Central Park West at 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, 6pm-9am.

American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, (212) 769-5100, 6:30-8pm, $15

The American Museum of Natural History, Central Park at 79th Street, (212) 769-5100; open 10am to 8:45pm daily.

It’s the post-holiday lull, and we still have relatives in town—now that they’re done with their Black Friday shopping, we’re catching up on the newly reopened Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. It encompasses two stories of the museum, including the entrance and a memorial hall. The memorial will be open for a year, and we’re beating the crowds: we’ll be taking inspiration from Roosevelt’s conservationist impulses, while we’re sure a few Republican attendees may be taking their own inspiration from the former prez’s gumption in bolting the GOP and starting his own third party!

200 Central Park West, open from 10am to 5:45pm.

The heads of the Met, the Natural History Museum and MoMA live in tax-free Manhattan housing, on their employers' dime. From The Times this morning:

In addition to her $877,000 compensation package, Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, lives rent free in a $5 million East Side apartment that the museum bought when she came aboard.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses its director, Thomas P. Campbell, in a $4 million co-op that it owns across Fifth Avenue from the museum.

The director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry, may have the best deal of all. In addition to the $2 million in salary and benefits he earned last year, he lives in a $6 million condo in the tower atop the museum.

The tax-free part? The directors are required to live nearby, so, like other workers such as college presidents and motel managers, they get the break.

Read the story here.

N.B. the Natural History Museum beat out the Met in attendance figures, probably because everyone likes dinosaurs but some people get squirmy or hungry when they have to look at paintings.

Why the institutional shift in topic and tactics? Call it a perfect blizzard of factors: The exhibition offered a compelling melodrama, a rich trove of artifacts from the museum's own collection (cutting costs of the show) and, in an age where museum-exhibition sponsors are difficult to come by, a willing one with a point of view about what actually happened in Antarctica a century ago. The British Consulate in New York is the "corporate" sponsor of "Race to the End of the Earth" (with funds provided by the U.K. government), and some Brits think history has given their valiant countrymen a very raw deal.

Scott's champions include Sir Alan Collins, New York's consul-general for England. He called Scott "one of Britain's most famous sons," whose story is one that every child knows by heart: "This story probably ranks with the conquest by the British expedition of Everest in the 1950s as being one of those great achievements of overcoming the physical environment." The consulate co-sponsored the show to draw attention to global warming and climate change, Sir Alan noted-but couldn't resist adding that Amundsen's victory was "just a dash to the pole."

Curator Mr. MacPhee said the museum has been "evenhanded" in its approach to the exhibition. "We're not out to make any claims about who did the better job," he said in an interview last week, although he conceded, "Well ... Amundsen did the better job. He had no dead guys. He was the more successful."  He continued: "[Scott] had this view, common at the time-the Brits are still famous for it-of sophisticated amateurism. Through pluck, you'll get through. Well, he didn't."

Scott is a controversial figure among Anglophiles, explorers and particularly among historians, who, since his death, have painted him as either a blundering incompetent or a hero of the British empire.  When news reached Britain of Scott's tragic end, he was lionized-Mr. MacPhee called him "practically a Sir Galahad," and statues and monuments were erected across the country. But his reputation disintegrated along with the empire, particularly after a critical 1979 biography, and resulting television show, dismissed him as craven and stupid for mistakes such as packing sleeping bags made of reindeer skin, which moulted.

In the past decade, the tide has turned again for Scott, and several biographers have recast him as a tragic hero done in largely by bad luck. Most famous of these is Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a modern adventurer whose many achievements include amputating the tips of his fingers after contracting frostbite on his own failed polar expedition. Reached by email, he declared that "a great many outright lies have been promulgated about Scott!" But he declined to elaborate.

Was Scott's fatal flaw kindness? The Scandinavians regarded their sled dogs as beasts of burden, to be run until dead, then eaten; the British were too sentimental to let them die. Instead, they relied on ponies, and when those proved useless, they resorted to the time-honored Naval practice of "man-hauling," dragging their own gear across mile after mile of frozen earth, while the dogs, presumably, ran in the snow alongside.

Scott's good motives are supposed to balance out what from a century's distance looks, at best, like recklessness. His team stopped regularly to take measurements and collect geological samples-30 pounds of rocks to drag along with everything else-while Amundsen simply charged ahead, forgoing science for personal glory. Less honorable, of course, but honor doesn't keep out the cold. Yet 100 years after the fact, Scott is being recast as a good naturalist, a "green" explorer, so to speak, while Amundsen's lust for victory is dismissed as frivolous.

Lorie Karnath, president of the New York Explorer's Club-which Amundsen belonged to, and which inducted Scott posthumously-has a soft spot for the tragic Brit. Although she said that Amundsen "made the right decisions, and that's really important," she praised Scott for "trying to make this into a more meaningful expedition." He who briefly was a martyr to the crown has now become a martyr to science.

Mr. MacPhee believes that no matter how one feels about Scott, it is impossible to read the details of his death without being affected. "He'd been out on the ice for something like 114 days," said Mr. MacPhee. "His feet were frozen. He had no chance. What would most people do? They would probably just fold up. ... He wrote. ... And they were beautifully written letters ... extremely compelling. It cannot help but bring a tear to your eye."

At the show, many of those heartrending letters will be on display for the first time. But, rather than closing on that sad note, the exhibition concludes with a look at modern Antarctic research, and its roots in the 1910 race. Sir Alan placed particular emphasis on Scott's 30 pounds of rock. "All his (scientific) samples were recovered," noted Sir Alan, "so one could say that he didn't die in vain."

wakers@observer.com

Ms. Mortimer was attending the unveiling of the new Spider Silk Exhibit at the AMNH. The exhibit’s centerpiece is an 11-foot-long hand-woven textile made from the silk of one million golden orb spiders. The event’s press release touted the fabric as “imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia, with tales and myths that resonate with us all.” It took artist Simon Peers and fashion designer Nicolas Godley five years and about $500,000 to produce the cloth. Some spiders did indeed die.

“It’s so delicate,” Ms. Mortimer, now securely draped in Spider Silk, said, “it makes me nervous.” Still, the shawl was “very comfortable, very light,” and, best of all, “it matches perfectly!” she said, gesturing toward her shimmering gold dress.

Model Maggie Rizer, Real Housewives of New York’s Countess Luann de Lesseps, Valentino’s Carlos Souza, Countess Natalie von Bismarck, and designer Nicole Miller each wore some version of gold, silk, glitter (or all three) as they walked a yellow carpet. Stylist Phillip Bloch wore a grey and blue tuxedo expertly matched with golden Nike sneakers. The fortuitous pairing was simply “a comfort choice,” he said. Perhaps having heard that some people in Madagascar eat the golden orb spider fried, a chatty Mr. Bloch added: “I was thinking I could go on that Survivor show, or I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, but when it comes to, like, eating them [spiders]…” he trailed off sadly. 

The event was hosted by golden-haired actress Heather Graham, who wore a feathered and bejeweled black Valentino frock. When asked why she wasn’t wrapped in the Spider Silk scarf that Ms. Mortimer was wearing, she replied, “I don’t think it would go with this dress!”

Inside the AMNH’s Grand Gallery, DJ Donna D’Cruz, donning headphones affixed with a massive crown of jewels, spun for Champagne-swilling guests. As the party wound down, a few attendees who seemed to have snatched the shawl away from Ms. Mortimer passed it around and posed for pictures.

During the pre-dinner cocktail hour in the museum’s spacious rotunda, Norton editor Bob Weil said softly that he hoped the big dinosaur skeleton mounted in the middle of the room was not a symbol for the future of the publishing industry. Later, when the dinner bell sounded and the crowd of 500 or so guests started towards the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, E.L. Doctorow pointed at a healthy-looking taxidermied tiger in the Hall of Biodiversity and said, “Maybe that can be a symbol!”

PEN’s World Voices Literary Festival had kicked off the night before and will continue until May 4th. Since a fair number of the events comprising the festival take the form of panel discussions—you can see the full schedule here--the Daily Transom thought it’d be fun to ask some of the gala guests for their thoughts on the form. What makes a good panel discussion? What can ruin one? How does an effective moderator behave?

“I think people seldom know how to condense or get to the point, and they get caught up with their own ego and defending their own reputation even though it might take them very far afield,” said the novelist and critic Edmund White. “You begin to see it as an exercise of competing egos rather than an effort to communicate or focus on the topic. Often people aren’t even clear on what the topic is!”

In England, Mr. White said, it’s all very different.

“In England, I’ve been on panels at the Institute for Fine Arts things like that, and they’re much more willing to intervene," Mr. White said. "Here I think they’re afraid of offending their friends, and they’re sort of grateful that anybody’s even agreed to do this.”

Daniel Menaker, who used to be editor-in-chief of Random House and was fiction editor of the New Yorker before that, said the problem with literary panels is that most writers aren’t naturally inclined to interact with the public, and so end up in a “cocoon” on stage rather than actually in conversation with their audience.

“It’s hard!” he said. “It’s wrenching. It’s like root canal for them–it’s very difficult. They have to go against the grain of their own introspection.”

Q & A sessions, he added, are usually a disaster, as they tend to devolve into chaos at the hands of narcissistic hijackers.

“You always get some guy who weasels his way in and says to, for instance, an editor, with electricity coming out of his eyes, ‘Why didn't you read the manuscript I sent you?' Snd then the moderator, like, if it’s Harold Augenbraum at the New York Public Library, says ‘Yes sir, well, that’s alright sir.’”
 
New Yorker editorial director Henry Finder said it's important to have conflict on the stage, but not so much that everyone’s talking about different things.

“If you have too much conflict, you don’t have any overlap at all,” he said, before recommending that the Daily Transom track down Rhonda Sherman, who organizes the New Yorker Festival every year.

“In general, it’s not a party unless there’s blood on the floor,” Ms. Sherman said. “There needs to be tension on a panel. You need to have some disagreement. If everyone agrees on the panel, it’s a total snooze-a-thon.”

She said it’s up to the moderator to control the proceedings and conduct the orchestra.

“The best moderators don’t feel that the panel is about them,” she said. “It’s about knowing what to ask, shutting people off, getting everyone talking, making sure everyone has an opportunity to talk, and shooting questions at the people who are disagreeing so that the energy happens. The best moderators understand that their job is to keep the action going, get as many points of view across as possible, and keep a little tension in the room.”

She said that after 10 years of the New Yorker Festival, she has a pretty good idea of who’s good at moderating and who’s terrible at it.

“David Remnick is a really great moderator,” she said. “George Packer is an excellent moderator. Adam Gopnik is a good moderator. These are great moderators. Susan Morrison is an excellent moderator. Because they understand the pace of a panel the way they understand the pace of a story. Moderators who let the panel take them over are to be avoided at all costs.”

Francine Prose, the outgoing president of the PEN American Center, said she’d recently served on a panel that lasted five and a half hours because all the participants spoke different languages.

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault--they just hadn’t found simultaneous translators,” Ms. Prose said. “And they had big talkers, which is why it lasted five and a half hours.”

Long-windedness, she said, was especially a problem when you were dealing with people who like to hear themselves talk. One time, she said, she was on a panel with such a well-known egomaniac that all the other participants got together before hand and “conspired so that he couldn’t take over the whole thing."

“It didn’t work,” Ms. Prose said. “But, you know, some panels are really interesting! They are! I like the ones at the PEN Festival.”

Still waiting to testify is a consortium called the Cultural Institutions Group, representing, well, city-supported groups looking to avoid said cutbacks.

According to C.I.G., they’re suffering twice over, having lost City Council funding in addition to coping with a 2.5 percent cut ordered by the mayor.

They also complain that they bear some expenses which can’t just be cut, like heating and energy bills, and that the 2.5 percent cut is therefore more deeply felt in other areas.

Here are a few items from a chart they prepared outlining how much money some institutions will lose by the end of Fiscal Year 2009:

--American Museum of Natural History: $2,790,746, a 22 percent reduction from the previous fiscal year;

--Carnegie Hall: $271,687, a 33 percent reduction;

--Lincoln Center: $1,035,290, a 42 percent reduction;

--Metropolitan Museum of Art: $1,691,246, a 13 percent reduction;

--Staten Island Children’s Museum: $170,146, a 31 percent reduction.