Fancy Free: then and later

The New Neo Posted on by

“Fancy Free” was one of Jerome Robbins’ earliest most successful and appealing ballets—and since he’s choreographed many successful and appealing ballets, that says a lot. I’ve been looking for some footage of the original cast from 1944, and I’m happy to say that I’ve found a little bit.

The ballet about three sailors on leave in New York (later expanded and made into the musical “On the Town”) must have been particularly affecting when it first came out during the war. The following John Kriza (original cast) solo is interesting to compare to a modern version. I’ve cued up a segment of about 30 seconds here:

And here’s a version of the same segment from 1986. Not bad, but not the same at all (I’m not sure who this is, but it’s the New York City Ballet):

Kriza has a breezy easy flow that might just be of its times, never to come again. Take a closer look at the part with the slide at the beginning. He does much more with it than the later guy, but it doesn’t seem that Kriza is dancing for the audience or posing. He really seems to be what he is supposed to be: a sailor out on the town, showing off for the girls in order to win them (or at least one of them), not even a trained dancer (which Kriza of course actually was) but just a guy who loves to dance.

The 1986 dancer is good, quite good, probably better than most these days. But there’s a tension there compared to Kriza’s loose and seeming ease. The later dancer seems to be performing for the greater theater audience, and you are always aware he’s a professional dancer who’s strutting his stuff for us.

[CORRECTION: It turns out that in that first video, the variation starts with a short bit of Kriza but then it switches to Barishnikov. Here’s a longer clip of Kriza, but it’s a different part of “Fancy Free.”]

Trump’s ambassador to Israel: a radical change

The New Neo Posted on by

So many of Trump’s appointments have raised a furor that it’s hard to keep up with the din.

But a particularly interesting one that I haven’t written about yet is David Friedman as ambassador to Israel. Friedman is most definitely a pro-Israel (pro-settlement, pro Jerusalem as capital) hardliner who has said some inflammatory things, such as this column, written last June. If you read it, it becomes clear what they are squawking about.

The appointment of Friedman is a signal that Trump is not planning business as usual in the Palestine/Israel conflict. Now, an ambassador is not the same as a negotiator, but an ambassador is influential, and Friedman’s appointment is definitely a sign that things will be shaken up there in ways with which the left—and even some Republicans—will not be happy.

Here are more unhappy people:

[Friedman] is strongly critical of the long-held US goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He also supports Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

A senior Palestinian official warned that such moves “will be the destruction of the peace process”.

Veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat said moving the embassy and “annexing” settlements in the West Bank would send the region down a path to “chaos, lawlessness and extremism”.

However, he said he did not really believe that Mr Trump would approve either action.

“The United States at the end of the day is a country of institutions, and they are guided by their national interests,” he said.

“Destruction of the peace process”? What “peace process” is left? It is a polite fiction that remains, like a vestigial organ, long after its function has disappeared. And “chaos, lawlessness, and extremism” in the West Bank? Since when has the region not been marked by those things? It is another polite (and ultimately destructive) fiction not to recognize that fact.

I have no idea whether Trump “would approve either action.” Neither does anyone else—perhaps not even Trump. My opinion is that what has been going on in that neck of the woods has not worked. The only thing that has “worked” in recent years has been Israel’s building of the protective wall that so many people have criticized. What’s the next step, and will it be successful? I don’t know, but it seems it will be something quite different.

Here’s John Podhoretz on the subject:

The reason Trump has chosen Friedman is that he has evidently decided he wants to up-end the conventional approach toward Israel and the Palestinians and go in a radically different direction. This was not predictable from Trump’s campaign rhetoric, when he talked about being “even-handed” and wanting to make a great real-estate deal. It’s possible he believes he can defibrillate the occluded heart of the “peace process” by approaching the Palestinians from a highly aggressive pro-Israel stance. If he actually wants to make a real deal, pursuing the entirely discredited approach of trying to drag the Palestinians to the table at which they refuse to sit is the worst possible strategy anyway.

The scalp hunters will be out for David Friedman, but if Democrats decide to go to war over this nomination, the joke will be on them. For one thing, blocking or derailing Friedman is a vastly more difficult thing to do now than it would have been otherwise because Senate Democrats, living in a fantasy world in which his party would always hold the presidency, stupidly invoked the nuclear option on executive appointments in July 2013 and have now made the passage of such appointments a matter of a simple majority vote in the Senate. For another, Republicans in Congress (with a 52-48 majority) are the nation’s foremost right-wing Zionists now and will meet any attacks on him with delighted counterattacks and defenses. And finally, should they succeed in derailing him, there are many other prominent Americans who share his views to whom Trump could turn. Personnel is policy. This is the policy the president of the United States wants to pursue. He’ll get the ambassador he wants, and he will pursue the policy he wants. Know why? Because he will be the president.

We’ll see.

It will take some getting used to for the left.

Interesting times, interesting times.

“Beyond Hope”: A New Republic panel analyzes Obama’s presidency, and whether it led to Trump’s election

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want a glimpse into the minds of people who feel themselves oh-so-smart but seem unable and unwilling to learn a thing, read this article wherein a group composed of “two of America’s preeminent scholars on American history” plus three journalists and authors responded to various questions about the Obama legacy.

The only person in the group who doesn’t spout the complete party line is Andrew Sullivan, which is understandable considering he’s an unusual amalgam of liberal and conservative. A couple of times during the conversation you can almost feel sorry for him (at least, I did), particularly when he attempts to say that race and racism don’t account for everything negative that’s happened to Obama:

SULLIVAN: But this is all a slow disintegration of an American identity, which is not racial.

JAFFE: Has there ever been an American identity that was not racial?

SULLIVAN: Yes. There can be understood to be something that transcends race, as a citizen with no race.

PAINTER: Maybe if you’re really rich.

SULLIVAN: [Obama]s] other failure is not doing enough to confront the identity politics of the left. Because the left’s obsession with race and gender and all the other Marxist notions helped create the white identity politics that is now going to run this country.

[Laughter and shouting]

The laughter and shouting is apparently because the others are devoted to looking at nearly everything in terms of those identity politics.

It’s hard to summarize the proceedings, but here’s how the entire discussion began, which should give you a sense of the flavor of it:

Q:…How much responsibility do you think that [Obama] himself bears for creating the conditions that allowed Trump to get elected? In retrospect, are there things he could or should have done to protect and institutionalize his agenda more?

NELL PAINTER: I don’t think it has anything to do with him personally, except that he’s a black man. The election of Trump was a gut-level response to what many Americans interpreted as an insult eight years ago, and have been seething against ever since. The only way you can see Trump as somehow Obama’s fault is Obama’s very being. It’s ontological.

Apparently, according to Painter (retired Princeton professor and former president of the Organization of American Historians), anyone failing to acknowledging Obama’s perfection must be a racist and can only be a racist who objects to Obama’s very being.

I guess that would include the voters in counties that once voted for Obama and but in 2016 voted for Trump:

This shift was easily spotted at the county level. For instance, in small, working-class Juneau County, Wisconsin, home to 26,500 people, Trump bested Clinton by 26 points. President Obama won the county by 7 points four years ago. In Macomb County, Michigan ”” a blue-collar Detroit suburb home to 855,000 people ”” Trump won by more than 11 points. Obama won it by 4 points in 2012. And in Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania, typically a critical county for Democrats in the battleground state, Clinton won, but barely, beating Trump by less than 4 points. Obama won the county four years ago by over 27 points.

The above quote isn’t from the New Republic, though; it’s from an interesting article at NBC News, and it deals with facts that the majority of TNR’s forum members don’t seem to feel the need to explain. The New Republic’s forum had a ton of excuses for Obama and very little blame, and much of the blame was on the order of “he didn’t go far enough to the left” and “he tried too hard to compromise with the Republicans.”

We’ve heard all of that before, but it seems especially odd to hear it now, post-election 2016. Who are these people trying to reassure by this sort of talk? Themselves? Each other? Their readers?

The title of the article is “Beyond Hope.” It is meant to refer to Obama’s promises of “hope and change,” now that he’s about to leave office. But it is unintentionally ironic in its description of the inability of most of the panelists to look at the truth and to fairly assess the situation in which the Democratic Party finds itself today.

[NOTE: And why pick on Andrew Sullivan’s “insane” quotes about Obama? Sullivan was by far the sanest person on the entire panel.]

[ADDENDUM: Speaking of “beyond hope,” Michelle Obama seems to have lost her hope and thinks America has, too:

“We feel the difference now,” Obama said in an excerpt of her final White House interview, conducted by Oprah Winfrey. “Now we’re feels like what not having hope feels like. ”¦ What do you do if you don’t have hope, Oprah?”

The full interview is scheduled to air Monday on CBS-TV…

“Barack didn’t just talk about hope because he thought it was a nice slogan to get votes,” the first lady said in the CBS interview. “He and I and so many believe: What else do you have if you don’t have hope?”

The first lady during her time in the White House made top priorities of empowering young women and promoting healthy eating habits.

She argued in the interview that children are the ones who most need hope.

And to try to explain how her husband gave Americans hope, she said he was like the soothing parent who didn’t overreact when a child bumps his or her head on a table.

“Barack has been that for the nation,” the first lady said.

I wonder whether the First Lady considers those millions of Trump voters as not comprising part of “the nation.” Because it seems to me that her statement is true only for about half the nation. For the other half, Obama was an infuriating mixture of tone-deaf non-reaction to their concerns both here and abroad, and extreme activist for positions to which they were opposed.]

Let’s have a fashion interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

Last Sunday was the 22nd Annual Critics’ Choice Awards, and you know what that means: neo-neocon brings you the fashion news, to make you forget all your woes.

At first I thought Kaley Cuoco looked dreadful as well as weird:

kaleycuoco

What’s up with that sort-of-lace sort-of-crocheted sort-of-macrame top with the HUGE train, paired with the saggy cropped pants that would look okay on the beach? Well, at least she looks happy, and as though she’s in on the joke.

But after I looked at the rest of the fashions, I realized that Cuoco was sporting one of the better ensembles. There was an embarrassment of riches to choose from in the “worst-dressed” category, which included practically everybody.

Sometimes the awfulness was subtle enough that it took a moment to realize in how many ways the outfit was awful. For example:

michellemonaghan

The panty-revealing see-through skirt (very fashionable these days, apparently). The deep V (likewise, almost obligatory). The floppy white bow. Strange and out-of-whack.

This next one is more simple; it’s just plain unflattering:
–
annachlumsky

Here’s a bad color, another deep-V, and the nightgown look:

brycedallashoward

This one is just “off” in a way that’s hard to describe. The color combination. The fit. Some outfits have too much imagination; this one has a deficit of imagination, with a style that’s rather prom-like (circa 1980s?):

cynthianixon

Strangely enough, I like this one. One of the few I like. It’s certainly different, but in a good way. It’s retro, but in a pleasant way. The hairdo is a bit much, but it works with the entire ensemble:

janellemonae

This one is again the wrong color. Plus another V-to-the-waist; so tiresomely revealing, and it can’t be comfortable to wear. Draggy and sad:

jessicabeal

Here’s a beautiful dress—for some occasion. Maybe a Goth wedding? A Victorian garden party? But with this geisha makeup, the effect is frightening and vampirish (maybe that’s the goal?):

lilycollins

Okay; I give up. Every now and then I’ve been known to wear a bunch of black clothes that don’t match (blacks have shades, too). But not to an awards ceremony. This is very very schlumpy, and probably purposely so:

mauratierney

Here’s that V again. It looks especially strange with this Cinderella-esque prom-queen look, which seems very juvenile for the sophisticate wearing it:

susankelechi

And last but not least—no, no, no. Very few people on earth could look good in this dress (including its unflattering length), and this lady is not one of them. It could probably make Audrey Hepburn look fat, and rather like a crocheted doily:

traceeellisross

There were more where those came from, but I’ll quit now.

Trump and the CEOs: power is the ultimate aphrodisiac

The New Neo Posted on by

Henry Kissinger said it, not me: Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Case in point:

Ringed by tech’s elite, President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday promised to do “anything we can do” to help the industry he often baited during the presidential campaign.

“This is truly an amazing group of people,” Trump said at Trump Tower to kick off a meeting with Silicon Valley’s top leaders. “I want to add that I’m here to help you folks do well.”

A dozen tech A-listers ”” Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, among them ”” sat down for the two-hour meeting with the president-elect to discuss jobs, immigration policy, China, cybersecurity and taxes.

Trump told the group that his administration is “going to be here for you. You’ll call my people, you’ll call me. We have no formal chain of command around here.”

He suggested, and tech leaders agreed to, meeting quarterly, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

These are people who for the most part hated Trump’s guts prior to this. They may still hate him—the title of this post was meant to be somewhat sarcastic; I doubt they come anywhere near to loving him. But they certainly seemed eager to be in his presence and pleased to have his ear. After all, people like to be asked what they think about something, and probably the last thing they expected (next to Trump’s becoming president, that is) was to have regular chummy meetings with him.

Not everyone was willing to talk to the press afterward. But some were:

“Trump is our president for the next four years, so the tech community needs to set aside its intellectual arrogance and move forward with him to maintain its preeminence as an industry,” says Vineet Jain, CEO of start-up Egnyte, an enterprise file-sharing and collaboration provider. “He’s a businessman; I don’t think he will do anything to jeopardize (the tech industry).”

techies

The impeachment of President Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post is hyperbole on two counts: Trump is not yet president, and of course he’s not being impeached.

He’s being pre-impeached, and I’m using the word “impeached” in the more general sense:

2. Chiefly Law. to challenge the credibility of: to impeach a witness…

4. to call in question; cast an imputation upon: to impeach a person’s motives.

5. to call to account.

And this:

2. to cast doubt on; especially : to challenge the credibility or validity of…

The attempt is to invalidate Trump’s presidency in many people’s eyes before it even begins, as well as to brand him with many labels, but most particularly “racist.”

Now, anyone who follows this blog knows I have a history of not being a Trump fan, to say the least. Now that he’s president-elect, I’ve been relatively pleased with his behavior and his choices, particularly considering what my expectations were. But most of all, I try to be fair.

But although “fair” may be what I try to be, I certainly don’t expect fairness from either the politicians, the press, or the left. And the press in particular is certainly living up to my low expectations, and then some.

I was at a social occasion last week where about ten women I know were present. Most, not all, were liberals, with one leftist thrown into the mix. The talk turned to politics and Trump, and most of the ones doing the talking (maybe five or six of them, that is) were expressing a fear—and not just a fear; almost a certainty—that his election would result in so much racism that we’d be back in Jim Crow days or worse. They made it clear that they believed that Trump himself and most or all of his supporters were racists of the worst kind, and now they were in the driver’s seat.

These women were not talking about some white supremacist fringe of the alt-right who supported Trump’s presidency; they were talking about Trump himself, his appointees, and all his supporters. And in this astounding point of view they have been egged on by a great many people in the press, so it really shouldn’t be surprising that they believe it.

Slate offers the latest entry entry in the business of stoking these fears:

“Trump wanted to ”˜make America great again,’ where ”˜America’ was a metonym for a traditional, industrial, and white America, set against a rising tide of racial threats, from Hispanic immigrants and black protesters, to Muslim refugees and the specter of ”˜radical Islamic terrorism”¦’” wrote Jamelle Bouie [this article in Slate]. “Roof, in his own telling, wanted to awaken white America to the alleged threat of blacks and other nonwhites.”

“There’s no causal relationship between Trump and Roof, no tangible link between the two events. From a certain view, this means they’re unrelated,” Bouie admitted. “But that view is too narrow.”

“Roof’s depiction of black Americans as violent and dangerous is just a few steps away from Trump’s depiction of black communities as violent and dangerous hellscapes that threaten the safety of the entire nation,” he continued. “Trump did not cause Roof. But their temporal proximity reveals thematic connections between the two.”

And of course, you can see for yourself the amazing amount of furor over the possible Russian hacking that we’ve known about for months, which almost certainly did not affect the election and which Wikileaks’ Assange says Russia was not involved in anyway (for what that’s worth).

Is it any wonder that many people like some of my friends, who were already distraught and fearful (which would certainly be logical for liberals at the Trump and the Republican victory), are now feeling even more so, with the flames of that fear fanned by the press?

This cannot possibly be good for the country, of course. I’m not even sure it’s good for the left, not that I much care about that aspect of it. But for every person who is stirred up by it, there may be another one (or two) who is turned off by it. What’s more—and everything really depends on this—if they fail to stop Trump from being inaugurated (and I believe they will fail in that endeavor), and if he acts without any particular racism during his administration, might at least some of the people who’ve been worked up to a fever pitch right now end up blaming and distrusting the press?

Well, I can dream, can’t I?

A public service announcement

The New Neo Posted on by

I was told this is the last day to ship packages ground mail and get them there by Christmas.

As I’ve gotten older, holiday gift-giving has become more challenging. I don’t have all that many gifts to buy to begin with, but the people I do get gifts for mainly have everything they need. Most of them are trying to get rid of things, not amass them.

And just about everybody’s on a diet.

But you can give a gift to me very easily, by going to my blog’s Amazon portal and ordering (yada yada yada—you know the drill)…

Thanks!

And speaking of Christmas music…

The New Neo Posted on by

…(which I was)…yesterday I was in a jewelry store and a truly ghastly Christmas carol wafted through the air.

It sounded like someone’s drunken uncle. It sounded a bit like Tom Waits, but not quite.

“Is that Bob Dylan?” I asked in horror and disbelief.

Ordinarily I kind of like Dylan’s distinctive nasal-and-raspy-but-not-untuneful voice. It works for his own songs—most of the time, anyway.

But oh no, not for this, not for this:

Looks like explosives…

The New Neo Posted on by

…may have brought down an EgyptAir plane last May:

TTraces of explosives have been found on the bodies from the EgyptAir crash in May ”” suggesting that the plane was bombed out of the sky by terrorists, according to several media reports Thursday.

All 66 people on board were killed when Flight MS804 crashed into the Mediterranean during a flight from Paris to Cairo on May 19.

Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry has announced a criminal probe that will look into the possibility of a bomb being planted on board, according to the Independent newspaper.

Another very disturbing piece of news to remind us that terrorism continues to take victims all around the world.

It also reminds us of how impressive forensics can be these days.

Trump fever

The New Neo Posted on by

Since the election, Trump has been dominating the news even more than he did when he was merely campaigning, and that’s saying a lot.

I’m not talking about straight news like his Cabinet appointments. I’m talking about all the hype about the rigged election; the awfulness of the Electoral College and the need for electors to stage a revolt against Trump; how bad the Trump Grill is (I kid you not); his appointees as “swamp creatures“; and articles such as this one, which cannot be described adequately but which features the following sentence from its opening paragraph, “The Electoral College, an institution that helped to protect the white supremacist ignominy of black chattel slavery could now become the instrument used to stop Donald Trump, the avatar of contemporary white racism.”

Now that Trump really is acting more “presidential” and much less volatile, which at least theoretically ought to be somewhat reassuring (and is reassuring to people like me on the right, who’ve had grave doubts about Trump), a certain large segment of the left seems to have become more hysterical about Trump rather than less.

I think it’s for a number of reasons. Some are tactical—they want to de-legitimize Trump’s presidency in advance. They want to spark demonstrations and protests and civil unrest. But they also are genuinely dealing with their shock that this is going to happen and Trump will be president, as well as the dawning realization that he is more conservative and perhaps more competent than they had previously thought.

This latter appearance of conservatism and competence, if it pans out once Trump is president, accounts for a goodly portion of my relative calm and guarded optimism about a Trump presidency. Those same things would fill a lot of people on the left with dread, and spark the question: what if Trump is a successful, conservative president? That may be as terrifying a prospect for many of them as the idea that he’s a madman.

And then of course there’s all the news about Russia and Putin influencing the election. That’s ironic on many levels, but one of them is the fact that until Trump surfaced, the left pooh-poohed concern about Russian influence. Another is that all Putin and the Russians are alleged to have done is reveal the truth about Hillary and the DNC. And of course there’s no evidence that the information turned the tide with voters who were far more concerned with things like getting jobs back and putting up a wall.

But the question of what is truth about Russian influence on the election is meant to be lost in the fog of allegations and counter allegations. You can wade through some of them yourself here; rumor and counter-rumor and speculation and lots of sturm, drang, and fog.

In other news that seems unrelated but really isn’t, we have the case of the Muslim student in NY who had alleged that three Trump supporters harassed her in a NY subway station. Now it’s revealed that the story was a lie. But this was a story that I had earlier chosen to disregard, and why? Because the minute I read it I felt there was a good chance her story was bogus.

I didn’t start out making such assumptions, but over and over we’ve seen such stories fall apart. I assume that some Muslim woman somewhere is being harassed by someone on the right (as opposed to being harassed by her family, which seems far more common). But so many such tales have been hoaxes that “hoax” has now become my default position, I’m afraid.

And that’s the sort of overload a lot of people are experiencing. Some of it is from “fake news,” some from the spin put on real news stories, some from the fact that so many controversial stories are based on reports from unnamed “sources.” We are all conspiracy theorists now, which makes it harder and harder to unite as a country.

[BUMPED UP: scroll down for new posts] One big reason to shop at Amazon for Christmas…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that you get away from the incessant repetitive Christmas music playing in so many stores.

I think the people who work in retail are driven crazy by it, too. This year I’ve noticed one particular earwormy song playing over and over and over.

WARNING: if you don’t want to get an especially hideous earworm, please stop here right now and save yourself!!:

And when you shop Amazon, don’t forget to use my portal. Thanks!