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That bit of advice I issued the Met Opera came before I’d seen the new ad campaign they’re doing. I saw a poster in the subway station yesterday. There’s a picture of Netrebko doing her torch song diva act with the legend, (if I recall correctly, I was scurrying), “The Voice Must Be Heard.”  Nice. Effective.

Yes, Netrebko’s persona has become trademarked, but so has every other opera singer in her/his forties. And if it works, as in, if it fills the theater, more power to her.

Kind of the way I feel about Misty Copeland. She and her handlers cleverly made the trajectory of her personal advancement a referendum on the integration of African-Americans into the ballet firmament. They are, of course, two separate things entirely, but if she is really bringing new audiences into the theater, more power to her.

It’s brought us Trump even being considered a possibility for public office. It’s brought us the spectacle of Bill Gates threatening to throw chickens down Bolivia’s way. It’s the idea that Sheryl Sandberg would be an appropriate secretary of the Treasury.

It’s the obsequious worship of corporate kingpins and the myth-making spun by the politicians they purchase and the “mainstream” media they own.

It’s why you can have a biography of–and movie about– Steve Jobs that never deign to mention how his fortune was made possible by government-funded research. It’s Obama coming to the overt, public defense of Tim Miller’s self-styled right to engineer Apple’s tax-evasion.

It’s what allows Big Pharma to take government-funded medical discoveries and put them beyond the reach of the public via extortionate pricing.

It’s the endless indoctrination we are subjected to in which corporate chiefs are turned into completely autonomous, self-created superheroes.

Obama seems to have lost even the most perfunctory interest in letting us delude ourselves into thinking he is what he is isn’t–and never was.

Now his administration is working as an enforcer arm for Apple, fighting the European Union when it insists that the corporation stop tax evading in their home ground.

Apple CEO Tim Miller already disgraced himself brazenly announcing that he will continue to tax evade until his corporation gets the U.S. tax rate it wants.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all do that?

Therefore, Miller has in all likelihood turned into the perfect candidate for Treasury Secretary! I mean, hasn’t he?

One can just imagine those long, profound discussions he and Sheryl Sandberg have about how creatively their companies evade paying their taxes.

It occurred to me again, as  I read Richard Eskow’s takedown of Megan McArdle’s duplicitous, shoddily-reasoned defense of the health insurance industry, that we have an awful lot. . say, a glut?. . . of business writers in the “mainstream” media, and almost none reporting on labor.

A certain holiday is coming up. .  does our “mainstream” media even know what the name signifies?

One day the Minerva cafe on West 4th Street is bustling, the all-window facade connecting consumpters inside with street activity–and the next day, brown paper is shrouding those windows.

Yes, another special Village place goes belly-up. .  I wonder what the rent hike was going to be?

He laid bare the sham of private charter schools:

the way that the public  education system is allowed to rot, defunded of even basic building repairs, while

TAXPAYER money goes to fund privatized education.

Which pays CEOS a great deal and pays teachers less than they receive in public ed, where they are of course often performing heroic duty in the face of grevious conditions caused by the systemic under-and-de funding, as more and more public funds are shunted to private charters.

Remember mandatory art/music classes? Remember phys ed? Remember public school buildings that weren’t mouldering around the students’ ears?

A few kids are allowed to escape the sinking public ed ship into alleged charter heaven/haven, while the rest are left to founder. (Not that charter schools necessarily provide better quality education.)

Of course the charter-ites are freaking out over Oliver!

But infinitely different —

I’ve convened Richard Strauss week, listening to (s0 far) three Ariadnes, one Rosenkavalier, and one Arabella.

Each stellar conductor/singer/(sometimes) orchestra makes you feel that that’s exactly the way it should be–no one could be better.

And then you savor the next iteration. . . .

I thought, No, it couldn’t be. . . but it was.

That kind of olive/Nile green linen slipover, placket midway-down-the-front shirt with purple knit collar–

The one I wore a lot in 1988–visual documentation exists in that snapshot of me with the great Barbara (BIBA) Hulanicki in Miami.

I reached way over in my clothes rack and fished it out. Impacted with the dust of ages, it actually irritated my nostrils. But it is intact.

Hand-washed it, then put it back. But I might still go out in it again.

That would be in the tradition of CZ Guest–I would have abhorred her politics, but love the way she’d come in from Long Island for a do, wearing a thirty-year-old Mainbocher.

Thrifty WASPS–I know all about them.

One good thing about Hillary:

She’s got Joseph Stiglitz advising her!

And the great economist–he’d be a lot better Treasury Secretary than Sheryl Sandberg–is blasting Obama’s lame-duck end-run plans for the heinous TPP.

When I interviewed her for Wilde Times last November, she told me about Wilde and Hayden:

“I loved the way they were out of themselves and into what they were doing and what they were expressing. They were real artists in the company. Tanny was, too.”