Club Petroushka, Émigré Performance, and New York's Russian Nightclubs of the Roaring Twenties

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-509
Author(s):  
NATALIE K. ZELENSKY
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Performative Space ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
Gypsy Music

AbstractIn the midst of the Prohibition era, New York City proliferated with nightclubs that presented patrons with imagined worlds of music and entertainment. This essay explores the role of music in creating such imagined worlds, looking specifically at the Russian-themed nightclubs founded by and employing émigrés recently exiled from Bolshevik Russia. Examining Midtown's Club Petroushka as a prime example of such a space, this essay focuses on the so-called “Russian Gypsy” entertainment that caught the eye and ear of the club's patrons, whose ranks included Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the Gershwin brothers. Based on an examination of archival material—including memoirs, compositions, and extant recordings of Club Petroushka's musicians and photographs detailing its interior—as well as on advertisements and reviews from Russian American and other newspapers and magazines, this essay contends that the “Russian Gypsy” music presented at Club Petroushka enabled a transformative experience for patrons while providing a performative space for its recently exiled musicians. I argue that two aspects of this music in particular enabled the transformative process as it was delineated in contemporary discourses: 1) heightened emotionality; and 2) playing with a sense of time (a musical attribute I call “achronality”). Examining the complex cultural entanglements at work in the performance of “Russian Gypsy” music and situating my analysis within a theoretical framework of night cultures proposed by Brian D. Palmer and mimesis proposed by Michael Taussig, this essay illuminates the multivalent role of this musical trope for the different constituencies comprising Club Petroushka, while it also documents the largely overlooked Russian-Romani musical tradition as it took shape in the anti-Bolshevik, first wave Russian diaspora.

38. Max Brodel (1870-1941): His artistic influence on surgical learning at John Hopkins Medical School

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
P. Pace-Asciak ◽  
T. Gelfand
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Neck Surgery ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Medical Illustration ◽  
3 Dimensional ◽  
Teaching Anatomy ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Pathological Disease

Medical students depend on illustration to learn anatomical facts and details that may be too subtle for the written or spoken word. For surgical disciplines, learners rely on tools such as language, 2-dimensional illustrations, and 3-dimensional models to pass on important concepts. Although a photograph can convey factual information, illustration can highlight and educate the pertinent details for understanding surgical procedures, neurovascular structures, and the pathological disease processes. In order to understand the current role of medical illustration in education, one needs to look to the past to see how art has helped solve communication dilemmas when learning medicine. This paper focuses on Max Brodel (1870-1941), a German-trained artist who eventually immigrated to the United States to pursue his career as a medical illustrator. Shortly after his arrival in Baltimore, Brodel made significant contributions to medical illustration in Gynecology at John Hopkins University, and eventually in other fields of medicine such as Urology and Otolaryngology. Brodel is recognized as one of America’s most distinguished medical illustrators for creating innovative artistic techniques and founding the profession of medical illustration. Today, animated computer based art is synergistically used with medical illustration to educate students about anatomy. Some of the changes that have occurred with the advancement of computer technology will be highlighted and compared to a century ago, when illustrations were used for teaching anatomy due to the scarcity of cadavers. Schultheiss D, Udo J. Max Brodel (1870-1941) and Howard A.Kelly (1858-1943) – Urogynecology and the birth of modern medical illustration. European Journal of Obstetrics & gynecology and Reproductive Biology 1999; 86:113-115. Crosby C. Max Brodel: the man who put art into medicine. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991. Papel ID. Max Brodel’s contributions to otolaryngology – Head and Neck surgery. The American Journal of Otology 1986; 7(6):460-469.

Neoliberalism, Law and its Discontents: Three Recent Interventions

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Malhotra
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Law

Honor Brabazon, ed. Neoliberal Legality: Understanding the Role of law in the neoliberal project (New York: Routledge, 2017). 214pp. Paperback.$49.95 Katharina Pistor. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 297 pp. Hardcover.$29.95 Astra Taylor. Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone (New York: Metropolitan Books--Macmillan, 2019). Hardcover$27.00

Wilfred Ethier. Modern International Economics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 1983. xviii + 588 pp.

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Nadeem A. Burney
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
New York ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
International Economics ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
International Markets ◽  
The Past ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Recent Developments

Its been long recognized that various economies of the world are interlinked through international trade. The experience of the past several years, however, has demonstrated that this economic interdependence is far greater than was previously realized. In this context, the importance of international economic theory as an area distinct from general economics hardly needs any mentioning. What gives international economic theory this distinction is international markets for some goods and effects of national sovereignty on the character of economic activity. Wilfred Ethier's book, which incorporates recent developments in the field, is an excellent addition to textbooks on international economics for one- or twosemester undergraduate courses. The book mostly covers standard topics. A distinguishing feature of this book is its detailed analysis of the flexible exchange rates and a discussion of the various approaches used for their determination. Within each chapter, the author has extensively used facts, figures and major events to clarify the concepts in the light of the theoretical framework. The book also discusses, in a fair amount of detail, the existing international monetary system and the role of various international organizations.

Music and Gesture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Zbikowski
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
Swing Time ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between music and physical gesture, drawing on recent research on the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech. Such gestures appear to be motivated by thought processes that are independent from speech and that in many cases offer analogs for dynamic processes. The chapter outlines the infrastructure for human communication that supports language and gesture as well as music. This outline provides a framework for exploring how music and gesture are similar and for how they are different. These comparisons are made through analyses of the movements Fred Astaire makes while accompanying himself at the piano in the 1936 film Swing Time and those Charlie Chaplin makes to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 in the 1941 film The Great Dictator. These analyses further explicate the role of syntactic processes and syntactic layers in musical grammar and introduce referential frameworks, which serve as perceptual anchors for syntactic processes.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

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