Sesame Street celebrates its 40th anniversary Tuesday, and there at nearly the beginning was Sonia Manzano, who was cast as "Maria" in the early '70s, becoming one of the first Hispanic characters on television. After ten years as in that role, Manzano began writing scripts for the series and has earned 15 Emmy Awards as part of the Sesame Street writing staff. I talked to her by phone Tuesday about the early days of the show and about working with and writing for children:

Hit children's television show 'Sesame Street' celebrates its 40th anniversary Tuesday. Please enjoy Cookie Monster's hilarious poetry reading below. Later today, we'll post Jeffrey Brown's conversation with longtime Sesame Street cast member and writer "Maria" (Sonia Manzano) about the early days of the show and how writers translate important ideas for children. And on the NewsHour this evening, Jeffrey Brown will talk to other guests about the iconic PBS program.

Nostalgia for the East -- or ostalgie, a portmanteau combining the words ost ('east') and nostalgie ('nostalgia') -- has taken hold in contemporary, unified Germany.

A symbol of the former East Germany, the Trabant used to be the German Democratic Republic's most popular car. But production ceased in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, 20 years after the reunification, drivers will now ferry you around the city in one of the plastic-sheathed relics, in a kind of safari-style homage to pre-1989 culture.

Trabants -- along with Spee laundry detergent, Vita Cola, and even the little figure on traffic lights known as the Ampelmann -- have reappeared in recent years, hearkening back to an era that most agree flopped politically, but still resonates with a generation of Germans disenchanted with what they view as some of the failed promises of German reunification.

"Two years after the Wende, or the 'turning point' in 1989, these East Germans started to feel a bit of disillusionment with the effects of reunification," explains historian and German consumer culture expert Prof. Katherine Pence. "They had had secure jobs under the socialist regime and now they had to struggle in a very competitive marketplace."
 
 
 
A scholar at Baruch College at the City University of New York, Pence sat down with Art Beat to discuss the particularities of East German design and culture, and how the products of the past continue to play a role in contemporary Germany.

Coming soon on the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown will have a report on 'Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture,' a festival currently taking place at Carnegie Hall in New York.

The festival features Chinese musicians, including artists and ensembles traveling outside of China for the first time. Jeffrey Brown's report will include a profile of Wu Man, one of the world's leading musical ambassadors and a master of the pipa -- a four-stringed lute with ancient roots in central Asia and China.

Below is part of Jeffrey Brown's interview with Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall's executive director, who oversaw the festival:

Chase Insteadman is a former child TV-star, now fiance of an astronaut stranded in space. Perkus Tooth is a forgotten culture critic with a deep sense of paranoia. These two and friends travel through a Manhattan that is both very recognizable -- from the billionaire mayor to the burgers at a local diner -- while also surreal. Among other things, an escaped tiger is on the loose and part of the city is shrouded in a strange fog that won't go away.

It's all part of the new novel "Chronic City," the latest from author Jonathan Lethem, whose other books include "the Fortress of Solitude" and "Motherless Brooklyn," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Here are some of this week's arts and culture headlines from public broadcasters around the nation:

- Rocco Landesman, recently-appointed head of the National Endowment of the Arts, starts a six-month tour of American arts institutions today. NPR had this profile, ahead of his first stop in Peoria, Ill.

- After President Obama named appointees to his Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Minnesota Public Radio's State of the Arts blog considered some of Candidate Obama's pledges on arts policy.

- If you missed the fifth season of Art:21, you can now watch all four episodes online, but only until November 13.

- Next week Sesame Street turns 40. Among its many virtues and accomplishments, the show has always been savvy about infusing their energetic, educational programming with smart, grown-up references, giving kids an intro to pop and high culture right along with ABC's and 123's. Indeed, it has resembled a veritable Ed Sullivan Show for the under-ten set, featuring many of the biggest names in music performing both their big hits along with their renditions of the alphabet song. Among the many stars to grace Sesame are Johnny Cash, Lena Horne, jazz great Joe Williams, conductor Seiji Ozawa, Paul Simon, Queen Latifah, Norah Jones, Feist, and of course, Stevie Wonder, with a sensational, almost-seven minute rendition of 'Superstition'.

Here's Ray Charles, jamming with Bert and Ernie ("I am prepared to wail, Ray!" says Bert):

There's a famous myth from Greek antiquity that places the invention of drawing and painting in the hand of a young woman whose lover was about to leave her. To remember him, she shines a lamp on his face, and traces the shadow it casts upon the wall. Since that fateful (if apocryphal) first portrait, a primary artistic challenge over the history of human creativity has been how to capture the essence of an individual.

Every three years, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., holds a contest showcasing the best efforts in the country for this particular craft. Out of 3,300 entries to the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, an exhibition of the top 49 is now on display. In previous contests, only drawings, paintings and sculptures were eligible for consideration, but this year the prize was open to all visual-arts disciplines.

[Click here to watch a slide show of some of the entries.]

Dave Woody of Fort Collins, Colo., took the top honor and a $25,000 prize for his photograph, "Laura." The subject of the piece was one of Woody's graduate school classmates at the University of Texas.

"I think that digital photography and photography for itself is one more tool. It happens to be the tool that I use. If I could paint like some of the people in the exhibition paint, I would love to," said Woody. "I can be bowled over by the simplest pencil drawing as much as a digital video. I think it is how you use it."

"For this particular piece, I wanted to bring back some objects I had painted in previous paintings and bring them together," Vinson said. "So the doll was a recurring subject."

All of the finalists attended the opening and award ceremony, and many of the artists brought their subjects. Ralph Gabriel Rayfield sat in a wheelchair next to the large painting of himself standing in a hospital room, chest exposed, fresh from surgery following a heart attack. The portrait, titled "Dad," was done by his 22 year-old son, Stanley of Richmond, Va., and was awarded the second place prize worth $7,500.

"I'm interested in African American subjects and overall the human condition, so it fits well into it because I'm painting my dad in a vulnerable position," Rayfield said. "It is something about the person."

Listen to an interview with the three winners, Rayfield's parents and Aga Vinson:

Works from the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition are on display through August 22. The museum's next exhibition is 'Portraiture Now: Communities,' the fifth installment of a series. The National Portrait Gallery invited three painters -- Rose Frantzen, Jim Torok and Rebecca Westcott -- to envision the idea of community in a variety of portraits of friends, neighbors and families from the places they live. That installation runs November 6 to July 5, 2010.

In the first autumn auction held Tuesday evening at Christie's in New York, total sales fell short of pre-sale estimates -- only $65.6 million instead of $68.6 to $97.1 million -- making for a slow start to the U.S. art market season.

With only 40 pieces of art on sale, the cautious audience neglected to bid on more "mediocre" pieces, according to the New York Times, and gravitated more toward Impressionist works than to the modern pieces on sale. Most of the bids came over the phones from overseas bidders, who could afford to spend more on the weak dollar.

A painting by French Impressionist Camille Pissarro received only one bid and failed to meet its minimum, going unsold. The most expensive work, Pablo Picasso's "Tete de Femme," expected to sell for at least $7 million. The bids stalled at $6.4 million, and the painting went unsold, as well.

"You'd think the good stuff would start coming out again since the recession is ending," New York dealer Jack Tilton told Reuters after the sale, "but the smart people are probably holding onto their art as a hedge against inflation."

There was one star of the evening: "Danseuses," a pastel drawing of a young dancer by Edgar Degas, sold for $10.72 million, which exceeded its high estimate by half-a-million dollars. Other pieces sold last night included paintings by Monet and Kandinsky and a bronze sculpture by Rodin, which sold for $6.35 million, much higher than its $2 million estimate.

[Click here to watch a slideshow of the some of the pieces at Christie's Impressionist & Modern Art Sale.]

Last month, writer and journalist David Sax visited the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., to kibitz about a favorite, salivating subject: the delicatessen. Sax's findings and dispatches on the cured meat business, and what it has meant for changing contemporary Jewish identity, are collected in his first book, "Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen."

A Toronto native now living in Brooklyn, Sax's travels have taken him to delis around North America and across the Atlantic, from Detroit to Los Angeles, Montreal to Brussels. With true immersive journalism zeal, he even landed a one-night gig slicing meats at the legendary Katz's Deli in Manhattan's Lower East Side. He likened the experience to "a minor league ball player being called up to pitch in the bigs."

Amid his more amusing anecdotes -- such as how his belt size actually remained intact over the course of his research, despite making up to six trips to different delis every day for three months -- Sax also drives at the more serious issues facing delis in the 21st century. Tracing the downfall of the authentic, ethnic deli, he holds out little hope for its comeback, blaming cultural assimilation and shifting values over the last several decades.

Sax explains that with the great influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to North America at the turn of the 20th century, people set up delis to honor and serve traditional cuisine, with the expectation that new immigrants would continue to flock to America, hungry for their favorite dishes. But after the devastation of the Holocaust, with whole generations wiped out, the purveyors of the original, ethnic fare did not continue to immigrate. With every subsequent, further Americanized generation, the connection to the tradition becomes weaker.

"People have come to fear the foods our parents and grandparents have grown up with," Sax told the audience at the synagogue. "The idea, fifty, sixty more years ago, that you would have fatty meat, this was the greatest pleasure you could have. And now people go to the deli and they say, 'I want the corned beef lean, I don't want a speck of fat on it.' And then they get the sandwich and they say, 'I don't understand why it's dry?'...This is terrible!"

Indeed, the terrible truth is even direr: Endangered by health trends and the economic challenges facing family-run businesses (like the increasing aspirations of immigrant parents for their children), explains Sax, classic delis are in shorter and shorter supply.

"With assimilation," he said, "the first thing to go is generally language," and then religion, and finally, food. And thus, the title of his book, "Save the Deli," is more than a plea to preserve pastrami on rye, but really a plea to preserve a cultural link to the past.

Luckily that night, the cookies and knishes served to the crowd in the synagogue basement were not in short supply, as the author and audience gathered afterward to eat, meet and schmooze.

[Watch a video of the event as the Washington Post's Ezra Klein interviews David Sax on the Jewish deli and diaspora cuisine.]

Untitled from ryder Haske on Vimeo.

Frank Messina, also known as the "Mets Poet," is the author of four books of poetry, including "Full Count: The Book of Mets Poetry," released in April, and "Disorderly Conduct," published in 2002. His poetry concentrates on larger themes -- love, struggle and war -- but he is best known for poems about baseball fanaticism, particularly for the New York Mets.

"Most people don't think of baseball as a typical poetry topic, but it has everything in human nature that makes for great writing," Messina told the New York Times in a 2007 profile. "It has victories and failures and struggles and angst."

In time for the World Series, we present two of Messina's poems:

Apology to a Television Set

You have withstood
long years of physical and verbal abuse
inflicted by my own hands, tossed shoes, beer cans
Chinese food containers
and
there were times I kicked and cursed,
hoisted you over my shoulder
and tossed you through the window
but
you came back
delivering me good news;
how great the team was doing,
how it was only a matter of time
we'd clinch the division
but
one night, with my mouth
stuffed with beer, pastrami and vulgarity
I once again turned on you,
hoisted you over my shoulder
and tossed you through the window
but
this time you were taken away by another man
who tossed you into the back of a garbage truck,
taking you to a place where broken dreams,
failed seasons and abused television sets
are buried for eternity

New Television Set

You're very lucky!
The salesman from Sears
bolted you to the wall
and said it would take
a very strong and angry person
to rip you off the hinges,
I think you'll be around a while,
After all, we are seven games ahead of the Phillies
with only seventeen games left to play

To learn more about Messina, visit his Web site, www.spokeface.com.