George Balanchine’s “Serenade” is one of my very favorite ballets. It’s the perfect marriage of music, choreography, costumes, mood, and lighting, casting a spell on all who watch it.
Here are two short but fascinating videos that feature some visuals while New York City Ballet dancers talk about what its like to perform in it:
And here is the complete “Serenade” performed by the New York City Ballet in 1990. It’s fuzzy, and also difficult to film because if the camera is positioned too close to the stage you don’t get the effect of all the dancers and the lovely formations, but if it’s too far away the dancers look like teeny tiny miniatures. Remember also as you watch it that ballet on video is a wonderful thing to have, but that two dimensions cannot begin to compare to three and the real thing in the flesh:
[NOTE: I’ve written about this ballet before, here.]
There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Trump is trying to humiliate Romney or whether he really wants him as his Secretary of State (see this, for example).
I’m already tired of it. I happen to think Romney would make an excellent Secretary of State. But I was surprised by Trump’s even considering him, and by Romney’s considering the post in turn. Everyone else was surprised by it, too, if they’re being honest about it. So, why would they have a clue what Trump is going to do next, since they couldn’t predict this in the first place, and since both men appear to be playing it very close to the vest?
Unpredictability was always one of the givens of a Trump administration. Trump is a wild card, and may be a loose cannon too, although let’s hope it’s more the former than the latter. Whatever else you might say about him, he is not in the mold of previous presidents. In addition, he has no track record in public office. He has changed his mind many times, and has lied many times. So why would anyone think they can predict the choice he will make?
But I do have one thing to say about it, for what it’s worth: I think that both Romney and Trump are seriously considering it, and that one of their main concerns is not so much the past bad blood between them but rather whether they are on a similar enough page regarding foreign policy that Romney could work under Trump. I think that Romney is all about service, and if he felt he could perform a service without giving up his integrity he would do it. And I think Trump is trying—at least initially—to get the best people for the job and that he actually respects Romney’s foreign policy acumen and believes he’s a straight-up trustworthy guy.
Recently I got a cryptic bill from the IRS for a small amount of money. The reason for the charges was ostensibly explained on the bill, but in a way that only dogs can hear and IRS agents or tax attorneys can understand. It wasn’t a big deal—I could have just paid it—but I thought I’d call to ask for some clarification because the bill seemed to be referring to something I already had paid.
I knew there would be a phone wait of at least an hour to talk to a human being. But that was okay with me because I could just put my phone on speaker or put my bluetooth in my ear while I worked at my computer and waited. The music was annoying, of course, but not as annoying as some while you’re on hold. It’s frustrating not to know whether it will be a half-hour wait or an hour wait or a five-hour wait or whether the line will disconnect. But after about an hour a person suddenly answered, and asked me why I was calling.
Actually, he asked me what I was calling to dispute. I started by saying that well, I wasn’t sure I was disputing anything, but I had gotten a bill about which I had a question…
And then it began. The “service representative” said—in a voice so nasty and dripping with sarcastic contempt that initially I could not believe my ears—“Excuse me; excuse me, I see you’re determined to interrupt me! Now, this time, how about listening to me? I asked you, what are you calling to dispute?”
I could have hung up right than and there, but I didn’t. More’s the pity, because that was the courteous highlight of what turned out to be about a twenty-five minute conversation that degenerated further and further on his part, although I remained scrupulously polite.
There were a number of reasons why I remained on the line and remained civil. The first was that one-hour wait. I didn’t want to repeat it, and I realized there was no guarantee the next agent would be any better. Perhaps this is the new norm at the IRS—abuse the caller and maybe he/she will never call again (by the way, I’ve spoken to the IRS about twice before to ask questions, both times over ten years ago, and the people who answered had been helpful and pleasant).
In addition, I couldn’t believe I was actually hearing what I was hearing. This person was so egregiously rude—so much like a teasing bully on the schoolyard—that it was both shocking and fascinating. How low would he go and how rude would he get? Throughout the entire conversation, I was cut off almost any time I wanted to explain anything or say anything other than what he wanted me to say (and I couldn’t glean what that might be), and then I was accused of interrupting him, or being unresponsive, or worse.
The man’s statements of supposed “explanation” were as hard to understand as the bill itself had been. It was as though his goal was not only to insult me but to keep information from me rather than reveal it, even simple information that he possessed and that could have shed light on the subject. So another reason I stayed on the line was out of sheer curiosity, to study what he was doing and see if any response of mine would change it, and also to see if I’d ever get the answers.
I could go on and try to describe the rest of the exchange, but only a recording would convey what it was like and alas, I don’t have one. I did get my answers in the end, but only because I persevered. I doubt most people would have. It was an “interesting” experience, to say the least, and one I’m not eager to repeat—which may have been part of the reason it was done that way.
It also was a demonstration of the corruption that goes with power. Power—and the IRS certainly has power—gives IRS employees the ability to vent their inner sadists because they know the people they’re dealing with are, for the most part, afraid of them. Each person one speaks to at the IRS is possessed of information that fully identifies you and makes you vulnerable, and if that person wanted to do much worse to you than merely treat you rudely, he or she probably can. It also became clear to me that the IRS either encourages this behavior on the agent’s part or at the very least could not care less about it; afterwards I looked at a bunch of discussion boards where people who’d been treated similarly had tried to complain and gotten absolutely nowhere.
The IRS is an unchecked behemoth. We already know—from its treatment of the right under Lois Lerner prior to the 2012 election, and from her subsequent behavior and that of others in the agency—what the IRS is capable of when political suppression is the goal. But now it may have come down to routine mistreatment of callers, just because they can do it. After all, who will check them and who will stop them? Nobody.
I had forgotten that when the IRS scandal first broke, even the left was upset by it. That ended after a short while, but here are some examples of the initial reaction that shows the universality of the anxiety:
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said: “There is a reasonable fear by all of us, by any of us, that the kind of power the IRS has could be misused,” she further said that this scrutiny of Tea Party groups was “not fair.”
Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart stated that the scandal had taken “the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver,” he further said that this threw doubt on President Obama’s “managerial competence” and had proven correct “conspiracy theorists,” moving the burden of proof onto federal authorities.
ABC News’ Terry Moran wrote that this was: “A truly Nixonian abuse of power by the Obama administration.”
Even though that sort of bipartisan outrage didn’t endure, it reflected the very real fear of the IRS that even Rachel Maddow was able to acknowledge and articulate. That’s a good reason—one of many, actually—to support the scrapping of the IRS (one of Ted Cruz’s campaign proposals, by the way) and the imposition of some completely different system that doesn’t require so much centralization of power and so much intrusiveness.
In what comes as no surprise to any human being on earth (with the possible exceptions of President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, and Obama would be pretending), the attacker has been identified as a recent Somali refugee and a student at Ohio State University. His name is Abdul Razak Artan, and he gave a brief interview to the school newspaper on August 25 of this year (page 5 here), in which he said he was a transfer student from Columbus State, and complained about the lack of prayer rooms at OSU and the bad press Muslims have gotten in general:
I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media,” he stated. “I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be.”
I wonder what the media will portray him to be this time.
[EARLIER POST]
This is a breaking story, and as such the facts are subject to revision. But here is what we know so far:
Police confirm the suspect who drove a car into a crowd of people and began attacking them with a butcher knife on the campus of The Ohio State University is dead.
Columbus fire officials tell NBC4 nine people were transported to local hospitals, and all nine victims have non-life-threatening injuries…
OSU president Michael Drake says the sole suspect drove a car into a group of people, got out and began to cut them with a butcher knife. A police officer arrived within a minute of the attack and shot and killed the attacker.
“Within one minute”—that’s a very very speedy response, which is good. But it shows just how much damage can be done with “ordinary” weapons like a car and a knife, and how quickly.
In other, only tangentially related news, Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof is being allowed to represent himself in his trial. I am uncomfortable with this, as was the judge who decided it. This is a capital murder case, and although I have no sympathy whatsoever with Roof himself and his heinous crime, I think the bar for declaring someone able to defend him/herself in a death penalty case should be especially high, because of the extreme gravity of the outcome and the need for a fair trial.
Roof may indeed be competent to stand trial in the sense that he is able understand the charges and to assist in his or her defense by cooperating with counsel. But that’s a far cry from handling the defense himself. But perhaps once someone is declared competent, he/she is considered by law to be competent in making the decision to defend him/herself, too.
The world has heard almost nothing from KSM in the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks, but Mitchell has spent thousands of hours with him and other captured al-Qaeda leaders. Now, for the first time, Mitchell is sharing what he says KSM told him.
Mitchell is an American patriot who has been unjustly persecuted for his role in crafting an interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives. He does not shy from the controversies and pulls no punches in describing the interrogations. If anything, readers may be surprised by the compassion he showed these mass murderers. But the real news in his book is what happened after enhanced interrogations ended and the terrorists began cooperating.
The death of Fidel Castro has further exposed the long slow drift of the West towards leaders who lean so far left they are unable to tell the truth about a man who was—as Trump put it—“a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.”
Instead, we get a carefully-worded weasel statement from President Obama, for example, from whom never a discouraging word is heard about Castro. But Obama’s statement is practically hard-hitting compared to some of the fulsome [see NOTE *1] praise heard from many other Western leaders. As Marco Rubio said:
Some of these people you’re talking about are people that have never had to live… near him, or anywhere around him or been impacted” by what he’s done, Rubio said. “Others, quite frankly have anti-American sentiments and have always viewed Fidel Castro as a person who stood up to America.”
“And others quite frankly are left-leaning — they just agree with his ideology,” he said.
One of the most over-the-top responses had been that of Canada’s Trudeau, whose remarks about Castro were so positive, and so carefully evasive in their wording, that they have unleashed a Twitter storm of humorous ridicule in which people imagine how Trudeau might have eulogized some of the most evil people in history. Very funny indeed. But there’s nothing funny about what has happened to the West—its moral and political decay, and its contempt for its own citizens who can still see, for the moment, anyway, what their so-called leaders think them unable to see.
It’s not an accident that so many Western heads of state think their people might swallow the idea that Castro was a really nice man who held onto power for over fifty years in Cuba (with his brother taking up the slack after that) merely because he was such a great guy and so excessively beloved. The Western media has been pushing that story for a long, long time, as chronicled here.
Not everything goes back to Donald Trump, even though it may seem so these days. But this story does, because it is hard to not be struck by the contrast between Trump’s response and that of so many of the other Western leaders. It takes a lot to make Trump seem like a breath of fresh air, but they continually manage to do so. This is precisely the sort of thing that has made Trump seem to a lot of people like a welcome relief from the claptrap that emanates from the mouth of so many other heads of state.
That’s not to say that some of his GOP opponents—and in particular I mean Cruz, as well as the previously-quoted Rubio—wouldn’t have been just as frank, particularly on this issue. But they are not going to be president, and Trump is.
[NOTE *1: I mean “fulsome” in its earlier meaning not just of “abundant” but of “offensive.”]
[ADDENDUM: Among all the other things the left conveniently ignores is Castro’s record on gay rights: “it should never be forgotten that [Castro] was also an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people.”]
As for the why, I was listening to the song “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” the other day. I hadn’t heard it in a gazillion years, and I got curious about him. So I did some research and discovered that this bubble gum pop singer and songwriter of my youth is still going, still touring, and chirpy and upbeat as ever.
And as with many of those older musicians, his story is more interesting than I had thought:
Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mac Sedaka, was a taxi driver and a Sephardi Jew of Turkish origin…
In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music’s Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother wanted him to become a renowned classical pianist like the contemporary of the day, Van Cliburn, but Sedaka was discovering pop music. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the legendary Brill Building’s composers.
Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives. When Sedaka became a major teen pop star, the pair continued writing hits for Sedaka and a litany of other artists…
[After several songs of Sedaka’s failed] RCA Victor had lost money on “I Go Ape” and “Crying My Heart Out For You” and was ready to drop Sedaka from their label. But Sedaka’s manager, Al Nevins, persuaded the RCA executives to give him one last chance.
Knowing he would not get another chance if he failed again, and desperate for another hit, Sedaka himself bought the three biggest hit singles of the time and listened to them repeatedly, studying the song structure, chord progressions, lyrics and harmonies””and he discovered that the hit songs of the day all shared the same basic musical anatomy. Armed with his newfound arsenal of musical knowledge, he set out to craft his next big hit song, and he promptly did exactly that: “Oh! Carol” delivered Sedaka his first domestic Top 10 hit, reaching No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1959 and going to No. 1 on the Italian pop charts in 1960, giving Sedaka his first No. 1 ranking.
The science of songwriting.
Here’s Sedaka singing away, just a few years ago:
And the following clip shows off Sedaka’s Julliard-trained chops as a pianist. Impressive. And equally impressive is the length of those fingers (the actual piano playing starts around minute 5:27, but I left the rest in because it’s kind of fun):
Sedaka looked somewhat Andy-Kaufmanesque back then, didn’t he?
Commenter “groundhog” asked this question in the “Hamilton” thread:
The same free speech can be trash to one person and treasure to another. The same speech you or I treasure may be considered worthless to others. And although decorum and respect are important, who gets decide when it is important enough to ignore decorum and respect?
Only the speaker, imo. Do you think otherwise?
My answer is that yes, I think otherwise.
The speaker gets to decide something, of course. The speaker gets to decide what he/she wants to say, and when and where.
And then each person who hears or reads those remarks gets to decide what to say and do in response, including his/her opinion on whether the first person was rude or obnoxious or should have kept his/her mouth shut.
There is also usually a very general public consensus within a society, as well as within different segments of that society, on what is okay and what is not. This is not completely uniform, nor is it uniform between subgroups. And it changes over time, as anyone who’s been alive as long as I have can clearly see.
Sometimes there are formal rules for each venue, as there used to be in the school system when I was a student (I assume there still are, but who knows these days?). There are rules in the workplace, as commenter “Kyndyll G pointed out here. There are also rules within each family, as well as general trends, and the trend for many decades has been for more and more permissiveness. There are basic rules for decorum in church, or at a function like a wedding. There are still rather strict rules for behavior in a courtroom; outbursts are not well-tolerated, and there is something called contempt of court. Contempt of court isn’t limited to disobeying a court order (although it can include that), but can also consist of “being rude or disrespectful to legal authorities in the courtroom,” and people may be sanctioned for such behavior by the court.
Earlier in that same Hamilton thread, commenter “groundhog” had also brought up the example of Joe Wilson, the Republican House member who yelled out “You lie!” during a speech Obama made to Congress in September of 2009. You may recall that Joe Wilson faced quite a bit of judgment after his outburst. Who got to decide whether what he did was a breach of decorum? Well, the press, the public, Obama, Wilson himself, and members of the House of which he was a member.
Here’s how it went down:
Then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel immediately approached senior Republican lawmakers and asked them to identify the heckler and urge him to apologize immediately. Members of Congress from both parties condemned the outburst. “Totally disrespectful”, said Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) of Wilson’s utterance. “No place for it in that setting or any other and he should apologize immediately.” Wilson said later in a statement:
This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of undocumented immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.
Obama later accepted Wilson’s apology. “I’m a big believer that we all make mistakes”, he said. “He apologized quickly and without equivocation and I’m appreciative of that.”
House Democrats called on Wilson to issue a formal apology on the House floor. Wilson refused, saying in a televised interview that, “I believe one apology is sufficient.” Congressional Republicans agreed, and opposed further action. On September 15, the House approved a “resolution of disapproval” against Wilson, on 240”“179 vote.
The people from Wilson’s district in South Carolina also got to make a decision. They decided to re-elect Wilson, and he’s still a member of the House.
The news comes as something of a shock—not because Castro has died, but because he was still alive till now and only 90 years old. After all, this was a man who came to power during the Eisenhower presidency, and was thwarted along with Khrushchev by JFK during the Cuban missile crisis that frightened me and my contemporaries so terribly in our youth.
So it seems he should have been a great deal older than 90 by now. But since he took office at the very young age of 32, it makes sense.
Castro began as a much-lauded figure. As the Miami Heraldputs it:
Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.
It’s not really such a paradox; revolutionaries and their revolutions often have a habit of betraying those who supported them, once the transition is safely over. And then they have a way of digging in.
Castro was exceptionally well-dug-in:
As he changed the face of Cuba, he remapped South Florida as well, transforming it from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America. The suffering of the refugees he sent pouring into Miami eventually turned to triumph as they forged economic and political success.
He was a spellbinding orator who was also a man of action. His tall and powerful build was matched by an outsized ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds, then helped him survive countless plots hatched by his countless enemies.
Every newspaper will have an article (or several) today on Castro’s life, and this will probably continue for quite a while to come. He was one of the 20th Century giants, and I don’t mean that in a good way. As the Miami Herald writes, Castron was “provocative” on the world stage.
Fellow dictators and leftists tended to love him; those interested in liberty and human rights to hate him. And they’re dancing in the streets today in Miami:
“We’re not celebrating the death of a person. That would be morbid,” she said. “We’re celebrating the beginning of the end of a dictatorship, of a genocide.”
That was a common theme for many dancing in the streets on Saturday. They know that Cuba won’t suddenly change overnight, that Cuban President Raéºl Castro remains in charge and that the powerful communist government the brothers put in place will not suddenly topple.
But Joseph Valencia said Fidel’s death was the first crack, the first tangible sign of hope that communism could end in Cuba and a new era of democracy could finally take hold.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. The day to wait patiently in store lines for bargains—in-between bites of turkey salad sandwich, doses of Tums, and the ritual of making turkey carcass soup.
But neo-neocon readers needn’t wait in those lines if you (act of shameless self-promotion coming up) just use neo-neocon as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases. Click on any of the Amazon widgets in the right sidebar (or go here if for some reason the widgets aren’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a tiny bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.
So now it’s time to relax and enjoy eating those leftovers to your heart’s content.
[NOTE: This post is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]
I know I’ve recommended Judith Curry’s blog before, but I want to do it again because of what she’s written since the election on the issue of Donald Trump and AGW. Curry is one of the most objective and reasonable of the major climate scientists writing today, in an atmosphere in which objecitivty is no mean feat and requires no small amount of courage.
