Five months ago Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art crowned its notable 1936-3 7 season with a comprehensive exhibit of the very latest artistic wrinkle, Surrealism. With a vertiginous backward leap 200 centuries into the Fourth Ice Age, the Museum last week wound up its season by presenting an extraordinary collection of Prehistoric Rock Pictures. Director Alfred Barr Jr. saw no paradox. He recalled that many cave decorations were magic symbols to help the painter with his hunting, and thus "today ...

Wearing a black gown and a black-veiled mitre, there arrived in Manhattan last autumn His Grace the Most Reverend Theodosios Abourjaily, Archbishop of Tyre & Sidon, Metropolitan of Judadeh and personal delegate of Alexander III, Patriarch of Antioch in the Syrian branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America, with 60,0000 members, had been without a head since 1934, when Archbishop Victor and his two immediate subordinates died. To select a successor, Archbishop Theodosios was dispatched to the U. S. by the ...

Graphology , long in the same U.S. doghouse with such pseudosciences as astrology, palmistry, phrenology may not be so phony as scientists have thought it. Last week in Manhattan, quiet, greying, sharp-faced Dr. Walter William Marseille, former Berlin psychologist, described graphology's partial emergence from the doghouse to do a routine job of work: rating customer reliability for Spiegel's, Chicago mail-order house, which sells clothing, furniture and household goods to more than two million installment accounts. Emergence. Marseille studied psychology at ...

The midtown-Manhattan crowd — real people, not movie reviewers, except for this one — stood patiently in line for a 12:15 A.M. screening of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, third in Michael Bay's ear-, eye- and block-busters based on the line of Hasbro robot toys. When the feature began, a half-hour late, the audience showed its fondness for the material by saluting each appearance of the friendly yellow car-bot Bumblebee, not with rowdy shouts but with courteous ...

One of the hard realities of launching a concert career in the U.S. is the necessity of a recital, preferably in Manhattan's hallowed Carnegie Hall, the cost of which—anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000— must be footed by the artist. But when Budapest-born Janos Starker first came to America at the age of 24, he flatly refused "the social degradation of having to pay to be heard. I will only play where people are sufficiently interested to pay to hear me."Treasure Unearthed. He had to wait 16 ...

Inside a crowded apartment in upper Manhattan, the executive producer of the FX comedy Louie needs to confer with the director, the star, the writer and the editor. Fortunately, they're all the same guy. Louis CK is choreographing a scene in which his character, Louie — like him, a comedian and divorced single dad — has woken up to cries of agony from his pregnant sister, who is crashing on his couch. In quick order, Louis adds a line making ...

The aging bosses seated at the defense table in the packed federal courtroom in lower Manhattan look harmless enough to be spectators at a Sunday-after noon boccie game. Anthony Salerno, 75, the reputed head of the Genovese crime family, sits aloof and alone, his left eye red and swollen from surgery. White-haired Anthony Corallo, 73, the alleged Lucchese family chief, is casual in a cardigan and sport shirt. Carmine Persico, 53, is the balding, baggy-eyed showman of ...

The scrum of reporters assembles in the pre-dawn quiet two blocks from the border of Chinatown. It is more than two hours before Dominique Strauss-Kahn is scheduled to make an appearance, but it doesn't matter. On Monday the curtain will lift on Act I of the trial of the new century, and the courtroom has precious few seats. Two hours early might be too late. After being herded through metal detectors, we ride the nearest elevator to ...

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick's debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, "Would you please tell Mr. Malick that we loved Badlands and want it as our closing-night film?" The unassuming fellow replied, "I'm Mr. Malick." After that, he was harder to find. In his fulfilling but furtive 38 years since Badlands, ...

In his apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Abraham Feller sat nervously one morning last week, chatting with his wife. For two weeks he had been acting strangely, had even mentioned suicide. Mrs. Feller left him only momentarily to call the family doctor, then returned to the living room."I tried to cheer him up," she said later. "He was an idealist, and his whole life was devoted to the United Nations. He thought he wasn't doing his job well. He was a perfectionist."Book on a Table. But ...