May 17-19: Bethel Woods celebrates 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 with Lunar Weekend’s sleepover in the museum and Deep Field symphonic film filled with Hubble Telescope imagery. What effect did space travel have on the 400,000 young people who descended on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm just weeks after the Moon landing?
Saturday, May 11: Wide-ranging musical fluency runs in the family – in brother Loudon, in nephew Rufus – and Sloan is no exception.
May 11-12: This Mothers’ Day Weekend event features more than 100 vendors selling a variety of wares.
Friday, May 10 and Sunday, May 12: While Mahler’s No. 8 is the one affectionately dubbed the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of its immense ensemble size and logistical challenges (sometimes involving entire second orchestras and choirs performing in the wings, out of audience view), No. 3 is no small and tidy affair. Bard’s performance will employ more than 160 musicians to get it right.
Saturday, May 11: In celebration of warming weather and a long history of apple-growing in the Hudson Valley, the Village of Red Hook will once again fill the streets with May merriment.
A strong and passionate mythology surrounds motherhood: one that alternately glorifies the institution in sentiment and song, and at the same time pins our culture’s ills onto the failure of mothers to get their jobs done well enough. Incidentally, that job is both thankless and supremely rewarding – a dichotomy that no woman expects when she signs on.
The Ulster County Poorhouse opened in New Paltz in 1828, at the site on Libertyville Road where the Ulster County Fairgrounds and county pool complex are now located. The facility closed in 1976 after having housed thousands of people in the intervening years. Some were classified as “insane” or “intemperate,” but the records show just as many who were admitted because of old age, sickness or disability. There were unwed mothers, “debauched” women, abandoned wives, babies and children, former slaves and recent immigrants injured while employed building the Catskill Aqueduct and D & H Canal.
Saturday, May 25: While the eccentric musical visionary Dave Longstreth had been making experimental pop records for years, a pair of major releases – 2009’s Bitte Orca and 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan – firmly established the then-Brooklyn-based ensemble as one of the most formidable voices in the conservatory wing of indie-pop. Everything the man does is challenging, and worth it.
If you ask anyone the first words spoken from the Moon, they’ll invariably mention the “One small step” speech. Actually, the first lunar words were, “Okay, engine stop,” uttered by Buzz Aldrin. Less than a minute later, Armstrong said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!” This July 20, 1969 photo of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module interior shows Aldrin during the lunar landing mission.
May 10 to October 31: Harvey Fite, one of the founders of the Fine Arts Department at Bard College, spent time restoring Mayan ruins at Copán in Honduras while studying Mesoamerican indigenous sculpture, and in the process learned how to do dry-key stone masonry, a technique that uses gravity to create stable stone structures without mortar. In 1938 he purchased an abandoned quarry in High Woods as a source for bluestone to sculpt, and began to position some of his larger pieces in that outdoor setting.