Gustave Moreau’s “Delilah” (1896), oil on canvas. Museo de Arte de Ponce.
Ann Coulter called Donnie a “wimp.”
And Nancy Pelosi proved she was right.
On yet another Farewell Friday — goodbye, Roger Stone — President Donald J. Trumpet announced that a deal had been made to end the 35-day government shutdown that held 800,000 federal workers and the rest of the nation hostage. Translation: Senate Majority Leader “Mitchie” McConnell told Hair Furor that he didn’t have the votes to keep the repudiated Repubs in line and so Donnie Two Scoops was forced to cave.
Read MoreSouth Vietnamese refugees arrive aboard a U.S. naval vessel during the fall of Saigon, April 29, 1975.
“Miss Saigon” — which I saw over the Christmas break at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. — owes its narrative to Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of a innocent geisha’s fatal love for an American naval lieutenant in 1904 Nagasaki. In updating the tale to the waning days of the Vietnam War (1975), “Saigon” improves on the story by making the American serviceman — here Marine Sgt. Chris Scott — and his eventual American wife, Ellen, much more sympathetic figures, trapped by circumstances of war rather than being blinded by white privilege.
Having said this, I must add that “Saigon” is no Puccini opera. It’s melodic enough without being memorable in the vein of other one-note Cameron Mackintosh musicals like “Les Miserables,” forcing the singers to belt when they might be better off lilting, particularly in the screeching upper register. Like “Butterfly,” however, “Miss Saigon” remains a potent metaphor for an America that, despite its best intentions is thoughtless, even callous, in its treatment of foreigners, particularly those of color.
Read MoreA mural tribute to Dean Martin in his native Steubenville, Ohio. The crooner’s 1959 cover of the newly controversial “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is heating up the charts again.
At the office holiday party the other night, the newly controversial song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” came up on the playlist. I explained to my publisher that the 1949 Oscar-winning song – which composer Frank Loesser had actually written five years earlier and performed with wife Lynn Garland as a kind of calling card at parties – has come under fresh scrutiny in the #MeToo era for its lyrics and the way they’re performed.
Read MoreHome Secretary Theresa May with Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. It’s her show now. Courtesy UK Home Office.
It was no minor metaphor when British Prime Minister Theresa May’s car door stuck as she strove to exit recently to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who waited with characteristic stoicism on the red carpet for yet another go-round in May’s futile attempt to negotiate a better Brexit deal. Brexit has been the ultimate stuck car door for May and the British people, a frustrating rigmarole with no satisfactory conclusion in sight.
Read More“The Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I” (1600-02), oil on canvas, Hatfield House.
The new movie “Mary, Queen of Scots” — which I am reluctant to see for reasons that will become clear — belongs to what I like to call the Sylvia Plath school of storytelling. That is, if your telling the story of the suicidal poet, the husband will always be the villain. (That he had two wives who killed themselves in exactly the same way doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in him as a spouse. You know what they say. Once is a tragedy. Twice is an unsettling coincidence.)
Read MoreBartholomäus Spranger’s “Minerva (Athena) Victorious Over Ignorance” (circa 1591), oil on canvas. Kunsthistoriches Museum.
It was another challenging week bookended by ice and snow on the East Coast and wildfires in California. I have no expertise to offer in alleviating the devastation wrought by wildfires, but I do have some thoughts on preventing the havoc wreaked by six inches – yes, a mere six inches – of snow, sleet and rain in New York.
Read MoreBruce MacKinnon’s cartoon appeared in The Chronicle Herald Sept. 29.
So Brett Kavanaugh becomes a United States Supreme Court Justice and that’s too bad, because he lacks the temperament for it, as he himself demonstrated, and because other revelations – an inability to confront a drunken youth, questionable credit card charges and a good deal of misremembering – would seem to indicate an injudiciousness that would be lethal for a judge….
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