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“You have to speak with that all technique,” says an ex-dancer. “Even if it’s an internal dialogue.”

Joe MacDonald–I was thinking about him yesterday and I’ll tell more in a bit.

But he was a big part of the fashion landscape when I started looking at fashion mags ca. 1974.

He was lantern-jawed and yet you felt there was something rather odalisque about him, too. He pretty much could play the requisite hetero image repertory but there was some faint hint of put-on that made him more provocative. (It reflects in some way the fact that advertising codes hadn’t quite caught up with the actual feminization of men’s wear in the 1960s. Today it would all kind of blend into metro.)

And after all, isn’t the fact that a performer can’t entirely be the character he/she is playing that makes performer and audience bond in a sense? If there is a distinctive image to be (convincingly or not) overcome. It becomes sort of our-little-secret, in the transaction between performer and spectator.

Called Wilde on the 31st of last year. “Are you recuperating?” she asked. “Are you ready for the next show?”

No, I’m not talking about the pathetic sight of spring-blooming plants being lulled by the torrid December into putting out blossoms, thus pre-empting the actual spring bloom–that’s been written about by Nicholas St. Fleur [some name!] in the Times.

No, I’m talking about the cover of the Winter 2015-16 Ballet Review.  Gilliam Murphy, decked out in rosy hues and silk rosettes, is shown as Aurora in American Ballet Theatre’s new Sleeping Beauty.

It’ s a welcome sight–sort of like a conservatory giving us bloom out of season to augment a healthy ecosystem that produces the al fresco kind of flower on nature’s own schedule.

The winter conservatory gives us its own, humanly-massaged kind of blossom–as does the balletic hothouse. Both distill, enhance, interpret the many properties of the real thing.

And General John Campbell is really good at it.

Sarah Lazare at CommonDreams details the way that Campbell is ginning up the war in Afghanistan.

Lazare writes that: “The U.S. is planning a military role long into Afghanistan’s future despite indications that its long-term intervention and occupation so far has worsened conflict and violence, with the Taliban now showing signs of increased strength.”

The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists has put out a marvelous 2016 calendar, each month topped by a cartoon skewering the greed and know-nothing demagoguery behind the current environmental assault.

Here’s the working trailer for the documentary on the Bankhead family that University of Alabama’s public TV station is doing–I told you about it earlier this year.

What a great idea!

The film series runs January 20-February 4 on 53rd St. . .

It’s time to call the war-mongering what it is: straight out of the totalitarian playbook.

As Hermann Goering said at the Nuremberg trials:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Killing thousands of innocent children–all in a day’s Presidential work, according to extreme right-wing panel moderator Hugh Hewitt.

The right wing’s degradation of this country reaches a new low at the GOP debates, shocking even to William Rivers Pitt, who’s seen it all.

“This happened on CNN with banners flying and theme music to boot. The audience, to its credit, had the decency to boo Hewitt. Nevertheless, it happened. That is where we are. That is who we are.”