…is create more jobs and growth.
Easy-peasy, dummyheads. Why didn’t I think of that?
So, let’s get cracking and do it!
Only question is—how?
The same—but not the same
“Dances At a Gathering” is a ballet choreographed in 1969 by Jerome Robbins for the New York City Ballet. I saw it about five times with the original never-to-be-equaled cast, and it’s one of my favorite ballets ever.
I haven’t seen it in over thirty years, or with a different group of performers. Maybe it’s just as well; perhaps some things are better left undisturbed in memory. I can’t imagine that today’s dancers could even begin to approach the artistry of that first ensemble, although the newer ones could no doubt exceed their technical prowess.
I wrote that the original cast was “never-to-be-equaled,” but it’s obvious that I have no way of knowing that. Even if I were to finally attend a modern-day performance of the piece, I wouldn’t be able to compare it to the original except in memory, because videos of that first cast are not readily available. YouTube, for example, has only a very short excerpt.
But I did manage to find two relatively recent videos of the man’s solo that I recall as opening the ballet. That dance was originally performed by my heartthrob Edward Villella, but there’s no online video of him in the role.
Villella was very different, both in body type and dance quality, from either of the modern-day dancers who perform the exact same choreography on those two YouTube videos. Villella was short and compact—muscular, masculine, coiled, and explosive. Here’s a still photo (in a different role) that might serve to give you a small idea of his particular gifts:
The two videos of the other dancers doing that introductory solo interest me because of the contrast between the dancers in them. I watched about ten seconds of this first man, Mathieu Ganio, and immediately thought “You haven’t a clue what you’re trying to convey here, do you?” Not that Ganio lacks technique—he certainly knows the steps, and is exceedingly fluid and lyrical. Actually, he’s way too lyrical; the life of these particular steps is simply not there, their intent and style and spirit, their emphasis and timing and color. He’s blanded-out and smooth, there’s not enough emphasis and shading, and he completely lacks the dance quality known as attack.
After a moment of walking, the dance starts with a mazurka-type step that should have a slightly ethnic flavor. But Ganio doesn’t seem to understand what the choreographer is trying to conjure up with that step (watch especially the folksy passage that starts around 1:06 and goes to about 1:40):
Now take a look at Simon Valastro. He’s no Villella, either—he lacks his fire and intensity. But he gets the point of the dance and the music, understands its shadings and emphases and especially its folk echoes. You can see it almost from the moment he walks on, and certainly within a few seconds after he begins to dance. And compare that passage I pointed out above that started around 1:06; with Valastro it beings around :59 and goes to about 1:35:
Maybe I’m being too hard on them. Maybe if I had a video of Villella to compare with them now, I’d see that the passage of time had given his performance more of a glow than it really had, and I’d decide that the current crop of dancers (especially Valastro) are his equal or even surpass him.
And although I doubt it, I wish I had the chance to find out.
Oh, and here’s that clip I mentioned, the one that shows the only bit of the original cast I could find on all of YouTube. It’s this pas de deux with Patricia McBride and Anthony Blum. Is it possible that any human being can be as light as McBride?
[NOTE: Here’s a Village Voice review of the original production. It was all that, and more.]
What about gun insurance?
Megan Mcardle mulls over the proposal to make gun owners buy gun liability insurance, and finds it wanting for a host of reasons.
Most of her arguments make sense to me, although I disagree with this particular point of hers:
[Reason] [n]umber one [posited for the proposal, to make gun ownership more expensive], is unfair to advocates of stronger gun control, most of whom say that they do not want to take all guns away from law abiding citizens. I see no reason to doubt them, and so I’m basically discounting any interpretation of this proposal that seems like it would just raise the cost of guns until they were unaffordable for all but the very wealthy.
She sees no reason to doubt them? I see plenty of reasons to doubt a great many of them.
It’s Blogress Diva time again!
[BUMPED UP. Voting continues through Dec. 31.]
Hate to ask more of you—but it’s Grand Conservative Blogress Diva time again at Gay Patriot’s.
So vote early, vote often. You’ll be glad you did.
One vote a day per person is allowed.
Oh, and I forgot to mention (perhaps it’s just my retiring nature)—vote for me, that is.
Senator Dianne Feinstein…
Want some suspense in your life?
Watch this (hat tip: Ace):
But the larger question is why? Why??
Fiscal cliff…
…blah blah blah…fiscal cliff, blah blah blah…fiscal cliff, blah blah blah.
Sorry to be so cynically dismissive. But my sense is that nothing will happen for a while, and when it does happen it won’t solve a thing, and Republicans will be blamed. And also that this result has been baked in the fiscal cliff cake from the moment Obama won the 2012 election.
This is a nice summary:
Plus, Obama’s polling [is] in the mid-50s on his handling of the fiscal cliff situation, according to Gallup. Republicans are mired in the 20s. Why cave to the GOP when the president is winning?
The public seems reluctant to blame Obama for anything, including the economy in general. And Obama knows it. He has supreme confidence that his PR is better than that of the GOP, and in this he is obviously and resoundingly correct. GOP “leaders” (in name only) have looked like the Keystone cops in this matter, only significantly less competent.
RIP General Schwarzkopf
General Norman Schwarzkopf has died at the age of 78 of complications from pneumonia. Those of us who were around during the 1991 Gulf War remember him as a television personality explaining it all, and a man who was popular enough to cause some people to wish he would run for office.
The US didn’t stick around after that war to deal with the complications of the aftermath, and left Saddam Hussein in power. Schwarzkopf himself later admitted that decision may not have been so great in light of later events.
I hadn’t realized some interesting things about Schwarzkopf’s father until I read the son’s AP obituary. It turns out that right around the time Norman was born, his father, “Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., founder and commander of the New Jersey State Police, was then leading the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnap case.” Later on, father (and son) had another brush with history when “as a teenager Norman accompanied his father to Iran, where the elder Schwarzkopf trained the country’s national police force and was an adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the young Shah of Iran.”
Interesting.
In a strange accident of timing, it appears that President George H.W. Bush, another man intimately involved with decisions during the Gulf War, is fading. He’s in the ICU right now, after having been hospitalized for over a month for bronchitis and now an unexplained fever.
More lookalikes
If you enjoyed yesterday’s thread about Morsi/Mamet, you might like this site. Instead of celebrities who look like each other, it features non-celebrities who send in their photos because they think they look like a particular celebrity.
Some really really do, although others don’t all that much.
And if you’ve long been told you look like someone famous, you can send your photo in there and have your tiny little moment of reflected glory.
Ted Kennedy Jr. not running…
…for John Kerry’s Senate seat.
That opens the way for Scott Brown to return to the Senate, if he can win the special election. And if there’s no Kennedy scion to claim the throne, it’s highly possible.
Not that it matters all that much at this point; the GOP threw away too many Senate seats they might have had. But still, every one counts, and it would be nice to have even a RINO occupying that particular Massachusetts seat rather than a die-hard liberal.
The quest for an egg beater
The day before Christmas I was visiting a relative in Washington DC and set out to make lebkuchen. The recipe calls for mixing with a rotary egg beater, and this relative didn’t have one. So I set out to find that once-ubiquitous, cheap, handy, and easily-obtainable classic. You know, one of these guys:
Did I say “easily-obtainable”? Think again. My first stop was Target, which had a lot of utensils but nary a rotary egg beater to be found. I thought that was a fluke, until I went to a Safeway (also nada, despite carrying about three types of whisk, which is supposed to be a similar tool but IMHO does not do the same thing). And then Whole Foods, same deal, despite the fact that you’d think they’d be promoting such a green instrument.
Furthermore, at Whole Foods the guy I asked about a rotary egg beater didn’t even seem to know what that was.
By then everything was about to close for Christmas Eve and stay closed on Christmas Day, so I had to do without. Which wasn’t that bad; there are other ways to mix the recipe.
But the experience gave me a jolt. What gives? When I wasn’t looking, did the rotary egg beater become an obsolete relic of the past?
Yes, I know there are places where they’re still sold; Bed Bath and Beyond would be one (I suppose an egg beater qualifies as “beyond”), but their version is a tiny bit pricey and upscale and significantly strange. And there are many obtainable by ordering through Amazon. But the egg beater used to be instantly accessible everywhere, including supermarkets, and not that long ago, either.
So, has the wire whisk, an implement I’ve never liked, won this war? Even though they say whisks are better for whipping egg whites, I beg to differ. And of course there’s the other culprit, electric mixers, but what a pain in the butt to haul one out for every little task. And then to clean it.
Apparently this lack of rotary egg beaters is not a new problem, either; here’s an online discussion about it that goes back to 2006.
So my advice is that if you think you might need a rotary egg beater in a hurry (and who doesn’t?), plan ahead. Or surrender to the all-conquering duo of the whisk and the electric mixer.
[NOTE: Here’s some proud history.]
About fighting the leftist domination of education
I think most of us are in agreement that the fight against the leftist domination of education from the primary grades right through the university is one of the most important fights of all right now—and that, although an ounce of prevention would have been worth at least a pound of cure, we’re going to have to go for the cure because it’s way too late for the prevention.
There was a discussion on this thread about how best to go about the huge task. Should the focus be on establishing and consolidating more of the alternative conservative institutions of learning, as well as the spread of methods such as homeschooling, or should it be on the attempts to influence and take back our public schools and mainstream higher education?
I maintain it shouldn’t be an either/or choice, although it’s tempting to just go the separatist route because that’s easier than trying to work from within the belly of the beast. But separatism’s a form of preaching to the choir, with the danger of becoming more and more of a minority cult that doesn’t reach the majority of people, who then continue to become more and more entrenched in a leftism which is increasingly accepted as mainstream and baseline and ordinary. And so it would seem to be that the prevailing leftist attitude must be successfully challenged on its own educational turf if it’s going to be defeated, and if an alternative message has any hope of reaching a significant enough number of young people to stem the growing leftist tide.
That said, here’s an organization, the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, (hat tip: William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection) that seems worthy of considerable support, despite the fact that it’s a separate institute rather than a way to transform mainstream education. As I said, both are necessary.
And on the mainstream public education side, John Hinderaker has an excellent piece analyzing the new educational standards for social studies. He finds some bad and some good there. Liberal PC thought dominates in two important ways, the first being what Hinderaker calls the Balkanization of the subject. Over and over, the emphasis is on “demographic interest groups,” and one of those groups is most definitely not white males.
Another constant is this:
Beyond the tiresome (race, class, gender, zzz”¦) and the false (big business causes racism), an obvious feature of the new social studies standards is the banishment of any sense of the heroic in American history.
My guess is that “the heroic” does remain in the curriculum, but that it’s mostly limited to members of those special interest groups such as blacks and native Americans. Oh, and Abraham Lincoln, one of the few honored exceptions to the “white men bad” rule.