Alex Ross's Blog, page 7

Fellow Travelers at the Kennedy Center

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The New York Times circa 1950.

The New York Times reported today that Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce, composer and librettist of the 2016 opera Fellow Travelers, decided to withdraw their work from the 2025-26 season of Washington National Opera, in protest of Trump's hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In light of a feeble statement from the W.N.O. — “Art and music have the power to rise above division and bring people together to find common ground," blah blah blah — it's worth specifying why, over and above the personal convictions of the creative team, Fellow Travelers doesn't belong at Trump's Kennedy Center. The opera, which I wrote about in 2018, is based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel, about the lives of two men who have an affair in 1950s Washington. The context is the "lavender scare," the purging of some five thousand gay men and lesbians from the federal work force. Many lives were ruined; more than a few people chose suicide. We are now living in a time where trans people are being demonized by the Trump regime. The draft-dodging president is attempting to bar trans and nonbinary people from military service, declaring, with his usual mind-bending hypocrisy, that their identity "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.” Precisely the same logic targeted gay men and lesbians in the fifties: our very nature marked us as un-American. Add to this the bans on transgender topics in schools, on trans people in sports, and on gender-affirming medical care for people under nineteen. As M. Gessen wrote in the Times: "The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation." History is repeating itself, in even more vile fashion. Under such circumstances, a presentation of Fellow Travelers at the Trump Center would have been grotesque.

John Roberts tramples the Constitution

Cristian Farias: "The real import of Roberts’s language here is not that it gave Trump a shield from prosecution (though that was the immediate result); the ruling gave Trump a 'sword' to brandish across the executive branch—which is exactly why laws, institutions, and what remains of the constitutional order are being slashed to bits in Trump’s Washington now."

The destruction of government science

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As the son and grandson of career-long employees of the US Geological Survey, I found this E. Tammy Kim article in The New Yorker tremendously sad to read: "At U.S.G.S. and other Interior agencies, thousands of emerging scientists saw their careers cut short. And, in fields such as geology and ecology, many were women. 'My graduate program, my cohort, was ten women and five men,' Mary said. 'Participation was being broadened among younger people.'"

The decline of BAM

Laurie Anderson in the NYT: “I used to go to BAM in the ’80s and ’90s once every couple of weeks and I’ve only been a couple times a year in the last few years. Sometimes the programming wasn’t something I was so into — not as experimental. I like stuff that’s way out on a limb.” It might be added that BAM's current production of A Streetcar Named Desire is not, contrary to what the article claims, "the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music." The institution reached its peak offering Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Mark Morris, and other artists of high imagination — not shows trading on Hollywood celebrity.

The logic of dictatorship

Jamelle Bouie: "This is a claim of sovereign authority. This is a claim that the president has the power to declare a state of exception around a group of people and expel them from the nation — no questions asked. It is anti-constitutional — a negation of the right to be free, in Locke’s words, of 'the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.' There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?"

Town hall of the day

Laramie, Wyoming: "Another woman who did not give her name described uncertain working conditions while serving as a fellow for the Department of Defense. 'Every day we get unsigned emails that are supposedly [from the United States Office of Personnel Management]. Are you scared? Are you getting those emails? Do you know what DOGE is doing?' she asked. Unsatisfied with the congresswoman’s response, the crowd chanted 'answer.' 'She asked me if I was scared and if I knew what DOGE was doing, and I said ‘no’ to both,' Hageman told the audience."

Émigrés absent from the Hollywood Walk of Fame

FW Murnau, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Max Reinhardt, Douglas Sirk, Robert and Curt Siodmak, Max Ophuls, Edgar Ulmer, Conrad Veidt, Karl Freund, Elisabeth Bergner, Helmut Dantine, Vicki Baum, Curtis Bernhardt ...

Eternal love love love

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A Kurt Weill moment

A Fannie Dillon moment

There is also a recording of this piece by Josef Hofmann.