Partyism Without the Party

The arrival of airship ZR3 in America produced a wave of zeppelin excitement, and almost at once Eckener and his officers began a crowded schedule of receptions and addresses in the major cities of eastern America. After the initial celebrations in Washington and New York, the airshipmen mixed business, politicking and pleasure in Akron, Cleveland and Detroit. The mayor of the Motor City praised the German commander: ‘[Since 1918] a barrier of ice has lain between the American and German people, which you and your airship have now smashed!’ Thereupon followed four days in Chicago, with another fortnight in Washington and New York. Returned to Germany, Eckener was overwhelmed with attention from newsmen and politicians of every persuasion. In contrast to the American acclaim for German technological prowess and the prospects for intercontinental airship travel, Germans celebrated the end of their postwar international political ostracism and claimed a moral victory over the mean spirit of Versailles. At his tumultuous welcome in Berlin the same Scherl publishers who had first advertised Count Zeppelin in 1903 now committed Eckener to six further exhausting public appearances Germany-wide. Thus the now-renowned airship commander stood in the glare of worldwide publicity, which he would intemperately bear for the next fifteen years.1

Reviewed by: Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen Chantal Frankenbach Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise. James Steichen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 302. $35.00 (cloth). In 1915, less than twenty years before Russian choreographer George Balanchine arrived in the US, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks observed that antithetical "twin values" of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" still divided every aspect of American life. Between the two brows, Brooks concluded, there was "no genial middle ground."1 For ballet in early twentieth-century America, this seemed particularly true. Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and the touring offshoots of Sergei Diaghilev's Paris-based Ballets Russes had convinced many Americans that, in contrast to the popular dancing on American stages, classical dance came from afar and on high. Yet a growing number of dance scholars are revealing the crevices in this dichotomy.2 Musicologist and dance historian James Steichen joins them with a richly researched and gracefully written book on the tangled origins of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) and its associated School of American Ballet. Steichen illuminates the collision of aesthetic and economic concerns driving Balanchine and his sponsor–benefactor Lincoln Kirstein in the first seven years (1933–40) of their now-fabled quest to create an American ballet institution. This period of "missteps, overlooked achievements, and unsung heroes," Steichen argues, is no less important to understanding American theater dance than the mature Balanchine ballets it eventually spawned (Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, 11). Steichen's account of these two remarkably persistent modernists stands to correct the received history that has "papered over" their endeavor's inauspicious origins (8). Scholars and students of American culture will find here a narrative that weaves dance history into theater, music, and film from a remarkable trove of materials, reminding us just how much positivist work still awaits historians of American dance. Titling Balanchine and Kirstein's project an "enterprise" fittingly acknowledges the crossed purposes in their effort to institutionalize ballet in America. An enterprise, after all, suggests something sleek, commercial, market-driven, and risky—something antithetical to any elite aesthetic sensibilities these self-proclaimed modernists might have coveted. Noting the absence of this foundational conflict in the legend and lore of the NYCB's founding, Steichen rejects the temptation of "triumphant teleology" and "retrospective coherence" in exchange for a more warts-and-all look at the initial American Ballet's first staggers and stumbles (11, 7). Drawing extensively from the popular press and numerous archives, Steichen makes good storytelling of Kirstein's colorful diaries and correspondence. A thorough literature review in the introduction; images of rehearsals, programs, and promotional materials; and meticulously sourced notes all add up to a volume of scholarly precision that deliberately avoids any deep dive into cultural analysis.3 The pragmatic year-by-year chapter titles are perhaps a sign of missed opportunities to weave more thematic reflections into the tale. Beginning and ending with thoughts on Serenade's place in the development of the symphonic ballet (unquestionably a signature achievement of Balanchine's), chapter three, for instance, might have developed this topic just enough to warrant a title more pledged to its purpose than "1934–1935." Yet the chronological arc and orderly delivery of Steichen's material has clear merits. Chapter one weaves the early biographies of Balanchine and Kirstein into the network of associates (Romola Nijinsky, Virgil Thomson, Chick Austin, Edward Warburg) who helped to bring Balanchine first to Hartford and then to New York City, where their "exhilarating and haphazard journey" of failures and contradictions began (4). As we see in Kirstein's diaries and correspondence—like the newsy October 1933 letter to his mother reporting that his "ballet people" were about to arrive in New York—his machinations with well-to-do Americans set the stage for the enterprise's [End Page 620] start (18). Chapter two traces the first two performances of the American Ballet: one ill-fated exhibition at the White Plains estate of patron Edward Warburg, and a more successful showing at the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford. The ballets produced for these debuts (Mozartiana, Errante, Dreams, Transcendence, Serenade, and the football-themed Alma Mater) reveal the...

Review: <i>Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer: Nathan Burkan and the Making of American Popular Culture</i>, by Gary A. Rosen

Just work

Improved New York City services and management are part of a long-term trend of incremental, almost self-perpetuating innovation within local American governments over five decades, rather than stemming from new developments attributable to the national and eventually global Reinventing Government movement of the 1990s. Management reform and service expansion have been a constant in New York City government over the past half century, first through additional spending, then through management innovation on a stable budget. Reinvention and traditional public administration both contributed to a sustained effort at improving service delivery, which New York reflects in its budget allocations. Decades before the first United Nations Global Forum on Reinventing Government (1999), New York City, like most American local governments, began expanding and improving the delivery of services. Today, considered from a public administration viewpoint, the programs that New York City spends money on and the outputs of those programs have not changed dramatically in the last quarter-century. The principles of government efficiency and effectiveness that are at the center of reinvention discussions are simply the traditional key elements of the field of public administration that are already integral to American local government as demonstrated by New York City. For decades, New York City's mayors and their administrations have fought poverty and crime; increased access to health care and services; and improved sanitation, education, information and communications technologies, and other services by adhering to well-developed strategies of management reform continually improved within the dynamic field of public administration.

Despite the provisions of a Smoke-Free Air Act (SFAA) enacted in 1995, more than 415,000 non-smoking New York City workers reported exposure to second-hand smoke in the workplace all or most of the time in 2002. Continued exposure to second-hand smoke in New York City prompted a renewed debate about a broader smoke-free air law. The approach taken by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to make the case for workplace protection from second-hand smoke, counter the opposition's arguments, and ultimately win the support of policymakers and the public for comprehensive smoke-free workplace legislation is described. On December 30, 2002, New York City's Mayor signed the SFAA of 2002 into law, making virtually all workplaces, including restaurants and bars, smoke-free. Proponents for a stronger law prevailed by defining greater protection from second-hand smoke as a matter of worker health and safety. Efforts to enact smoke-free workplace laws will inevitably encounter strong opposition, with the most common argument being that smoke-free measures will harm businesses. These challenges, however, can be effectively countered and public support for these measures is likely to increase over time by focusing the debate on worker protection from second-hand smoke exposure on the job.

William Solecki,1,a Cynthia Rosenzweig,2,a Reginald Blake,3,a Alex de Sherbinin,4 Tom Matte,5 Fred Moshary,6 Bernice Rosenzweig,7 Mark Arend,6 Stuart Gaffin,8 Elie Bou-Zeid,9 Keith Rule,10 Geraldine Sweeny,11 and Wendy Dessy11 1City University of New York, CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, New York, NY. 2Climate Impacts Group, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY. 3Physics Department, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY; Climate Impacts Group, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 4 Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University, Palisades, NY. 5New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York, NY. 6NOAA CREST, City College of New York, CUNY, New York, NY. 7CUNY Environmental Crossroads, City College of New York, CUNY, New York, NY. 8Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY. 9Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 10Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ. 11New York City Mayor’s Office of Operation, New York, NY

On January 10, 1995, New York City's mayor signed into law a bill restricting smoking in most public facilities including restaurant dining areas, workplaces, and sports stadiums. This law was the subject of extensive public debate and was considered quite controversial at the time it was enacted. Passage of the smoking law (known as the New York City Smoke-Free Air Act) helped pave the way for other localities in New York to enact similar restrictions on smoking in public facilities. This article documents the process of enacting the New York City Smoke-Free Air Act.

Chapter 5: Law and regulation

Recently, there has been a phenomenon of reducing the level of Islamophobia of the world community towards Muslims around the world, including Muslims in the United States. Allowing Muslims to carry out worship in public or open space, and the election of Muslim politicians in a government and congressmen are clear evidences to this phenomenon. This research aims to deeply analyze the de-islamophobia factors in New York City, The United States from 2017 to 2023. The phenomenon of Islamophobia, rising sharply since the 9/11 tragedy, has now begun to experience a significant decline, especially in the 2017-2023 period. A qualitative method was applied with literature studies. The data were taken from online books, online journals, and other relevant references such as online news. The study found various causes of the decline: socio-culture, demographic, and political events that contribute to the acceptance of Islam in the United States. Especially since Joe Biden was inaugurated as the U.S. President, the decline in Islamophobia is increasingly visible, particularly in the political fields.

Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens Mark Steinberg HISTORY SOMETIMES MAKES brothers of artists far separated by years. A flame can burn and then catch fire again generations later, a shared interest finding its energy taken up and vibrating anew. Many are those who have investigated our emotional landscape, whose revelations make us feel less alone and more noble. Rarer is the artist who grapples as well with our process of coming to know the world. Our own thinking is often mysterious to us, and we frequently recognize beauty in the fait accompli without knowing what led us there. The late works of Ludwig van Beethoven and much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, however, seem to engage vitally with the way in which our thinking helps us form the world as we know it. This is the idea behind an experimental and investigative performance my group, the Brentano String Quartet, put on at the 92nd St. Y in New York City in March of 2019. During a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, lines of poetry by Stevens were projected on a screen behind the quartet, fading in and out to correspond with events in the music. The text was projected just a bit at a time, full ideas brought to completion only over prolonged moments, as if being mulled over in the mind of the listener, summoned by the music. We made an attempt to have the music and poetry cohabit, neither usurping the attention completely, the two arts held in a fertile suspension. The music doesn’t need the words and the words don’t need the music, but we thought they shared enough between them to illuminate each other in some fashion, creating a new amalgam adding dimension to both. ________ During the intermission, before the start of the music, the audience sees these lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”1 priming them for the idea of art as an investigative tool: [End Page 168] the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (CPP 415) Beethoven in what is generally referred to as his late period often writes a sort of meta-music—music in which we can sense the process of creating music, and in which that process tells us about our ability to conjure sense from the world. Stevens, likewise, seems to write often about poetry itself, to meander in real time through the process of a poem’s taking shape, inviting us into the mind of the poet and sharing in his contemplations. This is precisely the sense I have always had in hearing the first movement of Op. 132. As when Stevens says that “the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is,” so does Beethoven write music, which, if it has an “aboutness,” is about composing itself, about ordering abstract musical ideas, both following and manipulating them to make a form that is built before our eyes. The quartet begins with a motif that is a bit of an obsession for Beethoven in his late period, a four-note idea that is, perhaps, his version of Bach’s having spelled his own name in musical notes. And so he speaks of both the complexity and perfection of his predecessor and of the idea of self-reference. The four-note idea is set forth as a sort of postulate upon which to build. Already in the introduction of the piece, the idea comes both right side up and upside down and intertwines with itself. It will rarely be completely absent from the proceedings, as if the laws of logic and perception are controlling what might otherwise seem an almost random succession of thoughts. It suggests a clarity of eye that is Stevens’s “things as they are” (CPP 135). As this motif is first introduced, the projections show: This is how the wind shifts:Like the thoughts of an old human,Who still thinks eagerlyAnd...

Reviewed by: Mister Orange by Truus Matti Karen Coats Matti, Truus . Mister Orange; tr. from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson; illus. by Jenni Desmond. Enchanted Lion, 2013. 159p. ISBN 978-1-59270-123-0 $16.95 R Gr. 6-10. This Dutch import is set in New York City in 1943, where a young boy named Linus finds his life changing when his older brother, Albie, goes to war. In their family, responsibilities move up the line while shoes and clothes move down, so Linus goes from babysitting the little ones to taking over his other brother Simon's shoes and delivery route for the family grocery store. Simon is sullen and grumpy, however, so Albie skips a brother and entrusts his comic-book collection and his sketchbook for Linus to look after while he's gone. Linus finds a superhero that Albie has created and begins an ongoing conversation with the character as his anxieties grow about the war. He also meets an eccentric artist who orders oranges by the crate and shares his vision of the future with Linus when he delivers them. This gently paced coming-of-age story effectively captures the period details of Linus' neighborhood during the war, especially the strong pull of a close, hard-working family and the fear they share for Albie's safety mingled with pride over his service. Linus' artist friend, who turns out to be Piet Mondrian, rounds out the emotional landscape with his unbridled optimism about a glorious future after the war, a future [End Page 427] of light and color and progress that he knows he will never see, but that he hopes his work will help bring about. His talks with Linus elicit the pull of hope that Linus needs to help him sort through his feelings about the war and growing up; both the vagueness and the tenor of his emotions are spot on for Linus's age and situation. While this isn't action-packed, it will appeal to artistic, imaginative souls who nurture their own superhero fantasies and believe in the power of art to see them through uncertain times. Each section opens with a loose-limbed monochromatic charcoal and watercolor illustration; end matter includes more information about Mondrian and a bibliography of Mondrian-related resources. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Postdisaster Videoconference Links Psychiatrists in U.S., Europe

Reviewed by: The Book of Grace Soyica D. Colbert The Book of Grace. By Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by James MacDonald. The Public Theater, New York City. 7 March 2010. The Book of Grace marks a turning point in the theatre of Suzan-Lori Parks that is both a departure and a return, journeys well worth the ride. Parks is a leading voice—perhaps the leading voice—in contemporary US theatre, so the evolution of her drama marks a significant shift in theatre more broadly. In an online interview for The Public Theater's website, Parks describes The Book of Grace as a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Topdog/ Underdog. While both plays draw from psychological realism and take place within a domestic setting, the production of The Book of Grace at The Public Theater incorporated technological innovation to situate the play at once in a home in south Texas and along borders—the US/Mexico border, the brink of familial disintegration, the tipping point of an abusive father's rage, and the brink of national disaster. The stage featured typical markers of US domesticity—a stove, sink, television, iron, ironing board, sofa, and rug—but all were carefully chosen to bend the normal into the fearful and the quotidian into the extraordinary. For example, the iron became a weapon at the end of the production, and the trap door under the rug (note Parks's signature use of geographical humor) hid a scrapbook that one of the central characters, Grace, compiled as evidence of good things in the world. The trap door in the middle, the sandbags along the sides, and the sand on the floor of the stage troubled the realism of the domestic space, figuring it as a liminal locale. While Parks is well-known for setting her plays in unusual places, The Book of Grace mediates the confusion created by the more obscure settings of The America Play (in a hole) and In the Blood (under a bridge), presenting instead a familiar site of domesticity. Yet Parks's latest play mobilizes the same rhetorical wealth of its predecessors by layering the domestic sphere with references to the US/Mexico border offstage and with projections that appeared upstage on a screen. Through the intermingling of sites on and off stage, the play takes an important next step in the development of psychological realism, rendering the setting, narrative, character development, and language itself as variable and contingent on the performance. The production challenged the static nature of geographic location (in a home or along a border) by displaying nonsequential chapter titles that introduced each section of the play. Similar to Parks's use of chapters in Venus, the system of ordering in The Book of Grace establishes disorder and therefore calls the audience's attention to the missing pieces of the story. Yet The Book of Grace urges audience members to create their own books of grace to evidence good things in the world and complete the work of the play. From Parks's modes of direct address in Venus to her development of theatre as a daily practice in 365 Days/365 Plays, Parks continues to fashion practices that blur the line between theatre and the quotidian, between what occurs onstage and what happens in her audience members' daily lives. By situating theatre as a part of the everyday, the imaginative possibilities made available in her plays become open to all of us. The collaboration between the audience and the play does not and cannot impact the play's central [End Page 666] Click for larger view View full resolution Amari Cheatom (Buddy) in The Book of Grace. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) [End Page 667] Click for larger view View full resolution Amari Cheatom (Buddy) and Elizabeth Marvel (Grace) in The Book of Grace. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) familial conflict, which the play depicts as a battle among the three characters, Vet, Buddy, and Grace, over boundaries and containment versus building bridges. Vet, the figure of containment, is a border guard. His psychic compulsion toward order manifests itself through the physical abuse of his wife Grace and sexual abuse of his son Buddy. While Vet serves...

The rhetorical device of zeugma, where one part of speech is used to yoke more than one other part of a sentence in a surprising and often ironically humorous way, can be seen as the governing figure, or the operative structural principle, of the new nature writing of the last decade or so. The new nature writing makes ironic use of the language of traditional nature writing in order to deflate the tradition's romantic and transcendental bent. We can see the tactic clearly in Robert Sullivan's Rats, which liberally borrows chapter titles and language from Thoreau's Walden, appropriating them in the service of celebrating not some pastoral ideal like Walden Pond but a rat-filled alley in New York City. Even as the tone shifts from spiritual reverence to comic irony, the tactic shifts our focus away from the tradition's emphasis on sacred and sublime landscapes and redirects our attention to what Scott Hess has called “everyday nature.”