Pas de Quatre
“Pas de Quatre” is one of the oldest ballets about which we have any knowledge. It’s from the Romantic era, when female ballet dancers first went up on pointe although in softer shoes than we have today. The aesthetic for dancers was to be an ethereal otherworldly being, gossamer-light and intensely feminine:
On the night it premiered in London (12 July 1845), it caused a sensation with the critics and the public alike. The reason for this was that it brought together, on one stage, the four greatest ballerinas of the time – in order of appearance, Lucile Grahn, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, and Marie Taglioni. …
The steps demand that each area of classical ballet technique is executed. These areas include adagio movements, petite allegro, grand allegro, fast footwork, graceful changes of position, and the elegant and fluid arm movements that have become a signature element of Pas de Quatre. Each ballerina has an individual variation, which are performed in succession between an opening and finale that are danced by all the ballerinas together. These variations were choreographed for the ballerina premiering in each role, and were designed to display the best features of each. …
The order of appearance of the ballerinas was done by age, from youngest to oldest, to squelch further confrontations between them.
Here is a lithograph from that 1845 production:
The original choreography is mostly lost. But in 1941 the British choreographer Anton Dolin recreated it at least in spirit. I see that in the original cast of the revival was the dancer Mia Slavenska. Strangely enough, when I was a young child in the late 1950s she was in a ballet class I took in Manhattan. She was not the teacher but rather a fellow student. She was slightly past her prime but could still dance up a storm and was a figure of high glamour. It was quite an eclectic class in terms of the students, but I think it’s safe to say that she was by far the best dancer although not the only professional dancer in the class, and I was the worst of all.
But I digress.
Dolin’s 1941 choreography was a conscious throwback to the older style, and the dancers of the mid-20th century were close enough to the 19th century that I think they were able to conjure up some of the feel of the original – although of course, how would I really know? But I doubt it could be performed effectively today because technique has taken over and the style is completely different. If you watch this video, you may come to appreciate the more delicate touch of the old ways – which, by the way, nevertheless require a steely technique, especially in the petit allegro of the small jumps. The old-fashioned approach is particularly challenging in the port de bras (arm movements) and slightly-forward lean of the torso.
I believe this was filmed in 1978 although I’m not certain. That would have made the Cuban dancer Alicia Alonso (the one with the sharpest features) around 58 years old here; she danced well into her 70s despite having only partial eyesight for most of her life. The video is somewhat blurry but not too bad:
Carla Fracci, who dances the Cerrito role (her hair is parted and she’s not wearing a wreath), is one of my favorite dancers of all time. She resembled the old lithographs come to life. This is an earlier production (1968) in which I think she’s especially fine. I’ve cued up her solo:
Roundup
(1) One of the strangest things about Obama’s scold on black men for not supporting Harris enough is that most polls still show a strong majority of black men supporting her. In fact, black men may just be the demographic of men supporting her most of all other ethnic groups of men. What Obama is really saying here is that Democrats should own black votes at about a 90% level, and that anything less is unacceptable.
(2) Iran hit with massive cyberattack on government and nuclear facilities, with information stolen. Good.
(3) Kamala Harris says the election is “packed with some stuff.”
?This is brutal to watch. Kamala Harris without a teleprompter is the Democrat Party’s worst nightmare:
“When we think about what’s at stake in this election – well it’s packed with some stuff! Some fundamental stuff! *cackles* I say rather articulately.” pic.twitter.com/2UEboEUkgW
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) October 11, 2024
I think this is Harris’ idea of a joke about her own inarticulateness. But like most of her jokes, an unfunny one.
(4) Bill Ackman, erstwhile Democrat, gives 33 reasons why he’s voting for Trump in 2024.
(5) Gretchen Whitmer attempts to explain her strange and offensive video. And Democrats call Republicans “weird.”
Remember the olden days of 2016, when it was okay to mess with electors?
Back when it was the Democrats doing it against the dreaded Trump, they considered it a virtuous activity.
It seems as though there have been so many rapid-fire events starting with Trump’s 2016 election that it’s easy to forget many of the details. But I think it’s very instructive to take a little stroll down memory lane from time to time. The article is from 12/17/16 [my emphasis]:
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States. In the meantime, they are under siege.
The nation’s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he’s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails.
Trump had been elected, but it seems it was perfectly okay to try to harass his electors and even to threaten them, in order to get them to vote for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the perpetrators should have been tracked down and charged with obstructing an official proceeding (or at least attempting to do so)? After all, that has been one of the most common charges against the J6 demonstrators of 2021, including peaceful ones. But back in 2016 Republican lawyers were nowhere near as creative as Democrat lawyers became in twisting statutes into something they never were meant to be, in order to charge the opposition with crimes.
More [my emphasis, and my remarks in brackets]:
In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.
But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.
There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway [isn’t that very similar to requests from Trump supporters in 2020?]. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia’s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots [sounds like a planned “insurrection” to me]. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly — and it’s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.
There were indeed demonstrations, although they were pretty tame. But the people involved certainly tried to obstruct an official proceeding. For example, in Wisconsin:
There were demonstrations in other states, too, and of course this happened in Congress:
I consider today Columbus Day …
… although it’s not officially till Monday. But October 12 is the real day, and it’s the one we celebrated when I was a child and before holidays were moved to Mondays.
I recently listened to a series on Columbus from “The Rest is History,” and I enjoyed it immensely. So informative and so engrossing!
There are four episodes, and here they are in order:
Open thread 10/12/2024
Walz, Kamala, and the Electoral College
Walz said the quiet part out loud:
“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote,” Walz said Tuesday during a campaign fundraiser at the home of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Walz made similar comments at an earlier fundraiser in Seattle, as well.
While running for president in 2019, Harris said she was “open” to the idea of abolishing the Electoral College.
That seems like it’s on the Democrats’ agenda, although ordinarily it would take a constitutional amendment. There’s also the The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which wouldn’t abolish the Electoral College but would get around it and make the national popular vote supreme, and would have the advantage (if SCOTUS found it be constitutional, which is doubtful in the present court) of not requiring an amendment to be implemented.
However, much as Walz and Harris and their supporters might long for the national popular vote to be ascendant, they seem to have walked back overt statements of that sort:
Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, remained silent Thursday on whether he still supports eliminating the Electoral College, after the Harris campaign insisted his position did not reflect that of the campaign’s. …
… [A]ccording to campaign officials pressed on the issue following Walz’s remarks, eliminating the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote is not an official position of Harris’ current campaign.
And here’s how they tried to undo what Walz said:
“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said in a statement sent to select media outlets like CNN and USA Today. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
That doesn’t fit what he said.
And let’s hear from demagogue Jamie Raskin:
Just last month, Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin suggested there could be deadly consequences for Americans if the Electoral College was not done away with. Raskin said a national popular vote was a far better option than the current “convoluted, antique, obsolete system from the 18th century, which these days can get you killed as nearly it did on Jan. 6, 2021.”
The article also mentions that Walz signed a bill that made his state of Minnesota a party to The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That seems to be another indication of wishing to override the Electoral College, which is seen as an impediment to Democrat power.
I wonder, though, if abolishing the Electoral College outright would be a question of “be careful what you wish for.” In states such as California, where the Electoral College guarantees that all the electors will vote for the Democrat because the Democrat always wins the state, there probably are many people who would otherwise vote for Republicans but who just don’t bother. Those people might be more energized to get to the polls and vote if the Electoral College were to be eliminated and they would be contributing to a national popular vote that would determine the winner.
Now, these were close elections
One vote can make a difference.
That was the takeaway from a nationwide survey by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) that found 29 elections ended in ties and another 18 were decided by a single vote thus far in 2024.
“If people ever think their votes don’t matter, I hope they remember these tied elections,” said PILF President J. Christian Adams in an Oct. 9 press release. “Every single vote matters.” …
Since 2022, when PILF began tracking close elections across America, it has discovered 635 tied elections and 173 that were decided by a single vote.
PILF researchers stated that those numbers do not represent all the incidents out there, and they do not include the thousands of close elections decided by two votes or more.
As one might imagine, it appears that the vast majority of these elections were very local, and the vote counts were in the hundreds. But still, it’s food for thought.
One of the elections was far bigger:
This year, the primary in California’s 16th Congressional District ended in a tie, with each candidate receiving exactly 30,249 votes for the second-place position in a three-person race.
The tie was resolved by a recount which gave one of the candidates for second-place the victory by five votes.
And of course, anyone who was around in 2000 knows that the vote in Florida, which decided the entire presidential outcome, was so close that there were challenges and suits and in the end it was the Supreme Court that had to step in and resolve the matter – although some Democrats still speak of that election as stolen or illegitimate.
The teacher and Obama: on those pesky Trump-voting men
There was an instructor at the University of Kansas who had some interesting ideas about the 2024 election, ideas he felt obliged to share with his students. I use the past tense “was” because he’s now on leave:
An instructor at the University of Kansas has been placed on leave after a video on X showed him suggesting to his class that men who won’t vote for a female president should be shot.
“(If you think) guys are smarter than girls, you’ve got some serious problems,” the man in the video said. “That’s what frustrates me. There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.
“Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that.”
Oopsie doopsie. This was being recorded and apparently the instructor knew it. Here’s part of the university’s response:
“The instructor is being placed on administrative leave, pending further investigation. The instructor offers his sincerest apologies and deeply regrets the situation. His intent was to emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality, and he recognizes he did a very poor job of doing so. The university has an established process for situations like this and will follow that process.”
In a similar statement on X, KU added that the comments “made an inappropriate reference to violence.”
Free speech advocates say he should be reinstated:
“The First Amendment protects professors who tell brief, off-topic jokes in the classroom,” said Graham Piro, FIRE program officer, in a statement. “It also protects hyperbole. In order to constitute a true threat, a speaker must communicate a serious intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a specific individual or a group of individuals.
Sorry, but that’s not the standard that’s applied if a professor were to say something of the sort against a protected group. For example, let’s say the professor had joked that people who vote for Kamala Harris should be shot. I don’t think such a teacher would last at any university, although I could be wrong.
A more interesting story, I think, is Obama’s latest statements on the matter – not the matter of free speech, but the matter of voting for a woman. Obama recently came out of pseudo-retirement to say this in a talk in Pittsburgh to a group of black men. He said they didn’t seem as entusiastic for Harris as they had been for him, and then added:
And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said.
“Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
Typical Obama. Kamala Harris’ individual characteristics are just “reasons and excuses” with which Obama has a problem, because the most salient characteristics anyone has are the identity groups to which that person belongs. Kamala Harris is black and a woman (yes, she’s also Indian, but that’s not Obama’s concern) – and that’s the reason to vote for her.
When Obama was running for president, he and many of his spokespeople made it clear that anyone who didn’t support him was suspected of having racism as the motivation. This was noticeable right from the start. I wrote this post in June of 2008, and it was already quite clear what he was trying to do:
Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:
“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?'”
We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.
Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.
But in this speech he appears to attribute – or to encourage his supporters to attribute – these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks – and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list – from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.
In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism. If the racism isn’t overt and clear, as in the emails, then it’s covert; “inexperience” (a valid concern based on the objective facts of his history) becomes a code word (wink wink) for hidden racism and fearmongering.
This is dangerous demagoguery.
Because one so seldom hears overt expressions of racism any more, and certainly not from mainstream candidates, there has been a tendency to imagine it is everywhere, but hidden. Here Obama cynically fosters that belief and encourages the definition of his entire opposition as energized by this impossible-to-prove – or, more importantly, impossible-to-disprove – motive.
No, it turns out that most of them haven’t mentioned he’s black, except in approving terms. But they don’t have to nowadays to be racists; Obama has taken care of that.
That’s actually the entire post from back then. Obama’s words alarmed me and were a portent of things to come.
But back to the present and Obama’s remarks in Pittsburgh:
[Obama] said that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.”
“When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting,” he said.
“And now you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”
There may indeed be men – black or white – or women, for that matter, who don’t want a woman president. They’re not going to care what Obama says on this. But by far more men – black or white – or women, for that matter, don’t want to vote for a particular woman named Kamala Harris because of her own very individual characteristics, the foremost of which is incompetence plus the inability to answer a question.
And note the dig about “supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you.” It actually took me a moment to realize that Obama must be referring to Donald Trump. In Obama’s circles, Trump’s anti-black racism is considered some sort of truism that doesn’t need proof or even evidence. But in what ways has Trump “denigrated” black men?
I doubt that Obama’s message is going to change the minds of a significant number of black men who have decided not to vote for Harris, or even to vote for Trump. I strongly suspect they are paying attention to things other than identity politics, such as how their lives have been going under Biden versus under Trump. As well they might.
ADDENDUM:
Black pastor Darrel B. Harrison has some trenchant and on-point observations:
Notwithstanding @BarackObama’s ethno-tribalist herding of black men into a sheep’s pen, as it were, so they can be told by him, their self-appointed political shepherd, for whom they are to cast their vote in November, he is stripping these men of their identity as image-bearers of God (Gen. 1:27).
Imagine having your entire identity reduced to the color of your skin and subsequently being told that on that basis alone—the basis of a static and immutable aspect of your personhood (melanin), as opposed to your God-given intellect and discernment—that you must vote for someone simply because that person looks like you.
Think about that.
In Obama’s eyes these black men aren’t “brothas,” they’re sheep. They’re not men, they’re political pawns to be used and discarded once the election is over — just like he did to black people in 2008 and 2012.
RIP Ethel Kennedy
I was surprised to read last night that Ethel Kennedy, widow of RFK and mother of RFK Jr., had died at ninety-six – but that was only because I had not realized that she was still alive. Ninety-six is old but it’s not unbelievably old; however, my perception was that she belonged to an era so different from our present one that it seemed impossibly distant.
Here is her son’s beautiful tribute to his mother:
My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends. God gave her 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and the energy to give them all the attention they… pic.twitter.com/X6yr1yZ5DK
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 10, 2024
My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends. God gave her 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and the energy to give them all the attention they required. He blessed her with a rich and eventful life. Even as she declined in recent months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her joie de vivre. She wrung joy from every moment, but for 56 years she has spoken with yearning of the day she would reunite with her beloved husband. She is with him now, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her “adopted” Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Rosemary, and Patricia. From the day she met my father, her new family observed that she was “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” She was never more enthusiastic about the afterlife than when she considered that she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters — all conveniently named “Rusty.”
The cognitive dissonance that allowed her to keep two inconsistent truths in her heart at the same time without budging made my mother a collection of irreconcilable convictions. Among these was her ironic combination of deep — nearly blind — reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence toward its clerics. She was at once starstruck by America’s presidents, all of whom she came to know personally, and at the same time skeptical of government and toward all figures of authority. She balanced her contempt for pretension and hypocrisy with a boundless tolerance for error and mistakes in others.
God also endowed her with a perpetual attitude of gratitude that fueled her taste for adventure and an irrepressible buoyancy in a life beset by a continuous parade of heartbreaking tragedies. Her sunny optimism eventually brought my shattered father back to life following the assassination of his brother and then helped her children to thrive after her husband’s assassination five years later.
Among her most defining qualities were moral and physical fearlessness. She was a peerless equestrian and held the high jump record on horseback, jumping 7?9? on a Quarter Horse. Critics named her among the best female amateur tennis players, and she was a competitive diver. But she did every sport well — from football to skiing, waterskiing and kayaking. Her disciplined stoicism and her deep faith in God enabled her to endure over ten years of pregnancy without complaint. She also suffered the murders of her husband and Uncle Jack, and the early deaths of two of her children. Various air crashes killed both of her parents, her brother, her sister-in-law, and her nephew John. She never enjoyed flying, but her worry never stopped her from boarding a plane. While giving short shrift to her own monumental suffering, she always showed intense compassion for others.
My mother invented tough love, and she could be hard on her children when we didn’t live up to her expectations. But she was also intensely loyal, and we always knew that she would stand fiercely behind us when we came under attack by others. She was our role model for self-discipline, for resilience, and for self-confidence. She deeded to each of her 11 children her love of good stories, her athleticism, her competitive spirit, and the deep curiosity about the world, and the intense interest in people of all backgrounds, which caused her to pepper everyone she met — from cab drivers to presidents — with a relentless cascade of questions about their lives. She also gave us all her love of language and for good storytelling. I credit her for all my virtues. I’m grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.
Open thread 10/11/2024
Boris Johnson on Trump’s foreign policy
Of course, Boris Johnson’s own reputation is hardly stellar these days. But he had some kind words for Trump:
But, you know, with Trump, a lot of the people on the liberal side of the left, liberal side of the argument, kind of demonized him on foreign policy. Actually, from where I sit, he projected an image of a strong America.
He stood up to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator. He bombed him when he used chemical weapons against his own people. Donald Trump hit back, and Assad never used chemical weapons again. He took out — we talk about Iran. Trump took out Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC, Quds Force. Iran really went quiet after that.
And when it came to Putin, a lot of people say Trump is a big buddy of Putin. Well, I didn’t see that when I was foreign secretary. I saw Trump expel 60 Russian diplomats after they poisoned some people, as you may remember, and the Russians poisoned people in our country with chemical weapons, with Novichok.
And I saw Trump give the Ukrainians — and everybody says he’s, you know, he’s friendly with Putin. I don’t see that. He gave the Ukrainians those shoulder-launched Javelin missiles, which were very important to Ukraine in the defense of Kyiv in routing Putin’s troops.
So, I, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I have hope that Trump will, if Trump is elected, that he will be the strong president overseas that I saw.
I’m with Johnson on all of that, and what’s more I think Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments are obvious to anyone who looks at them objectively. I do disagree, though, that the left “kind of” demonized Trump on foreign policy. They very much demonized him on foreign policy and just about everything else.