The World is Talking. Global Politics

The raven caw of Laura Ingraham’s voice on the radio has never been one of nature’s nobler mating calls, and her on-air personality has always struck me as the antithesis of sparkling. Her off-air personality likewise, based on my brief cheesegrating exposure to it. Years ago, waiting in a remote studio to do Howie Kurtz’s show, I heard Ingraham mutter in complaint, “Why am I always on with this guy?”–this guy being, of course, the inimitable me. My tender feelings might have been hurt by her little snippy-poo had I not divested myself of pride, vanity, and the need to appease others years ago by taking a summer course in emotional detachment at the Learning Annex, where “lack of affect” was considered a major plus. But from behind the Fortress of Solitude ice-blocks of practiced indifference, I admit I felt a flicker of sympathy for Ingraham as exasperation gets the worst of her in this samizdat highlight reel of lowpoints at the host desk of Fox News’s “Just In…” At the mercy of inept nincompoops who seem to be studiously ignoring her escalating objections to their studio chatter and doorway hovering (you half-expect to see stagehands crossing behind her, carrying planks of wood), Ingraham sounds like a U-Boat commander just before everything goes pitch-black and desperate cries compete with the ominous clanging of pipes. The point is, it’s not her fault the ship’s about to spend eternity as a steel turd on the ocean floor. And a shiny forehead is simply impermissable given today’s advances in on-air cosmetology and the ruthless demands of HD TV. No, she has every every right to gripe,* and managed to maintain her composure, which is more than can be said of at least one Harvey Keitel impressionist.

I also find myself in rare concord with Elizabeth Hasselbeck, token Republican Twinkie on that lettuce bed of insurrection, The View. I’m tired of the N-word, I’m tired of the phrase “the N-word,” it’s an ugly-sounding word that does immense more harm than comedy or comradely good; the debate over its shock value, over whether it’s self-asserting or self-hating, is one of those unresolved, racially-frictive bores, given the flux and flex of the context in which it’s considered OK and the subjective sliding scale of acceptability depending on whose mouth it’s coming out of. That Jesse Jackson dropped this familiar nugget in the Fox studio during his insta-classic mumbly “nuts off” monologue seems to me worse than Imus’s “nappy ho” comment because Jackson assumes sonorous airs of eminence and should know better. Imus can be a jerk, but he doesn’t drop his bucket into the deep well of piety from which Jackson honey-coats his words when he knows the mike is on. His use of the n-word is as indefensible as any rapper’s, Whoopie Goldberg shouldn’t be slinging around the air either, and the easiest thing to do is to anethematize the word across the board. Just drop it already, an unofficial universal ban that would make its utterance as crass and offensive as spitting on the sidewalk instead of solemnizing it into controversy that “we as a people must come to terms with” when there are so many other topics more deserving of blathering to death. It’s time to “move on” and explore new and different ways we can get on each other’s nerves in the post-racial America Time and Newsweek have laid out so nicely for us on the picnic grass.

*Alas, K’Lo does her heroine no favors hailing Ingraham’s cool aplomb in a post titled “Laura, the Cucumber Queen.” In today’s climate of innuendo, ‘Cucumber Queen’ is the sort of honorific that could be easily misconstrued.

“Things have deteriorated to the point where staffers at People are mystified by the inanity of the political press corps.”–Bob Somerby, Daily Howler

“Let’s just say we’re taking a flying fuck at a rolling donut,” Marlon Brando philosphized in Last Tango in Paris, an apt description of Maureen Dowd’s modus operandi as the Rona Barrett of the Beltway.

I feel sorry for anyone staring mortality in the immediate face after the flood of lyrical obituaries of former Fox News host and White House press secretary Tony Snow this weekend, which carried the cathedral-bell echo of those for William F. Buckley a few months ago. Such ardent testimonials set an impossibly high luminous bar of grace under pressure and gallant deportment for any current or future cancer patient and terminally ill person. Henceforth it will be considered “bad form” for any misfortunate individual or accident victim to contemplate their near death with anything less than radiant optimism, joy, good humor, stoic strength, generous consideration of others, an uncomplaining nature, and religious serenity. Regret, remorse, bitterness, pain, fear, crankiness, recrimination, and despair will be deemed selfish and immature, the night nurse or family member silhouetted in the doorway chiding the patient dwelling in negativity, “Why can’t you be like Tony Snow, chipper to the last?” Raging against the dying of the light will be regarded as spiritual blockage, sulky resistance to receiving the final boarding pass. Not everybody possesses nobility of spirit, and shouldn’t be expected to provide a shining example to others and keep up a brave front painted with a smile. As Seymour Krim wrote in “Notes Toward My Death,” reprinted in What’s This Cat’s Story?:

…I don’t think I’ll die a “natural” death because I’m not sure there are any left. Any unwilled human death today is unnatural. We find the idea unacceptable compared to the amount we give to stay alive from Monday to Monday. All that energy and foxiness spent for nothing? Death is too simplistic to be natural anymore. Even a long illness, in that favorite veiled phrase of the Times obituary page, is no longer a natural death to our minds. It is a wrong death. Too many possible outs come to the imagination of even the dying person to make him go philosophically into that dark night.

I maintain that every death today is violent…

Krim’s viewpoint may not be univeral but it’s as legitimate as the sun-dappled, rose-petaled sentiments strewn in the path Tony Snow left behind…

Emily Gordon, empress of Emdashes, has raked away the dead leaves obscuring the life and enduring achievement of Rea Irvin (similar to the ones tempestously blown through the front door of the mansion in Written on the Wind, that carefully crafted case study in Freudian interior decor gone mad), revealing the underlying originality, polish, and jazzy brio. If Miss Gordon, if I may be so formal (considering that I’m sitting here at the computer dressed for a hobo convention), is considering other avenues to investigate vis a vis The New Yorker, may I throw out as a possibility the name of whom I consider to be the magazine’s greatest cover artist, Arthur Getz? The deep-shadow, deep-focus, cove-like sanctuary hush (or, alternatively, sun-knighted imperial majesty of his work enshrines the Manhattan of our imaginations as a collective memory captured in the bittersweet mood of a change of seasons. Mood is what’s missing from most contemporary New Yorker covers, so hostage are they to the news.

Unlike millions of moviegoers this summer, I’m not breaking out in a manic twitch in aging fanboy anticipation the new Batman movie. I seem to be nearly alone in not whopping to rafters over Batman Begins, which I found plodding, distended, stiff, pretentious, blurrily frantic, chewingly obvious, sexless, joyless–so humorlessly awestruck with itself that it seemed to fear a single light throwaway moment might ruin its clenched-fist spell. With its angst-powered, flame-farting Batmobile, The Dark Knight threatens to amplify the solemn bluster, drilling away in the coal-black streets of Manichean strife like an epic root canal. I’m sick of manufactured murk and exoskeletal heroics, of schoolyard nihilism conducted as if it were the end of the world (until the next inevitable sequel). Bring on the bright careless bird-cheep of pagan afternoon. As a healthy Pan-goat with sunshine in his veins and a song in the Julie Andrews vestibule of his heart, there is only one summer movie I crave to see, one only summer movie that matters, and I’m happy to hear that even Mark Kermode has surrendered to its sugar rush, at no small cost to his pride and dignity. If Meryl Streep indeed sings-recites the lyrics of ABBA as if the words were being projected on a Brechtian scrim, this strikes me as the sort of “gutsy” artistic experimentation that should be supported by all art-lovers between visits to the concession stand.

Permit a confession. A backstage look at the exciting world of magazine journalism, if you will. A few years ago, Vanity Fair deputized me to sample a round of rock musicals as a possible column subject. I flew to London and saw Taboo in its original staging (realizing that the Leigh Bowery saga was one of those you-had-to-be-there phenomena, a Warholian aftershock illegible to latecomers on the scene), and a press conference for the Wagnerian rock adaptation of Queen’s We Will Rock You in which Robert DeNiro, Ben Elton (comedian, author), and others emerged from a bank of dry-ice fog sheepishly wielding guitars. I saw other shows that have mercifully receded from memory, jukebox bios about Buddy Holly and Elvis. The one musical that worked, the one that tore through the paper walls of resistance like a Panzer disguised as a Good Humor truck, was, of course, Mamma Mia! To paraphrase Richard Lloyd on the Ramones, Mamma Mia! invaded a stupid part of your brain where you were completely defenseless and set up holiday camp. Only later did you decipher how ingeniously constructed, seamlessly efficient, and sportily compact ABBA’s songcraft and execution were, its components as light and bouncy as charmed particles. By the end of Mamma Mia! I was on my feet with the rest of the standing-O audience, happily converted into a complete idiot. Exposed to the gleaming enamel of the ABBA experience, Dr. Kermode too seems to have undergone indoctrination at the subatomic level of consciousness that released his inner sprite. My own inner sprite later filled up on candy and joined the Obama campaign, but who am I to judge? Each of us must make our own wayward path in life, be we human flesh or dragonfly figments of caprice. That’s the Iron Law of the Universe, as I understand it.

Well, I must get back to watching Cassandra’s Dream, where for some crackpot reason Woody Allen has staged the unveiling of the murder scheme by having poor Tom Wilkinson, Colin Farrell, and Ewan Macgregor standing under a tree in the pissing rain, not a scene likely to go down in the record books as one of the glories of Naturalism. Everybody looks uncomfortable, as if unsure if drenching wetness is integral to the scene, or something they have to put up with as part of the wondrous experience of working with Woody.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something Mannion this way comes.

Yes, Lance Mannion, appreciator of hands shaped to exquisite purposes and enemy of false piety where unrepentant racist old coots are concerned, is hosting tonight’s chinwag confab devoted to Bonnie & Clyde over at Newcritics.

I will be unable to take part, due to a prior date with destiny, but would like to relay Manny Farber’s take on the bankrobbers’ bloody ballad, reprinted in Negative Space:

The movie starts with the aroma of a French Agnes Varda bedroom scene: Miss Dunaway lying belly down on a bed, in heat, restless, with no action in town, West Texas. “Hey, there, that’s my momma’s car you’re stealing!” She flies down the stairs, the camera staring up her billowing skirts. The movie picks up now that it’s out in the open air, an authentic small town street with covered sidewalks: pseudo-folk conversation, spiffed-up Warren Beatty doing that coy shuffle when his face loses itself inside a boyishly fake half-grin.

The fluke of Dunaway is that her body moves uncannily in harmony with the film’s movement. While Beatty-[Michael J.] Pollard-[Gene] Hackman are muscular, earthbound, scurrying and plodding in skit-like business that is both entertaining and synthetic, she is almost air.

And so fetching in her dandy beret!

I skipped the Rush Limbaugh profile in The Sunday Times Magazine, put off by the smug, belligerent, Al Capone-ish cover photo and the byline belonging to Zev Chafets, as odious a journalistic operator as there is above ground. That my prophylactic measures were prudent has been confirmed by Eric Boehlert’s dismantling of this puff job, whose very publication offers further masochistic proof of the Times’ death wish (i.e., lauding a conservative kingpin who would happily and triumphantly blow plumes of cigar smoke into the paper’s grave).

To hear Chafets, Rush Limbaugh is simply Jackie Gleason with a point of view, livin’ large and lovin’ it. Boehlert:

…Chafets clearly never intended to inform readers about who Limbaugh is and what he actually does for a living. Instead, the reporter set out to paint false portraits of Limbaugh as a deep thinker as well as a powerful GOP insider…

That’s why there was no mention in the very long profile about the fact that Limbaugh has called Sen. John Kerry a “gigolo,” mocked Democratic Party chief Howard Dean as “a very sick man,” agreed that liberal philanthropist George Soros is a “self-hating Jew,” denounced then-Sen. Tom Daschle as an Al Qaeda sympathizer, mocked anti-war crusader Cindy Sheehan, whose son was slain in Iraq, by teasing, ” ‘Oh, she lost her son’ — well, yes. Yes. Yes. But you know, this is [sigh] — aaah. We all lose things.”

Or that Limbaugh has claimed Democrats “hate this country” (i.e. “What’s good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today”); denigrated members of the U.S. Armed Forces, calling military men and women who criticized the war in Iraq and advocated withdrawal “phony soldiers”; toasted photos of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib as “good old American pornography”; suggested actor Michael J. Fox faked symptoms of his life-threatening illness while taping a pro-stem-cell-research commercial; called Sen. Barack Obama a “Halfrican American”; and announced Obama and Osama bin Laden are “on the same page.”

There was not even a whiff of those odious attacks in The New York Times. Who knows? Maybe Chafets, given his clear political leanings, didn’t include those nuggets because he didn’t think the smears were particularly controversial. Maybe Chafets agreed with all of Limbaugh’s pronouncements.

It’s certainly possible. Reading some of Chafets’ previous work (he used to be a columnist for the New York Daily News), I often got the feeling that he was applying to be a Limbaugh ghost writer, the way he dumped all over Democrats and cheered lustfully for a war with Iraq.

One scurrilous Chafets column in particular really captured just how far out on the Democratic-hating fringes he has operated. The column was published less than three weeks before the 2004 election, and Chafets relayed a story, which he had heard secondhand, about the time Sen. Kerry made an official visit to Israel some 20 years earlier. According to Chafets, Kerry walked away dry-eyed after visiting a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. When an Israeli host told Kerry that then-Sen. Al Gore had been emotionally overwhelmed by the museum, Kerry, determined to match his stateside “rival,” asked for time alone and then allegedly returned with tears in his eyes.

They were manufactured tears, according to the New York Times contributor whom Rush Limbaugh now calls “friend.”

Safe to say that during the 2004 campaign, Chafets did everything he could to slime the Democratic nominee, who was nothing more than “the standard bearer for the unbearable” and a “Giant New England Slack-Jaw.”

Chafets chuckled at Kerry when the Swift Boat Vets spread their smears about his war record, and wrote: “[Kerry] made a career out of being a proud Vietnam war hero who came home and threw away his medals.”

Chafets has done lots of Dem-trashing in recent years…

Boehlert cites a number of slimy examples but the one that I recall most vividly was Chafet’s widely-reprinted column charmingly titled “Having a Jewish Wife Won’t Save Dean,” because when it comes to Israel, nothing less than dirt-groveling fealty will do:

Here’s a hint to the Dean campaign: He won’t be able to hide behind Bill Clinton–or Dr. Judith Steinberg [Dean’s wife].

On a campaign stop in Iowa, Dean was asked by a woman named Norma Jean Sharp about his position on Israel. According to The Weekly Standard, Dean replied, “They’ll be all right. … I’m not going to let anything happen to Israel. My wife is Jewish.”

Jewish relatives are a dime a dozen in this year’s Democratic field, from John Kerry’s long-lost grandparents to Wesley Clark’s departed Yiddishe papa. Heck, even Joe Lieberman has a Jewish wife. [har har]

Besides, marriage is a thin reed these days. As far as I know, Dean and Steinberg are as solid as Ma and Pa Kettle. But let’s face it–these days, half of all marriages wind up in divorce.

What if Steinberg decides she doesn’t want to be First Lady and takes a hike? What if a despondent President Dean falls for Queen Noor (she likes short guys) or Hanan Ashrawi or one of the Dixie Chicks?

Yeah, he’s a regular Morey Amsterdam, our Zev, with uglier aspersions. But perhaps his lowest low was registered when he–well, let’s have Robert Fisk tell it:

Is “Palestinian” now just a dirty word? Or is “Arab” the dirty word? Let’s start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote–among many other books–Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: “As an Episcopalian, he’s ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates.”

This is the creep the Times assigned to do a cover story for its Sunday magazine.

Has Roger L. Simon misplaced his last remaining marble? Is senility tapping its bony finger at his entrance door? Or is it simply the summer heat boiling his head like an egg beneath his private-eye fedora?

A few days ago he favorably compared John McCain in North Vietnamese to Alec Guinness’s colonel in The Bridge over the River Kwai, not quite comprehending that the colonel was an unswervingly upright paragon and stickler for the rules to a near-insane degree–in the words of TBogg, “an honorable yet ultimately arrogant and deluded man who puts his principles above his fellow soldiers which compels him to collaborate with his captors.” To get it that wrong about a movie that famous requires a certain knack of negative genius.

Now it appears that Simon, a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, is as comprehension-challenged about American fiction as he is about classic film.

In his latest post he tries to take a literate swipe at Democratic senator Chris Dodd by comparing him to Sinclair Lewis’s self-made businessman Dodsworth from the novel of the same name. “Chris Dodd is beginning to look as fatuous and fake as that famous Sinclair Lewis hero,” he jeers.

Problem is, anyone who has read Lewis’s novel or seen the moving, beautifully acted screen version starring Walter Huston and Mary Astor knows that there’s nothing “fatuous and fake” about the character of Dodsworth. (Did Simon confuse him with Babbitt?) Moreover, if you follow Simon’s own link to the Wikipedia entry, you find the following description of Lewis’s protagonist:

“Sam Dodsworth is a rare Lewis character: a man of true conviction and purpose.”

So not only does Simon get Dodsworth wrong, he doesn’t pay attention to the contents of the sites to which he links, otherwise he’d spot the contradiction.

To summarize: Comparing John McCain to the mad colonel in River Kwai: not a compliment.
Comparing Chris Dodd to Dodsworth: compliment.

Multifaceted ignorance can be exhausting, requiring a lot of upkeep to maintain the flow of misinformation. Given that Simon is now haplessly writing the opposite of what he means to impart, perhaps he ought to consider taking a summer-long sabbatical to spare himself further self-embarrassment and mental fatigue, emulating the example of his former fellow Pajamas Media sahib shown here cocooning in the hopes of acquiring a filmy residue of authenticity to go with his stubble. I assume it’s stubble. The resolution on my laptop isn’t the best, so perhaps what I perceive as stubble are simply large dots distributed across his sleep-creased face.

Simon, for his part, should nap with his head pointed towards an open window, allowing the occasional breeze to aerate his brain and disperse the Miss Havisham cobwebs hanging like heavy drapes.

Needless to say, no blogger is in deeper crying need of an extended bout of suspended animation than the babbling brook known as K’Lo.

Update: The Fedora, in shame and chagrin, seems to have pulled his post, sparing himself untold abuse in the comments section.

Set your chimes for 8 pm Eastern tonight for the debut of Elvis Mitchell’s Under the Influence series on TCM. The debut show features Elvis’s interview with actor-director-producer Sydney Pollack, whose vitality, insight, and generosity here make his recent death an even keener deprivation. The dynamic half hour is followed by a showing of Tootsie, and future subjects Under the Influence include Bill Murray, jabberwocking Quentin Tarantino, Laurence Fishburne, Richard Gere, and Ed “Hulk Smash” Norton, though I note with some asperity that Elvis seems to have ignored my advice that he track down and nab Hollywood legend Olivia de Havilland as his “big get.”

There’s so much about her century-long rift with sister Joan Fontaine that remains enigmatic and unexplicated, even by Larry King.

I hope it doesn’t come as an inconsiderate surprise to Elvis that before he hitched up with TCM, they approached me to host a show to be called Word Up, with James Wolcott, where I took the stage to the funky sounds of the Cameo classic, sans padded shoulders and cherry-red codpiece (which the producers prudently figured might be a bit “too too” for the folks at the senior center). We taped the pilot before a live audience at La Cienega. Well, they were live when we started, but after about twenty minutes into the taping it was kind of hard to hear any breathing and tell where the humans left off and the zombies began.

My first guest was legendary director Mike Nichols, who owed somebody at TCM a favor. Rather than fawn over him every which way as Charlie Rose would have done, I decided to open with a wicked slider to throw Mr. Diane Sawyer off balance and provoke him to “open up.” Instead of blah-blah’ing about his endless string of directorial triumphs, I asked him about his acting role in the screen adaptation of Wally Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. I said:

“Pauline Kael hailed your performance in the film, claiming that the role allow your cold, clammy inner weaselly qualities to rise to the runny surface. Any response?”

Nichols fixed me with a gaze that was an odd mingling of contempt, bewilderment, and fury, and something whooshed past my ear that may have been a carefully concealed dagger. I then asked him which actress he thought possessed the best rack in Charlie Wilson’s War, and this too proved a fruitless route of inquiry.

My second guest was wide-eyed actress-comedienne Rita Rudner, who was doing a benefit in town and just happened to be susceptible to the booker’s tearful begging. We happily “hit it off,” but I’m afraid RR, as I affectionately called her, lost what was left of the studio audience when I asked her for some amusing tales from the set of the ultimate luvvies film, Peter’s Friends, whereby she proceeded to pay homage to Stephen Fry’s ability to convert everyday common slang phrases into ornate mock Latin tags, providing numerous examples of his extemporaneous wit. Now Fry’s gift of Latin gab may have kept Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in stitches but it flopped like a flock of dead geese in the studio, where my flop sweat formed a manmade lake under the swivel chair I had insisted on to make me look more “dynamic” even in repose.

Well, needless to say, the pilot episode never aired, and higher-ups at TCM disavowed any knowledge of my involvement in the Bay of Pigs. Some infotainers might be bitter after such scalding rejection, but that’s not my style. I prefer to wave my hands in the air like I just don’t care; until my arms get tired, that is, then I have to stop and rest a bit, maybe apply a little ointment to the problem areas. I really should find a good masseuse, one who understands my “needs” and isn’t into being all “judgmental,” if such a deity exists.

One of the many reasons I miss Steve Gilliard is imagining how he would have gone to town with the mad melange of A-Rod-Mrs. A-Rod-Madonna-Lenny Kravitz-and the Kabbalah–the rampageous joy he would have had. It’s a cosmic injustice that Gilliard isn’t around to ride bronco over that Yankee stew and so many other subjects crying out for his Swiftian abuse, analysis in loving detail, appetite for the absurd, and special brand of rough justice (think of the hole he would have torn in the sky over the whitewashing Jesse Helms obits). But if he’s no longer in the electric present, at least there are still rediscoveries to be made in the myriad postings he did before many of us became fans and addicts, and the stalwart crew at Group News Blog–keeping alive and carrying on the Gilliard tradition–have updated the archives of Gilliard’s online library. Gilliard Unbound offers a powerful antidote to the ever more prevailing institutional blogging that presents us with such self-infatuated spectacles as the A-Listers of The Atlantic showing off their etchings at the luminary-infested Aspen Ideas festival.

There was a time not so long ago when those of us devoted to the artistry and luminosity of ballerina Veronika Part felt somewhat alone and beleaguered in divinity school, surrounded by hostile holdouts heavily armed with spitballs and impacted sneers. It’s how Oriole manager Earl Weaver must have felt when he originally moved Cal Ripken to shortstop, a position traditionally held by squirtier players of cricket agility. There were those who resisted Part because their squinty, scheming eyeballs were held hostage by political danceworld agendas and personal egos soaked in brine. Some of them are mute now, unable to admit they were wrong or that the impressions they originally formed are moth-eaten, outmoded. Others housed legitimate suspicions or doubts about Part–about her stamina, her height (how difficult it would make her to partner and lift), her theatricality (which some found picture-posey), her speed on the basepaths. They liked her in spots but worried she was overrefined, soft, skittish. The spring ABT season has not only put those doubts to rest but to rout. The last faint mists have burned off her performance and persona, baring the lineaments of gratified desire. There’s no denying her now. After a spectacular Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Part did five Lilac Fairies in Sleeping Beauty’s week-long stint, and then, the climax of her season so far, a pair of revelatory Nikiyas in La Bayadere.

“This year, there’s been no ballerina more sublime than Veronika Part,” Eric Taub writes at Ballet Magazine (UK).

Heroic yet imbued with the restraint of her Mariinsky training, Part could well be a visitor from another plane than her fellow ABT ballerinas. The cantilevered turns and twists of her Vaganova-trained torso are as much an architectural wonder as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Chrysler Building, and her delicate, soft-sell phrasing doesn’t detract from the majesty of her port-de-bras. This season, Part’s hit her stride as an artist. Hers was the best Swan Lake of the season (better, it saddens me to say, than the fading, Ananiahsvili), and I have a hard time imagining any of ABT’s ballerinas coming close in Bayadere. Had she materialized in the midst of the Kirov’s recent visit here, she’d have given the great Lopatkina a run for her money. I might even prefer Part; the two are statuesque goddesses of the dance, but Lopatkina’s icy cold in her magisterial perfection, Part’s all warmth and accessibility.

This night’s Solor was the ham sandwich that’s Marcelo Gomes. Tall, sturdily built and undeniably strong, he’s a perfect partner for Part, not just mechanically, but also in temperament. Seldom have I seen a dancer look so damn happy just to be onstage, making his every second there tell a story. At the beginning of the first act, his Solor demanded that Craig Salstein’s Fakir, who’s having a very, very bad hair day, fetch Nikiya so that they might ruin both their lives by pledging eternal love before the Sacred Fire (a tricky bit of mime!). Salstein protested, and Gomes replied by raising his pointed finger, ever so sloooowly, towards Salstein’s face, as if it were the business end of a .38. It’s nice to see a man who enjoys his job so thoroughly, and who wouldn’t when paired with a goddess like Part?

One thing I love about Gomes is how shamelessly he plays the enamored romantic. Gomes has been quite public about being gay, and while many gay men partner their ballerinas with an attentive but uninvolved politesse, Gomes plays the part of a raging heterosexual with great elan and perfectly realized detail. In Kabuki, men are famous for their portrayals of women; they’re particularly affecting because they’re not women their characters are created entirely from art and artifice, and yet they can appear more feminine than “real” women, who don’t need to put quite so much effort into being female. Drag queens work in much the same way, and so does Gomes, in becoming, onstage, more blazingly straight than the most studly heterosexual. With Part (as with Herrera or any of his ballerinas), Gomes eyes blazed with ardor, and he was always pressing his grinning face up close to Part’s, reacting to her slightest inflection with the exaggerated attentiveness and puppy-dog face of a teenager in the throes of his first crush.

Part played right along, especially in their first-act love duets, which were delightfully over-the-top. At the end of one adagio, Gomes cradled Part stretched out almost horizontally in a swooning backbend, made quite magnificent by the voluminous sweep of her long arms, one of which, at the music’s final note, gently pressed Gomes head downward so his cheek came to rest in the not-insignificant pillows of her bosom.* Later, while on his knees partnering Part by holding her about the waist, he took a moment to delicately press his other cheek against Part’s impressively flat stomach, proudly bared to the world in her two-piece harem-girl, I mean temple-dancer costume. At other times, and with other dancers, such liberties taken with accepted classical deportment might’ve seemed vulgar, but with Gomes and Part they were one detail among many which described the worshipful, unheeding force of Solor’s love for Nikiya. (I was about to use Margot Fonteyn as an example of that deportment with “would anyone have treated Fonteyn thus?” I wonder how I could’ve asked myself such a dumb question, even rhetorically.)

Despite Part’s statuesque beauty (she’s quite possibly the most beautiful ballerina extant in New York), she displays none of the hauteur and regality one sometimes sees in beauties, especially on the stage. Even her Odette is more heartsick woman than queen. In Bayadere her Nikiya’s completely unaware of her beauty (she probably has no idea why the poor Brahmin would forsake his position for her); if this were a Hollywood movie, there’d be a moment when Solor would snatch away her pointy-cornered librarian’s glasses and declaim “but..but you’re beautiful!” She’s the temple-dancer next door, or the nice girl who sprouts the occasional feather. Those of us of a certain age might say she’s Ginger but thinks she’s Mary Ann. With many great dancers, you’re aware of their artifice even as you allow yourself to be swayed by it (I have always adored Ananiashvili’s brilliant stagecraft). It’s Part’s genius that the slight reticence in her phrasing, the stylistic modesty imbued by her Kirov years, makes her persona all the more accessible. When her Nikiya died, I saw the woman as much as the artist. It’s no wonder she’s become one of ABT’s most popular ballerinas, she deserves it.

I’m not sure if Veronika is as familiar with the lore and mythos of Gilligan’s Island as she is with the fine points of Seinfeld, so I can’t confirm if the Ginger-Mary Ann eternal feminine dichotomy played a factor in her characterization of a sacred-profane hootchie-cootchie dancer. Clearly more investigation needs to be done, preferably after a fine glass of Glenlivet.

But ABT’s spring season at the Met still has a week-long string of Giselles to go, with Part performing Myrta, Queen of the Wilis, on Wednesday evening, July 9th, and again at July 12th’s Saturday matinee. Ticket availability seems better for the July 9th performance, but that could change in a hurry; check here for purchase and seat information.

*Or “tits,” as Mark Morris would probably say, a topic for a future post.