He is pillaging the American economy.
Will Rice at Americans For Tax Fairness pulls back the curtain on Apple’s latest-breaking dodge:
“Apple’s plain purpose is to curry favor with the Trump administration by creating the mirage of positive economic news closely following the tax overhaul. The goal is to obscure the fact that the new law is a massive giveaway to huge multinational corporations like Apple.”
I don’t know, the contrast between Benedetta who at forty-five when I met her looked stunning in the most humble of tops and bottoms, and the glitz overload of the Trump clan got to me.
Someone complimented my sweater yesterday and I launched into an impromptu riff channeling how Trump would have fielded it.
“Well, you know, I am so very, very fashionable. You know, when I go to Europe, everyone tells me–everyone–that I’m more fashionable than anyone in Paris, London, or Milan. In fact I’m like a really, really fashionable person. Believe me. I’m probably the most fashionable person you’ll ever meet.”
Read Sophie Bew’s profile at AnOtherMag of the “The Boldly Heroic Benedetta Barzini: Marxist, Model and Muse.”
I want to make my first E-short my account of the days I spent talking to her in Milan in 1988.
Clio Chang at Splinter writes:
“The new spending deal that Paul Ryan has put on the table to avert a looming government shutdown is a disgrace. In exchange for a stopgap measure that would fund the government for a month—something that comes with even more corporate tax cuts for multibillion dollar health insurance companies—Ryan is offering a measly six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance program. In other words, he’s turning the funding of children’s healthcare into a bargaining chip to get Democrats to vote to keep the entire country running.”
The Leaves Are Fading “is the world’s most boring ballet if you don’t do it the right way,” Tudor’s assistant Airi Hynninen told me, “if you do it the easy way.”
Kirkland did it the hard way–the real way, taking, Hynninen recalled, “incredible chances with balance and everything.”
Uh, like, isn’t that treason?
At Vox.com, Matthew Yglesias recoils from “Donald Trump’s terrifying plan to win the 2018 midterms. . . If Trump thinks a terrorist attack would serve his political interests — either through a blind rally ‘round the flag effect or by specifically validating anti-immigrant demagoguery or what have you — how hard is he really working to keep the country safe?”
Trump’s Plan B was first reported in the Washington Post.
Gelsey Kirkland in Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading was more than good, more than good enough–she was, as Tudor himself said, “stupendous.” She brought a mesmerizing profundity to her final performances of the ballet in 1983-84.
It wasn’t until December 1983 that I saw her in the ballet she’d created in 1975–it was revived by American Ballet Theatre in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center–that’s one of the few dance programs that I’ve ever kept.
An ABT dancer told me that when the company was in Boston later on that tour Charles France was heard telling someone on the phone to get up to Boston and see Leaves immediately–who knew how long she’d be able to sustain that level of performance?
When the revival bowed at the Met the following spring, Kirkland’s opening night was her farewell as well. After the performance, I saw her clutching a bouquet, laughing on stage as someone gave her a compliment, then slipping back to her dressing room.
And the next morning, or the day after, she’d resigned from ABT for the last time.
I’ve seen films of her dancing the ballet at her peak in the 1970s. I think she was better in 1983-1984. Despite the drug-ravaged state she describes in Dancing on My Grave, life and art experience had brought her to a point of maturity that made her surpass her younger self.
Tudor once said about someone’s performance, responding to people coaxing, “Wasn’t she good?”
“Yes, she was good-but not good enough.”
And that’s the trouble with ballet–good is never good enough. This particular art form exists on such an outrageous plane of unreality–super reality?– that somehow to be truly valid it has to be exceptional.
“Since you gave yourself the biggest, beautiful tax cut in the history of the nation,” a rural Iowa resident asks Sen. Grassley at a town hall, “I would like to have you on the record, because of all the deficits this is going to cause, you’re not going to go after Social Security, Medicare, and all these other things.”
Grassley replies, natch, with a big, beautiful waffle.
Jen Hayden at Daily Kos notes that rural town halls have traditionally been safe spaces for extreme right-wing GOP politicians–but no more.
This is what America looks like under Koch brothers rule:
Kentucky’s governor vows to destroy Medicaid for 500,00 state residents if he’s not allowed to take it away from 100,000 of them.
