Operation Mincemeat (5*)

I expected laughter not tears but this splendid London import elicits both in a stirring mix of vaudeville and valor that can't help but remind audiences that once upon a time, war was mission-driven and strategic.

British comedy isn't usually my thing and for the first several numbers I found Operation Mincemeat, based on historical events, a little difficult to follow, except in the broadest possible terms.  World War II intelligence officers, including Ian Fleming (Allison Guinn, definitely playing against James Bond type), line up to pitch ideas for dispatching Hitler, cutting ahead of Charles Cholmondeley (a perfectly elastic Brandon Contreras).  A nervous Nellie with a thing for newt anatomy, he's got an out-of-the-box plan to pass along fake intelligence to the Nazis via Spanish Republicans using a dead body which a more polished officer with a secret side gig, (Gerianne Pérez, showboating shamelessly) runs up the flagpole.  A junior staffer with ambitions to do more than serve tea (Lexi Rabadi, yearningly feminist) and a secretary of a certain age (a spit-curled Jeff Kready, wearing a pearl lanyard, who embodies Keep Calm and Carry On dignity) join the unlikely team.

Has a talented cast ever worked as hard as these five gender-bending performers who, among them, play at least 50 additional roles, changing costumes at often breakneck speed?  The night I saw it, three were stand-ins (Guinn, Pérez and Rabadi) which probably contributed to the undeniable electricity on stage, enough to power a data center.

Two numbers will remain forever etched into my theater-going memory, which stretches all the way back to one of the show's inspirations:  "Dear Bill," a faux missive devastatingly sung by Kready, in which English rose gardening becomes a metaphor for the awful human losses incurred by war, and "Useful," a sly, gentle duet (Kready again, with Rabadi) that quietly affirms the value of service and mentorship regardless of recognition and completely devoid of bombast.  

The crackerjack creative team, comedians all (David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Felix Hagan and Zoe Roberts, the first three of whom also starred in the original cast), manages a feat rare even for theater gods like Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse: steadily building engagement and excitement from beginning to end.  This includes kicking off the second act with a show stopping Gestapo rap ("whose side are you on?" asks Guinn, after the audience bursts into ecstatic applause).  But "A Glitzy Finale," as delightful as the number that ended A Chorus Line (which opened exactly half a century before Operation Mincemeat debuted on Broadway) also makes time to pay tribute to the homeless Welshman whose body facilitated the Allied invasion of Sicily, something that the creators of Dead Outlaw, another terrific corpse show, skipped.  

I left the Golden Theater remembering an Armistice Day visit to London in 2016, when red poppies, representing a traumatized nation's desire for a permanent end to the mass slaughter caused by World War I, were pinned to people's lapels and scattered across fountains nearly a century later.  At precisely 11 a.m., the entire country stopped to observe two-minute silence in remembrance of the "glorious dead."

That startling commemoration, just three days after Trump's first election,  thrilled me with nostalgia for a time when we could both honor history and learn from it.  Like one of the Operation Mincemeat team says (if only to scattered applause):

If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won't need to bash the door down. They'll have already won.

Dogs (4*)

And here I thought Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life, would forever wear the crown of miserabilism but C. Mallon snatches it from her head with Dogs, a blistering novella that increases trauma's intensity if not duration.

Mallon, acutely sensitive to color and light, writes very much like Caravaggio paints except we're in a godforsaken, wide open part of America where blotto is the typical teenage destination. Self-harming Hal has a better reason to get there than his three buddies, including sweet, blond Cody John whose gentleness does not go unpunished.  They're all members of the wrestling team, driving around in a junker several nights before Halloween after Hal's mother serves the boys spaghetti and meatballs that he refuses to eat for initially opaque reasons.

I had to put Dogs down more than once because Mallon gets inside Hal's messed-up head so completely that it hurt to read.

I was throwing off some type of unstable heat. Blue hollow down in the center of a butane torch. Bad radiation. Hole-punching scraps out of anyone caught in my radius, lung matter, heart muscle, brain tissue. Pink living brain. I took a part so small nobody noticed it gone. I understood myself to be a crippling weight to carry. I understood myself to be a total nightmare all the time.

Hal isn't wrong; the only solace he finds other than alcohol and pills is Tough Guy, a furry and non-verbal companion animal.

Let's hope the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Mallon the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction this year for the viscerally poetic quality of his prose, not his unrelenting shame and despair. 

We get enough of that already from the newspaper. 

What They Said: July 2026

 

“He had a lot of opinions on what makes a good cheeseburger,” said Cliff Rome, chef for the Obama Presidential Center.  (New York Times, July 1)

*  *  *  *  *

“Buildings are crumbled,” said Trey Espy, who is leading an American search and rescue team in La Guaira, Venezuela. “There’s no place to get gas. No place to buy groceries. No running water or electricity. It rained pretty heavily last night, and people couldn’t get shelter.” 

“The most gloriously over-the top celebration of music on earth,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said of Eurovision, was about to get “even better, even wilder, because the world needs more Canada.”  (New York Times, July 2)

*  *  *  *  *

“It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner who now studies cryptocurrency issues at Duke University. “This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”   

“America doesn’t have royal weddings,” said said Emma Fitzsimmons, a public policy correspondent for The New York Times who covers New York City. “But this [Taylor Swift's marriage to Travis Kelce @ Madison Square Garden] is probably the closest thing.” 

“There is nothing comparable to her level of stardom and her fan base — you’re on the level of Elvis, Michael Jackson or the Beatles in their heyday,” said Kenneth Corey, the former NYPD chief of department.  “I was at the N.Y.P.D. for almost 35 years, and there was no wedding near this scale.”  (New York Times, July 3)

*  *  *  *  *

"Whatever happened to your life long ago, whatever carousel you were on, reminds you of yourself, who also happened long ago," writes Roger Rosenblatt in Why Old People Cry.  "So you’re tearing up for all that is gone, all that monumental past, vast and variegated. These days, I have so much past behind and within me, it’s as if it bubbles over."  (New York Times, July 6)

*  *  *  *  *

“It [America's future with Iran] will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain.  (New York Times, July 9)

*  *  *  *  *

“That’s the gospel truth — Midtown is usually where vibes go to die,” said Dana Tamuccio, 57, a native New Yorker who runs Vibe NYC Tours, a local guide company.  (New York Times, July 10)

*  *  *  *  *

“I almost supported Swalwell, and who am I going to blame for that? Swalwell,” said former California senator Barbara Boxer. “Do I blame Bernie and other people for Platner? No. I blame Platner for Platner.”   

"There’s no Graham Platner without Donald Trump," writes Alex Seitz-Wald, deputy editor at the Maine newspaper Midcoast Villager and a registered Independent voter.  "Trump’s ability to keep winning and hold G.O.P. support made Democrats feel like they had permission to accept Platner’s faults for as long as they did — though there’s clear asymmetry in how his strongest supporters were willing to toss him overboard the instant a credible sexual assault allegation came out."  (New York Times, July 12)

*  *  *  *  *

“Everybody that rides a lot knows it’s hard to maintain a bad mood on a bike,” said Jacqueline Phelan, a writer and former national off-road biking champion.  

“I felt powerless in that situation, which is not an easy thing, as I have a lot of privilege in life,” said U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, who was detained for 90 minutes by Israeli settlers and the military during a visit to a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank. “Imagine how people feel every day, Palestinians under the occupation, if they could make an American congressperson feel powerless for 90 minutes.”(New York Times, July 13)

*  *  *  *  *

“I found [Sam] Neill particularly attractive, and he is lovingly and lingeringly shot in [My Brilliant Career, directed by Gillian Armstrong],” the film critic Carrie Rickey wrote in a 2019 essay for the Criterion Collection website. “In other words, like the girl in most movies. In retrospect, I realize this was an early experience for me of seeing a male lust object through the eyes of a female director.”  (New York Times, July 14)

*  *  *  *  *

“I believe the productivity gains began coming out of Covid with the digitization of work, remote work and the implementation of machine learning — and we’re just scratching the surface on A.I.,” said Henry McVey, an investment chief at KKR, a private equity firm that has seen them across its portfolio in health care, tech and retail.  

“Try a bigger bite,” said Phyllis Kao, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s encouraging higher bids on a dinosaur skeleton that sold for more than $50 million, the highest price ever paid for a prehistoric specimen.  “It’s a T. rex after all.”  (New York Times, July 15)

*  *  *  *  *

“What we do is sociopolitical art,” said Aaron Golbert, an artist who makes cannabis pipes under the name Marble Slinger.  “This isn’t about a junkie sitting in an alleyway with a needle. There is mindfulness behind glass. The craftsmanship becomes a symbol of the maker and the user.”  (New York Times, July 16)

*  *  *  *  *

“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “[President Donald J. Trump] is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”   (New York Times, July 18)

*  *  *  *  *

“We’re trying to get them [parents] proud to say ‘My kid’s a welder’ at a cocktail party,” said Jerome Grant, the chief executive of Universal Technical Institute, a private vocational school.  

"["Ringing Hollow" a song on "Foreign Tongues," the 25th studio album from the Rolling Stones] is really a love song to Americans: I fell madly in love with you before we ever met, like a lot of European teenagers," said Mick Jagger, 82. (New York Times, July 19)

*  *  *  *  *

“It has often seemed selfish, inappropriate or simply ridiculous for the uninfected to have any important feelings about themselves,” wrote Walt Odets, author of the 1995 book In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being H.I.V.-Negative in the Age of AIDS. "Feelings about oneself seemed the exclusive right of those who were infected, sick or dying.” 

“The most authoritarian government [China] is producing the most egalitarian models, and what should be the most democratic government [America] is breeding companies that are the most authoritarian,” said Rayan Krishnan, chief executive of Vals AI, a company that evaluates the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. (New York Times, July 21)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s a belief that you can take any process no matter how complex and break it down into its component parts and explain it to people,” said Micah Lasher, the Democratic nominee to represent Congressional District 7 in Manhattan, reflecting on his decision as a 12-year-old to write a book explaining how he performed magic tricks. “That’s an important thing in politics as well, and particularly in policy, being able to explain how something’s going to work.”  (New York Times, July 22)

*  *  *  *  *

“Hot damn! We’re bringing the [Los Angeles Cinerama] Dome back, baby,” Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony’s Motion Picture Group. “We believe in moviegoing down to our soul, and no venue on Earth stands more for that than the one-of-a-kind Dome.” 

"When Cabaret lost its money, that felt to me like a turning point," said Oskar Eustis, the retiring artistic director of the Public Theater.  "A whole lot of investors went, 'If a show that ran for that long with that much star power and that much buzz could lose all that money, what am I doing investing in musicals?' Going from four out of five shows losing their money to nine out of 10 shows losing their money was a qualitative shift. Now it’s Russian roulette." (New York Times, July 23)

*  *  *  *  *

“If [Mykhailo] Fedorov returns to the post of defense minister in the current situation, a parallel power center will emerge in Ukraine,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of Penta, an independent analytical group in Kyiv. “This will be the beginning of Zelensky’s political end.”  (New York Times, July 24)

*  *  *  *  *

“I have no control over my life anymore,” said Behnam, a 38-year-old unemployed musician in Tehran. “Our fate is in the hands of those who don’t think about ordinary people.” 

“The sad reality now is that the federal government is our biggest concern,” said Nick Brown, the Democratic attorney general of the state of Washington, adding, “It used to be that the Department of Justice was our No. 1 partner, helping states prepare for election-related issues.”  

“It has ascended to the vaporous regions of myth, but [Bobbi Queen, recently deceased Women's Wear Daily editor] was pretty consistent in the details,” said Ben Brantley, the publication's former chief fashion critic. “She was standing on the corner with a cherished bag — I can’t remember what it was — and a man came by and tore it out of her hands. She screamed like the whistle in ‘Sweeney Todd,’ and everyone came running. When the police asked for a description of the mugger, she was extremely clear: ‘He had on twill pants with about a quarter-inch cuff, a jacket with a slight crease in it and a broadcloth shirt that wasn’t ironed.’”  (New York Times, July 25)

*  *  *  *  *

“People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” said Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and co-author of a paper called Why Slop Matters.   

“Americans were invited to see themselves as decreasingly young rather than ever old,” writes Samuel Moyn in Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It. (New York Times, July 26)

*  *  *  *  *

“We refuse to believe that Jewish safety requires silence about the Israeli government’s actions,” T’ruah, an organization of progressive rabbis, said in a statement. “A narrative that public criticism of Israel causes antisemitism and therefore must be censored is not only overly simplistic but dangerous to Jews, Palestinians and our democratic values.” (New York Times, July 27)

*  *  *  *  *

“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests,” warned Matan Vilnai, a retired deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, in a public letter to President Trump on behalf of an organization that includes hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.

“I got a name that’s got 11 letters in it — sounds that come out of parts of people’s throats most people don’t know they have,” said Abdul El-Sayed, MD, the son of Egyptian immigrants and a progressive Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. “People like me are not supposed to run.”  (New York Times, July 29)

*  *  *  *  *

“We have decided not to submit an entry for Grammy consideration this year,” said the members of BTS in a group statement after the Recording Academy announced a new Asian pop category.  “We hope music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided into region or language.”  (New York Times, July 31)

The Nix (4*)

I guess if you need to blame something for your life not turning out as you'd hoped, a Norwegian ghost--a nix--is as good a scapegoat as any even when trauma inherited from the old country and passed down through two generations of Americans is the more likely explanation.  

It takes decades--and overblown accusations of political violence--for panicky Faye who has abandoned Samuel, her all-too-similar only child, a cry baby, to reach this conclusion in a well-plotted novel whose action toggles between between Samuel's Occupy Wall Street era and his mother's experience as a Chicago undergraduate during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Their shared passivity and blandness--which could be read more charitably as Midwestern decency--makes it hard to relate to either one.  Still, Faye's passion for poetry (especially Sunflowers by Allen Ginsberg) really says all you need to know about this haunted, unfulfilled woman.

Fortunately Hill's on-point and sometimes polemical observations about American society--particularly during the new millennium-- are more compelling than either of his main characters. 

There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. And there is no better test of this than watching what happens when there is a hundred-car line in the far-right lane, which there is when Samuel reaches his exit. How people bypass the line and dive into any available cranny in front, skipping all the drivers patiently waiting, all of whom are now enraged at this because they each have to wait incrementally longer, but also a bigger and deeper rage that the asshole didn’t wait his turn like everyone else, that he didn’t suffer like they suffer, and then also a tertiary inner rage that they are suckers who wait in lines.

The split and somewhat complicated story, supplemented by characters in Samuel's life who are more convincing as types than actual people also gives Hill an opportunity to riff on his own lived experiences (he's 50), including this killer analysis of how kids once accessed analog porn.

Because for kids his age, for kids hitting adolescence in the eighties, in those days before the internet, before the web made pornography easily accessible and therefore banal, for this last generation of boys for whom porn was primarily a physical object, possessing pornography was like having a superpower. One that made you immediately legitimate and popular among the other boys. This happened roughly once per semester, some obscure boy locating his father’s collection of dirty magazines and suddenly finding himself elevated socially for as long as he didn’t get in trouble, which might take a day to several months, depending on the constitution of the boy. The ones who were transparently desperate and begging for attention and craving to be liked tended to steal the whole pile in exchange for a one-time flash of celebrity, bright stars who burned out in a day when their fathers noticed the disappearance of all their pornography and put two and two together. Other boys, the ones with more impulse control and less desperation for approval, were more judicious in their porn approaches. They might remove only one magazine from the pile, say the second or third from the bottom, an edition that had presumably been perused, enjoyed, digested, and abandoned. They brought that one magazine to school and let everyone look through it before replacing it in the pile a week or two later, then removing another edition from near the bottom, and then repeating the pattern. These boys maintained a consistent popularity for, sometimes, months before a teacher noticed a group of boys sitting still in a huddle on the playground and came to investigate, because when grade-school boys weren’t running around like spazzes it meant something was definitely wrong.

When I could relate to Samuel's childhood experiences--which Hill renders much more convincingly than Faye's--I enjoyed The Nix a lot more than when I couldn't.  He goes on at such length about Samuel's nemesis at the college where he teaches, an entitled white student (EVERYBODY in this book is white) that I almost skipped the chapters describing the execrable machinations of this novel's villainous heir apparent, as well as those that detail, endlessly, the pathetic existence of his well-meaning video gaming buddy.

Had I done so, however, I would have missed Hill's tour-de-force account--told in a chapter-long sentence--of the gamer's psychotic breakdown and the method behind the novelist's narrative tedium:  he persuasively demonstrates how little difference exists between the arbitrary rules of Elfscape's virtual world and Samuel's real one, between the internet-based behavior of today's players and the actions taken by yesterday's naive protesters and club-happy pigs.

Then, in a remarkably executed twist with a huge thematic pay-off, Hill tips his apolitical hand through a very slippery character, an avatar of American success who, like Faye, now off on a kind of vision quest, bridges both eras.

What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now . . . We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.

Hill may be a be a better prophet than a novelist:  he wrote The Nix before you-know-who was elected the first time.  

Palimpsest (4*)

Imagine the feeling of having been so central to your time that you can use your memoir to critique how others, including Anaïs Nin and Tennessee Williams, portrayed you in theirs. Or, to put it another way: was any 20th-century American as well-connected as Gore Vidal in literature, show business and politics?  And unapologetically homosexual to boot?

A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double checked. I’ve taken the memoir route on the ground that even an idling memory is apt to get right what matters most. I used to say, proudly, that I would never write a memoir, since “I am not my own subject.“ Now I’m not so sure. After all, one’s recollected life is just about all that’s left at the end of the day when the work is done and gone, property now of others.

Vidal published Palimpsest in 1995, when he was 70, a year after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, "whose boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice were a great joy to me." I checked the timing because his Jackie dish is more than a little damning, at least for someone who has had her demure First Lady picture (autographed) hanging in my bathroom for nearly half a century.  The two shared a stepfather and while that relationship doesn't sound particularly significant, it gave him early admission to Camelot not long after he had lost a Congressional election in New York State, despite the endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt, a less attractive but far more accomplished First Lady.

Did Jackie really become sexually intimate with RFK sometime after JFK bedded Lee Radziwill, her sister, while she slept in the next room?  Was RFK really the love of her life (she didn't marry Aristotle Onassis until after her brother-in-law was assassinated, too)?  Did Jackie really fuck William Holden?  Did the European jet set really find Ari more charming than she? You know how the gays love to gossip!

Much less shocking is Vidal's speculation that Jackie's mother was Jewish, and that the former newspaper photographer disliked Princess Grace (a year younger) because of her conservatism and JFK's reaction when the senator from Massachusetts--with his eye already on the presidency--saw her front-page nuptials in 1956: "I could have married her!"

With a life like Vidal's, he can't help dropping names but what makes Palimpsest particularly fascinating is his candor about his sexual orientation.  In today's hook-up parlance, he would be known as a "total top," who doesn't reciprocate with his partners, a type I alway have avoided.  

In those days, I liked to give the impression that I was a professional tennis player turned hustler.

Looks-wise, Vidal likens himself, without too much conceit, to a Greek god--Apollo--which helps explain how he managed to notch more than a thousand sexual encounters at a fairly young age, a benchmark he claims puts him in range of  JFK and Marlon Brando. Much to my surprise, it seems that gay men could get laid as easily in post-World-War-II New York City as they could in the 70s before AIDS, sometimes even in the same establishment before it burned down in 1977 (my fear of the place may have been a life saver and not just because of the fire that killed seven people).

I also discovered, that magical winter, the Everard baths, where military men often spent the night, unable to find any other cheap place to stay. This was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me. Newly invented penicillin had removed fears of venereal disease, and we were enjoying perhaps the freest sexuality that Americans would ever know. Most of the boys knew that they would soon be home for good, and married, and that this was a last chance to do what they were designed to do with each other.

Vidal clearly enjoys bragging about an especially noteworthy conquest whom he meets not at another venue quite popular among gay men of his generation, although not one I would have expected the author of On The Road to frequent.

I still see Jack vividly. We are standing at the back of the opera box, which is so crowded that our faces are only a few inches apart. I feel the heat from his body. The eyes are bright and clear and blue; the body muscular, not yet bloated; a drop of water slides alongside his left ear and down his pale cheek, not sweat, but water that he must’ve just used to comb his thick black Indian-like hair. We were also coming on to each other like two pieces of trade – yes, I was attracted.

Afterward, the "two pieces of trade" check into the Chelsea Hotel, under their own names where Vidal tells the bemused clerk that their night together will make literary history.  But when Vidal reminisces about what went down--a drunken Kerouac, to be specific--it seems more sad than anything else.  

As does his reconstructed ode to Jimmie Trimble, a consummated crush a year ahead of him at St. Albans, who found a girl he wanted to marry before taking a bullet at Iwo Jima.  He amusingly (and accurately) describes their encounter as kid stuff before inflating it to something else entirely.

If not seated together in class, Jimmie and I would signal each other when a hard-on had arrived unbidden. When the other boys figured out what we were doing, they began signaling, too.  At twelve, erections come and go, like T. S. Eliot’s ladies, talking, most appropriately, of Michelangelo.

Jimmie Trimble, 17 (1942)

His love for Trimble haunts the memoir and almost certainly served as the basis for The City and the Pillar, his third novel, published when the wunderkind was just 22. Trimble's memory was relatively fresh then and yet to be colored by decades of projection and nostalgia.  The novel originally ended with the gay protagonist, clearly modeled on Vidal, murdering his now married crush years later, after he tries to renew their relationship and is rejected. In the revised edition, one I read shortly after graduating from college, the gay protagonist doesn't kill his crush but rapes him instead.  Though the novel may have been groundbreaking in its depiction of a shameless homosexual, it certainly doesn't model behavior worth emulating.

Tellingly, Vidal mentions Howard Austen, whom he "met" at the Everard, only in passing even though he lived with the man platonically for more than 50 years, including a summer when they happily shared a Malibu beach house with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, their long-time friends. Vidal concludes the book with the news that reveals he and Austen will be buried together in Rock Creek Cemetery, "midway between Jimmie Trimble and Henry Adams--midway between heart and mind to put it grandly."  If there's a gay afterlife, Austen, né Auster (he made the change at Vidal's suggestion to sound less Jewish, thereby reducing workplace discrimination in the advertising world) has every right to ask "What was I, Gore, chopped liver?" 

This begs for some amateur psychoanalyzing.  Here goes:  the only person besides Trimble who arouses feelings of similar passion for Vidal is his mother, whom he despises with good reason if his characterization of her as a narcissistic alcoholic is accurate.  Having never been loved by the woman the majority of people would say loved and nurtured them the most in life would stunt a person emotionally, to say very the least.

Still Vidal's lack of maternal affection likely enhanced his determination to succeed professionally and dominate sexually. Palimpsest is a glorious subconscious testament to that, and Vidal's incisive analyses of politics in The Best Man and his acclaimed historical novels including 1876, my favorite, will secure his place in American literary history.

On a more personal note, it's heartening to know that Vidal, like me at a similar age, had begun developing a "never again" list.  

. . . I am not social; I also like giving up things, letting go. The British Embassy in Rome has just rung. Will I come to dinner for Princess Margaret in September, two months away? I say no. I don’t want, ever again, to sit at a formal table with a strange lady on either side of me and make conversation.

My own list is a little more prosaic.  It includes the Pines, colonoscopies and house painting, 

What Really Makes America Great

You wouldn't necessarily expect a renowned research library to embrace an artist who cuts up books with a power saw to make sculpture.  But Robert The pulls more than one trigger with a WTF?-work that should also fire up Americans who defend the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution with the same fervor that they embrace evangelical Christianity.

"Holy Bible: King James Version" (1995)

It's included in "Declaring America: 1776 and Beyond," a commemoration of the nation's semiquincentennial that leaves the patriotic chest thumping to the MAGA crowd.  I left the quirky exhibit wondering if the New York Public Library received any federal funding.  It does, but very little, so my former employer may be less vulnerable to extortion than my alma mater or the Smithsonian.  That's a good thing, because the curators understand that being American means different things to different people.  California-born Kara Walker's lineage of violence and oppression informs "African/American" (1998) 

. . . just as "Power Bidder" (2015) reflects the white privilege of Shepard Fairey, a prep school kid from Charleston (once the site of the nation's biggest slave market).  Both artists attended the Rhode Island School of Design which cultivates "elastic thinking," anathema to the Trump Administration.

No doubt, economic insecurity shaped David Hammons, one of ten children in Detroit raised by a single Black mother before moving to California. Fond of mixed metaphors, he created a potent one for deprived neighborhoods, filling a honey jar with red, green and black jelly beans, the colors of the Pan African flag. Marcus Garvey, the early 20th-century father of Pan-Africanism, believed that people his color could never achieve equality in the United States unless they pursued their capitalism separately which, by the time Hammons created this work, must have seemed like utter folly. 

"Marcus Garvey Vitamins" (ca 1983)

But in this futuristic print, Kerry James Marshall, who moved from his birthplace in Alabama to California as part of the Great Migration, clearly believes that achieving financial success doesn't necessarily mean giving up your identity or your past.  African influences are apparent in this family's furnishings and attire, and the "dark continent" faces the viewer In the globe hologram floating above the coffee table.

"Keeping the Culture" (2011)

Two Silent Generation artists from the New York metropolitan area bucked their cohort with elongated critiques of democracy.  Barbara Kruger's feminism is evident in a 1986 print series that declares "We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard."  Five years later,  Vito Acconci envisioned "Wav(er)ing Flag" as a public art installation in St. Louis with neon lights to make partying conventioneers stop and think about the meaning of the words they pledged by rote, hands over hearts, as school children.  It works even on the much smaller scale of the library's walls.

Edward Snowden helped expose the level of federal government secrecy and citizen surveillance conducted in the wake of 9/11.  His leak of classified material included the release of more than 400 code words used by the National Security Agency.  Massachusetts-born baby boomer Annie Bisset, using an ancient Japanese way of making woodcuts, illustrates 26 as an ironic alphabet primer for kids. The activities they conceal are far less whimsical than names suggest.

"Secret Codewords of the NSA: A Primer" (2013)

HERCULES refers to a terrorism data base developed by the CIA after it was criticized for failing to "connect the dots" prior to 9/11.

"hercules" (detail)

A flying monkey connects the dots between TINMAN and the data base that NSA maintains to track air warning and surveillance.

"tinman" (detail)

I usually find the work of Glenn Ligon, a gay African American from the Bronx, a little too conceptual, but these lithographs illustrate the journey from chattel to artist in a uniquely personal way.  Inspired by ads that used names, ages, and physical characteristics to identify and reclaim people who had escaped enslavement, Ligon asked ten of his friends to describe him instead.

"Runaways" (1993)

Their responses subtly convey the differences between owning and knowing.

RAN AWAY, Glenn. Medium height, 5'8", male. Closely-cut hair, almost shaved. Mild looking, with oval shaped, black-rimmed glasses that are somewhat conservative. Thinly-striped black-and-white short-sleeved T-shirt, blue jeans. Silver watch and African-looking bracelet on arm. His face is somewhat wider on bottom near the jaw. Full-lipped. He's black. Very warm and sincere, mild-mannered and laughs often.

RAN AWAY, Glenn. He is black. He has very short hair and eye glasses. He has quite light skin tone (faded bronze). Not tall. No noticeable accent. Wearing a plum-colored shirt, long-sleeved, and shorts. Very casual and stylish in appearance. He is wearing a bead bracelet (stones - a mixture of black-and-white). He has big hands and fingers. When he walks his feet cross each other a little bit. When he talks, he usually has a big smile towards you, yet he faces you from a slightly different angle. He looks at you from the corner of his eyes. His voice is very calm.

The Jim Crow era made the journey from chattel to artist a very long and arduous one. Nearly seven decades after the passage of the 13th Amendment--which finally banned slavery--African Americans still had to fear lynching in addition to suffering discrimination. It took the Scottsboro Boys to expose the systemic racism of the American legal system, particularly in the segregated South where pre-trial vigilantism remained common. According to the NAACP, nearly 5,000 people--72% of them Black--were lynched from 1882 to 1968, though the practice continued sporadically until 1981.  

Hugo Gellert, an immigrant from Hungary, illustrated this poster for International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party (the "red" arm grips a hammer to drive a spike through the skeletal hand of capitalism, represented by a dollar-sign ring, about to clutch the Scottsboro Boys who are a comradely red!). For a less politically-charged but even more powerful visual representation of this American atrocity, visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

"Spike Lynch Terror" Poster (1934)

I spent another half an hour keeping cool in the enormous Salomon Reading Room which was restored to its original function as a place to hang the library's art in 1986, three years after I left. Many of the all-white and mostly male portraits lining the walls belonged to the library's founders and reflected their 19th-century tastes.  Two others, of "heritage Americans" who could not be more disparate, caught my fancy.  One could never tell a lie  

George Washington by Rembrandt Peale (1850)

. . . and the other, who donated his archives to the New York Public Library, did nothing but lie if you believe Gore Vidal.

Truman Capote by James Whitney Fosburgh (1971)

Our differences, not our bloodlines, make us American and our history, like our art, should reflect both the good and the bad.  Cheers to NYPL for recognizing that when our government increasingly refuses to do so!

This Storm Is What We Call Progress

Once you know Paul Klee was spoofing Il Duce--who already had consolidated his control over Italy--and the fascist fondness for erecting monuments in this work, it's hard not to flash on our fearless leader doing the same thing right now with his imperial building spree in the nation's capital.

"Monument in Progress" (1929)

Klee's arches, here equipped with humanizing feet, aren't as grand as Trump's and serve another purpose entirely: their diverse hues defy the conformity of the Nazi's Brownshirt color palette.

"Revolution of the Viaduct" (1937)

Despite his Christian heritage, the Nazis smeared the Swiss-born artist, who had taught at the Bauhaus for a decade, as a "Galician Jew," precipitating his return to his native country in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. 

Klee in his Bauhaus Studio (Weimar, Germany, 1924)

Trained as a musician, his mostly abstract work soon became a prime example of "degenerate art," as well as a chilling document of his final year in Germany when he created more than 500 paintings and drawings.  More than a few of their titles ring a contemporary bell.

"Outbreak of Fear" (1933)

Emigrating (1933)

After Klee returned to Switzerland, an autoimmune disease made it difficult for him to swallow, greatly reducing his productivity to just 25 works in 1936.  But as the situation in Europe worsened, Klee picked up the pace again with encouragement from Wassily Kandinsky, his former colleague at the Bauhaus, and Pablo Picasso.  This painting alludes to Hitler's infamous bombing of Guernica's civilians in northern Spain, which the latter artist depicted even more famously, if less colorfully.

"God of War" (1937)

Here, a drooling young member of the SS listens spellbound to Nazi propaganda on radio.  It might just as well be a podcast from the manosphere

"Voice from the Ether:
'And you will eat your fill!'" (1939)

. . . or fake news from another era.  As Johnny Rotten once sang, "anger is an energy." Klee finished more than 1,500 works in 1939, an annual record.  Most of the paintings and drawings on view in Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum are drawn from the late '30s, and have been little seen in the United States.  

"Oh! These Rumors!" (1939)

Klee's final burst of creativity included 29 angels, although they appear to be more avenging than guardian.

Angel Applicant (1939)

"Angelus Militans" (1940)

Thanks to Walter Benjamin, an early Klee angel became one of the artist's most iconic works.  The German Jewish philosopher bought "Angelus Novus" in 1921 and took the cherished print with him when, like Klee, he fled the Third Reich in 1933.  In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin described "Angelus Novus" as 

looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Angelus Novus (1920)

In 1940, shortly after those words appeared in print, Benjamin committed suicide rather than face the likelihood of deportation to a concentration camp.  Klee had died three months earlier.  No doubt the forces of evil never looked more powerful to both men than in their final days. I know the feeling.

At the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust is always just around the corner, or maybe it just seems that way after a refresh of the works exhibited from the permanent collection.  By the time Alice Neel painted this protest organized by the Artist's Union to increase awareness of state-sanctioned anti-Semitic violence in Germany, both Klee and Benjamin already had scrammed.  Years after a critic blithely commented, "An interesting picture, but the sign is too obvious," Neel rebutted his myopic cluelessness:  "If they [the Roosevelt Administration] had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might have been saved."

"Nazis Murder Jews" (1936)

Prior to dying in a Polish concentration camp at the age of 40, Czech artist Gertrud Kauders squirreled away the contents of her studio in the walls and ceiling of a friend's home not far from Prague.  Nearly 700 paintings and drawings were recovered during a 2018 renovation of the then abandoned property.  Her survivors donated her life's work to Jewish museums around the world, including this ahead-of-its-time homage to the female gaze painted sometime before 1939. 

This charm bracelet, fashioned in by a woman imprisoned in Theresienstadt, is a wonderful example of Jewish resilience as well as a quirky evocation of life in the camp.  Can you find the commode?

Israeli artist Mordecai Ardon studied architecture at the Bauhaus when Klee, a decade older, taught there.  He fled Germany in 1933, too, immigrating to Jerusalem when Palestine was under the administrative control of the British.  His work became more religious and figurative after the full horrors of the Holocaust became known.  This painting, which presumably references Berger-Belsen (where Anne Frank and her older sister died), is a collective portrait; according to exhibit label, "the number tattooed on the woman's forearm was assigned to multiple people in different camps."  I'm guessing that Ardon wasn't aware that the Nazis tattooed only prisoners at Auschwitz/Birkenau, something I learned for the first time after a visit in 2024. 

"Girl No. 109336" (1950)

(detail)

Reuven Rubin headed for Palestine even earlier than Ardon. The landscape probably reminded him of Old Testament stories he had heard in his native Romania, rendered here with hope and a modernist slant. Rubin eventually became Israel's first official representative to his former European homeland.

"Old Sycamore Trees" (1927)

Other galleries exhibit more contemporary works unrelated to the Holocaust, including a fascinating installation that juxtaposes Andy Warhol's work with two Jewish artists. Jonathan Horowitz supplemented "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" with 92 additional Jews (yes, kids, both Marilyn and Liz converted!) silkscreened by Warhol to fashion digital wall paper of the tribe reaping the benefits of their 15 minutes.  Candice Breitz, who represented South Africa at the Vienna Biennale in 2017, shot "Profile," a video that captures the difficulty in pinning down an individual's identity.

Case in point: Oded Halahmy was born in Bhagdad, airlifted to Jerusalem with his orthodox Jewish family at the age of 13 because of increasing Iraqi anti-Semitism, and moved to Soho in 1971 where he has sculpted ever since.  

 

Despite having lived in France and Germany as a child--as well as studying both countries' languages in high school and college--I'm definitely more fluent in Yiddish!

"The Joys of Yiddish" by Mel Bochner (2012)

Andi LaVine Arnovitz put her grandmother's handmade wedding dress to good use with some help from the Jewish Women's Archive in 2023 and a laser cutter.

"What We Bring" (2023)

Her sculpture pays tribute to the material and intellectual assets wives bring to their marriages, protected by the Talmud protects even after divorce.  Sometimes my gaydar is like a heat-seeking missle: without searching or even knowing it at the time, I photographed Joan Rivers' name among the more than 2,600 that comprise the train.

The menorah display on an upper floor is not to be missed.  I bought a tiny one at Dachau shortly before I learned what had happened in Israel on October 7, 2023.