"In contrast to the carved statues of monarchs and saints framing the entrance to the museum’s main building eight miles to the west, this towering sculpture depicts an anonymous young Black woman."

"She holds a phone in one hand as she turns, in a twist reminiscent of Bernini’s 'David,' to look over her right shoulder with an intent gaze. Her hair is in two neat braids and the folds of her T-shirt drape luxuriously where they tuck into her jeans. She wears colossal Nike Air Rift sneakers."

From "A Huge Statue of a Black Woman Opens a New Door to London’s V&A/Thomas J Price’s bronze figures present anonymous Black people at heroic scale. After an installation in Times Square sparked a furor, his latest work welcomes visitors to a new museum outpost" (NYT).

What was the Times Square sculpture that "sparked a furor"? It was a similar anonymous generic black woman. According to the artist, "the messages I would get from women who look like her [were] saying she was disgusting." He said: "A lot of people, they’re not used to seeing people who look like them. And I mean that not just in terms of race or gender, but people just being people."

I wonder if most people, confronted with a colossal sculpture of a person who looked exactly like them — other than the size and the monotone color of bronze — would find it disgusting. But those 2 changes — size and bronzeness — are what we usually think makes a statue "heroic."

Or perhaps the "heroic" quality requires something more: a proud pose, idealized beauty, nudity (or a military uniform, a toga, or at least a business suit), some connection to glorious achievement (certainly not just standing around casually). But when's the last time elite art came out in favor of the heroic? That's so right wing. Like something Trump would do. Or try to do.

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

"Some viewers may have heard strong and offensive language during the BAFTA Film Awards 2026."

"This arose from involuntary verbal tics associated with Tourette syndrome, and was not intentional. We apologise for any offence caused by the language heard."

Said a BBC spokesperson, quoted in "BBC faces backlash after racial slur shouted during BAFTA awards by attendee with Tourette syndrome/The host, Alan Cumming, acknowledged the 'strong and offensive language' several times during the Sunday show and thanked the audience for their understanding" (NBC News).

Here's the occurrence of the hurling of the notorious epithet (and I will delete any comments that write it out):

"Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or decry the shirt’s language as anti-Indigenous."

"'Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt?' indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000 followers, asked in a post Thursday. Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt...."

From "Fans criticize Beyoncé for shirt calling Native Americans 'the enemies of peace'" (AP).

What shirt? It was a T-shirt depicting the Buffalo Soldiers that stated that "their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries."

ADDED: The only Indians mentioned by the shirt are "warring Indians," so by definition they are against peace. If there were some Indians who were pro-peace, the shirt has nothing to say about them. I'm not seeing the NRA complaining about "murderous gunmen" or Mexicans complaining about "Mexican revolutionaries."

"I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity."

Says the sculptor Thomas J. Price at his website, linked at the New York Times in "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity."

Wow! That headline says so much about "meaningful connections," "intimate emotional states," and "deeper reflection around the human condition."

What could be more meaningfully connected, intimately emotional, or more deeply reflected upon than to call you a big old racist if you scorn a monumental statue of a casually dressed black woman?

Price's hopes are dashed. And the Times doesn't even tell us the title of the statue — "Grounded in the Stars" — until the 7th paragraph. After the headline calls it "Times Sq. Sculpture" and "a 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman," the text calls it "the bronze sculpture," "the 12-foot statue," "the sculpture," and — quoting others — "a statue of an 'angry Black lady,'" "a D.E.I. statue." 

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

"This order would reduce the number of interracial couples in TV commercials"/"Oh, it's just too many, right?"

"You see them in the kitchen together making meals from HelloFresh. He's wearing loafers, she's got tight braids. You're like: Where'd they meet, you know, what do they even talk about? It's insane."

Most of what is in that sketch has Trump signing orders with respect to things Trump has actually made an issue of his own, but I don't think he's ever seemed antagonistic toward interracial couples. I wonder how that made it into the sketch. And the line "He's wearing loafers, she's got tight braids" prompts us to picture the man as white and the woman is black, but the humor I've been hearing about these ads is that the man is always black and the woman is white. Anyway, the issue of interracial couples in TV commercials is a general topic for comedians these days. It's not connected to Trump, so it's rather scurrilous to throw this subject into the mix.

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

"When we interrogate systems of power and challenge historical narratives that center whiteness and colonial dominance, we do not divide, we restore balance."

Said Nicholas Galanin, a sculptor of "Indigenous heritage" who produced a work called "The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole)" ("a wooden totem disappearing into floral wallpaper" (image here)).

From "Taking Aim at Smithsonian, Trump Wades Into Race and Biology/His executive order faulted an exhibit which 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct,' a widely held position in the scientific community'" (NYT).

What are you holding with care and not suppressing? What are you interrogating and centering?

Was sculpture disappearing into the floral wallpaper of academic jargon?

10 things I've asked Grok in the last 2 or 3 days.

1. Is it honest for me to say: I have no idea whether Trump has any idea whether Mitch McConnell had polio?

2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?

3. What is the origin of the phrase "take up the mantle"?

4. What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."

5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?

6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?

7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?

8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?

9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?

10. What if you had to argue that "The fog comes /on little cat feet" is actually very depressing and pessimistic?

"I talked to Meta’s Black AI character. Here’s what she told me. Is this the new era of digital blackface?"

Writes Karen Attiah in The Washington Post... and this is well worth a free-access link.

Attiah asks the AI character, "How do you celebrate your African American heritage?" This nonexistent person — billed as "a Proud Black queer momma” — answers:

Through music, food and tradition! My family loves cooking soul food for holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa — my mom’s fried chicken and collard greens are famous! [...] How about your heritage? Any special traditions?

Annoyed at AI's posing as a real person — which seems like blackface — Attiah conducts an interrogation:

"Robert Zemeckis’ film 'Here' is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it...."

"… a single camera sits in one spot for the entirety of the film as the action jumps back and forth through time.... Starting off as an old man, [the Tom Hanks character] walks into a sunlit modern living room only for the shot to fade away to the era of dinosaurs…. [I]n a bid for self-protection, Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth unconvincingly force in some diversity. In the future, when the Youngs have left, we see glimpses of a 2010s black family, the longest of which shows the dad telling his son how to talk to the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Almost nothing else is learned about them except that their housekeeper gets COVID. Hundreds of years in the past, an indigenous couple wordlessly flirt, have a kid and die in the 2,000-square-foot meadow where the Young home will eventually stand...."

From the NY Post review of "Here."

Somehow the first 2 articles I click to read in the NYT this morning both bring up Theodore Roosevelt.

1. "The Election Is Happening Too Soon" by David Brooks: "By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, society was heaving with change. The legislative program that we call progressivism — cleaning up local government, breaking up the monopolies, regulating clean food, water and air — grew out of the cultural and civic change that was already underway. The pattern was cultural change first, then civic revival, then political reform. Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?"

2. "It Sounded Like Dancing, Drinking and Sex. It Blew People’s Minds" by John McWhorter: "We moderns can’t feel ragtime as the hip, naughty thing it was to people when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Jazz, rock, hip-hop and so much else came in ragtime’s wake, all of them syncopated (and hip-wiggly) to degrees beyond anything [Scott] Joplin, who died in 1917, ever knew." (Interesting use of language: "hip, naughty... hip-hop... hip-wiggly....")

***

I sense a reaction to the immersion in 2024 electoral politics. Those who'd been hoping to leap forward are drawn instead into the past, and when they look back, the human marker of time who stands out is Theodore Roosevelt.

"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.

Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:

 Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.

Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party. 

Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."

ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.

ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."

"So you start to see the the trappings of this thing that was created in New York City, in the Bronx in the 1970s start to leave its beginnings a little bit..."

"...and become more of a competition and more of a sport through Red Bull and these other entities that are sponsoring it.... It's actually a bit of a wild story [how breaking went from a Red Bull event to the Olympics]. So nearly three decades ago, this global governing body of dance, international dance sport is recognized by the International Olympic Committee and they wanna bring dance to the Olympics. So they want to have ballroom dancing and they suggest that and they get rebuffed. So they eventually rebrand themselves as World Dance Sport Federation, and they find out that it's not foxtrot or salsa or ballroom that the Olympic thinks could have a shot. It's breaking. Breaking is highly watchable, easily viewable on social media. And it comes along as the Olympics is reevaluating what they're going to use as a sport to try and gain that younger audience. There was a testing period in 2018.... They debuted breaking at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.... There was over 2.5 million social media impressions according to the International Olympic Committee. I mean, it seems like it aligns itself perfectly with the Olympics mission of trying to skewer to a younger audience. And once you see those numbers that pretty much locked up breaking for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris..."

From the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Breaking’s Olympic Debut." 

"Skewer" — sometimes the wrong word is the right word.

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

What is the word in the 1964 movie "Mary Poppins" that has caused the British Board of Film Classification to change the rating to "Parental Guidance”?

I'm reading "‘Mary Poppins’ gets higher age rating as U.K. reckons with racism in classics" (WaPo).

"I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives."

Said Judd Apatow, quoted in "Judd Apatow’s 'Bob and Don: A Love Story'/Watch a short film about the lifelong friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, who were not an obvious match" (The New Yorker).

“What’s so different about them is Bob was a real writer. He wrote those routines, which were, like, one-man sketches. . . . Don came from working really hard playing lounges and strip clubs, figuring out how to do crowd work, doing multiple shows a night into the wee hours in Vegas. Bob just got huge immediately..... [Don] came from a time when his theory was, It’s O.K. to make fun of people as long as you make fun of all of them,” Apatow explained....

The New Yorker writer, Bruce Handy, quips: "Think of it as a very old-school version of D.E.I."

ADDED: I've given the impression that I think "very old-school version of D.E.I." is quite clever, but I don't. It's a variation on the cliché wisecrack: "I'm an equal opportunity offender."

Urban Dictionary has an entry for "equal opportunity offender": "One who bashes and trashes any and every different type of person known to earth; including the basher's own race. Don't call me racist, I am an Equal Opportunity Offender."

"Some people call these ‘folk songs.' Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!"

Said Big Bill Broonzy, in 1956, as he was performing "This Train (Bound for Glory)" alongside Pete Seeger to an audience of college students.

Quoted in "Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre/In returning to a songbook that is decades — if not centuries — old, a new generation of performers is expanding the definition of what their traditional art form can be" (NYT).

"Folk," meaning people in general, goes back to Old English.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back as far as 999: "Þa elkede man fram dæge to dæge, & swencte þæt earme folc þe on ðam scipon lagon." Chaucer used it, in Middle English, c1405, that's surprisingly readable: "Vp on thise steedes, grete and whyte Ther seten folk."

And here's Alexander Hamilton, with American terseness: "There were Folks killed in 1723." That made me think of Ilhan Omar's "Some people did something."

IN THE COMMENTS: James K said:

Incidentally, the Alexander Hamilton who said "There were Folks killed in 1723" is not the Alexander Hamilton who co-wrote the Federalist Papers. It was some other guy with the same name.

And I see at the link that the other Alexander Hamilton was not an American, but a Scot. So that must be Scottish terseness. And I am retrospectively less reminded of Ilhan Omar.

"But during the Globe’s first Shakespeare and Race Festival... she hosted a workshop in the theater with actors of color and learned how they were disadvantaged by some of the set and lighting design decisions."

"'What we have proved subsequently is that it does not work for actors of the global majority,' she said, using the Globe’s preferred language to describe actors of color. 'It feels like a space of empire.' With this in mind, the Globe has plans to change the design when it raises the money, repainting the space in a lighter hue and reconsidering the Renaissance-inspired ceiling mural that depicts the white-skinned goddess of the moon surrounded by similarly complexioned cherubs...."

From "This scholar is pulling back the curtain on race in Shakespeare/Farah Karim-Cooper argues that the Bard has a race problem. But that doesn’t mean we have to love him less" (WaPo).

In honor of his 80th birthday: 80 things about Mick Jagger.

At The Guardian.

A few that struck me the right way:

10. “You do tend to present a yobbish image.” One interviewer suggested this to him as the Stones were breaking through. “Moronic, I think, is a better word,” he replied, deliciously....

15. Great rock stars project vanity. And you don’t get more magnificently vain than Jagger singing “Tell me a story about how you adore me,” on Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?...

25. Jagger is the only middle-class Englishman from Kent who could sing “I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis / She tried to take me upstairs for a ride” without it sounding like cosplay....

Succès de scandale: "Try That in a Small Town."

"Initially, the track got relatively little notice, landing at No. 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. That changed last week, after the song’s music video became a culture-war battlefield, with some accusing Aldean — one of country’s biggest hitmakers for nearly two decades — of employing racist dog-whistle tactics and the singer defending himself as the latest victim of an out-of-control 'cancel culture.'... As the debate over 'Try That in a Small Town' boiled last week, the song’s consumption metrics spiked...."

I'm reading "Jason Aldean, Decrying ‘Cancel Culture,’ Has a No. 2 Hit/'Try That in a Small Town' went from overlooked to almost topping the charts after a week of controversy" (NYT). 

This got me reading the Wikipedia entry "Succès de scandale":

Succès de scandale (French for "success from scandal") is a term for any artistic work whose success is attributed, in whole or in part, to public controversy surrounding the work.... This concept is echoed by the phrase "there is no such thing as bad publicity"....

That entry quotes Mae West, who got arrested in 1927 for a play titled "Sex": "I expect it will be the making of me."