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.