Luigi Pirandello and the Mad King of Trumpistan

 

Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936

Over the years, Curmie has called upon his knowledge of dramatic literature on several occasions to address topics that aren’t really about dramatic literature.  He may be forgetting something, but there are plenty of examples, not including references to novels, philosophical essays, films, television shows, songs, paintings, or other such works… or, of course, essays about censorship of plays or similar phenomena.

There’s a list of Curmie’s linkages of dramatic literature to contemporary events at the bottom of this essay.  Feel free to browse or ignore as you wish, Gentle Reader.

There are actually two plays that come to mind in terms of what Curmie wants to discuss here.  One is Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!, in which the central character is injured during a historical re-enactment and wakes up believing that he really is the Irish hero Robert Emmet.  Curmie is going to concentrate, however, on Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (Enrico IV).  It’s better known and came a little earlier: the short story on which it is based was published in 1915; the dramatic version was first produced in 1922, seven years before Johnston’s play.  It’s also a little closer to the point Curmie wants to make.  Henry IV is probably second on the list of Pirandello’s most significant plays: definitely behind Six Characters in Search of an Author, and probably a little ahead of Right You Are! (If You Think You Are). 

Curmie knows the latter two plays a little better, having directed them both, but has taught Henry IV a couple of times when the anthology he was using chose that rather than Six Characters as its representative Pirandello work.  The three plays all illustrate what Pirandello called “juxtaposed planes of reality.”  That is, rather than showing a single, distorted view of the world as occurs in, say, expressionism, Pirandello presents the reader/spectator with different perspectives which logically cannot be simultaneously true, but seem to be so.

In Six Characters, figures from an unfinished play interrupt a rehearsal looking for a playwright to finish their stories.  As such, they are simultaneously real and unreal, physically present and completely imaginary.  Consider that an audience seeing the play is watching actors playing actors playing characters from a different play altogether, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of philosophical gamesmanship in which Pirandello indulged.

In Right You Are!, and man (Signor Ponza) and his mother-in-law (Signora Frola) both declare the other to be insane.  According to him, she became distraught at the death of her daughter, and the only way to calm her was to pretend that his second wife was actually his first.  She, on the other hand, asserts that her daughter was in an asylum, not dead, but Ponza became convinced of her death, so Signora Ponza humored her husband’s delusions and married him again.  At the end of the play, Signora Ponza appears, declares herself to be Signora Frola’s daughter, Signor Ponza’s second wife, and for herself, “nobody” and “who you want me to be.”  It is truly a play in which you can’t tell the players without the proverbial scorecard, but that’s the point: truth is ambiguous, contradictory, and ultimately unknowable, as the raisonneur Laudisi laughingly points out in the play’s closing speech: “You have the truth! But are you satisfied?”

The title character in Henry IV had fallen off a horse several years ago, again in an enactment, and now believes himself to be Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor of the late 11^th century and into the early 12^th.  His colleagues set up an elaborate plan to maintain his fantasy, complete with period sets and costumes.  There are subplots aplenty: a new arrival who researched the wrong Henry IV (the French king who reigned about 500 years after the emperor Henry believes himself to be), a little unrequited love, an attempt to shock Henry back into reality, and so on. 

But the signature event is Henry’s revelation in Act II that he had come to his senses years earlier but chose to keep up the pretense of madness.  By the end of Act III, however, he appears to have reclaimed his madness, grabbing the sword from one of his counselors and stabbing (fatally, we presume) his present-day rival.  He then lapses back into his illusory world as the final curtain falls.  Or does he?

And now we start talking about the US in 2025.  A pedestrian (at best), paranoid, narcissist becomes convinced that he is the king of all he surveys.  A collection of sycophants and enablers cheerfully support his delusions (until he inevitably turns on them, of course).  He is an authoritarian monarch who seems to have little grasp on reality, makes decisions based on petty jealousies, and shows little regard for anyone but himself (or, from time to time, those very much like him).

The incoherent babble he spews, the obvious lies, the puerile strutting: do they mean he is delirious, or are they part of a strategy to test the extent of his associates’ willingness to dance puppet-like to his every whim?  Claiming he’s reduced prices by 1500% is the stuff of lunacy, but his followers, many of whom know better, and the same folks who loudly decried President Biden’s (less frequent and less egregious) lapses, are content to pass that off as “exaggeration.”  N.B., Curmie completely understands that literally everyone makes mistakes like this occasionally—Barack Obama didn’t really think there were 57 states—but normal, sane, people don’t do this with this level of regularity, and they sure as hell don’t double down on their absurd claims.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the Mad King of Trumpistan that he never admits that he made a mistake, even that he misspoke.

Is he as unhinged as he appears to be?  Is he lying, or does he really believe the nonsense he belches forth?  The real cause for concern is that we don’t know for sure.  Curmie has suggested before that intelligence and shrewdness are different things, and whereas this particular despot-wannabe has always been short on the former, he is more than amply supplied with the latter.  It boggles that mind that anyone this obviously self-serving, obviously mendacious, and obviously ignorant could draw a single vote from a reasonably sensible citizen, let alone get elected… but here we are.

Is it time to invoke the 25^th Amendment?  Well, that will never happen, as the entire Republican party has proven itself invertebrate, and SCOTUS is pretty well implicated, too.  Are the antics of the likes of Gavin Newsom unprofessional and distasteful, or are they the only hope of saving a tattered but still breathing democracy?  Curmie fears that the answer is “yes.”  Pirandello would certainly understand that seemingly contradictory ideas can co-exist.  He might even write a play about it.

Oh, wait.  He did.

Previous entries linking dramatic literature with contemporary events:

· W.B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in a piece on the Catholic Church’s excommunication of a nun/hospital administrator who signed off on an abortion to save the life of the mother (the fetus would have died, anyway, by the way).

· Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to discuss yet another example of the anti-intellectuality of the Texas Board of Education.

· Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in thinking about a standoff between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Republican legislature.

· Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to comment on multiple sexual assault allegations against jocks at the University of Montana.

· Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit to talk about a case in which the idiot repo guys stripped the wrong house and the homeowner wanted appropriate compensation.

·  John Lyly’s Gallathea and Phillida and Alexander and Campaspe in a piece about the debate over student loan forgiveness.

·  Aeschylus’s Oresteia, especially the Eumenides, to comment on President Biden’s pro-active pardon of his son, after promising he wouldn’t do so.

·  Shakespeare’s As You Like It (and some traditional Asian forms) in an indictment of Iowa’s heinous anti-drag proposal.  (Good news: the bill was ultimately defeated.)

·  Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to call attention to the craven insidiousness of the GOP’s decision to declare that there were no “calendar days” remaining in the 119^th Congress.

· Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis to discuss President Trump’s unfettered narcissism, mendacity, and duplicity… and the unlikelihood of a solution that doesn’t involve direct action.

 

 

Of Left-handedness, Sydney Sweeney, and Empathy

 

A typical evening at home for Curmie and Beloved Spouse consists of watching a couple of episodes of television shows—some new, some long since cancelled.  We can access a fair number of different streaming services, so we’re pretty well stocked with options. 

We’re particularly fond of mysteries, and that was last Saturday night’s fare.  Curmie won’t mention the program or the episode, except to mention that it was fairly recent, so he won’t risk spoiling something for you, Gentle Reader, but one of the shows featured our central character pretty much solving the crime by noticing that a photograph of a left-handed woman showed her holding a drink in her right hand.  That meant that she wasn’t really sentient when the photo was taken and that the culprit was creating a false alibi. 

As this moment was unfolding on our TV screen, Curmie, who is left-handed, was holding a glass of iced tea in his right hand.  He laughed at the incompetence of the writers; the general story line was pretty good, but that single moment spoiled the entire episode for him.  Beloved Spouse noticed the error, too, but was less upset about it.  We’ll come back to this in a moment.

This wasn’t the first time that we’ve experienced this phenomenon—there have been a couple other variations on the theme that we’ve seen in the last couple of months alone.  Of course, there was even a moment early in a Sherlock Holmes story in which our hero is showing off for a prospective client, deciding which was the man’s dominant hand based on which side of his face had been shaved first.  Curmie had actually thought of that bit of story-telling earlier in the day, when he realized that he had started to shave on the other side of his face from usual practice.

Which hand we use to do things isn’t absolute, in other words.  Curmie is a leftie in the things that make one a southpaw: writing, throwing, cutting, etc.  And if he ever tried to shoot a gun or play the guitar, he’d do them left-handed.  But for two-handed things: swinging a baseball bat (the one place that being a leftie is actually a small advantage), a golf club, or an axe, he’s right-handed.  He’s a little more right- than left-handed with a hockey or lacrosse stick, but is pretty close to ambidextrous in those areas.

And he drinks with his right hand more than with his left.  Part of this is situational: his accustomed seat is on the couch, with a TV tray to his right as he faces the television.  Part is cultural: if you want to see what’s printed on your mug, you’ve got to drink with your right hand.  This, of course, is reasonable given that about 90% of the population is right-handed.  But part is probably natural inclination.

Of course, there are many other ways in which there is a subtle but clear indication that right is right, and left is wrong.  (We’re not talking politics here, of course.)  The fact that words like “gauche” and “sinister” are linked to “left,” whereas “dexterous” is “right” is more than accidental.  But there are pragmatic considerations, as well.  Curmie sometimes has to use his “wrong” hand to take the cap off a bottle of water, for example:  more strength is generated turning the hand towards the body than away from it.  Again, perfectly understandable.  But left-handed spatulas, scissors, etc., are often hard to come by, or are considerably more expensive.  Curmie is only a couple months short of his 70^th birthday, and has literally never seen a left-handed catcher’s mitt or serrated knife. 

But, Gentle Reader, you’ve no doubt already figured out that this essay isn’t really about which hand you drink with.  Rather, it’s about the thought that formed in Curmie’s mind as he lay down to bed: that the writer of that television episode must have been right-handed, because no leftie would possibly suggest that only right-handed people could possibly drink with their right hand… and that the reason Beloved Spouse wasn’t as upset as Curmie is because she’s right-handed.

Both of those suppositions are questionable at best, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that they formed in Curmie’s mind.  And that is what this piece is about.

When it comes to privilege in this society, being a leftie is about the only place Curmie is behind the curve.  Among the things over which he had no control but seem to have worked out in his favor are the facts that he’s a tallish cishet white male, born into a middle-class family with two loving and supportive parents who stayed together until his mom’s death when Curmie was already 37.  He had some control over his success as a student, but he was able to attend the colleges and universities of his choice without fear of going into deep, long-term, debt.

Like most theatre people, he got his start as an actor: in an arena in which there are more roles for men than for women, and more good women than good men at the amateur level.  In other words, he didn’t need to be as good as his female friends were to gain the experience that led to opportunities in other theatrical disciplines than acting.  That doesn’t mean he’s ashamed of what success he’s had, or that he didn’t earn it, but he acknowledges that he had fewer and lower hurdles to clear.

But he is left-handed, and suspects with some reason that people who aren’t don’t fully understand.  Sure, Gentle Reader, if you’re right-handed you’re still fully capable of intellectually appreciating some of the points made above.  But you don’t understand viscerally unless you live it day-by-day.

If you think about it, Gentle Reader, you’ll know why Curmie is reluctant to sit in the middle of the table at the restaurant or why he doesn’t use a lovely fountain pen he was given as a gift lest he smear ink all over the document.  But you probably won’t think about it unprompted.  That doesn’t make you a bad person, or even someone lacking in empathy.

By the same token, Curmie can simultaneously understand and not really understand what it’s like to be female, or LGBTQ+, or black, or Hispanic, or to have grown up in poverty, or in a foster home, or with an alcoholic parent, or… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Curmie is unlikely to be grabbed by ICE unless he actively interferes with them (that could change in the future, but we’re not there yet).  Beloved Spouse’s best friend and several of my favorite former students might not be so lucky.  Our lawn guy, who has a pronounced Mexican accent, is probably at active risk.

The point is that virtually all of us are advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.  And we’re all going to do stupid things: both failing to appreciate the consequences of what we say or do, and imagining ill intent where it didn’t exist.  The recent brouhaha over Sydney Sweeney’s ads for American Eagle is a prime example.  It takes a peculiar mix of paranoia and virtue signaling to get too upset over a play on words to link “genes,” which make this conventionally beautiful young woman blonde and blue-eyed, with “jeans,” which is what she’s selling.  To suggest that AE and/or Ms. Sweeney are advocating white supremacy or eugenics is, quite simply, daft.  The whole point is that she, not to be confused with all blue-eyed blondes, has great jeans/genes.

And stop the presses!  A clothing chain is using sex to get people to buy their product, an event never before seen in the history of advertising.  😉  Indeed, one suspects that the folks at AE knew their ad campaign would generate a response, which is precisely why they went with it.  Those ads have been seen by a lot more people a lot more times than a more conventional series would have received, and AE didn’t have to pay for most of it.  This is a variation on the phenomenon that got DJT a lot of free publicity back in 2016.

There’s a lot of noise about how Sweeney’s career may be in jeopardy because of the backlash, and that the Trump administration’s mocking of the uproar will work against her.  Curmie doubts it, but it could happen.

But here’s the thing: maybe Curmie just doesn’t get it.  He’s blue-eyed, after all, and was quite blond as a wee lad.  If his melanin count were higher, would he respond differently?  Again, doubtful… but maybe.

There are indeed some racists, sexists, homophobes and assorted other creeps out there.  But even this crusty old fart refuses to believe they are in the majority, even if they seem to be in charge of an increasingly authoritarian and intentionally cruel government.  What we need to do is three-fold.  First, spend a little time contemplating our collective tendency to conflate the specific and the general.  Second, consider the possibility that what we say or do isn’t what other people hear or see, or that what we see and hear isn’t what other people intended to do or say.  There’s a lot of communication theory about this, which Curmie, in an unaccustomed fit of empathy, with not bore you with, Gentle Reader.

Finally, we need to pick our battles.  One of the things Curmie talked a lot about as a director and occasional acting coach was the need to “have a place to go.”  If everything is highlighted, then nothing is highlighted.  Similarly, detaining specific illegal immigrants is different from rounding up everyone who “looks Hispanic” and sending them to a concentration camp.  And there’s enough actual racism out there not to get caught up in hypersensitivity. 

By the way, Curmie is well aware of the irony of posting about over-reaction on a site which is pretty much devoted to that kind of response.  He’s working on it.

Three Stories about Opera and Opera Houses

Curmie has seen a couple dozen operas, mostly presented by the music program at a place he was teaching.  He helped on a few, and even appeared in one.  (Fear not, Gentle Reader, it was as a narrator, as literally no one wants to hear him sing.)  But to say he’s an aficionado would slide beyond the boundaries of exaggeration and into falsehood.

That said, there are three opera or opera house stories that caught his attention in the past couple of weeks.  They are presented here in chronological order. 

We start, then, with a story Curmie first learned about from a post on Chris Peterson’s OnStage Blog.  The Thomaston (CT) Opera House has recently undergone a $3.5 million renovation, apparently funded by the state.  The space is home to the local community theatre and shares a building with the town hall.  About $700,000 of that grant was spent on restoring the original ceiling… and that’s where things start getting complicated. 

You see, that photo at the top of this entry is of part of the newly restored ceiling.  It duplicates that original design from when the opera house was built in 1884.  According to an article by Tracey O’Shaughnessy for ctinsider.com, the ceiling was designed “to get visitors to look up, forget their troubles and just get happy.”  There are four panels representing architecture, literature, music and the performing arts.  The ceiling and the rest of the building served to enhance civic pride.  State Historic Preservation Officer Jonathan Kinney says that the opera house “was a sign of a municipality achieving a level of status that they had evolved to a point that they could provide that for their residents.”

Ah, Gentle Reader, but you’ll have noticed that some of that decoration looks rather like swastikas.  The original ceiling included them as symbols evoking good fortune or well-being.  Remember, the building was constructed decades before the Nazis destroyed the possibility of a positive meaning to those images.  Well, actually, they only sorta did so.  By this Curmie is not suggesting that swastikas in the sense we generally think of them are anything but a symbol of hatred, but the ones on that Connecticut ceiling are pointing in a different direction than the one associated with Nazism: that is, the lines coming out from the center of the symbol turn left/counterclockwise, opposite of the Nazi version.

Does that matter?  Well, the term swastika comes from the Sanskrit, so it seems appropriate to respond as Curmie so often did in his Asian Theatre classes: yes and no.  First off, the term “swastika” applies to both the left-facing version seen on that ceiling and the right-facing version hijacked by the Nazis.  In other words, yes, those symbols are technically swastikas, but they aren’t what we generally think of when we use the term.  That does indeed mean that the people who are upset about the decision to repaint the ceiling are reacting to a stimulus that doesn’t really exist.  What Curmie finds interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be any attempt by those who approved the design to point out the difference between the two symbols.

So, is it over-reaction?  Or misplaced anger?  Perhaps.  But even if so, are those who argue that restoring the ceiling to its original look was an “obvious mistake” just snowflakes who need to sign on to the “historical” restoration?  Curmie thinks not.  Going ahead with a project you know is going to offend people is generally bad form, even if you’re “right.”

There is the whole authenticity argument, though… or is there?  First off, the ceiling had been painted over in the 1930s precisely because of the presence of those swastikas, so returning to what things looked like nearly a century ago doesn’t seem out of line. 

More significantly, Curmie remembers touring Shakespeare’s Globe in London twenty or so years ago.  The new (1997) theatre was built to be as accurate to the original as possible: there was no structural steel, the tools used were those available to carpenters in the late 16^th century, and so on.  But, for instance, whereas the thatch for the roof was authentic, it was treated with a fire retardant chemical, and sprinklers were installed (the original Globe burned down in 1613, and repeating that particular bit of history seemed contra-indicated). 

Similarly, no one today really wants to see a show in an authentic 19^th century theatre: we prefer modern electricity, plumbing, etc.  So there’s not going to be absolute authenticity.

Curmie is enough of a literalist theatre historian to call the ethical cases on both sides of the dispute to be roughly equally persuasive.  If you’re going to re-create the original ceiling, which is both inoffensive and decorative, then do it.  Except… well, you see where this debate leads to, Gentle Reader.

But there’s one other factor: the publicity.  You don’t get extra credit for scrupulous detail in a renovated building; you do catch flak for even approximating one of the most divisive and offensive symbols in human history.  This is, after all, a permanent fixture now, not a piece of set dressing in a production of The Producers.  If Jewish patrons (in particular) are made to feel uncomfortable and will avoid the space in the future, maybe there’s a problem.  In sum, then, yeah, bad idea, although Curmie does not condemn those who disagree with that assessment.

The other two stories are less ambiguous in terms of right and wrong.  So, let’s go to London for the final moments—the curtain call, in fact—for the run of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.  Daniel Perry, a self-described “queer dance artist” (spare me!), unfurled a Palestinian flag in the middle of the bows.  Perry, who appears to have been in the chorus, successfully got the flag onstage despite the attempts of some backstage crew member to thwart them [they/them pronouns, not plural].

OK, this one is simple: Perry is an idiot and an asshole.  Curmie doesn’t care whether Perry’s empathy for the Palestinian cause is appropriate or not (in fact, Curmie rather agrees with them… up to a point, at least): this is not the time or place for such self-indulgent displays.  The opera’s administrators were absolutely correct to distance themselves from the puerile display and to ban them from further productions in the space.  One hopes that Mx. Perry will find that such grandstanding has some serious career consequences.

Meanwhile, there’s the kind of boorishness displayed by Amin Hashwami’s post on X in which he suggests that the opera administration is “more disturbed [by the incident] than the killing of 58000 civilians in Gaze.”  Oh, FFS, give it a rest.  It is not the responsibility of the administration, the audience, or the leading performers who had no idea of the silliness going on behind them to support your cause 24/7/365.  When you’re on stage at Covent Garden, you adhere to the company’s apolitical credo.  And if Curmie is in that audience, he’s going to label you an asshole and be less likely to support your cause.

Oh, there’s one more thing: our Daniel speaks from a place of considerable privilege.  He was trained at the hoity-toity Tring Park School for the Performing Arts, where annual tuition is a cool £48,000.  For context, that’s about five times as high as at the very reputable conservatory with which Curmie’s university has had a relationship for a quarter century or so.  This is of little relevance to the main story, but it elicited a snort from Curmie, and it might from you, as well, Gentle Reader.

But, intentionally or otherwise, Curmie saved the most horrifically hilarious of the stories for last.  Yes, it’s true that House Republicans are threatening withhold funding from the Kennedy Center if the opera house is not named for… wait for it… Melania Trump, presumably because, to quote a vulgar but not inaccurate meme, Trumps balls won’t lick themselves.  You can’t make this stuff up.

GOP pols have proven themselves the perfect storm of malevolence, cowardice, and hypocrisy.  They’ve done more harm in a variety of ways than even passing this nonsense would be, but even confirming the likes of Baby Bobby, Dr. Oz, and Pete Hegseth wasn’t as profoundly, awe-inspiringly, stupid as this.

Melania Trump has done literally nothing for the performing arts in general or for opera in particular.  She has less right to have an opera house named for her than Curmie does—he’s worked on a couple of amateur productions, after all.  The only upside here is that there has never been a clearer demonstration of the GOP legislators abrogating their responsibilities as a co-equal branch of government.  Not even passing that Big Ugly Bill or shutting down so they can avoid dealing with the absolute certainty that Dear Leader’s name is all over the Epstein files can compete.  Naming literally anything after a vulgar trophy wife known primarily for posing for some soft-core porn is beyond laughable.  Remember, this is the couple who broke tradition by not attending the Kennedy Center Awards during 45’s term.  “Appreciation of the arts,” my ass.  Curmie cannot improve on the line of comedian Andy Borowitz: “Karoline Leavitt defended the decision to rename the Kennedy Center after Melania: ‘Since President Trump took it over, the Kennedy Center has been like our nation’s First Lady: renovated and vacant.’”

Oh, and <insert late-night infomercial voice here> that’s not all!  JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, hammered the amendment and, as the kids say, brought receipts… like the federal law that prohibits this kind of grandstanding: “after December 2, 1983 no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”  There are some exceptions noted; this bill doesn’t qualify.

It’s not clear whether Schlossberg would be as adamant had the proposal been to honor someone worthy of the recognition—Jessye Norman or Leontyne Price, for example—but the fact is, we’ll never know: because no one is going to try to do that.  This is nothing but sycophancy and delusion… oh, and, as one commenter put it, the Epsteinth attempt to distract from the issue that has, for better or worse, captured the public’s attention.

So there you have it: three stories about opera and opera houses.  Curmie may not write about either subject ever again.  But… never say never.

If you’re reading this on your phone, Curmie apologizes if some of the formatting is weird.  It looks fine on Curmie’s laptop, but not on his phone, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

Tamara de Lempicka to the Rescue

 

Young Woman in Green, c. 1931

Curmie can’t seem to focus much on anything these days.  His writing, both for scholarly publication and on this blog, has slowed to a crawl.  He suspects that he’s not alone in feeling a little overwhelmed by the stupidity, cruelty, and lawlessness of the Trump administration and the mind-boggling cowardice of the Congressional GOP.  Senator Murkowski is only the most outrageous recent example; there are, as you know, Gentle Reader, plenty of others.

Although some of the worst stuff was cut before the final version, what remained in the “Big Beautiful Bill” was still an indictment of the morality of every pol who voted for it, as well as an abdication of the legislature’s responsibility to do that whole “checks and balances” thing, especially when the executive branch wants something transcendently moronic (or evil).

Then there was the horror that took place a few hours west-southwest of Curmie’s abode in East Texas.  Would there have been fewer deaths had the country been led by someone less sociopathic, someone who didn’t cheerily cut funding for the very agency that could have detected the intensity of that storm sooner?  Well, we don’t know that for certain, but it seems pretty damned likely.  And it’s certain that the cuts to FEMA, even though this a red state, will negatively impact the lives of thousands of people.

Those of us who think of ourselves as “the left” generally really mean “not the right.”  One of the differences is that we tend to be at least marginally empathetic: it doesn’t have to happen to us for us to care.  There are lots of memes about how Biden sent relief to red states as a matter of course, but Trump wouldn’t do so after the California fires. That doesn’t mean that events don’t hit a little harder when you know someone directly affected, though. 

One of Curmie’s favorite former students is from Kerrville, one of the hardest-hit communities; it was good to hear that her family is safe, but so many spaces important to her are gone forever.  (By the way, Gentle Reader, if you have a few spare dollars, the organization she’s suggesting we support is the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country.  Curmie made an online contribution and he hopes a few of his readers might be in a position to do so, as well.)

Beloved Spouse went to a conference in Anaheim a couple of weeks ago.  While she was there, she took some time off to visit Disneyland with her best friend (who was also at the conference) and her son and one of her daughters.  They’re all US-born citizens, but they’re identifiably Hispanic, and mere details like citizenship haven’t seemed to matter much to the cowardly goons of ICE.  The was a major raid in the area two days after they came home.  One wonders, “what if…?”

There are personal distractions, too: a minor health issue, some unforeseen expenses,  and the realization that Curmie will soon need to replace his car, his mattress, his phone, and his laptop.  Not getting to hear the Boston Pops play the 1812 Overture on the 4^th, as we’ve done for many years in a row (thanks for nothing, CW), shouldn’t have been as annoying as it was.  

So we come to Saturday the 5^th, not exactly in foul humor, but certainly stressed and a little overwhelmed.  What to do?  There are two possibilities.  The first is escape into nature.  Head to the mountains, the forest, the shore, but away from everyone else except those you love.  But Curmie was never a fan of heat indexes over 100°, and what meager allure being outside in that heat may once have had has dwindled further as septuagenarian status approaches.

That leaves ART.  Curmie and Beloved Spouse don’t live within an easy drive to any major city, but Houston is still close enough that a day-trip is possible.  So that’s what happened.  We’d been intending to go down to the Tamara de Lempicka exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts for some time, but it never seemed to work out.  But on Saturday, it did. 

Normally, when we go to a museum, we’ll see the special exhibitions that interest us and still have time to check out the permanent collection, too.  We can’t do that at, say, the Art Institute in Chicago—it’s just too big—but we generally get to visit our favorites from previous visits.  Not this trip, either.  Not only is the MFA huge, spread across four multi-story buildings, but the Lempicka exhibit was also enormous, with dozens of works displayed.  Yes, some of them were small preliminary sketches or whatever, but it was a lot.  There were a couple of places to sit, and Curmie took advantage of them, but just the amount of standing and walking was rather exhausting for an old fart like Curmie.

So we didn’t see much else.  We didn’t need to, to declare the day a huge success.  The exhibition was magnificent.  Tamara de Lempicka (originally, “Łempicka,” apparently, so I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for years) is one of those handful of artists—alongside the likes of Van Gogh, Chagall, and yesterday’s birthday boy Giorgio de Chirico—whose work is instantly identifiable as hers. 

Regarded as one of the founders of Art Deco (she claimed to be the founder of the movement), she drew from about every artistic movement imaginable.  There’s one painting “inspired by Botticelli.”  Yep, Curmie can see that.  Others are reminiscent of the style of other late medieval or Renaissance artists.  Her use of color seems to be drawn from the vividness of expressionism, her still lifes from post-impressionism, many of her backgrounds from cubism.  There are hints of surrealism in the juxtaposition of images (there are a couple of her works that are unquestionably surrealistic, but they weren’t part of this exhibition).  And yet all of her paintings are unquestionably hers.

She was also, of course, a fascinating individual.  Born in Warsaw (probably), she later lived in St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Houston before retiring to Mexico.  She was married twice—to Polish lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki and Austro-Hungarian baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh—and had multiple affairs with both men and women.  When her first husband was arrested by Russian authorities after the 1917 Revolution, she supposedly slept with the Swedish consul to get his support for Łempicki’s release.  It worked.

She was an outstanding example of the “new woman” or “modern woman,” both in her life and in her work.  An article in Vogue from 1929 is cited on the description of Young Woman in Green (Young Woman with Gloves).  It describes the modern woman: “She seeks purity in line, in contour, hair, and clothes.  She knows that, in the drama of her own personality, she must be stage director, scene-shifter, mistress of costumes, as well as star of the play.”  It’s no wonder that such a confident, competent, independent woman would be just a little scary to those who knew nothing but patriarchy.

She understood her role in all this: 

I was the first woman to make clear paintings, and that was the origin of my success. Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable. The banality in which art had sunk gave me a feeling of disgust. I was searching for a craft that no longer existed; I worked quickly with a delicate brush. I was in search of technique, craft, simplicity and good taste. My goal: never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors, rediscover the elegance of my models.

Lempicka was cognizant of the need to apply, on numerous occasions, a male suffix to her name when she signed paintings (the art establishment was not interested in female artists); she hid her Jewish ancestry, which certainly played a role in her decision to leave Paris in the late 1930s.  But she was also iconoclastic, fully deserving of the title of “Bad Girl Queen,” as a headline on the Paper City site reads.

The sensuality of her models, especially the women, is foregrounded.  Yes, she painted both male and female nudes, but, as Dan Duray wrote for Observer, “everyone is much sexier with their clothes on.”  Young Woman in Green is a good example.  The eyes are turned away in a manner reminiscent of all those studio shots of Clara Bow; the dress looks like it is sprayed on in places; the left hand draws the eye towards the crotch.  The sexuality is a function of both what is revealed and what is concealed.

Not all of her work is this overtly sensual, but most of it is nearly as eye-catching.  It’s difficult for us now to understand how her work fell out of favor, even as the likes of Elton John, Barbra Streisand and Madonna were buying it up.  But that did happen.  The more recent revival of interest in her work, and in Art Deco in general, is a good thing.  Because she and a lot of her contemporaries were good at their jobs.

Curmie still worries about the future of the country, about the upcoming bills, about what he’ll do when he really retires.  But for a couple of glorious hours last weekend, none of that mattered.  The problems are still there.  But the mind is clearer, and Curmie is more mentally and emotionally prepared than he was a week ago.  

We take our triumphs where they come.  Take care of yourself, Gentle Reader.

 

Two Stories Set at Dodger Stadium

 

Curmie isn’t as big a baseball fan as he once was, and he’s never been a Dodgers fan, but it’s still not unusual for him to read about the goings-on at Dodger Stadium.  It’s usually about what happened on the field, though: Shohei Ohtani did this, Mookie Betts did that, and so on. 

Yeah, there was that moment a couple of years ago when stadium security couldn’t catch the idiot fan who had run on the field so the ball girl tackled him.  (Curmie thinks the best part wasn’t the takedown per se, but the casual stroll away afterwards.)  And there have been a couple of squabbles over the “ownership” of a couple of home run balls, especially Ohtani’s first homer as a Dodger and his “50/50” ball. 

But Curmie never had an urge to write about any of that.  Now, however, there are not one but two stories from the last month or so that caught Curmie’s attention.  Neither is really related to what happened on the field at all.  Neither made big headlines; indeed, the earlier one escaped Curmie’s notice altogether for about a fortnight.  Let’s start there.

Over the off-season, the Dodgers completed a $100 million renovation of the stadium.  Most of the improvements were to the field per se and to the clubhouses, but there were also some projects dedicated to ensuring a “top-notch game-day experience” for fans.

Yeah, well, maybe not quite so “top-notch.”  On May 30, a chunk of concrete about the size of a softball dislodged from an upper deck and hit a fan, Luis Ricardo Aquino, in the back, breaking a rib.  Aquino, a resident of Mexico City, had traveled to LA for the game. 

OK, there are three stories here that Curmie is going to skim over really quickly here, but are worth mentioning: 1). $100 million in renovations and you can’t have a stadium that isn’t a death trap?  If Aquino had happened to be leaning back for some reason and that chunk of concrete had hit him in the head, it could have killed him.  2). How slimy do the Dodgers’ reps have to be to get Aquino not to file a complaint in exchange for a jersey, couple of trinkets and a bobble-head?  That’s a 7-figure lawsuit, easy.  3). Aquino declined a trip to the hospital, saying “this is not my country, so I did not feel comfortable.”  One reasonable translation would be “I’ll live with a broken rib until I get home, where I can actually afford medical care, and the Dodgers aren’t likely to pay.”

But the big story is that when help appeared on the scene, the first question wasn’t about where he was hit or the severity of the injury, but whether he was in the US legally.  Subsequent reporting by Michael Elizondo suggests that the questioning may not have been merely insensitive, tacky, and racist, but literally unlawful if performed by other than an immigration agent.  Notice also the blithe assumption that Aquino isn’t a citizen.

“Papers, please” has long since achieved cliché status in movies.  The line is usually given to some officious official representing an evil regime.  You know, Gentle Reader, like all those WWII movies with Nazis who always spoke in English but with German accents.  But we’re heading towards that level of intrusion in the US right now. 

Curmie has been lucky enough to be able the travel outside the US on numerous occasions.  He’s lived in two foreign countries and spent over three months total over several visits in another; he’s spent the night in eight others, and passed through (on a train, for example) or made a brief excursion into four more.  There are two more he specifically wants to add to the list, and many others he’d be happy to visit.  All this probably puts him above the mean for Americans, but he knows several people whose international experience far exceeds his own. 

In all those voyages, Curmie has needed his passport (his “papers”) for precisely three kinds of events: crossing a national border, checking into a hotel, and (before ATMs became ubiqitous and linked) changing currency (or, in the old days, travelers checks) at a bank… and not literally every time for any of them.  He was told directly by trip organizers, experienced travelers, and even local law enforcement not to carry his passport except when necessary: better to leave it where you’re staying.  This was true, too, for when he had the UK equivalent of a green card when he was studying for his MA. 

But whereas ICE goons needn’t have any identification at all to detain someone for… you know… looking and sounding like they might not be an American citizen (Curmie is certain the tourism industry has some choice words for these assholes), Mr. Aquino had to have his paperwork on his person to attend a freaking baseball game.  Imagine if he hadn’t! 

It is more than a little terrifying that any non-citizen in this country is subject to this level of scrutiny.  True, it’s not as bad as requiring applicants for student visas to supply details of their social media presence for the last five years and to set all their accounts to public, much less to the horrific idea that all “non-detained migrants” (that would include students) must wear GPS tracking devices.  But it’s still creepy as hell, and a far cry from anything resembling “the land of the free.”  Emma Lazarus famously wrote about the “golden door.”  In Trumpistan, having enough gold will get you a free pass through that door.  Everybody else gets treated like a criminal. 

OK, moving on to the other story…  On June 19^th, the Dodgers tweeted that “ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots. They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization.”  There’s not much of a story there, right, Gentle Reader?  Stories of people facing down the goons are damned near ubiquitous.  Ah, but <insert late-night infomercial voice here> that’s not all! 

You see, ICE proclaimed they “were never there.”  They’re almost certainly lying, of course.  Anti-ICE activists, as the kids say, brought the receipts in the form of photographs.  It’s possible, of course, that they never asked permission (they’re not the type to be professional, of course), but they were certainly there. 

So, why would they lie?  Well, it’s what they do, for one thing.  The number of times they’ve lied about the reason for an “asylum meeting” or blamed an American citizen they tackled for attacking them when there’s clear video evidence to the contrary has now reached into the “frequently” range.  We know that, like all bullies, they’re cowards: hence the masks, the refusal to show appropriate identification, the unwillingness to go after actual gang members when they can make their quota by rounding up hotel maids and dishwashers who sorta look Latino.  And they sure as hell don’t want to reveal the fragility of their faux machismo preening.  The fact that they tried and failed to throw their weight around simply cannot be allowed to become public knowledge.

But, Gentle Reader, you know what’s even worse than a gaggle of federal agents longer on testosterone than on empathy or truth-telling?  What if this time they were actually telling the truth?  That would mean that since ICE and their partners in crime (this is not merely an expression, of course) refuse to identify themselves, a bunch of other white male assholes can now try cosplaying as federal agents.  At least some of the detentions made by immigration officials are legitimate.  But the fake guys: actual, no-doubt-about-it kidnappings, with the potential for extortion, theft, assault, rape, even murder. 

All the while real police stand around and watch… and may even help.  We’re already seeing the inevitable: reports of fake ICE agents committing crimes are popping up with grim regularity.  Commenting on a case in Houston this week, ICE released a statement: 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents are highly trained and dedicated professionals who are sworn to uphold the law, protect the American people and support U.S. national security interests. ICE strongly condemns the impersonation of its officers or agents. This action is not only dangerous, but illegal. Imposters can be charged with various criminal offenses both at the state/local level, as well as federally (under 18 USC 912).

Yeah, right.  Actual cops need a badge, an ID, and a warrant.  And they’re not hiding behind masks.  Judge, lawyers, journalists… they’re not anonymous, and they do things that could get the bad guys mad at them.  But ICE?  They won’t identify themselves, which of course would make impersonating them considerably harder, but they’ll charge you with assault of law enforcement if you fight back.  They’re scum.  Literally every one of them, starting at the top.  As Curmie wrote during the 45 regime, “why else would anyone want to join a notoriously brutal, racist, self-important organization if not to be, well, brutal, racist, and self-important?”  Hat tip to the Dodgers for throwing them out.

Oh, there’s another non-baseball story about the Dodgers: they’re pledging $1 million to families affected by ICE raids.  Sure, it’s virtue-signaling and showboating.  And yes, they can afford it.  But underscoring the sadism, mendacity, and criminality of ICE… that’s not a bad thing.

 

Trump’s Birthday Parade and Stopping the End Run

Yes, this is photoshopped.
But it wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t close to the truth.

Curmie’s father played football in high school.  One of his favorite stories of that time nearly a century ago was about the end of the big rivalry game.  His team was down by four points as time was running out.  They did get the ball back, though, so they weren’t out of the game yet, even if they needed a touchdown and had 80 yards or so to get to the endzone.

That’s when the coach told them to run an end run, with Curmie’s dad and his cousin as the lead blockers, on literally every play until the other team stopped them for less than four yards.  A dozen or so plays later, they scored what turned out to be the winning touchdown with about a minute left on the clock.  If a play works, use it again.

Almost exactly five years ago, on Juneteenth, 2020—we’re talking peak COVID time—President Trump held a rally in Tulsa.  As usual, he crowed about the huge number of ticket requests… but the actual turnout left two thirds of the seats empty.  How did that happen?  Well, it was a combination: utter incompetence by whatever staffers were assigned front-of-house duties, and a bit of fun from Tik-Tok Teens and K-Pop Stans, who apparently ordered hundreds of thousands of free tickets they never had any intention of using. 

Curmie wrote about the story at the time.  Of course, having actually done some house management, Curmie also enumerated several different ways of preventing embarrassing situations like this.  Always the educator, is Curmie.  But Curmie had always been blessed by students who could out-think a kumquat.  Not so, this time.

By now, Gentle Reader, you’ve figured out what this essay is about—the paltry turnout for Trump’s most recent vanity project, that absurd parade—and what those first two paragraphs were about: the TikTok-ers are baaaaaaack, using precisely the same scheme as they’d used in Tulsa.

Curmie doesn’t approve of the subterfuge, but he does chuckle at the apparent inability of Trump to hire anyone whose name isn’t Stormy Daniels who is even remotely competent at their job.  Folks who say they’re from Canada or Australia or wherever claim to have gone online and ordered multiple tickets, some of them under crude or ironic names.  Oops, they couldn’t go.  Some of the confessions may be fake, and one might suspect that inclement weather may have affected turnout to some degree, but there is no question that the parade was not merely costly and boring, but also under-attended. 

Exact numbers for the turnout are impossible, of course, but Barbara Comstock posted that Newsmax, which makes Fox News look like leftist propaganda (that’s Curmie’s description, not hers), estimated about 10,000 attendees; she then added that the parade was “a huge waste of our military $$$ when the world is on fire…”  Curmie tried but failed to confirm Newsmax’s reporting, but Comstock is a former Republican Congresscritter, so she’d be unlikely to misrepresent the right-wing press. 

The place was damned near empty.  Asmodeus Naggoob posted on X that “AOC and Bernie would draw more people with thumb wrestling alone, lol.”  Part of that is, no doubt, attributable to… erm… running the same play until the other guys stop it.

But apparently the organizers’ incompetence stretched well beyond their amply demonstrated inability to learn anything from the Tulsa debacle.  Amanda Moore posted, “The marketing material said the entrance was on 14, but in reality it was on 12 St and you had to go through this pen for two blocks. Everyone who was around to answer questions was an asshole, too. Probably part of the issue!”  There are a host of other comments about poor planning and lack of crowd management.  Starting early to avoid thunderstorms also complicated things: it’s understandable and indeed appropriate in terms of safety, but problematic logistically because apparently some people didn’t make it through the barricades until the parade was over. 

That may have worked out OK for the prospective parade-goers, as the event itself was apparently a world-class snoozefest.  Numerous photos and videos show Trump and most of the people around him nodding off or nearly doing so. 

But let’s get one thing straight about that parade.  No one objects to recognizing the manifold contributions the Army and the other branches of the military have made to this country’s welfare, and having a celebration on the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the Continental Army seems an entirely appropriate time to do so.  We might not approve of everything the military has done, but that is almost never the fault of the troops themselves.  And there are still some vets out there who were on the front lines against actual Nazis: anyone who disrespects them will have Curmie to deal with. 

The ceremonies planned by the Biden administration were pretty much what the occasion called for, but, being pathologically incapable of doing otherwise, Trump turned the event into a vulgar, expensive (estimates just to repair damage to the streets from running tanks over them run to $12,000,000), narcissistic display that was one part cheap theme park and two parts North Korea.  This wasn’t a celebration of the anniversary that happened to fall on Trump’s birthday; it was a birthday celebration of Trump that used a coincidence to pretend it wasn’t really a tacky glorification of Dear Leader.  

It was in recognition of what was about to happen in DC that the day was chosen for the nation-wide “No Kings” protests, which organizers say attracted over 13 million participants.  Curmie is not so naïve that he believes that number without a raised eyebrow, but even the most conservative estimates put the turnout at or near eight figures.  The ratio of protesters to parade-goers is probably somewhere around 1000:1.

Part of that is because the Trump administration couldn’t stop the end run.  In either sense of the term.