year. The featured poet, Grace Schulman, was a former Director of the Poetry Center. Lastly, Galen Williams, also a former Director of the Poetry Center and founder of Poets & Writers, was in attendance.
That’s a lot of 92Y representation, and well deserved! You can read more work from students and faculty of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Podium, a literary journal produced by the Poetry Center. The Center also has a Facebook, where you can keep up to date on events, get new content and podcasts, special deals, and more!
92Y School of Music faculty member Rupert Boyd was a finalist in this year’s Concert Artist Guild competition—a prestigious competition for ensembles, instrumentalists and vocalists. In its nearly 60 year history, very few guitarists have won the competition. Notable examples are Manuel Barrueco, (here on Dec 5) The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (here on Nov 11) & The Brasil Guitar Duo.
With regard to the competition, Rupert told us via email:
I am just so honoured and consider it a great achievement to have made it as far as I did in such a prestigious competition. Out of over 350 contestants, I was one of only 12 (and the only guitarist) to be chosen for the finals. I shared the stage with some extremely talented musicians, including the current principle flutist of the Metropolitan Opera, pianists and violinists who have performed concerti with orchestras around the world, a vocal quintet from Germany and a chamber ensemble from Israel.”
92Y Podcast: From the Poetry Center Archive: A.S. Byatt: “Your Own Poet’s Voice”
A.S. Byatt first appeared at the 92Y Poetry Center in October of 1991, for a reading from Possession, which had won the Booker Prize the year before. This Thursday, some 18 years later, Ms. Byatt returns to the Poetry Center to read from The Children’s Book, a finalist for this year’s Booker. (Hilary Mantel, this year’s winner, was one of the judges who awarded Ms. Byatt the prize in 1990.)
The Sunday Times of London has called The Children’s Book “easily the best thing Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece Possession...[It] superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip.” Like Possession, The Children’s Book is a teeming, polyphonic novel.
“I started writing in other voices really when I wrote Possession, partly because I was somehow dissatisfied with the ‘voice’ of realist prose about people’s feelings,” Ms. Byatt said in a recent interview with Bookforum. “That is only one way to write. So I wrote parodies of scholarly analysis, biographical musings, Victorian love letters and poems, and I think this makes the ordinary ‘storytelling’ voice in turn more surprising and problematic. When people ask me why I write, I say it’s because I love the language and what it can do. I think I’m not very interested in self-expression.” Read her interview on Feministing for more insight.
Today’s featured recording is Ms. Byatt’s October 28, 1991 reading from Possession. In this excerpt, which comes from Chapter 8 of the novel, Ms. Byatt conjures the voices of all four of her main characters—two modern-day researchers (Roland and Maud) and two Victorian poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte).
In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time—many of whom, like Ms. Byatt, are returning this season. To purchase tickets to Ms. Byatt’s reading, please click here. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.
Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
You can also download the MP3. [12 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
For this month’s Fiction Podcast in The New Yorker with fiction editor Deborah Treisman, novelist Orhan Pamuk reads from Vladimir Nabokov’s My Russian Education. We found the podcast quite interesting, particularly Pamuk’s choice to read Nabokov.
Pamuk will make his first appearance at 92Y on Nov 9, when he reads from his novel, The Museum of Innocence. And on Nov 16, the Poetry Center presents: A Celebration of Vladimir Nabokov with Martin Amis, Brian Boyd, Chip Kidd and others. This will be a notable event where The Original of Laura is read and discussed, which only exists because the manuscript was saved against Nabokov’s dying wishes.
The Michelle and Norman Lattman Lecture: Michael B. Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi have an expansive conversation about the world’s obsession with Israel and the tempestuous politics of the Middle East.
Sweet, Sweet Candy: Discover the sweet history of candy and the origins of jelly beans, Charleston Chews, Chuckles, Tootsie Rolls, Red Hots, wax lips, gum and more.
Greenwich Village Ghosts Tour : Including the Old Merchant’s House, the Astor Library, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a former potter’s field, an execution ground and more.
92Y Podcast: William Kanengiser of The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet
On Wednesday, November 11, The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet will present a dramatic retelling of Don Quixote, with comic actor Phil Proctor narrating and playing more than a dozen parts. The LAGQ will accompany him, performing Spanish Renaissance guitar music heard by Cervantes from Renaissance Spain. The program uses a recent translation by Edith Grossman, a 92Y faculty member, and the concert is part of the Art of the Guitar series. In this podcast, LAGQ member William Kanengiser, who arranged the program, talks about its creation.
You can also download the MP3. [6 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
An exclusive private dinner party of fine food, engaging wit, and sparkling conversation at New York City’s legendary, literary Algonquin Hotel. You and a guest will be part of an extraordinary gathering drawn from this impressive array of literati.
The group includes such luminaries as Christopher Buckley, Malcolm Gladwell and Anna Deavere Smith.
There are a total of twelve individuals listed. Most have been guests here at 92Y, and are due to appear again. Let’s review the full list.
This Wed at 92Y, Glamour’s Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive moderated a talk between Robin Givhan, a writer for the Washington Post, designer Isaac Mizrahi and designer Ashley Olsen for The Future of Women’s Fashion. In the clip above, Ashley Olsen speaks about making the transition from acting to designing. On being in the entertainment industry, Ashley candidly admitted: “That wasn’t my choice, of ‘that’s what I want to do when I grow up, I wanna be an actress.’ That’s never what I thought I wanted to be. So when I turned 18 I stopped everything...and fashion is what I went after.”
The panel went on to discuss body image and the trend of ever smaller sizes in fashion even though women have become larger. Givhan noted “...all of the complaining and the blogging about how thin models are, no one is not buying the clothes from designers who use thin models.”
As you might imagine, a who’s who of the fashionista press was in the audience, and they all filed reports. For more coverage, visit The Cut blog, Glamour Fashion, (who also gave a great Twitter accounting!) and Fashionista. For an exclusive bit of news not yet reported in the main stream press, we have heard that after the event, Ashley Olsen and her sister Mary Kate, who attended the event to show support to her sister, stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street.
Upcoming events at 92Y:
The New York Restaurant Redux: Frank Bruni with Mike Colameco: Nov 1
Karim Rashid and Gaetano Pesce: Dialogues with Design Legends: Nov 3
Gail Collins with Nora Ephron: Women Come of Age: Jan 12
Kurt Vonnegut: “Short Sentences and Placebo Profundities”
Upon the release of Kurt Vonnegut’s Look at the Birdie, a collection of previously unpublished stories, the Poetry Center is pleased to share an archival recording of Mr. Vonnegut from May 16, 1983.
“If you are a New Yorker, if you are a writer, it’s part of your civic duty to appear at the Y—at least once,” Mr. Vonnegut says in his opening remarks. As it happens, this was Mr. Vonnegut’s second appearance at the Poetry Center. His first, with poet Muriel Rukeyser, took place some 13 years before, on the evening of May 4, 1970—the day the National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State. That night, he recalls in the recording from 1983, “there were people out in the audience standing up saying, ‘What do we do, what are we supposed to do?’ and nobody had a very bright answer, certainly Muriel and I didn’t.” Mr. Vonnegut ended up reading from a forthcoming novel, Breakfast of Champions, and that recording can be found here.
In the recording from 1983, however, he addresses Kent State much more directly, by reading a speech he delivered at Haverford College shortly after the shootings. He then reads two more speeches—one on our addiction to war preparation and another on nuclear holocaust, which was originally delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time. Next week, in anticipation of her upcoming appearance, on Thursday, October 29th, we will share a recording of A.S. Byatt reading an excerpt from Possession. To purchase tickets to Ms. Byatt’s reading, please click here. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.
Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
You can also download the MP3. [19 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]
Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.
One of the world’s great cultural impresarios and the founder of the Ballet Russes from which many famous dancers and choreographers would later arise, Sergei Diaghalev had an enormous impact on the developments in Russian and Western Europe’s visual and performing arts. What made Diaghilev the right man for the right time?
Join Russian-born musicologist, lecturer, journalist and art critic Maya Pritsker on Oct 25 at 92Y as she discusses the life and times of Sergei Diaghilev, this year being the centenary of the first performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Hear about his circle of friends, his personal tastes and his relationship with artists, the press and patrons in the context of the major artistic trends and political movements in Russia and Europe between 1890 and 1929.
Manhunts:Saboteur, The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, To Catch A Thief: View and discuss scenes from the aforementioned films and other Hitchcock movies to appreciate his genius and style. Read more on the 92Y Blog.
Saturday Night Ballroom: Step out of the streets and into one of NYC’s most beautiful social dance ballrooms for an evening of waltz, tango, foxtrot, quick-step, rumba and more!
Deeper Dating with Kathryn Janus: Each event includes an illuminating mini-lecture on dating and intimacy, followed by a series of enjoyable exercises.
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