Yes, a treasure beyond measure: pointe shoes autographed by Veronika Part, without whose dancing no Happiness Project can be truly complete.

Oberon's Grove has a rapturous passel of photographs taken of Veronika in rehearsal and should the photographer--Kokyat--ever blow any of them up to poster size (especially this one!), I will buy a bundle and use them to wallpaper the sun room of my summer retreat, as soon as I get a summer retreat, preferably one that doesn't have any dark secrets buried in the backyard or basement.

From my Vanity Fair preview of Great Performances's premiere of Jerome Robbins' NY Export: Opus Jazz (on tonight, baby!--check your local PBS listings):

It’s inspiring how beautifully dedicated the young dancers of NYCB are arraying themselves in the buildup moments of N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz, both honoring the legacy of Jerome Robbins and the achievements of the dancers who came before them (encapsulated in a silent elevator ride shared by Rebecca Krohn, a soloist at NYCB, and Sondra Lee, an original cast member of N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz) and declaring their own presence. They’ve taken a piece of the past, re-polished it, and made it their own, something new. As if attending to a collective awakening, N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz opens with a mosaic of the city lazily, drowsily kicking into gear—the Manhattan skyline at dawn; waters rushing under piers; a James Dean-ish dude in a white T-shirt (NYCB soloist Adam Hendrickson), leaning intently into the reflecting light of a pinball machine; an apartment complex in which laundry is being hung in one unit by a young woman eager to come out and play; a backyard tiny-tot wading pool; a subway platform overlooking a headstone-clotted cemetery; a descending tram car; a vacated municipal swimming pool whose lane lines are still chalked in—and, then, thrillingly, the finger-snapping jazz score by Robert Prince kicks in: reporting for duty, the dancers, dressed in shorts, sneakers, and casual tops, flip into cool-cat kiss-me-deadly action, tearing off those trademark Robbins moves of tense contraction and lyric release, one silent petaling explosion after another, like a series of wows.

Or "pow"s!

And don't miss VF's NY Export: Opus Jazz slideshow.

The always discerning Haglund's Heel makes an astute, inarguable observation:

Some big city newspaper critics . . .

. . . just hate writing ballet reviews if they can’t figure out how to make it an opportunity to write about Balanchine. Other critics see choreography where the corps de ballet performs first arabesque saute and cry out to blessed relief, “Look at the Balanchine influence!” [Sorry, Mr. B didn’t actually invent the first arabesque saute for corps work; he just used it ad nauseam.]

Still other critics do little more than promote the usual agenda which is: a. whine if a visiting company doesn’t perform Balanchine, b. scowl and complain if it does, and c. wallow in the critics’ own celestially-bestowed gifts of choreographic insight as to what Balanchine intended here or intended there or intended in his underwear.

[snip]

Yep, no doubt about it, dance criticism in the big city's newspapers has become little more than a tiresome cup of tea made with old, used teabags. But at least it retains its diuretic properties judging from all the pissing that results.

I've elided one graf--signified by that snip (ouch)--about a certain nameless critic so sodden with ennui that each performance not to his liking inflicts a martyrdom that he shares with his readers in a series of sighs and "alas"es and Proustian reveries of performances that took place long ago and far away. I of course am completely mystified as to the identity of that critic, dwelling as I do in such deep innocence.

In a desperate, ghoulish plea for attention (now that even right wing sites are no longer linking to it), Protein Wisdom has published an editorial cartoon portraying President Obama as a gloating, unrepentant rapist with Lady Liberty his weeping victim, her torch lying broken at the foot of the bed. Rapist Obama tells Lady Liberty to stop whining, get herself cleaned up, and promises he'll be back later with "friends," i.e., a gang-rape.

For those slower cowpokes among Protein Wisdom's armchair outlaws, the cartoon is helpfully titled "Rape of Liberty," to ensure they won't miss the message over the sound of their own chewing.

The perpetrator of this tawdry little exercise, a flagrant offender named Darleen Click, doesn't care if you think this cartoon is racist because conservatives get called racist no matter what we do and we're sick of it and besides "I made it a cartoon and not a photoshop and the “woman” is green. Deal, people."

I find the logic of that statement somewhat elusive, though I suppose we should be grateful that it's a symbolic green statue being shown forcibly violated in that Psycho room and not, oh, the Virgin Mary, virgin no more. With Easter coming up, perhaps Protein Wisdom will favor us with Lady Liberty hanging from the cross as Obama drives in the last nail--I wouldn't put anything past those "desperadoes."

Well, whatever one's feelings about the semiotics of this cartoon and the political sentiments I think we can all put aside our political and philosophical differences and agree that it makes for one crappy piece of artwork.

Arriving home after a lovely dinner at A Voce in the Time-Warner building (a superb third-floor restaurant with spectacular window views of Central Park South and swivel seats that make dining such a dynamic experience), I found an email from Barack Obama with the message hed Thank You, James.

No, thank you, Mr. President.

The letter states:

Because of you, every American will finally be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage.

Honestly (blush), I can't really claim any major credit for the passage of health care reform. You, Mr. President, Speaker Pelosi, and the House and Senate leadership deserve the lion's share, as does the late Ted Kennedy.

It's true, I was steadfast in my conviction that Obama was on a righteous course and that this epochal legislation would pass, baptizing the first half of his first term in glory.

Granted, there was that slough-of-despond interlude in which I coughed up a few posts entitled "Does Obama Know What He's Doing?," "Why Won't Obama Listen to Me?," and, my pre-Easter cri de coeur, "Obama, Obama, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?," but you know how it is--we bloggers go through "phases."

One blogger/activist/visionary/morale officer whose eyes never wavered from the prize is Al Giordano, who kept faith while so many others let their knees knock like Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. In his latest post, Al says, savor victory but prepare to suit up for the next battle:

While so much of the US news media was understandably focused on the Health Care Reform debate on Capitol Hill, and a few thousand (and that’s a generous head count) tea-bagger protesters against it, also in eyeshot from Congress today, one half million strong rallied for immigration reform.

[snip]

Although many members of the Hispanic Caucus in the US House have declared, again and again, that their number-one priority is legislating a path for citizenship for twelve million undocumented Americans, they unanimously showed up and supported the Health Care Reform legislation and its reconciliation bill tonight. They did so even after swallowing defeats and compromises that blocked so many undocumented Americans from access to the newly legislated improvements in the Health Care system.

Without the votes of those 23 House members, today’s battle would not have been the historic victory for Health Care Reform that we have just lived to see.

It’s objectively true, once again, that the Democratic coalition owes them, but that is not at all the only reason why Immigration Reform must now, at this precise hour, be driven through to victory.

It is unconscionable that twelve million people - children, elders, workers, homemakers - in the United States of America are left defenseless and persecuted for simply existing. Other than the comparatively very small number of full-blooded descendants of Native Americans that are still around today, and so many African-Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped and brought to his hemisphere in chains, every single one of the rest of US citizens likewise come from immigrant stock. The injustice of deporting people who are so much like our grandparents and great grandparents is as un-American an impulse as could be exercised.

To leave the status quo in place would mean continuing to rip mothers and fathers away from their children (as happens so often when the children, having been born in the US, are citizens but the parent is not considered “legal”). And, of course, continuing such policies to their natural conclusion by attempting to deport twelve million people or even one tenth of them would be unworkable, more expensive and harmful than any of the problems such enforcement claims to cure. And that’s why, on Friday, even Republican US Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) joined with US Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) to announce their upcoming legislation in a Washing ton Post op ed column: The right way to mend immigration.

Politically, if played right, this could be a win-win for both parties.

For the Democrats, this should be a no-brainer: The influx of newly eligible voters would turn swing states Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico deep blue. It would usher Arizona from red to blue. And it would soon enough put even Texas in the swing-state category, winnable again for Democrats.

And yet (as Graham and others have noted) it also makes sense for Republicans to get out of the way of this inevitable reform: Not to do so further alienates their chances at winning the votes of some thirty million Hispanic-Americans (and Asian-Americans and others) who are US citizens and for whom reform is a deeply personal and important matter.

I'm very doubtful about the Republican side heeding reason. After a quick scanning of the day-after commentary in the conversative blogosphere about the health-reform vote, it's blazingly evident that wingnut bloggers, tea partiers, and the like are in a foul, recriminatory, vindictive, victimized state of dysphoria where they're more interested in exacting vengeance and cursing the fallen sky than considering any practical remedies. Unhappy with the naked lunch at the end of their forks, they're issuing threats and rehearsing guerrilla warfare in their heads like the big babies they are. So we'll probably have to bugger on without them, disappointing the hopes of incurable bipartisans such as David Broder.

It was the same right wing coalition that flooded the US Capitol switchboard in May 2007 to defeat the last push for immigration reform that in recent days and weeks attempted to do the same against Health Care Reform. Today’s vote knocks them back on their heels, off balance, demoralized and squabbling among themselves. (Wait 'til Rush Limbaugh finds out that to move to another country he will have to confront its own immigration laws!)

This is not a moment for authentically progressive Americans to rest on our laurels. It is, rather, the hour to go in for the knock-out punch and to defeat the haters and their demagogues on the very issue that they last were able to claim victory. To do so would break their spirits for a generation to come, fulfilling the hope that took its first baby step in November 2008.

Onward.

How scorching hot is the Keigwin + Company show at the Joyce?

So sizzy hot that in an exclusive email to me, F Word Brenda revealed that she has gone to Keigwin twice, once with her daughter and once with her husband.

If that isn't official certification, I don't know what is.

An ardent Lady Gaga-ite, Brenda doesn't waste time with what's routine, inert, and a stale holdover on the menu. She has extravagant tastes when it comes to theatrical sensation, a Diana Vreeland thirst for the fizzing New, and "Runaway" has clearly lit up her receptors, as it did mine.

Only two performances left in this current run, and the weather is so rapturous in NY this weekend it would be a sin to stay home.

Worry beads are often clicked about the graying of the performing arts audience (and there's a basis for concern--I've been to theater and dance performances which looked like 50th anniversary college reunions), but last night's crowd for Keigwin + Company at the Joyce was the youngest, glossiest, best-looking, clearest-complexioned Gossip Girl casting call I've seen. Whether it's word of mouth or social networking or what, Keigwin + Company is attracting the younger audience everyone fears is MIA and, despite the badmouthing younger audiences get, there was a minimum of chatter and cell phone checking--their theater manners were superior to what you often get at the Koch or Met or City Center, where the crinkling of cough-drop wrappers and running commentary from older audience members ("This must be the hunt scene," said as male dancer enters the stage carrying a crossbow) can result in shusshing battles so antithetical to the spirit of Ballet.

Or perhaps it's simply that sexy calls to sexy, because K + C's Joyce program is one sexy packet, wired into the overactive nervous system of our ADHD time from "Caffeinated" (coffee cups welded to the palms of career-driven, frenzied, overscheduled urbanites and wielded like spray cans, tipped like medieval mugs, vibrating like milk-shake makers) to the phenomenal finale piece "Runaway," which lays down strips of energy that sets Lady Gaga, the multiplying hitmen of The Matrix, the residents of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, Wigstock, a fashion show, and the flashbulb circus of La Dolce Vita ("Runaway" is what Nine should have been) on an electrical grid in an industrial setting. The dancers march up and down the aisles, across the stage in laterals and diagonals, lose items of clothing each time they disappear in the wings (some of the men emerging like Calvin Klein underwear models), and somehow maintain formation and manic discipline--the moment in which the lead female figure (the blonde idol we see being doted on at the beginning) accelerates from a militant walk into an Amazonian run up the aisle was a thrilling coup d'theater. The current cant word in fashion, courtesy of Tyra Banks and Project Runway, is "fierce," but "Runaway" exemplifies true fierceness, and laser focus, utilizing poses to go beyond poses into new enigmatic terrain. The Rita Hayworth pose that the female dancers do at the end, their heads clicking sharp toward us over their shoulders--it's the objectifying gaze being swung back with a vengeance.

I'm not going to go into "Birdwatching" and "Mattress Suite" just yet because I don't want to overtalk the evening, but I was struck by how the opening bridal section of "Mattress Suite," which I'd never seen before (I'd only seen the other sections at a benefit performance) establishes a storyline that gives the dance a modern Tudoresque shadowing. The carnality episodically exploding, billowing, from Nicole Wolcott in her bridal gown was quite amazing, like something only hinted at in Tennessee Williams.

Keigwin + Company will be at the Joyce until Sunday, March 21st. You really must go.

Driftglass dissects David Brooks, a task requiring a pair of surgical masks worn on top of each other to ward off the fumes of Pecksniffery released from the froggy bowels of Brooks' latest sophistry.

"[W]eek after week, year after year -- David Brooks spends his tenure at one of the most powerful positions in American journalism making little Centrist finger paintings of imaginary hippies which somehow always miraculously absolve people like David Brooks."

This time it's Brooks making the reasonable, fair-minded, judiciously-weighed bogus argument that Left and Right are equally culpable for Sandra Bullock's marriage falling apart in a tattooed heap.

For our part, we on the Left apparently fucked the country all up crazy/bad by (among other things) staging “a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores.”

Which is certainly an odd way of talking about demanding that the Former Confederate States of American stop butchering their black citizens for trying to vote.

Although admittedly that certainly was “a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores.”

Or maybe Mr. Brooks is referring to the Left forcing the federal government to stop sending kids off to be slaughtered in a stupid, illegal war? (It is my understanding that many of the people involved in that effort were indeed very unmannered.)

Or does he think it was the crafty Liberal plot to create a minimum wage that destroyed America?

Of course, demanding that a criminal presidency be brought to book for its crimes was also a dangerously non-traditional thing to do.

As was fighting for the rights of women to own property instead of being used as property.

Or was it all those worker safety rules that ruined the Land of the Free?

Child labor laws?

Giving poor people lawyers when the slumlord decides to throw them into the street?

Brooks' elongated sigh reminds me of the soundbite by Victor Davis Hanson that's being circulated through the right blogosphere as some Roman coin of hard-won wisdom.

This prevalent utopianism that now characterizes our society — it has become a new barbarism in which we insist on perfectionism or else we’re no good.

What prevalent utopianism? I've never met one of these fabled creatures, these utopians I keep reading about. Think of the most prominent left-sphere bloggers--Markos, Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, Digby, choose any names you want--and utopian perfectionists they are not. Every liberal/lefty I know has healthy reserves of cynicism, bitter memories of hopes dashed and promises betrayed, and a realistic sense of what can actually be accomplished in a country so divided with a government so in bed with corporate interests. This health reform package isn't a product of utopian social engineering but of the stark realization that the system we have is unfair and dysfunctional and will only worsen without an overhaul. Whatever utopianism ever existed on the American left, especially the countercultural left, died at the bloody hand of the assassinations of RFK and MLK, the Manson family murder spree, Altamont, and the massacre at Kent State, enjoying a brief resurgence with The Greening of America that didn't survive the Nixon era.

Conservatives such as VDH invoke the utopian chimera as an excuse to do nothing, claiming that those activists on the left want the impossible when in fact what's at stake is what has become untenable. Had it been up to National Review, for which VDH writes, blacks and whites might still be eating at separate counters and drinking at separate fountains, the economic and social advances of women over the last forty years would have been laughed off the stage once the first bra was burned, and gay life would have remained relegated to the closet and the shadows. National Review's mission statement, composed in 1955 by the magazine's founder William F. Buckley Jr., proclaims that as a conservative standard-bearer, "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop..."

But as another favorite psalm, "You Can't Stop the Beat" from the book of Hairspray, rejoinds:

You can't stop today
As it comes speeding down the track
Child, yesterday is hist'ry
And it's never coming back

Fictional though she may be, Hairspray's Maybelle is wiser than Victor Davis Hanson and David Brooks, which comes as little surprise to us musical-comedy appreciators.

Last night on the uptown local IRT a gaunt, grayish man with an intense inward focus raised his sleeve, looked at his wristwatch, and asked us (he was standing, we were sitting):

"Is today Friday?"

"No," Laura said, "it's Thursday."

His sleeve slid back over over his wristwatch as he internalized this information, then he got off at the 59th Street stop, having gotten a day more than he bargained for.

Full report tomorrow, once I recover my senses and return to earth.