Go See Van Gogh

When I was a student at Kutztown State College (Pa.) back in the early 1970s, one of the courses that was required was art history.

Van Gogh's 'Bedroom in Aries' in 3-D

 I have no idea why. I was studying to be a U.S. history teacher, and later, when I decided I couldn't speak in front of groups of people who knew more than me, I switched to Liberal Arts English and became a sports writer. 

I think the idea behind requiring art history was to help make us informed and well-rounded citizens of the world. It probably didn't hurt that Kutztown was a teachers' college that massed produced art teachers for public education. Anyway, as I recall, the textbook for the class was outstanding, and I wish I still had it. To this day I can close my eyes and see selected works of such artists as Delacroix, Monet, Manet, Czanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh virtually jump from the pages and into my mind's appreciation vault.

I was fascinated.

So, decades after my introduction to art history, the Van Gogh Immersive Experience showed up in Winston-Salem last month at the former Jo-Ann's Fabrics Store off of Stratford Road, I had to go.

Kim and I went last week, and we thought it was spectacular. As you enter the exhibit, you get to see at least 100 copies of Van Gogh's work, accompanied in most cases with explanatory text. Then you enter the immersive room, the crown jewel of the place. Projections of Van Gogh's artistic style swim across the room and floor, literally engulfing you with stimuli as you relax in folding chairs or bean bags. You can let yourself float upstream and into the Starry Night.

•   •   •

I wasn't a very good student at Kutztown. I was a commuter who drove 45 minutes each way in my Volkswagen Beetle, five days a week, to keep my tuition down to around $50 a semester. No student loans for me. Much of my day was spent just trying to stay alive making the commute.

Anyway, as noted, Kutztown specialized in graduating art teachers, and every once in a while, those art students would hold exhibitions in the school's modern and spacious library.

I had two good friends that I'd meet with at the library most days, and instead of studying, we'd mess around, talking this and that, checking out the women instead of books. Stuff like that.

One day, we noticed one of those student art exhibitions going up. I decided to participate.

I took a sheet of composition paper and, with my multi-colored pen, drew four parenthesis (the singular of parentheses) in a single row, each parenthesis a different color. Like this: (  ) (  ). Then I ripped the page out of my composition book and placed it on the floor, near the other exhibits, which I feel certain to this day were being graded. We chuckled and didn't think much else of it.

Until the next day. My work was still on the floor. As it was the next day, and the next, and the day after that. We couldn't believe it. On one of those days, we saw a library worker vacuum around it. On another day, we saw a patron walk up to my work, stop for a few moments and rub his chin in contemplation as he took it all in.

I was beginning to think I had accidentally created a study in philosophical rhetoric: What is art? I never did find the answer to that.

Apparently I had switched my major yet again, this time from Liberal Arts English to Liberal Arts Smart Ass. 

As it turned out, my work stayed on the floor for the entire two weeks of the exhibit. It was the first and only time I've ever been displayed in a gallery. True story. Thank you very much. 

 (The Van Gogh Immersive Experience will remain in Winston-Salem through September. It's $35 per adult on weekends and $25 on weekdays and begins at 10 a.m. each day. There are small discounts for seniors, etc, so ask if you qualify.)

 

 

 

 

The Beatles: Her First Concert

She probably couldn't know it at the time, but Midway's Jane Pacific was kissed by stardust in August 1964. She was gifted a memory that only a fortunate few can ever share with the rest of us because, well, you know, that's how stardust memories work.

She was an eyewitness to Beatlemania. 

Jane Pacific with her Beatles ticket stubs.

 "I think I was around eight years old," said Jane, who grew up in Lakeview Terrace, Calif. "My parents got us tickets to see The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

"It was my first concert. 

"Yes, I was young, but I was still old enough to know what was happening," said Jane. "My older sisters, Karen and Kris, were into The Beatles, and my mom and dad both loved The Beatles. And so did I. I knew all the songs and loved them." 

The first of three Hollywood Bowl concerts – now iconic in the lush lore of Beatlemania – came only seven months after The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February. That televised moment changed everything about the way we listen to popular music, from stage to studio.

Ironically, Jane couldn't hear a note The Beatles sang that night at the Hollywood Bowl. The nonstop decibel-splitting shouts of teenage girls drowned out The Beatles and their hopelessly inadequate amplifiers. Basically, Jane and her family attended a screamfest. Welcome to Beatlemania.

"I don't think we did any screaming," said Jane, whose family had pretty decent seats about halfway up from the stage. "I know my sisters said they didn't scream like that. But, yeah, the screaming is what I remember most. Not being able to hear the music as well as I wanted to. The whole concert was like that.

"I remember standing on the top of my seat because everybody else around me was standing, too." 

What the fans who were interested in the music missed was a setlist that went like this:

1. Twist and Shout

2. You Can't Do That

3. All My Loving

4. She Loves You

5. Things We Said Today

6. Roll Over Beethoven

7. Can't Buy Me Love

8.  If I Fell

9. I Want to Hold Your Hand

10. Boys

11. A Hard Day's Night

12. Long Tall Sally

And that was it. Twelve songs, clocking in at just under a half hour. G'night, folks, and thank you very mooch. Tickets went for $4.50 then, which comes out to about $46.00 per ticket today. Is that good enough for a half hour of The Beatles? That, my friends, is a rhetorical question. It needs no answer.

Anyway, Jane's family enjoyed the experience so much, they did it again. This time, they went to see The Beatles perform two years later at Dodger Stadium on August 28, 1966. By now, Beatlemania was shedding some of its luster. Beatle John Lennon had alienated a number of fans a few weeks earlier when he famously suggested the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, and they weren't selling out some of their venues.

 But, you know. They were still The Beatles.

"What I remember about this concert is that from our seats it seemed like they were very far away and small," said Jane. 

Baseball stadiums can do that to you. The setlist at Dodger Stadium included:

1. Rock and Roll Music

2. She's A Woman

3. If I Needed Someone

4. Day Tripper

5. Baby's in Black

6. I Feel Fine

7. Yesterday

8. I Wanna Be Your Man

9. Nowhere Man

10. Paperback Writer

11. Long Tall Sally

"Sometimes I can't remember which concert was which in my memory," said Jane. "But it was pretty much the same thing at Dodger Stadium: screaming girls and a lot of people standing around me. I do remember my parents taking my hand and dragging me through all the people to leave."

As it turned out, Jane was witness to another bit of history. The Beatles performed at San Francisco's Candlestick Park the next night, and then they immediately gave up touring to focus solely on studio work. So she saw the next-to-the-last Beatles concert ever (the Savile Row rooftop doesn't count).

"Is that right?" said Jane. "I didn't know that."

Soooo, 60 years later, Jane can produce several ticket stubs from both the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium concerts. Who's smart enough to think to do that?

"When I was a small girl I had a little box that I kept stuff in," said Jane. "That's where I kept my tickets. I even have my Mom's ticket stub. It's just a box full of keepsakes that I'll never let go.

"They have real emotional value for me."

 Indeed. How could it be otherwise?

Note: https://youtu.be/KqOsmUthz74 is a link to The Beatles 1964 Hollywood Bowl performance. When Jane's husband, John, showed the video link to her several weeks ago, she said it brought tears to her eyes. And why not? Stardust memories, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women, good and bad

Unless you're an Atlanta Braves fan, this one might have slipped underneath your radar.

But Major League Baseball made some significant history Saturday in its doubleheader sweep of the Florida Marlins. Jen Pawol became the first female to umpire in a regular season game when she took the field behind first base in the first game of the twinbill, which the Braves won 7-1.

Jen Pawol

 She covered third base in the nightcap without incident as the Braves won 8-6.

Today, she is scheduled to call balls and strikes behind the plate in what should be another historic moment. What's her strike zone like? She'll be in the spotlight and in clear focus. After all, nobody ever shouts "Kill the ump!" at the first-base umpire.

I suspect she'll do well. She was the first woman to umpire a Triple A championship in 2023. She also was the first woman to umpire in a spring training game last season. She is the seventh woman to umpire professionally, but the first to reach the major leagues.

A former three-time all-conference softball selection at Hofstra, where she played catcher, Pawol started umpiring softball in the early 1990s. What followed was a steady and yet passionate climb up the ladder, finally reaching her professional pinnacle yesterday.

"The dream actually came true today, and I'm still living it," said Pawol, 48, between games of the doubleheader. "I am just so grateful to my family, to Major League Baseball for just creating such an amazing work environment. To all the umpires that I work with ... it's just amazing camaraderie."

In today's political atmosphere, I wonder how long before some MAGA freak suggests that diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) was involved, even though women have been calling games in the NBA (six females) and NFL (three) for several years. The question for baseball is what took so long? And what is the NHL waiting for?

•   •   •

While Pawol has given most of us reason to celebrate the accomplishments of women swimming in vats of testosterone, we have Ghislaine Maxwell to consider

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her part in the sex trafficking crimes as Jeffrey Epstein's associate in procuring minors for sex work.

But suddenly, Maxwell finds herself moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum security facility in Texas MAGAland. This came about when assistant attorney general Todd Blanche paid Maxwell a visit behind closed doors in Florida last week. Within days, she found herself in a very different circumstance.

Kinda makes me wonder if this is the Trump version of DEI. Trump, a convicted felon who is also an adjudicated rapist who happens to be president of the United States, is frantically trying to disassociate himself from Epstein after it was learned that Trump's name appears in the Epstein files.

Do you suppose Maxwell didn't incriminate Trump in her interview with Blanche in hopes of receiving a presidential pardon? Speculation is that she did not implicate Trump of anything improper. Imagine that.

The cruelty behind all of this is astounding. Brown-skinned people who don't speak English (now the country's official language) are being rounded up by the SS, er, ICE, for either deportation or detention, often without due process, and often labeled by Trump as the worst of the worst.

Meanwhile, a pedophile sex trafficker might potentially wrangle a pardon from a criminal president for one of the worst crimes an adult can commit against children.

We are living in strange times where the Constitutional guardrails are being disassembled in front of our very eyes. 

 

 

 

 

Connect the dots

The president is a pedophile.

That's the first thing that came to mind when I heard a week or so ago after The Wall Street Journal (now my favorite newspaper. Who saw that coming?) ran a story that said Attorney General Pam Bondi informed convicted felon President Donald Trump that his name appeared "numerous times" in the Epstein files.

You, too? 

Jeffrey Epstein, we know, was the high falutin' financier who was convicted of child prostitution. He then mysteriously died in prison of suicide while awaiting trial for sex trafficking underage females to the rich and famous on a U.S. Virgin (oh, the ugly irony here) Island he owned called Little Saint James.

Suddenly, after years of MAGA world screaming for the Epstein files to be released, because, you know, high profile names of liberals like Clinton, Gates, Hanks, et al, would be revealed, embarrassed and prosecuted, we're now told there's nothing to see here.

Except for maybe Trump's involvement. For the first time ever, MAGA is furious with Trump. What? You mean you're the deep state? You lied to us? Release the files! What are you afraid of?

Trump's name appearing in the files is no proof of guilt of anything, and on the surface, that's true.

But when you start connecting the dots of his character...

• Like Trump's 34 convictions stemming from his attempt to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn star (Stormy Daniels) who said they had sex. Dot connected.

• Like accusations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least 25 women. Dot connected.

• Like being declared an adjudicated rapist by a federal judge. Dot connected.

• Like the hot mic capturing Trump telling interviewer Billy Bush that women like to be grabbed by their genitals when you are a star. That was during the 2016 presidential campaign, and why that wasn't a disqualifier for the presidency is beyond me. Trump got elected. Bush got divorced. Dot connected.

•  Like owning the Miss Universe pageant franchise, which he felt allowed him to walk into women's dressing rooms while they were changing clothes. Dot connected.

• Like Trump's early associations with Jeffrey Epstein that goes back to at least 1990. At one point, Trump is quoted as saying "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Dot really connected. Holy crap.

There's more. I could fill today's blog with this stuff. but you get the point.

Trump, for his part, is predictably denying any of this because he is God's chosen angel and can do no wrong. In the past few weeks, sometimes on consecutive days, he's tried his favorite deflection tactics: like telling us that President Obama committed treason, or that Obama rigged elections (sounds like projection), the releasing of 200,000 pages of Martin Luther King Jr. files (but not the Epstein files?), Rosie O'Donnell, Harvard, tariffs, NPR and PBS, and even changing back the names of sports teams like the Guardians and Commanders back to their original Indians and Redskins. Please, lookit this and not this Epstein stuff. You still taking about him? He's been dead a long time.

It sounds like he doth protest too much. Dot connected. 

There are too many dots for me. There are too many connections. I could be wrong about where the dots lead me, but so far, Trump's not been able to talk himself out of the disgusting and distasteful deep-state swamp that he's created here. So for now, I have it in the back of my head: the president is a pedophile.

 

 

 

Epstein

I never saw the backlash coming. And when it did come, I never expected its fury.

Finally. A cry for accountability.

In case I'm being too opaque, I'm talking about the Jeffrey Epstein situation here. Epstein, of course, was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and who allegedly invited the privileged elite to his private Caribbean island for romps with underage females. Epstein supposedly kept an incriminating list of client names and flight logs that had everybody from Prince Andrew to Bill Clinton to Tom Hanks shaking in their boots.

And now perhaps even Donald Trump – himself a convicted felon as well as an adjudicated rapist, famous party boy and somehow the current president of the United States with that résumé – might be connected.

After all, Trump and Epstein were once close friends. There's video of Trump doing his fist-pumping white-boy boogie next to Epstein at a party, which kind of documents their friendship from more than 20 years ago.

Epstein was arrested again for sex trafficking of minors and was in prison in July 2019. A month later, he was found dead in his cell, apparently a suicide. But the circumstances of his death remain murky.

Meanwhile, since Epstein's death, MAGA has been clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, no doubt in hopes of embarrassing (and perhaps convicting) the privileged elite. Everything appeared to be headed in that direction until a couple weeks ago when Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi told MAGA world there was nothing in the files, that there's nothing to see here.

And thus the current outrage from Trump supporters who suddenly feel betrayed by their idol and are now screaming about a deep state cover up. "This is not what I voted for!" bellows MAGA. Given ICE arrests and deportation of immigrants, passage of the Big Bad Bill that will take health care away from millions, the deconstruction of the Department of Education that will send millions of children into poverty if not hunger, illegal tariffs that are just now raising inflation numbers, just what the hell did you vote for?

How Trump deals with the schism within MAGA could be the actual measure of his accountability, even if his name never shows up in the Epstein files. 

An interesting side note in the Epstein case is what is to become of Ghislaine Maxwell? She is Epstein's associate who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex trafficking. With Trump claiming the Epstein files are fake and a hoax, can Maxwell now ask Trump for a pardon, or at the very least, a retrial? Trump, of course, wants her to stay quiet.

Trump is asking Bondi to release "pertinent" aspects of the Epstein grand jury testimony, but that's not a simple thing to do – not even for a president. By law, grand jury testimony can only be released by a judge and a court order, and that will take time. If it happens at all. Grand jury testimony is almost never revealed.

It's a freaking mess. But the MAGA monster seems to be eating its own over this. I don't know. Trump has wriggled out of accountability so often before that we've come to expect it to happen again.

Maybe this time it will be different.

 

  

 

Review

Last month I participated in my second political protest since my college days in 1970 – 55 years ago – when I joined about 300 other demonstrators for the "No Kings" rally on the Square by the Old Courthouse.

I was holding a hand-crafted cardboard sign that said "Hands Off Our Democracy" when a fellow came up to me and asked me point blank, with more than a little reproach in his voice, "Do you think we're a republic or are we a democracy?"

The question caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to attend a Q and A event. But without giving it much thought, I responded with a smile, "A little bit of both, I think." It's what I was taught in civics class back in high school, when civics was an actual subject and public schools were not considered a platform for leftist propaganda.

"You're wrong," he replied. "We are not a democracy. We're a republic," and then he stormed off to stand behind me, where he promptly gave a smart military salute to the American flag waving proudly on the tall pole in the Square.

I swear to God he did. 

Several thoughts raced through my head at once. I'm pretty sure his earnest salute to the flag was a protest to my (our) protest and that possibly he thought he was the only patriot in the crowd that day. I told myself, "Wait a minute. I'm exercising my First Amendment right to free speech here. I'm as much a patriot as you think you are. It's because I love this country that I protest against a president who sends brown-skinned people to detention camps in an overt act of racial prejudice and without due process, who places the Marines in American streets to intimidate protesters, who fosters an enforcement agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) whose members wear masks and no identification, and who does all of this without the consent of Congress and through executive decisions that are probably illegal and can be challenged in court.

I want this country that I love to be better than this. 

In retrospect, I should have stepped next to this fellow and saluted the flag with him. All my best thoughts come after the fact.

I bring this up because I recently heard a conversation on TV where this Trump supporter tried to explain why this country is a republic and not a democracy. OK, I get it now. That's where I've heard this argument before. It's a MAGA talking point. If you take democracy out of the equation, you can justify to yourself that a president is all powerful. A monarch. A king. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers tried to avoid and why presidents were given limited powers in the Constitution.

Originally, a president was commander-in-chief of the armed forces; he could negotiate treaties (with Senate approval); he could appoint ambassadors and other officials (with Senate approval); he could grant reprieves and pardons, and he had the power to veto legislation. There's nothing there about suspending due process or building inhumane detention camps in the Florida swamp.

So what kind of government are we supposed to be? 

I see us as a constitutional federal democratic republic.

It is constitutional because we follow the  U.S. Constitution; it's federal because power is divided between national and state governments; it's a democracy because its citizens (We The People) have a voice through free and fair elections, and it's a republic because we elect a representative government.

There's not a lot I remember from high school. I do remember slow dances with Peggy, running cross country in the fall, chess club on Fridays. And all those civics and history classes. 

That was the good stuff worth remembering. 

 

 

 

 

1776

Every Fourth of July, I treat myself to a viewing of the Broadway musical 1776. I taped the show off TCM about seven or eight years ago and tucked it away in my video library, so I always have access to it. I can watch it any time I want to.

But mostly, I like to watch it on the Fourth.

As you might expect by the title, it's a Broadway rendition of the birth of or country. And while many aspects of the film (and the musical) are either composites or half-truths to move the narrative along (for example, Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia to be with her horny husband), it's still an inspiring film – especially given that the Second Continental Congress was held in secrecy and the nascent nation was in the midst of a shooting revolution.

If nothing else, the movie reflects the sense of purpose the Founding Fathers had in breaking away from England and the tyranny of King George III and thus drafting the Declaration of Independence. The half-truths and composites are not only entertaining, but they feel real. At least they do to me.

Anyway, the signing of the Declaration ultimately led to the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 – just seven years after the end of the Revolutionary War. I tend to tie those two incredible documents together. The Revolution was fought to separate the colonies from a monarchy and the Constitution was designed and created by We the People to prevent the rise of another King George III.

The Founding Fathers were aware of this problem as they grappled with the danger of a strong president who could become a tyrant. That's why they created a bicameral Congress with three branches of government that is empowered with checks and balances to reign in a rogue president. 

It works when everybody does their jobs. 

Fast forward 237 years...

Somehow, some way, the Supreme Court has granted a felonious president with 34 criminal indictments complete immunity for the length and duration of his term. Where is the logic in that? Where is the logic of removing 50 years of settled law to prevent a woman from having control of her own body? How do detention camps exits in America after what we saw in World War II?

On this Fourth of July, felon president Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill (who comes up with these stupid names anyway? Alligator Alcatraz. Really? It sounds like we're getting our government from out of a comic book) that will add $3.3 trillion to the nation debt over 10 years. It will cut $930 billion from Medicaid, thus endangering the existence of possibly 300 or more rural hospitals and perhaps 25 percent of the country's nursing homes. A total of $170 billion will be cut from Medicare. Another 12 million people could lose their health care. How about a $285 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? All of this in order to pay for a tax break for billionaires in what is amounting to be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. How does this help the American people? All it does is make us hungrier, poorer and sicker. Many of us will die before our time because of this immoral bill, but, hey, we all die anyway, right Sen. Joni Ernst?

Meanwhile, $10 billion is earmarked for missions to Mars (what?) and another $150 billion to immigration enforcement (those masked men from ICE who don't bother with piddly stuff like due process). You know all those criminals they're supposed to be deporting? Turns out less than 10 percent have committed violent crimes, and that is from ICE's own data. Another 65 percent have committed no crimes at all except, apparently, for the color of their skin. And to meet a quota.

I have a feeling this type of paranoid, fear-mongering government isn't what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned We the People. I might be wrong, but I assumed their concept of government was a bit loftier. Perhaps more idealistic. Certainly kinder.

I guess I might have to wait for the musical 2025 to find out.