"Soon after Swan Lake’s first, warmly received revival in 2019, allegations emerged about Scarlett’s conduct over the previous decade..."

"... including inappropriate sexual behaviour and bullying at the Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School. Leading classical companies and vocational schools are coming under greater pressure on questions around safeguarding and accountability, either those coming forward or those accused. An independent investigation by the employment consultant Lucinda Harvey Associates found 'there were no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School,' but neither discounted nor described the allegations. Scarlett made no public response and the ROH ended its relationship with him."

From "Liam Scarlett obituary/Dynamic choreographer whose meteoric rise at the Royal Ballet was halted in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations" (The Guardian).

Scarlett — "the new choreographic wonder boy of British ballet" — was 35, and the cause of death is "undisclosed." If the inference of suicide is wrong, please disclose something. This looks like an infuriating case of the cancel culture destroying one of the most gifted human beings we had in this world. 

There was an investigation. It found "no matters to pursue." But he was cut off from his work nonetheless — the work at which he was a genius! What monsters did this! What loss! What vicious cruelty!

"Scarlett made no public response...."

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There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

She's not like other Senators.

Kyrsten Sinema, the Senate’s most colorful member, posts a pic of herself on instagram rocking a “F*** Off” ring & sipping what looks like Sangria pic.twitter.com/ec6AkEPUiE

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) April 18, 2021

Post headline is a reference to the "not like other girls" meme: 

"Any law is only as good as the people that are enforcing it. Does it make sense we took away the gun because he’s too dangerous to have one, but we didn’t take the step to prevent him from going out and buying one the next day?"

Said Brad Banks, a former prosecutor in Marion County (location of Indianapolis), quoted in "In Indianapolis Shooting, a Red Flag That Never Flew/Red flag laws are supposed to keep guns away from people who should not have them. That did not happen with the gunman who killed eight people in Indianapolis." 

The headline is obfuscatory. Why can't they say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws? The Indianapolis Shooter Was Legally Barred From Purchasing a Gun, But the Seller Sold One to Him Anyway. 

But is my proposed clear headline correct? I had to comb through the article trying to find the answer. It wasn't easy!

Intrusive thoughts.

Have you thought about intrusive thoughts? Here's a brilliant TikTok on the subject:

Bloodroot.

Goodbye to Cousin Itt.

 

"Actor Felix Silla, who portrayed Cousin Itt on the 1960s TV series 'The Addams Family,' died on Friday. He was 84....The actor did stunt work on 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,' 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' and 'Poltergeist.'... Silla was 3 feet, 11 inches tall and his wife is 4 feet, 8 inches tall... 'Felix used to tell everyone he married a tall blonde.... He is beloved by all that knew him.'" 

CNN reports.

"Think of all the fat celebrities — predominantly Black women and women of color — who have paved a path in plus-size fashion, allowing so many of us fat folks to explore our personal style."

"The choice [by plus-size luxury retailer 11 Honoré] to collaborate for the first time with rich white Lena Duhnam, who flashes her privilege like it’s a joke... speaks volumes. It’s a reminder that plus-size fashion is still an exclusive club intent on keeping authority and power rotating in the same circles, desperate to do anything but give fat Black women their flowers."

From "The Problem With Lena Dunham’s Plus-Size Collection" by Kendra Austin (at The Cut).  Austin calls Dunham a grifter: "She grifts."

Here's what the page over there looks like (on my computer):

That Marc Jacobs ad is mindbending. Click to enlarge and clarify. Speaking of giving "women their flowers" — look at those big bulgy roses bursting forth from the model's breasts. And what is she so glum and leg-spread-y about — shopping?!

How emotional is shopping for clothes? Apparently, there's big racial turmoil, such that a white woman promoting plus-size clothing is heard to "speak volumes" about white supremacy. If I'm reading Austin correctly, she's observing that black women made clothing for fat women trendy, and Dunham is appropriating their creation. But I read Dunham to say — in so many words — that white women are fat in a different way, a way that is so uncool that they need special help from a white woman who openly admits she's fat like that:

[Dunham] describes the changes she has witnessed as “not the cool kind that make you muscular” but “just the kind that make your face fat.”...

Later, Dunham complains about the language around plus-size fashion, arguing that descriptors like “plus,” “curve,” and “body-positive” are used to describe a community of “curvy bodies that look like Kim Kardashian has been up-sized slightly,” who “want big beautiful butts and big beautiful breasts and no cellulite and faces that look like you could smack them onto thin women.”

ADDED: I think the model in the Marc Jacobs ad is Madonna's daughter Lourdes. I'm just noticing "Madonna's daughter Lourdes announced as the new face of Marc Jacobs" (CNN).

6:04 a.am.

 

"This talk show was so elegant and respectful, that even the comment section of a video like this isn't infested by angry people shouting from both extremes of the issue."

A comment written one month ago on a video put up on YouTube a year ago: 

 

The show aired in 1970. Watch the whole thing. The person at the extreme left of the talk-show couch — who eventually pipes up — is Grace Slick. The host Dick Cavett engineers the mood — which is serious and comical, tense and relaxed. It's quite something. 

The 70s vibe is mesmerizing. Somehow the colors brown and orange dominated. And who remembers that there was once a feminist notion that women should travel in pairs so that no one becomes a celebrity?!

Hugh Hefner takes the position that maleness/femaleness is the very beginning of who you are as a person. He also attempts to bond with the feminists over his strong support for abortion rights. And he gets out his pipe and smokes up a storm. One of the feminists smokes a cigarette, and makes a theatrical point of lighting it for herself, rejecting Cavett's straight-man offer to play the old chivalrous role of cigarette lighter.

I cannot tolerate today's TV talk shows. The mood is so poisonous. One alternative is to watch half-century old talk shows on YouTube.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"In the war of racism, we don't want scouts, we want soldiers."

That's a comment, from Washington Blogger, that was emailed to me after I noted the absence of any Critical Race Theory analysis in the New York Times story about the West Point cheating scandal. 

The "scout"/"soldier" terminology harks back to a post 5 days ago about the "tech elite's favorite pop intellectual Julia Galef." As NY Magazine put it:

"Galef argues for what she calls 'scout mindset,' which she contrasts with 'soldier mindset.' The idea is that evolution has wired our minds to be soldiers (focused on winning) instead of scouts (focused on ensuring our mental maps accurately reflect the territory of reality). To adopt a scout mindset is to resist falling prey to 'motivated reasoning,' in which we distort our thoughts to achieve a desired outcome."

Here's the graphic comparing the 2 mindsets:

I read Washington Blogger's statement — "In the war of racism, we don't want scouts, we want soldiers" — as satirizing the present-day "woke" pose. And I want to add that I think that mentality is at odds with Critical Race Theory as it was originally understood and used by legal academics in the 1990s. Based on personal contact, I believe that these scholars were — to use Galef's model — scouts, not soldiers. 

The phrase "war of racism" is a bit confusing. I'm assuming the commenter means "war on racism." Obviously, there is room to say that there once was a war on racism but those fighting racism used racism too and, at this point in the evolution of the war, with racism on all sides, "of" is more accurate than "on."

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

Scarlet elf cups.

"Sarcoscypha coccinea, commonly known as the scarlet elf cup, scarlet elf cap, or the scarlet cup, is a species of fungus in the family Sarcoscyphaceae of the order Pezizales."

 

 

We found them today in Blue Mound State Park, where we walked my favorite trail, the Over Lode.

AND: Here's the photo Meade took of me: 

"Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves 'Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?'"

"Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.... Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.... [M]ost people who take to the streets about cases like Daunte Wright are not thinking about the fact that black people are killed by cops 2.5 times more than their representation in the population would predict. They are protesting because all they see in the news is the black people killed, and have no way of imagining that whites are regularly killed in the same way and in much greater numbers.... Every time the media broadcasts the murder by cop of a black person, ask yourself if it’s really true that a cop wouldn’t have done it to a white person – and then go to, for example, the Washington Post database and see cops doing just that. And upon that, we will settle upon an honest national conversation about the cops as murdering people in race-neutral fashion. Or at least we should." 

Writes John McWhorter in "The Victorians Had to Accept Darwin/We Need to Accept that Cops Kill White People as Easily as They Kill Black People/Otherwise, our conversation on race is deeply and perniciously fake" (Substack). 

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

Magnolia, scilla, fritillaria.

Flowers in Madison, this past week. The magnolia was in the arb, the frittilaria and the scilla on the Meadhouse property.

"On Friday, West Point officials said in a statement that the [second-chance] program had 'not met its intended purpose' of increasing the self-reporting of honor code violations and reducing cadets’ tolerance for them...."

"'The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same, to graduate Army officers that live honorably, lead honorably and demonstrate excellence,' General Williams said in a statement. 'West Point must be the gold standard for developing Army officers. We demand nothing less than impeccable character from our graduates.'... Tim Bakken, a professor of law at West Point, said the involvement of so many athletes in a cheating scandal was a recurring theme at the academy and he called for greater scrutiny of the issue and more transparency on the part of the institution’s leaders. 'We have to ask the question of whether there is something about the culture of athletics that is at odds with the academy’s mission with regard to honor,' he said... Echoing Professor Bakken, C. Richard Nelson, a 1960 West Point graduate... noted that the 1976 scandal, like last year’s and another in 1951, was concentrated among athletes at the academy, in that case the football team. Mr. Nelson said that in his day, there was 'no slack' given and that 'any violation meant separation' — the academy’s term for expulsion. He also said he could see how the second-chance program that was being discontinued, known as the Willful Admission Process, might have fallen short of its goals. 'You’re asking an awful lot of these young people to turn somebody else in,' he said."

From "West Point Scraps Second-Chance Program After Major Cheating Scandal/Some graduates criticized the program as too lenient after the U.S. Military Academy disclosed its biggest academic scandal in decades" (NYT). 

I'd like to see the NYT go more deeply into the question of athletics and cheating — something more than quoting 2 professors on the subject. The question that arose in my mind — and I have no idea of the race of the various accused cheaters — is whether an honor code is a manifestation of white supremacy. The NYT has been weaving Critical Race Theory throughout so many of its articles that we ought to take note of its failure to include that dimension.

FROM THE EMAIL: Robin writes: 

Bob Ross, resurrected to paint a Mountain Dew ad, is welcome even as it obstructs the "Repo Man" clip I wanted to find.

For once, I am not annoyed — I am the opposite of annoyed — by the ad YouTube served up in front of the video I wanted to watch: 

 

Well, that's just great. Good to know the beloved dead man is refreshed. 

There is a Bible verse about tending to the thirst of a dead man: "And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'" 

Yet no one pictures Bob Ross in hell. It is more likely that you would picture him in a Heaven that resembles his paintings, and I'm sure that picture has abundant water features, with painterly tree reflections. Still, you weren't picturing Paradise with soda, were you? Maybe you were! There's that song about Paradise with cigarette trees and a soda water fountain.

Now to the serious business of this post, the "Repo Man" clip: 

"So he hauled a new generator into his S.U.V., strapped $800 worth of wood onto the vehicle’s roof and drove down into one of the city’s ravines in the middle of the night..."

"... to build... a wooden box — 7 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 9 inches — sealed with a vapor barrier and stuffed with enough insulation that, by his careful calculation, would keep it warm on nights when the thermometer dipped as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. He put in one window for light, and attached smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later, he taped a note to the side that read, 'Anyone is welcome to stay here.' Since then, Mr. Seivwright (pronounced Seeve-right), 28, has built about 100 similar shelters with a crew of 40 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations. He has hauled them to parks across Toronto where homeless encampments have slumped into place — jarring reminders of the pandemic’s perversely uneven effects. The city’s bureaucrats called them illegal and unsafe, and stapled trespass and eviction notices to many, informing their residents that the city had rented out hotel rooms for them. They served Mr. Seivwright with an injunction, ordering him to stop putting the structures on city-owned land." 

From "The Carpenter Who Built Tiny Homes for Toronto’s Homeless/Khaleel Seivwright built himself a wooden shanty while living on a West Coast commune. Then he started building similar lodgings for homeless people in Toronto to survive the winter" (NYT).

The box is not much larger than a coffin (which tends to be 7.17 feet by 2.5 feet), but people prefer them even when they know "the city had rented out hotel rooms for them." A city can't allow a shantytown — far below its standards of habitability — to grow up its in its parks. But Seivwright is nevertheless celebrated.

I can see how building these squalid boxes and depositing them around town works as protest art, speaking loudly to the people of Toronto about the poor and desperate people who live in their midst. The city is providing hotel rooms, but if these people are in hotel rooms, the housed citizens of Toronto won't need to agonize about them.

To be in the box is to be inside but outside, seen but unseen. To be in a hotel room is to be thoroughly inside and unseen. That's what the city prefers. I don't think the article explains why it is what the homeless prefer.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes: 

Sorry, this guy sounds whack. These boxes are not Habitats for Humans but a kind of litter. There’s a reason why cities have governments, poor and stupid and cruel as they may be; and it’s to help manage the risks to health and safety that come with our common lives. Your analysis takes some account of the “City” as if it were a bumbling bureaucracy —easy to mock, that. But what about the *citizens* of the city? The suffering nameless individuals who pay the taxes, try to mind their ways and be decent to each other, try to build lives and raise families, try to *use the (few, crowded, worn) amenities* of the city? Who now find the homeless occupying their parks, cadging and foraging and leaving a trail of trouble, encouraged now by characters like this to repurpose the precious open space into flop-houses and latrines? Do the citizens not get a voice in this little hippie happening?

I think citizens are getting fed up with this. Not just in Toronto, either.