The animated short film, “Juxtaposed” by Alex Wager, opens with this dedication:

“For those I’ve lost,
for those I’ve found,
and for those I hope to rediscover.”

As the general public, we don’t get exposed to short films from our typical media consumption sources…TV, movie theaters, Hulu, Netflix, DVDs…If you want to watch a short you have to seek it out – at a festival or online. This dedication from Alex reminds me of that search. I often find myself browsing the web looking for sites I know I’ve seen but can’t remember, those I’ve found by accident and those I hope will inspire me.

Reel13 online is one destination you can browse for short films that will inspire you, whether it’s the extraordinary talent of a gifted animator or the way a story can ring so true to your own life.

This week we’re kicking off a partnership with Rooftop Films – one of New York’s most popular and venerable summer event series. For four weeks, Rooftop will curate Reel13’s online shorts competition. The shorts will screen at a Rooftop live event and then stream online at Reel13.org where you can vote for the winner. And as always, each winner will be broadcast on THIRTEEN on Saturday night and win a cash prize. Read More …

Laura Savini, Vice President of Communications and Marketing at sister station WLIW21, taped a conversation with renowned chef Jacques Pepin about what he’s cooking this summer, hanging out with chocolatier Jacques Torres and other famous chefs. Click here to watch the video.

You can see more of Jacques Pepin on THIRTEEN and WLIW21 every Sunday in “Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home” and on THIRTEEN every Saturday in “Jacques Pepin: More Fast Food My Way.”

Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his childhood in Ireland into a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday, July 19th. He was 78 years old.

In 2006, New York Voices host Rafael Pi Roman sat down for an interview with McCourt, at his old classroom at the original Stuvyestant High School. McCourt also discussed his most recent book, “Teacher Man,” an account of his thirty years as a teacher in the New York public school system.

The nominees for the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy® Awards were announced this morning in Los Angeles by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Great Performances and American Masters have been nominated for nine Emmy® Awards in seven categories. Winners will be announced this September at a ceremony in Los Angeles. Here’s a list of programs at THIRTEEN that are nominated this year, along with links where you can watch many of them online.

OUTSTANDING VOICE-OVER PERFORMANCE

American Masters
Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About
Ron Rifkin, Narrator

OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL MAIN TITLE THEME MUSIC

Great Performances
John Williams, Theme Music By

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR A MOVIE

Great Performances
Cyrano de Bergerac
A Cyrano on Film, LLC Production
with Thirteen/WNET New York in association with Ellen M Krass Productions, Inc. and NHK Enterprises
Kevin Kline as Cyrano de Bergerac

Great Performances
King Lear
A Co-production of The Performance Company, Iambic Productions Limited, Thirteen/WNET New York and Channel 4, in association with NHK
Sir Ian McKellen as King Lear

OUTSTANDING SPECIAL CLASS PROGRAMS
Carnegie Hall Opening Night 2008: A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein
A Production of Carnegie Hall and Thirteen/WNET New York in association with San Francisco Symphony

OUTSTANDING NONFICTION SERIES
American Masters
Susan Lacy, Executive Producer
Prudence Glass, Series Producer
Julie Sacks, Supervising Producer
Judy Kinberg, Producer

OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING
American Masters
Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About
Amanda Vaill, Writer

Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business Of America
When I’m Bad, I’m Better—The Groundbreakers
A co-production of Ghost Light Films and Thirteen/WNET New York in association with Rhino Entertainment and BBC
Michael Kantor, Writer
Laurence Maslon, Writer

OUTSTANDING SOUND EDITING FOR NONFICTION PROGRAMMING (SINGLE OR MULTI-CAMERA)
American Masters
Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts
Stephen R. Smith, Sound Supervisor

by Susan Yung

The great German choreographer Pina Bausch passed away on June 29 within a brutally short week of a cancer diagnosis, at 68 years of age. It was a terrible shock to the world of dance and performance—the end of an era and the sudden, cold beginning of another without her.

Her pieces, performed by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, a company of characters more intriguing than Dickens’, were life magnified—passionate, dirty, beautiful, violent, and crazy. A lot of their actions seemed more like rituals of torture than dance. But it was definitely theater, set to expansive musical collages, in various Peter Pabst arrangements of dirt and water, among a fallen wall of concrete blocks which we witnessed crashing down, a field of carnations, a human-scaled terrarium.

The collapsing wall in Palermo, Palermo was certainly the most terrifying mechanical event I’ve witnessed in a theater. But more terrifying were the things Pina’s dancers did to one another or themselves, as people do in real life. Whatever you can think of to inflict pain or humiliation on another human, she did. These tasks, in which the women were usually the victims, often involved icons of femininity—long hair, lipstick, the donning and shedding of evening gowns, and the pervasive stilettos, which the mere idea of wearing was enough to make my calves cramp. She also trafficked generously in the four elements (well, fire being cigarettes), and in fruit, knives, chairs, and other banal objects.

Women in silk warred for power with men in suits, each gender wielding its considerable charms and brute strength. But the bolt of pure romance that shot through her work explored the opposite pole. The men, sometimes acting as mere furniture, carried the women aloft like angels; the women curled themselves around men like wisps of smoke, or cooed in a group around one lucky guy.

In the mid-90s, Pina’s work began to soften for real, beyond the periodic seduction. More floral and less grave (as in burial) imagery. Water, but in buckets to wash with, or to shower from the rafters or well up mildly in a pond and recede. Hair, now brushed; satin, less to escape out of than cover up with. Always heels and suits. A good deal more movement—solos created for each individual dancer, even for the liquid Pina herself on rare anticipated occasion. It was like she’d exorcised most of the demons that drove her til she was five plus decades in, and she’d fallen in love all over again and needed to remind the world what it felt like. Elysium after the apocalypse.

Soundtracks grew in eclecticism and source. Clamored for to do commissions by cities/countries around the planet, her later oeuvre grew by a series of travelogues, cultural scrapbooks of numerous destinations far from Wuppertal. And even more dance than ever, in her lyrical, unending pages of cursive, forcefully performed by the dancers we’d come to know less as athletes, more as personalities. And each new show added new characters to an already indelible pantheon, performers who burrowed even deeper into our psyches with each visit.

I’ve watched her work for 25 years at BAM, her sole New York venue. I work at BAM, and a big reason is because Pina’s work had a seismic affect on me when I first saw it. It pushed human emotion to unexpected extremes, frighteningly dark as well as gloriously ecstatic. When her company came to town, there was always a buzz in the building, from hearing company class being conducted in the mornings, to the feverish lines of people in the Opera House lobby waiting to buy tickets to her sold-out shows. In person—pale, slight, and soft-spoken—she seemed less flesh and bones than luminous spirit, humility, and politesse, which is how she will be remembered, alongside her wildly human body of work.

Photographs: (top) Pablo Aran Gimeno and Ruth Amarante in Bamboo Blues, photo by Ulli Weiss. (bottom) Pina Bausch, photo by Jonathan Barth.

Susan Yung writes about dance and art for various publications including Dance Magazine, The New York Sun, and Ballet-tanz. She oversees publications at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as well. Read more of her take on the New York art and dance scene on the SundayArts blog.

THIRTEEN is spotlighting the unique stories and experiences of Muslims with a month’s worth of diverse programming from emerging Muslim-American comedians to modern-day society in Morocco.

Saturday, June 6, 2009
10:50 pm: REEL 13: LE GRANDE VOYAGE
Directed by Ismael Ferroukhi, this 2004 film is a story about a French-Moroccan and his father traveling to Mecca by car, and how their relationship changes along the way.

Sunday, June 7, 2009
12 pm: A THOUSAND AND ONE VOICES: THE MUSIC OF ISLAM
Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud’s film explores the rich and diverse forms of music coming from the Muslim world.

Monday, June 8, 2009
10 pm: WIDE ANGLE: DISHING DEMOCRACY (originally aired July 31, 2007, watch online)
The advent of satellite television in Arab countries in the early ‘90s has brought independent journalism to the region, especially news and talk shows that deal with topics such as equality among the sexes and polygamy. This documentary explores this phenomenon.
Watch a clip.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009
1:30 am: REEL 13: LE GRANDE VOYAGE
Directed by Ismael Ferroukhi, this 2004 film is about a French-Moroccan and his father traveling to Mecca by car, and how their relationship changes along the way.

10 pm: AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: STAND UP: MUSLIM AMERICAN COMICS COME OF AGE (originally aired May 11, 2008)
This program tells the story of five Muslim-American comedians on how they’re making audiences laugh while breaking down stereotypes.
Watch a clip.

Friday, June 12, 2009
3 am: AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: STAND UP: MUSLIM AMERICAN COMICS COME OF AGE (originally aired May 11, 2008)
This program tells the story of five Muslim-American comedians on how they’re making audiences laugh while breaking down stereotypes.

4 am: WIDE ANGLE: DISHING DEMOCRACY (originally aired July 31, 2007, watch online )
The advent of satellite television in Arab countries in the early ‘90s has brought independent journalism to the region, especially news and talk shows that deal with topics such as equality among the sexes and polygamy. This documentary examines this phenomenon.

10 pm: WIDE ANGLE: CLASS OF 2006 (originally aired July 25, 2006, watch online)
This program spotlights on the current political and social changes in Morocco, particularly for its female population, since the reforms instituted by King Mohammad VI.

Saturday, June 13, 2009
1 pm: SHIFTING SANDS
A companion documentary to the book by Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Gil Sedan of the same name, Shifting Sands explores the modern-day changes facing the traditionally nomadic Bedouin women of Israel and Palestine, and how they are coping with them.

10:55 pm: REEL 13 INDIES: CONFESSIONS OF A GAMBLER
This 2008 dramatic film is about an independent Muslim woman with a gambling addiction that is further exacerbated when her son has AIDS.

Sunday, June 14, 2009
2:25 am: REEL 13 INDIES: CONFESSIONS OF A GAMBLER
This 2008 dramatic film is about an independent Muslim woman with a gambling addiction that is further exacerbated when her son has AIDS.

11:30 pm: AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: THE MOSQUE IN MORGANTOWN
With a child to take care of on her own, former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani returns home to Morgantown and discovers that her mosque has been taken over by men whom she considers extremists. The film recounts the steps that Nomani takes to challenge the mosque’s exclusion of women.

Monday, June 15, 2009
12:30 am: ON A WING AND A PRAYER: AN AMERICAN MUSLIM LEARNS TO FLY
A documentary about Monem Salam, a Pakistani financial advisor, who learns to fly despite the concerns of his family and society after September 11.
Watch a clip.

1:30 am: SHIFTING SANDS
A companion documentary to the book by Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Gil Sedan, Shifting Sands explores the modern-day changes facing the traditionally nomadic Bedouin women of Israel and Palestine, and how they are coping with them.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009
1 am: REEL 13 INDIES: CONFESSIONS OF A GAMBLER
This 2008 dramatic film is about an independent Muslim woman with a gambling addiction that is further exacerbated when her son has AIDS.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
10 pm: P.O.V.: NEW MUSLIM COOL
Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s film is the story of Puerto Rican-American and Muslim rapper Hamza Perez, who is bringing his spiritual message to young people in Pittsburgh.
Watch a clip.

Thursday, June 25, 2009
3 am: P.O.V.: NEW MUSLIM COOL
Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s film is the story of Puerto Rican-American and Muslim rapper Hamza Perez, who is bringing his spiritual message to young people in Pittsburgh.

by Colin Fitzpatrick
Web Producer, The Music Instinct: Science and Song

On Wednesday June 24th at 9pm, you will get a chance to view the fantastic, creative, and informative program for PBS, a documentary called The Music Instinct: Science and Song. While you wait for this premiere (check local listings), we’re giving you a chance to interact with this upcoming program though a contest we have created with the good folks over at Indaba Music.

We launched our first contest with Indaba Music back on March 31st, giving their community the first chance to interact with this program. In a contest titled “The Music Instinct: Science and Song – Noise Reinvented!” we provided these musicians with 207 diverse sound effects and environmental noises, such as a running coffee grinder, monkeys hooting in the jungle, crickets chirping, and a babbling brook, and we asked them to take these noises and turn them into music. Indaba’s community had a great response to the contest and we received more than 140 submissions. We even had one Indaba member comment, “This will be my favorite Indaba experience YET,” within days of launching the contest.

Due to an overwhelming number of submissions we will be announcing the winners on June 5th and post them on the on the Music Instinct Web site. While original recorded melodies or other material could be used in generating a composition for the contest, all compositions were judged on the originality and expressiveness of the rhythmic and harmonic use of the sound clips provided. You can also listen to all the submissions at Indaba at the original contest page.

With the great success of the first contest, we’re now giving people a second chance to engage with The Music Instinct. We have launched a second contest where you can mix the Indaba Music Theme with tracks from diverse array of musicians. From The Music Instinct, we have a bass track from Bobby McFerrin, a violin track from Daniel Bernard Roumain, and vocal tracks from world musicians Gino Sitson of Cameroon and Christiane Karam of Lebanon. Additionally we have tracks from contributing musicians Amanda Palmer (best known for her work with the Dresden Dolls, folk musician Ari Hest, and Latin world musicians Tiempo Libre. You can win some cool prizes, including a customized iPod and an online music course from the world-renowned Berklee College of Music. We are accepting submissions until June 19th and you can enter the contest through Indaba Music.

Not interested in entering the contest? The Music Instinct is also part of the World Science Festival for the panel called “Notes and Neurons,” featuring scientist and Music Instinct contributor Daniel Levitin.

In addition to these contests, Indaba and Thirteen have partnered to create interactive tools for education. On June 6th, we will publish 3 comprehensive lesson plans based around national education standards for middle school and elementary school teachers. We have developed some cool tools to demonstrate different facets of music, a keyboard for creating chords, a mixer for exploring frequency, and a sequencer to learn about rhythm. Both the frequency explorer and the sequencer employ sounds found in nature or daily life so that students can understand how musical concepts apply to the world around them. We’re hoping that these lesson plans will become an important resource for teachers long after the broadcast of the program in June.

We also have a wide selection of video and an active blog on the Music Instinct Web site. Be sure to check these out and tune in on June 24th at 9pm for this documentary premiere.

Frankie Manning, ‘ambassador of the Lindy Hop’, will be profiled in this short documentary that airs Thursday night, 5/21, at 10:30pm. It will be rebroadcast as part of SundayArts on Sunday afternoon, 5/24. We asked the filmmaker, Julie Cohen, a few questions about what it was like working with Manning, and that he passed away just as the project was wrapping up.

You can watch the entire documentary online at SundayArts.

(a little background on Manning here.)

Frankie Manning
photo: Ralph Gabriner

What was the impetus for this documentary?
I started reading about Frankie when I was researching a documentary about New Yorkers who served in World War II (Frankie fought in the Pacific). His whole life just felt like a THIRTEEN documentary waiting to happen. He had a fascinating career spanning eight decades and involving iconic New York City institutions from the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club in Harlem to Broadway. And luckily there was amazing footage of him dancing dating back to the 1930s. He had done a number of television interviews, most notably as a swing expert in Ken Burns’ wonderful Jazz series, so I knew he was a “great talker.” I got in touch with Cynthia Millman, who co-authored Frankie’s 2007 autobiography Ambassador of Lindy Hop, and she pointed me to loads of video of him dancing over the past ten years or so. I found myself smiling the whole time I watched. Frankie told me he’s never seen a dancer Lindy-Hopping who wasn’t smiling; I defy viewers to try watching Frankie dance without a smile.

I know he’s kind of a legend…did he perpetuate his own legend status?
I don’t think Frankie’s goal was to be a legend. He just wanted to swing. He achieved legend status because a) he was really, really, really good and b) he kept on swinging when most other people would have slowed down. Read More …

The tiny downtown mom-and-pop opera institution soon will shut its doors: its last performance will be May 29, 2009, the last night of The Marriage of Figaro; this was their 61st season. THIRTEEN a few years ago profiled Amato in a documentary Amato: A Love Affair With Opera.

8 years ago, this list catalogued of all of the opera companies across the U.S., of which Amato was one. Now that Amato is closing, which of the other companies on this list have closed in the intervening years? If you know, tell us in the comments.

* Read or watch a profile of Tony Amato, the company’s founder
* See a gallery of scenes from the Company, 1948-2001
* Watch clips from the documentary (realmedia)

Newshour on Monday, 5/18, interviewed Tony Amato: Read More …

from: Jared Lipworth, Executive Producer, Secrets of the Dead

Michelangelo Revealed premieres May 13 at 8pm on THIRTEEN.

First Robert Langdon had Da Vinci’s Code to deal with. Now, in his latest fictional adventure, he is off fighting for his life and tracking down a powerful underground brotherhood attempting to bring down the Catholic Church. Popes die, Cardinals are captured, and Robert teams up with a pretty Italian woman named Vittoria to decode secret messages carefully hidden in ancient symbols.

Sounds like a perfect summer blockbuster.

Also sounds eerily similar to our latest episode of Secrets of the Dead. Read More …