"There should be a fountainhead in the city for
music and art, and it seems to me that [New York] City Center fills that
need." —Leonard Bernstein,
1945 Long before there was a Lincoln
Center, there was City Center. City
Center was always an open door for the artistic underdogs, the scrappy
companies that charged popular prices and didn't play by the established
rules. When the Ancient and Accepted
Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine built their Mecca Temple meeting hall
on West 55th Street in 1924, it was the rival of any of the great movie palaces
that lined Times Square. Boasting two
balconies and two ornate lobbies, it had a 3,000-seat auditorium with a rich,
riotous polychromatic decorative scheme.
The Depression eventually took its toll on the building, the Masons
defaulted on their taxes, and Mecca Temple was shut down. It would have been demolished were it not for
the initiative taken by arts publicist Jean Dalrymple, City Council president
Newbold Morris, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. What New York needed, they realized, was an
all-purpose theatre for the people, where performing arts could be enjoyed at
prices accessible to all. Securing
funding from local philanthropists, union members, and arts organizations, they
were able to save the building and turn it into the performing arts center we
know today. With LaGuardia himself
leading the New York Philharmonic in "The Star-Spangled Banner" on
his birthday, Dec. 11, 1943, the newly christened New York City Center
opened. It was now the official home of
three new companies: New York City
Center Opera, New York City Symphony, and New York City Center Theatre. A fourth, the New York City Ballet, would
have its inaugural season there five years later. Throughout the 1940s, New Yorkers spending
$1.50 for the top ticket price could experience a dazzling series of cultural
events. In addition to all the City
Opera, City Ballet, and City Symphony performances (the latter led by Leopold
Stokowski and the young Leonard Bernstein),
there were visits from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Don Cossack Chorus,
and the Paris Opera Ballet. Interspersed
among these were such memorable stage events as Gertrude Lawrence in Susan
and God, Eva Le Gallienne in The Cherry Orchard, Tallulah Bankhead
in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paul Robeson in Othello. But the talent was not just onstage. Three other smaller Masonic halls within the
building were constantly in use as rehearsal studios. And during the 1950s, one of the building's
sixth-floor office spaces held the team of young geniuses who wrote the scripts
for Sid Caesar's hit TV series "Your Show of Shows." Among them were Mel Brooks, Carl
Reiner and Neil Simon. Simon went on to immortalize those years in
his Broadway show Laughter on the 23rd Floor starring Nathan Lane. By the late 1960s, City Center was in
trouble. There was no denying that the
newly-built Lincoln Center had stolen its thunder—and its audiences. The cost of producing live musical and
theatrical events had spiraled, and at the same time the city's economic
fortunes were going into a free-fall.
The municipal economic crisis of 1975 seemed to spell doom for the
building, which came close to being bulldozed for a parking structure. Once again, a dedicated coterie of arts
aficionados came to its aid. Four of the
city's major dance companies—American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey, the Joffrey,
and Eliot Feld—began playing regular seasons there. The City Center 55th Street Theater
Foundation was formed to ensure its survival as a non-profit organization, and
the Foundation's chairman Howard Squadron led a movement that helped the
building finally attain landmark status.
Since then, the fortunes of City Center have been on a continuous
upswing. Eric Myers http://www.playbill.com/article/a-palace-for-the-people-com-142377
January's moon
is the third in a series of “supermoons,” when the Moon is closer to the Earth
and is about 14 percent brighter than usual.
It’s the second full moon of the month, commonly known as a “blue moon.”
While the Moon is in the Earth’s
shadow, it will take on a reddish tint, known as a “blood moon.” And on January, 31st ,
2018 skywatchers will get a chance to see all three moons in
one. “While none of these 3 things are
rare on their own, the fact that they are all happening on the same day is
pretty remarkable. It has been about 150
years since the 3 events happened on the same day, which is exciting that they
are happening now,” said Adjunct Professor of Physical and Environmental
Sciences at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Sabrina Krueger. “A super moon is when the moon is at its
closest point in its orbit to us. It
will be about 223,000 miles away from us, as opposed to its normal 238,000
miles away from us,” said Krueger.
It’s the first time a Super Blue Blood Moon will have been witnessed
since March 31,1866 Roland
Rodriguez http://www.kristv.com/story/37346624/its-been-150-years-since-the-last-super-blue-blood-moon
The founder of the Dead Poets Society of
America suffered a fatal
heart attack a little more than a month after commissioning his own tombstone. Walter Skold enlisted the son of novelist
John Updike to carve a unique tombstone that will be topped with a dancing
skeleton and a quill. Michael Updike,
who received the poet’s deposit last month, said he never expected to be
carving the monument so soon. There was no indication of
any premonition of an untimely death before Skold’s passing at age 57 on Jan.
20, 2018 in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Updike said Friday. “He was a sweet soul,” said Updike, of
Newbury, Massachusetts. “He was a kind
person with this quirky predilection to poets’ graves and death and the
macabre.” Known as the “Dead Poets Guy,”
Skold visited the final resting places of more than 600 poets after launching
the Dead Poets Society in 2008 in Maine, drawing inspiration for the name from
the 1989 Robin Williams movie.
In 1964, four businessmen—Joe Neuhoff, Julius Schepps,
John Stemmons, and Peter Stewart—wanted
the City of Dallas to be known not only for its worldly aspirations and
economic accomplishments, but also for the enduring heart of its citizens. The Thanks-Giving Foundation was chartered to
create a public space in the heart of the city dedicated in gratitude to God and
to the “most ancient and enduring of American traditions.” Forming the first public-private venture in
the city’s history, the Thanks-Giving Foundation worked with the City of Dallas
to acquire land in 1968. Construction
began in 1973. Designated as one of the
region’s American Revolution Bicentennial Projects, the Chapel of Thanksgiving
and the Bell Tower were dedicated on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. President Gerald Ford recognized Thanks-Giving
Square as a “major national shrine.” The
remainder of the grounds opened in 1977, two hundred years after General George
Washington proclaimed the first national Day of Thanksgiving on request of the
Continental Congress. As much as
6,000 gallons of water continuously cascade down the Great Fountain and recirculate
throughout the system. Thanks-Giving
Square sits atop the city-operated Bullington Truck Terminal, which provides
loading docks for 43 trucks servicing surrounding high-rise buildings via
cartways and conveyor systems. It was
estimated that this facility could remove up to 350 trucks daily from city
streets. A time capsule dedicated in
1996 contains statements of thanksgiving to be opened by the citizens of Dallas
in the years 2064 and 2164. It is
located in the Court of All Nations. Three
monoliths set in surrounding street corners celebrate the traditions of
thanksgiving in Texas, America, and across the world. Each is made from Sierra Granite and weighs
7.5 tons. http://www.thanksgiving.org/thanks-giving-square/aboutthesquare/
Visionary
Peter Stewart died January 11, 2018
at the age of 97. See also https://www.untdallas.edu/news/unt-dallas-mourns-loss-peter-stewart-friend-university
January 26, 2018 What one thing in this life is truly worth
fighting for? Justice? Freedom? The love of a good man or woman? Or a small tub of brown gooey paste that tastes
kind of like chocolate but also kind of like hazelnuts? The answer, if you were in a French
supermarket this week, was the brown gooey chocolate paste. The grocery chain Intermarché slashed its
price on tubs of Nutella by 70%. Word
got around. People got crazy. The result: a run on Nutella and commotion in the aisles. Hundreds
of millions of metric tons of this brown gold gets eaten around the world every
year. It's chocolatey, it's creamy, it's
nutty, and because it's nutty that means that it's probably healthy, right? Well, right-ish. Sure, a glance at the nutritional label shows that it is 56.3%
sugar and 10.6% fat--about the same as a Mars bar. But
since it has the word "nut" in the title, and a picture of two
hazelnuts on the label, Nutella is implicitly positioned as a food that doesn't
just taste good--it actively nourishes you.
Dan Jones https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/opinions/why-the-french-went-nuts-for-nutella/index.html
There’s
a reason history museums are packed with stone statues, pottery and arrow heads—these things resist decay while exposed
to hundreds (or even thousands) of years in the sun, wind and rain. It’s rare to find organic materials, like a
woven shawl or a leather shoe, but there’s at least one circumstance
when these types of artifacts survive: when they’re frozen in ice. Glaciers and permafrost hold many of these
treasures, but as climate changes they’re releasing their haul to the elements.
And as Kastalia Medrano at Newsweek reports, this is exactly what’s happening in Norway. A group of glacial archaeologists have
recovered over 2,000 artifacts from the edges of Norway’s glaciers, and the
find promises to help researchers better understand the history
of mountain populations. Archaeologists
from the United Kingdom and Norway have surveyed the edges of glaciers
in Norway’s highest mountains in Oppland since 2011 as part of the
Glacier Archaeology Program and its Secrets of the Ice Project. They’ve uncovered thousands of
objects that date as far back as 4,000 B.C., including wooden skis, near
complete bronze-age arrows and wooden shafts, Viking
swords, clothing and the skulls of pack horses. Norway is not
the only place where artifacts are emerging from the ice due to climate change.
As Marissa Fessenden wrote for Smithsonian.com in 2015, bodies of soldiers lost
during World War I have emerged from the Alps and Incan mummies have emerged
from glaciers in the Andes. Melting permafrost in southwest Alaska has also released 2,500 artifacts, including woven baskets and wooden masks. Researchers even think Ötzi the iceman, the most famous glacier
mummy, likely emerged due to the warming climate. Jason
Daly https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-artifacts-pulled-edge-norways-melting-glaciers-180967949/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1834
January 29, 2018 On this date in 1845,
"The Raven" was published in The Evening Mirror in
New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe. On this date in 1861, Kansas was admitted as the 34th U.S. state.
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