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)

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“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)

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“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)

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"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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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)

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“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, 

Proud Zionist

Now that Zionism has become more a knee-jerk accusation than description, a visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage:  A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Lower Manhattan provided a useful lesson about what the term meant a century ago, when Israel was an aspiration, not a right-wing government that I abhor as much as our own. Realpolitik has transformed the dream into a nightmare.

Had the Garden of Stones been open, I would have been able to see the Statue of Liberty from the second floor as well as the Staten Island Ferry.  The museum is impressively--and symbolically--situated.  I'd meant to visit when artifacts from the Anne Frank house were exhibited last year, but missed the opportunity, perhaps because I'd already seen them in Amsterdam twenty-five years earlier.

Art of Freedom: The Life & Work of Arthur Szyk finally got me in the door for the first time even though the museum has been open for more than two decades. His name recognition may have faded, but his life as a proud Pole, Jew, Zionist and American remains exemplary. The British and Polish-in-Exile governments, recognizing his illustrative talent and the power of his political cartoons, dispatched him to North America 1939 as a propagandist against the Axis powers. 

"Bubbe" from Celebration of Life (1936)

"Schmoozing" from Celebration of Life (1936)

"Poland on a Platter" (1939)

Shortly after his arrival in New York City in late 1940, he pulled out the venomous stops. There's a LOT going on in this work, just 14" x 13," but the perfect size for reproduction on a magazine cover.  Can you find Mussolini, Goebbels, Göring and Tojo?

"Anti-Christ" (1942)

The museum has enlarged the detailed painting considerably--making the tiny skulls in Hitler's eyes more apparent--and provided a key helpful in spotlighting less obvious details. Szyk embedded the Latin phrase "vae victis" (which means "woe to the vanquished") in the dictator's slicked-back hair. The banner in German held above the skeleton's head at the top declares "Europe is ours today, tomorrow the whole world."  

There's nothing subtle about Szyk's caricatures which appeared in Esquire and Collier's magazines, often on the cover.  To its credit, the museum connects the dots between his racist and dehumanizing depictions of the Japanese and Germans to the interment of American citizens whose ancestors immigrated from those countries.  Sometimes, the ends do justify the means.

"December 7, 1941" (Esquire, 1942) 

This wartime public service advertisement from Young and Rubicam informs readers that "By means of a series of sly rumors and clever propaganda, the Nazis are attempting to pit class against class, race against race in America." It exhorts American companies to appoint "rumor wardens," something we need just as desperately in Trumpian America, where some people believe that Haitian immigrants dined on cats in Springfield, Ohio, fake news that no doubt made their subsequent loss of Temporary Protection status more palatable.  

"Detour on the Glory Road" (Esquire, 1942)

I'm really surprised I didn't see this stirring work reproduced in the Warsaw Rising Museum.   It's as if Szyk had illustrated Mila 18, a novel by Leon Uris published a decade after his death.  Uris did for the Jews in best-selling fiction what Szyk accomplished in art.

"The Repulsed Attack (Warsaw Ghetto)" (1943)

Szyk's work may remain better known in the United States than Poland.  When I searched the website for the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I found only a single item in its collection, his illustrated edition from 1928 of the Statute of Kalisz, a decree that made Poland one of Europe's most welcoming places for Jews in the Middle Ages.  Szyk highlights his tribe's contributions to Polish life with this depiction of tradesmen and craftsmen.  His father worked as a textile factory director until a worker threw acid at his face during the Łódź insurrection,  permanently blinding him when Szyk was just 11 years old.  

 

In 1948, the year Szyk became an American citizen, he published The Holidays, looking back at his roots in Łódź.  The paintings feature the likenesses of his parents and other family members, the only time he ever incorporated a personal element into his work.  I recognized Purim because of the hamantaschen in the lower right-hand corner.  An orthodox Jewish printing company I once worked with for years delivered a batch to my office every spring.  Yum!

The museum's permanent collection documents Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust.  Much of the material presented was familiar from previous visits to Jewish museums in Amsterdam, Berlin and Krakow, as well as numerous concentration camps.  But I was particularly struck by this 1921 photograph of young Zionists gathered around the grave of Theodor Herzl in a Vienna cemetery.  These vigorous young men look less like oppressors than idealists, a group in search of a land (which migh have been Uganda!) where they could thrive and observe their holidays without being treated like second-class citizens. They also don't seem like victims which is the unfortunate stereotype that I have come to associate with most early 20th century Jews as a direct result of "Never Forget."

In fact, eighteen-year-old Szyk had spent six months touring Palestine with other writers and artists to observe nascent Jewish settlement efforts when World War I began.  Forced to return to Poland, he was conscripted in the imperial Russian army which sought to invade Germany during the Battle of Łódź.  No doubt the idea of establishing a Jewish state became even more appealing as a result.  Is it any wonder that in the wake of the Holocaust the much older and wiser artist--whose mother and brother were killed by the Nazis--used his propagandistic skills to support the creation of Israel by any means necessary, including Biblical allusions and guns?

"The Modern Maccabees" (1942)

These virile young men--who gave me Tom of Finland vibes--personify rival Jewish militias that fought together in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War which resulted in the Nakba, a perspective with which it has taken me more than 70 years to become familiar, thanks largely due to New York City's last mayoral election. Haganah (center), formed in 1920 with funding from both Poland and the United Kingdom to defend Jewish settlers from attack by Arabs, initially wasn't as militant as Irgun and the Sternists but after World War II it, too, attacked the British occupiers of Palestine who had begun turning away Holocaust survivors and other Jews with nowhere else to go.  Once Israel finally became an independent country--with the support of the United Nations--these militias comprised the Israeli army, long respected throughout my lifetime for its sill and ferociousness.

"Irgun, Haganah, Sternists" (1947)

When Israel declared its independence on May 10, 1948, Szyk said it was the happiest day of his life.  He promptly set to work illuminating the document in Hebrew.

By then, he and his family had settled in New Canaan, Connecticut where he remained until his death three years later.  Illuminating the U.S. Declaration of Independence was one of his final projects although he also continued to produce work that reflected his unease with the social injustices of his adopted country.  The House Un-American Activities Committee eventually accused him of communism.  

Milestone: 50 JH Journals

The writing bug first bit in elementary school.  I vaguely remember turning in a story adopting the perspective of an animal caged in a pet store, longing for liberation, and another titled "My Ten Faces," inspired by a very weird movie starring an unrecognizable Tony Randall.  Both efforts were well-received by my teachers.

As a junior in high school, I began taking an enriched English class where I was the attractive young teacher's pet for reasons I didn't entirely understand.  Pale Miss Conroy, who wore her hair Cleopatra-style and shadowed her eyes heavily with kohl, assigned us to keep journals.  I can't remember if she read them, but when my friend Pattie read mine, surreptitiously, without my permission, she stopped speaking to me.  An entry vented suspicions I had been her second choice when she asked me to accompany her to a prom that required renting a tux and buying a corsage because she a member of the "royal court" representing Andress at another local high school.  But even then, I had been too cautious to commit my sexual orientation struggle to paper.

When I arrived at Columbia in 1971, the core curriculum included a required Humanities course where we read through the (white, male) Western canon.  Dr. Robert Belknap, an intimidating professor of Russian literature who was as tall and thin as his pointer, taught the first semester.  He gave me a B- on a paper about The Odyssey, commenting that it was "tersely" written and noting my lack of original thought.  The criticism stuck.  My writing improved more than my critical acumen over the next four years although I was very proud of a paper I aced about "New Japanese Photography." It presaged my obsession in retirement for photographing and documenting my reactions to museum exhibitions and travels on this blog.

The admissions office of Columbia's School of Journalism put me on the wait list.  I probably shouldn't have been surprised.  Although I had applied to be the editor of the Aquila, my high school newspaper, Mrs. Sanchez, our tippling journalism teacher, thought my talents would be better suited to the yearbook. Applying elsewhere would mean leaving New York City so I found a job in the publicity department of a book publisher and supplemented my meager income with an evening job at a department store.  I still had vague aspirations to be a writer and experimented with various formats including a snarky magazine article called "A Day in the Life of a Bloomingdales Employee" and "Backpedalling," a short story about engaging in anonymous sex for the first time that I shared with no one.  But the effort to come to grips with my shame opened up a desire to write honestly about my feelings again, dormant since Pattie's furious reaction to my speculative venting.  Letters home certainly didn't provide that release, although my stepmother, a romance novel reader, looked forward to my censored descriptions of 20something life and encouraged me to pursue writing in a way that no one else ever has.

I returned to journaling in a haphazard way, filling an occasional notebook purchased for the purpose, but mostly using plenty of down time at the New York Public Library to type entries on a self-correcting IBM Selectric which I hole-punched and kept in a binder.  I bought my first composition book in 1977 which offered portability, significantly increasing the opportunities for scribbling.   Early entries are a collection of random thoughts, dream descriptions, quotes from books, overheard conversations and even a few pathetic stabs at poetry.  Dates first appear when I take a solo road trip from El Paso to San Francisco in a Volkswagen Scirocco borrowed from my father.  In an analog preview of "PhotoPest," I jotted down travel observations on one side of a page and left the other blank so I could tape in snapshots of my travels once they had been developed. 

In the summer of 1980, in advance of another road trip, this one from El Paso to the Arctic Circle, I bought a fancy blank journal made in France with a grey floral cover that looked a lot like a William Morris print.  My sentences still weren't complete but I made daily entries which served as the basis for Other Frontiers a play I wrote about failing to come out to my father while camping together along the Alaska Highway for nearly a month. Dad, an inveterate letter writer, had taken notice: when we began circumnavigating Australia in December 1983, both of us would pull out our journals after dinner and record the events of the day.  Long after his death, while composing Homosaic, a memoir of my life before turning 40, I compared our entries.  Two people could not have seen Down Under or apprehended the world more differently.

By then I was on volume XI (Roman numerals gave them more serious heft!) of the blue hardcover journals--124 pages each--pictured at the top of this page and writing in complete sentences.  That had begun on April 28, 1981:

I picked up this new notebook before riding to work.  When I filed the previous one away, I noticed that it covered a greater period of time than the one prior to it.  I guess I'm not so verbose as I once was although that may change now that I've to decided to write in complete sentences.

As the bluebooks accumulated, it gave me great satisfaction to see them lined up on a shelf; even if their author would remain unpublished, they provided solid evidence that I had been writing regularly which is, of course, what successful scribes advise. Their content changed with my life and times.  Accounts of my difficult relationship's end with David, the sexual promiscuity that resulted and kvetching about what happened at the office dominate the early volumes; then AIDS rears its ugly head.

Entry, July 4, 1981 

July 4, 1981:  Barnet called to see if I would like to join him and Chris to see S.O.B  I didn't make a commitment, but later figured what the hell, it would get me out of the house at least.  By then I thought the rain would stop, but it hadn't, so when I left I dressed in my nylon rain outfit which kept me perfectly dry wherever it covered.  Only my shoes and socks were soaked by the time I reached the Baronet, where I discovered that the 4:20 p.m. show was sold out, although both Lars and Chinny Buns, wearing glasses [my nicknames for a sexy Upper West couple; the latter eventually achieved closeted television fame], as well as one of the stars of The Paper Chase and several hundred other trendy New Yorkers already had tickets.  Barnet and Chris showed up a few minutes later and because we couldn't get in, I was more eager than ever to see it.  We hung around for a couple of hours waiting for the next show . . . after we had an expensive cafe mocha under the Roosevelt Tramway, I brought up an article about a rare form of cancer I had seen in Friday's New York Times.  Recent studies indicate that it affects promiscuous homosexuals ("those who have frequent and multiple sexual encounters, as many as ten times an evening, up to four times per week") who use amyl nitrate and LSD.  Purple spots on the skin are a first symptom.  Until this study, doctors thought Kaposi's sarcoma was a slow killer found in the elderly, but now 26 cases in younger homosexual men (who also have had just about every other sexually-related disease known to man) indicate not only is it not as rare as had been believed previously, but that it may even be contagious!  This has yet to be proven, but doctors hope that it may eventually teach a great deal about what causes more common types of cancer.  Medical guinea pigs!  The tone of the article led me to conclude that the Times, which has been criticized for its avoidance of "gay news," has adopted a new strategy:  all of the unpalatable homosexual news that's fit to print."  Some long-suppressed radicalism may be rearing its head here, but I found the statistic about the men who have been diagnosed as having KS almost beyond belief and certainly difficult to substantiate.  Yet it was included so matter-of-factly under the headline RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS that a casual reader might easily think that 40 sexual encounters per week was common.  Neither Barnet nor Chris [a dancer at the time who eventually directed a film called Test] had seen the article so they weren't able to discuss these ramifications, nor were they eager to hear me rant about them.

Ramifications, indeed.  Suddenly I was writing my own Journal of the Plague Years which continued as soon as I returned to work when my lesbian boss referred to it as "Spencer's disease," referring to a co-worker with the tell-tale purple spots who was out sick.  Many years later, I learned that Spencer Beach, who loved opera and Brideshead Revisited, had been one of the epidemic's first casualties in New York City.

While re-reading the blue books has been a source of continuing fascination at various ages, I avoid volumes XXI through XXIII when the disease claimed David who had been diagnosed in 1991 and was gone just two years later, along with my father, who had suffered a fatal stroke just six months before.  Their deaths convinced me of writing's therapeutic value; letting my raw feelings flow through my pen helped me flush them from my consciousness.  It also seemed like I had nothing else to lose.

By that time, entries had become less frequent, though longer.  I eliminated any mention of work because it made for very dull re-reading.  Capturing the experience of sharing a house in the Pines, begun in 1988, was way more exciting.  Entries became focused on summer weekends or out-of-the-ordinary happenings in my life, and were often timed to the (every third) Friday nights when I washed my clothes at the laundromat or weekend afternoons as I surveyed the Ramble from a park bench.  Although I almost never wrote in front of my friends, I enjoyed being seen scribbling away by strangers, some of whom were even bold enough to approach. A stunned father of young children in the West Palm Beach airport reacted as if he were witnessing the birth of calligraphy when I explained what I was doing and for how long.  He clearly didn't have the time for endless self-examination.

Remember "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles from 1979?  Blogging nearly vanquished my blue books just three months before 9/11 when I was between jobs and pseudonymously started Chasing Rapture, "the picaresque adventures of an unemployed gay sex addict in Manhattan and Fire Island Pines."  The new medium deserved some formal experimentation, too, cribbed from the shorthand used to hook up using AOL "Man for Man" chatrooms:  "you" became "u," dialog (without quotation marks) and thoughts were italicized, capitalization was abandoned except for proper nouns, ellipses replaced periods and I linked to external websites whenever possible because I read that doing so could improve your search ranking in Google.  In other words, I was hunting for an audience and was soon rewarded with a sole "follower" (nomenclature that hadn't yet become familiar), Dante Woo whose cheerleading was a powerful motivator, although I already had learned to be suspicious of virtual relationships.

Two years later, again jobless for the summer, I hit upon the idea of chronicling my time in the Pines with a jaundiced eye in an ancillary blog. The House of Six MEs delighted some of my housemates (the Expatriate), others not so much (Testa Grande, who was offended that I referred to a group of his day tripping friends as the Freeloader Cartel).  The Curmudgeon even kept a journal of his own.  I'll never forget the night we discovered that we had attended the same party long before becoming friends. We compared entries as soon as we returned to the city; neither of us had mentioned the other, but it quickly became apparent that my journal was much bitchier than his, as Pattie had learned in high school.

Unfortunately, blogging cannibalized my journal keeping.  The span of time covered in subsequent volumes widened significantly.  During my late 20s, a single year could yield four volumes; by age 40, I barely filled one annually.  And when my career finally kicked into high gear, often months would pass before I sat down at my schoolboy desk to write.  My journaling hit rock bottom in Volume XXXVI which took more than four years to complete.

Retirement in 2014 again increased the frequency of entries; it also gave me the time to read through boxes of letters my father had written after I decided to remain in New York City upon graduation from college.  His voluminous, often repetitive accounts of working on what he proudly called his "stable" of four automobiles (three VWs and a Corvair), written in longhand on yellow legal pads, had bored me upon receipt but with the perspective of age they didn't seem so different than my early journal entries about cruising the Ramble: clearly, we both felt a compulsion to document our passions.  Had he passed down a writing gene?

When I celebrated my 70th birthday in the Pines, Christine toasted the occasion by noting that  "no one I know has documented their life more than Jeff."  Of course this also means that I have written about my friends extensively both publicly on this blog and privately in my journal.  The latter includes two or three entries each year about the growth of Magda and Zoltan, my god children, usually composed after birthday or holiday visits to New Jersey, and who continue to make regular appearances now as adults. They add a level of detail to memories that photos can't of enjoying kids without the responsibility of raising them.

I began ordering blue books in bulk quite some time ago; after completing the 50th, I now have two left. If I continue to travel, which precipitates most recent entries, they should last until the summer of 2028, shortly before I turn 75, my self-determined expiration date.  But their continuation interests me less now than their eventual disposition.  It's a quandary I faced when deciding what to do with my parents' photo albums.  Throwing the visual evidence of Ken's and Mary's lives away seemed too much like discarding them.   So  I scanned and posted many of the photos on this blog in a kind of digital resurrection that will last as long as Blogger remains accessible.

JH Journal Volume L (July 16, 2025 - July 6, 2026)

Discontinued software or the elimination of an internet platform doesn't threaten my journals, however, and as the end of this branch of the Hon family tree, I can't decide what should be done with them. On the one hand, I'm convinced they've served a mostly therapeutic purpose: who cares how I reacted to the Challenger Explosion or planes crashing into the Twin Towers?  On the other, I have the sense that there can't have been too many gay men who both survived both the closet and AIDS who committed their most intimate feelings to the page for nearly 50 years.  Maybe, just maybe,  the JH Journals would be of interest to some future historian.

But I can’t forget the Pattie lesson either.  Maybe burning this voluminous record of my state of mind along with my body when I’m cremated is a safer way to go. That way the people depicted in them can remember me only for how I behaved, not what I thought.  

After all, I did rent a tux and buy a corsage.  And if memory serves (which, if nothing else, my journals have proved time and again that it doesn’t!), Pattie and I had a lovely night when we represented Andress at the Ysleta Junior Senior Prom back in 1970.

Red, White & Blue on Dartmouth Green

Desi and Della will likely be around for the nation's Tricentennial.  Imagine what their world will be like (or don't, if you're a half-empty glass kind of guy like I am).

"Hoarfrost with Rabbit" by Kiki Smith (2014), Hood Art Museum

We happened upon an Independence Day parade in Hanover, New Hampshire while checking out Dartmouth College where Victor, my former Pines housemate, is an alumnus.  

Watching the small-town parade made me feel a lot better about life in America than anything I read in the newspaper.  I felt the same way after driving to Seattle and back three summers ago.  Polarization is less apparent in person.

Wrapped samples of Red Kite Candy, tossed from this tiny Fiat, definitely elevated my blood sugar level, but in a really good way.  If the store hadn't been closed, I would have bought a box of melt-in-your-mouth caramels and I'm not usually a candy guy.

A fierce bull painted on a blue pick-up served as a reminder that they're not all like Ferdinand whom Thom and I had visited on the drive to Quechee.

Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art commissioned this work for a nearby building's exterior. Artist Ellsworth Kelly says its architecture reminded him of symmetrical Renaissance arches. Alumnus and private equity investor Leon Black paid for it before he was besmirched by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Dartmouth Panels (2012)

Victor's college experience must have been considerably different than mine, not only because the campus is somewhat rural and isolated.  Dartmouth has the Ivy League's smallest undergraduate enrollment and a reputation for conservatism.  Both of these buildings face the Green, a large town square where the paraders and locals celebrated the sweat-inducing holiday.

Dartmouth Hall

Brauner Library

Somehow, I can't imagine a petting zoo on the South Lawn.

Local firefighters displayed their trucks and equipment and gave away some red plastic hats.  Too bad Dagny was at sleep away camp for her first time.  Kids really do grow up so fast . . . 

Della always manages to find a way to provoke.  Nobody else was shouting out the British capital on their tees!

The Tricksters, a New England wedding band, really, REALLY rocked.  I never realized how much Shake It Off owes to Hey Ya!

Dartmouth is full of surprises, like this oddly tricked-out car.

We assembled for a Semiquincentennial photo op with the Founding Fathers and Abigail Adams, both a founding mother and wife if anyone's asking.

Occasional showers did not dampen Desi's enthusiasm for the pool later that afternoon.  He does love his binky.

Despite her raspberry, Della was enthusiastic about the new summer outfits Thom bought for the D-Kids.  Dagny's awaited hers in Boston.

 

I gave Desi one last spin prior to our departure Sunday morning.  Blind Moofy wanted to get in on the dizziness, too.