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Chairman of the Hirshhorn Museum Board Cites Issues as She Resigns

The list of departures from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington grew longer this week when Constance R. Caplan, the chairman of the board of trustees handed in her resignation Monday, The Washington Post reported.

In a letter to the Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian Institution that runs it, Ms. Caplan complained about the “contentious manner and lack of inclusiveness with which a number of trustees and staff associated with the Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian have behaved over the past year.”

She blamed those conditions for the resignation of the director Richard Koshalek, who announced he was stepping down in May after the board split on whether to continue supporting a project he had long championed: a temporary inflatable bubble that would cover the museum’s inner courtyard. The bubble, which was first proposed in 2009, was never able to garner the $15 million it would take to finance its construction and operations. Last month, the Smithsonian announced the museum was canceling the project.

Divisions over the bubble have now contributed to the resignation of seven board members within the last year, including the previous chairman, J. Tomilson Hill.

Ms. Caplan also complained that the museum was too focused on “exhibitions and operations” instead of taking a more ambitious role as “the nation’s museum of contemporary art.” Richard Kurin, Undersecretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian, dismissed the notion that the Hirshhorn is pulling back as an innovative institution. He added that the board’s role is to advise, not to handle day-to-day management and this it is “dangerous to conflate the two.”

Later this month the 12-member board is supposed to meet to pick a new chairman.



Chairman of the Hirshhorn Museum Board Cites Issues as She Resigns

The list of departures from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington grew longer this week when Constance R. Caplan, the chairman of the board of trustees handed in her resignation Monday, The Washington Post reported.

In a letter to the Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian Institution that runs it, Ms. Caplan complained about the “contentious manner and lack of inclusiveness with which a number of trustees and staff associated with the Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian have behaved over the past year.”

She blamed those conditions for the resignation of the director Richard Koshalek, who announced he was stepping down in May after the board split on whether to continue supporting a project he had long championed: a temporary inflatable bubble that would cover the museum’s inner courtyard. The bubble, which was first proposed in 2009, was never able to garner the $15 million it would take to finance its construction and operations. Last month, the Smithsonian announced the museum was canceling the project.

Divisions over the bubble have now contributed to the resignation of seven board members within the last year, including the previous chairman, J. Tomilson Hill.

Ms. Caplan also complained that the museum was too focused on “exhibitions and operations” instead of taking a more ambitious role as “the nation’s museum of contemporary art.” Richard Kurin, Undersecretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian, dismissed the notion that the Hirshhorn is pulling back as an innovative institution. He added that the board’s role is to advise, not to handle day-to-day management and this it is “dangerous to conflate the two.”

Later this month the 12-member board is supposed to meet to pick a new chairman.



Small Books With Big Souls

In poetry, small is often most beautiful: The poignant four-line lyric that bears more emotional weight than an entire novel. Ancient Chinese and Japanese poems that transcend centuries and cultures. And the poetry bungalows â€" not near large enough to be called publishing houses â€" that quietly make small-seeming books full of big-souled poems.

Those books are as irresistible to me as the spooky porch-sitting girls of my boyhood who somehow made August dusks complete. And as these modest chapbooks and svelte volumes congregated in my study on the handsome oak desk that my wife’s grandfather built, I realized that most of the books I loved best were handmade and came from micro-publishers in the state of Washington. It was as if I’d discovered a previously unremarked atoll of poetry.

The names of the presses roll light and easy off lips and tongue: Brooding Heron and Grey Spider, Wood Works and Copper Canyon.

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

So, why these books? Well, there’s a pure joy in reading and beholding a handmade volume that defies our mad, mass-producing culture. And it pleases me to sense the other human beings that pulse behind the pages. These books own the plain beauty of fresh-planed two-by-fours, all complemented by well-made papers, proper and elegant typefaces, delicate spot illustrations. Winemakers talk of micro-climates, the nature of terroir, when they speak of their wines. And I suspect the same phenomenon is at work when it comes to the poetry produced by these Washington poets and printers. Here’s a sampler of a few of my favorites among these verse vintages:

Since the early 1980s Sally and Sam Green, who’s also a fine poet (and a former Washington poet laureate), have run Brooding Heron Press, making books of austere beauty by poets like David Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser and many others. “Eleven Skagit Poets” (1987), dedicated “to every berry picking kid on dusty Skagit farms saying poems along the rows to pass away the time,” is a homey introduction to a broad family of poets gathered about the Skagit River in Washington.

Jean Marie Haight’s “God Grant the Practical Shape of Our Days” could serve as an ars poetica for these writers. Here’s a yeasty slice:

These things make us
day by day: colanders filled with new potatoes,
griddles and breadbowls, crockery smelling of brine,
the canning kettle, hose and froes and scythes,
rasps, levels, drawknives, stones:
no room for trinkets.

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Before it became one of the country’s most important trade publishers of poetry, Copper Canyon started out as a small specialty press. And “At the Home-Altar,” by Robert Hedin, just might be my favorite from those early days. It was designed and printed by Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, who were among the founders of Copper Canyon.

One of the pleasures of this book, and all the others here, is learning what they’re made of: “The text is Jan van Krimpen’s Spectrum, a modern face in the Aldine tradition. The display type is Palatino Italic, designed by Hermann Zapf. The paper is Rives, a French mould-made rag paper.”

I bought my copy of “Home-Altar” second-hand (100 copies were originally published in 1978) and it arrived signed and with pressed flowers in it â€" someone before me had treasured this book â€" not to mention the unruly serpents in this excerpt from “Rattlesnake Bluff”:

That night the lack of rain brought them
Down off the bluff,
All we saw was the grass
Fluttering where we’d burned…,

Wood Works is just one of the labors of love of the poet, printer and musician Paul Hunter, and “Rembrandt, Chainsaw” (2011), by Clemens Starck, is one of the many gems he’s published. Mr. Starck, not well-known outside the Northwest, is an essential plainspoken poet of work. Here’s the second stanza of his “Late October”:

I’m thinking how Rembrandt
over the course of his lifetime created
nearly a hundred self-portraits, and also I’m thinking
how one of those pictures
of everyday life in Holland in the 17th century
might include
a carpenter in his workshop filing a saw.
Some things don’t change.

Paul Hansen, who has also been published by Brooding Heron and Copper Canyon, is one of my preferred translators of ancient Chinese poets â€" but also a strong poet in his own right. His 1978 collection “Rimes of a River Rat” was printed by Clifford Burke, also a poet and the author of the exquisite and unequaled guide “Printing Poetry.”

Listen here as Mr. Hansen channels his ancient poets in the opening of “Going Home to the River”:

My house on the Skagit stands empty and quiet.
Its visions envelop and everyday diet
Of sunsets and logfloats, the snow-geese migrations,
Paintings and firewood, Chinese poems and translations.

Grey Spider Press was founded by the late C. Christopher Stern and Jules Remedios Faye, and “The Only Time We Have” (2002), by Samuel Green, is a perfect synthesis of well-wrought poems and well-wrought book. Here’s a too-small taste of Mr. Green’s verse from “The Work That Is Given”:

her hands had work in them always,
having come from a time that believed
hands are the tools of the heart,
that you do the work you are given.

These books and their sturdy and humble sisters and brothers make me feel like Bob Rose. The poem “Heart Lake,” by Mr. Burke, appears in “Eleven Skagit Poets,” and it’s about Mr. Rose:

Who stepped up to a venerable fir,
stretched his arms
a third of the way round, no more,
and hugged that tree
and kissed it, or tasted it,
took a bite of it or just breathed in
its ancient fragrance …
________________________________________

Dana Jennings is an editor at The Times.



Sam Mendes Will Direct New James Bond Movie, After All

Sam Mendes at the opening night of his Joel Ryan/Invision/Associated Press Sam Mendes at the opening night of his “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” musical in June.

As they say in the movies, James Bond will return â€" and so, too, will the director Sam Mendes, who will oversee that long-lived secret agent’s next cinematic adventure, despite a previous declaration that he had passed on the film project.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and the longtime James Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said on Thursday that the 24th official entry in the 007 spy series will star Daniel Craig and will be directed by Mr. Mendes, the Academy Award-winning director of “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road.”

There seemed little doubt that Mr. Mendes would be sought out for the new movie after having directed “Skyfall” â€" yes, “Skyfall” â€" the oddly named if tremendously successful 2012 Bond film, which sold more than $1.1 billion in tickets worldwide and yielded the Oscar-winning title song performed by Adele.

But in March, Mr. Mendes said he had made “a very difficult decision not to accept Michael and Barbara’s very generous offer to direct the next Bond movie,” pointing to a busy theater schedule that included a new production of “King Lear” and a musical version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In a statement on Thursday, however, Mr. Mendes said, “I am very pleased that by giving me the time I need to honor all my theater commitments, the producers have made it possible for me to direct Bond 24. I very much look forward to taking up the reins again, and to working with Daniel Craig, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for a second time.”

The new James Bond movie will be written by John Logan, a screenwriter of “Skyfall,” and will hopefully have a better title. It is planned for release in the United States on November 6, 2015, while British audiences will receive it on October 23 of that year.



Randy Travis Undergoes Surgery After a Stroke

Randy Travis performing at the funeral service for George Jones in May.Rick Diamond/Getty Images Randy Travis performing at the funeral service for George Jones in May.

Randy Travis was in critical condition on Thursday morning after suffering a stroke and undergoing emergency surgery to relieve pressure on his brain, according to officials at the Heart Hospital at Baylor in Plano, Tex., where he was being treated.

The stroke was a complication of congestive heart faiure, Mr. Travis’s publicist, Kirt Webster, said in an online statement.

The country singer was first hospitalized on Sunday at Baylor Medical Center in McKinney, Tex., after he showed up at the emergency room. Doctors diagnosed his condition as a heart infection that had caused an enlargement of the heart and led to congestive heart failure, doctors said in a video statement.

On Monday, doctors implanted a pumping device in Mr. Travis’s left ventricle to stabilize the singer before transferring him to the Heart Hospital in nearby Plano, where he could get more advanced care, Mr. Webster said. By noon on Wednesday, his condition had stabilized and shown signs of improvement.

But Mr. Travis, 54, took a turn for the worse on Wednesday afternoon when he suffered the stroke, the hospital said.

Mr. Travis’s illness is related to his “recently acquired viral cardiomyopathy,” Mr. Webster told CNN. He had recently been on tour and appeared to be in good health, performing in Detroit on June 28 and Chicago on June 29. During business meetings on Friday and Saturday, he appeared well. “Then on Sunday, it hit him,” Mr. Webster said.

Viral cardiomyopathy is a disorder in which a virus attacks the heart muscles, causing them to beat slower and sometimes stop, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site.

Mr. Travis had been through a turbulent year in 2012, being arrested for assault and public intoxication, As one of country music’s top-selling artists, Mr. Travis has won several Grammys and has a shelf-ful of Academy of Country Music awards and American Music Award statuettes. His best-known songs include “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “Diggin’ Up Bones” and “Deeper Than the Holler.”



As Labor Dispute Drags On, Minnesota Orchestra Cancels Summer Concerts

The intractable labor dispute at the Minnesota Orchestra, where the musicians have been locked out since October, had already caused the cancellation of the respected orchestra’s entire 2012-13 season and has now wiped out its planned summer season as well.

The orchestra’s management announced on Wednesday that it was canceling a series of summer concerts that was to have run from July 20 to Aug. 3, and which would have included some of the works that were to have been performed during the regular season. The summer concerts were announced when the main part of the season was canceled in May.

“We have delayed canceling these concerts as long as we possibly could with the hope we would have an agreement in place,” Jon Campbell, the chairman of the orchestra’s board, said in a statement. An unsigned notice on the orchestra’s Web page went further:

“Our board and management have a responsibility to protect the Minnesota Orchestra for the long term,” the notice read, “and that means negotiating a contract that allows the organization to live within its financial means. We need an Orchestra that is both artistically and financially strong to benefit our audiences, supporters, community and musicians for years to come, and we will keep working with our musicians to arrive at an agreement that achieves this goal.”

But management and the musicians have pointedly not been working together. There were several meetings and exchanges of letters during the spring, but they were meetings about whether to have further meetings. Management has proposed what it calls its best and final offer, and the musicians say that they have made several proposals, including an offer to continue performing under the terms of the expired contract while negotiating a new one. But the players insist that they will not negotiate while they are locked out.

Critics around the country have wondered why the sides have been unable to find common ground, and have noted that this unusually contentious labor dispute has threatened to ruin the promising relationship between an ensemble that had long been regarded as one of the country’s best and Osmo Vanska, the high-regarded Finnish conductor who has been its music director since 2003, and with whom it is in the middle of several recording projects that have been put on hold. Mr. Vanska has gone so far as to suggest, in a letter to the board on April 30, that if the lockout caused a cancellation of the orchestraâ€s Carnegie Hall appearance, scheduled for November, he would have to resign.

Blois Olsen, a spokesman for the musicians, said that the players did not have a comment on the latest cancellation.

The orchestra also announced that it has returned a $960,000 grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, which was to have been used for general operating expenses. In December the orchestra had promised the state legislature that it would not use the money until it had reached an agreement with its musicians. Since no agreement was reached before the end of the arts board’s fiscal year, on June 30, the money was returned. It could be granted again in 2014.



PEN Announces Finalists and Judges for Book Prizes

The PEN American Center today announced the shortlists and judges for its 2013 PEN Literary Awards. Taken together, the awards, fellowships and grants from the literary and human rights organization will confer $150,000 on writers, editors and translators.

The finalists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which awards $25,000 to the author of a debut work of fiction, are “Battleborn,” by Claire Vaye Watkins; “Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain,” by Lucia Perillo; “My Only Wife,” by Jac Jemc; “A Land More Kind Than Home,” by Wiley Cash; and “A Naked Singularity,” by Sergio de la Pava. This year’s judges in the category are Tom Drury, Danielle Evans and Donald Ray Pollock.

The nonfiction award, a $10,000 prize named for John Kenneth Galbraith, is available for books published in 2011 or 2012. This year’s finalists are “Iron Curtain,” by Anne Applebaum; “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” by Katherine Boo; “Moby-Duck,” by Donovan Hohn; and “God’s Hotel,” by Victoria Sweet. The judges are Eliza Griswold, Maya Jasanoff and Edward Mendelson.

Other award categories include essay collection, science writing, sports writing and biography. The full list of finalists in all categories also includes Daniel Mendelsohn, Lisa Cohen, David Quammen and Frank Deford. The winners will be announced later this summer and honored at a ceremony on Oct. 21 at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium.



PEN Announces Finalists and Judges for Book Prizes

The PEN American Center today announced the shortlists and judges for its 2013 PEN Literary Awards. Taken together, the awards, fellowships and grants from the literary and human rights organization will confer $150,000 on writers, editors and translators.

The finalists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which awards $25,000 to the author of a debut work of fiction, are “Battleborn,” by Claire Vaye Watkins; “Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain,” by Lucia Perillo; “My Only Wife,” by Jac Jemc; “A Land More Kind Than Home,” by Wiley Cash; and “A Naked Singularity,” by Sergio de la Pava. This year’s judges in the category are Tom Drury, Danielle Evans and Donald Ray Pollock.

The nonfiction award, a $10,000 prize named for John Kenneth Galbraith, is available for books published in 2011 or 2012. This year’s finalists are “Iron Curtain,” by Anne Applebaum; “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” by Katherine Boo; “Moby-Duck,” by Donovan Hohn; and “God’s Hotel,” by Victoria Sweet. The judges are Eliza Griswold, Maya Jasanoff and Edward Mendelson.

Other award categories include essay collection, science writing, sports writing and biography. The full list of finalists in all categories also includes Daniel Mendelsohn, Lisa Cohen, David Quammen and Frank Deford. The winners will be announced later this summer and honored at a ceremony on Oct. 21 at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium.



London Theater Journal: Monsters and Ghosts

LONDON â€" Kim Cattrall has one great movie-star moment toward the end of “Sweet Bird of Youth” at the Old Vic Theater. Before that moment it arrived, I was worried that there would be nothing worth remembering from Marianne Elliott’s turgid revival of Tennessee Williams’s overwrought 1959 play about time as an assassin of the young and beautiful. So, thank you, Ms. Cattrall and Ms. Elliott, for salving my disappointment - at one of my final shows on this trip to London â€" at the last minute with this single image, fit for Cinemascope-sized recollection.

This is what happens: Ms. Cattrall, portraying the has-been, self-medicating film goddess Alexandra Del Lago, has been stumbling around a hotel room in a panic, hell bent on getting out of the unfriendly Florida town where she has washed up. Suddenly, someone’s battering on her door. It’s a gang of white supremacist rednecks, who have come to castrate her pet stud!

And Alexandra, bless her gold-plated heart, pulls herself together before you can say, “Roll ‘em.” She throws a mink stole over her now squared shoulders, straightens her back and faces down the thugs like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Her instinctively grand posture suggests years of red-carpet appearances and confrontations with domineering studio heads; she’s valiant, pathetic, intimidating and absurd.

This is surely just what a survivor of the old Hollywood studio system would do when faced with a life-threatening crisis. When those castrating baddies burst into Alexandra’s room and froze in their tracks, I couldn’t help thinking (god forgive me) of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest,” telling a board room of Pepsi Cola executives not to mess with her, fellas; this wasn’t her first time at the rodeo.

Otherwise, watching Ms. Cattrall in this production, which features the fresh-faced Seth Numrich as the gigolo Chance Wayne, I thought mostly of Susan Hayward. This is not just because Ms. Cattrall wears that red Haywardesque wig, which has been the subject of much sport in the London newspapers. Ms. Cattrall is also acting in the style of Hayward when that old-school star had her eyes on an Oscar nomination and was striving for high sincerity.

Best known for television’s “Sex and the City” but a deft stage veteran as well, Ms. Cattrall makes all the right histrionic gestures here, but they mostly feel hollow.She gives a carefully measured performance in which you’re always aware of the actress playing the actress. I might have enjoyed her more if I hadn’t seen Diane Lane’s searing Alexandra at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last year.

Ms. Lane’s gasping, grasping portrait unmistakably belonged to that gallery of creatures Williams identified as monsters, people made grotesque by success and humiliation, and a tribe to which he admitted he too belonged. Monsters are scary, partly because you’re afraid you might become one yourself given the right provocation. Ms. Cattrall didn’t scare me for a second.

Nor did Mr. Numrich â€" who played opposite another larger-than-life figure in the Broadway production of “War Horse” (co-directed by Ms. Elliott) - as Chance, a baby monster about to self-destruct. He’s a fine, sensitive and very likable actor. But in the role of a professional beauty who discovers his youth has evaporated, Mr. Numrich doesn’t look even remotely shopworn. This Chance is just a nice kid who can’t hold his liquor.

Remove the monstrosity from Alexandra and Chance, and you also remove the potential for “Sweet Bird” to be a tragedy as well as a melodrama. What’s left, then, is a lot of hokum about evil-minded Southern power-mongers and their minions. And it’s the vengeful, racist Boss Finley (played quite credibly by the Irish actor Owen Roe) who by default becomes this production’s monster supremo. Ms. Elliott and her technical team whip up a lot of rumbling, sinister atmospherics for “Sweet Bird,” but somehow the air remains inert.

Thunder and lightning - of the variety associated with generic dark and stormy nights - figure in “Bracken Moor,” Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play at the Tricycle Theater. Staged with absorbing conviction by Polly Teale, “Bracken Moor” is a ghost story with an earnest social conscience.

That combination of form and content isn’t as unusual as you might think. Isn’t that essentially what Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” is? In this case, the urges to terrify and moralize ultimately work against each other in this Great Depression-era tale of a coal-mining czar haunted by the death of his young son.

But until it reveals the political machinery behind the illusions, “Bracken Moor” is good fun in an old-fashioned way. It has some of the appeal of those early 20th-century Gothic tales by M.R. James (not Henry James, who aimed higher in his haunted house stories). Especially in its first act, in which visitors to a somber mansion in Northern England stir up things that go bump in the night, “Bracken Moor” smoothly melds shivery sensationalism with Shavian talkiness.

Ms. Teale is the artistic director of Shared Experience, which is known for translating classic novels into story theater, and her respect for traditional narrative serves “Bracken Moor” well. This is not a show to be winked at.

Mr. Campbell, whose previous works include the gay social-studies play “The Pride” and the family psychodrama “Apologia,” is a dramatist of admirably aspirational reach. But he needs to unfurrow his didactic brow a bit, and let the audience figure out on its own what he’s trying to say.

Great ghost stories, like Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw,” leave room for the individual imagination to fill in the blanks. “Bracken Moor” may end in darkness, with a last-minute “gotcha” reversal. But by that time it’s been flooded with so much instructional light that all shadows have long since been dissolved.



July 11: Where the Candidates Are Today

Planned events for the mayoral candidates, according to the campaigns and organizations they are affiliated with. Times are listed as scheduled but frequently change.

Joseph Burgess and Nicholas Wells contributed reporting.

Event information is listed as provided at the time of publication. Details for many of Ms. Quinn events are not released for publication.

Events by candidate

Albanese

De Blasio

Liu

Group event


John A. Catsimatidis
Republican

9:30 a.m.
Participates in the Council of Senior Centers and Services’ “The Future of Aging in New York City” breakfast forum, at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.

Bill de Blasio
Democrat

8:20 a.m.
Greets morning commuters at the West 4th Street subway station, in the West Village.

9:30 a.m.
Participates in the Council of Senior Centers and Services’ “The Future of Aging in New York City” breakfast forum, at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.

10:15 a.m.
One day after he got arrested for participating in a rally to save Long Island College Hospital, a move that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office cast as political gimmickry, Mr. de Blasio, in his public advocate role, holds a news conference calling on the hospital’s overseers at SUNY to release information about any requests they received to save or sell the facility, at the public advocate’s office.

3 p.m.
Knocks on doors, greeting voters, with State Senator James Sanders, in Rochdale Village, Queens.

4:15 p.m.
Continues greeting voters with State Senator James Sanders, in Jamaica Center, Queens.

John C. Liu
Democrat

9:30 a.m.
Participates in the Council of Senior Centers and Services’ “The Future of Aging in New York City” breakfast forum, at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.

12:30 p.m.
Attends ribbon-cutting for the Flushing Town Hall garden and portico, at Flushing Town Hall.

8:15 p.m.
Attends the Arab Muslim American Federation of New York’s Ramadan Iftar dinner, at the Dyker Beach Club in Brooklyn.

Anthony D. Weiner
Democrat

9:30 a.m.
Participates in the Council of Senior Centers and Services’ “The Future of Aging in New York City” breakfast forum, at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.

Sal F. Albanese
Democrat

9:30 a.m.
Participates in the Council of Senior Centers and Services’ “The Future of Aging in New York City” breakfast forum, at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.

12 p.m.
Lunches with seniors at the Whittaker Center, on the Lower East Side.

5:30 p.m.
Marches with supporters of Long Island College Hospital to protest its threatened closing, from the hospital to the Brooklyn Bridge.

7:30 p.m.
Attends the Arab Muslim American Federation of New York’s Ramadan Iftar dinner, at the Dyker Beach Club in Brooklyn.

9 p.m.
In one of those only-in-New-York scenes, he follows up on his communal breaking of the fast for Ramadan with a stop in Midwood to greet shoppers outside of Pomegranate, a high-end kosher grocery whose wares have caught the eye of everyone from Ivanka Trump to Bibi Netanyahu, on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn.

Readers with information about events involving the mayoral candidates are invited to send details and suggestions for coverage to cowan@nytimes.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @cowannyt.



An Expressway Speed Record

Dear Diary:

Overheard during the Five Boro Bike Tour on May 5, at about the 37-mile mark of the 40-mile ride, on the B.Q.E., heading toward the Verrazano Bridge, one bike rider to another:

“You know, I’ve driven on this road hundreds of times, but I think this is the fastest I’ve ever gone.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.



New York Today: Ballot Fever

Thursday is the last day for office-seekers to collect the signatures they need to get on the ballot.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Thursday is the last day for office-seekers to collect the signatures they need to get on the ballot.

Thursday’s forecast calls for a deluge of campaign workers. They will roam the city’s busier areas, ever more eager for you to sign a petition as the hours fade.

Candidates who want to run in September’s primary have until the end of the day to turn in signatures to the Board of Elections.

Those seeking a citywide office (like mayor) need 3,750 signatures from members of their party. That may not sound like much, but a large cushion is preferable because opponents may challenge some.

Much attention will focus on whether the campaign of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a late entrant in the comptroller’s race, can collect enough.

Here’s what else you need to know to start your Thursday:

WEATHER

Clammy, mid-80s, rain likely by afternoon. A lot like yesterday, though the chance of thunderstorms, which mostly didn’t materialize yesterday, rises to 70 percent. Bring an umbrella.

TRANSIT & TRAFFIC

- Roads [5:51] O.K. so far, 1010 WINS reports.

Alternate-side parking rules: in effect.

- Mass Transit [5:53] Delays on the D train northbound. Click for the latest status.

COMING UP TODAY

- Amma, the Indian “hugging saint” with the gigantic global following, begins her three-day run at the Javits Center. She will hug many thousands of people.

- City bus drivers will speak out against the “physical and verbal abuse” they suffer at the hands of riders at an afternoon rally in Brooklyn.

- Children in pajamas (and their parents) will protest the proposed closing of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn starting at 5:30 p.m.

- On the campaign trail, some mayoral candidates will attend a forum on the elderly at 9:30 a.m. at N.Y.U., sponsored by the Council of Senior Centers and Services.

- Shakespeare in the Parking Lot opens its season with “Cymbeline” at 8 p.m in municipal lot at the corner of Broome and Ludlow in Manhattan. [Free]

- The rambunctious Hungry March Band will serenade lunch-eaters outside 1 New York Plaza near the Manhattan terminal for the Staten Island Ferry at 12:30 p.m.

- “Easy Rider” screens in Tompkins Square Park at sunset. Live music before the show. [Free]

- 7/11 means free Slurpees at participating 7-Elevens from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

- Salsa lessons in Hudson River Park at 6:30 p.m.. [Free]

- An astronomer will explain Manhattanhenge, where the sun sets in line with the street grid, at the American Museum of Natural History at 7 p.m.

- For more events, see The New York Times’s Arts & Entertainment guide.

E.C. Gogolak contributed reporting.

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