[PHOTO] Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park

On my first day in New York City, my cousin took me and a friend of his on a brief tour of New York City that included Bryant Park, located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and between 40th and 42nd Streets and hosting the impressive main building of the New York Public Library. This statue of American modernist writer Gertrude Stein stuck out: apparently one of five statues on the Bryant Park grounds, this struck us as particularly lifelike. The Bryant Park Blog notes the background to the statue's casting and location.

[This statue] is one of ten made from a cast by friend and sculptor Jo Davidson in Paris, in 1922, and possibly the only one displayed outdoors year-round. Davidson had a long list of commissioned busts, including Charlie Chaplin, Hellen Keller, and Frank Sinatra. [. . .]

Stein was connected to the ex-pat art and literary scene of the times, coining the term "lost generation," later used by Hemingway to refer to that generation of authors: "You are all a lost generation," epigraph [in] The Sun Also Rises. Though most well-known for her writing and personal relationships, Stein, along with several members of her family, amassed an impressive art collection, on display at the Grand Palais now until mid-January.Time to use up those miles!

The Bryant Park statue was donated by Dr. Maury Leibovitz, psychologist and art dealer, and unveiled in a small ceremony on November 5, 1992. In addition to the sculpture, Mr. Leibovitz owned an estate formerly belonging to Jo Davidson. Davidson has another Bryant Park connection -- for a time, he worked out of a studio at the Bryant Park Studios, on the corner of 40th Street and Sixth Avenue. So it's fitting that she found a home in the park.

From this angle, Davidson's bust looked particularly lifelike.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Andrew Barton is unimpressed by much of the recent fuss over surveillance in airports in Canada, on the grounds that airport security is defensible and there are better things to fight against.


• The Burgh Diaspora builds from a brief Demography Matters post I made, about the likelihood of the resumption of patterns of migration from Mediterranean to northern Europe regardless of what happens to the Eurozone, and wonders why people won't migrate from Mediterranean Europe to points elsewhere in the world. (I agree that they will; Europe's borders are not impermeable, at least not for citizens of European countries.)


• Crooked Timber's Maria Farrell thinks that sharp cuts in the British military undermine fundamentally the attractiveness of the military as a career option in the United Kingdom.


• The suicide attempt of former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase after his conviction on charges of corruption, Eastern Approaches notes, highlights the novelty of a Romanian judicial system that actually does deal with abuses of power at the highest levels.


• Geocurrents notes how the staging of the Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine is evocative of the Holocaust and (in Ukraine) of present-day anti-Semitism.


• Marginal Revolution takes note of strongly pro-Russian sentiment in Cyprus, to the extent that some Cypriots would welcome a Russian bailout, not a European Union one.


• Noel Maurer, at The Power and the Money, notes that Mexico's rising competitiveness relative to China, as Chinese wages rise, has to led to a recovery of the Mexican export manufacturing sector and to growth in jobs. The problem is that this is job growth is not paralleled by wage growth.


• The spread of an Internet meme in Kyrgyzstan, Registan notes, explains much about Kyrgzystan's internal divisions, between Russophones and Kyrgzy-speakers and between rural and urban areas.

[DM] "Some Friday demographics blog links"

I've a post up at Demography Matters collecting links to some demography-themed blog posts I'd linked to here earlier: mass emigration from northwestern Bulgaria, migration to and from United States Rust Belt cities, migration from Mediterranean Europe to the wider world, and immigration controls in the United Kingdom.