Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, With a Bad Guess About American Culture in the Past Decade)

“What sorts of novels, poems, films, television series, video games, paintings, music, or graphic novels will adequately reflect America’s next decade? We don’t have any idea yet. We can’t: Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Donald Trump’s interest in the arts, gauged on a scale from one to 100, is somewhere between zero and negative 10—lower than any president in the last 50 years. Some of those presidents didn’t give a hoot about the arts, but at least they found it politic to pretend. Trump won’t. In fact, he may not even notice they’re there.”—Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood, “Creative Reconstruction,” The Nation, Feb. 6/13, 2017

Margaret Atwood developed a reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.

Yet it turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture. It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”

In other words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the already vast powers of his office to crush them.

Count among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood Reporter account from earlier this week.

In implementing plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of academe.

But the algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen, writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.”

Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building down.

Even before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures, as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American figures.

Nevertheless, he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s “America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or limited-edition U.S. passports.

When late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a similar fate at ABC.

Anytime something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate either Republican or Democratic fans.)

I guess we should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say, literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential war President.

His second term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7. That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated by images from the state.

Unfortunately, this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.

But she was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.

Joke of the Day (Tina Fey, on a New Form of Plastic Surgery)

“There's a new procedure I'm doing a lot where they freeze your fat off you, then make it into a whipped dessert, and you eat it again.” — American actress and screenwriter Tina Fey, quoted by Dan Snierson, “Tina and Amy Boss Us Around (And You Love It!)”, Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 20, 2013

Song Lyric of the Day (Dolly Parton, on Her ‘Coat of Many Colors’)

“My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be.
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”—Grammy-winning country-music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton (1946-2026), title tune from her Coat of Many Colors LP (1971)
 
There’s a reason why Dolly Parton was remembered not just with respect for her talent, but even with love for her personality: she was so transparently down to earth. She never forgot where she came from: Locust Ridge, TN, in a tiny log cabin with her parents and 11 siblings, but without electricity or running water.
 
There will certainly be those who say that she achieved success through hard work. No argument from me there. But I think it’s also fair to say that, despite what some cynics say, you don’t have to step on other people’s toes to get ahead in life. Her career proved that, too, in abundance.

(The image accompanying this post, of Dolly Parton accepting the Liseberg Applause Award 2010, was created on Nov. 16, 2010, by Curtis Hilbun.)

Quote of the Day (Teresa Carpenter, on ‘Crime As Entertainment’ in the Eighties)

“It would be no exaggeration to call the ’80s the decade of Crime as Entertainment. An epoch where fascination with ‘reality’ permeated every nook and crevice of television. The first and most visible manifestation of the phenomenon was the unprecedented number of miniseries and movies-of-the-week based loosely upon true tales of mayhem. In 1981, there was Murder in Texas recreating the demise of Texas heiress and equestrian, Joan Hill. The following year brought The Executioner’s Song based upon Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the felonious life and ultimate electrocution of Gary Gilmore. Nineteen-eighty-four was a bloody year, giving us both The Burning Bed and Fatal Vision, followed close upon by the following year’s extravaganza, The Atlanta Child Murders. Nineteen-eighty-seven produced not one, but two, network miniseries on the rather minor case of Frances Schreuder, a demented Mormon heiress who induced her son to kill her father. And, of course, in the closing months of the decade were offerings fresh off the newsstands: The Preppie Murder and Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, “1980-1989: Crime as Entertainment,” The Village Voice, Jan. 2, 1990

Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer. 

That would not be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over again.

It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties. 

His mother was an Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term “preppy.”

Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown. 

In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)

What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point. 

It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.

It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred. 

But editors needed a way to convey the morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the trick.

Then Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed, and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.

The shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to “hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way to dispute his story.

Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the defendant, was responsible for her own death.

The judge in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press as a record of her encounters with other young men.  Moreover, for a New York Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.

Litman sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Then, with the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”

It was too late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.

Even after serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law. Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years ago.

Ironically, he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.

After seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.

Unfortunately, today, even after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.

In that sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"

This Day in Art History (Death of Thomas Moran, Painter of Dramatic Western Landscapes)

Aug. 25, 1926— Thomas Moran, a British emigrant whose many sweeping landscapes led him to become known as “the dean of American painting,” died at age 89 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

His most significant art resulted from his participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to the Yellowstone region in the West. When he returned east, Congress bought for inclusion in the Capitol Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (pictured) and The Chasm of the Colorado, for the then-princely sum of $10,000 each.

The sensation that these sparked created a groundswell of support for creating, within a year, Yellowstone National Park—the cornerstone of the parks system that a Ken Burns documentary called “America’s Best Idea.”

Displacement motivated the Moran family’s migrations in his childhood, an involuntary movement that he would later convert to a more positive—and lucrative—wanderlust. 

His parents, who were handloom weavers, had left Dublin, Ireland for Bolton, Lancashire, England to improve their economic prospects. But mechanization put them out of work and compelled them to move to Kensington, just outside Philadelphia, PA.

While working as an apprentice at a local wood engraving firm, Moran took up painting and drawing, until he became adept at watercolors and illustrations. Influenced by British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Moran was uninterested in “realism,” but instead aimed for “idealization.” “The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture,” he explained.

Despite his strenuous attempts to build his practice and reputation, Moran was not a logical addition to the 1871 Geological Survey Expedition, in the eyes of others or even necessarily himself. First, the very idea of having an artist dedicated solely to recording impressions of a new territory hadn’t even occurred to the normally visionary Thomas Jefferson when he authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly seven decades before.

But the rumors of wonders in the Yellowstone region—along with entrepreneurs like Jay Cooke who hoped advertisements would stir travel to this virtually unknown American interior—sparked the need for a visual record of what was encountered. 

A railroad manager and friend of Moran’s urged Hayden to hire him for this purpose, with the added inducement that the artist would pay his own way and simply hoped for a cavalry escort for protection.

It does not appear that Hayden and his associates were informed that Moran was frail and had never trekked through anything approximating the physical environment where he would go now. But he quickly impressed his counterpart in photography on the expedition, William Henry Jackson, with his “fine courage…[N]one was more untiring on the trail, or less mindful of unaccustomed food or hard bed under a little shelter tent, than he was.”

For most of the 1870s, to be closer to New York publishers who published his work in their magazines, Moran and his wife Mary (another artist) lived in Newark, NJ. In the early 1880s they relocated to East Hampton, NY, the beginning of that town’s status as an art mecca. (Today, their studio is a National Historic Landmark overseen by the East Hampton Historical Society.)

Public taste can be fickle, and Moran had to adapt to buyers no longer interested in the Far West scenes that had once caused sensations. With obvious resignation about the changing art market, Moran told a reporter, "I prefer to paint western scenes, but the Eastern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are not familiar with mountain effects and it is much easier to sell a picture of a Long Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."

Even after his beloved wife died in 1900, Moran continued to travel, in the company of his daughter Ruth or his old friend and expeditionary companion Jackson. He revisited the places that initially fascinated him while adding Venice as a subject of some of his most popular paintings.

It would take seven decades before the National Gallery of Art mounted the first major retrospective of Moran’s work, coinciding with the 125^th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. 

Museumgoers were able to behold on that occasion 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs—including, most importantly, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Chasm of the Colorado, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875), which Moran and his admirers were previously unable to convince Congress to keep together as one whole.

(For an informed analysis of Moran’s technique, I urge you to read landscape painter Stapleton Kearns’s April 2011 blog post.)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)

Quote of the Day (Frances Trollope, Loathing a Most American Summer Fruit)

“The huge fruit [watermelon] is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”—English novelist and travel writer Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

To her infinite horror, Mrs. Trollope first came across this fruit (one I love, BTW) while visiting Cincinnati in 1830. I’m afraid that her bad opinion wouldn’t be improved by the image accompanying this post: Juliette Lewis in the 1993 film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.