So John Bolton’s not running. Big whoop, right? But a sign of how sick our politics are that he or anyone would consider himself presidential timber. A lying, war-mongering loony who drove America over the cliff into Iraq and was one of those I’m-here-to-blow-up the-institution-I’m-representing when it came to being UN ambassador.
When it comes down to it, I’m sure Aniston would do a better job than Bolton.
He’s hiding behind our troops, using them as a shield to deflect his blatant if unwitting admission that he would do Iraq all over again.
Are the Democrats going to let him get away with it?
Someone who used to translate for Plisetskaya during her American press conferences and interviews recalls frequently asking her, “Do you really want me to translate that?” after Plisetskaya had said something indiscreet, uninhibited, proscribed. The answer was always a resounding Absolutna by the law-unto-herself. Her autobiography, by the way, is a must.
The tall would very much be Veronika Part. It’s a given that she dominates any theatrical space that she’s in. But after watching her for more than fifteen years, Part can still surprise me. As the Mistress in Lilac Garden at ABT this week, she embodied Tudor’s adage about humans being able to live without extremities but not without a center. Let’s say her back can grab you by the throat! Tudor, whose rehearsals I loved watching in the 1980s, would have been thrilled.
The opening Theme and Variations was led by Sarah Lane and Herman Cornejo. Lane is always a good dancer, but sometimes when I’ve seen her in the past she seemed to be trying to acquire length by stretching herself into a kind of perpetual allongee stiffness. But tonight she accomplished more by doing less. She danced with altogether admirable aplomb and no sense of trying too hard. She was marvelously on top of her technique as well, except for a couple of what must have been nervous moments.
Cornejo was brilliant all the way to his very last tour. Some interesting personal expression in the arms too.
In the closing Rodeo, Xiomara Reyes dominated the stage without pushing her petite self at us over on the other side of the proscenium. Because of how she used her entire body, how she paid attention to details, how much she could convince us that she believed in what she was doing. It’s like something baritone Gerald Finley once said to me–it’s the focus of your tone not the exertion of voice production that lets you fill a huge theater without strain.
Lilac Garden and Rodeo haven’t been seen on the Met stage for a long time. I’d forgotten how they live up to that scale. Those infinite plains and vistas on Rodeo’s backdrop–did they ever pull us to the horizon. The ballet and the stage became partners.
The scales have fallen from America’s eyes about the way our Supreme Court weighs those scales of justice–with their thumbs pressed down!
Jim Newell at Salon reports on the country’s awakening to the sham perpetuated by our Supreme injustices.
The Indian Point complex is one of the oldest, most dilapidated nuclear installations in the country, and it’s in our own backyard. A transformer there exploded yesterday and caused a fire. And this is the nuclear plant complex that will now be cheek-by-jowl with a big oil pipeline. And is now scheduled to be re-licensed by the Nuclear “Regulatory” Agency, yet another government agency completely captured by the industry it purports to regulate.
The question is: why do we tolerate this?
In his desperate desire to deliver TPP for the co-President (Dimon has of course come out with his kiss-of-death endorsement), Obama has now taken himself to depths of self-engineered humiliation that are just too graphic to be believed.
Yes, he is going to Nike to hawk the TPP—and, yes, we do mean THAT Nike: poster child for outsourcing of U.S. jobs to countries that pay starvation wages to populations beleaguered by environmental degradation and prohibited by law from unionizing.
My father’s mother Sallie was not good at all when it came to racial bias, but I remember her calling us upset in September, 1973, when she heard that the great Diana Sands had died very prematurely of cancer. Grandma had seen her on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun fourteen years earlier.
When Leontyne Price would say that she didn’t get involved in politics because her singing opera was itself a political statement, I think that was a cop-out and I think that it wasn’t. When a lot of Atlanta’s white elite didn’t want her singing Donna Anna on the opening night of the Met’s season there in 1964, she stopped the show cold in “Non, mi dir.” Yes, that was an accomplishment on all fronts.
Plisetskaya is one of those people who truly seemed immortal.
I remember interviewing her in 2001, when she was a spring chicken of 76.
She was very, I would have to say. . . sexy.
She was a law unto herself on pointe and off.
Playing dumb is one major way that Blitzer keeps that salary rolling in. Jon Stewart lacerates the faux-incredulity of the willing-to-be-truly-out-of-touch-for-a-price “newscaster.”
