Mendocino County Today: Sunday 7/27/2025

Marine Layer | Cool | Steve Jurist | PG&E Dams | Local Events | Trail Video | GRTA Management | Four Trees | Strike Averted | Plum Harvest | Murder Mourning | Pet Cora | Yesterday's Catch | Show Up | Music Festival | Enlightened Being | Rail Tunnel | Anywhere But | Huckleberry Finn | Marco Radio | Giants Lose | Glimmerglass 50 | Costume Pictures | Worn Out | Civil War | Mamdani Bird | Chicago | Hulk Legacy | Marines Wading | Romeo + Juliet | Too Shy | Lead Stories | Starving Gaza | Palestinians Gather | Francis Black

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THUNDERSTORM chances remain for Sunday afternoon. Near normal to slightly below normal temperatures expected into early this coming week. Another upper low could bring chances for thunderstorms mid week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): In the same manner that if you throw rocks at a tree long enough, you will eventually hit a squirrel, if the NWS forecasts sunny skies enough times there are likely to hit sun? In a few days weather fans, in a few days? A foggy 53F this Sunday morning on the coast.

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IN LOVING MEMORY: STEVEN MICHAEL JURIST

July 24, 1946-March 31, 2020

Do Good Everyday.

In remembrance of Steve for his deep love of family, intellect, warmth, wise counsel, and keen sense of humor that is greatly missed. He is remembered as a master educator for his leadership, dedication, and compassion for a lifetime of service throughout Mendocino County and to those in need.

Your loving family,

Susan, Adam, Roxanne, Matt, and Jaime

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TWO NORCAL DAMS COULD BE RAZED UNDER PG&E PLAN

by Kurtis Alexander

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. submitted a request to federal regulators Friday to tear down an aging hydroelectric project in Mendocino and Lake counties, a $530 million demolition that would include removal of two dams on the Eel River.

The Potter Valley Project, according to PG&E, is no longer financially fit for power generation. However, the project’s greatest asset has become the water it provides, and the beneficiaries of that water, which include cities and towns in Sonoma and Marin counties as well as the region’s celebrated grape-growing industry, have been on edge about losing supplies.

The decommissioning plan that PG&E filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission calls for preserving the project’s water-delivery system, which those worried about water were hoping for. Under PG&E’s proposal, a new agency run by local communities would take over some of the existing project facilities and continue water shipments. The agency, though, wouldn’t be able to ship as much water and would likely charge more for it.

“We are working toward a path that allows this (water) diversion to continue at the same time (as the project’s decommissioning),” Tony Gigliotti, PG&E power generation licensing project manager, recently told the Chronicle.

The fate of the power project and future water deliveries in the region is now in the hands of FERC. PG&E doesn’t anticipate major problems getting federal approval for its decommissioning plan, but the FERC review is expected to take at least two years and includes public comment. The soonest project demolition might begin would be late 2028.

Some communities, notably in Lake County, have remained outright opposed to PG&E’s proposal and will likely continue fighting it through the review process. One concern is the potential loss of Lake Pillsbury, a recreation spot on the Eel River that would be drained with the removal of the project’s Scott Dam.

Conversely, environmental groups, tribes and other communities on the Eel have lauded the decommissioning as a vital river restoration. The dismantling of the 138-foot-high Scott Dam and 63-foot-high Cape Horn Dam downstream would make the Eel the longest free-flowing river in California. As such, struggling salmon and other fish that haven’t been able to access the upper reaches of the river because of Scott Dam would benefit from more water and more habitat, advocates say.

The Potter Valley Project is unique among hydroelectric enterprises. Its dams do not generate power but rather help hold and steer water for power production elsewhere, in this case the neighboring Russian River watershed.

The project works by diverting Eel River flows to a powerhouse in Potter Valley, built in 1908 for electricity for the Ukiah region. The water, after being used for power production, is sent to Lake Mendocino, where it has become a boon for Russian River supplies.

Many utilities in the Russian River basin, including Sonoma Water and Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, have come to depend on Eel River imports as have numerous vineyards in southern Mendocino County and Alexander Valley.

The Eel-Russian Project Authority, formed by the recipients of Eel River water, has been working on a way to continue flows between the basins. The new authority’s hope is to build a fish-friendly diversion facility on the Eel to ensure water deliveries after the dams come down.

PG&E’s decommissioning plan includes an application for “non-project use of project lands,” which would specifically allow the Eel-Russian Project Authority to operate.

“It was good to see that they had mention of that in their surrender plan,” said Janet Pauli, a member of the authority’s governing board. “This is one step in the process, and I’m glad we’re here.”

Sonoma Water, which provides water to more than 600,000 people in Sonoma and Marin counties, also said it was pleased with PG&E’s plan.

“This was critical,” said Don Seymour, the agency’s deputy director of engineering.

Still, the Eel-Russian Project Authority and the water agencies that rely on Eel River supplies face the challenge of having to import less water in the future under agreements made to protect the Eel. The Eel-Russian Project Authority also has to come up with financing for a new water-delivery operation, a cost that’s likely to be passed on to water users.

PG&E began looking to offload the Potter Valley Project about a decade ago, but it didn’t find any takers. Citing the high cost of producing power and relatively small amount generated, the utility decided in 2019 to pursue the project’s retirement. No power has been produced there since a transformer malfunctioned in 2021.

Many on the Eel River have welcomed PG&E’s plans, wanting to see less water taken from the river and the century-plus-old dams come out.

“The Eel River is one of California’s best opportunities for wild salmon recovery, and removing Scott and Cape Horn dams is critical to that effort,” said Charlie Schneider, Lost Coast Project Manager for California Trout.

(SF Chronicle)

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LOCAL EVENTS (today)

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CAN YOU PICTURE IT?

Thanks for publishing my rail trail poppy photo. Here’s a link to the YouTube video I made. The video is festive and in my opinion educational.

Andrew Lutsky

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‘LET’S DO THIS THE RIGHT WAY’: Great Redwood Trail Agency Adopts a New Approach to Illegal Camping, Dumping Along the Defunct Railroad

by Isabella Vanderheiden

As plans for the Great Redwood Trail move steadily ahead, the agency overseeing the ambitious 300-mile rail-to-trail project is changing how it handles homeless encampments and illegal dumping on its remote, undeveloped stretches.

At its meeting last week, the Great Redwood Trail Agency (GRTA) Board of Directors approved contracts with two community-based organizations — The People of New Directions in Humboldt County and Friend of Boon in Mendocino County — to provide property management and on-the-ground supportive services to people experiencing homelessness on the trail. The groups will actively monitor undeveloped sections of the trail that are not yet open to the public or managed by local jurisdictions.

“This is our first step in actively managing our property and having eyes on the ground for regular monitoring to get a better sense of what’s happening in these remote areas and how we can best respond to it,” GRTA Executive Director Elaine Hogan told the Outpost during a recent phone interview. “We do sometimes get calls from neighbors about trash or someone sleeping in a remote area … that’s why regular property management and monitoring of our land is going to be really crucial moving forward.”…

https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2025/jul/25/great-redwood-trail

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SKIP TAUBE: Four plum trees I planted at Ten Mile 40 years ago.

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SAFEWAY STRIKE AVERTED as unions reach tentative agreement with grocer

by Jerry Wu

A potential strike involving thousands of Safeway employees across the Bay Area was averted this weekend as their union representatives and the company reached a tentative agreement for a new labor contract early Sunday after months of negotiations.

The new agreement came a few hours before grocery workers from almost 250 stores from Grapevine (Kern County) to the Oregon border would have walked off their jobs and picketed, according to Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Sunday’s strike would have been the first regional labor stoppage against the company in almost 30 years, according to UFCW 5.

The new agreement, scheduled for ratification votes in the unions in the coming days, fulfills many key terms Safeway employees have been vying for the past five months since negotiations for a new contract kicked off. Those include improved wages, pension plans, work scheduling and health care benefits. Full details of the agreement will be released after the ratification votes, UFCW 5 said.

“This is a hard-earned and inspiring victory,” UFCW 5 President John Frahm and UFCW 648 President Dan Larson said in a joint statement Sunday morning. “Because our members stood together — strong and unshakable — they secured a contract that reflects their value and delivers real improvements for their families and futures."

“To every customer, ally, and elected leader who stood by our side — this win belongs to you, too,” Frahm and Larson added. “Bay Area communities made it clear: grocery workers deserve more than thanks — they deserve a fair deal. Because of your support, we won one together.”

The unions had originally planned to go on strike after Friday midnight if they had not reached an agreement by then, but extended the deadline to midnight Saturday as talks continued.

Workers could have picked Sunday if no progress was made in negotiations, the union had said Saturday morning.

The decision to delay striking came after “incremental progress” was made during contract negotiations with Safeway representatives and at the request of a federal mediator, according to UFCW 5.

For the past five months, labor unions representing more than 25,000 employees in Northern California have been negotiating with the Bay Area’s largest grocery chain, demanding improvements in benefits for their employees.

Safeway did not immediately return a request for comment Sunday morning. A spokesperson said in a statement Friday that the company remained “committed to productive, good-faith negotiations with the UFCW locals in Northern California” and that it had brought in a federal mediator earlier to help with negotiations.

Ahead of the potential strike, Safeway released job openings online for temporary workers as early as a week ago.

(sfchronicle.com)

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GALINA IN MOURNING

Galina Trefil:

My ethnic heritage is mixed. Long hair is very culturally significant for women in one of my main backgrounds. The majority of my adult life, my hair was down to the bottom of my back. In addition to wearing black for year, I've cut my hair short now though, as part of the mourning process, after Joshua Lee McCollister's murder. I barely recognize myself now; doubt my friends would recognize me. Josh understood these cultural traditions--(he was, in general, very respectful and supportive of my minority background,)--but he wouldn't have expected me to go through with them. Still, it is a comfort for me to show him this respect.

I would legitimately like to hear what other people do, what helps them with the mourning process.

Also, others who have lost their loved ones to violence, I would appreciate knowing how you coped with it. Josh was not the first person that I loved to die violently. Every death is different though.

Given the events leading up to him being in Humboldt County in the first place, I just keep thinking of how utterly avoidable all of this was. It's that it could have been avoided that just is haunting me so badly.

This didn't have to happen. He shouldn't have been there.

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Cora is a sweet adult dog with a mellow personality. She can be a bit wary of people at first, but will easily warm up to you with after a little time and patience. Cora would do best in a quiet home without too many other pets, where she can relax and enjoy her golden years. Cora is a low-energy dog, happy to take a stroll around the neighborhood, then relax on the couch and watch a good movie with you. She’s very treat motivated and may enjoy some canine training with her new guardian. Cora is a Mastiff mix, 2 years old and 90 sweet pounds.

For information about all of our adoptable dogs and cats and our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com.

Join us the first Saturday of every month for our Meet The Dogs Adoption Event.

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, July 26, 2025

QUENTIN BRADLEY, 53, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, resisting.

JOSEPH CARRILLO, 31, Ukiah. Assault.

JASPER CLARK, 31, Potter Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, false ID, probation violation.

JOHN FREULER, 37, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

CHERYL MATTSON, 53, Willits. Burglary.

NAOMI MENDEZ, 44, Fort Bragg. Disobeying court order.

DEVON PARKER, 19, Clearlake/Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s permission, stolen property, paraphernalia.

JOSE RIVERA-DIAZ, 54, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia.

EDUARDO TORALES-LOPEZ, 31, Ukiah. Burglary.

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BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Editor:

Show up and protest, before it’s too late.

I went to the “Make Good Trouble” march in Sebastopol on July 19. I was disappointed because barely anyone came when so many showed up for the “No Kings” march in June. I know people care about democracy. I know they are angry about deportations, about cruelty, about corruption. But you have to show up, people. You can’t show up just when it is easy, or just when it is a Saturday crowd. If you don’t show your rage and send the message, then what we value is going away, piece by piece, law by law. Being silent only makes it easier for the fascists to take more.

I get it. People (myself included) are tired. Discouraged. Afraid it won’t matter. But if we wait much longer, we may be too late. If you’re reading this, you have power. You can write. Call. Donate. March. Talk to your neighbors. Democracy doesn’t need your perfection. It needs your participation. Please — show up before there’s nothing left to show up for.

J.T. O’Neill

Sebastopol

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ARE YOU AN ENLIGHTENED BEING?

(“Never complain, never explain”)

by Paul Modic

On my birthday we were talking about who were the “enlightened beings” (EB) among us and I nominated our neighbors Mike and Luanne, though it was pointed out that we see only certain sides of people so who knows? (“I’ll call Mike and explain the situation and ask him for some dirt on himself, yeah?” I said.)

What makes someone an enlightened being? As an example of someone who’s not, here’s a little reverse engineering: I’ve often said that it’s my petty streak which keeps me from claiming that title, though anyone who “claims that title” is probably by definition not EB.

Holding grudges, not forgiving and not accepting unenlightened beings for who they are are all my sins of non-enlightenment. (One big one for me is when friends won’t answer simple questions during a conversation, why do people do that?)

(As I write this I’m realizing what a complex definition it is for these EB’s, so instead of delving into deeper characteristics which might apply to them, like humor, kindness, creativity, intelligence, generosity, tolerance, brilliance and genius, I’m going to limit the focus to how we relate to each other, and the petty concerns which bother us.)

Yesterday I got pissed off at a long distance friend, why wasn’t she answering my questions? They weren’t even deeply personal, just simple questions. I decided to diss her, unfriend her on Facebook, just say that’s it, I’m taking a break, goodbye. Even though I enjoy 99% of our interactions, our penpal thing, this just felt disrespectful and game-playing. Why couldn’t she at least tell why she wouldn’t answer? Was she clueless, mean, spacey, forgetful, not a real friend or just extremely private?

C’mon people, this isn’t the Old West when a stranger comes into town, is asked where he’s from and says something like, “Oh here or there,” or “just down the road apiece,” which I suppose was technically true. (Could have been an outlaw on the run coming from an adjoining or faraway state or territory starting a new life, clean slate, pretty easily done back then.)

So that’s it, I thought, I’m done with her, and then I thought wait a minute, this is exactly an example of my state of non-enlightenment: getting annoyed or upset about something which doesn’t really matter, as well as not accepting someone for who they are.

Then I realized that though I’m not an enlightened being today, maybe it’s not too late to become one, like the AA mantra one-day-at-a-time? This was a moment of enlightenment! Why should I choose to get “my vengeance” by dissing and unfriending this person when I could just smile and refrain from such unnecessary anti-social behavior? (Especially as I have few friends and had lost two over the last year because of this very issue: one I dissed because she wouldn’t answer my questions and the other dissed me for asking too many.)

So who are the enlightened beings among us? I think it helps if you’re solvent, if you’re broke or have health issues it’s probably more difficult to be magnanimous. It could be laziness which keeps us from being enlightened, it’s just easier to react, be a reflexive petty person, though really it doesn’t take that much thought to accept those who don’t think or do as we do. (For example, someone told me that my carpenter is a big Trumper, well, he does great work so that’s all I care about.)

Some of my friends and acquaintances are too far gone to make this leap into positivity, half their lives seem to be complaining even though the other half is exemplary and more giving of their energy than me, for example. During the discussion on my birthday someone said “No one’s an enlightened being,” but she probably said that because she’s so deep into complaining, holding grudges, judging others, and being depressed about the political situation that she wants to feel that she’s not so bad. But she is, and I am, and maybe all my few friend are too. (Yeah, we’re human, great excuse, but what about Mike and Luanne?)

So one day at a time. A couple weeks ago I did a very minor good deed, took about fifteen minutes, and directly after and for some hours I felt a warm glow of solidarity with humanity and my community. Some say that telling about it negates it, but I’m trying to make a point.

(I was up for three hours last night with insomnia and read an article a fellow writer, who lets me post my sex stories on his blog, was telling about his terrible toothache. He’s had it for a week, writhing in pain and just taking lots of aspirin, but says he can’t afford the $250 the internet tells him is the cost of a tooth extraction. As soon as I got up I wrote him this message:

Doug, just read your story at 4am.

Don’t you know about the link between teeth health, the brain and mortality?

If something happens to you where can I post my dirty stories?

I’ll pay for your tooth extraction and a bottle of Vicodin, up to $500.

Find an emergency dentist and Go Now.

Have them call me and I’ll put it on my credit card, no problem…)

My housecleaner (slash Death Dulah slash Gal Friday) was here this week encouraging me to deal with some of the useless stuff I have stored in my attic and closets. I was paralyzed and though I didn’t need any of it I was unable to let go and get it outtahere. (Then I realized forget the AA mantra, there’s no hope for me, but you, you have hope my friends, on the road to enlightenment.)

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ANYWHERE BUT HERE

Shree Sadguru Bhausaheb Maharaj | Founder Of Inchegeri Sampradaya

Warmest spiritual greetings from Washington, D.C.,

Sitting here comfortably on a public computer at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, with the earbuds on listening to Sri Sadguru Bhausaheb Maharaj, who is the guru of Siddharameshwar Maharaj who is the guru of Nisargadatta Maharaj, whose compilation of thoughts was published in 1973 as "I AM THAT."

Meanwhile, am presently ignoring an insane individual sitting nearby, who is cursing irrationally, and is thus adding more evidence for a need to allow law enforcement to forcibly take such individuals into custody and deliver them to local hospital psychiatric departments for observation. It was announced in yesterday's Washington Post that the Trump Administration is working on legislation to make this happen, in order to ensure public safety. The situation in America's national capital is a disaster insofar as homelessness, mental illness, and poverty is concerned. It is dangerous here! Tourism is still encouraged, but be careful when going outside of your hotel.

I am available for peace & justice and radical ecological activism on the planet earth, and also will do automatic writing. I have $842.59 in the Chase checking account, and $88.98 in the wallet. General health is excellent at age 75. Go ahead and contact me. I'd like to get the heck out of the D.C. homeless shelter and relocate to a more sattwic environment. That is probably just about anywhere compared to the District of Columbia. I have completed being supportive (for the sixteenth time since June of 1991) of the William R. Thomas Memorial Anti-Nuclear Vigil located in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. I am ready to move on to my next highest good!

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

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MEMO OF THE AIR: Crazy train.

/"One day, everyone will have always been against this." -Omar El Akkad/

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-07-25) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0654

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Charles Tyler - They're Crazy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeJogv2ZNJk

Barefoot Bluegrass Crazy Train. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iW3-oiNl4o

Pushnoy – Shine On You Crazy Diamond. (The accordionist looks just like Klaus in The Umbrella Factory.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENUxVrbWwkc

A slippery slope to doom. (via Juanita) (You might have to click the sound on.) https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/789852349322690560

And about those immense, truck-engine-powered, walking, fire-breathing French puppet animals. https://laughingsquid.com/fredette-lampre-la-machine-ted-talk/

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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RAFAEL DEVERS’ FIRST-BASE DEFENSE QUESTIONABLE in Giants’ loss to Mets

by Susan Slusser

The Rafael Devers First Base Experience will not be without drama as the former third baseman learns the spot while playing for the San Francisco Giants, and no one expects perfection. Midseason isn’t ideal for a position change.

The first two games Devers played at first were uneventful, but Saturday made up for that. Devers found himself in the middle of almost everything and, mostly, his lack of savvy at first ranged from harmless to amusing. In the sixth though, with one out and two men on, Devers picked up a grounder by Brett Baty, then bobbled the transfer as he was setting up to possibly start a double play and had to settle for the out at first.

The runner at second, Starling Marte, scored the go-ahead run moments later when Mark Vientos rapped a two-run double off Robbie Ray in the Mets’ 2-1 victory at Oracle Park, New York’s sixth consecutive win.

Devers thought the double play was a possibility, saying, with Erwin Higueros interpreting, “Yes, we had a chance, but those are things that are going to happen during the game, and unfortunately, they got the hit that give them the runs.”

Ryan Walker came on in relief of Ray with a strange MO for success, walking the Mets’ No. 8 and 9 hitters, then striking out leadoff man Brandon Nimmo on three pitches to end the inning.

Devers’ adventures afield began in the fourth, when Ray hopped off the mound for a tapper by Baty and, as Ray looked toward the runner at third to make sure he was staying put, Devers wandered in no-man’s land, not at the bag, not in position to field the ball. Ray tossed it to him, he missed it and the bag and Baty was safe on an infield single, loading the bases. The next batter, Francisco Alvarez, hit a bouncer to third that Matt Chapman stabbed before tagging the bag and throwing to first. Devers made a nice scoop to complete the double play and end the inning.

“It makes me feel good when I’m able to make those plays I have been practicing,” he said. “I’m learning a new position, so you will have your ups and downs.”

The next inning, Nimmo hit a 102 mph shot at Devers, who knocked it down, nudging it toward first base, then picked it up while it was rolling and got the out as shortstop Willy Adames started laughing and Devers broke into a big grin.

In the seventh, Devers made an error on a grounder by Juan Soto, but no runs resulted. He wasn’t the only Giants player with an error, either; Chapman, a Platinum Glove winner, also made one.

“That’s not an easy thing to do, go from third base to DH to first base and kind of learning it on the fly,” Ray said of Devers' veer over the season. “He’s given his max effort out there, for sure.”

Manager Bob Melvin was happy that Devers got so much action Saturday. The best way to learn is by doing, after all.

“I’m glad he got a bunch of balls today,” Melvin said. “The more he gets like that, the more in-between plays and plays where he’s got to make a decision where he’s covering first or going to get the ball, all those things are going to be good for him at the end of the day. I know a couple didn’t look great, but the experience is good over there.”

Everyone understands that working out at first daily, as Devers has since arriving last month, isn’t the same as playing at game speed. “I practice that a lot, but it’s kind of hard to simulate game action during practice,” he said. “I don’t want to do anything bad, but those are things that are going to happen.”

There is little doubt he will be more proficient in a month and even more so after a full spring training at the position. “I think that my responsibility is to improve,” Devers said. “I think that the end of the day, as I practice, I will get better,”

The Giants are likely to be patient with Devers, their massive June 15 trade acquisition, while he becomes accustomed to first base, but there is one obvious issue: The team emphasizes pitching and defense because the offense isn’t high powered or consistent. That was the case Saturday, with San Francisco’s only run off All-Star lefty David Peterson coming on a groundout in the fourth.

The Giants’ best shot to tie it up didn’t come until the ninth, when Jung Hoo Lee knocked a one-out double off the bricks in right, but Mike Yastrzemski, pinch hitting, struck out on a borderline check-swing call and Patrick Bailey lined out to first baseman Pete Alonso.

While the Mets are making a strong second half move to jump into first place in the NL West, the Giants are faltering at the wrong time, losing eight of 10 and scoring no more than three runs in six of those. They’ve fallen two games behind in the race for the third wild-card spot.

(sfchronicle.com)

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UPSTATE NEW YORK OPERA: GLIMMERGLASS TURNS 50

by David Yearsley

Across most of its four-hundred-year history, opera has been predominantly an urban pursuit. It flourished in Italian cities—Florence, Mantua, Venice, Naples—then was exported to the rest of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and on to much of the world since. If the tech-potentates of the present age unexpectedly develop a taste for sung drama, it might even find footing on Mars.

While the great opera houses were established in urban centers, musically inclined monarchs also built their own theaters away from the hustle and bustle of their capitals: at Versailles, then far from Paris; at Caserta, a pleasant remove from Naples; in Potsdam, the better part of a day’s carriage ride from Berlin.

Across the 20th century, opera open to the paying public came to estates like Glyndebourne and Garsington set in the English countryside. Picnicking during the intermission on the spreading lawns of a stately mansion can elevate even the crassest arriviste to cultivated aristocrat, at least for an afternoon.

To remain viable, bucolically sited theaters demand that the distance between town and country shrink. The rural operatic retreat should, depending on traffic, be reachable within an hour or four by horseless carriage.

The Glimmerglass Festival takes place each summer in an opera house at the upper end of Otsego Lake in central New York State. It is twenty miles north of Cooperstown (home to the Baseball Hall of Fame) and, in light traffic, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan. The company just marked its 50th anniversary with a gala weekend of three operas (The Rake’s Progress; Tosca; The House on Mango Street) and a musical (Sunday in the Park with George).

A dozen years after Glimmerglass Opera got its start in the Cooperstown High School in 1975, it built its current theater up the lake. Except for the wood of the portico that offered outdoor protection from a spectacular downpour that let loose just as the intermission began during Tosca on Sunday afternoon, the building’s cladding is metal, its construction and beige color cleverly simulating the weathered board-and-batten barns of the area’s agrarian architectural past. The towering fly loft that houses the scenery flats could as well be a hayloft rising from a series of peaked metal roofs and crowned by a venting cupola that alludes to those same classic barns. Yet the auditorium, which seats about 900, feels like an intimate space that was indeed designed carefully for opera.

The terrace in front of the theater gives way to a lawn that slopes down to a pond over which willows happily weep. These grounds evoke both English landscape parks of the 18th century and the Otsego pastureland that the acreage once was.

Launched half a century ago, the seemingly quixotic initiative of mounting operas Upstate has proven expansively enduring. The current Glimmerglass Festival Artistic & General Director is a polymath Brit named Robert Ainsley who’s not only a dynamic and devoted impresario, but also a gifted keyboardist and conductor. Ainsley took rightful pride in announcing before each of the weekend’s performances that the fiftieth anniversary capital campaign had surpassed its initial goal of five million dollars and is now approaching the new mark of $7,500,000. Whether done in town or out of it, opera is not cheap.

To get to the post-pastoral Glimmerglass opera house (the west side of Lake Otsego has more golf courses than working farms), we did not drive north from New York City, like many had for the operatic weekend, nor from Albany on the Hudson River an hour to the east.

We came from Ithaca two hours to the west, in the geographic center of the state. We took country roads for the entire two-and-a-half-hour journey, passing not a single big box store nor even a McDonalds. No distribution, fulfillment or data centers marred the landscape. Unlike the well-funded and durably constructed Alice Busch Theater at Glimmerglass, we passed by many wooden barns that had collapsed, their silos now abandoned to stand lone sentry as the vines encircle them. Woodlands have reclaimed the fields, but for a few large dairies supplying milk to Ciobani Greek Yogurt whose headquarters are still in Norwich, an hour west of Glimmerglass, but soon to move from this Upstate city of 7,000 down to Manhattan.

On our way to the operatic weekend we crossed just one Interstate (I-81 joining Syracuse and Binghamton) as it slammed through the town of Marathon. On the overpass, I glanced north to see the freeway cut through the Valley of the Tioughnioga and into the lush hills stretching to the horizon. I thought of W. H. Auden’s Et in Arcadia Ego:

I well might think myself

A humanist,

Could I manage not to see

How the autobahn

Thwarts the landscape

In godless Roman arrogance.

Themes of Nature and alienation from it crisscrossed the weekend’s four carefully chosen works, cannily curated by Ainsley and his team to elicit myriad echoes and interconnections between them. Auden, in collaboration with his partner Chester Kallmann, supplied the libretto set by Igor Stravinsky for The Rake’s Progress. Inspired by the series of narrative paintings by William Hogarth of the same name, The Rake’s Progress smartly draws on 18th-century musical forms that resonate with the pictures even while affirming and challenging the modernity of listeners. In the ferment of Stravinsky’s musical imagination these historical elements become active ingredients stirred by his vast technical range and theatrical virtuosity, unique talent for pathos and comedy, and an ingenuity and eloquence enlivened by a penchant for the absurd. The resulting operatic creation is both admiring of the past and unabashedly proud of its present—which sounds to me like another way of saying that The Rake’s Progress is timeless, a classic in any epoch. The Glimmerglass production was as fresh and cutting, entertaining and uplifting, cynical and morally astute as it must have been under the baton of Stravinsky himself at its premiere in 1951 in Venice, that urban island crucible of opera.

The sung story follows young Tom Rakewell, played at Glimmerglass by the vocally and physically fit Adrian Kramer, who engaged the role with precision and panache across a broad dramatic arc leading from guilelessly gung-ho to melancholy and madness. We first meet Tom dressed in casual tennis club whites, temporally transplanted from the country estate of the original libretto to an artist’s studio where he paints big abstract canvases. These directorial and design decisions of Eric Sean Fogel’s staging drew on the animating energy of art to move us across time and space and through changing states of mind and emotion.

Lured to the debauched city by the Mephistophelian pleasure broker Nick Shadow, sung with diabolical suavity by the Ukrainian-born American baritone Aleksey Bogdanov, Tom leaves behind not only the countryside but its romantic embodiment—his betrothed, Ann Trulove. Lydia Grindatto sang the part of the long-(but-not-forever)-suffering woman with a forthright purity that refused to lapse into passivity. Instead, she proved herself a renewable source of empowerment that in turn generated rapturous applause from the sold-out theater. That reception came after her high C that was the last note sung in Act II, yet the ovation seemed as much if not more for the moving fragility of her preceding Cabaletta, its steadfast major contours and expectant octave leaps darkened fleetingly by portentous minor shadows, as at the end of that number’s opening phrase: “… Love cannot falter, cannot desert.”

But Tom has deserted Ann for the city’s degenerate charms. But he soon sickens of London’s numbing, salacious sameness. At the start of the second of the opera’s three acts he asks himself in sharp-edged F-sharp Major, insolent and unforgiving, “Is it for this I left the country?” Having forsaken the true love of Trulove, Tom beds and weds, at Shadow’s urging, Baba the Turk, a Bearded Lady circus performer who attracts princely patrons and collects admirers and objets d’art as unlikely and alluring as she is. Through curly black bristles, Deborah Nansteel sang Baba’s music with nonchalant superiority, then an unexpected tenderness, and, finally, a mocking comic verve with which she warned the ladies that “all men are mad.”

When, in the third act, the infernal bill comes due from Shadow, Tom prays to be taken back by Ann and be allowed to return to the upscale rustic life he had so foolishly left behind. The walls of the Glimmerglass theater can be rolled open to let the afternoon light in through scrim-like screens. These panels had just closed out the landscape and light when Tom, facing his imminent doom, sang “O let the wild hills cover me” in undulating G-major arpeggios echoed by the pastoral flutes and bleating clarinets that so often evoke the rural idyll in this devastating, delightful opera.

The Rake’s Progress is about the selling of a soul, but also the depredations of capital that are driven by the same godless arrogance decried by Auden in Et in Arcadia Ego. Before Tom asks to be buried by the greening countryside, the opera stages an Art sale presided over by Sellem the Auctioneer. That part was handled with a harrowing, yet hilarious mix of professionalism and effrontery by tenor Kellan Dunlap. The man with the gavel pontificates on the “balance in nature,” then brings his greedy hammer down on a figurine of a Great Auk, once the most populous bird of the North Atlantic hunted ruthlessly to extinction a century before Auden and Kallmann wrote their libretto. Stage Director Fogel did at least double duty, acting also as the production’s choreographer for the fabulous bacchanales of tuxedoed, garter-belted libertines, antic marches of jaded auction-feverers, and blithe choruses of “Roaring Boys and Whores.” Fogel even got the long-gone seabird to glide through space on the video projection above and behind the human folly on stage.

In the ironical undoing of the Stravinsky/Auden melodrama in the opera’s finale, the Garden of Eden gets a shout-out not long after one for the Elysian Fields. Does Nature endure to redeem its human despoilers and self-mutilators, or are all these musico-poetic paeans and games nothing more than theatrical conceits, vapid entertainments and distractions? Stravinsky’s archly irreverent closing chorus, with its final peal of laughing orchestral scales, suggests to me that flippancy is an essential weapon in confronting what is and will be lost.

At dinner after the Saturday afternoon show, Joseph Colaneri, who had just conducted the performance and who has been the Glimmerglass music director since 2013, told me that The Rake’s Progress was among his five favorite operas. Colaneri had shepherded the Glimmerglass orchestra in the pit and the robust cast of singers on the stage through the devilishly demanding musical topography of Stravinsky’s score with virtuosic precision, winning enthusiasm, and commanding expertise. Enjoying the freedom won through his comprehensive knowledge of the music, Colaneri seemed to be discovering each scene and sonority anew, thrilled as he went.

After dinner we strolled back to the theater from the pavilion, a smaller but no less barn-like outbuilding, for Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. This musical from 1984 confronts the artistic and personal demands of Art—of depicting nature as well as people, even when they are trussed up in 19th-century stays and corsets, bustles, collars and cuffs. With minimal means, Director Ethan Heard and Set Designer John Conklin conjured the island in the River Seine of Georges Seurat’s most famous painting with a raked rectangle of variegated green. When depicting Seurat’s emerging visual style, Sondheim’s music becomes pointillistic, as when, early on, an electric harpsichord dabs at repeated eighth notes which are then complemented by different hues from the piano, winds, percussion. Above them on stage Seurat intermittently adds two-note melodic brush strokes with his voice: “More red … more blue …”

As the painter, John Riddle got his voice to project an obsessive, workaholic worry banished only occasionally by bright lines of soaring melody that might have been anticipating the deferred redemption of Art. Back in his studio, represented by that same rectangular patch of stage, Seurat works on his magnum opus, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Brush in hand, he looks through the empty frame directly at the audience, which regards him from the back of the painting. The movements of Seurat’s body and voice invite us to imagine what the artist sees in his mind and then commits to the invisible canvas.

The musical’s first act takes place at the close of the 19th century and near the end of Seurat’s short life. His mother (a wonderfully crotchety Luretta Bybee) complains of a tree now missing tree from the park and of the new factories rising beyond the opposite bank of the river, a prelude to the crescendo of urbanizing transformation to come. The second act then transports us forwards a century and across the Atlantic to America, where we meet Seurat’s great-grandson (also sung by Riddle, the beard now downsized to a suspect moustache just as the S was shaved off the chin of his character’s name). American George is a one-trick installation artist. Fearful of failure, he churns out his trademark Chromolumes. These are hokey constructions of synesthetic color and light—electrified, industrialized, de-natured. Instead of painting en plein air, this George gladhands in air-conditioned art galleries suffused with the strains of smarmy cocktail piano, beset by buyers, critics and self-doubt. When George visits the island where his now-illustrious forbear had pursued his painterly vision, the sylvan scenery behind has become a mass of high-rises. Only a skeletal snag remains, perhaps the ghost of the tree whose disappearance was lamented by Seurat’s mother a century before. To one side of the green patch now paved over, its trunk dangled as if from invisible gallows.

The weekend had begun in a similarly blighted, yet vivid urban landscape with the world premiere of The House on Mango Street, its tapestry of stories drawn from the best-selling novel (also of 1984) by Sandra Cisneros. She co-wrote the libretto along with the stylistically agile and engaging composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel. As teenage novelist-in the-making Esperanza, Mikaela Bennett sang with both a youthful sincerity and a wisdom beyond her character’s years. As her name suggest, Esperanza hopes to escape the suffocatingly close quarters of her neighborhood. “I don’t ever want to come from here,” she admits, even as she takes it all in, notes it all down. Bermel’s music ranges resourcefully and successfully across styles, many of them born elsewhere, especially the Mexican-American borderlands, though the multicultural soundscape is imbued with texture and color by Gospel elements, Hip Hop, and European Art Music. Amidst the sometimes oppressive constrictions of her surroundings, Esperanza yearns for the green of a lawn, for spaces that can only be found outside the inner city. Art in the form of people-inspired fiction and music becomes both a celebration of place and a virtual escape from it.

The weekend concluded on Sunday afternoon with Puccini’s Tosca, thrilling to the point of terror, beautiful to the brink of otherworldly. Stage director Louisa Proske updated the action from the turn of the 19th century to somewhere in the 20th in the Eternal City turned eternal nightmare. On the wall of Fascist boss Scarpia’s headquarters, a map evokes not Rome’s grandeur but the oppressor’s regime of surveillance, control, incarceration, and death.

The biggest stars of the weekend came out that stormy, sunny afternoon. Maestro Colaneri was back in the pit and not a beat less commanding than he had been the day before. Greer Grimsley’s Scarpia was clad in a cheerless gray suit over a pressed white shirt pleading to be bloodied. The sexual-predator-and-police-state-murderer-in-chief’s voice searched out menacing shades of darkness that made his character complex and threatening. Grimsley was compelling in every sense of the word—an evil, oppressive, unyielding force. Michelle Bradley’s Tosca was gowned in coruscating gold sequins so resplendent she often donned sunglasses. Her voice shone too, minted from Nature and perfected, paradoxically, by Art.

From amongst the urban hellscape and its unseen torture chambers nearby, Tosca and her lover, Cavaradossi—yet another painter, this one voiced by the luminous, urgent palette of tenor, Yongzhao Yu—plan to meet in a wild thicket beyond a canefield “that winds along through meadows.” That rural refuge from urban terror would never be revisited by the pair. Their tragedy was rendered all the more painful by the performances that proved that is nothing more Natural than the singing voice, even when as artfully trained as those of Bradley, Yu, Grimsley and so many others assembled from around the world for the Glimmerglass summer.

Across rural route 80 from the theater, in the terraced parking lot of gravel rows divided by banks of mown grass, the audience cars peered patiently through their headlight opera glasses at the human action staged before them: the groups in their finery carrying picnic hampers, program booklets, and the occasional parasol-cum-umbrella; the golf carts ferrying those in need of assistance to box office or the pre-concert lecture in the pavilion; the dramatic tempest timed perfectly to treat the automotive audience to a cooling comic intermezzo; Director Ainsley thanking the departing and sending them safely on their way as the sun made its final curtain call.

Our battered Subaru joined vehicles from around the region, Canada and across the United States as they filed out. Some were destined for nearby clapboard cottages or (air)BnBs, lakeside inns or rooms in Cooperstown. Others were starting back to the big city, for the time being, still far away.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)

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SUDDENLY in the '50s, a whole new group of actors came out: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman, who were very moody and realistic. So actors like myself and Basil Rathbone and so on didn't really fit into those realistic dramas and we began to do costume pictures. This was really the only place we could go on working if we wanted to survive as actors. Most of the things of my later career have been costume pictures. They require a certain knowledge of the language, they require enunciation and a poetic approach to the language. Really, the one thing we have over the apes is our language, isn't it? That's about all.

— Vincent Price

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“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?”

— Anton Chekhov

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Darrell Royal once said, "When You Pass The Football, thee are 3 things that can happen. 2 of them are bad."

A civil war May be coming and may be necessary…But

When you start a civil war there are 4 things that can happen. 3 of them are bad

1. You Win.
2. You Lose.
3. Neither side wins and the damn thing goes on and on until no one really remembers why it started.
4. You win, but in winning to destroy that what you were fighting for.

Be Careful What You Wish For. You Just Might Get It.

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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS & STEPHEN COLBERT

An old tweet spurs a defense of Christopher Columbus and debate over Mamdani policy proposals; outraged Colbert supporters protest his firing and Trump

by Ford Fischer

From Managing Editor Greg Collard:

A little-noticed June 2020 tweet resurfaced this month in which Zohran Mamdani is flipping off a statue of Christopher Columbus. The caption reads: “Take it down.” The most notable thing to me was Mamdani flipping the bird with a plastic glove, presumably to protect himself from Covid. On brand, I thought.

The tweet, however, received a lot of news coverage, and on Monday it was a hook for a protest where it was noted that Columbus is a “symbol of Italian-American pride and ancestry,” but Ford Fischer of News2Share also shows it was about more than saving a Columbus statue. It was about Mamdani’s policies if he ends up mayor of New York City.

The dialogue between protesters and counter-protesters is entertaining. My favorite is the counter-protester yelling:

“You mix your meats! You mix meats in your meatballs! You put raisins in your meatballs!”

Fightin’ words for sure.

Ford then pivoted to the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where there was a protest of CBS’ decision to ax Stephen Colbert and The Late Show next year. One speaker—wearing a miniature Ben and Jerry’s ice cream container as a hat—holds up a copy of 1984 and declares it’s time to speak up or “this [1984] will become our reality.”

(RacketNews)

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CHICAGO

by Carl Sandburg (1916)

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
for I have seen your painted women
under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer:
Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill
and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
On the faces of women and children
I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more
to those who sneer at this my city,
and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head
singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job,
here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,
cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,
and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth,
half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker,
Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads
and Freight Handler to the Nation.

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WHAT HULK HOGAN LEFT BEHIND

by Elizabeth Spiers

Terry Gene Bollea, better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan, died Thursday at the age of 71. For wrestling fans, he will be remembered as the man who, along with Vince McMahon, was responsible for turning professional wrestling into a popular mainstream sport and a franchise worth billions. But for many journalists, Mr. Hogan’s legacy is altogether less impressive.

He was fired from World Wrestling Entertainment for using the N-word repeatedly on tape and he used slurs to describe gay people. He prevented his colleagues from unionizing. His ex-wife and daughter have described him as physically and emotionally abusive. Most relevant to me, he sued Gawker, a news and entertainment site that I co-founded in 2002, because its editor published a clip from a tape that featured him having sex with his friend’s wife.

The lawsuit, to be clear, was not important because Gawker was important. Gawker was largely an entertainment site that, on its best days, reported presciently about powerful people behaving badly. The site published stories about the alleged sexual misconduct of many celebrities long before the #MeToo movement, and published Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book way back in 2015. It could also be frivolous, crass, and even mean, which often rankled the powerful people it covered. But journalists’ frivolity, vulgarity and snark all happen to be protected by the First Amendment, as long as what they write is truthful. Only there is an exception to that: When someone sues for invasion of privacy, the truth is no longer a defense. And that is what Mr. Hogan and his allies cynically exploited.

Because that sex tape was undeniably Mr. Hogan, he could not sue Gawker for defamation and win. But Gawker had made plenty of powerful people angry in its day, one of whom was the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. (A Gawker site had outed Mr. Thiel as gay in 2007 and later reported that his hedge fund had gone into free fall. Again, truthful.) What Mr. Thiel recognized then was that someone with deep pockets can try to drown an outlet in legal fees and make truth legally irrelevant by suing for invasion of privacy.

Mr. Thiel funded Mr. Hogan’s suit, intending to drag Gawker in and out of court until it was bankrupted either by the cost of fighting the lawsuit or by any damages awarded. After an initial suit on the basis of copyright infringement failed in federal court, Mr. Hogan brought a second suit against the publication in state court. He found a friendly jurisdiction in his hometown — Tampa, Fla. — where he sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. There, Mr. Hogan won his case. The jury awarded him damages of $140 million; Gawker ultimately settled for $31 million. A cocktail of bad luck and an angry billionaire resulted in an industry-defining judgment. Gawker did not have the money left to put up the $50 million bond needed to appeal the decision.

The suit ultimately had a chilling effect on many journalists who cover powerful people. At one point during the trial, Mr. Hogan’s lawyers successfully added individual journalists to their lawsuit. Under normal circumstances, those journalists would be indemnified by their employer. Mr. Hogan’s lawyers went after the editor A.J. Daulerio personally. It left Mr. Daulerio on the hook for upward of millions of dollars that he could not possibly pay.

Even a decade and a half on, journalists were still worried that what happened at Gawker would happen to them. In 2017, I was trying to raise money for a news outlet that would, among other things, cover the business interests of the Trump family. When interviewing reporters, I was often asked whether the new outlet would be able to provide indemnification, and whether the company would be adequately insured if a malicious actor like Mr. Thiel decided to use the courts to destroy it. It was then and is now a legitimate concern.

Journalism, at its best, exists to hold people with power accountable for their abuse of it. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do our work if we can be bankrupted by lawsuits any time a powerful person decides they don’t like how they were covered. The ability of a journalist to report what needs to be reported cannot be contingent upon their ability to withstand a financial assault from a billionaire, especially when the billionaire just has to make it prohibitively expensive for the journalist to fight it, no matter how frivolous the suit.

Mr. Thiel and Mr. Hogan created a playbook for deep-pocketed people to pressure news outlets, by weaponizing the judicial process and threatening them with bankruptcy. Today, President Trump is suing or has threatened to sue multiple news outlets, seemingly because he didn’t like the correct, if unflattering, information they published about him. He is currently suing The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion because they reported that he signed a birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein and included a lewd drawing. Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, is defending their reporting and vowing to fight the lawsuit. Not all news outlets have such backbone. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and ABC have both settled suits with Mr. Trump, despite little to no evidence that they have done anything other than what the law allows.

Whatever you may think of Hulk Hogan or Gawker or Peter Thiel or Donald Trump, or even outlets like The Wall Street Journal, the fact that a powerful man can so easily skirt the protections of the First Amendment is a travesty for this country. That is Mr. Hogan’s real legacy, and it is more significant than any abhorrent character trait or W.W.E. appearance.

It was not surprising that he aligned so heavily with the MAGA movement and Mr. Trump during the last years of his life; the two men share so many character traits. Most relevant here is their command of showmanship. On television, Mr. Hogan pretended to wrestle and Mr. Trump pretended to be a successful businessman. They both benefited heavily from media coverage, courted it when it suited them, and when it didn’t, tried to shut it down. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump is still trying to do that.

(NY Times)

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ROMEO + JULIET

by James Shapiro

At a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Boston in the 1850s starring Charlotte Cushman, the most celebrated Romeo of the day, a spectator fake sneezed loudly and derisively during an intimate scene between the cross-dressed Cushman and her Juliet, Sarah Anderton. Cushman halted the show and gallantly led Anderton offstage, as her early biographer Clara Erskine Clement put it, the way “a cavalier might lead a lady from the place where an insult had been offered her.” Cushman then returned to the footlights and confronted the offender, saying that if some man didn’t throw him out, she would do so herself. As “the fellow was taken away,” the “audience rose en masse and gave three cheers for Miss Cushman, who recalled her companion and proceeded with the play as if nothing had happened.”

Women began playing Romeo in the nineteenth century, when one leading man after another failed miserably in a role that calls for both furious sword fighting and acting unmanned. Shakespeare has Romeo kill first Tybalt, then Paris, but also has him tell Juliet, “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate,” and has him collapse, weeping, as the Friar chastises him: “Art thou a man? … Thy tears are womanish. … Unseemly woman in a seeming man.” It apparently took a gay actor like Cushman (though she never came out publicly) to render these extremes convincingly in an age of Manifest Destiny, when America experienced a crisis of manhood, as a masculinity that embraced moderation, virtue, and domesticity was elbowed out by a more aggressive one characterized by physicality and domination.

Between the 1820s and the Civil War more than a dozen women played Romeo on stages in New York City alone; The New York Times declared that “there is in the delicacy and gentleness of Romeo’s character something which requires a woman to represent it” and that the character’s “luscious language … seems strange on the lips of a man.”

Fifteen years after that Boston performance the fires that had fueled Manifest Destiny were largely extinguished, having consumed the lives of some 700,000 young men who fought for the Union and the Confederacy. Female Romeos soon vanished from the stage, and this episode in theater history was all but forgotten, along with what it revealed about ultimately tragic fissures within the culture.

“Romeo and Juliet” is a play with an uncanny capacity to show, as Hamlet put it, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” and versions of it, on film and onstage, continue to tell us what we desire, and expect, when boy meets girl.

In his 1968 film Franco Zeffirelli cast Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting as the young lovers; she was only 15 and he 16 when cast. They embodied the free-love Sixties, at what, for these teenagers, proved to be a steep price: decades later they sued Paramount Pictures, alleging that Zeffirelli had coerced them to act in the nude as minors and then, without their knowledge, filmed them.

In 1996 Baz Luhrmann first cast the 14-year-old Natalie Portman as Juliet opposite the 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, then ditched her in favor of the 17-year-old Claire Danes. (A disappointed Portman told The New York Times that the executives at 20th Century Fox “said it looked like Leonardo DiCaprio was molesting me when we kissed.”

(New York Review of Books)

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals

Israel Says It Has Paused Some Military Activity in Gaza as Anger Grows Over Hunger

Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Ship of Activists and Aid

What Will It Cost to Renovate the ‘Free’ Air Force One? Don’t Ask.

Trump to Meet With Top E.U. Official as Threat of Trade War Looms

Right-Wing Influencers Say Ghislaine Maxwell Is Key to Unlocking Epstein Case

'It’s a Wipeout’: The Ripple Effects of an ICE Workplace Raid in Nebraska

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WE'RE BACK at the part of the news cycle where Israel tells the world it’s going to allow a bit more aid into Gaza in order to mollify its allies and reduce the public outcry as images of starving children draw objections from the west. 

This is just Israel giving the Kier Starmers and Anthony Albaneses of the western world just enough of an excuse to go silent about the starvation of Gaza again. They will then continue starving Gaza. This psychopathic python-like suffocation tactic is how Israel has gotten Gaza to the point it’s at now.

And of course it’s worth noting that Israel’s announcement that it will allow more food into Gaza so people don’t starve completely debunks all its claims these last few days that people in Gaza are starving because of Hamas and the UN. They’re starving because Israel is starving them.

— Caitlin Johnstone

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"I AIN’T NO NIGGER" – The Testimony of Francis Black

Cass County, Texas – ca. 1937 (WPA Slave Narrative Collection)

My name is Francis Black, and I don’t rightly know how old I am, but I remember a lot about them slave days. I was already a big girl—washing and ironing—when they set us free. From that, I reckon I’m in my eighties.

I was born in Grand Bluff, Mississippi, on Old Man Carlton’s plantation. But I was stolen from my folks when I was just a little girl, and I never saw them again.

We children used to play in the big road near the plantation. One day, me and another little girl were playing when three white men came by in a wagon. They snatched us up, threw us in the wagon, and covered us with quilts. I screamed and hollered, but one of them said, “Shut up, you nigger, or I’ll kill you.”

I told him, “Kill me if you want—you done stole me from my folks.”

They took us to New Orleans, to the big slave market. I had long hair, and they cut it off like a boy’s. They tried to sell me, but I kept telling the men who looked at me that I’d been kidnapped and my hair had been cut. The man who brought me cursed and said if I didn’t hush, he’d kill me. But he couldn’t sell us there, so he took us to Jefferson, Texas.

I never knew what happened to the other girl.

In Jefferson, he sold me to Master Bill Tumlin, who ran a big livery stable. I belonged to him until surrender. I lived in the house because they had a little boy and girl, and I looked after them. They bought me clothes and took care of me, but I never saw money till freedom came. I ate what they ate—but only after they finished. Missy always said she didn’t believe in feeding the darkies scraps, like some folks did.

I played with their two children all day, then set the table for supper. I was so little I had to stand on a chair to reach the dishes. I’d pull a long fly brush over the table while the white folks ate.

Master Tumlin had a farm about four miles out of town, with an overseer. I saw that overseer tie the slaves across a log and whip them. When Master Tumlin went to the farm, he always took his son Jimmie with him. Sometimes we’d be playing in the barn and he’d yell, “Come on, Jimmie, we’re going to the farm.”

Jimmie would say, “Come on, nigger, let’s ride ‘round the farm.”

And I’d say, “I ain’t no nigger.”

He’d say, “Yes, you is. My pa paid $200 for you. He bought you to play with me.”

Jefferson was a fine town until it burned. I remember that big fire—it looked like the whole place was going to burn down. Master Bill lost his stable in it.

After the war, Yankee soldiers in blue came to run the town. Master Tumlin told me I was free. But I stayed on till I was nearly grown. Then I started working around town and married Dave Black. We moved to Cass County, and I raised six children.

But my husband turned mean and lazy, so I left him and worked for myself. I moved to Texarkana to earn my own living. I always could take care of myself—until about a year ago, when I lost my sight.

Now I live at the old folks’ home, and Mr. Albert Ragland takes care of me. I get a ten-dollar pension a month, and they feed us good here. They treat me well.