…on the effect of single motherhood.
Statistics are tremendously manipulable, depending on what you want to say.
Dueling Carmens II
Commenter “Steve57” asks:
I was goofing around on the intertubes. I came across this nugget [of ballet dancer Diana Vishneva as “Carmen”] and I was captivated…
She wasn’t one of the “Dueling Carmens” you wrote about in June 2013 (Svetlana Zakharova and Maya Plisetskaya) . I was wondering what you thought of her as a performer.
Happy to oblige.
First, here’s the Vishneva video Steve wanted me to watch:
There’s no question she has tremendous appeal. She’s lovely, has a beautiful body, and certainly puts a lot more sexy fire into it than most other modern-day Carmens. That’s good, and important for the role.
But for me, there’s no comparison to Plisetskaya, whose sexuality was smoldering and serious and almost dangerous as Carmen. Why is Vishneva smiling? She’s charming but it comes across as light to me.
Here Plisetskaya is again, in a performance recorded 51 years ago (a different variation, however; it’s the one I had in my original post and I think it shows off her gifts particularly well. And if you’re getting bored and/or are pressed for time, please scoot down to the last four clips at the bottom of the post, with much shorter excerpts of both dancers):
Both dancers are exemplars of the Russian tradition of dramatic dance. But I prefer Plisetskaya; your mileage may indeed differ on this.
Here is one of Plisetskaya in the same variation as in the Vishneva clip, and it’s not as socko IMHO. Yet I still prefer it to Vishneva because of Plisetskaya’s interpretation of the role:
There’s no question that Vishneva has the more astounding technique. But Plisetskaya’s technique is sufficient for her art. Unlike Vishneva, Plisetskaya’s extensions were never gymnastic and exaggerated. She was trying to seem like she was doing something a real Carmen would or at least might do—an actual woman, not an acrobat, although a woman who’s a trained ballet dancer. Gymnastic extensions in ballet bother me in general (see this); I’m not picking on Vishneva in particular at all. To me they spoil the line by drawing attention to themselves and away from the flow of the dance.
There’s a reason extensions like that used to be discouraged and actively frowned on by the people who train ballet dancers. Nowadays, however, they seem to be required. But every time Vishneva kicks that leg up to about a 180 angle I think of the circus or acrobatics, not dance. There’s a place for the circus and for acrobats, of course, but for me that place is not in ballet.
One more thing that’s a bit of a technical observation. There are ordinarily two types of dancers, although that’s a generalization. There are the rubbery and naturally elastic ones who have no trouble with getting legs into positions that seem humanly impossible. Then there are those whose tighter and more resistant muscles and other soft tissue (although they can’t be really tight or really resistant; they have to yield to stretching) tend to go along with having more strength. It’s not that flexible people aren’t strong, too, but they tend not to have a very good jump (most men are less flexible than women and they can ordinarily jump higher). Plisetskaya was known in particular not just for her acting ability but also for her soaring, powerful jump. It’s no accident.
Here are some small but in my opinion telling details of their performances for special comparison. In this clip of one sequence of movement, Plisetskaya gives it a completely different focus and meaning than Vishneva does:
Plisetskaya always seems to be stalking prey in this role; she’s a predator. Vishneva not so much (at least, that’s the way I see it). Plisetskaya’s front kicks, for example, have a knifelike quality of attack. Vishneva’s are impressive, but to me they say “Look ma, I’m dancing!”
Here’s another little vignette for comparison. Note how Plisetskaya emphasizes the Spanish style more than Vishneva does:
[NOTE: Here’s the original “Dueling Carmens” post.]
Limping along
The is the sixth day since I sprained my ankle, and I’m limping along.
Limping is tiring. It’s also not so great because it leads to other aches and pains. I realized today that when I walk I’ve got more pain in the calf above my hurt ankle than in the ankle itself, and I’m favoring that, which means my back is a bit out of whack and achy and so on and so forth.
You get the drill; no doubt it’s happened to you a few times. It’s not the worst injury in the world. In the scheme of things it’s pretty minor. But since my forms of exercise are limited by other old injuries, I walk fast for exercise, and I get very antsy when I can’t let out some energy that way. Blogging doesn’t quite do it.
Today as I was hobbling around I realized that one of the weird things about limping is that it disrupts a nearly-automatic and seamless mind-body connection. We learn to walk at such an early age that we very soon make it an unconscious coordination of timing and muscle and balance and manage to just stride along.
But just start limping and you may begin to question just how it is that people walk. Do I usually stand up straight? How do I usually bend my ankle and push off, and why can’t I do it now in that same way? After all, I’m not in excruciating pain. But my body is automatically protecting me (or is it my mind, or both?) from further pain and sends me gimping along in this herky-jerky way instead of the usual smooth flow I tend to take for granted.
Well, I’m not taking it for granted now.
The phantoms of “Phantom Thread”
I used to enjoy watching the Oscars. Long long ago I actually cared about the movies themselves. But after that ended, I enjoyed the fashions.
Now the sanctimonious political posturings of most of Hollywood have become relentless rather than episodic, making it less likely I’ll watch the Oscars at all, although I may still report on the fashions through after-Oscars photos.
But—speaking of fashions and movies—I recently saw a favored “Best Picture” nominee with a fashion theme: “Phantom Thread.” And what a puzzling movie it is, with strange shifts of tone in a film whose tone was already strange to begin with.
I didn’t like it much at all, although I admired some things about it. This puts me in a distinct minority for this highly-praised film. I’m not a film buff, but even I could see the beauty of the movie, especially the sets and period costumes (I’d place the period at around 1954 by the fashions) as well as the music (one of my favorite Brahms waltzes, for example). The script was complex and didn’t pander to the audience, and the acting was great.
Or was it? But more about that later. On the surface, the acting seemed great.
On the surface is the operative phrase for this movie. Of course; it’s about people who deal in the glossy surface of high fashion. But in a movie, we need to care about those people. And I didn’t.
Daniel Day-Lewis’ character “Reynolds Woodcock” is supposed to be a tormented genius. The clothes he designs are very nice, but they’re not incredible for the fashions of those times, although we’re supposed to accept the premise that they are. His art isn’t the sort of thing that would justify the fact that he treats people like shit, although we’re apparently supposed to forgive him because he’s a tormented genius—or to sort-of forgive him, or at least to believe that his paramour loves him in the deepest of ways and he loves her that way too even though it takes him a while [SPOILERS!] to be able to show it.
But when he does finally show it he’s still cold, cold, cold as ice. And she—well, she starts out kind of likeable but at a certain point she becomes so distinctly unlikable you might begin to think that even he doesn’t deserve that sort of punishment.
Why should I care about these two people who some critic called “monsters”? (And that was a critic who liked them—unfortunately, however, I can’t find the link at the moment.) I’m in agreement. And they’re not entertaining, fun monsters. They’re repellent.
In fact, there was no major character in “Phantom Thread” who was likeable, and no minor character either. And although I already said that Daniel Day-Lewis’ acting was very good, towards the end of the movie I began to wonder whether that was true. Even when this guy supposedly melts he seems cold as ice, and so I didn’t believe for a single moment what was supposed to be an important plot point.
It’s not that I need a movie to be sweetness and light. But who wants to see a movie that has no one to root for by its end? And who wants to invest so much time and energy and talent and skill and care (all of which were abundantly evident) in making such a movie?
Brennan’s next in line
The investigations go on:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump — including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.
In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election “to help Trump’s chances of victory.”
Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Nunes has apparently also written a document that details the involvement of the State Department “in creating and disseminating the dossier.” Phase I was about the FBI; that will be Phase II. Phase III involves the role of the intelligence community, including not just Brennan but also Leon Panetta and James Clapper.
Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016…
In early January, just weeks before Trump was inaugurated, investigators say Brennan saw to it that the contents from the dossier were attached to an official daily intelligence briefing for Obama. The special classified briefing was then leaked to the major Washington media, allowing them to use the presidential briefing to justify the publication of claims they had up to that point not been able to substantiate and had been reluctant to run.
Please read the whole thing.
The Democrats claim that this is all an unwarranted attack on important and trustworthy institutions that are the bulwark of our government. And it certainly does sound like a wild conspiracy-theory movie. Nonetheless, at least so far it appears to be true.
If true, this sort of widespread misuse of the government apparatus and the press to disseminate sketchy information to hurt a candidate and then incoming president is far worse than anything Richard Nixon did. Two things that stopped Nixon were that the government agencies involved wouldn’t go along with his desires and the press wasn’t on his side. For the Obama administration, those obstacles did not exist.
Happy Birthday, President Lincoln
Lincoln is one of the smallish number of presidents who can truly be called “great.” For me, his greatness isn’t confined to what he accomplished as president, or to his formal speeches, which were as brilliant as Churchill’s although in a different tone. He also was an incredible human being, a self-made man who spoke with wit, humor, poetry, and wisdom.
I recommend two pieces at Powerline by Scott Johnson that pay tribute to Lincoln: here and here.
The special qualities of ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn: Part II
[Part I can be found here.]
This next clip is an example of an element of Fonteyn’s specialness that’s extremely subtle. It’s not even a dance step; it’s more a bit of acting expressed through movement (acting through dance was her specialty). Though small, effects like this are important in setting the tone and telling us what’s going on emotionally rather than being a mere physical exercise.
Audiences want to know (or used to want to know) why the dancer is doing something, particularly in old-fashioned classical ballet. After all, aren’t the princess and her cavalier supposed to be in love, or falling in love? Shouldn’t they be looking at each other, for example? Relating to each other, rather than just making pretty shapes with their bodies in space?
So just before Fonteyn and her Prince begin to dance here, she turns and pauses to look at him and give him her hand. Here’s the moment:
It may not seem like much, I grant you. But the more modern (and modern-style) dancer Vishneva barely even glances at her Prince. Who are these two people to each other, besides dance partners on a stage? Nothing much, it seems (the photography is much better though, of course):
And then there are those balances at the end of the Rose Adagio, the ones you saw at the end of that first Fonteyn segment in Part I. Fonteyn apparently began the tradition of putting both arms up for the balance that comes after each of her suitors takes turns circling her around in attitude (“attitude” is when the leg is up in the back and bent, as opposed to arabesque where it’s straight).
Here’s the passage again; note how secure and relaxed she appears, and how each suitor waits his turn before he approaches her. It seems she’s balancing out of sheer exuberance (unfortunately the clip is so blurry we can’t really see her face):
Here’s Svetlana Zakharova, a modern “extreme ballet” practitioner who is at her best (IMHO) in other-worldly roles such as “Swan Lake,” where her near-freakish extensions serve her well (but whose interpretations are nevertheless not my cup of tea). She doesn’t put both arms up, but nevertheless each suitor in turn lines up very close to her previous one and to Zakharova, in order to be able to rescue her quickly in case she falters:
Here’s a version from the Royal Ballet (Fonteyn’s old company) recorded in 1999, with a dancer who was supposedly a great success in the role. She puts her arms up as Fonteyn did, but you can see a problem:
I have little doubt that Fonteyn sometimes wavered in the Rose Adagio, too, particularly as she got older. But she never wavered in her ability to impart charm and grace and believability to everything she danced. She never seemed to have that frozen, deer-in-the-headlights look (or the downcast eyes, looking at the floor) I saw in the eyes of almost every more recent dancer I watched on YouTube performing this adagio, in order to research this post. And believe me, I watched many.
Here’s one of the best recent dancers I found in terms of the ability to balance. Nevertheless, why on earth is she balancing—what is she trying to express? Why is she looking at the floor, and then smiling afterward for a nanosecond, and then looking at the floor again? It seems to me as though she’s saying “Oh-oh, now I have to concentrate; whew! I made it! Smile! Oh-oh, now I have to concentrate again…”
This next clip of Fonteyn is included because it has many closeups, which showcase her acting ability. She was subtle and never hammy, but projected to the furthest reaches of the theater. Just how she accomplished that I will never know:
And here Fonteyn is on her 60th birthday, proving that technique can fade but Fonteyn went on:
I’ll give these former Royal Ballet dancers the last word:
Schiff memo delayed; McCarthy on the Grassley-Graham memo
Yesterday I wrote a post that pointed out the following:
The Democrats protested mightily that the Nunes memo could not be released because it would expose too much secret and/or classified information and compromise our national security.
But the Schiff memo””ah, the Schiff memo! If you redact parts of it we will accuse you of playing politics.
Today we have this article:
On Friday, White House counsel Don McGahn informed the committee of the President’s decision, writing in a letter that although Trump is “inclined to declassify” the memo spearheaded by the panel’s ranking member, California Rep. Adam Schiff, “he is unable to do so at this time.”
“However, given the public interest in transparency in these unprecedented circumstances, the President has directed that Justice Department personnel be available to give technical assistance to the Committee, should the Committee wish to revise the February 5th Memorandum to mitigate the risks identified by the Department,” McGahn wrote.
What follows is the predictable back and forth of accusations. You can read the details at the link, if you’re so inclined.
And Trump tweeted this morning:
The Democrats sent a very political and long response memo which they knew, because of sources and methods (and more), would have to be heavily redacted, whereupon they would blame the White House for lack of transparency. Told them to re-do and send back in proper form!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018
If you look at most of the headlines about this topic at today’s memeorandum, you can see that for the most part they are written to suggest that the block is not temporary but permanent. This is no accident; the MSM knows full well that a lot of people just read the headlines.
Now, perhaps it will be permanent. Perhaps the Democrats will decline to redact it further, and will milk the propaganda value of “Trump blocked the memo.”
We’ll…see.
And in a very related topic, Andrew C. McCarthy points out something that has probably occurred to just about everyone on the right, but that bears repeating:
Rest assured: If a Republican administration had used unverifiable hearsay from a patently suspect agent of the Republican presidential candidate to gull the FISA court into granting a warrant to spy on an associate of the Democratic nominee’s campaign, it would be covered as the greatest political scandal in a half-century.
Instead, it was the other way around…
McCarthy was even more impressed by the information in Grassley-Graham than in Nunes:
With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.
What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge ”” or perhaps as many as four judges ”” rationalized signing the warrants…
We need full disclosure ”” the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games…
But the games will undoubtedly continue.
And please, please, please read the entire McCarthy piece. He is very clear about the Grassley-Graham memo, what it reveals and its significance. His outrage on behalf of the rule of law is palpable. McCarthy is a former prosecutor (see this) with a wealth of information on how it’s supposed to work, and he is clearly stunned at the egregious liberties taken by the FBI in seeking FISA’s go-ahead to surveil Page and at the court’s acquiescence.
I’ll offer just one more quote from McCarthy on this:
For purposes of justifying a warrant, it does not matter that, in a totally unrelated investigation (involving corruption at FIFA, the international soccer organization), the FBI judged that the hearsay information provided by Steele, then a British agent, checked out. In his anti-Trump research, Steele could not verify his sources. Furthermore, he was now a former foreign intelligence officer who was then working for private clients ”” which is the advocacy business, not the search-for-truth business.
Let that sink in, then think about this contrast: No actual FBI agent, no matter how renowned, would be able to get a judicial warrant based solely on his own reliability as an investigator. Jim Comey, despite having a résumé geometrically more impressive than Steele’s, including Senate confirmations to some of federal law-enforcement’s loftiest positions, would not be given a warrant based on representations to the court that the FBI, the Justice Department, the president, and the Senate all attested to his impeccable reliability.
The only reliability that counts is the reliability of the factual informants, not of the investigator who purports to channel the informants. The judge wants to know why the court should believe the specific factual claims: Was the informant truly in a position to witness what is alleged, and if so, does the informant have a track record of providing verified information? The track record of the investigator who locates the sources is beside the point. A judge would need to know whether Steele’s sources were reliable, not whether Steele himself was reliable.
As I said, please read the whole thing.
I wish it was required reading for everyone, but of course most people will never see it.
Update on my foot and mouth
That is, my ankle and teeth—
Both are progressing, as far as I can tell. I can put a bit more weight on the ankle, although it will definitely take time before I’m not limping. The teeth are actually amazing, because I’ve had virtually no pain. Of course, I’m not supposed to eat anything hard, particularly on that side. But it’s surprising to me that I could have a pretty invasive procedure and three stitches and really not feel much of anything afterward.
They gave me a prescription for Vicodin, too. I can’t imagine taking anything for the amount of pain I feel, which is none, so Vicodin for this is really shocking. I’m sure, though, that it’s a “just in case” thing, because the amount of pain after the procedure is probably highly variable. But if I was the type of person who wanted to make some illicit money on the side, I could easily fill that prescription and abuse it.
I’m not that sort of person, and I hate taking drugs if I don’t have to. I’m counting the days till I can stop taking this incredibly strong antibiotic, too.
Jordan Peterson’s new book is #1 on Amazon
It’s called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and it’s been #1 for much of the time since it was released on January 23, 2018. As I write this it has over 600 customer reviews and, astoundingly, almost all of them are five-star. And that’s despite the fact that among much of the left Peterson is quite a hated figure.
Peterson already had a large and loyal following prior to the book’s publication, and no doubt that has much to do with its popularity and the overwhelmingly positive reviews so far. And no, I haven’t read the book yet. But I also believe that another reason this book is so popular—and that Peterson himself has become so popular—is that he fills a need, a hunger, for his tough-love combination of common sense and wisdom as well as seriousness. His wisdom also encompasses timeless wisdoms from sources like the Bible and mythology, and that’s appealing too, particularly in people previously unfamiliar with what those sources have to offer.
In a world that’s loaded with jargon, shallow and predictable thinking, and encouragement to claims of victimhood, Peterson offers a refreshing call to responsibility. Responsibility might be difficult, but it is also hopeful because it puts more of the reins of a person’s life in his/her own hands.
[NOTE: And of course, if you’re inclined to buy his book, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to click on the above link to the book’s title and buy through neo.]
Principled liberal
This is the way I remember liberals thinking long ago. Not all of them, of course; but a lot more of them compared to these days, when statements like these from liberals have become awfully scarce [hat tip: Powerline]:
Garrow has also written a biography of Obama. It’s very long; about 1000 pages, and so I very much doubt I’ll read it. He talks about it here, and in my opinion displays a curious naivete about Obama’s early character in politics, despite the fact that he probably knows more than anyone on earth about him:
I’d be curious to know how Garrow treats the Alice Palmer incident in his book. For me, that was the key to Obama’s cold and ruthless character, and it seemed odd to me that not only was it ignored by the left, but also by the right. Another telling moment for me was Obama’s Rev. Wright speech in which he used his grandmother as an example of a racist, something I called “one of the single most revoltingly self-serving statements I’ve ever heard in a speech.”
Trump has certainly provided us with many revolting moments since. But at least everyone on both sides agrees that he’s ruthless and insulting. In contrast, Obama was thought to be a real nice guy, which puzzled me because he’d demonstrated that this was just not true.
Dueling redactions
The Democrats protested mightily that the Nunes memo could not be released because it would expose too much secret and/or classified information and compromise our national security.
But the Schiff memo—ah, the Schiff memo! If you redact parts of it we will accuse you of playing politics. In fact, Schiff is already setting the stage:
Rep. Adam Schiff predicted Tuesday that the White House would not block the release of a Democratic memo related to the Russia investigation, but he warned the administration against trying to obfuscate the document by redacting portions that could embarrass President Donald Trump.
In addition, all the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have voted to release the Schiff memo, making the decision unanimous (after initially voting against it, saying they had just received it and needed more time to study it). All the Democrat members of the House Intelligence Committee had voted against releasing the Nunes memo.