The City Ballet's current crop of dancers have, by and large, done him proud, even if some of the big guns have been largely missing in action, injured. But that makes room for a younger generation, which in turn assures a continuance of the Robbins tradition as cultivated at the School of American Ballet and City Ballet itself. More and more companies worldwide dance this repertory, in ever greater depth past the big hits, aided by a devoted cadre of coaches fanning out, by and large, from City Ballet.

I'd like to single out four ballets. "Ives, Songs" has been the highlight of the programs I've seen. Robbins's wonderful ability to blend the purity of ballet abstraction with gestures that hint at narrative drama is never more evident here. "Opus 19/The Dreamer" found Wendy Whelan and Gonzalo Garcia at their romantic best. "Dances at a Gathering," even with a weaker set of dancers than in the recent or more distant past, is such a grand, glowing masterpiece that it still shone.

For me, the most intriguing revival was of "Watermill." It didn't really work, its hypnotic revery undercut by an overlaod of busy incident. For many critics of the piece, then and now, it failed because it wasn't sufficiently balletic. For me, it failed becaus it wasn't sufficiently Robert Wilsonian.

"Watemill" was made in 1972, after Robbins had worked closely with Wilson, not least out in the Hamptons, at Water Mill. (Wilson's Watermill Center flourishes there now.) This was the apex of Wilson's great early period, what with "Deafman Glance," "The King of Spain" and "The Life and times of Sigmund Freud" (Robbins played Freud in at least one performance), all of which fed into the epochal "Life and Times of Joseph Stalin." Robbins sought to emulate the dreamy rapture of those works, but he fell nervously short. Not much happens in "Watermill," but enough happens to disrupt the flow.

In The New Yorker, Joan Acocella argued that in general, Robbins "always seemed torn between ballet's abstraction and what was his own fundamental realism -- his attachment to stories, feelings, current events." I would argue that the real tension lies not so much in his ballets in general as in "Watermll" in particular, and that the tension is between an instinct for lively action against the courage to remain minimalistically pure.

Most of our leading ballet critics today, at least in the United States and Britain, value Balanchine over Robbins, and perhaps rightly so. Even in their ostensible admiration there is something more or less overtly condescending in their attitude toward the upstart Robbins, too brash, too ambitious, too American. One wonders how the Robbins Celebartion will alter those feelings. Not much, I suspect. 

Injuries are part of a dancer's life, and probably this has just been unlucky coincidence. Nursing injuries is an intergral part of the ethos and camaraderie of any ballet troupe. But then I recalled a front page story in the New York Times recently in which educators worried about the plethora of injuries to high-school women athletes, especially soccer players, in beefed-up female sports programs. And then there was the Kentucky Derby, in which the only filly in the field of 20, Eight Belles, heroically finished second and then collapsed with two broken front legs and had to "euthanized" on the track, as they say in horse-racing euphemism.

That in turn prompted a spate of hand wringing from PETA and others arguing that horse racing was a cruel sport in which big, heavy animals are bred for speed, with bones too slender and fragile to support all that weight. And then one thinks of ballet training, which is properly muscular and athletic but also puts female dancers at risk with toe shoes, one step up from Chinese foot-binding, and constant pressure to lose weight. Ballet dancers today look different from photos of dancers from decades ago or the 19th century; they're thinner.

A ballet dancer, or a female athlete in most any sport (me, I'm partial to women's tennis, but the same thing holds true for basketball or sprinting or any sport that doesn't put a premium on brute strength, like steroid-pumped Soviet female shot-putters of yore). The Women's Tennis Association has been plagued with injuries to its top players the last few seasons, commonly attributed to its incessant tour schedule.

Slim, strong women can be marvelous exemplars of skill and speed and aesthetic refinement. Male athletes get injured, too, since they are subject to the same pressures to excel. Though they may have more muscled bodies, they also subject them to often more strenuous demands. But at least they don't have to dance on toe or epitomize the lightness of air. We won't even broach the possibility, vigorously denied by dancers and companies, that some may use performance-enhancing drugs of whatever kind.

One would hardly want high schools to drop female sports programs or horse racing to ban fillies or ballet to become the exclusive territory of Ted Shawn or Eliot Feld  and his Mandance project, which in any event cheats to include some females. "Ballet is woman," said George Balanchine. But competitive or careerist pressure, for all the greatness it may inspire, can also push bodies past the point of common sense. One wonders if that point hasn't been reached on our ballet stages today.  

Still, it was good of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to cast Allen, and to work her into the story in such an integral way. What they lost in stereotypical va-va-voom sex appeal, they gained in dramatic crediblity, political correctness (strirking a blow for the older actress, especially one who doesn't seem to have subjected herself to Botox or plastic surgery) and simple nostalgia. And they got that megawatt Allen smile, undimmed.

The movie itself has its ups and downs. Cate Blanchett, or more accurately the Cate Blanchett cartoon character, is rididulous. Shia LaBoeuf doesn't have much of a part, either. But the movie is worth watching for Ford and Allen, at least one chase scene and the special effects (the nuclear explosion!). Not all of us have a taste for big, noisy pop summer spectacles. But as far as they go, this one goes far enough.

And then, you can go out and rent "Starman." It has a terrific srory, a wonderful performance from Jeff Bridges, and Allen at her radiant youthful peak.  

In the script, I stressed the operatic qualities of the three singers' voices, and how they opened me up to the possible varieties of vocal production in opera. Ives was a French-style, pre-verismo tenor, complete with voix mixte and floating head tones, and he developed a penchant for folkish classical singing of the kind that became widespread in the early music movement. Robeson was a true operatic bass, in an era when blacks weren't allowed to sing opera. Jackson was a gospel belter, one of enomous power and grandeur (and musicality and sensitivity, too). Had she been allowed and had she chosen, she too could have dominated our operatic stages.

But one aspect of her singing I didn't mention, and it was equally important to me as a boy, being as I was lily-white and all. I had never encountered black church singing before listening to her records of gospel music and Christmas carols. The carols were especially striking. She ornamented these bedrock, deeply familiar songs with all manner of grace notes and appoggiaturas and bluesy flattenings and slidings up to the pitch. I had never heard anything like that, and I was thrilled -- in the same way that a lot of people were thrilled (or horrified) when years later Jose Feliciano applied similar ornamentation to the National Anthem at a World Series. Without Mahalia, I might never have loved opera, or loved it in the same way. But without her, I might never have loved gospel and the blues and rock & roll like I do, either.

It might look like more big, cartoonish Asian art, the kind that, as with some highbrows' reaction to Olafur Eliasson, seems primary-colored vulgar to refined sensibilities. Takashi Murakami, with his enormous Hello Kitty! cartoon art, can provoke similar reactions. I haven't gotten to Murakami's current Brooklyn Museum retrospective, but I did see a show he curated recently at the Japan Society, and it was downright disturbing, right beneath the shiny kiddie surface. Good disturbing, though; Murakami gets to me on a deeper level than does Cai, at least so far.

But there is something endearing aobut the modern Chinese penchant for the over the top. I think of the composer Tan Dun, whose rather pallid "The First Emperor" has been recently revived at the Metropolitan Opera. Tan started out a modernist, and he retains some of that hard-to-take modernist dissonance, seemingly for dissonance's sake. But his other side is exuberantly populist, and for me is far preferable. His score for the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," with Yo-Yo Ma, was gorgeous. And his two big, noisy celebration symphonies, one for the turn of the millennium and the other for the reabsorption of Hong Kong into the Motherland, sounded completely over the top in their mixing-up of musical idioms. I loved them; they were right up Peter Gelb's alley.

Some of the stage work of the director Chen Shi-Zheng, a friend of Tan's, fits into this category, too, as in his circus-terpsichoric-rock opera "Monkey: Journey to the West," which has stirred up the Spoleto U.S.A. Festival in Charleston of late. It would probably be part of this summer's rather sparse Lincoln Center Festival were not the New York State Theater being closed to begin its renovation for the Gerard Mortier era at the New York City Opera.

For better or worse, when you think about Cai and Tan and Chen, China is on the move, and Chinese artsts are on the move, too.   

That said, Eliasson is pretty special, as affirmed by his "Weather" installation at the Tate Modern, the talk of London for its entire run (two years?). Now he has a show at both the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and its Queens adjunct, P. S. 1. I haven't been out to Queens yet -- the plan is for this Thursday -- but I want to write now about one part of the MOMA show. It consists of a room (a hallway, actually) bathed in yellow ligfht.

So it's yellow; so what? But soon you realize that this yellow light has the property of bleaching out color and turning everything gray. At one end you can stand in the middle of the light, feeling rather like a character in "Star Man" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" being drawn up into the mothership by light beams, and watch innocent museum-goers wander across a kind of platform or bridge and enter into the yellow zone. You see them, still bathed in natural light, with their red dresses and blue scarves, and as they enter the yellow all that bleeds into gray. Skin colors, too: white people and black people and even yellow people become gray people.

It is very, very strange. Thrilling, maybe, but scary, too; creepy. Whether grandiose social conclusons can be drawn from all this, that we are all brothers under the skin and such, I know not. It's hard to extract an optimistic message when everyone looks like a corpse. But it, and other optical tricks that Eliasson plays upon the willing viewer, are pretty striking. I suppose the more profound question is whether this is art or optics, something meaningful or something merely tricky. All I can say is that if you seek an unsettling experience, check out the third floor of MOMA. 

Apthorp quotes the Bayreuth press spokesman as saying that Eva and Katharina are getting along better now, and Eva has apparently made renewed contact wiht her long-estranged father. From what I hear, that's true. What I hear is not, by the way, from Eva, who's a terrific person. We had drinks a few weeks ago in New York and I had the forebearance (farewell, reportorial instincts) and she had the discretion not to mention one word about Bayreuth for the entire hour.

The real question, assuming everyone including the controlling foundation signs off on this deal, is how it will work. Will Eva or Katharina actually or titularly be above the other in the pecking order? How will they get along with Christian Thielemann (the imperious conductor) and Peter Ruzicka (the composer and ex head of the Salzburg Festival) in the day-to-day operation? It's hard to imagine all these egos (not Eva's so much, or maybe even Katharina's) as working together without a clear hierarchy in place. It's even harder to imagine that this rapprochement would have had a chance before the sudden death of Gudrun, Wolfgang's second wife and hence Katharina's mom. Does everyone have their scorecards handy?

For those of us who love Wagner and Bayreuth, anything would be better than the previous entropy and stasis. So let us fervently hope that Eva and Katharina get along in sisterly harmony and that the two men can help them facilitate their ideas without getting in the way. 

All of this floated into my brain as I was thinking about more mundane facts, and how the Internet, more dramatically than archival reserach, multiplies the impact of any seemingly innocent error. I can think of three errors of fact relating directly to me, meaning I was their subject, not their agent.

One is the habit of the New York Times, and hence most everyone who relies on the
Times for its facts, to refer to Chen Shi-Zheng's epic six part, three-day production of the Chinese kunju opera masterpiece "The Peony Pavilion" as lasting 19, or sometimes 20, hours. I conceived and produced that production for the Lincoln Center Festival and saw it many times. I can assure you it lasted 18 hours, each of the six parts being more or less three hours on the nose, with no intermissions (except long ones between the matinee and evening parts on a given day). But someone decided it was 19 (or 20) hours, and that's what comes up if anyone checks the Times data base, so 19 (or 20) it shall be forevermore.

Easier to fix was a Wikipedia biographical entry on me, wherein it was falsely stated that I was part of the family that founded and owns Rockwell International, the California weapons manufacturer. My family has never had anything to do with Rockwell International. Being even more technologically inept then than I am now, I got my friend Tim Page to delete that offending sentence. The assertion will crop again, somewhere, but at least the last time I looked it was not in Wikipedia.

More stubborn was the entry on me by my friend Patrick J. Smith in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Smith asserted that I had come to classical music after 1980 and after I had established myself as a rock critic. The reverse is true; I got into rock after I had come to the NY Times in 1972 as a classical critic, and I remained one throughout the 70's. This was a sensitive issue for me in the 80's because I didn't want people to think that I was some untrained pop bozo who had stumbled into the classics. I'm more relaxed about all that now.

The larger issues behind these rather self-referential tales involve the need for everyone -- writers, editors, fact-checkers -- to exercise care. The Times at least corrects its more obvious errors (though not about the length of "The Peony Pavilion"!) in print and appends the corrections to the electronic versions. The New Yorker, the most fact-checked magazine we have, recently referred to Chen Shi-Zheng as if Shi-Zheng were his last name. The Chinese (and Hungarian and others') practice of placing last names first confuses most of us, but to my knowledge the magazine never formally acknowledged the error. Which means it may crop again, in the New Yorker and beyond.

Oi: if we were all just old-fashioned, fair-and-balanced ranters, we wouldn't have to fret about facts, or truth, at all.