Lobenthal.com

The Washington Post will now provide in-depth coverage of Jeff Bezos’ decision to cut worker benefits at Whole Foods, right?

John Bolton is a proven liar and war criminal. And now the publishing industry is about to pay through the nose for a self-serving look back at his months trying to goad Trump into attacking Iran?

Boy, are they going to pay through the nose.

“The rule of law, absent from American business for several decades, may be on its way back,” Mott Stoller opines in the Guardian.

While the “mainstream” “news” media and our current slew of apocalyptic Republicans go on denying climate change, the reality of climate change continues apace.

Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement” examines the central conundrum of our time: why humanity continues to cheer on the species’ extinction. Ghosh pulls in aesthetic paralysis as well. He believes that the art form of fiction has become so concerned with domestic issues that it doesn’t seem to be able to acknowledge something as existential as climate change. Ghosh himself sets out to rectify that in his new novel, “Gun Island.”

This Tuesday, Ghosh will parley with Nathaniel West, who’s written “Losing Earth,” a history of scientist’s attempt to bring the human race into alignment with climate change reality, in the Celeste Barton Forum at the 42nd St. library.

I don’t have the stomach to actually watch Fox “News” in real time, so I thank Raw Story for pre-digesting a travesty appearance by Sanders. She demonstrated again that she is a narcissistic, sleazy, duplicitous hypocrite, pivoting from the GOP’s enabling of mass shootings to utterly vacant drivel about people not being nice to her.

Yes, Sanders actually made that equivalency.

Go ahead, Sarah, make the Democrats’ day–run for governor of Arkansas.

Her interlocutor in amoral shamming was, of course, lunatic loudmouth Jeanine Pirro.

I was talking to someone my age who recalled that back in the 1970s, it was the kids in class who were demonstrably launched on an arts or science track who were considered A-list, while the kids were going to pursue business concentrations were considered stragglers.

Then the 1980s happened.

Reagan’s America launched a mindless veneration of business and mogul-dom–a regressive return to the atavistic worship of mammon that the country seemed to have put behind it.

That led to many disastrous things in this country, among them the lone-mogul theory of political qualification that brought us Trump.

And it brought about today’s subservience to oligarchs-with-an-agenda that presents these unfit people and their self-serving, megalomaniacal agendas as the solution to the problems that they themselves have created.

In The War on the Arts in America, I describe how “The Triumph of Militarism”–our ever-more gargantuan military budget and the concomitant cutting of everything else–as well as “Media Malfunction”–the gradual expulsion from the “mainstream” media of most cultural coverage–have contributed mightily to the decline of the arts in this country.

Sen. Sanders is decrying the military budgets that have swallowed our country and the decline into meretricious vapidity of the corporate-monopolized media. And he has constructive solutions.

does he?

Shout it from the rooftops!!

It’s long past time that the Democrats start calling them what they are.

Three weeks ago, Patricia Mears gave me an advance copy of “Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse,” the catalogue for the upcoming FIT exhibit. It was even more beautiful than I’d expected: Vendome’s printing and reproductions are so pristine.

I love the photo of Hayden, Tallchief, Le Clercq together in my “Dryads of West 55th Street” essay. It embodies the spirit of the essay; it tells the story wordlessly. But in the spirit of Henry James’ “The whole of anything is never told,” I haven’t told the whole story of this photo, also in part because of caption space limitations. But I did mention that it was taken in Paris, which is for me part of the emblematic message of the photo: ballerinas of the New World bringing themselves and their recently-formed New York City Ballet to the city that cradled the art form.

They’re facing outward, off-stage but still performing, projecting amid a liminal state between full theatricality, public persona, and personal reality. They really look relaxed and happy.

I’ll give you some additional backstory:

The ballerinas are dressed as themselves, each wearing different iterations of cocktail party attire at a celebration of the “Salute a France” Festival in which NYCB participated at the Champs-Elysee theater in spring 1955.

If you look closely you’ll see that Le Clercq is fingering something and if you look more closely you’ll be able to see that Hayden and Tallchief are as well–those are little medallions they were given to commemorate their participation in the Festival. Obviously they’ve been asked to show them for the camera.

They are three distinct, strong personalities: their amperage is such that they almost become the flashbulb bursting on the page in perpetuity.