dirac

I should think that for a friend like Brubach to write such a fiction would be a considerably worse bit of exploitation, given the various reasons already presented for objecting to such a project on principle, unless she and Le Clercq had some sort of understanding on the matter. Hemingway wrote his own story, but he used people and incidents from life and not always fairly. It turned out a classic but I'm not sure that made all the people concerned feel better.

I guess it would be all right if Le Clercq were the heroine of a novel with a higher brow? Hemingway wrote about real (and living) people in The Sun Also Rises and he was rather less respectful than Varley O'Connor is reported to be. Sure, he was Hemingway, but less reputable novelists have done the same. I'd be more impressed if Tobias was actually able to cite something outrageously exploitative (sorry, BTW, to see Tobias making use of the unfortunate "exploitive"). I suppose if you think the project is by definition outrageous then there you are, but we've already had that discussion. (I get the impression that Tobias might have been more forgiving if she'd enjoyed it more.)

Has anyone seen the 3D version?

I wasn't thinking of a letter of support, believe me.

Thanks, sandik, for that link - it also mentions Art21, a good show.

Depressing news, if true: These are savage cuts to several of PBS' outstanding performing arts shows. Write to the NEA, write to your congressman, write, write, write.....

In the video biography of Balanchine, he says that he always envisioned a large theater and large stage and had composed with that in mind. Nevertheless, some of them did look different, at least according to some of the contemporary reviews I've read. Concerto Barocco was one such mentioned but I am not sure about that. Melissa Hayden told Nancy Reynolds that emphases in his training changed as well after the move (from memory: "He wanted big, flowing moves, covering space, whereas before he talked for ours hours about the articulation of the foot....We were not small fry any more...") (Edited for typo)

Deneuve is honored in New York.

I guess I don't really see any contradiction, sidwich. I can understand how Gershwin could work with Astaire and write great songs for him and still not be totally satisfied with his singing voice. Not sure that George's health problems necessarily enter into it, although they could have affected the Gershwins' experience with "Shall We Dance" generally.

I recall particularly one passage in her book where she dismisses a list of roles that other ballerinas would kill to dance in one or two sentences. With her taste for dance drama NYCB would probably never have been right for her, but on the other hand if she had risen to prominence during a time when Balanchine was in a better frame of mind maybe things might have been different. Melissa Hayden observed that Kirkland "got too much too soon without the right kind of support" and Kirkland remarks rather poignantly in her book that "I never knew what to do with my love for him (Balanchine)." A pity there's not more of her dancing on commercial video.

As one who was here in New York during that period and who spent more evenings than I can count standing outside the theater waving a ticket I no longer wanted for one of Kirkland's many last-minute cancellations, I disagree with you about just how honest she has been. Her book took the position that someone else was always responsible for getting her or keeping her on drugs; she was just an innocent victim. She never did address that habit of sticking her partner and audience with someone other than who they were counting on to dance.If you accept her chronology, Kirkland was not yet drugging before she left NYCB -- except for that time in Russia when Mr. B slipped her a "vitamin." You can't blame her questionable judgment about Coppelia (and other ballets -- she singled out Concerto Barocco as one she particularly disliked ) on drugs. When I saw the term "ad hominem," my immediate association was, "if it was Balanchine's staging, Gelsey wasn't going to like it, no matter what." The term "ad hominem" referred specifically to the earlier post, cargill, which seems to suggest that Kirkland's having suffered from an eating disorder, "sampled columbian marching powder, " etc., were reasons to question what she had to say about the ballet and why she didn't want to appear in it. As for her book, few memoirists are unable to refrain from the self-serving, I'm sorry to say, and Kirkland was hardly immune. I appreciated the fact that she was honest about matters such as her anorexia at a time when such things weren't discussed nearly as much as they are now. Sorry about your tickets.

Fussy? Not at all. Just a note to say I'm enjoying these reports. Great thread.

Gee. Ad hominem, much? Kirkland has been very honest about her personal problems (not all of which were in their most severe form when she left the company). That doesn't mean the aesthetic reasons she gives for not wanting to be in the production aren't genuine --which is not the same thing as having to agree with those reasons or accepting that those were the only reasons for her unhappiness at NYCB.

Just bumping this up - I, too, would be curious to hear from anyone who heard it.

No one is denying Astaire's musicality, taste, and skill in presenting a song. Berlin said he would rather have Astaire introduce his songs than any other performer. Certainly, as Croce observes in the article, the Gershwins worked very closely with the Astaires in the theater. But it doesn't look as if Gershwin felt quite the same way as Berlin did, or didn't feel that way all the time.

Allen was once in sync with the times. As a standup comic he was a trendsetter and people are still trying to make the movies that Allen doesn't make any more. His early comic persona was very much a part of the era and expressed contemporary anxieties. Obviously he would lose touch with the zeitgeist to some extent as he aged but increasingly I don't find his movies grounded in much reality, even those without the magical elements to which he often reverts. Line after line rings false. This picture is a hit and my opinion seems to be in the minority, so what can I tell you....

Tell me about it.....

The Gershwins had a troubled time on "Shall We Dance" and George remarked that the amount of singing one could take from Astaire and Rogers was limited. Could be he was just having a bad day, but he also had a point. Astaire's singing was musical but it was also odd and limited, and he became a star as a dancer, not because he was such a great singer (and because his long career took place in the era during which musical comedy songs were still an important part of the hit parade, as you note, sidwich).

My point was that said transfers did not always work and were undertaken hastily, as Quiggin notes. Lack of storage capacity was the proffered excuse and often, not always it was true, but the end result was the same. It would certainly help. No doubt there will one day be an electronic equivalent to browsing freely through the stacks, but we' re not there yet.

My comment on the move to microfiche not turning out so well was a comment on your post noting that libraries had been moving material to fiche for decades. As I noted in response, that decision had its drawbacks. The move of print publications online is still very much in early days. No doubt eventually the electronic environment will look much different - the Internet, after all, is still very young. In the meantime, it is worth watching closely what libraries are doing with their books and periodicals and how such materials are being maintained.

Thanks, California, but I wasn't talking about books that are falling apart (apologies for repeating myself). I'm talking about the discarding of viable and valuable books and periodicals, which has certainly happened. No question that it's important to keep up with changing times. But the old one about throwing the baby out with the bathwater invariably comes to mind when this subject arises.

Books aren't that fragile. Obviously you don't want to keep around volumes that are falling apart, and as stated earlier, responsible culling of collections is plainly necessary. (The transfers to fiche were disastrous - horrible to read, horrible to use.)

Just so. What worries me are the culling of valuable books from collections and the elimination of hard copies of periodicals after a certain point. That's been going on for decades now, of course. Obviously it's important to have plenty of computers in the library since so many people still don't have internet access at home and one understands that. But it seems to me that for now libraries are still for books and that's how it should be.

Given that this movie has given him his biggest box office hit in decades (maybe ever) Allen's probably not feeling very sad himself. I don't really see that his attitude has changed much, since, say, Hannah and Her Sisters. Old pop music good, new pop music bad (McAdams wants to go dancing instead of taking a walk in the Paris streets - bad girl), etc. I guess I didn't find the situations or the people believable, and for the most part the laughs that people found in the movie escaped me.

Some of those less fortunate than most of us who post here are availing themselves of one of the few public places where they are allowed to stay for any period of time. I've seen some in my own library. Many of those who are still suffering from our ongoing disastrous rate of unemployment also spend a great deal of time in the public library.