November 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Oh! You Tony By Elena Passarello The Daily’s newest correspondent is Elena Passarello, who will be writing about famous animals from history. This week’s beast is the silent-film star Tony the Wonder Horse. Design by Kristen Radtke. Tom Mix and Tony at their best! Rip snortin’ action!—break neck horsemanship! A thrill for everybody! —Destry Rides Again promo poster, 1932. When they were about to do a difficult scene, Tom would pat Tony on his nose and say, “Now, look, Tony, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” And then that was the way they did it. —Olive Mix, 1957. Tom once told a newspaperman that I liked to show off. Well, I’ll tell you something. He likes to show off too. Do you think he would do all those difficult and dangerous tricks if he thought nobody would see them? —“Tony’s Story Told By Tony Himself,” 1923. Read More
November 21, 2016 Our Correspondents Theater 101 By Alison Kinney On civility, risk, and the demonization of dissent. Maxime Dethomas, set design sketch for Les abeilles, 1917. I’m using this fifth installment of my opera column to offer a primer on theater, protest, and safety, by people who actually know about theater. As you’ve likely heard, at the November 18 evening performance of the musical Hamilton, Mike Pence was booed (and also cheered) by members of the audience. After the show, the cast assembled onstage to address him with a statement written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and read by the performer Brandon Victor Dixon. He said, in part, “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” Donald Trump tweeted his reactions, writing in one message, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” #BoycottHamilton trended on Twitter on Saturday. We witnessed the absurd spectacle of an incoming administration that threatens every kind of safety for marginalized people, yet demands an antiharassment safe space. Of one elected leader’s turning his back on a diverse group of Americans politely requesting protection and dialogue, and another’s attacking them. Although these Hamilton tweets are possibly a ploy by Trump to distract attention from the Trump University settlement, his reaction to the Hamilton incident is important: it’s about weaponizing the discourse of civility and respectability against the people who stand to lose the most in the next four years. I asked for responses from playwrights, performers, directors, and scholars who belong to artistic and academic communities that are all endangered by the Trump presidency. Here are their answers, in alphabetical order by first name, with their own descriptors. Read More
November 18, 2016 Our Correspondents At Sea By Merritt Tierce On the defunct language of nautical flags. Willem van de Velde II, Sea Flight, mid-1800s–early 1900s, pen and brush and brown and gray ink, 7″ x 11 1/8″. There are forty flags in a complete set of international maritime signal flags—one for each letter of the English alphabet, one for each number, and four flags called substitutes, which perform special operations. The flags are a way of raising a meaning to the eye, at a binoculared distance, and while most vessels still carry a set on board, the flags themselves—unfurled, unraised—now mainly signify that we are seafaring in the time of radio and digital and satellite and do not need to communicate so slowly or primitively, via material squares of color. To a ship’s crew, I imagine they signify something like what a drop-down oxygen mask signifies to the commercial air traveler: if you think about it, all you realize is you don’t want to think either about the situation in which you’d have to use it or exactly how unable it would be to fully remedy that situation. The ships carry the flags in case they lose all other means of communication, but what set of circumstances could cause that kind of outage and also be cured by flying some flimsy flapping message? Read More
November 17, 2016 Our Correspondents In Step By Wei Tchou Taking to the streets for New York City’s Trump protests. Photo: Dustin Kirkpatrick. On Sunday evening, after four days of involuntarily clenching so badly that my jaw had started to ache too much to fully open, I dosed myself with painkillers and melatonin and finally got a full night of sleep. No bad dreams, only blackness. New York City has hummed with tension since the election—most people I know feel as though we’re in a nightmare we can’t wake from. The best I’ve been able to do so far is start at square one every day when I get up: turn on the kettle, read the headlines, jot a sentence in my diary, and remember to take a jacket on my way out the door. The protests that have roared up Fifth Avenue frightened me when they began last Wednesday evening; the pictures I saw on Twitter and Instagram captured a version of a city too unwieldy for me to comprehend. I flipped through countless posts of protesters’ faces, indistinct except for their anger. Their crudely made signs were chilling in their simplicity: FUCK TRUMP. I appreciated my peers’ passion and readiness to action, but I was still too numb to be moved. What was the point? Trump won the election fairly. Weren’t we flouting President Obama’s call to “go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens”? Weren’t we behaving like the faceless mob we’d spent this entire campaign decrying? These, and many other questions, rattled me. So on Saturday morning, I did what I am inclined to do when I don’t understand something: I grabbed a notebook and headed for the crowds. Read More
November 15, 2016 Our Correspondents Meeting One’s Madness By Megan Mayhew Bergman Our newest correspondent is Megan Mayhew Bergman, who will be writing about naturalism. For her first piece she considers the writer Alan Watts and the “age of environmental anxiety.” Eric Ravilious, Wet Afternoon, 1928, watercolor. For the others, like me, there is only the flashOf negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, oneStaggers to the bathroom and stares in the glassTo meet one’s madness —W. H. Auden, “The Age of Anxiety” Living in rural Vermont, I enjoy proximity to wilderness, though I observe its sickness at close range. In spring, my family marks the return of swallows and red-winged blackbirds on the barn door. But the migrations are off, and the frosts are late, the harvests erratic, and the thaws early. Though the landscape looks bucolic, and the foliage bright, industrial perfluorooctanioic acid poisons our wells and the herons in town fish from polluted ponds. This year, the maple season started three weeks earlier than ever recorded, and some ski resorts saw only a few days of snow. In the last decade, as I’ve followed the harrowing environmental data, I’ve experienced sharp pangs of human guilt and fear of the future. Fortunately, I’m able to turn to books like medicine in times of crisis. Recently, on an eighty-five degree October day, my crimson dahlias unusually fat and healthy outside, I felt my anxiety bloom and looked to Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity, A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Read More