As the tomato-borne salmonella now appears to have spread to twenty-three states (including New York), we expect greenmarkets across the city to see increased demand for their wares. Of course, localism has already become popular, both as a means to reduce one’s carbon footprint and as a measure of returning to the rhythms of the natural season after years of imported fruits and vegetables have made seasonality nearly meaningless. And transporting food across the country means that contamination—as with these tomatoes—can infect many communities at once. A similar, if more unusual, situation occurred in 1981, when a mysterious outbreak of salmonella appeared in Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia. As Berton Roueché reported in the magazine in 1984, investigators began searching for the most common form of infection: food. But nothing edible tied the cases together. The breakthrough came when a victim admitted to smoking pot with her friends, all of whom had also contracted the illness. One of the lead investigators, Dr. David N. Taylor, who then worked for the Centers for Disease Control, told Roueché:

The salmonella was in the marijuana. When a marijuana smoker rolled a cigarette, his hands became contaminated, and when he put the cigarette in his mouth his lips became contaminated. Then a touch or a kiss or any sort of contact could spread the infection.…And not only that. Pot decreases the gastric acid, and gastric acid is an important defense against infections of all kinds. Regular pot smokers are especially susceptible to infection.

The investigators concluded that, because of the extremely heavy contamination and the presence of other bacteria like E. coli and K. pneumoniae, the marijuana had likely been deliberately laced with dried manure—a quick way to boost weight, and profits.—Andrea Thompson

With the Tony Awards show around the corner (Sunday night at 8), the heat is on with these burning questions: Will anyone beat “South Pacific” for the most Tony wins? Can “Passing Strange” edge out “In the Heights” for Best Musical? Is it remotely possible that anyone can topple Pulitzer Prize-winning “August: Osage County” for Best Play? Will “Cry-Baby” pick one up for Best Choreography? Sometimes the performances are the best part, so, in the spirit of competition, let’s see if anyone (Patti? Stew?) can outdo last year’s cast of the Best Musical winner in this “Spring Awakening” medley.—Shauna Lyon

Hundreds of students and alumni of the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, are petitioning the school’s trustees to suspend plans for a fifty-million-dollar building designed by Frank Gehry, the L.A. Times reports. Casting the college president, Richard Koshalek, as an empire builder (think: education’s answer to Thomas Krens), the petition asks trustees to “take immediate action to again make education the school’s top investment.” At issue are rising tuition costs and allegedly falling academic standards. Koshalek, who has helmed the school since 1999, countered in yesterday’s L.A. Weekly that the Gehry building will help Art Center “distinguish itself in the global marketplace [and] attract the best students, faculty and corporate partners. ”

The long-simmering opposition to the building went public last month when Nathan Cook, a twenty-six-year old Industrial Design major, wrote a blog post challenging the administration’s priorities. What set Cook off was the fact that, while Art Center brands itself a leader in sustainability, the campus has no recycling bins and its cafeteria uses Styrofoam plates and cups. When he was informed that the school couldn’t afford eco-friendly amenities, Cook blogged that the school managed to pay Gehry Partners in excess of three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in design fees in 2005, according to public tax records. The moral of the story: It pays to recycle.—Andrea K. Scott

For a while, the rumor was that George Clinton’s forthcoming studio album would be called “Any Percentage of You Is As Good As the Whole Pie,” and that it would feature a collaboration with Sly Stone. As is often the case, the truth approaches the rumor, but doesn’t quite reach it. The album, we have now learned, will be called “Radio Friendly,” and it will be released on Shanachie Records, on September 3rd. And Sly Stone does appear, along with Carlos Santana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, El DeBarge, and others. However, the album will be composed mostly of funk-flavored covers of old R. & B. songs such as Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” and Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar.” The Sly Stone collaboration was supposedly called “Fever,” but maybe it’s a cover of the Little Willie John classic. There is one new song, titled “Mathematics of Love,” which may or may not have anything to do with the Emma Darwin novel. Below, Clinton and a bunch of tourists perform a P-Funk medley on David Letterman’s show in 1989. Clinton was promoting a solo album that was released on Prince’s Paisley Park label and titled accordingly (“The Cinderella Theory,” which can be roughly paraphrased as “Someday my prince will come”).—Ben Greenman

My colleague Katherine Stirling sends along proof that Alfred Hitchcock is a great director. An unpublished critical essay by André Bazin? Hitchcock’s own tell-all autobiography, found preserved in the trunk of a submerged car? No, a report in the Guardian of a neurological experiment, the results of which were published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, in which a bunch of viewers had their brain waves monitored while watching one of his works (an episode of his TV series), an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a scene from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and video of a concert in Washington Square Park. The scientists figured out how to map responses common to its participants (the “inter-subject correlation,” or I.S.C.) and their results were summed up in Science Daily:

• The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers’ minds;
• High I.S.C. was also extensive (45 percent) for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”;
• Lower I.S.C. was recorded for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

The scientists explained, “The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers’ minds.” They’ve proven that the sky is blue. What awaits to be seen is the extent to which, and the reason why, viewers find this sort of control pleasurable; how the level of mind control provided by Hitchcock (or, for that matter, Sergio Leone, surely a master, though a somewhat lesser one) compares with the captivation factor of great music or great books; and, as with so many aesthetic matters, who the outliers are. (Probably critics.)—Richard Brody

An object of curiosity around the office lately has been “Evil Urges,” the new release by the Louisville quintet My Morning Jacket, which came out earlier this week. The album’s title, which is also the name of its first song, makes it clear that the front man and chief songwriter Jim James has fallen under the sway of some strange and powerful forces. Up until now, the band has been known for excavating reverb-heavy southern rock in the electric Neil Young vein. Sure, they’ve taken detours, embracing a Flaming Lips exoticism on their previous album, “Z,” for example, but “Evil Urges” sounds like the band has been placed under a spell. More specifically, a spell cast by Prince: James often sings with an eerie falsetto and a funk vibe permeates the album. The band, which is at Radio City next week, just announced that it will be playing Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve. That might seem like a long way off, but tickets go on sale next Friday, the 27th, at noon. The Radio City appearance sold out in twenty-two minutes, so don’t be late if you’re interested. Here’s the band performing the title track at Coachella, earlier this year.—John Donohue

I’ve heard the New York Philharmonic twice over the last week, once in their home at Avery Fisher Hall and once at Carnegie Hall, their historic home base until the mid-nineteen-sixties. Lorin Maazel conducted on both occasions. Maazel is nearing eighty, and over the last year it has become standard for the conductor to spend the first few minutes (sometimes more than a few) of a concert warming up, the way many a great diva has used an opera’s Act I to get in her groove. (Let it be known, however, that Maazel’s schedule would exhaust a man half his age.) In Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, at Avery Fisher, it was near the end of the second movement, in which a rather pedestrian account of the Ländler dance suddenly acquired a new expressive accuracy and rhythmic bounce; in “The Ring Without Words,” a masterly condensation of orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s tetraology that Maazel fashioned in 1987 for a Telarc CD, it was around the love music from “Die Walküre.” But who wouldn’t be roused by that?

The Mahler bloomed wonderfully from then on; once again, I marvelled not only at this conductor’s brilliant execution of musical detail but also at how this orchestra has managed to produce (under Maazel’s baton, at least) a sumptuous, even elegant sound in a hall of notoriously frustrating acoustics. Heading to Carnegie Hall last night, I was expecting to hear the Phil in a newfound glory, and what I heard was…well, unglorious.

Of course, they can play Wagner’s music with satisfying richness and formidable expertise. They’re a great orchestra. But the sound they’ve honed for Avery Fisher seemed strange in Carnegie’s warm confines: The basses are thin instead of resonant; the violas almost disappear; the violins’ athletic phrasing sounds chunky and prosaic instead of fulsome and gracious. We still get those eloquent horns, those stunningly precise trombones. Yet the special weaknesses amidst the superb wind section are painfully magnified: I won’t be specific, but let’s just say that during the Prologue to “Götterdämmerung” I could have used a hearty dose of Dramamine.

The audience cheered the performance with the lusty ardor of a home-town crowd.—Russell Platt

With political fervor running high, it’s hardly a surprise that Jones soda would jump into the fray. (After all, this is the company notorious for creating a Turkey and Gravy soda in honor of the holiday season.) Their Campaign Cola (via Serious Eats) gives political education a sugary infusion: you can explore how the candidates’ statements stack up to the facts (“Barack Obama: A gas tax holiday is a gimmick that ‘every economist says will just go into the pockets of the oil companies.’ The Truth-O-Meter says: Half-True”); register to vote; or post in a forum (where Ron Paul supporters have come out in force: “Jones Soda Includes the Three Stooges, but not Ron Paul?”). Clinton is still an option, and running in close third to McCain (she’s got a thousand and sixty-two votes, he has twelve hundred), but Obama is the clear soda candidate of choice, with nearly three thousand votes. Unfortunately for Jones, Obama doesn’t like soda—he prefers water.—Andrea Thompson

When the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art hired Lionel Ritchie to perform in honor of the collector Eli Broad at its recent gala (an act that one wag dismissed as a bar-mitzvah set), it may have started a pop-star-at-big-ticket-openings trend. Tomorrow night, when the new Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow hosts an invitation-only gala, guests will be treated to the sultry song stylings—or the churlish song slurrings, condition pending—of Amy Winehouse (who is being paid a rumored two million dollars to perform). The C.C.C. Moscow is the brainchild of Daria (Dasha) Zhukova, a twenty-six-year-old Russian-born, London-based model turned clothing designer turned art impresario whose boyfriend (and backer) is the forty-one year-old Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. (Abramovich, also a Londoner, made headlines in art circles last month, when he dropped two hundred million dollars at auction on a pair of paintings, by Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.) The nonprofit center is housed in a former bus garage (pictured) designed in 1927 by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. Its first show, an installation by the Mexican electronic artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer, is being billed as a soft opening of sorts, with the real inaugural planned for September: a retrospective of works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the first major survey of the expat artists’ work in their hometown. Who will play at that party, Bruce Springsteen? In the far-fetched event that the Boss succumbs to the lure of oligarch dollars, we offer below a clip of “My Hometown,” recorded in Paris in 1985.—Andrea K. Scott

Surfers have been rocking since as long as the sport and the music have existed. The godfather of the genre is, of course, Dick Dale, whose crashing reverb set the standard for the surf-rock genre. Dale’s 1961 instrumental “Let’s Go Trippin” was followed by the Chantays’s “Pipeline” and the Surfaris’s “Wipe Out.” In more recent years, Jack Johnson has charted with a smoother brand of surf rock. The latest surfer to enter the recording studio is Timmy Curran, whose first album, “Word of Mouth,” comes out next month; Curran, who is on a national tour of surf shops and taverns, follows Johnson’s mellow vibe. But if the trend in surf rock has been toward the placid, the trend in the sport have been the opposite. Curran is famous for pioneering a move that’s more at home under the big top than on a surfboard: a full rotation, upside-down flip. Here’s a clip of Curran in action on the high seas.—John Donohue

The second and final week of the series at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave., at 2nd St.; 212-505-5181) devoted to Howard Hawks’s later films (1948-70) begins tonight with two Westerns starring John Wayne, “Rio Bravo,” from 1959, at 6:45, and “El Dorado”—virtually a remake of “Rio Bravo”— from 1967, at 9:30. I was tempted to call them both “classics,” but, where the earlier is indeed a classic, and perhaps (along with John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) an apogee of the genre, “El Dorado” is Hawks’s hysterical, modernist refraction of the same story. The performances in both are brilliant: in “Rio Bravo,” Dean Martin and Walter Brennan steal the show, and Robert Mitchum and James Caan admirable fill their boots in the later film. (For those who can’t get downtown tonight, both movies came out on DVD last year, along with a spate of other masterworks by Hawks; I reviewed them at the time.)—Richard Brody

Some days you wake up angry. That’s just how it goes. I didn’t design the world; I’m just reading the blueprints. On those days, you need the Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine, designed by the artists Yarisal and Kublitz. It works like a regular vending machine, but instead of getting candy or chips you get the satisfaction of seeing a china cup or plate fall to the floor of the machine and smash into smithereens. It’s been making the rounds online and increasing in popularity, which may mean that the duo has to market it commercially. Buy one for your office today.—Ben Greenman

BMW engineers have designed a car covered not in metal but in high-tech stretched cloth, as the video below startlingly attests. I can’t believe this satisfies even the most basic safety requirements, despite the Design BMW Group Director Chris Bangle’s insistence that “crash and stiffness and ride-handling can be handled in a space-frame type vehicle entirely without the skin.” Still, the prototype is fascinating, if not exactly beautiful, and it will certainly change your idea of what a car looks like. For such an elegant innovation, the name is all elbows—the acronym is Geometry and Function In N Adaptations, or GINA, and it’s hard to imagine that an office-wide contest wouldn’t have turned up something snappier. (The first person I asked said, “Flexi-Car,” which isn’t better, but isn’t a whole lot worse.) This may be an automotive design philosophy whose time has come: Bangle explains the car’s appeal by saying, “There’s a lot of change possible,” which sounds vaguely familiar. Maybe BMW can loan a car to Barack Obama for the campaign trail.—Ben Greenman

Christopher Hitchens last week objected on two counts to the practice of waiters pouring wine without being asked. His first gripe was intrusiveness. Hitchens is a talker, and interruption, he says, puts him off his game, the way a ball rolling onto the court might wreck a Federer forehand. (Lets are apparently not an option for the grand-slam anecdotist.) Hitchens’s second objection is on chintzier grounds. “Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself,” he writes, “but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle.” Frank Bruni, the Times’s restaurant critic, seconded the check-padding thing, calling it “up-selling in the drag of solicitiousness.”

When a waiter pours the wine, Hitchens writes, “it completely usurps my prerogative.” If only every host was as chivalrously minded. More often, though, the crime is less usurpation on the waiter’s part than abdication on the host’s. People these days are confused about who does what at a formal meal. It’s only humane for the waiter to pick up the slack in fancy-boozing situations (dates, business dinners, “Meet the Fockers”-type parental outings), in which the alpha member of the table sips his Bordeaux like it’s hemlock while the rest of the table’s glasses approach Aral Sea levels.

“It pains me to see good wine being sloshed into the glasses of those who have not asked for it and may not want it,” Hitchens writes. It pains me, on the other hand, to see good wine not being sloshed into the glasses of those who can’t ask for it and want it desperately—frequently, women with nice manners. According to Amy Vanderbilt’s “Complete Book of Etiquette,” it is the responsibility of the male host or the male guest of honor to keep glasses filled. So, like seconds and sex, women are supposed to play coy even if they want it. (The French, unsurprisingly, are really adamant on this point.) Anna Post, the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, says that there’s no specific prohibition on women requesting refills, but that a man commonly attends to a woman’s glass as a courtesy, the way he might pull out her chair. This is good, except that a host may be overly eager to impute abstemiousness to his female companions, perhaps to his own advantage. Hitchens writes, “Not everybody likes wine as much as I do. Many females, for example, confine themselves to one glass per meal or even half a glass.” This is why chicks dig the waiter approach.

A Swiss friend who cares about this stuff said that he normally doesn’t have any problem with women grabbing the bottle, but, “in a more formal dinner, men should probably be in charge of the task.” He was far more concerned about putting a stop to the mistake of people pouring wine with their hand backwards, palm up, around the bottle. (This never should be done, he said, because that’s how the condemned were served in the Middle Ages.) He added, “In Switzerland, we have a pretty nice belief, which is that the one who gets the last drops, called ‘les amours,’ will be lucky in love.”—Lauren Collins

As early as 1988, barbed words flew back and forth between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, when the latter made the film “Bird” and the former complained that it wasn’t a white director’s place to do so. Later, Lee said that he made the film “Mo’ Better Blues” in part as a corrective to Eastwood’s depiction of a black jazz musician as a self-destructive drug addict (which, in fact, the movie’s protagonist, Charlie Parker, was).

Then, at Cannes last month, Lee again took Eastwood to task, this time for having excluded black soldiers from “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” (Lee was there to promote his own forthcoming Second World War drama, “Miracle at St. Anna,” about an all-black platoon.) Eastwood responded by telling Lee to “shut his face,” and, though he admitted that there were some black soldiers on Iwo Jima, he defended his decision by the fact that “they didn’t raise the flag” in the iconic photo on which the films are based. Lee riposted, saying, “The man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either,” and continued:

If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist.

Eastwood then upped the ante and broadened his target, speaking of his new film, “Changeling,” which premièred (to mixed reviews) at Cannes, set in Los Angeles in the nineteen-twenties, in which no blacks are featured prominently, on the grounds that the black community there was quite small at the time:

What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fucking story about that?…Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game.

Here’s the problem: Eastwood and Lee (the former, a classic liberal; the latter, a postmodern multiculturalist) are both conservative storytellers. They are both very good filmmakers who tell very good stories, but what keeps them both from the first rank of filmmakers is precisely their insistence on buttoned-up, buttoned-down dramatics. The great modern directors, from Welles and Rossellini to Godard and Kiarostami, know how to puncture, fracture, and disrupt their stories in order to get at their ideas. It’s in the disunity and interruption of storytelling that the most important directors reveal themselves, and make their strongest, deepest, most personal points. If the segregation of the U.S. Army mattered to Eastwood, he could easily have found a way to film the absence of black soldiers or to make their minor presence ring tragic (a kind of tragedy which the frantic, digressive tone of “Bird” indeed achieves). If Lee wanted to avoid the appearance of making advertisements on behalf of the excluded, he could confront inimical and offensive realities with overt polemics—in his best work, such as “Do the Right Thing,” he does exactly this. The problem with their personal war of invective is that both talk politics and history, on which neither is particularly expert, instead of framing the argument in terms of what they love and what they know: cinema.—Richard Brody

Remember when Alex Rodriguez embarrassed the sport of baseball, and himself, by stealing the spotlight from the World Series with his announcement that he would opt out of his Yankees contract? The resulting controversy caused a rift between A-Rod and his agent, Scott Boras, and even though A-Rod ended up back with the Yankees, it seemed clear that a star player would never again make the same mistake by scheduling a self-centered contract announcement during his sport’s championship. Right? Well, almost. As expected, Gilbert Arenas opted out of the final year of his Washington Wizards contract, and somehow the parties involved made sure that the official confirmation of the news came right in the middle of the N.B.A. finals, which currently finds the Celtics up 2-0 on the Lakers. Agent Zero has not yet addressed the matter on his blog; here he is in an after-practice shooting contest with teammate DeShawn Stevenson.—Ben Greenman

During the valley between the regular and summer seasons, interesting concerts spring up—and Milton Babbitt, the doyen of mathematical modernists, is nothing if not an interesting guy. His music, if you can stay the course, can be quite charming, as his titles often indicate (“Lagniappe,” “Canonical Form,” and “My Complements to Roger”), though in an astringent, Campari-and-soda way. The pianist Augustus Arrone offers a tour d’horizon of Babbitt’s solo piano music at Merkin Concert Hall (212-501-3330) on June 10th, at 8.

Babbitt is, at least, well known among the New York cognoscenti. George Apherghis, a senior Greek composer who (like his great, late colleague Iannis Xenakis) moved to Paris long ago, is famed in Europe as a master of innovative and challenging music-theatre. His work will be a main focus of the Mannes College of Music’s admired Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance (IFCP), which runs from June 10th to June 17th. Another focus will be on Elliott Carter, whose Elizabeth Bishop song cycle, “A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” will be presented by the festival on June 16th. All concerts are at 8 P.M.—Russell Platt

(Photograph of Georges Aperghis by Patricia Dietzi.)

In the current issue of the magazine, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the visionary architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, whose legacy includes a flying car (the Dymaxion Vehicle), an “Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth,” and, most famously, the geodesic dome. Fuller also has a Nobel Prize-winning namesake: the buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball, for short. The spherical, all-carbon molecule was discovered by Sir Harold Kroto in the U.K. and Richard E. Smalley and Robert F. Curl, Jr., in the U.S., and the three researchers shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery. In honor of Fuller—and of the heat wave currently plowing over the East Coast—we share this video recipe for buckyballs made of ice-cream cones, in lieu of non-planar carbon compounds.—Andrea K. Scott

On Saturday, I made the trip to Governors Island, to take in the Jazz Age Lawn Party organized by Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra. The gathering was full of mostly young and thin people dressed, despite the sweltering heat, with what appeared to be extreme concern for the latest in Roaring Twenties fashion—lots of slender frocks, seersucker suits, and, in what could have been a nod to the early arrival of summer or simply a pristine example of New York City eccentricity, the occasional tight-shorts-and-tank-top outfit that was either a) underwear or b) a vintage bathing suit. (A bona-fide example of local eccentricity was found in the dozens upon dozens of folks who actually knew how to dance the Charleston, and did so with abundant flair.)

The lawn party is over for the year, but even without the music and dancing Governors Island is worth a visit. For one, it is a bit cooler than the rest of the city, thanks to its location in New York Harbor. And visiting it requires a ferry ride, which. if you put any faith in Kenneth Grahame, who wrote, in “The Wind in the Willows,” that “there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” is nearly its own reward. The island itself has remained underutilized since the mid-nineties, when the federal government offered to turn it over to the city for a dollar. Prior to its present, stuck-in-time state, it was an army base, a coast-guard facility, and a prison for Confederate soldiers (though not in that order). The island is leafy and green and a great place for biking. For those who don’t own a bike, it was announced last week that bike shares are now available on the island. They are free on Fridays and available at a nominal charge on weekends, which calls to mind Freddie Mercury’s great exclamation.—John Donohue

Girl Talk’s last album, “Night Ripper,” was half art and half philosophy. On the one hand, it was a joyous, up-tempo pop record with hip-hop influences; on the other hand, it was a master class in intellectual property use (or misuse)—Greg Gillis, the mastermind behind the band, didn’t exactly create songs so much as assemble them, magpie-like, from bits and pieces of more than a hundred and fifty other songs, many of them recognizable pop classics. “Night Ripper” arrived at a time when mashups were fashionable, and so it was classed with them, but it had as much in common with John Oswald’s “plunderphonics,” which sought to explode ideas of pop-music ownership by recombining familiar songs into unfamiliar compositions.

Now, Girl Talk is about to release its new album, “Feed the Animals,” which Gillis promises incorporates more than three hundred songs. And sprezzatura, evidently: “For the final editing process, I probably worked eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, for about three months,” he told Billboard. “I worked very hard to make it sound like I didn’t work hard.” The album will be released soon, though the Illegal Art Web site, and will follow the pricing plan of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”: pay what you wish. In the open-source spirit of the project, here is a rotoscope video for Girl Talk’s “Bounce That,” created by students and faculty at Concordia University, in Montreal. Try to name all the samples. See—too many.—Ben Greenman

After his ill-fated tenure leading the London Philharmonic (1990-96), the joke about the then-young conductor Franz Welser-Möst was that he was “Frankly Worse Than Most.” Now he’s going to be Longer Than Most, as the Cleveland Orchestra, which he joined as music director in 2002, has extended his contract to 2018, the year of the orchestra’s centennial.

This first struck me as a surprise, since his yearly Carnegie Hall appearances leading the Clevelanders have been extremely uneven: delectable Johann Strauss, solid Brahms, boring Mahler, formidable Dutilleux, messy Roy Harris. Certainly Donald Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s respected classical music writer, has been consistently critical of Welser-Möst’s performances.

And yet it all makes sense. By 2018, Maazel, Mehta, Haitink, Boulez, Abbado, and Colin Davis will likely be retired, and Riccardo Muti has made it clear that his recent appointment at the Chicago Symphony will be his last full-time music director position. Who else will be available to give commanding performances of the Central European and Modernist music that is the Clevelanders’ bread and butter? Robert Spano, Marin Alsop, Philippe Jordan, David Robertson, Alan Gilbert, Gustavo Dudamel? Hopefully, but that’s not yet clear. Esa-Pekka Salonen is magnificent in contemporary works, but no one rushes out the door to hear his Beethoven and Brahms. And he’s spending more and more time on his composing. Welser-Möst, at a minimum, will get the job done.

Other aspects of the Welser-Möst renewal are laudable—a renewed emphasis on education, and the return of staged opera to Severance Hall, nutriment for an opera-starved Lake Erie community. One aspect of the orchestra’s announcement stands out, however: the upcoming schedule of commissions and premières of new works. With the all too obvious inclusion of Osvaldo Golijov, the composers listed—a distinguished lineup that includes such figures as Oliver Knussen, Kaija Saariaho, Julian Anderson, Matthias Pintscher, and George Benjamin—are all European; apparently the maestro and the management could find no worthy American composers. This is not only surprising; it is contemptible.—Russell Platt

On Thursday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that a security guard at the Carnegie Museum of Art irreparably damaged a painting by Vija Celmins. A surveillance camera caught the man in the act of dragging a key across the surface of “Night Sky #12 (1996-98).” Valued at 1.2 million dollars, the work was on view in “Life on Mars,” the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition. Such vandalism is unconscionable under any circumstances, but it is especially shocking given the profoundly contemplative nature of the sixty-nine-year-old painter’s work. In a review titled “Dark Star,” from 2001, Peter Schjeldahl wrote,

If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one contemporary art work, it would be a picture of a starry sky, a spiderweb, or a choppy ocean by Vija Celmins—a smallish painting, drawing, or print that is sombre, tingling with intelligence, and very pure.

Below is a video of Celmins at work on one of her night-sky paintings, courtesy of the PBS program “Art: 21.”—Andrea K. Scott

You don’t have to hop on the jitney to get a decent lobster roll (though if you do, Amagansett’s Lunch is the place to go), and the ominous-sounding “market price” is getting slightly less so with every warm day. The rivalry between Pearl Oyster Bar ($27) and Mary’s Fish Camp ($33) continues—wait for it—unabaited, but for us, Pearl’s remains the gold standard, with more lobster, less mayo, and the softest top-loading hot-dog bun, an ideal vessel for the velvety goodness within. Both restaurants offer the obligatory hot fudge sundae for dessert, though on a recent visit to Pearl, a hybrid strawberry-rhubarb-pie crumble stole the show. At other restaurants, subtle variations on the lobster roll abound. Ed McFarland, of Ed’s Lobster Bar ($27), finally free of the threat of litigation after Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar sued for plagarism last summer, adds chives to what Lauren Collins called his “completely delicious” take on the New England classic. Andrea Thompson found the lobster roll at Ditch Plains ($28) “nice, if unremarkable,” although, for purists, the sweet-potato chips which accompany the not-so-generous portion could prove a deal-breaker. Tides ($26), which also serves a sweet-potato side, makes their mayonnaise with dill and cucumber. BLT Fish ($24) also tweaks the formula, with a buttery brioche as its bun, though on a recent visit the lobster inside was disappointingly thin, and so finely chopped that the dressing overwhelmed the fish. And Mermaid Inn ($26) has attracted some controversy for serving their lobster salad with pungent chopped onion. On a sunny summer’s day, your best bet may be the Lobster Place at Chelsea Market ($16.95). Their serving is generous, their seafood fresh, and while it may not be Montauk, the Hudson River park on a sunny day is the perfect place to enjoy summer’s finest sandwich.—Amelia Lester