Urban Agenda New York City, September 2014

URBAN AGENDA: NEW YORK CITY SEPTEMBER 2014

The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec at MoMA September 2014

Paul Krugman Q&A The 9/11 Museum Day vs. Boarding Schools Digital Classrooms The Paris Review

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ATLANTIC CITY | doatlanticcity.com DO AC Pro Beach Volleyball Invitational September 5-7 | Boardwalk at New Jersey Avenue Olympians and other pro beach volleyball superstars will wow spectators when the AVP Tour, the most prestigious pro beach volleyball series, returns to Atlantic City for its only stop on the east coast. General admission is FREE.

Miss America September 9-14 Miss America returns to Atlantic City with the Preliminaries September 9-11 and the 2015 Miss America Competition on September 14 at Historic Boardwalk Hall.

September 13 Don’t miss the long time Atlantic City tradition, the Show Us Your Shoes Parade on the Boardwalk. Join in the fun while spectators cheer “Show us your shoes!” to the 53 contestants as they display their fabulously festive and state-centric shoes and costumes. In addition to the contestants, the Show Us Your Shoes Parade will showcase floats, bands, dignitaries, military heroes, celebrities, youth groups, special units and our Forever Miss Americas.

DO AC Boardwalk Wine Promenade September 27-28 | Boardwalk Mark your calendars! The outdoor wine stroll along the historic Atlantic City boardwalk will be returning with new vintages and rare and expensive wines and champagnes. With FOOD & WINE as the presenting sponsor, the second annual event will bring together Atlantic City’s casino resorts to celebrate the thriving culinary scene in Atlantic City on the famed Boardwalk. Over 100 wines will be presented at multiple destinations along a one-mile stretch of the famed Atlantic City Boardwalk. Insider access to rare and expensive wines and champagnes handpicked by expert and media personality Leslie Sbrocco plus gourmet bites, live music and breathtaking ocean views will combine to create an only-in-Atlantic City spectacular.

Visit AC – great weather, great events, a great way to extend summer Book your getaway now at www.DoAtlanticCity.com.

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September 27 & 28 | 12-5pm | Atlantic City Boardwalk $65 on Saturday / $55 on Sunday

Sponsored by

Mark your calendars! The outdoor wine stroll along the historic Atlantic City boardwalk will be returning with new vintages and rare and expensive wines and champagnes.

The second annual event will bring together Atlantic City’s casino resorts to celebrate the thriving culinary scene in Atlantic City on the famed Boardwalk. Over 100 wines will be presented at multiple destinations along a one-mile stretch of the famed Atlantic City Boardwalk. Insider access to rare and expensive wines and champagnes handpicked by expert and media personality Leslie Sbrocco plus gourmet bites, live music and breathtaking ocean views will combine to create an only-in-Atlantic City spectacular.

Tickets can be purchased online at www.DoAtlanticCity.com/wine

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september 2014 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Lynn Adams Smith CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jorge Naranjo art DIRECTOR Jeffrey Edward Tryon GRAPHIC DESIGNer Matthew DiFalco

ALL GIRLS. ALL EXTRAORDINARY.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Linda Arntzenius Ellen Gilbert Anne Levin Ilene Dube Stuart Mitchner Gina Hookey Taylor Smith photography Scott Lynch ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Robin Broomer

THE ETHEL WALKER SCHOOL is a private, independent boarding school for girls in grades 6-12. Research shows that all-girls learning environments produce young women who study better, test higher, excel in mathematics and sciences, and build academic poise and self-reliance.

Come see how we empower girls to lead with integrity, confidence, courage, and conviction. The results are, in a word, extraordinary.

JOIN US FOR AN OPEN HOUSE THIS FALL. Visit ethelwalker.org or contact admissions at 860.408.4200.

SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER Jennifer McLaughlin ACCOUNT MANAGERS Jennifer Covill Kendra Russell Cybill Tascarella Erin Toto OPERATIONS MANAGER Melissa Bilyeu URBAN AGENDA: NEW YORK CITY Witherspoon Media Group 305 Witherspoon Street Princeton, NJ 08542 P: 609.924.5400 F: 609.924.8818 urbanagendamagazine.com Advertising opportunities: 609.924.5400 Media Kit available on urbanagendamagazine.com Subscription information: 609.924.5400 Editorial suggestions: editor@witherspoonmediagroup.com

Urban Agenda: New York City is published 6 times a year with a circulation of 35,000. All rights reserved. Nothing herein may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher.

To purchase PDF files or reprints, please call 609.924.5400 or e-mail melissa.bilyeu@witherspoonmediagroup.com.

Simsbury, Connecticut

Š2014 Witherspoon Media Group

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contents

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Digital Classrooms: New Paths in Education BY ellen gi lbert

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Day School vs. B oarding School by taylor smi th

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Toulouse -Lautrec Exhibition at MoMA

september 2014

BY lynn adams smi th

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Q & A with Paul Krugman BY lynn adams Smi th

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Autumn in New York By ellen gi lbert

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Visiting the 9/11 Museum The Memories Come Flooding Back BY i lene dube

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The Paris Re vie w and the Pilgrim Souls Who Shaped It— Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton

BY Li nda Ar ntzeni us

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Urban Shops: My Cozy B edroom

BY St ua rt mi tchner

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University Life

Calendar 34

Destination: Brandywine River Val ley

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Gray Matter 46

BY Taylor Smi th

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Cover Image: At the Moulin Rouge: The Clowness Cha-U-Kao,

by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895.

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Urban B ooks: School Days in the City

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Product selection by Lynn Adams Smith

MY COZY BEDROOM 1

1. Baby Animal Portraits, $199; www.rhbabyandchild.com 2. 19th C. British Drum Bookcase, $1,279; www.rhbabyandchild.com 3. The Yolk Chair, Giggle. www.giggle.com 4. Bashful Donkey. www.serenaandlily.com 5. Baby Elephant by Melissa & Doug. www.melissaanddoug.com 6. Sorel Falcon Ridge slippers for kids; Harry’s Shoes.

855.642.7797 www.harrys-shoes.com.

7. Star Sheet Set, Red, from $110; www.serenaandlily.com 8. Black Stripe Canvas Teepee, $159; www.landofnod.com 9. Oeuf Perch Twin Over Twin Bunk Bed, NessaLee Baby. www.nessaleebaby.com

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SEPTEMBER 2014

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For some, it’s kindergarten.

A G R OW N-U

P CO ME DY A

By

For these parents,

IT’S WAR.

B O UT K I ND E

R G A RT E N A

DMISSIONS

GREG EDWARDS & ANDY SANDBERG Directed by ANDY SANDBERG

ApplicationPendingPlay.com

Tickets Now on Sale!

Performances Begin This October Cherry Lane Theatre • 38 Commerce St • 212-352-3101 UA_adtemplate.indd 1

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DIGITAL CLASSROOMS

NEW PATHS IN EDUCATION

BY ELLEN GILBERT

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I

t’s just a few years since MOOCs (massive open online courses) appeared on the scene. In 2011, Google research director Peter Norvig and computer scientist Sebastian Thrun taught the first MOOC (/mu:k/), a class on artificial intelligence, under the auspices of Stanford University. More than 160,000 students enrolled. Thus was born what Uncharted authors Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel describe as “a revolution in higher education.”

There are naysayers, to be sure, prophesying doom and gloom as a result of the surge of enthusiasm for online learning. According to American Interest contributor Nathan Harden, MOOCs spell “the end of the university as we know it. In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.”

An amusing rejoinder to Harden appears in a Daily Riff article (“Here a MOOC, There a MOOC, Everywhere a MOOC, MOOC...”) where writer C.J. Westerberg considers “16 Possible Effects of MOOCs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

Whatever the outcome, MOOCs appear to be here to stay, causing what a New York Times article recently described as “a snowballing revolution in education.”

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY Universities weighing the decision about whether or not to embrace online teaching are stepping into largely uncharted terrain and must ask themselves whether they should join up at the risk of “devaluing higher education,” or do nothing and risk being left behind.

Princeton University chose early on to be actively engaged in the digital revolution. The University’s McGraw Hill Center for Teaching and Learning coordinates the effort, and about a dozen Princeton faculty members currently teach Coursera classes. They include sociologist Miguel A. Centeno (“Paradoxes of War”); computer scientist Robert Sedgewick (“Algorithms, Part I”); bioethicist Peter Singer (“Practical Ethics”); and astronomer David Spergel (“Imagining Other Earths”).

“My motivation was to try to see what this new thing called a MOOC was like,” says Centeno. “And, of course, to experience the ability to reach many more than will ever hear me lecture, or read one of my books.”

It may be no coincidence that Centeno, the Cuban-born scholar who came to this country at the age of 10, is also the force behind Princeton University Preparatory Program. “PUPP” as it is known, seeks to provide academically gifted students from low income families with financial aid as well the opportunity to develop the necessary academic skills, confidence and leadership abilities to flourish at top institutions of higher learning.

“I hope that ‘Paradoxes of War’ will get a conversation going not just about war, but about sociological analyses more generally,” says Centeno. “My aim in teaching is always to get people thinking in new ways.”

“The most important pillar behind innovation and opportunity— education—will see tremendous positive change in the coming decades as rising connectivity reshapes traditional routines and offers new paths for learning.”

“Gaudeamus igitur.

Don’t need classrooms, that’s for sure.

Libraries are so passé— Remnants of another day.”

—Education writer Ted Fiske, College Songs for MOOC Era

—Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age

COURSERA Online courses are available for free to just about anyone who can log into a computer. Under the rubric of programs like “Coursera” anyone can sign on—for free—for courses ranging from “Internet History, Technology, and Security” taught by University of Michigan computer scientist Charles Severance, to “Classics of Chinese Humanities” taught by Ou Fan Leo Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Sites like “Harvard Medical School Open Courseware” are designed for specialist learning communities, and smartphone apps help prospective students and current participants in the course selection process, and allow users to access classes away from home.

Two-year-old Coursera is, so far, among the most successful ventures in online education. It exists thanks to millions of dollars of venture capital provided by investors like the International Finance Corporation (the investment arm of the World Bank); Laureate Education (a “higher education company” managing dozens of profit-making universities around the world); and individual entrepreneurs like Yuri Milner. At this writing the Coursera website indicates that there are 8,057,367 participants enrolled in 672 courses offered by 110 Coursera “partners.” Ivy Leagues and distinguished universities from abroad figure prominently in the mix. Coursera recently scored a coup by hiring former Yale University President Richard C. Levin to serve as its chief executive.

FIRING UP THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE Coursera is not the only game in town. Princeton recently announced that several faculty members were signing on with a newer venture called NovoEd. One of them making a switch from Coursera to NovoEd is history professor Jeremy Adelman. His “World History Since 1300” will be taught synchronously in two, six-week modules on the Princeton campus and as a MOOC on NovoEd.

GROUPWARE Adelman acknowledges that the main draw of NovoEd is its use of “groupware,” a software program that allows greater interactivity among students. “I know from teaching in Princeton that when the learning experience is fired up, the students are really learning from each other,” he observes. The result, he adds, is that “I can be a better teacher.”

Having both Princeton students and NovoEd registrants in the same class makes a lot of sense to Adelman, whose recent book, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman was met with excellent reviews. Adelman believes that teaching history should “bring the world into the history of itself.” Rather than Coursera’s emphasis “on lectures and machine-graded

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“We’re creating new tradition.

Ours is wireless erudition.

We eschew all printed words.

Rest in pace Gutenberg.”

—Education writer Ted Fiske, College Songs for MOOC Era

assignments,” Adelman looks forward to proving NovoEd’s superiority by having students from all over the world working on collaborative projects as they learn about each other’s vocabularies for concepts like “conquest,” “trade,” and “globalization.” An effort to do outreach using the Coursera iteration of the class proved unsuccessful, he reports. Wanting “to offer something to the world where higher education systems have been shattered,” he created a separate section of the course for Syrian refugees, but “internet constrictions” made it untenable.

Which is not to say that Coursera doesn’t aspire to a higher calling, too. “We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education,” observes the Coursera website. “We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.”

More recently Coursera announced “Global Translator Community,” consisting of partnerships with international organizations to make their MOOCs available in foreign languages. To date, Coursera offers courses with subtitle translations in 13 foreign languages, with Chinese, French, and Spanish among the most popular. The company reports that only 40 percent of those taking Coursera classes live in English-speaking countries.

Adelman’s NovoEd class is, essentially, “the same course,” he taught before: “an exploration of the history of the modern world since Chinggis Khan that focuses on the connections between societies from the time of the Mongol conquests and the gradual, but accelerating ways in which connections became ties of inter-dependence.” The NovoEd version will, however, include some “very new materials” and assignments and projects will be less “traditional,” with “pre-assigned questions” and collaborative projects in lieu of individualized paper assignments. Teaching the class in two modules will give students greater opportunity to experience different peer groups.

A WORK IN PROGRESS Centeno describes his Coursera version of what was originally called “The Western Way of War,” as “pretty close to the original but, of course, much abridged. It’s been a lot more work than I thought, but I have also learned a lot about what is critical in the material and what I have missed.”

Students challenged to maintain the momentum of regularly logging on to a class and doing work assigned by someone outside of a traditional classroom—and the faculty who teach them—are, to be sure, just getting the hang of it and have lots fine-tuning to do. The potential, however, is huge as more data is amassed. The New Digital Age authors Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen call online learning “a game changer,” citing MOOCs’ ability to collect and use data effectively as an important plus. A BBC Future segment aired last fall similarly enthused “when students learn online, every mouse click is tracked. Harness this wealth of data and we can create the ultimate in personalized lessons.”

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“The most important pillar behind innovation and opportunity—education—will see tremendous positive change “We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.

We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.”

—Coursera website

TRADITION Princeton area residents interested in learning about something new—or adding complexity to what they already know—have at least two venerable institutions from which to choose: Princeton Adult School and Evergreen Forum. While they are not (yet) online options, the range of subjects both offer is remarkable and new topics are regularly introduced. Class leaders in both programs usually come from nearby institutions of higher learning or corporations, and students are particularly ready to meet a good challenge.

Indeed, Evergreen Forum was founded about a dozen years ago when people who signed on to audit classes at Princeton University were tired of being relegated to the back of the classroom and prohibited from participating in the conversation. Evergreen Forum typically offers about 20 classes that cast a wide and somewhat idiosyncratic net. Spring and fall semester offerings are usually taught during the day at the Princeton Senior Resource Center.

Offerings this coming fall include “Woody Allen: Light and Dark,” “Contemporary Business and Economic Issues,” “Fatal Attractions in Literature,” and “The Amazing Avian Artists.” Last semester students got to choose from “World of Downton Abbey,” “Alice Munro,” “1913 and the Armory Show,” and “Georgraphical Links: Explorers.” The six-to-eight week courses cost $60, and the enthusiastic response to some offerings sometimes necessitates a lottery. See www.TheEvergreenForum.org.

The Princeton Adult School, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary, is a much larger enterprise, currently reporting that it offers “300+ in-person courses; 1,000+ online courses, and 3,600+ students.” With all-year-round evening classes, Princeton Adult School was founded “to offer to the adult residents of the Princeton area—regardless of race, color, creed, place of national origin, or sex—a variety of educational courses for their bent and enjoyment.” An online catalog of the classes, which are held at various locations in Princeton, is divided into categories like “Digital Photography,” “Foreign Languages,” “Dance,” and “Personal Enrichment.” Course fees vary and there is a $10 registration fee. Visit www.princetonadultschool.org. U

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Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. • Programs begin at 9:00 a.m.

Avon Old Farms believes strongly in the benefits of a singlesex education and understands the unique learning styles of young men. A structured academic day includes regular all-school meetings, family-style meals, athletic practices, and quiet evening study hours. Core values such as brotherhood, integrity, scholarship, and sportsmanship are emphasized and modeled by a caring and committed faculty who also serve as coaches, dormitory masters, counselors, valued mentors, and friends.

Avon’s diverse academic program is both challenging and supportive. Avon Old Farms is a fully-accredited college preparatory school and its graduates represent their school proudly at some of the finest colleges and universities in the nation and abroad.

Avon Old Farms is located 15 minutes northwest of Hartford, offering a magnificent campus with outstanding facilities.

QUICK FACTS: Established: 1927 Enrollment: 405 boys States/Countries Represented: 22/22 Average Class Size: 12 Student-Teacher Ratio: 6:1 Campus Size: 860+ wooded acres Interscholastic Sports: 15

To RSVP or schedule an interview, call us at 800-464-2866, email us at admissions@avonoldfarms.com, or online at www.AvonOldFarms.com/OpenHouse 500 Old Farms Road, Avon, Connecticut 06001

www.AvonOldFarms.com

Follow us:

Avon Old Farms School welcomes students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin.

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image courtesy of Princeton Day School

Day School vs. Boarding School image courtesy of avon old farms

by Taylor Smith

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image courtesy of Princeton Day School

At

the end of their child’s eighth grade school year, parents are faced with the quandary of where to send their teen to high school. In New York the options are plentiful. Private day school is an attractive option to most since it combines academic rigor with the creature comforts of home. Enrolling as a day student at a local boarding school is also an option. The Millbrook School, TrinityPawling School, the Emma Willard School and the Hackley School are four examples.

Some teenagers dream of the pre-college experience that only a boarding school can offer. These teens crave independence, adventure, and the unknown. Knowing their teenager’s strengths, weaknesses, sociability, and adaptability will help parents to decide whether being a day student or a boarding student is right for their child.

Private day schools such as the Dwight-Englewood School, Rye Country Day School, The Greenwich Country Day School and The NightingaleBamford School, offer excellent college preparatory experiences. At these schools, students entering the ninth grade will have the option to handpick from a diverse assortment of classes, clubs, sports, arts, science, and music programs. Student to teacher ratios are small, which means that most class sizes average 12 students. Guidance from teachers, coaches, and faculty members lend these school a familial atmosphere. In addition, much emphasis is placed on the whole student, so that student happiness is seen as being just as significant as A.P. chemistry scores. As private day students, teens travel locally to compete in athletics and come home at night to have dinner and to sleep in their own beds. Academic demands are strenuous, but the aspects of living at home are an added attraction.

The Northeast, and particularly New England, is home to some of the most elite and picturesque boarding schools in the world. Just visit St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire during the height of autumn to watch a cross-country meet and be overwhelmed by the history and majesty of the place. Observe new levels of school spirit at an ice hockey match at Avon Old Farms in Avon, Connecticut or watch the spring

musical at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. All of these experiences will help your teen to decide whether or not they would like to apply.

Applying to boarding school is not unlike applying to college.

More often than not, both require campus visits, interviews, teacher recommendations, standardized test-taking and application fees. The application process ideally begins during your child’s seventh grade school year. Go to any school’s website to read about the faculty, facilities, and boarding to day student ratio. Then, plan a road trip. It makes sense to visit when school is in session, between September and May. During this time, you can schedule a student-led campus tour through the admissions office.

If you are not set on one school, it is best to visit as many as you can. There is a high concentration of schools, located relatively close together, stretching from New Jersey to Connecticut and Massachusetts to New Hampshire. You can easily drive from one campus to another over the course of a few weekends. Once you have selected a list of schools, you will have to schedule formal interviews through the school’s admissions office. Interviews are part of the application, so students should remember to dress well, be gracious, and write a thank-you note to each interviewer.

After visiting selected campuses, it is time for paperwork. TABS (The Association of Boarding Schools) developed the uniformed Boarding Schools Admission Application Form to simplify the admission process.

Visit www.boardingschools.com to see a list of schools that currently accept the TABS Application. If your school is not on the list, you will have to download that school’s particular application from its website. All of the applications contain a slew of forms that include a student information form, questionnaire, student essays, parent statement, and teacher recommendation forms. The final application must also include a copy of the student’s transcripts/academic records and official SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test) scores. Lastly, you must submit an application fee, which is indicated on each school’s website. If you are applying for

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(left) image courtesy of ethel walker school. (right) deerfield academy, image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

image courtesy of the lawrenceville school.

image courtesy of the kildonan school

image courtesy of avon old farms

financial aid, all forms must be submitted at the same time as the application.

The SSAT is a required test for most private and boarding schools. The Upper Level SSAT test is designed for students in grades six through eight who are applying for matriculation in grades nine through 12.

The test includes quantitative (math), reading comprehension, and verbal multiple choice, along with a written essay.

For fall admission, most schools have a January deadline. Keep in mind that all components of the application must be completed and received by this time. Getting the application in before the winter holidays is always a good idea. Notification of acceptance usually occurs in March. Students are asked to notify each school of their final decision by May, at the latest.

Be it at a private day or boarding school, both routes will have a large impact on a child’s personal development and success in college. However, what is most important is that they enjoy the preparatory experience and eventually graduate with positive memories and a greater sense of self.

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Rethinking Learning, Reigniting Lives

The Gow School is a coed college preparatory, boarding and day school, grades 7-12, for students with dyslexia and related language-based learning disabilities.

Miss Hall’s School 492 Holmes Road, Pittsfield, MA 01201 (413) 499-1300 • (800) 233-5614 misshalls.org • info@misshalls.org

Gow provides the right environment and the right tools for dyslexic students to rethink the learning process and reinvent themselves.

2491 Emery Rd • South Wales, NY 14139 • P 716.687.2001 • F 716.687.2003 • gow.org

ALL-GIRLS • BOARDING AND DAY • GRADES 9-12 & PG

“Having my voice emerge in studio art class, that’s My Hun.”

– Amelia Cura ’17

JOYFUL LEARNING. Experience a dynamic community where

learning is a passion and each day is infused with a spirit of joy. We prepare students for college and life, with a skill-based curriculum that weaves innovative, student‐centered learning opportunities within the context of a challenging STEM and humanities curriculum. We also believe that we do our best work when we are able to find joy in the process, through meaningful relationships and individualized opportunities.

Experience our Joy. Call or visit to learn more.

THE HUN SCHOOL OF PRINCETON Serving grades 6 through 12 and post graduates www.hunschool.org (609) 921-7600

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Join us for our Open House, Sunday, October 5th, 1:00 p.m.

RSVP at www.hunschool.org SEPTEMBER 2014

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Knox Ad for Newsday June 14 6/17/14 5:34 PM Page 1

THE KNOX SCHOOL

Offers an exceptional educational opportunity, free from the Common Core standardized testing.

• Rigorous curriculum with Advanced Placement courses • • Small class sizes • Competitive college placements • • Three-season athletics, including on-campus equestrian and crew programs • • Accessible from the Long Island Railroad • • Day student tuition $10,500 • 5-Day boarding tuition $34,500 • • 7-Day boarding tuition $45,000 •

A Coeducational Independent Boarding and Day School for Grades Six - Post Graduate 541 Long Beach Rd., St. James, NY 11780 631.686.1600 ext. 414 • www.knoxschool.org

Admissions Open House

Call to schedule a tour or attend our Open House on November 15, 2014, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

To RSVP, call 631-686-1600 ext. 414 or email admissions@knoxschool.org

Rolling Admission for 2014-2015

THE KNOX SCHOOL LEARN TO BE EXCEPTIONAL A Coeducational Independent Boarding and Day School for Grades Six - Post Graduate

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541 Long Beach Rd., St. James, NY 11780

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Product selection by Taylor Smith

UNIVERSITY LIFE

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1) Shinola The Bixby Bike in blue, $1,950; www.shinola.com.

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2) L.L.Bean Signature Collection Westport Leather Tote, $249; www.llbean.com.

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SEPTEMBER 2014

8/22/14 12:05:22 PM

Introducing the Armellino Merit Scholarship

founded in 1864

Scholars of exceptional academic success, character, and intellectual curiosity who have an infectious excitement for life and an entrepreneurial spirit are invited to apply for for the Armellino Scholarship.

Open to all domestic boarding applicants regardless of financial need, the new merit scholarship covers full tuition, boarding costs, required fees, a stipend for travel expenses, and an additional stipend for an approved summer signature experience.

Admission Open Houses Sunday, October 5 at 1:00 p.m.

Sunday, November 2 at 1:00 p.m.

Peddie School is a co-educational boarding and day school for grades 9–12 and post-graduate located minutes from Princeton, New Jersey

Visit www.peddie.org/openhouse or call 609.944.7501 to RSVP. South Main Street | Hightstown, New Jersey

Princeton International School of Mathematics and Science WELCOME BACK TO A NEW YEAR!!!

We’ve been busy all summer! ² Building dedicated science research laboratories ² Developing our innovative Research Program ² Hiring scholarly faculty ² Modernizing the dorm building ² Establishing new extra-curricular activities PRISMS is a visionary, intercultural research community educating and inspiring high school students through rigorous scholarship and personal responsibility. The residential school accepts students in grades 9-12. Day students welcome.

Call today to tour our campus!

(609) 454-5580 SEPTEMBER 2014

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Get Ready for Another Amazing Year!

www.prismsus.org 19 Lambert Drive, Princeton NJ URBAN AGENDA New York City

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URBAN BOOKS where I lived on East 53rd near Third Avenue, I took an IND train to Seventh Avenue, changing there for Columbus Circle. It sounds simple enough, but the morning rush hour for a kid from Indiana was a big deal: the daily battle to fight your way on and off packed trains before the doors slammed shut, and to come to school still reeling after being pressed face to face and body to body with a sweaty heaving mass of humanity in that super-intense zone of subway noise and motion.

Walking through the Boy’s Entrance at McBurney was not something a ninth-grader from the midwest ever took for granted. The 14-story West Side YMCA building occupied by the school resembled a “castellated Italian hill town, with towers, battlements and balconies rising in irregular sympathy, culminating in a huge, central tower with an octagonal roof,” according to New York 1930 (Rizzoli 1987). “Above the base the building’s masses stepped back with loggias and hipped tile roofs.”

Reference is also made to Gothic and Romanesque details and “the extensive use of polychromed terracotta.” Inside, the architect Dwight James Baum sustained the “medieval Italian theme ... with studded plank doors, concrete beams painted and decorated in imitation of wood, rough plaster walls, medievalstyle furniture and polychromed tilework.”

Quite a change after three grades in a two-room red brick schoolhouse in the woods of southern Indiana.

When McBurney closed its doors in 1988, there was an auction of the contents. A story in The New York Times describes buyers looking for old yearbooks containing photos of future celebrities. While Salinger remains the most illustrious McBurneyan, two actors known for playing tempermental opposites on television went there: John Boy of The Waltons (Richard Thomas) and The Fonz from Happy Days (Henry Winkler). Although McBurney had other noteworthy alumni, including Felix Rohaytan, chair of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and Ted Koppel of Nightline, it “may be best remembered,” according to the wikipedia entry, “as the destination of Holden Caulfield when he left all the equipment of the Pencey Prep fencing team on the subway.”

School Days in the City

BY STUART MITCHNER

E

very time the “back to school” theme comes up, I think of The Catcher in the Rye, New York City, and the year I went to McBurney School on 63rd Street off Central Park West. I was 16 when I read Holden Caulfield’s story for the first of many times, not knowing that J.D. Salinger had been at McBurney decades before me and that some of Holden’s school experiences and relationships were drawn from his two years there.

On that first reading, I was struck by Holden’s mention of a fencing meet with McBurney School that never happened because, being manager of the Pencey Prep fencing team, he’d left the equipment on the subway (“It wasn’t all my fault. I had to keep getting up to look at this map”). So, even before I knew we had McBurney in common, there it coincidentally was, out of all the schools Salinger could have named. The passing mention of the school and the subway gave me an connection to Catcher beyond what was already a love-at-first-sight reading experience.

Years later when I found that Salinger had not only gone to McBurney but had managed the fencing team, it was a thrill to discover that someone I admired more than any living author could well have shared the same morning ritual of a subway ride to Columbus Circle and the three block walk up Central Park West. Since his family lived in an apartment house on Park Avenue and East 91st at the time, Salinger would have taken IRT’s Lexington Avenue Line from 86th and changed to a crosstown train. From

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CELEBRITY ALUMNI

“THE LAUGHING MAN”

In New York, almost every school, public or private, big or small, can claim celebrity alumni. It’s a form of what CUNY Sociology professor William B. Helmeich calls “community cachet” in The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City (Princeton University Press $29.95).

One example is the naming of West 84th Street after Edgar Allan Poe. Another is P.S. 199 on Shakespeare Avenue in the West Bronx, which is known as the Shakespeare School and presents a play by the Bard every year in June. P.S. 149 on Sutter Avenue in East New York is known as the Danny Kaye School, after the comedian. Then there’s the West Harlem School on Edgecombe Avenue and 165th Street which features a mural depicting famous alumni, a diverse mixture that includes Diana Sands, who starred in Raisin in the Sun; singer Harry Belafonte, and economist and Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan.

All the moral bases are covered at Washington Irving High School on Irving Place, from movie stars Paulette Goddard and Claudette Colbert, radio/television legend Molly Goldberg and The View’s Joy Behar, to porn star Asa Akira, rapper Vast Aire, and computer hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu). But it’s hard to top Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue in Brookyln, where the alumni list includes chess champ Bobby Fischer, artist Elaine de Kooning, movie star Susan Hayward, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, novelist Bernard Malamud, Neil Diamond, Beverly Sills, Mickey Spillane, Barbara Stanwyck, Barbra Streisand and Mae West, and that’s a very selective list.

Helmreich’s example of the other side of community cachet is Cypress Hills in Brooklyn, bordering East New York, where just to the right of P.S. 65’s “Corinthian pillars” and the “decorative cement shields” above the entrance “a lonely pair of kids’ sneakers dangles on a telephone wire.”

Posted on the stairs are “various exhortations” such as “Work hard to be nice,” ‘Raise the bar,” and “We are climbing the mountain to college.” As Helmreich observes, “a mountain it is, indeed” in a place like Cypress Hills.

The base of the statue of Erasmus in front of Erasmus Hall is inscribed, “Desiderius Erasmus, the maintainer and restorer of the sciences and polite literature, the greatest man of his century, the excellent citizen who, through his immortal writings, acquired an everlasting fame.”

In 1994 Erasmus Hall H.S. closed “due to poor academic scores.” In 2011 the New York City Department of Education announced that Washington Irving H.S. would be closed by summer 2015. At the time Hector Xavier Monsegur was attending, only 55 percent of the students graduated with their classes.

Before he attended McBurney, J.D. Salinger went to public schools on the Upper West Side, including P.S. 165 on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue, as he notes in the opening paragraph of “The Laughing Man,” one of his most autobiographical stories. The hero of the story is a young law student from Staten Island who has been hired by the parents of the narrator and his 25 classmates to drive them around after school in a bus; when the weather is suitable, he takes them over to Central Park after school to play football or soccer or baseball. On rainy afternoons, the Chief, as his charges calls him, shepherds them to the Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the playing is over and they’re back in the bus, the Chief tells them an ongoing narrative for which the story is named. Like most good stories, Salinger’s comes with complications, a love interest, and a sad, thoughtful ending.

The school at 109th and Amsterdam is still in business, but judging from the parent-teacher blog, the situation there is dicey, to say the least, and all indications are that the issues raised in John Owens’s book are the reality: committed teachers and a struggling administration. The demographic is 70 percent Hispanic, 15 percent black, ten percent white, and three percent Asian.

On the P.S. 165 Robert E. Simon website is a photo of the entrance through which nine-year-old Jerry Salinger presumably came and went.

I have been unable to find out what Robert E. Simon’s contribution is or was. The P.S. 165 home page says, “Dare to dream, to achieve, to make a difference.”

Like McBurney, P.S. 165 should be best remembered for its relation to the life and work of a great American writer who dared to dream and make a difference. It’s a connection the school should make more of, since P.S. 165 is obviously in serious need of what William Helmreich calls “community cachet.”

TEACHERS Some of the best-known accounts of New York City schools come from former teachers. Generations of readers and moviegoers have read or seen Evan Hunter’s Blackboard Jungle, which was based on the author’s 17 days teaching at Bronx Vocational High School, and Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, which reflects Kaufman’s experience teaching at various city high schools. Hunter, whose real name was Salvatore Lombino, also wrote under the name Ed McBain. He took his schooling seriously enough to base his pen name on his two alma maters, Evan for Evander Childs High School and Hunter for Hunter College, which was also Bel Kaufman’s alma mater.

Among the most engaging teacher memoirs is Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man (Scribner 2005), which begins with McCourt in his mid-twenties teaching at Staten Island’s McKee Vocational and Technical High School, where on his first day he was called into the principal’s office for picking up a sandwich one student had thrown at another and then eating it while the class watched. It was his “first act of classroom management,” and it was no chore: “The bread was dark and thick, baked by an Italian mother in Brooklyn, bread firm enough to hold slices of rich baloney, layered with slices of tomato, onions and peppers drizzled with olive oil and charged with a tongue-dazzling relish.” So began the first of the 33,000 classes McCourt estimates teaching in thirty years divided between McKee, Seward Park High School in Manhattan, Stuyvesant High School, and night classes at Washington Irving.

The conflict between an inventive “classroom management” style like McCourt’s and a clueless or dictatorial administration is also played out in John Owens’s Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public Education (Sourcebooks 2013), which recounts the author’s struggles teaching English at a public school in the South Bronx.

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URBAN AGENDA New York City

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URBAN ART

Toulouse-Lautrec in his studio in Rue Caulaincourt.

Toulouse-Lautrec

BY LYNN ADAMS SMITH

At the Moulin Rouge: The Clowness Cha-U-Kao,

by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895 (TOP-LEFT).

The woman in this portrait was one of Lautrec’s favorite models. She was a dancer, contortionist, and clown, deriving her stage name from the chahut, an acrobatic dance similar to the cancan. Crowds often became chaotic and roared in applause when she performed on stage. Her Japanese-sounding stage name was undoubtedly due to the influence of Japonism, the movement inspired

by Japanese wood-block prints which was admired by many French Impressionist painters.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French post-impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, draftsman, and printmaker who is best known for his depiction of Montmartre and Parisian cabarets and theaters in late 19th-century France.

Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family from the south of France.

His parents were first cousins and his grandmothers were sisters. Lautrec suffered from congenital health conditions, which today, are often attributed to inbreeding. As an adult he was very short, with an adult-sized torso and child-sized legs.

In Paris, Lautrec studied under the acclaimed portrait painter Leon Bonnat.

His painting style was influenced by Manet, Degas, and classical Japanese

wood prints. Lautrec was good friends with Vincent Van Gogh and made a portrait of Vincent while sitting at a cafe. Theo Van Gogh (Vincent’s brother) was Lautrec’s first art dealer and purchased one of his paintings for his private collection.

Lautrec’s first color lithograph was a poster for the Moulin Rouge, a popular music house located at the foot of Montmartre hill. Three thousand copies of his poster were placed around Paris and Lautrec became an overnight celebrity. His posters were so popular that Parisians were known to follow around the workmen hanging them, so that they could peel them off the walls before the glue dried. When Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900, he sketched a Lautrec poster into one of his own paintings.

Lautrec was well known for creating his art while sitting at cafe and cabaret tables, simultaneously chatting and drinking with friends. He was ridiculed for his physical abnormalities and found solace in mingling with social misfits. He spent a lot of time in brothels and became friends with many prostitutes, sketching them at work and at leisure.

Lautrec died at the age of 36 due to complications caused by alcoholism and syphilis. After Lautrec’s death, his mother, the Comtesse Adele Toulouse-Lautrec, promoted his art and contributed funds for a new museum to house his work.

In 2005, an early Lautrec painting of a red haired laundress, sold at Christie’s for $22,400,000.

More than 100 of Lautrec’s prints and posters are currently on display in a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including the image on our cover. The exhibit is on view through March 2015.

(ABOVE) Toulouse-Lautrec monogram.

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QA Paul Krugman

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&

interview by lynn adams smith

obel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman will be retiring from Princeton University in 2015 to join the faculty of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, as professor in the Ph.D. Program in Economics, where he will become a Distinguished Scholar at the Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center (LIS). He will continue writing his column and blog for The New York Times.

UA: Tell us about the Luxembourg Income Study Center.

PK: The background here is that a number of countries have long collected data on the distribution of income—the US has been doing it since 1947— but it was often hard to compare the results across countries and to some extent over time. What LIS does is coordinate with local statisticians so that they produce comparable information and help support research on what we learn from these comparisons. We learn, for example, about the comparative role of government programs in reducing poverty in many countries.

UA: New York’s minimum wage is currently $8 per hour. Germany is introducing a national minimum wage next year of 8.50 euros an hour, equivalent to $15 an hour. Swiss voters recently rejected increasing their minimum wage to 22 Swiss francs or nearly $25 per hour. What would you like to see the minimum wage be in the US?

PK: I’m for raising the minimum to something over $10 nationally, which would bring it back in real terms and as a share of average non-managerial wages to its level in the 1960s. High-productivity centers, like New York, could justify going higher.

UA: How has studying economics at a Ph.D. level changed since you were a student?

PK: I’m actually struck by how little it has changed. The basic structure of course-work that lays a foundation, followed by dissertation, is the same; the math and statistical level has risen, but it was already pretty high in 1975! The content of some fields has changed, of course, mostly though not everywhere for the better. On the whole, though, the structure both of education and of the career track for young economists has been remarkably stable. I think that’s starting to change now, as the web and the proliferation of think tanks shake up the sources of career success. But that’s just happening, after decades of stability.

UA: Do you have any concern that mounting student loan debt will eventually impact the economy and housing market?

PK: It’s already happening. Household formation is very low, and debt has to be part of the explanation.

(opposite) Paul Krugman, illustrated by Jorge Naranjo and Jeff Tryon.

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How much inflation is appropriate and why has the inflation rate remained low despite the expansion in the money supply?

PK: Inflation is a tradeoff—higher inflation raises some costs of doing business, but low inflation or deflation have the effect of prolonging slumps. In the ’90s there was a sort of consensus that 2 percent made the most of that tradeoff, but subsequent experience shows that the costs of low inflation are much bigger than we thought. So I’d advocate something like 4. As for why inflation hasn’t picked up—both theory and historical experience told us that in a depressed economy with near-zero interest rates, increases in the quantity of money would just sit there. Some of us were saying that over and over back in 2009 and 2010; what will it take for people to admit that we were right?

UA: Are bubbles good or bad and do we need them to create strong economic growth and reach higher levels of employment?

PK: Bubbles are bad if you have an economy near full employment, where they divert resources from their proper use and set the stage for financial instability. In a depressed economy, even ill-conceived spending can help create jobs, so bubbles aren’t necessarily bad. There are reasons to believe that we’re facing an era of persistent economic weakness, which means that we’ll only feel prosperous during bubble periods.

UA: Please comment on how artificially low interest rates have impacted the current value of baby boomers’ retirement portfolios and should this be a consideration of the Federal Reserve?

PK: Oh, boy. What do you mean “artificially low”? Compared to what? The appropriate level of the interest rate, most economists would say, is the rate that gives us full employment without inflation; since we don’t have full employment, that says that rates are too high.

And no, the Fed’s job is to stabilize the economy, not to protect incomes of some groups at the expense of that mandate.

UA: Do you think Bitcoin will gain momentum and become a viable currency?

PK: No. I could be wrong, but Bitcoin is harder to use than other forms of electronic payment, and lacks any fundamental source of value (unlike dollars, which can be used to pay taxes). It’s possible that Bitcoin will somehow become self-supporting, but for now my guess is that it’s largely a fad that will collapse one of these days.

UA: What do you like to do for fun in New York City and what will you miss most about living in Princeton?

PK: People don’t necessarily know this, but New York is a great walking and running city; the outdoors seems especially precious amid all that urbanism. I also value the music scene, and just the sheer number of interesting people. Oh, and tons of good modest-price restaurants.

What I’ll miss about Princeton is the birdsong, the good friends I do have there, and some of the cultural institutions, McCarter Theatre in particular.

september 2014

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URBAN AGENDA New York City

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urban style

A Blend of Modern and Traditional

by David Steffenhagen

Architectural Salvage If a space is lacking in architectural character, adding found items instantly imparts age, patina and character. Reusing a great turnof-the-century mantel is also environmentally friendly.

Block Printed Textiles Using one of the earliest methods of printing, these textiles add sophistication to a room. Often intricate and sometimes whimsical, each piece has unique variations inherent in the handcrafting, bringing analog charm into our increasingly digital interiors.

Biomorphic and Organic Forms There is something comforting about natural elements and themes in our surroundings. Great for creating spaces that are calming and relaxing, sculptural organic shapes subtly reconnect us to nature.

Modern Fabrics on Traditional Icons A Chippendale settee is a beautiful object, but if it’s been sitting in your Grandmother’s front hall for 40 years, it’s often overlooked. A fresh modern print, bold and geometric, brings a different attitude to the piece.

David Steffenhagen

DESIGN & DECORATION

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september 2014

8/22/14 12:51:22 PM

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8/22/14 12:51:47 PM

MAJESTIC AMBIVALENCE: Autumn in New York*

*Suggested accompaniment while you read: log on YouTube and play “Autumn In New York–Eddie Higgins”.

BY ELLEN

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GILBERT

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( L E F T TO R IGHT)

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Billie Holiday’s, Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong’s, and Claude Williamson Trio’s “Autumn in New York.”

escriptions of the bittersweet lyrics and music of Vernon Duke’s jazz standard “Autumn in New York” invariably reference the melancholy elegance of this much-recorded song. “There is something so improbably consoling about the sadness at the heart of the best Vernon Duke melodies,” observes writer Barry Singer, who rates “Autumn in New York” as one Duke’s three most enduring songs (“April in Paris”, and “I Can’t Get Started” are the other two). “It’s not that the songs are even inherently unhappy,” he adds. “They inhabit an emotional realm uncommon in the American popular song canon, that of dry-eyed ballads of unusual poignancy. The melancholy induced by these songs, while hauntingly seductive, is never glum.”

“Duke’s lyrics to the verse could easily be the message from a post card,” writes musician and jazz historian Chris Tyle. “‘It’s time to end my lonely holiday, and bid the country a hasty farewell.’” So it’s goodbye to the room on the 27th floor of the Manhattan hotel from which he or she has looked down, as the song says, “on the city I hate and adore;” adieu to the “glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel;” and an acid-tinged au revoir to “jaded roués and gay divorcées, who lunch at the Ritz.”

Forget the awful movie of the same name that came and went in 2000 (Richard Gere falls in love with terminally ill Winona Ryder). This is 1934, and Vernon Duke is expressing “his feelings about his city of Gershwin, Ellington and Goodman,” suggests John Robert Brown. “By then, the canyons of steel that Duke describes already included the Chrysler Building and the Empire State. And, inspiring Duke’s thrill of first nighting, Harlem danced, Broadway sang, and Manhattan was the location of the center of the jazz universe.”

AUTUMNAL The autumnal equinox, which brings the fall season to the Northern Hemisphere, occurs this year on September 22 at 10:29 P.M. EDT. The word equinox comes from the Latin words for “equal night.” The fall and spring equinoxes are the only days of the year in which the sun crosses the celestial equator. From here on out, the temperatures begin to drop, and the days start to get shorter than the nights.

The writer and musician John Robert Brown thought that Duke’s song and the season are well matched: “‘Autumn in New York,’ that great ballad of

urban longing, describes for me the best season to visit Manhattan.” The Essential New York City Guide foregoes the angst, and simply suggests that “Autumn is a wonderful season in New York City. The weather is nice, the leaves change colors, and the parks are beautiful. It’s a very enjoyable time to visit NYC.” Commemorations of 9/11, though, will forever cloud that enjoyment.

For many people the idea of autumn begins much earlier, around Labor Day, the first Monday in September. Women of a certain age don’t wear white after Labor Day, and school kids know that a new school year is about to begin. New York-area boomers may recall the uneasy feeling that came over them when the Robert Hall clothing store jingle started playing on local radio stations in in late August:

School bells ring and children sing It’s back to Robert Hall again Mother knows for better clothes It’s back to Robert Hall again You’ll save more on clothes for school.

Shop at Robert Hall.

Closely related to the queasiness evoked by The Ed Sullivan Hour on Sunday evenings signaling the end of the weekend, the jingle reminded you that it was just a matter of weeks until the fun was over. The brilliant, unhappy novelist John Cheever provided an adult version of this sense of impending doom: “A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.” The English writer Angela Carter was similarly gloomy: “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.”

The late Nora Ephron thought otherwise, finding joy in the back-to-school rituals associated with autumn. “Don’t you love New York in the fall?” she asked.

“It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” The French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher Albert Camus dropped his absurdist,

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Saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, Ira Gershwin (left) and Vernon Duke at work, highly influential double bassist Charles Mingus, and legendary Tony Bennett.

( C L O C K WISE F ROM TOP LEFT)

“conscious dissatisfaction” long enough to suggest, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” The urbane poet/Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara was perfectly willing to be uplifted by the season:

It was autumn by the time I got around the corner, oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

RUSSIAN ROOTS Composer/songwriter Vladimir Dukelsky (1903-1969) came from an aristocratic background and received his musical training in a Russian conservatory.

Arriving in New York in the early 1920s, he was quick to make the acquaintance of Sergei Prokofiev, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, George Balanchine and Jean Cocteau. He collaborated with lyricists such as Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn. George Gershwin (né Jacob Gershowitz) suggested the Americanized version of his name around 1922.

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Duke used his given name, though, when he wrote classical music and poetry, but it is for songs like “I Like the Likes of You” and “Taking a Chance on Love” that Vernon Duke is remembered; Vladimir Dukelsky’s “Dédicaces,” (a concerto for piano, orchestra and soprano obbligato), and “The End of St. Petersburg” (premièred by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra) seem incidental.

In his wonderfully entertaining book The House that George Built, Wilifred Sheed notes that Duke “actually received worse reviews for his classical work than George [Gershwin] ever did, but behaved as if he came from a superior species anyhow, just for having written it.” Sheed credits Gershwin’s generosity toward up-and-coming songwriters like Duke with “ushering in an era of goodwill along Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s. Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski describes Duke as George’s “excitable, gossipy, class conscious composer friend.”

As sung by Billie Holiday:

Autumn in New York, the gleaming rooftops at sundown Autumn in New York, it lifts you up when you’re run down

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Jaded roués and gay divorcées who lunch at the Ritz Will tell you that its divine This autumn in New York transforms the slums into Mayfair Autumn in New York, you’ll need no castle in Spain Lovers that bless the dark on benches in Central Park Greet autumn in New York, it’s good to live it again.

GREAT RECORDINGS

Mingus, Charlie Mariano, Mary Lou Williams, and Stan Kenton each made recordings of “Autumn in New York,” and 1952 was pretty good too, with contributions from Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson, Teddy Wilson, and Dan Terry and His Orchestra.

JazzStandards.com identifies Charlie Parker’s version that year, which included strings, “stands as perhaps the definitive instrumental interpreter of the song according to JazzStandards.com. Billie Holiday’s version with pianist Oscar Peterson is No. 5 on Timeout, New York’s list of the 100 best New York City, and people familiar with the recordings don’t need to be told that the 1957 collaboration between Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald is a standout. A Lena Horne recording was released in 1998, and Dawn Upshaw, Sun Ra, David Liebman and John Scofield; and David Murray all issued versions in 1999.

Duke did not provide “the uplift that Tin Pan Alley consumers overwhelmingly preferred,” as Barry Singer has noted. His “music for grownups,” though, seems the exception to the rule. U

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but, like Frank Sinatra, he was able to record more than one moving version of “Autumn in New York.”

Duke wrote the song in 1934 for a show called “Thumbs Up.” The Wikipedia list of “Notable Recordings” of it since that time runs to eight pages. It reads like a Who’s Who of the world of musical artists, beginning in 1946 (Charlie Parker) and ending in 2011 (Ferit Odman). In 1951 alone, Barbara Carroll, Charles

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calendar highlights Thursday, September

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Mercedes-Benz New York City Fashion Week. The world’s top designers showcase their newest collections amongst a crowd of fashion industry titans, celebrities, and models (through September 11). www. mbfashionweek.com.

Thursday, September

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The World Trade Center Memorial and The National September 11 Memorial Museum honors the victims of the World Trade Center attacks through a variety of tributes, exhibits, and walking tours. www.national911memorial.org.

Monday, September

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The New York Theatre Ballet begins its 2014/2015 season in a new location, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, on East 10th Street. The company will operate both its offices and its training arm, the Ballet School NY from the Bowery location. www.nytb.org.

The American Theatre Wing celebrates its 2014 Gala by honoring Dame Angela Lansbury at The Plaza. The star-filled evening includes a cocktail reception, dinner, and performances. www. americantheatrewing.org.

Saturday, September

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The Greenwich Country Club in Greenwich, Connecticut hosts this year’s Wall Street Tennis Challenge.

All of the proceeds benefit the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. The tournament consists of round-robin tennis games with some of Wall Street’s leading tennis players. www. wallstreetchallenge.kintera.org.

Germanic heritage and culture is proudly on display for Oktoberfest in Central Park (Rumsey Playfield).

This is New York’s largest Oktoberfest celebration. Expect authentic German food and brews. www.germanparadenyc.org.

9/30

The 88th Annual Feast of San Gennaro in historic Little Italy on Mulberry Street, between Canal and Houston. This 11day celebration of the Patron Saint of Naples includes religious processions, colorful parades, and a huge selection of Italian sweets and delicacies. www.sangennaro.org.

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9/27 10/13 Saturday, September

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“Dance & Fashion” exhibit opens at the Museum at FIT. The show explores the relationship between traditional ballet costuming and the influence of contemporary fashion designers like Yves Saint Laurent, Balmain, Balenciaga, and Valentino through January 2015. www.fitnyc.edu.

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Best selling author Ken Follett reads from and signs copies of his latest book, Edge of Eternity: Book Three of the Century Trilogy at the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square. www. barnesandnoble.com.

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The New York Film Festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center (through October 13). www.filmlinc.com.

Tuesday, September

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Explore autumn night skies with Hayden Planetarium presenters Christina Pease, Joe Rao, and Ted Williams of the American Museum of Natural History. www.amnh.org.

Saturday, October

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The Autumn Crafts Festival at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will take place over the course of two weekends: October 4, 5 & October 11, 12. www. craftslincoln.org.

Sunday, October

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Take a peek inside of Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Children’s Garden with this very special behind-the-scenes tour, which ends with tasty treats from the garden. www.bbg.org.

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Wednesday, October

The Columbus Day Parade features floats, bands, and members of over one hundred local citizen’s organizations.

The Parade travels down Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to 72nd Street. www. columbuscitizensfd.org.

Thursday, October

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Food Network’s New York City Wine and Food Festival. This multi-day event includes exclusive dinners, wine tastings, and culinary workshops with personalities like Mario Battali, John Besh, Tom Colicchio, Bobby Flay, Tyler Florence, and Gabrielle Hamilton through October 19.

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New York Youth Symphony Annual Benefit honoring Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall. The event will take place at Tribeca Rooftop and feature performances by the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Ensemble. www.nyys.org.

In advance of Classic Stage Company’s production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1947 musical Allegro, CSC’s artistic director Brian Kulick and Tony-Award winning director John Doyle lead a conversation at the 92 Street Y. The evening will also feature performances by the members of the cast. www.92y.org.

Cabaret 2014 featuring a performance

by Broadway-veteran Kristin Chenoweth at the New York Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. Proceeds benefit both New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College. www.weill. cornell.edu.

Art Exhibitions: “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs;” MoMA “V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life;” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum “Dance and Fashion;” The Museum at FIT “Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry;” The Metropolitan Museum of Art “The Untamed Landscape: Théodore Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon;” The Morgan Library & Museum “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective;” Whitney Museum of American Art “Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India;” Rubin Museum

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New York Comic Con at the Javits Center in New York City—the largest pop culture festival on the East Coast (through October 12). www.newyorkcomiccon.com.

Saturday, October

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The 12th Annual Open House New York celebrates the city’s architecture and allows New Yorkers and tourists the opportunity to access private residences and historic landmarks throughout the five boroughs (also on October 12). www.ohny.org.

Sunday, October

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“Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” opens at the MoMA New York. This exhibition is a fascinating look at Matisse’s work in the late 1940s when the artist turned almost exclusively to paper and scissors as his primary medium (through February 2015). www.moma.org.

New York Jets vs. Denver Broncos at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. www.newyorkjets.com.

The New York Road Runners FiveBorough Series: Staten Island Half. www.nyrr.org.

Saturday, October

Thursday, October

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The Oyster Festival in downtown Oyster Bay from 11AM to 6PM is the East Coast’s largest waterfront festival, offering live entertainment, Tall Ships, pirate shows, and the iconic oyster eating and shucking contest, also on Sunday, October 19. www. theoysterfestival.org.

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The 2014 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America, will be held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Traci K. Smith, Jan Beatty, and Robert Pinksy are just some of the celebrated writers who will read from and discuss their works through October 26. www.njpac.org.

Friday, October

Spa Week is a bi-annual event focused on the personal health and wellness of consumers. During this time, hundreds of spa, health and wellness locations across the New York area offer discounted treatments and free gift cards (through October 26). www.spaweek.com.

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Village Halloween Parade on Sixth Avenue (from Spring to West 16th Streets). Only those in costume are allowed to participate in the parade —the more outlandish the better!

The event also attracts crowds of artists, dancers, musicians, and street performers. www.halloween-nyc.com.

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Theatre Performances: Aladdin; New Amsterdam Theatre Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; Stephen Sondheim Theatre Bullets Over Broadway; St. James Theatre Cabaret; Studio 54 A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder; Walter Kerr Theatre Rocky; Winter Garden Theatre Heathers: The Musical; New World Stages If/Then; Richard Rodgers Theatre Cinderella; Broadway Theatre Chicago; Ambassador Theatre Jersey Boys; August Wilson Theatre Les Miserables; Imperial Theatre

OCTOBER

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VISITING THE

MUSEUM

THE MEMORIES COME FLOODING BACK

BY ILENE DUBE

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North Tower antenna. (ABOVE

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Chief Medical Examiner vehicle door. ( AB OV E

f I had been asked, before visiting the 9/11 Memorial Museum, if I was personally affected by the September 11 attacks on our country, I might have answered no. After viewing the eight-acre site honoring the 2,983 people who were killed in the horrific attacks, I would have to say we are all personally affected.

When you enter the glass trapezoidal entry pavilion, you immediately develop a somber mindset. An enormous photograph depicting a peaceful scene of the Brooklyn Bridge and East River at 8:30 that morning gets you thinking about what you were doing when the planes hit.

Iconic 70-foot high columns with three-pronged tops soar into the lobby space, designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta.

Trident: One of the architectural terms we learned at the time, referring to the three-branched element distinctive to the lower facades of the Twin Towers. There were 84 that formed its structural perimeter, and here we see two of them, rising like contemporary sculpture, rusted Corten steel with painted markings that helped rescue workers identify them in the rubble.

These weighed 125,000 pounds and were too long and heavy for flatbed trucks so they had to be sawed in half, then rejoined with a protective sleeve, explains docent Howard Levy. The architectural elements were temporarily stored at the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, as archaeologists searched for human remains.

Levy was there at the time of the attack. A neighborhood resident, his apartment was filled with dust from the explosions. Registered with the World Trade Center Health Registry, he is regularly checked out for pulmonary disease. So far, so good. Another friendly docent, a rescue worker, is not so lucky—he developed cancer.

Before beginning his 16 weeks of docent training, Levy volunteered at the Tribute Center on Liberty Street. His warm welcome helps to shake off the rain I had to wait in outside in the ticket holders line.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania: A place few of us had ever heard of before the passengers and crew of the fourth flight hijacked by terrorists that day launched a counter attack, bringing down the plane after it was forced to change course.

Box cutters: A tool few of us knew of, no less that they could be used as a weapon.

Before descending to the museum’s subterranean levels, you walk through a dark corridor and hear voices of those interviewed on the day: “Papers

Museum entrance.

floating through the air like feathers”; “Is this really happening?”; “Surreal”; “Like a Hollywood blockbuster”; “Everything stopped”; “I couldn’t wrap my head around how anyone could do this.”

Suspended screens suggesting the Towers’ shapes display these words, as well as a slide show of people on the street looking up, hands over their mouths.

Minoru Yamasaki: The Modernist architect we learned about in the 1960s; in addition to the Twin Towers, he designed Rainier Tower in Seattle, Picasso Tower in Madrid, the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin Collage and Robertson Hall at Princeton University.

“What has 200 elevators, 1,200 restrooms, 40,000 doorknobs, 200,000 lighting fixtures, 7 million square feet of acoustical tile ceiling, more structural steel than the Verrazano Bridge and was built for more than $1 billion in the 1970s?”

And then the personal connections come flooding back: Yes, just out of film school, I applied for a job as bartender at Windows on the World (no, I didn’t get it, although we ate brunch there.) My family loved taking visitors up for the view. Yes, my husband once worked in one of the towers, although he didn’t go in the day of the attack.

During college breaks, my father took me to watch the construction in progress. He was interested in the engineers’ slurry trench technology enabling the reinforced concrete perimeter wall to be sunk six stories into bedrock, and the specially designed kangaroo cranes from Australia that could lift the heavy loads as the towers rose into the skyline.

What’s amazing is that visitors are inside now, where the original slurry wall has been preserved, again like contemporary art, with reinforced tiebacks make up of 21 steel cables and enclosed in metal pipe to hold it to rock. The slurry wall is designated an historic artifact, as are the tiebacks.

Remnants of our national tragedy as contemporary art: how do I feel about this? The North Tower soared more than a quarter mile into the sky, supported by columns anchored 70 feet below ground. Recovery workers sheared the columns during cleanup. Many victims’ family members view the column remnants as defining elements of the sacred ground where their loved ones were killed. They, too, are designated permanent historic assets. Benches, like pews, are spread about so visitors can pay respect.

Standing in the center of the pit is “The Last Column,” affixed with memorial messages by recovery workers, first responders, volunteers and victims’ relatives. “The Last Column” was lowered on a flatbed truck in May 2003,

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ambulance. (TOP RIGHT) World Trade Center Tridents. (ABOVE RIGHT) North Tower antenna. (BELOW) The Last Column.

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Flight paths for both planes that struck WTC. marking the official end of the nine-month Ground Zero recovery effort, while bagpipers played “Amazing Grace,” and then shrouded and draped it with the American flag. When it departed, buglers played “Taps” and bagpipers and drummers played “America the Beautiful.”

Electronic stations allow you to add your own message and view those of others: “Everyone knows where they were that day;” “I never realized how strong our country can be;” “I was a child that day and am now a police officer with this memory heavy on my heart;” “I have dreamed of coming to NYC all my life to see the courage and strength of New Yorkers;” “Never forget.”

At right is a photograph of the towers and surrounding buildings at sunset, the windows illuminated like jewels. To the left is a section of the steel façade, now sculpture that visitors click their cameras at, and just beyond, a photo of that same skyline without the towers, just clouds of smoke. I remember the smoke and how it drifted to the suburbs, where people could smell death in their verdant backyards.

Feb. 26, 1993: The first effort to topple the towers by Islamic terrorists in a van loaded with 1,200 pounds of explosives that killed six.

Walls with screened projections of the postings for those missing, snapshots of smiling young people, happier times.

“The Survivors’ Stairs:” An artifact of the Vesey Street stairs that hundreds used in seeking escape. It brings back those images that continue to haunt us, of those who fled by jumping out the windows. Two who held hands.

What were you doing on that morning? A perfect end-of-summer day. I was sitting on my porch, having one extra cup of tea before work to enjoy that beautiful September sky. “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning” by Spencer Finch is an installation of 2,983 individual watercolor paintings, an attempt to remember the color of the sky. Each is a unique shade of blue, creating a panoramic mosaic of color in memory of those killed.

Remember how the only visible difference on the skyline between the two towers was that one had an antenna protruding upward? A segment of it is here—all transmissions from it stopped at 10:28, when the second tower collapsed. By then I was driving to work through blurry vision.

Eleven firefighters were lost when the second tower fell. The FDNY lost 343 all told.

Ever since that historic day, we contend with increased security protocols at airports and other public venues. Even here, before entering the museum, we must put our belongings in a gray plastic tub that goes through a scanner.

No, it’s not part of the exhibition—it’s real security. In the “Reflecting on 9/11” Recording Studio, you can join the conversation with the likes of Robert De Niro and Bill Clinton (“We can’t get so concerned with security that we give up our freedom and give in to the terrorists.”)

Another flashback: Visiting one of the towers, witnessing the lobby filled with young men in stiff white shirts, scurrying to elevators, off to their important missions.

Advisory: “This area of the exhibition includes content that may be particularly disturbing.” In one theater area, there are recovered voice mail messages of those in the tower at the time. “The sky so pure, the air so crisp, everything was perfect.” “Walking over bodies…” Not all survived.

These are not actors. Tissues are provided.

Among the artifacts: Debris and papers that flew out of the buildings that day; a girl’s pink jacket with a Peter Pan collar and boy’s pajamas covered with fire trucks, worn by two children among the 53 passengers on Flight 77 that hijackers crashed into the Pentagon; melted touchtone phones, a Rolodex and photo cube from the Pentagon.

9:59AM: The South Tower collapses and Mayor Giuliani attempts to contact Vice President Cheney.

Remember the escape scene in North by Northwest, when Eva Marie Saint climbs Mount Rushmore in high heels? What was it like for women in their work shoes who had to run faster than their personal best? We see a photo of a rescue worker carrying a barefooted woman, and a display of some of the shoes worn by the evacuees.

10:03AM Shanksville, Pennsylvania: On display is the watch of Todd Beamer, the Cranbury, New Jersey, resident aboard Flight 93 who tried to reclaim the aircraft from the hijackers. His last words: “Are you ready? Okay. Let’s roll.” His daughter was born four months later.

10:28AM: The North Tower collapsed.

Never forget. The 9/11 Memorial Museum will make sure you never do. U

Tickets for the 9/11 Museum, $15-$24 (special discounts apply—see museum website), are sold for a specified time and can be purchased in person or online, available up to three months in advance. The museum is open daily: May 21, 2014-September 21, 2014, 9AM-8PM and September 22, 2014-December 31, 2014, 9AM-7PM. Admission to the 9/11 Memorial, on the grounds outside the museum, is free. www.911memorial.org

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urban books Party Animal: George Plimpton, courtesy of the Paris Review

The Paris Review

And The Pilgrim Souls Who Shaped It— Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton

by Linda Arntzenius

It’s been said that individuals only come of age with the demise of their parents.

The same might be said of institutions. With the recent death of literary lion Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) and that of legendary journalist George Plimpton (19272003), the institution that is The Paris Review has surely come of age.

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ounded in 1952 by Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes along with Donald Hall and Thomas Guinzburg, The Paris Review’s first issue appeared in the spring of 1953, with Plimpton replacing Humes as editor. TIME Magazine has called it “the biggest ‘little magazine’ in history” and who could disagree.

For its first few years, it was produced out of a small room in the publishing house Éditions de la Table Ronde, then for a time (1956 to 1957) from a Thames River barge anchored on the Seine. It must have been cramped quarters since the staff took to meeting at Café de Tournon on the Rive Gauche.

Early 1950s Paris was a place of pilgrimage for many writers. The expatriate community included a number of established and struggling American authors, William Styron, James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw, among them. All out war had been replaced by Cold War. It was a time of ambiguity and change. Oh to have been a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on the witticisms, the banter, the gossip, perhaps even the odd shady character who passed through the doors of that Left Bank café.

As Matthiessen acknowledged some 50 years later, The Paris Review was a good cover for his CIA activities. Like many well-connected Yale graduates, he was recruited by the CIA to keep an eye on “suspicious” (read: left leaning or communist sympathizers) expatriates. The Paris Review wasn’t the only overseas journal being supported by the CIA, another notable was Encounter. And Matthiessen wouldn’t be the first or the last old boy from Yale looking out for his country’s interests against the rise of the Russian bête noire.

The revelation of Matthiessen’s CIA connection raised a few eyebrows when it came out in 2007.

In a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen acknowledged that he had “invented” The Paris Review “as cover.” The connection, however, is a mere sidebar to the journal’s stellar history and the larger-than-life adventures of its founders.

One wonders whether Matthiessen and Plimpton had any idea what their “little magazine” would become or indeed any inkling of what they themselves would achieve. That Plimpton would carve a unique niche as a journalist who inhabited his subjects like no other.

That Matthiessen would influence a generation of naturalists, environmentalists, travel writers, and simple dreamers like myself who read his now classic 1978 The Snow Leopard and promptly set about planning my own Himalayan adventure; one that has sustained my nostalgia for those places where “men and mountains meet” ever since.

The Snow Leopard recorded an expedition Matthiessen took with field biologist George Schaller into the Himalayas in 1973. Its candid account not only of the physical journey and its author’s insights about nature, man, and himself—the book was written shortly after his second wife Deborah Love died of cancer— turned Matthiessen into something of a guru. During the 1960s, before LSD was outlawed, Matthiessen and Love, a writer who introduced her husband to Buddhism, were “guinea pigs” in experiments exploring its use. Their Long Island home was a summer retreat for a circle of New York writers. Matthiessen would become a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and, eventually, a Buddhist priest.

I took in little of the Zen aspect of Matthiessen’s book when I first encountered The Snow Leopard back in the early 1980s and was so transported by descriptions of “snow and silence, wind and blue,” that I set off from Kashmir in the north of India to the Buddhist enclave of Ladakh in the Karakoram mountains to experience firsthand what Matthiessen describes so exquisitely.

Focused as I was on the haunting beauty of a journey in which “the precise bite and feel and sound of every step . . . fills me with life,” I missed much of Matthiessen’s spiritual quest until his recent death and the outpouring of reminiscences that it provoked prompted me read the book again, this time in the 2008 paperback reissue with a new introduction by Pico Iyer. Clearly I am not alone in finding Matthiessen’s prose transcendent. “I have been reading Peter Matthiessen’s silver classic for more than a quarter of a century now, and every time I do, like any classic, it gives off a different light,” says Iyer.

Pilgrim Souls Cut from the same cloth, Matthiessen and Plimpton shared privileged Manhattan backgrounds. Both served in WW II, Plimpton as a driver and demolitions expert for the U.S. Army (much later, his parties would become famous for fireworks displays) and Matthiessen designing protection for transatlantic merchant convoys for the U.S. Navy. Both were born in 1927 and the War interrupted their studies; Matthiessen’s at Yale, and Plimpton’s at Harvard. Matthiessen majored in English and studied zoology at Yale. He also wrote a short story which won Atlantic Monthly magazine’s prestigious Atlantic Prize; his junior year was spent at the Sorbonne. At Harvard, Plimpton also studied English. A classmate and close personal friend of Robert Kennedy, he would later be among those who wrestled Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan to the ground after the assassination in 1968. As an undergraduate he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. After graduating, he went on to King’s College, Cambridge in England, from which he earned a bachelor’s in 1952.

Both men began their literary careers in Paris.

And both took on life’s experiences with gusto.

Matthiessen, the novelist, traveled the world and inspired generations of naturalists, environmental conservationists and travel writers. Plimpton, the journalist, invented his own style of risk-taking participatory journalism to take his readers inside the world of sports. He “tried out” all manner of professions: the life of a professional athlete (boxer, pitcher, quarterback, tennis player, bridge player, golfer, ice hockey goalie); a musician with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; a circus aerialist; even performing his own stand-up comedy routine at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

George Plimpton His book titles record his exploits. Plimpton authored some three dozen, including Paper Lion (about playing professional football with the Detroit Lions, 1966), Out of My League (baseball, 1961), The Bogey Man (travelling with the PGA Tour, 1967), Mad Ducks and Bears (Detroit Lions linemen, 1973), Shadow Box (the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, 1977), One More July (NFL training camp, 1977), and Open Net (professional ice hockey with the Boston Bruins, 1985). He also appeared in cameo roles in more than 30 films, including Lawrence of Arabia, and Good Will Hunting.

At one time, while working as a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic, he struck a gong with such force during a performance of Tchaikovsky that conductor Leonard Bernstein burst into applause.

The witty accounts of George Plimpton’s various “careers” were so well-loved that he was poked fun at in two New Yorker cartoons. A November 6, 1971, cartoon by Whitney Darrow, Jr. shows a cleaning lady on her hands and knees scrubbing an office floor while saying to another one: “I’d like to see George Plimpton do this sometime.” In another, a patient looks up at the masked surgeon about to operate on him and asks, “Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?”

Described as having “boundless energy and perpetual bonhomie,” Plimpton had a circle of friends that included Norman Mailer, William Styron and Gore Vidal. He loved practical jokes and pulled off a corker for Sports Illustrated in an article about an invented baseball pitcher called Sidd Finch, whom he described as a Buddhist with a 168-mile-an-hour fastball. Plimpton enlarged on his character in his 1987 novel, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Hugh Hefner, Graydon Carter, Ken Burns, Ric Burns, James Lipton, Gay Talese and Matthiessen were among those to describe him in last year’s documentary film Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, which uses Plimpton’s own narration and archival material for a portrait of the man who lived life to the full. “As an artist, his life was his greatest work of art,” said the film’s co-writer and co-producer Tom Bean.

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Peter Matthiessen at home by Jill Krementz, 1995.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described him thus: “Like my father, he saw life as a great adventure. You could either embrace and embark or you could wait until the tide rolled out and you lost your chance. I think George never wanted to lose his chance. He always launched his ship on a high tide and found whatever adventure was waiting for him there.”

indigenous South American tribe, was adapted into the film of the same name in 1991.

Matthiessen’s 1969 Sal Si Puedes focused on farm union leader Cesar Chavez. A spokesman and fundraiser for the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy, in addition to nature and travel, he examined American Indian issues and history. His 1983 In the Spirit of Crazy Horse argued for the innocence of the Lakota leader Leonard Peltier whose controversial conviction and sentencing for the shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 is questioned by Amnesty International. His last work, a novel, In Paradise, set inside a WW II concentration camp during a weeklong Zen retreat, has been described as “a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.” It was was published in April.

He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction.

Peter matthiessen For a time, Matthiessen also wrote non-fiction for Sports Illustrated. After returning from Paris, he produced a series of articles that later formed the basis of his successful 1959 book Wildlife in America, a history of the extinction and endangerment of animals and birds as a result of human settlement. He traveled farther afield to the Amazon and Tierra del Fuego for Cloud Forest (1961), and to New Guinea for Under the Mountain Wall (1962).

Besides The Snow Leopard, his best known works include the novels Far Tortuga (1975) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965). The latter, about the encounter of a group of American missionaries and members of an

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Peter Mathiesesen

George Plimpton in George Plimpton as Himself. Laemmle Zeller Films.

“ The pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that . . . leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight.”

—Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds The Paris Review With Matthiessen and Plimpton at the helm, could The Paris Review have been anything less than extraordinary? After establishing the magazine, Matthiessen left it in Plimpton’s hands and returned to the United States in 1954, although he continued his involvement. In its first five years, the literary quarterly published Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. By 1973, when the magazine left Paris for Plimpton’s New York apartment on 72nd Street, it had a firm reputation for quality fiction and for introducing little known writers to fame, Terry Southern and Philip Roth, among them. Its signature “Writers at Work” series of one-on-one interviews (Matthiessen’s idea, executed by Plimpton) laid bare the life and craft, as well as the personal idiosyncrasies of contemporary writers. Plimpton drew on writers he knew personally, beginning with E.M. Forster, whom he had met in his student days at Cambridge. Interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, Elizabeth Bishop, Vladimir Nabokov, among others, followed.

Milestones of contemporary literature that made their first public appearance on the pages of The Paris Review include Italo Calvino’s “Last Comes the Raven,” Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus,” Donald Barthelme’s “Alice,” Jim Carroll’s “The Basketball Diaries,” Matthiessen’s “Far Tortuga,”

Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Virgin Suicides”, and Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.”

Plimpton served as editor for 50 years and the magazine today continues to live up to its auspicious beginnings with even more to offer its readers under Lorin Stein, editor since April 2010. The magazine’s print edition and its website (www.theparisreview.org) have both been overhauled to critical acclaim; its online archive is a goldmine of literary interviews. Today’s Paris Review has more non-fiction (a recent issue has a piece on Alan Turing and artificial intelligence).

From 2006 to 2009, Picador published the four-volume set of The Paris Review interviews. In 2012, the magazine published the anthology, Object Lessons, a selection of twenty short stories from its archive, each with an introduction by a contemporary author. A resource for those interested in literary technique, it has works chosen by the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis and Ali Smith.

As Stein wrote in 2010, “Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world.”

And, I might add, our picture of ourselves.

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GRAY MATTER Product selection by Gina Hookey and Kendra Russell

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destinations

Longwood Gardens

An Autumn Escape to the Brandywine RiverValley

Gateway Stables Riding Center

by Taylor Smith

T

he Brandywine River Valley encompasses sections of Southeastern Pennsylvania and Northern Delaware. This is horse country, rich in farmland, rolling hills, and history.

The area is dotted with 19th century grist mills and Civil War sites. In autumn, the foliage is alive with color and the many bed and breakfast lodgings open their doors to weekend travellers. It’s no wonder that the famously talented Wyeth clan made the Brandywine their primary home when they weren’t in Maine. Located only a few hours from Philadelphia and Manhattan, the Brandywine valley makes for a relaxing long weekend.

Visitors will soon come to understand why it is often referred to as the “England of Pennsylvania.”

Kennett Square (www.historickennettsquare.com) is a small town with many shopping and dining attractions. The unique eateries range from Japanese to German. Sovana Bistro is an excellent choice for authentic European and Mediterranean cuisine (www.sovanabistro.com).

Half Moon Restaurant and Saloon (www.halfmoonrestaurant) is a cozy pub in downtown Kennett Square serving a huge selection of bottled Belgian beers and hearty entreés. Art galleries and home décor stores are particular highlights here.

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The Longwood Art Gallery (www.longwoodartgallery.com) has been serving the Brandywine River arts community for over 30 years. They currently represent more than 50 local and regional artists. Scout & Annie (www.scoutandannie.com) houses a fun collection of vintage furniture, pottery, accessories, fine candles, and luxurious bath products. They are the go-to source for mid-century modern furniture.

Gateway Stables Riding Center (www.gatewaystables.com) in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania provides expert riding services to locals and visitors alike. The center offers English and Western-style riding lessons seven days per week, along with trail rides and boarding services. Autumn trail rides are particularly peaceful. These rides are geared towards

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(above riders ages 10 and older and last approximately 1 hour. Reservations are requested to ensure availability of horses and guides. Dress code is also enforced for the comfort and safety of the rider. Be sure to wear long pants and boots with a heel.

Don your warmest fall sweater and rent a canoe from Northbrook Canoe Co. (www.northbrookcanoe.com) in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

The Brandywine River is calm and quiet here—almost meditative. On your paddle journey you will pass by stately oak, and sycamore trees, along with a host of local wildlife. Be sure to row past Trimble’s Ford, the spot where British and Hessian soldiers crossed the river to surprise George Washington. A one-hour canoe rental is $45.

Longwood Gardens (www.longwoodgardens.com) was once owned by the industrialist Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954) who purchased the property to serve as an arboretum and his private estate. Du Pont was greatly inspired by his world travels and added extensively to the property over the years in the form of fountains, sculptures, and flora. Today, the property consists of 20 outdoor gardens, 20 indoor gardens, greenhouses (conservatories), fountains, tree houses, and a new meadow garden. The entire property is set on approximately 1,077 acres. Longwood Gardens changes with the seasons. The onset of fall brings new life to the acres of walking paths. After Thanksgiving, the estate creates special yuletide displays, light shows, and festive orchestral concerts. Longwood Gardens is located less than 15 minutes from Kennett Square.

The Brandywine River Museum (www.brandywinemuseum.org) houses a definitive collection of art works by the Wyeth family of artists.

Located in beautiful Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the area inspired the many folkloric scenes painted by N.C. Wyeth, his son Andrew Wyeth, and grandson Jamie Wyeth. The current exhibit, “Exalted Nature,” includes the visionary landscapes of Charles Burchfield, and is on view through November 16. Paintings and drawings depicting the quests of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table will be on view from November 28 through January 4 in the exhibit, “Enchanted Castles and Noble Knights.” Visitors can take a tour of Andrew Wyeth’s studio in Chadds Ford where he painted from 1940 to 2008. The modest studio has undergone careful restoration to preserve its original appearance.

Not to be overlooked is the museum’s collection of American landscape paintings, illustrations, still lifes, and portraits.

Winterthur

The Benjamin Ring House The Benjamin Ring House (www.thebrandywine.com/attractions) is a historic building on the Brandywine Battlefield in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The home, which served as main headquarters for General George Washington during the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, is now a walk-through museum and contains a delightful collection of Quakerstyle furniture.

Winterthur (www.winterthur.org) is one of America’s leading museums for the exhibition of American decorative arts. Costumes of Downton Abbey is an exhibition of original fashions from the awardwinning television series Downton Abbey. The exhibition is on view through January 4, 2015. The museum’s 60-acre garden and surrounding

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Wyeth Gallery at the Brandywine River Museum

Gathering room at the Inn at Montchanin Village

woodlands make for ideal exploration especially if the weather is cool and mild. The museum offers a variety of tours and programs for families with young children. Museum stores and cafés are another fun diversion.

The Inn at Montchanin Village (www.historichotels.org) in Montchanin, Delaware, was named for Alexandrine de Montchanin, grandmother of the founder of the DuPont Gunpowder Company. The inn is actually a 19th-century village that includes 11 restored buildings, landscaped gardens, outdoor fireplaces, walking trails, and the popular Krazy Kat’s Restaurant, which was once the village blacksmith shop.

The village is located halfway between New York and Washington, D.C., and only 25 minutes from Philadelphia’s International Airport. A stay at the village is ideal for a family vacation or a solo retreat.

The Fairville Inn (www.fairvilleinn.com) includes elegant accommodations and is conveniently located a short distance from Longwood Gardens, Winterthur, and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Now a bed and breakfast, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Fairville Historic District. Situated on over five acres, the inn is surrounded by miles of backroads, which make for excellent hiking and walking paths.

All of the 13 rooms and two suites are individually decorated in elegant colonial décor. The inn serves a complimentary homestyle breakfast each morning with freshly-baked breads and muffins. Afternoon tea is served daily, accompanied by fruit and cheese. If you are looking to break a sweat, the inn will direct you to nearby golf courses and bike rentals.

The Chaddsford Winery (www.chaddsford.com) was founded in 1982 and has since grown into one of the most productive vineyards in Pennsylvania. It regularly produces Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir, to much acclaim. Its new artisan series includes a collection of Niagra, Sangria and Spiced Apple. The Chadds Ford location consists of a tasting room, patio and market where you can purchase all of the wines. They also maintain a Wine Tasting Room at Peddler’s Village (www.peddlersvillage.com), a popular outdoor shopping center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The Chaddsford Winery

Brandywine River

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