New Director Selected for Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

After 15 months without a director, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced Wednesday that the board has chosen Colin B. Bailey, a deputy director at the Frick Collection in New York, as the new chief. Mr. Bailey said in an interview that he is excited about his new position and unfazed about the turmoil among the staff that the museums have been experiencing.

In the past year, the museums have gone through bitter labor negotiations, a string of dismissals of senior staff, and pointed criticism of the board president, Diane Wilsey, who has been accused of exercising too much control over daily operations.

“No one likes to hear of problems in an institution,” Mr. Bailey said. “But not for a minute did any of this reporting diminish my incredible excitement and the honor of having this position.” On the top of his agenda is getting to know the collection, the board and the staff, he said.

The Fine Arts Museums, comprised of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor, are together considered the fourth most-visited museums in the country.

Mr. Bailey, who started at the Frick in 2000, has also worked at the National
Gallery of Canada, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth.

$17 Million Gift to Bolster Old Master Collection at Dallas Museum of Art

Maxwell L. Anderson, the suave former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, swung through New York on Wednesday to update folks in the media about goings-on at his latest gig â€" the Dallas Museum of Art, where he became director 15 months ago.

Rather than just jawbone over steak at BLT Prime, Mr. Anderson actually delivered some news: Marguerite Steed Hoffman, a Dallas philanthropist, has donated $17 million to the museum for the acquisition of Old Master paintings and European sculpture. The gift establishes an endowment to expand and enhance the museum’s collection of European art, primarily of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Ms. Hoffman, a former chairwoman of the museum, made the gift in her name and and that of her husband, Robert, who died in 2006. They were among a group of Dallas collectors who in 2005 announced a pledge to donate their modern and contemporary collections to the Dallas Museum upon their deaths.

In other news, the museum’s shift to free membership in January has had memorable results, with 6,000 people having joined so far. In a new approach akin to frequent-flier programs, members amass points for various activities â€" like visiting particular exhibitions â€" and can redeem them for perks like a private tour or going to a storeroom with a curator.

“Museums need to do this in order to understand who’s visiting, what they’re doing, what they’re learning,” Mr. Anderson said.

Musical by Gorillaz Duo To Get Substantial Run in Lincoln Center Festival

“Monkey: Journey to the West,” a music and theater mash-up that also includes cartoon segments, martial arts and acrobatics, will open the Lincoln Center Festival this summer and play more performances than any show in its history.

“Monkey,” which had its premiere at the Manchester International Festival in 2007, is conceived and directed by opera and film director Chen Shi-Zheng and features music by Damon Albarn of the band Blur and design and animation by Jamie Hewlett, who collaborates with Mr. Albarn on the “cartoon band” Gorillaz.

Based on a 16th-century Chinese folk tale, the show is about a monk’s fantastical journey, led by the Monkey King, in search of sacred Buddhist scriptures. The 27 performances at the David H. Koch Theater will mark its New York debut; it played the Spoleto USA Festival in 2008.

While the show has played internationally since, Nigel Redden, the Lincoln Center Festival’s director, said he still expected it to be a big draw in New York. “It sold more tickets than any other single event in the 36-year history of Spoleto,” he said on Wednesday. “But it’s never been in New York and to some extent, many artists feel their work has not premiered in the U.S. until it has premiered in New York.”

Other theatrical productions announced by Lincoln Center on Wednesday include “Shun-Kin,” from the London-based Complicite, which has appeared at the festival several times. Directed by Simon McBurney, the play â€" about a blind musician and her lover in 19th century Japan â€" will be performed by members of Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater.

Music offerings will include a celebration of John Zorn and the U.S. premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Michael’s Journey Around the World,” an instrumental work derived from the avant-garde German composer’s seven-opera cycle.

The often unpredictable Sinead O’Connor, who cancelled her 2012 tour, will appear for two nights at Alice Tully Hall, presenting her new project exploring soul gospel music.

The 2013 festival runs July 6-28. Single tickets go on sale on April 8.

A Senior Dancer Is Leaving Paul Taylor Company

Amy Young, the senior female dancer of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is leaving the troupe. She made her New York farewell at the end of Sunday’s performance, the last in the company’s New York season in March at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. 

Ms. Young’s final performance with the company will be at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Mass., during Memorial Day Weekend, May 24-26, Lisa Labrado, a spokeswoman for Paul Taylor confirmed Wednesday.  Ms. Young made her debut with the company at the Paris Opera House in January 2000. She has been featured in diverse roles in “De Sueños que se Repiten” (2008), “Beloved Renegade” (2008), “Brief Encounters” (2009) and “Three Dubious Memories” (2010).

In the Wee Hours in Albany, the Talk Turns to Kumquats

ALBANY - The great kumquat debate began around 1 a.m. Wednesday, when Senator George S. Latimer, a Westchester Democrat, likened a voluminous budget bill to a Christmas gift basket that contained some items that were desirable, but others that were not.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Seedless kumquats

“You like the shortbread cookies, but you don’t like the kumquats,” Mr. Latimer said. “But you have to either take the whole basket or send it back to your aunt and say, ‘Sorry, I didn’t really like this basket.’”

The kumquat in the budget basket, for Senator Latimer, was a proposal to raise the minimum wage, but to do it gradually and not tie it to inflation.

That was just the beginning. In one of the stranger rhetorical runs in recent Albany memory, more than a half-dozen senators turned to kumquats in their wee-hours musings about various aspects of the state’s spending plan, which they ultimately approved at 4:15 a.m. Wednesday. (The Assembly plans to vote on the budget Thursday.)

Some lawmakers acknowledged they were not prepared for the fruity furor. Senator Michael N. Gianaris, a Queens Democrat, said he did not quite know what a kumquat was before the subject arose. “I looked it up; apparently it’s a citrus fruit,” he explained. “I don’t know why there’s so much hostility against it, but nonetheless, there is.”

But even kumquat know-nothings seized on citrus, at least for debating purposes.

“If we’re going to go with the assumption that a kumquat is a bad thing, this is one big kumquat in this revenue bill that we’re dealing with,” Mr. Gianaris said.

The fruit proved irresistible for senators of all persuasions. Senator Kathleen A. Marchione, a Republican from Saratoga County and an outspoken advocate of gun rights, said the state’s new gun law was her kumquat.

And Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, noting that he did not like kumquats, described one budget bill as “a bag full of kumquats.” He said the provision to raise the minimum wage was “the biggest kumquat of all,’’ but two hours later, he compared the creation of a tax credit he found objectionable to “slipping on a kumquat and falling in a hole, or something.”

Senator Latimer later seemed to feel some remorse for besmirching an innocent fruit (the kumquat is not mentioned in the state budget, nor in any legislation introduced this year). Speaking shortly before the Senate adjourned, he pulled his cellphone out of his breast pocket and joked that he had received a text message from the New York State Association of Kumquat Growers.

“Apparently they’re not coming to my next fund-raiser,” Mr. Latimer said, drawing laughter from his weary colleagues and their aides. “My apologies to anybody else who I’ve dragged into the Kumquat-gate of tonight.”

The discussion of kumquats added some levity to an overnight session that was otherwise filled with grumbling among Democrats about why they were there in the first place, since the budget is not due until Monday. One alluded wistfully to a piece of legislation called the Vampire Voting Act that would forbid such overnight sessions. That bill’s sponsor, Terry W. Gipson, a Hudson Valley Democrat, acknowledged the kumquat chatter but said he preferred to discuss vampires.

Flags’ Waving Doesn’t Come Cheap

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Two flagpoles that were repaired and repainted near Bowling Green Park in the financial district. The city spends over $160,000 a year to maintain flagpoles.

Nobody can accuse New Yorkers’ patriotism of flagging, not when the city’s parks department alone spends about $160,000 a year keeping its over 1,000 flagpoles in shape.

If you wonder how New York City’s budget tops $66 billion, more than all but a few states’, it’s not just because of the big-ticket items like education, social services and public safety. The tiny ones add up, too.

The parks department recently awarded a two-year, $320,060 contract to a Westchester County company for the painting and repairing of its 1,112 flagpoles (that’s about one for every 7,500 New Yorkers, not counting the poles on schools and other public buildings).

Last year, 57 poles were repainted or repaired as needed, which would mean an average of nearly $3,000 each. Sounds high.

“Flagpoles can be as high as 80 feet or even over 100 feet tall, requiring skilled painting and repair people,” said Vicki Karp, the department’s director of public affairs.

“For example, in 2012, a 120-foot flagpole in Battery Park South required reroping,” she said. “The repairman was lifted in a boom truck to the truck’s maximum height and then had to climb out of the bucket and complete the climb by hand to the top of the pole. Also in 2012, two 100-foot flagpoles in Bowling Green Park were reroped with steel, and a 75-foot flagpole in Corlears Hook Park was completely repainted.”

The cost, Ms. Karp said, ranges from $20 a foot for simple painting or repairs to $55 a foot for more challenging jobs.

For LaBeouf, a Front-Row View of Production That Fired Him

Shia LaBeouf, who was fired from the Broadway play “Orphans” last month after clashing with the director Daniel Sullivan and his co-star Alec Baldwin, attended the first preview performance of the play on Tuesday night at the Schoenfeld Theater - sitting in the first row on the aisle and leaping to his feet before any other audience member to give a standing ovation at the end.

At one point mid-performance Mr. Baldwin noticed Mr. LaBeouf and fixed on him for a beat; it was unclear if he was surprised to see him there. A spokeswoman for the play said Mr. LaBeouf bought his ticket on Tuesday and did not formally alert the production team that he would be attending.

At the curtain call Mr. LaBeouf shot out of his seat and applauded enthusiastically, his hands raised high in the air. When Ben Foster, who replaced Mr. LaBeouf in the play, took his bow, Mr. Foster pointed to the actor and smiled, and Mr. LaBeouf rapped his palm on the stage. Mr. LaBeouf, who appeared to be by himself, left his seat during intermission and then bolted the theater after the curtain call; he could not be reached for comment.

Mr. LaBeouf was replaced in “Orphans” during the second week of rehearsals last month after he and Mr. Sullivan, the Tony Award-winning veteran director, butted heads over Mr. LaBeouf’s acting choices and his behavior in the rehearsal room, which four members of the production team described as volatile and self-centered. Mr. LaBeouf also had words with Mr. Baldwin on a few occasions which were described as not collegial. The production team members spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door rehearsal process.

After leaving the production - a relatively rare occurrence for a high-profile actor on Broadway - Mr. LaBeouf published several e-mails on Twitter about the rupture, including this comment from Mr. Sullivan to Mr. LaBeouf: “This one will haunt me. You tried to warn me. You said you were a different breed. I didn’t get it.”

Mr. Baldwin, in a brief telephone interview last month after Mr. LaBeouf left, said, “You realize in the process, theater is not for everyone.”

“Orphans,” Lyle Kessler’s play about two wastrel brothers (Mr. Foster and Tom Sturridge) in Philadelphia who take a hostage (Mr. Baldwin) until the man offers himself as a king of father figure, is scheduled to open April 18.

Covered in Pacifiers, Trees Signal a Rite of Passage

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Small trees outside a building in Borough Park, Brooklyn, have become festooned with pacifiers, tossed on the branches when children outgrow them.

Rachel Rhine’s apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, has a strange view: two small trees standing sentinel at the entrance of her building are covered in used pacifiers.

Through her window she has seen dozens of tender, early childhood rites of passage â€" families that gather to send off a beloved binky by hanging it on a branch.

“I see mothers picking up their little kid and the kid actually puts it on and they say: ‘O.K., say goodbye, no more. You’re a big girl now,’” Ms. Rhine said. “It’s kind of a celebration to say, ‘That’s where it goes and that’s where it stays and that’s the end of it.’”

The tradition at the Plymouth, a six-story complex on 48th Street near 14th Avenue, tenants say, goes back around 10 years and was started by a former superintendent.

“It was from all of these little pacifiers kids throw out of the carriage and the moms don’t even notice,” said Roberta Kahn, a doctor who has lived in the building since 1978. “So what should he do with them He hung them on the tree.”

The super, Miro Dugandzic, declined to be interviewed, but his daughter-in-law, Maria Dugandzic, said the idea to showcase the building’s pacifiers came from Miro’s wife, Andja.

Ms. Rhine said it was no longer only building residents who made use of the pacifier repositories; the trees have become something of a neighborhood institution. Children who have given up their pacifiers see the bushes as monuments to their new, pacifier-free lives.

“They pass by and they say: ‘That’s mine! You see the pink one there’” Ms. Rhine said.

Matthew Goldfine, a child psychologist at Columbia University’s Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said the arboreal weaning ceremony “turns a negative experience into a creative, fun way of showing a child that you’re not alone in this: ‘We’re contributing to this beautiful and unique pacifier tree.’”

While many parents these days take their children to sew up their pacifiers in a stuffed animal at a Build-A-Bear workshop, the pacifier tree has deep roots in Europe. It is not clear where the Dugandzics, who are Croatian immigrants, got the idea, but Scandinavian children have been tying their suckers to tree branches for a long time.

Families have been leaving pacifiers on an elderberry bush on the Danish island of Thuro since 1963, a Danish folklorist, Hanne Pico Larsen, wrote in an e-mail. Other accounts date Thuro’s tree, which has become a pacifier-deposit tourist destination, back to the 1920s.

Across Denmark and Sweden, branches bow with the weight of a thousand self-soothers. The Skansen zoo in Stockholm is home to one of the more famous pacifier trees.

Back in Borough Park, admiration for the special little trees abounds.

“We all enjoy it and we all have fun, and everyone looks at it and wonders what’s going on,” Dr. Kahn said. “It’s just one of these quirky things in the neighborhood.”

ABC Family Plans Spinoff of ‘Pretty Little Liars’

Here’s a way to make fans of your television series very happy: announce another season of the show and a new spinoff series at the same time. That’s what the ABC Family channel did on Tuesday when it renewed “Pretty Little Liars” for a fifth season (before the fourth one even starts), and revealed plans for a spin-off called “Ravenswood.”

The announcements were made via the social media accounts for “Pretty Little Liars” in a nod to the fact that the drama ranks higher than most other TV series in terms of Twitter and Facebook interaction. True to form, the name of the new show was a nationwide trend on Twitter within minutes.

The fourth season of “Pretty Little Liars” will start in June, and a fifth season has been picked up, according to the channel’s announcement. The move is a no-brainer since the show routinely ranks No. 1 in its time period among young women.

ABC Family will introduce “Ravenswood” on the back of “Pretty Little Liars” in October. The series will be led by the same creative team as “Liars” and will linger on some of the same themes, like an unsolved mystery. (“Pretty Little Liars” involves the death of a young woman; “Ravenswood” will involve a deadly curse in a town.)

Kate Juergens, an executive vice president for the channel, said in a statement that the new show “will have plenty of mystery, drama, friendships and suspense that will inspire the same dedication from its fans.”

On Illegal Betting Slips, a Three-Digit Mystery

Yana Paskova for The New York Times A copy of a betting slip seized on March 13 during a police raid of a numbers game in Manhattan.

So what do all those numbers in a so-called numbers-running racket mean, anyway

On Saturday, the Crime Scene column reported the arrests of two people in East Harlem who were accused of running numbers, an age-old sort of illegal neighborhood lottery. Bettors choose three-digit numbers and wager that they will match a prearranged result appearing in horse-racing reports later that day.

The column included a copy of a betting slip seized the day of the arrests, March 13. There were several numbers scratched on the slip without explanation. Here is how the police explained it:

The bettor appears to be placing two wagers on the “New York number,” hence the “N.Y.” at the top of the slip. It was formerly known as the Manhattan number or the “357,” and is not to be confused with the “Brooklyn number.” The winning New York number is usually based on payoffs following the third, fifth and seventh races at the New York track operating that day.

The bettor’s two numbers are 226 and 310. For the first number, the bettor bet $1.50 that the number 226 would win, and placed a combination, or “boxed,” bet of another $1.50 that those digits will appear in any order, like 262 or 622. For the second number, 310, the bet is $1.10 for a straight win and 90 cents for a combination. The total appears below, $5.

The date speaks for itself, but the stamped version is the mark of the numbers joint that day, to prove authenticity if the bettor wins.

But no one won that day. It was the day of the police raid.

Punched in Herald Square

Dear Diary:

I was recently spending my Sunday morning trudging along the beat-up pavement of 34th and Sixth, idolizing pastel-print cottons hugging porcelain mannequins, daringly dressed for spring.

When cavorting in that part of town, it’s important that I pay attention to the sharp edges of overstuffed Macy’s shopping bags galloping my way and sashay around them like a running back aiming to score a winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. Except here, in Herald Square, I am moving to avoid the black-and-blue marks shopping bags can leave on my thighs when they slap me leg-on.

While I was doing the Argentine tango around a family of tourists weighed down by shopping bags, a lady extended her right arm out to point to an “I Love NYC” magnet hanging in the window of a Duane Reade and, instead, punched me straight in the nose.

The discomfort of the oozing pain that suddenly overcame my face, and the drips of blood that began to stain the supportive pavement, were all silenced when the lady looked me in the eyes, shrugged her shoulders and delightfully walked away.

New York, you’re adorably rough sometimes.

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