"A quirky wooden sculpture of US First Lady Melania Trump is reported to have been set on fire near her hometown in Slovenia, prompting its removal."

"... The sculpture of Mrs Trump, which could be described as only bearing a crude likeness to the US first lady, was carved out of a tree trunk on the outskirts of Sevnica, her hometown in central Slovenia. The statue, which depicts Mrs Trump dressed in a blue coat similar to one she wore to her husband's inauguration and with a club-like hand gesturing to the sky, received mixed reviews when it was erected in July 2019. Some residents branded the statue a "disgrace", complaining it looked more like the Smurfs character Smurfette than the first lady.... Since Mr Trump was elected US president in 2016, Sevnica has become a tourist magnet, as visitors search for an insight into Mrs Trump's early years Residents have brought out ranges of Melania-branded merchandise, including slippers, cakes, and Trump-like burgers with fly-away cheese 'hair.'"

BBC reports.

As a statue of Melania, the Sevnica artwork was kind of like the notorious "scary Lucy" statue. It's just really hard to understand why the artist would depict the person that way. As for why someone would set it on fire, presumably it's politics, but it could be aesthetics.

And I just want to repeat the phrase "Trump-like burgers with fly-away cheese 'hair.'" Something delightful about that. "Fly-away cheese" alone would have intrigued me.

"As a 19-year-old, her former professor concludes, Melania clearly had ambition to match her intelligence."

"If not she could have chosen a much easier academic path instead of one that demanded proficiency in engineering, statics and dynamics. 'She passed exams on construction engineering and statics; she managed to complete an experiment and defend her paper at the faculty,' Vogelnik told us. To write her paper, Melania had to understand the effects of pressure, visualize a structure, build a wooden model, take photographs of it, describe the experiment in a way that showed knowledge of urban architecture and put it all together in a book... But then, 'at the end of the first year she did not show up at the exam,' the professor recalls. 'She must have realized that it would take her six to seven more years of studies before she could start making good money as an architect.' Melania had decided to become a model, which is also a fiercely competitive field....."

From "Young Melania: From Model Student to Cover Girl/The first lady might have been a talented architect or designer, but modeling took her in a different direction" (The Daily Beast).

Also from the article, this quote from her old professor: "If only she visited us in Slovenia, people would treat her like a queen. It also says she's "the world’s most famous living Slovene," which made me wonder who are the famous dead Slovenes? There's a list, of course, at Wikipedia. Wikipedia is fantastic at lists like this — "List of Slovenes." The only ones I know are Peter Handke and (hmmm) Mickey Dolenz. And the Senators Tom Harkin and Amy Klobuchar. But none of them was dead at the time The Daily Beast proclaimed Melania the world’s most famous living Slovene.

Among the dead Slovenians is Frankie Yankovic:



Not more famous than Melania, I think. "Known as 'America's Polka King,' Yankovic was considered the premier artist to play in the Slovenian style during his long career. He is not related to fellow accordionist Weird Al Yankovic...."

Apparently, Weird Al is not of Slovenian descent. But Weird Al's parents decided that he should play the accordion because he had the same last name as Frankie Yankovic. I learned that from a list of 20 things about Weird Al (at Mental Floss), where I also learned that Michael Jackson was a big fan but Prince not only rejected getting parodied, he even tried to require Al not to look at him.

ADDED: Mickey Dolenz was born in Los Angeles, but his father George, an actor (the one on the right)...



... was born in the Slovene sector of Trieste, which was at the time in Austria-Hungary and is now in Italy.

Beastly graphics.

The Daily Beast is going for a distinctive graphic style. Here's how the top of the front page looks right now:



Red and yellow predominate, but notice the streaks of magenta in the red background and the intense blue of Melania's shoulder (and also dotted around around her jacket).

Like the colors, gender is heightened and highly contrasted. 2 of the 4 rectangles are feminine, 2 are masculine. The males are: 1. In shadows, 2. Brutally violent, 3. Not individuals. The females are: 1. Specific individuals, 2. Distinguished from each other through color and style, 3. Distinguished morally: One is depicted as a saint, the other as complicated, mysterious, and dangerous.

Here's "Inside the Cult of Melania Trump/Does the first lady of the United States have something she’s afraid to confront in the little city where she grew up?" It's really just an article about Melania's home town:

Today, [Melania's] family has a modern two-floor white house in the center of the modern part of Sevnica. It has a built-in garage, a mansard floor, a balcony, and a small satellite dish on the roof. While not grandiose, it is still far from the modest apartment where Melania and her sister Ines grew up.

What's a mansard floor? That's a mistake, no?

The house is not far from a statue of an enormous boot, a monument installed at the entrance to the city in honor of local Kopitarna shoe factory. (Last year Kopitarna sent Ms. Trump “White House” slippers as a present.)...

That's comically dull. Meanwhile, we hear of Bojan Pozar, who's writing (or has written) a book about Melania and who "interviewed several local men who claimed that they had once been Melania’s boyfriends" and said she was "cold" — which either means Melania was (and maybe is) cold or that these guys never really attained the elevated status that we in the United States call "boyfriend."

Also in the article, the way some Slovenians would like to hear Melania speak Slovenian and would like her to wear Slovenian clothes. So... basically, this is a completely inconsequential puff piece about Melania, and it contains absolutely nothing that's religion-like or cultish about anybody's interest in her. Nor is there anything to justify the subtitle, nothing about Melania's fear of anything back home.

But it's a fascinating graphic. It made me think of another article about an American First Lady, one that really did work on the idea religion — "Saint Hillary," a cover story by Michael Kelly in the NYT Magazine in 1993 (previously blogged here). Sample text:

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

When it is suggested that she sounds as though she's trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, "That's right, that's exactly right!"

The 1993 cover image of Hillary makes a nice contrast to the graphics that sear the Daily Beast today. The color idea here was white white white:

At the Belmarket Café...

... park your scooter and come in! Talk about whatever you like (and consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal)

***

The Google grab is from Trieste, which has a fascinating history that I learned about only after looking at a map and saying "Trieste looks like it should be in Slovenia."

First impression — Slovenia and Hamburg.

One thing I like to do in Google Street View is pick a general place (perhaps something related to news I've been following) and drop in the quite randomly. I'm intending to look around, but it's uncanny how often I love the very first thing I see.

Yesterday, I parachuted into Slovenia — I was thinking of the First Lady — and this was the first sight:



Today — with the G-20 business — I dropped into Hamburg, Germany, and saw this lone, stately figure. I'd call this Arrangement in Blue and Red No.1 (if you'd get the reference):

"And finally we arrive at the Italian Charnel House. Mussolini had it built in 1938 to honor the fallen Italian soldiers from the awful war..."

"... (Kobarid was in these years under Italian rule). As if there would be no other war. As if Kobarid was heading toward a peaceful era, where one could look back and reflect on the horror of past aggressions. Mussolini had moved the remains of 7014 known and unknown Italian soldiers who lost their lives in the Soca Front — taking them from local military cemeteries and honoring them here, in this house of corpses. We walk slowly around the edifice, reading the names, understanding the pain that each death caused to those left behind, feeling the irony of this Mussolini gesture and the exclusive pride in the Italian sacrifice, ignoring the pain felt, too, by Slovenian people who lost lives as well, in addition to losing pasture lands, cattle, a livelihood that had been very much centered on the mountains towering over the Soca River."

Much more here, with photographs, from the mountains of Slovenia.