Kehinde Wiley:  A New Republic until May 14, 2017 in the Levis Galleries (Galleries 26, 27 on the upper level, Toledo Museum of Art) offers an overview of the artist’s prolific 14-year career.  His signature portraits of everyday men and women riff on paintings by Old Masters, replacing European aristocrats in those paintings with contemporary black subjects and drawing attention to the absence of African Americans from historical and cultural narratives.  The exhibition also features a selection from the artist’s ongoing World Stage project, which he started in 2006 by establishing a satellite studio in Beijing; several bronze portrait busts and new stained glass “paintings.”  The touring exhibition is organized by Eugenie Tsai, the John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.  Toledo showing is presented in part by Welltower with additional support from 2017 Exhibition Program Sponsor ProMedica, KeyBank, and the Ohio Arts Council.  Free admission.  http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/wiley/  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehinde_Wiley and http://www.gq.com/story/kehinde-wiley

APRIL IS NATIONAL POETRY MONTH  

Examples of poetry during the Victorian era (1837-1901):

(1)  "Casey at the Bat:  A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" is a baseball poem written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer.  First published in The San Francisco Examiner (then called the The Daily Examiner) on June 3, 1888, it was later popularized by DeWolf Hopper in many vaudeville performances.  It has become one of the best-known poems in American literature.  The poem was originally published anonymously (under the pen name "Phin", based on Thayer's college nickname, "Phinney").  Read the poem, see graphics and learn of uses in popular culture, including parodies and sequels at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_at_the_Bat

(2)  The Volunteer Organist   This was written by William B. Grey under the pseudonym of W B Glenroy as the lyrics for a song (music by Henry Lamb a pseudonym of Henry Spaulding).  Gray's lyrics are based on an earlier folk tale.  Poet Sam Walter Foss had published his own version of it in 1889 in the Yankee Blade, a magazine Foss edited.  The Foss poem was reprinted in a number of newspapers and in his book Back Country Poems, which was published in 1892.  Gray wrote the lyrics in 1892.  Spaulding added the music, and it was first published in 1893.  Read the poem at https://allpoetry.com/The-Volunteer-Organist

Born in Siberia in 1932, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a Russian poet, novelist, actor, and director who achieved great fame in the Soviet Union during the cultural “Khrushchev Thaw” that occurred following the death of Stalin in 1953.  Yevtushenko rose to prominence following the publication of his long poem Babiyy Yar, a work about the Nazi massacre of Jewish citizens in Kiev and the Soviet Union’s refusal to acknowledge it.  Notable Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set the poem to music shortly after its publication.  Yevtushenko lived in both Russia and the United States before his death in 2017.  He taught English and Russian poetry at the University of Tulsa and at Queens College, CUNY.   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/yevgeny-yevtushenko

The Sweet Science of Brisket  Aaron Franklin studied the physics of chimney draw and the maddeningly long time during which barbecue appears to have stopped cooking long before it’s done, known in the trade as “the stall.”  He has to be the first pitmaster in Texas history whose cookbook has a list of recommended books that is devoted entirely to the food-science writers Harold McGee and Nathan Myhrvold.  What Mr. Franklin had stumbled across in his backyard was a craft in which, for both the maker and the consumer, the financial barrier to entry was low and the opportunity for connoisseurship was ample.  One of Mr. Franklin’s apostasies from old-school central Texas barbecue technique is wrapping meat midway through smoking to keep it from drying out.  All his products are noticeably juicy; the turkey is helped by a quick dip in a pan of butter and juices.  He swaddles brisket in butcher paper, which lets some steam out.  Other meats are sealed inside aluminum foil.  Much of the fat simply yields a glossy liquid that makes a delicious sauce for the lightly smoky pulled pork. The smoke works its way more thoroughly into the ribs, which become a firm and chewy pig candy, and into the sausages.  Franklin Barbecue isn’t famous for its sausages, which are custom-made by a nearby butcher.  They are glorious, though, loaded with pepper and garlic and enough beef fat to make the wrinkled surface of the casings sparkle.  Within the next few days, they will be ground and stuffed on site.  Read more and see pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/dining/franklin-barbecue-review.html 

Franklin Barbecue has sold out of brisket every day since its establishment.  The restaurant is prominently featured in a scene from the 2014 Jon Favreau film Chef, with speaking cameos by owner Aaron Franklin and general manager Benji Jacob.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Barbecue

Aaron Franklin's BBQ Brisket recipe  http://bbqblvd.com/bbq-brisket-recipe-aaron-franklins-texas-brisket/

Follow-up to story on sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens redesigning all American coins   "With regard to Teddy Roosevelt’s commissioning Saint-Gaudens to revise U.S. coins, take a look at the 1907 $20 double eagle.  It is the most beautiful coin ever minted.  The original ultra-high relief design was impractical, as it took several strikes of the dies and made the life of the dies too short, so subsequent coins were flatter.  Only about 20 of the ultra-high relief coins are known, and one sold for about $3 million.  The motto “E Pluribus Unum” is on the edge, which, like the milling on the edges of all gold and silver coins, prevents the filing of the edge.  Lady Liberty on this design is clearly not someone to be trifled with."  Thank you, Muse reader!

Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora.  Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest collection of American oral argument audio, daily collection of new legal opinions from 200 United States courts and administrative bodies, the RECAP Project, which collects documents from PACER, and user-generated Supreme Court citation visualizations.  Free Law Project was founded in 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver with board members Thomas R. Bruce and Jerry Goldman.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project  Corpora or corpuses is defined as a large or complete collection of writings.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1689  April 7, 2017  On this date in 1788, American pioneers to the Northwest Territory established Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory.  On this date in 1927, the first long-distance public television broadcast from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displayed the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover).