NYC Scene: Cross and Crescent

The cross on St. Mary's Church
2nd Ave & 15 Street, New York
Photo: LB

Three-bar cross without a dome,

Eastern church aligned with Rome -

In this strange East Village scene

Story arc is byzantine.

A couple of weeks ago, walking up Second Avenue I noticed an eight-pointed cross projected against the evening sky. An Orthodox church, I thought, – not an unusual sight in East Village. The sign in front of the church, however, announced that it was St. Mary’s Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite. This sounded like an oxymoron: how can something be Catholic and Byzantine at once? A page of dense text on St. Mary’s website explains that this church has been brought to the US by Carpatho-Ruthenians, or Rusyns; it follows the Eastern (Byzantine) ritual, yet bears allegiance to Rome and is therefore Catholic.

Sign in front of St. Mary's

Perhaps embarrassingly, I first learned about Rusyns from the movie The Deer Hunter, which, despite stellar cast, was so incoherent and made my BS-o-meter go out of scale so often that I dismissed it as a source of information altogether. The characters in this movie were said to be Russians, but were certainly not behaving like Russians: they were neat and cheerful, had strong work ethic and lived in a tight-knit community. At first I chalked it up to this film's high level of background nonsense, in the same category as the Cascades playing the role of the Appalachians, but later I found out that these people were in fact Rusyns, or Carpatho-Ruthenians, a Central European Slavic ethnicity. After running into St. Mary’s, I thought it was time to find out more about them.

Lunacy at the Old Theater

Curtain of the Mariinsky Theater. Photo from Wikipedia.

A more accurate title would be “Lunacy at the Bolshoi Theater”, but this would hint too strongly at the recent events at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater, which certainly qualify as lunacy, but are not what this post is about.

This spring, my home town, St. Petersburg, has finally inaugurated a new building of the opera and ballet theater, Mariinsky II. The new theater opened with a lavish gala on May 2, followed by Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta, whose enduring popularity is a mystery to me, and Balanchine’s ballet Jewels performed on May 3. Mostly enthusiastic reviews of the new building have prompted me to refresh my memory of the history of Mariinsky Theater. Among other things, I was curious about the very first performance given on stage of the old opera house.

Half Hour at the Morgan Library

The Morgan Library, south wall

It is a quintessential American story (by George!):

There lived a man who liked buying stuff. He filled two houses with stuff, but when stuff started to overflow his third house, he built a large shed to store his stuff. When the man died, his children held a garage sale and donated the rest of the stuff to charity.

The man in question is John Pierpont Morgan (1837 – 1913) (the JP Morgan, JPM) and his stuff – an eclectic collection of art, books, and manuscripts – at the time of his death was worth over $50M and accounted for up to three quarters of his estate. The big shed is what is now known as the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue and 36^th Street.

After Pierpont’s death, his son Jack, JPM, Jr., sold part of the estate to pay taxes, gave a large part (6 to 8 thousand pieces!) to the Metropolitan Museum, where his father had been a trustee since 1888 and the president since 1904, and in 1924 unloaded the rest into a trust overseeing a public library and museum.

A visit to the Morgan Library (visit virtually via the Google Art project), which offers free admission every Friday between 7 and 9 pm, was planned as yesterday’s after-dinner entertainment; but various circumstances intervened, and I ended up having only about 40 minutes to spend there. The Library is certainly worth a cursory look and perhaps more.

Milonga with Eric Jorissen

Eric Jorissen at Tango El Corte.
Screenshot from "This is El Corte!" film.

This was my third workshop with Eric Jorissen at Dance Manhattan. The previous two workshops about a year ago focused on colgadas and volcadas and were so well attended that there was barely any room to move, just like in a milonga. This time there were fewer people, plus I was in the middle of an energy dip, so I was phoning it in most of the time. However, looking back, I conclude that this workshop was useful.

Eric first observed the group dancing (oy vey!) and pointed out that many people were making quite large steps. Eric then proceeded to define a “footprint” of milonga as the length of the step that one can firmly take without reaching or lifting the heel of the leg that bears the weight before the step. This distance is surprisingly small, about shoulder width. Eric then asked the group to step and transfer weight from one foot to the other. The easiest direction to step out of the "footprint" area is forward. There was hardly any problem making small, tidy steps sideways or back, but the temptation was great when stepping forward. Since the leader mostly steps in forward direction, it is up to him to set the scale of this movement. The feet stay close to the floor; and the faster the pulse of the music, the smaller and cleaner the steps become.

NYC Scene: Riddle of the Girdle

74 St & 35 Ave, Jackson Heights. Photo: LB

Drop a shoe or half a dress

To become a new princess.

Monarchs are in short supply –

Time to let that girdle fly.

Cello at Carnegie Hall: Isserlis & St. Luke's

Breguet Clock in Carnegie Hall lobby. Photo: LB

The cello music theme has captured my attention since the recent Bargemusic concert. After that performance I remembered how during my brief sojourn in Seattle in 2004 I was lucky to hear two major cellists – Mstislav Rostropovich and Steven Isserlis – at the acoustically excellent Benaroya Hall. 

I was still reminiscing about the Seattle performances, when I discovered that Isserlis was about to play in New York City with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on June 1. Originally this concert was supposed to be held on November 1, 2012, but at that time the area around Carnegie Hall was threatened by the dangling arm of the construction crane damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the concert was postponed. This was too much of a coincidence and too good a story to be missed, so I marched to Carnegie Hall.