What They Said: April 2026

“The Iranians have achieved mutual assured destruction without a nuclear weapon,” said Robert S. Litwak, a scholar at George Washington University who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program. “If Trump attacks Iran’s civil infrastructure, Iran will destroy the comparable energy and desalination facilities in the Gulf.” (New York Times, 04.01.26)

“We have this obsession with gas prices because they dictate a lot of ‘Can we drive? Can we do things we enjoy?’ And now some of that is at risk,” said Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy, which also tracks fuel prices. (New York Times, 04.01.26)

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“At this point, I kind of want to hire people because I’m lonely,” said Matthew Gallagher who used AI to build and operate a $1.8 billion telehealth company marketing GLP-1 and erectile dysfunction drugs with his brother as his only employee.  (New York Times, 04.05.26)

“I only use it like for 10 minutes when I’m bored,” said Quentin, whose interactions with AI chatbots have declined since he began dating another teenager. “Even though I could torture people in that universe and beat up a kid named Oliver, because I hate that name, I’d rather be in my life.” (New York Times, 04.05.26)

“One principle of collage, for me,” said Lucy Sante, a visual historian and the author of Low Life, an account of tenement life in lower Manhattan during the Gilded Age, “is you have to kill one thing to make another. It’s a small-scale model of revolutionary behavior.”  (New York Times, 04.05.26)

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“It’s something so clearly unlawful and deeply misguided,” said Oona A. Hathaway, a Yale law professor who co-wrote an open letter signed by 100 legal experts and lawyers expressing their concerns about the U.S. strikes on Iran. “It’s hard to fathom how much the rules have been completely thrown out.” (New York Times, 04.06.26)

“Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace,” Pope Leo XIV said in his first Easter message. “Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue. Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them.” (New York Times, 04.06.26)

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“One wonders,” wrote Ronald H. Spector, a Viet Nam veteran turned academic historian, in 2017 in Politico, “how anyone could have believed that a complex and intractable war that began 14 years before President Kennedy came into office and continued for six years after Johnson left it could have been won or lost by presidential decisions in Washington during the four years between 1961 and 1965." (New York Times, 04.08.26)

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“Listen, I may not be part of the solution here[a world of doomscrolling, political chaos and uncertainty about AI]  in any fundamental way,” said Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing, a humanistic account of "the Troubles" in Ireland and a staff writer for The New Yorker. “But I’m not part of the problem. And that’s something.” (New York Times, 04.09.26)

“The feature of these negotiations that may extend the cease-fire is that there is a bit of mutually assured destruction between the U.S. and Iran right now,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and the vice president of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. (New York Times, 04.09.26)

"We call it the manosphere, but it could more accurately be described as the boyosphere," observed Louis Theroux, director of Inside the Manosphere, a documentary. (New York Times, 04.09.26)

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“We made cameras that threw treats for pets. and now we make cameras that throw explosives at occupiers,” said Ukrainian drone manufacturer Yaroslav Azhnyuk.  (New York Times, 04.09.26)

“Two months ago the global news story was Tehran massacring its own people,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Today the global news story is Tehran successfully resisting America and Israel.” (New York Times, 04.09.26)

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"I’ve also spent a long time with the song “Memory,” writes Betty Buckley, the Tony Award-winning actress and singer who originated the role of Grizabella in the Broadway production of “Cats. "I sang it at the Tony Awards in 1983, and I sang it at The Saint, a gay club in the East Village. At the song’s core is a simple plea of longing to be seen again — to be recognized and to be welcomed back into the circle.  (New York Times, 04.11.26)

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“They could hold their ground for another two months, if not more. And economically, I think there is no threshold for how much more pain the Iranians are willing to tolerate,” said Ali Vaez, the head of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, a think tank.  (New York Times, 04.12.26)

“There’s one new thing I know, and that is: Planet Earth, you are a crew,” said NASA astronaut Christina Koch at a press conference celebrating the success of the Artemis II expedition. (New York Times, 04.12.26)

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“Look at what [Mark Carney, Canadian Prime Minister] has been able to do; ‘remarkable’ is just not the correct word,” said Shachi Kurl, president at the Angus Reid Institute, a nonpartisan political research group. “He took a party that was a bus with no brakes headed for a brick wall and somehow managed to not only pull it from the brink of oblivion, but then within a year, get it into a majority position.” (New York Times, 04.15.26)

"I can talk to actors who are 20, 30 years younger than me who have never heard of Laurence Olivier or Noël Coward or John Gielgud or Peggy Ashcroft or these giants of my youth: Gone. Particularly theater actors, over and done with. That’s fine," said Ian McKellen. "And I don’t have children. That’s most people’s legacy, isn’t it? No. I don’t think there’s any life after death in both senses of heaven and hell and a legacy. It’s over. So you better enjoy it while you’re here." (New York Times, 04.15.26)

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“When needed, try to be there — it’s as simple as that,” said Mary Kay Finneran, one of the last members of the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic order that has voted to close after serving New York City since 1869. “That’s how we all were as younger women. It is how I try to be now.” (New York Times, 04.17.26)

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“They [Germany's far right party, AfD, in the wake of Viktor Orban's defeat in Hungary] will latch on to whatever narrative is convenient,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If they have to, they will latch on to the idea of being the last of the Mohicans.” (New York Times, 04.18.26)

“Netanyahu influenced how the war started,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He won’t influence how it ends.” (New York Times, 04.18.26)

“We believe there’s a sweet spot where we can meet our investment goals and help a project through that might otherwise not get built,” said NYC Comptroller Mark Levine, who announced a $4 billion pension fund investment in affordable housing. (New York Times, 04.18.26)

“It is a bit weird to see my professors in the audience at readings, knowing that they still need to grade my papers,” said Nelio Bidermann, the 22-year-old author of a bestselling German novel that has drawn comparisons to Buddenbrooks by Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. “But I imagine they can still do that without being biased.” (New York Times, 04.18.26)

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“I think the vast majority of Americans recognize that there is a large group of undocumented immigrants who have been literally keeping food on our tables,” said Kelsey Erickson Streufert, the chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association. “And if we remove those people, it is going to hurt everyone in terms of higher prices.”  (New York Times, 04.19.26)

“My grandma would collect cans out the trash can for money," recalled Hykeem Jamaal Carter, Jr. who performs as Baby Keem.  "We’d walk home, sell cans. You kind of get the why. You don’t have to ask why. You’re living the why.” (New York Times, 04.19.26)

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“Leo wasn’t looking for a fight,” said Christopher White, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. “One of the reasons he found his voice is out of necessity.”  (New York Times, 04.20.26)

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“Ever since the Trump Administration took office, something crazy like this seems to happen every single day,” said Bianca Marino whose travel plans were suddenly interrupted by the February closure of the El Paso International Airport, “so I just assumed it’s just another part of their incompetence and chaotic management going on.” (New York Times, 04.22.26)

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“Sometimes controversy makes artists more visible,” said Larry Miller, the executive director of the Sony Audio Institute for Music Business and Technology at New York University. “And in the streaming era this translates directly into listening.” (New York Times, 04.26.26)

“There have been wonderful queer people elected from the district over the last 30-some years,” said Cynthia Nixon, the actress and activist, who supports a heterosexual woman for a New York City Council seat in a district that has elected gay representatives since 1991. “But I feel now and have always felt we should be voting for people not based on their identity, but based on who they are.” (New York Times, 04.26.26)

“We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians,” observed Graham Platner, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Iran, and Maine Democratic candidate for Senate. “If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.” (New York Times, 04.26.26)

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“I always look for exits every time I’m in a room,” said Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida and a target of an assassination plot in October 2024. “We can do a lot of stuff, we can mitigate it. But if someone really wants to try to cause harm, it’s almost impossible to prevent it.” (New York Times, 04.28.26)

“I saw this gorgeous photo on social media, and I was like, ‘How can I get myself here as fast as possible’?” said Julia Morrow, 26, an Ohio retail worker visiting Fujiyoshida during the peak of Japan's cherry blossom season. “If you don’t get that photo, it’s like, what’s the point of the trip?” (New York Times, 04.28.26)

“When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America,” said Kevin McCarthy, the former House Republican leader shortly after leaving Congress in 2023. “When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.” (New York Times, 04.28.26)

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“A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Max Tegmark, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit trying to reduce catastrophic technology risks. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.” (New York Times, 04.29.26)

“The internet restrictions [in Russia] have turned a large number of people against the ruling class, if not against Vladimir Putin personally,” said Mikhail Komin, a political scientist at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “That’s why we’re seeing approval ratings drop and people who never spoke out on political issues suddenly getting political.” (New York Times, 04.29.26)

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"I don’t have any problem with Trump being a Republican," said CBS Late Night host Stephen Colbert.  "I have a problem with Trump being a complete narcissist who is only working for his own interest and does not appear to care if the entire world burns. That’s not a partisan position. I have eyeballs and ears, and I think calling late night partisan is just roughing the ref. And we don’t even want to be refs, but they perceive us as refs. I reject the partisan description. Partisan means you’re never, ever going to make a joke about a Democrat, and that’s just not true. There’s just no comparison of how fertile the fields are." (New York Times, 04.30.26)

“The first Americans I met in life were the characters I met in my treasured childhood novels,” British Queen Camilla said during a public appearance at the New York Public Library. “I knew even then: The books are best friends you can have, in good times and bad.”  (New York Times, 04.30.26)

“The Americans obviously have no strategy,” said German chancellor Friedrich Merz, “and the problem with such conflicts is always that you don’t just have to go in, you also have to get out again. We saw that very painfully in Afghanistan for 20 years. We saw that in Iraq. So this situation is, as I said, at least ill-considered, and I do not see at the moment what strategic exit the Americans are choosing now.”  (New York Times, 04.30.26)

The Balusters (5*)

If David Lindsay-Abaire had listened to Jesus ("Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her") this set would have remained empty of its uniformly terrific ensemble cast, assembled to represent America's most diverse neighborhood association of equal-opportunity hypocrites locked in a battle between preservation and progress.  

Like newcomer Kyra (the ageless Anika Noni Rose), who hosts the meetings at her impeccably decorated upper-middle-class home, I needed Elliott (Richard Thomas, a native New Yorker), the association president, to explain the meaning of "baluster," an architectural term.  By the end of this intermissionless, two-hour dramedy--the kind that used to be the meat and potatoes of Broadway--it turns out that a vertical support for a porch railing can be wielded as a weapon, too, both literally and figuratively.

The Balusters also proves that all politics are local, as Tip O'Neill, a powerful Speaker of the House (remember them?), once famously proclaimed.  Elliott wants to stop a disabled resident of their landmarked neighborhood from installing historically inaccurate balusters; Kyra is more interested in solving a traffic problem she fears may endanger her children.  

Black and white horns lock. while alliances and zingers galore emerge among the association's membership who include an Asian lesbian (Jeena Yi) whose legal skills enable her to execute a long-overdue and wholly justified coup; a Jewish matron (Margaret Colin) who selects her maids based on their nationality and wears a rabbit fur coat to press the buttons of the association's youngest member, a politically correct heiress (Kayli Carter) who inspires a White Girl Tears wager; a not-yet doddering woman (Marylouise Burke) almost as old as the neighborhood; a macho Latino contractor (Ricardo Chavira, from Desperate Housewives) who probably voted for our current president; an almost-woke middle-aged teacher who might as well be named Caspar Milquetoast (Michael Esper); and a travel writer (Carl Clemons-Hopkins, from Hacks) whose gaydar seriously malfunctions, revealing his own prejudices.  Even though many in the group only vaguely recall meeting Kyra's new Filipino housekeeper (Marina-Christina Oliveras) she remembers their drink preferences and knows the meltdown secret of Elliot, her former employer.

Although Lindsay-Abaire stacks the deck heavily in Kyra's favor from the beginning, I found myself sympathizing more with Elliott for reasons that had less to do with the issues and motivations explored by the play or Kenny Leon's superb, fast-paced direction than the experience of watching it.  Like the former John Boy, I'm now an old white man, one who longs to sit in a theatre with an audience respectful enough to put their phones away during a live performance.  If it means picking up a baluster, so be it.

Guggenheim Discoveries

Self-Portrait (ca 1909-1910)

Gabriele Münter, an early 20th-century German artist drew me to the Guggenheim, not Carol Bove, whose toothpaste-reminiscent "Victoria" (2026) greets visitors at the entrance.

But I'll start with Bove, because the unique installation of her work flatters its abstraction, a style that doesn't usually appeal to me.  She also serves on the board of the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, where I had just seen a terrific exhibition.

"Vase Face I/The Ascent to Heaven on a Dentist's Chair" (2022)

Bove's twisty sculptures and straight line of mirrors--recycled from a previous exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--complements the sinuous curves of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture.

Is it sexist to attribute Bove's use of bright color to her gender? Stainless steel seems like such a "masc" medium otherwise, although in this context it feels much cooler than the fiery mills where brawny workers produce it.

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" (2019)

"Second Cartesian Sculpture" (partial, 2014) & Hieroglyph (2013)

"Peel's foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep" (2013)

Some of the work is so recent that Bove must have created it with the exhibit space in mind. Knowing the Guggenheim will display what you're creating:  what could be more motivating?  The Met gave her the same opportunity when it commissioned her sculpture for its facade.

"Sweet Charity" by Carol Bove (partial, 2026)

"Widdershins 81, 82, 87, and 88" (2026)

Bove's ouevre is quite varied.

Untitled (2016)

Shells and peacock feathers are among the natural materials that she occasionally incorporates into her work; fastidiousness characterizes their arrangement.

"The Foamy Saliva of a Horse"  (partial,  2011)

Walking on this rug must induce self-consciousness.

"Untitled (The Middle Pillar)" (2007)

Although Bove, a California girl until she dropped out of high school in Berkeley, has spent her career working primarily in New York City, her art only occasionally betrays its origins, in this case the precise positioning of the stars at a specific place and time.

"The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 pm" (partial, 2007)

She also pays homage to one of my favorite '60s icons with a startling, barely-there portrait.  Bove wasn't born until 1971, although she also used Playboy centerfolds as the basis for a series of equally faint paintings.

"Twiggy" (2004)

She collages, too.

Her approach is more architectural than thematic.

Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World

I can't believe I was completely unfamiliar with Gabriele Münter's Expressionist painting.  Oh, wait, yes I can:  she's a woman of an earlier century.

"Head of a Young Girl" (1908)

Münter, born in Berlin to wealthy parents who took her drawing talent seriously, credits Wassily Kandinsky--seen below at the far right, she's at the far left--for teaching her how to use a palette knife to unleash the creative energy that too often had been dissipated into painstaking brushstrokes.  They were lovers for a decade, and briefly engaged before World War I intervened.

"After Tea II (Kandinsky with the Art Dealer Goltz at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich" (1912)

Paul Gaugin clearly influenced Münter's use of bright color which seems more radical in Bavaria than the South Seas.  With money she inherited from her parents--both of whom were deceased by the time she turned 21--she purchased a summer house in Murnau.  She and Kandinsky lived and painted there together, decorating the place with their art, before he returned to Moscow and married another woman.  She stopped painting for nearly a decade as a result of his betrayal.

"Lion Hunt" by Vasily Kandinsky (1911)

"Santa Francisca" by Vasily Kandinsky (1911)

Münter kept the house until her death in 1962 at the age of 85.  During World War II, she successfully hid paintings by both artists from the Nazis who considered their art "degenerate."

"Sunset over Staffelsee" (1910)

Here, Münter has depicted herself rowing an imperious Kandinsky across Lake Staffelsee, along with a friend and her child.  She often invites viewers of her art to adopt her point of her view but in this scene, it looks as if she may always have contributed more to their relationship than he did.

"Boating" (1910)

"In the Salon" (1911)

Münter excels at capturing the simple pleasures of life, particularly in a domestic setting.

"Still Life on the Train (After Shopping)" by Gabriele Münter (1909-12)

She spent World War I in Scandinavia, waiting for Kandinsky to join her, but he visited only once, not long after she arrived in 2015.  Nevertheless, she stayed until 1920, during which time she had the biggest solo show of her career. 

"Future (Woman in Stockholm)" (1917)

Her work continued to evolve after she and Kandinsky parted ways.

It's hard to imagine a more perfect winter morning.

"Breakfast of the Birds" (1934)

Life Can't Be Stopped:  Robert Rauschenberg

"Not for me," would be my typical response to a work by Robert Rauschenberg, barely giving it a glance.  No longer.  Maybe, like Stephen Sondheim, he's an acquired taste who requires patience and a bit more depth of perception than my idolatry of Andy Warhol demands.  Both were gay, though Rauschenberg married to hide it.  He and his wife divorced in 1953, the year of my birth, and he had relationships with both Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly before settling down with his former assistant for nearly 25 years.  Maybe I should give them a second look, too.

Silkscreened images that Rauschenberg clipped from newspapers and magazines, as well as his own photos, comprise "Barge," a monochromatic canvas 32 feet long.  It may very well be his visually rendered, nuclear-age equivalent of "My Favorite Things." The Sound of Music had opened on Broadway just a few years earlier. 

Maybe I'm stretching the pop culture allusions a little thin, but this sculpture seems as if it could be a colorful riposte to the black-and-white Beatles album cover, released the year before.

Revolver II (1967)

But this 1968 lithograph is the work that really changed my tune, no doubt because autobiography has long been my thing with both an unpublished memoir, Homosaic, and this blog which Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence, this week described as "a staggering archive of cultural witness-bearing."  AI certainly has mastered sycophancy; Rauschenberg, visual symbolism.  It's hard to see in small reproduction--Autobiography is a floor-to-ceiling work--but the three panels are a personalized 20th century Rosetta Stone for anyone interested in the Texan-born artist who shares a hometown with Janis Joplin.  There's his full-body X-ray and astrological chart at the top (he's a Libra); he uses his circularly printed CV, embedded with a childhood photo, as a kind of fingerprint; and at the bottom, the thirtysomething Rauschenberg is an aesthetic action figure, rollerskating from Port Arthur to New York City to perform in Pelican, propelled by parachute.  He's truly a master of analog compression.

'

Rauschenberg eventually began to incorporate other materials into his collaged works, including dishtowels.

"Cot" (1980)

He printed this image from "Easter Lake" (Galvanic Suite)--which I'm definitely adding to my bicycle collection--on galvanized steel in 1988.

(partial)

But his experimentation wasn't just a product of artistic restlessness.  After learning that the chemicals he used for silkscreening were bad for the environment, he began exploring ink jet printing with soy and vegetable dyes as an alternative.  He used this technique for "Bilbao Scraps [Anagram (A Pun)]" which features photos he took in the Spanish city when the Guggenheim mounted a retrospective of his work, a decade before his death.

Other Discoveries

Maybe I'd seen these paintings before, maybe I hadn't.  This time they made an impression.

"Madame Cézanne" by Paul Cézanne (ca 1885-87)

Say what you will about the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, but some great European art emerged from the wreckage of the revolutions and war mongering.

"Morning in the Village after Snowstorm" by Kazimir Malevich (1912)

Knight Errant" by Oskar Kokoschka (1914-15)

"Portrait of an Old Man (Johann Harms)" by Egon Schiele (1916)

"The Blue Blouse" (Mrs. Oscar Olson) by Gabriele Münter (1917)

I never would have guessed who painted this.

"Bird on a Tree" by Pablo Picasso (1928)

Two Strangers Carrying A Cake Across New York (4*)

 

"Two Strangers" felt like a homecoming, not only because I returned to Broadway after a four-month absence but because the show thrillingly celebrates what it feels like to fall in love with New York City for the first time.  

I'd wanted to see it before departing for Florida but the wait afforded me the opportunity to familiarize myself with cast recordings from both sides of the pond.  Chiffon immediately added three songs to his 2025 playlist, an unusually high number for a single score. With New York, the opening number, two songwriting teams--Comden and Green, and Kander and Ebb--finally have some 21st century competition; it impresses as much with its savvy movie allusions, including Midnight Cowboy ("I'm walkin' here"), as its unbridled, infectious enthusiasm. What'll It Be cleverly captures the directionless yearning of a barista and He Doesn't Exist tenderly warns how a son's desire for a relationship with an absent father can mask can mask the reality of the situation.

Christiani Pitts as Robin, a no-nonsense native New Yorker, and Sam Tutty as Dougal, in town from London for his father's nuptials to Robin's sister, command the revolving luggage carousel stage set with chemistry, charm and talent galore for just over two hours, to say nothing of a very visible band that seems never to take a breath.  Tutty, IMHO, has the slightly heavier lift because both his cockiness and looks bear a slight resemblance to the current occupant of the White House as a young man. Let's hope Tutty's preternatural bravado--which should certainly earn him a Tony Award nomination--doesn't age into insane megalomania.

The book, unfortunately, is more-than-occasionally farfetched, especially in terms of the revelations that drive it.  Jim Barne and Kit Buchan develop the personalities and motivations of Robin and Dougal much better than they do the mechanics of a rom com that sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. This also explains why the original cast recordings left me clueless about the action on stage.

In the end, however, it doesn't matter.  Two Strangers Carrying A Cake Across New York is an utterly delicious romp that delivers laughter, goosebumps and tears in equal measure.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (5*)

Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an abusive European artist with a cheekily chosen name, makes only brief appearances at the beginning and end of Kiran Desai's wondrous, utterly heartfelt novel, but he's central to its theme in his role as a monstrous and manipulative overseer of Western culture.  After all, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ends up being exactly the book he forbids Sonia from writing while he's busily--and successfully--stealing her culture (and virginity) for himself.

We know from the outset that she's no fool, and probably inspired by the author, who won the Booker Prize more than two decades ago, at the ripe old age of 36.  As Sonia writes in her thesis:

Superstition possessed the richness of art. A fantastic tale was another kind of mirror, another kind of metaphor, a way to expose larger-than-life brutalities, a rot beyond rational understanding, a way to say things about a dictator you could never say outright. Also, there was the practical purpose of being able to leap between times and places, to reveal patterns and connections beyond the reach of a realistic book in realistic time.

Desai has done just that and more in an "arranged" love story that explores multiple parental and other family perspectives as thoroughly as those of the protagonists, including their unquestioning acceptance of the caste system.  As Sonny's Uncle Ravi says in an observation that captures the novel's meandering narrative:

Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down. 

Desai moves confidently between India and America with brief detours to Italy--including a dramatic reveal in the "obscure" Fortuny Museum, which I had visited just months earlier--and Mexico, where Sunny has taken refuge in a North American country populated by brown people at just the moment that America loses it innocence.  Her characters' reactions to the September 11th terrorist attack--which intrude on their sympathies--are the gut reactions of people long traumatized both directly and indirectly by the global oppression of colonialism: now they know what if feels like to be on the receiving end.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny plunges readers into the worlds of two young Indians whose lives don't really seem to begin until they reach America as college students. The title characters are fulfilling the dreams of their parents, the first generation of south Asians who look to the United States rather than the United Kingdom for self-validation. Both fall into relationships with white people. Sonia's near enslavement to Ilan is uniquely scarring and does metaphorical duty with a significant dose of magical realism, while Sunny's infatuation with Ulla gives Desai an opportunity to generalize broadly about the dynamics of mixed relationships from the perspective a man with significantly more agency. 

Sunny overheard Mala [a mutual friend] begin to denounce the disheartening and repetitive occurrence of Indian boys running after white American women, always picking the most pallid, androgynous ones, the kind who withdrew to spend moody hours scribbling in diaries. This was what attracted them, said Mala, because no Indian woman was bequeathed enough privacy to thus indulge herself with a solipsistic obsession over her own psychology—encouraged to chart the fluctuations of her temperament in response to deep crises that were inevitably banal. These women, meanwhile, realized they could snag a Third World man far higher up the ladder of class and money than any fellow white American, where their prospects were dim, simply by using the bargaining power of their citizenship and their pale complexion.

  

The question of how Sonia and Sunny will end their loneliness drives Desai's six-hundred plus page novel which never flags.  It veers from scorching analysis to comic observation about the differences between Indian and American culture.

Why was it that in the Western world, snooping to uncover a crime was a worse crime than the actual crime! Ulla’s civilization was built upon not snooping and wandering about naked. Sunny’s civilization was based on donning your clothes and listening to every conversation.

*  *  *  *  *

While Sunny understood that Ulla was emphasizing that he had never invited her to join him on a trip to India, he was intrigued to be traveling to a part of the country that was unreachable to a foreigner, an America he could never see on his own. A mythic land imbued with memories of Dust Bowl poverty, of fields worked by migrant labor, of proms, sports heroes, and cheerleaders; six hours to the nearest mall; real cowboys swearing genuine curses on cattle farms; a black-sheep uncle covered in tattoos in a trailer park; an ancestor whose diary from the Civil War indicated he didn’t know which side he was fighting for, although he had carefully recorded each time he ate bacon.

*  *  *  *  *

All of us Indians who are educated to be Westernized are fated to make the same journey. If we have any intelligence or any heart, we have to search for ourselves backward. This was true of Gandhi, it was true of Nehru, it is true of me, and it will be true of your generation. You may think it a fine thing to be in America, and when you’re young, making your way, there’s enough reason to be anywhere in the world—but eventually you begin to wonder who you should have become instead of the person that you are.

*  *  *  *  *

He sat for a long time by his one window holding the miraculous piece of paper, experiencing the seismic shift to his fate from heaviness to lightness, weighing this lightness of being against the gravity of what had occurred, mulling, as if at an occasion where one simply does not know what to feel, what to think, how to behave—as at a circumcision, a loss of virginity, a rite of passage that is a wake and a celebration at the same time. He anticipated that no struggle would feel as important or real as this one. The green card would proceed staidly to citizenship, he’d live at an even farther, safer distance from true life, and life would never be quite real again.

In the end, Desai proves Thomas Wolfe, who wrote a classic American doorstopper about a young writer, wrong:  you can go home again even if you have been successful in your pursuit of the Indian Holy Grail.

(PPE) Punster Provocateur Extraordinaire

"Big Feet" (1995)

Inflatables remind me of suburban car dealerships and tacky holiday decorations in Lake Worth Beach.  But artist Pat Oleszko has been employing them in service of her irreverent performance art since 1980.  

Here's what she has to say about "Blowhilda," her first, in the essential catalog for a button-pushing exhibit at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City.

The first performances with inflatables characterized newspaper stories blown out of proportion. "Blowhilda" represents the Munich Opera in protest. The opera staged a ‘mouth-out’ strike during the final act of Die Meistersinger Nürnberg, where singers moved their lips but emanated no sounds. They got their raise.

Much of Oleszko's work, which includes sculptures that don't need to be blown up, remains absolutely contemporary.  Look no further than the basement for evidence.  Believe it or not, she created the "O-men" in 1974.  

"Fool Disclosure" opened at the Sculpture Center a month before this loathed figure began bombing the shit out of Iran.

"DUMP DA TRUMPTY ON HIS GREAT THRONE" (2025)

Nor did she spare George W. Bush, another president who invaded the Middle East for no good reason.

"WarUSaurUs" & "Miss Ill Cluster"  (2007)

Closer to home,  Oleszko called gentrification from the get-go.  

"Yupasaurus II" (1987)

The Yup starred in a film and performance chronicle of The Free Little Pig, as an artist who was constantly forced to relocate because of ever-avid real estate monsters. Finally, after building her dream house, acclaim comes to the Free world and, she doesn’t sell out.

And I love how she turned the "domino theory"--an American anti-communism strategy responsible for the war in Viet Nam--on its head shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A tribute to those joyous moments when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Poland stands first amidst the Eastern Bloc that collapsed communism in rubble without pause.

It's probably no coincidence that Oleszko's father, a chemical engineer, immigrated to Detroit from Poland.

Oleszko once boiled her artistic method to “using all the world as a stooge," in part because of the portability of the inflatables which allowed her to perform almost anywhere.  I'm truly sorry I never caught her act.

No doubt, her heavy emphasis on sexual politics limited her appeal and recognition mostly to the "underground" (aka the usual ghetto for female artists), although she did appear as Lady Liberty on the cover of Ms. magazine in 1976.

Oleszko moved to New York shortly after earning her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  Some of her early sculptural work lovingly skewers the first-wave feminist movement of her generation.  Female stereotypes of the era face off in a basement corridor.   How underground can you get?

Women's Libber (1971)

"Baby Hippy"  & "DAR (Daughter of the American Revolution") (1971)

"Little Old Lady" (1971)

Gloria Steinem, of course, was once employed as a Playboy bunny.  

Playboy Bunny (1971)

Oleszko went even farther out on a limb than Steinem.  Here's what she has to say about "Big Pussy" from 1989:  An homage to my mentor, burlesque queen Rose La Rose (who named me “Pat the Hippy Strippy”) during my side gig stripping while in college, an early and lifelong exploration and benign exploitation of female forums and forms.

Although her work can shock

"Womb with a View" (1990) & "Mr. Green Jeans" (2000)

. . . its essential truth, usually delivered with a humorous punch, cannot be denied. 

"Duh Nincompope" (1999)

Never mind that I was in residence at the esteemed American Academy in Rome and eventually landed in the slammer for posing as Duh Nincompope at the Vatican, a tiny rendition of pomposity toting a Supersoaker filled with holy water.

The tape measure at the bottom kills me!

Oleszko seems resolutely binary in her attitude about gender.  At least women in her caricatures get real heads.

Men, for the most part, are buffoons.

The fat buoys were the foil for Oldilocks, an interloper who, after the original conflicts about food and lodging were resolved, was finally accepted by that Arm-y of Three when she began serving booze-laced porridge and life improved

all ‘round.

"Three Bozos" (1985)

I read the ads. I got the books. I could be the man I’d always wanted to be. Pumping irony was my game. Sew and ye shall reap.

Nobody but a baby boomer will recognize who Oleszko is spoofing here.

"Charles Patless" and "Barbells for Charles Patless" by Pat Oleszko (1980)

Fashion catches her gimlet eye, too.  Apparently she enjoyed her nights out at Studio 54 and the Mudd Club.

"Knee-o-Fashism: Wendy Wear-With-All and Her Sole Sister, Ms. Trixie" (1994)

Oleszko, nearing 80, is still going strong.  "Nora's Ark," sculpted just last year, incorporates animal crackers, likely an ironic allusion to the traditional women's work of feeding children instead of merely herding animals onto a boat as her husband reputedly did to get star billing in the oh-so-patriarchal Bible.