Thanks for this, Steve. I’m glad you’ve watched it so I don’t have to.

I have made numerous comments over the past couple of years expressing my mystification in trying to make sense of Hamilton’s success, and finding reasons for its incredible resonance with my own middle-class, midwestern, middle-aged peers.

Speaking of which, there has been burst of Hamiltonmania within this group recently, with long FB threads comprising encomiums to Miranda’s matchless genius (comparisons to the Bard himself have been made), and brags about what percentage of the musical’s song lyrics and dialog each breathless fan has memorized (several of my 50-something peers claim to have memorized the entire thing, and note that their young-adult children also have it by heart).

One telling detail: all of these superfans are female. There must be a link to your previous post on ‘Dear White Women’ here. Is it possible that Hamilton provides the perfect conduit that allows these extremely unhip women to reach out and connect with the glittering but maddeningly remote galaxy of Current Year Coolness they see promoted in popular culture? They may not get Biggie vs Tupac, but they get the founding fathers — maybe Hamilton makes this almost as easy and fun as the Schoolhouse Rock ditties they all learned as kids back in the 70s.

In the millions of words written about Miranda, few have been published about his family’s role in Puerto Rican nationalism, even though that is clearly extremely important to him. Miranda’s relatives were among the more distinguished people of Puerto Rico, what Jefferson might have called the “natural aristocracy” of that island nation.

This helps explain Miranda’s identification with the American revolution. Like the men of 1776, his ancestors felt they deserved to rule their own land, a not unreasonable aspiration.

Although I don’t think DT is going to be re-elected, in the off chance that he is, he should grant PR’s independence, whether they want it or not. And it should involve repatriation of its citizens, wherever they may be. Whether they want it or not.

“Schoolhouse Rock ditties”- I think you figured it out for us, TLRC!

I thought it was interesting that Chernow figured out which rich Englishman was Hamilton’s father. He was not Jewish, unlike what the play says.

Who can afford to see Hamilton? Well, Wall Street guys, most obviously.

Maybe the hysteria was driven by liberal Jews in NYC who think it’s funny to portray these White Gentiles in such a ridiculous manner.

I had never heard that it’s so childish

Maybe our “elites” are truly silly people.

more like Dr. Seuss

…or Dr. Zaius?

Bingo.

Broadway, despite being less juvenile in most aspects than film, still, like film, makes its biggest profits from juvenile fluff. Though “Wicked” is basically one big Third Reich/WASP vs. Jew allegory, with the poor Ozzians turned into Nazis, the actual music is quite childish and the shows biggest fans are 10-year-old girls (naturally the composer of “Wicked,” Stephen Schwartz, has composed for several Disney films – the crappy ones like “Hunchback” and “Pocohonta).

Andrew Lloyd Webber has had multiple hits, but his best shows, like “Evita” and “Sunset Boulevard,” are beat out by a musical about cats, of all things. And of course Sondheim has written more than a few great shows, such as “A Little Night Music,” but the one everyone loves is the one about fairy tales, “Into the Woods.”

So I guess it should be no surprise that “Hamilton,” as successful as it is, pretty much targets the same juvenile audience.

Can a hip hop vision of the Third Reich be far behind?
Nazis as men of color?
“Got me locked up in Landesberg (Yo!!)
Said I was on my third strike (Fuck dat,boy!)
Now I’m bangin bitches in Mitte (he’ll yeah!!)
Tryna build me this here…”

Couldn’t come up with a line there. I’ll have to work on that.
I think this project may have legs. Seems to be some good material there.

The most important point about Hamilton was made by Michael Rapaport of all people.

That is, it sucks and we have proof: rap music is very popular but go to the bodega in the hood and I guarantee you nobody is bumping Hamilton.

Who is Hamiltons original audience? Boomer Jews who dont listen to rap music.

What does that tell you? Rap music is not obscure. But actual rap fans dont listen to this trash.

This is a bit off-topic but very ISteve-ish: If you make any comment on the New York Times comments pages that mentions (even in passing) the possibility that Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive decline, the comment is automatically blocked. They seem to have a system-wide ban on any mentions of this issue. An an example, check out the comments on Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece explaining why Biden should not agree to debate Trump. It is because of his tax returns, that’s why.

By the way, Miranda is a rare Broadway composer with a wife and kids.

I’m not so sure this is true. There certainly are plenty of gay Broadway composers and lyricists, but most of the ones who immediately come to mind, both old and new, are straight: George Gershwin (who was straight but died young and never married), Rodgers, Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, Frank Wildhorn, Robert Lopez, Jason Robert Brown, Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz, etc. Gays may be overrepresented, but straights are hardly “rare,” and the biggest Broadway hits have arguably been written by straight composers.

He cast himself as his own hero despite having a thin singing voice, not much dancing ability, and a shortage of charisma as an actor.

Indeed. Until “Mary Poppins Returns” I hadn’t seen him in anything except a couple of YouTube videos. I was distinctly unimpressed. His music for “Moana” wasn’t all that great nor was his earlier musical, “In the Heights.” I mistakenly assumed that he had also written the lousy, forgettable music for the “Mary Poppins” sequel, but I guess that was written by another forgettable composer, Marc Shaiman.

Hamilton is the Obama Administration on stage: Change the color of the leader to distract from how Wall Street is continuing to do its thing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of, if not the, first public performance of a number from “Hamilton” was at the White House early in the Obama Administration. That performance was actually pretty damn good, unlike most of the rest of the music.

Miranda is an ardent supporter of Puerto Rican nationalist terrorist Oscar López Rivera, who was commuted out of prison by Obama in 2017.

Interesting how little attention this gets, for either Miranda or Obama. How quickly would a conservative artist get cancelled for supporting a convicted terrorist? How much flak would Trump get for pardoning, say, a neo-Nazi? But Miranda gets one Disney contract after another without any comment at all, and we were routinely commanded to ignore Obama’s close friendship with Bill Ayers & Co.

Wicked has a fairly sophisticated story for a musical, and it has impressive effects. It has one memorable song, which I guess is one more than Hamilton.

Cats had lyrics by T.S Eliot.

But from a children’s book by TS Eliot.

Let me know when there’s a Broadway musical version of Murder In the Cathedral

I Paid $2,500 for a ‘Hamilton’ Ticket. I’m Happy About It.

Well, he probably expensed it or wrote it off as a business expense (obviously White Privileges), but in any case it’s one of the cheaper forms of virtue signalling when you consider the trillions wasted in the War on Poverty in the US and the subsidies of PR.

BTW, the link doesn’t work for me.

several of my 50-something peers claim to have memorized the entire thing, and note that their young-adult children also have it by heart

What tax bracket are you in?

The real reason Puerto Rico will never have independence is that most of the pro-independence voters live in New York.

Also I made a point in another thread that the ‘Juneteenth’ musical numbers in Black-ish have the makings of a kind of turbo-Hamilton phenomena, imagine an all black cast with black writers and creators. Somebody is going to make a fortune on that.

And yup, it’s coming.

https://www.sohh.com/juneteenth-musical/

https://thegrio.com/2020/06/19/kenya-barris-pharrell-juneteenth-musical-netflix/

The first act of President Yeezy will be to cancel all trash rap! ‘All of the lights’ will become the new presidential anthem.

While I have no doubt that Hamilton is artistically ridiculous, I’m going to be charitable to it within the context of what Broadway has historically done.

Before all the present racial nastiness burst forth, it was possible to see the Obama presidency as the formal entree of POC into the broader, normative context of official Americana — viz, as real, actual Americans and not just tedious exotics that the Americans petulantly put up with. A similar thing famously happened with the election of JFK, which signified that the white-ethnic Ellis Island crowd (not just the Irish, but the Jews and other ethnics) had been officially “made” as Americans, had been jumped into the gang.

That is what Hamilton achieved in cultural terms. Broadway used to only accommodate Black work specifically AS black work — think of things like “Ain’t Misbehaving” or “The Wiz.” There was a patronizing aura of, “Aw, look at the cute Black people, doing their zany Black thing!” Hamilton proposed POC starring in the normative American story, the founding myth, and using their own cultural language to tell that story. That could be viewed as healthy progress, not cultural appropriation. In 19th century Broadway, Irish actors could only play stage Irishmen, Jews played Jews, and so on. But after the breakthroughs of say Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, white-ethnic artists were free to speak as Americans. In a generous world, that is Hamilton’s accomplishment.

Just, too bad it isn’t less stupid.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Dr. Zaius.

Let’s just say the peers I have in mind are solidly midwestern middle class — teachers, small college profs, pharmacists, wives of mid-level managers, etc.

So far as I know, not one of them has actually seen Hamilton in NYC. Some of them do make trips to NYC expressly to see Broadway shows, but Hamilton is just too costly. Some have seen it in Chicago.

I always liked Mark Steyn’s explanation that it appealed to the idea that you would change the players but not the play.

Here is Steyn, talking about European immigration policies but it applies to Hamilton:

“The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors. Or maybe the all-black Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! is a better comparison: Pearl Bailey instead of Carol Channing, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever’s at the switch.”

Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece explaining why Biden should not agree to debate Trump.

Wow. I’m so naïve my jaw dropped reading that.

Of course, the real reason Biden shouldn’t agree to debate Trump is because Biden has absolutely nothing to gain by it, and everything to lose.

I note the mention in the article that Washington himself led the troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Was that the last time an American President has led an army in the field while President?

It seems to me that if our so-called leaders were required to put themselves in the same physical peril as the men they send to die, they might be more discerning about what conflicts they engage in.

OT: Bubba Wallace signs endorsement deal with Beats by Dre.

Bubba Wallace Signs Endorsement Deal With Beats By Dre Amid Donald Trump Trolling: ”Hate Cannot Win The Day”
https://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/bubba-wallace-signs-endorsement-deal-with-beats-by-dre/

Hours after Donald Trump claimed that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace owed his bosses at NASCAR an apology for sounding the alarm over a noose that was found in his garage, Beats by Dr.Dre announced that they had signed an endorsement deal with Wallace. The audio company, which is home to athletes such as Serena Williams and LeBron James, even took the liberty to stand with Wallace amid Trump, trolling him on Twitter.

We weren’t going to announce this until later this week, but hate cannot win the day. No one should ever be asked to apologize for standing up for what’s right — we are proud to welcome @bubbawallace to the Beats by Dr. Dre family. pic.twitter.com/HeiC76MDle

— Beats by Dre (@beatsbydre) July 6, 2020

In other news from BallerAlert. (My new favourite news site. It’s like an upmarket version of WorldStar)

DeSean Jackson Apologizes For Controversial Post About Jewish Community; Philadelphia Eagles And NFL Respond: “Highly Inappropriate, Offensive And Divisive”
https://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/desean-jackson-apologizes-for-controversial-post-about-jewish-community/

Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson has apologized for posting a series of alleged anti-Semitic posts on Instagram.

Over the weekend, Jackson came under fire after posting a slew of offensive posts about the Jewish community. The 33-year-old posted a thread on his IG Stories, one spoke on the Black Jews of Israel. In it, Jackson’s post calls Black people “the real Children of Israel” and says that white Americans would be upset to find out that they have been “mistreating and discriminating and lynching” them, CNN reports. Some people in the Snopes forum said the passage has been coopted by people who claim Adolph Hitler was not racist.

Is ‘people who claim Adolph Hitler was not racist’ the PC term for black dudes who post Nation of Islam stuff?

Another aspect of Wicked that I didn’t pick up in until I read one of the author’s other books is that the author, Gregory Maguire, is committed to stripping classic tales of all their magic and hope. He’s a huge demoralizer, taking beloved, uplifting tales and making them dirty, depressing and ugly.

Just do a Rap version of “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers.

I don’t know how to judge hip-hop, but after a while the endless rhymes about the Constitutional Convention started sounding less like Eminem and more like Dr. Seuss. Hamilton is like if The Butter Battle Book took two hours and 45 minutes to recite.

See Jo Stafford on popular music as she knew it from about 1937 to about 1955. In her telling it grew increasingly sophisticated, then you had a severe regression with the advent of rock. She said the displacement of traditional pop by rock didn’t bother her (she was still making a good living, and could afford to retire when she felt like it – at age 49), but it did puzzle her, because, to her, the stuff resembled nursery rhymes.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is also listed as a signer of the We See You, White American Theater statement. It says, among other choice things, “We have watched you un-challenge your white privilege, inviting us to traffic in the very racism and patriarchy that festers in our bodies, while we protest against it on your stages. We see you.” It ends with this: “You are all a part of this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy. And this is a house that will not stand. This ends TODAY. We are about to introduce you…to yourself.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/theater/theater-artists-decry-racism.html

They could call it “Springtime for Hitler”.

I take it you watched the Disney-streamed version, not the live show?

“Is it possible that Hamilton provides the perfect conduit that allows these extremely unhip women to reach out and connect with the glittering but maddeningly remote galaxy of Current Year Coolness they see promoted in popular culture? ”

Similarly: fitness trainers at exercise clubs (ex: Planet Fitness) tend to be disproportionately black. They seem to be a chance for suburban white women to safely flirt with fit black men.

joe

Steve,

You just watched “Hamilton” when the Met free streams this week have been: La Boheme, Il Trovatore (Pavarotti singing), and Cosi Fan Tutti tonight?

You are not getting paid enough, and time is the constant value in determining Opportunity Cost.

Let’s check in and see what the Respectable Paper of Record has to say about this production….

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/movies/hamilton-review-disney-plus.amp.html

“Jonathan Groff channels the essential, irreducible whiteness of King George III.”

Yep, sounds about right.

Anyone can get in a daily lottery for front row seats to Hamilton, but you have to be ready to go on one day’s notice. Or at least, until this, you could. If you don’t live in NY, that is nonstarter.

The Mrs. , who saw it live via such a lottery with our daughter in law, watched in Disney+. It’s too long, and without closed captioning no idea what they’re saying.Found George III kinda fun, the rest of it, silly. And it has almost nothing to do with the actual person Alexander Hamilton.In recent pop culture HBO’s “John Adams” was much more accurate.

My niece is a theater major, and aspires to one day be on Broadway. To your point about Miranda; she explained that his original understudy, who attended the same performing arts high school in Brooklyn as her,Murrow, is much better in the role. She also while on break had some friends watch it, and she expected that they would not be able to deal with the long running time and the volume of dialogue/singing. And she was right. By about the 45 minute mark all her college age pals had enough.Which is telling; Hamilton may be more about being part of a phenomenon than any good.

Recall many of the same Nueva York Puerto Ricans lobbied for the US Navy to close their live fire range on the PR island of Viques. Locals did not want the navy to leave. But the Navy eventually got tired of the likes of Al Sharpton harassing them, so enough of that. And once the Navy packed up, the locals found themselves destitute without the business of sailors.

The reason for the 6 gazillion lies about dindus being Founding Fathers:
1 – only way (((NYC theatre landlords & producers))) will fund it.
2 – Diversity jobs for DMV Man!

The one all-white character in “Hamilton” is King George III, who is a mincing flamer.

He sired 15 children.

Yay corona’s gone. From the topics posted here it is gone I guess?

Presidential debates have been routine during presidential election campaigns since when? The 1970s? Over a generation now.

Could a candidate duck debates and not look cowardly?

We weren’t going to announce this until later this week, but hate cannot win the day.

That second clause is worth remembering. I’m going to start using it to justify whatever I happen to want to do at any time of the day or night.

“We are about to introduce you…to yourself.”

That characteristic mix of solipsism, sanctimony, and complete lack of self-awareness. We Dare Not Call It Privilege! But the other thing it clearly resembles is the world view of a terminally spoiled toddler.

Hamilton proposed POC starring in the normative American story, the founding myth, and using their own cultural language to tell that story. That could be viewed as healthy progress, not cultural appropriation.

Excellent comment.

The Hamilton fanatics I know comprise a pretty earnest bunch; they may be deeply attracted to a vision of America in which people of all colors and cultures are tastefully and respectfully assimilated into the country’s foundational narrative. And as I mentioned above, Hamilton offers my friends a gentle introduction to a more ‘vibrant’ culture and its forms of expression. It’s a nice white lady’s dream of integration and multicultural unity.

I go on at length at times about Substitute Savior Syndrome, i.e. a degraded and ultimately heretical form of post-Christianity in which progressives, in their pride, take on the job of redemption themselves. And who is to be redeemed? The most sorely oppressed among us, of course. And what would that redemption look like? The Redeemed, in all their colors, speaking and singing in their authentic voices, would gather to rejoice — but all deep down would now hold fast to the beliefs of the nice white liberals who saved them.

It may be no wonder so many of Americans find Hamilton to be an almost heavenly experience.

Scotsman.

He was born to the son of a minor laird from Ayrshire. Hes related to the British monarch via descent from the Stuarts. James II England and Ireland, James VII Scotland.

Broadway is — well, was — for tourists, an estimated 65 percent of theatergoers. And they’re not showing up to see Chekhov, Ibsen or O’Neill

When Cornel West was at Harvard, he produced a rap album called “Sketches of My Culture.” I’ve wondered more than once whether any black person outside of academia has ever listened to this album by choice.

Frankly the ‘He/Him’ in his twitter bio telegraphs far more on it’s own than any statement ever could.

Very nice comment. And like JFK’s term leading to our greater involvement in Vietnam and the 60s/70s cultural upheaval, Obama’s perpetuated our involvement in the MENA and Central Asia and led to the Great Awokening.

Best laid plans …

Well, as a satisfying counterpoint to the delusional Hamilton bullshit, who would have guessed that the historic political hero, riding in like the fucking cavalry, for white people, is none other than Kanye West.

Roughly speaking, which is plenty good enough, as a political element, he’s “The White People’s ‘Hamilton.’”

The satisfying distinction is, our “Hamilton” is real, and we get to watch him do what he does best, in real time.

And please, dear God, allow a 3-way debate to happen.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2020/07/08/kanye-west-says-hes-done-with-trump-opens-up-about-white-house-bid-damaging-biden-and-everything-in-between/#36a9bf0d47aa

implying the post-Christian Europe is an ‘advanced society’

Lol. The Europe of the future will put Papua New Guinea to shame in its primitive barbarism.

Doesn’t rock ultimately derive–through blues and hillbilly–from folk music, which is the opposite of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook?

In other words, no surprise that it’s less sophisticated.

He sired 15 children.

Well… maybe he was a flaming homosexual who preferred having sex with women.

Gays can be perverts to, you know.

I have forsaken live theater, something I once thoroughly enjoyed. I greatly admire performers who entertain live, without a net. But I’ve stopped because I’m tired of being preached to. The last three stage performances I attended were:

(1) Anna Karenina, in which Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky was played by a black guy with dreadlocks.
(2) A no-name crime procedural in which all the cops were sadistic beasts and the druggie street people were uplifting heroes from whom we could all learn a thing or two.
(3) A biography of William Shakespeare in which it was revealed that The Bard’s Lost Years were filled (literally) by a homosexual relationship with Christopher Marlowe.

I’m just tired of this. I can’t even go out for an evening of simple entertainment – including classic tales that I’m deeply familiar with – without being woke. I’m done.

It’s hard to know Hamilton would speak with his Caribbean background, but here’s a reconstruction of how Benjamin Franklin would sound like, based on Franklin’s own attempt to transcribe his phonetics.. Mostly like an Upper Class South-Eastern Englisman of his time.

http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-voice-of-american-founding-father.html?m=1

Even Mark Twain sounded more British than what we know consider American.

http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2018/09/voices-of-earlier-english-mark-twain-on.html?m=1

So I spent four hours talking with @kanyewest yesterday, his first interview since his Fourth of July Tweet declaring he’s running for president in 2020. We covered a lot of ground….(1/x) https://t.co/ezzrl717lU

— Randall Lane (@RandallLane) July 8, 2020

Joining the grievance industry was always Bubba’s fallback career. He was never good enough to win races.

Beats by Dre is now an Apple subsidiary. This is purely a virtue signal, Bubba Wallace has a totally insignificant fan following, Beats has higher name recognition than he does.

The DeSean Jackson stuff is hilarious. Some enterprising reporter with nothing to lose should start interviewing pro athletes about their opinions and print all the insane conspiracy theories they believe.

Is $2500 for a "Hamilton" ticket worth it? Judging from the video now streaming on Disney+, Lin-Manuel Miranda is more ambitious than broadly talented. He has a thin singing voice, not much dancing ability, and a shortage of charisma as an actor.https://t.co/0n8QYyfdCB

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) July 8, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=zSGWoXDFM64&feature=emb_logo

I liked Rap better when Gilbert and Sullivan did it.

Steyn is a great humorist.

OT:

Plannned Parenthood destroys unborn bodies
many black bodies have been destroyed by Planned Parenthood
White bodies too
Yellow bodies
Brown bodies
all unborn of course, thus have no rights

My white middle aged female cousins traveled far to see Hamilton on a special occasion, and raved. One was suspiciously, or maybe kindly, quiet.

I would pay money to avoid hip hop. Come to think of it, that’s the mortgage.

Surely any even vaguely successful Kanye West campaign will merely subtract black votes from the Democrats.

Or is him saying he’s done with Trump enough plausible deniability?

The article is worth reading. I can’t tell yet if he is totally insane, but this sounds pretty good:

“Oh one other thing, Black History Month. That is torture porn because when that comes up what we do is we see…. So here we go. Black History Month every year they gotta remind us about the fact that we couldn’t vote, they meaning white supremacy construct, and I said that with the CT at the end, I knew what was I was talking about…Our minds are so much more infinite than what’s coming across TikTok or Instagram, what’s trying to influence our children and the next generation of who we are. ”

On the other hand:

“[Wakanda] the best explanation of what our design group is going to feel like in the White House…That is a positive idea: you got Kanye West, one of the most powerful humans—I’m not saying the most because you got a lot of alien level superpowers and it’s only collectively that we can set it free. Let’s get back to Wakanda… like in the movie in Wakanda when the king went to visit that lead scientist to have the shoes wrap around her shoes. Just the amount of innovation that can happen, the amount of innovation in medicine—like big pharma—we are going to work, innovate, together. This is not going to be some Nipsey Hussle being murdered, they’re doing a documentary, we have so many soldiers that die for our freedom, our freedom of information, that there is a cure for AIDS out there, there is going to be a mix of big pharma and holistic.”

Read the Forbes article. I think it’s very possible that Kanye is mentally ill. It’s also possible this is a huge trolling. Also, that Kanye thinks that he’s going to step into the Republican nomination if Trump backs out (does he know something we don’t?).

Also, that this is some weird Trump hail mary to siphon off enough of the young and stupid from the Dems. Someone should Photoshop Kanye, Trump and Putin into the Malta photos.

I can see Kanye in a cape…

Hopefully, Trump has the good sense not to criticize Kanye and let him self-distruct.

Also, hopefully, Biden is foolish enough to say, “well, now they’re back to slovenly and inarticulate…”

The commenters have made me aware of a Broadway musical called “Wicked”. The existence of such a musical is encouraging, in the same way that “Hamilton” is, as a celebration of American innovation and industry. In Hamilton’s day, nighttime illumination was provided by wickless candles. But when the inventor Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea of adding a wick to the wax, home illumination was transformed. The wicked candle was an innovation comparable to later inventions such as the whale-oil lamp and Henry Ford’s introduction of the assembly line.

Lin-Manuel Miranda = Linn-Manual Mierda

I haven’t seen the musical and am not likely to. I gave up pop music in 1965. I love musical theater but mostly Italian opera (and German and French). I heard Cosi fan Tutte that year. Hard to be satisfied with The Top 40 on the car radio after that.

So it is with Alexander Hamilton. I read the Ron Chernow biography of Hamilton like millions of others. It was and remains the best biography I’ve ever read. (I read a lot) That’s why I was so disappointed with Chernow’s biography of Washington. It’s good but not incandescent like the Hamilton book. I know the secret. The Hamilton biography is a big book maybe 800 pages. But it was easy for him to write because Hamilton had written 6,000 pages about himself. It wasn’t Chernow who was such a good biographer it was Hamilton himself.

The Chernow Hamilton book was so impactfull that I quickly read a biography of Aaron Burr and most of the other Founding Fathers. Good for my civic education I suppose but not like the Hamilton biography.

Making Hamilton a darkie is crazy. He grew up in a black society in the Caribbean. He was a recognized prodigy who was active in local public affairs. There is no record of him being particularly concerned about the fate of black slaves. Slavery was an issue even at this early date but Hamilton was not like Franklin or even Washington. He was just silent on the issue of blacks. Blacks have had a history. It mostly began when the literate Europeans came in the fifteenth century. The Muslims had arrive in East Africa to begin their own slave trade much earlier but wrote little black history that I’m aware of.

So blacks without a canon of heroes and accomplishments of their own have turned to fiction. Hence Wakanda and the Hamilton musical. It’s just so feeble.

You think Tin Pan Alley was sophisticated?
Lots of classical music is derived from European folk melodies.
Sophisticated music always builds from simpler forms.
And rock became more sophisticated as it went along.

Now I would pay to see a Planet of the Apes musical—–Hamilton- I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch for free.

Hamilton proposed POC starring in the normative American story, the founding myth, and using their own cultural language to tell that story. That could be viewed as healthy progress, not cultural appropriation.

It starts as cultural admiration, ends at cultural abrogation.

In 19th century Broadway, Irish actors could only play stage Irishmen, Jews played Jews, and so on. But after the breakthroughs of say Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, white-ethnic artists were free to speak as Americans.

And then free to speak as ethnics, again, except super-sized with intensity.

In a generous world, that is Hamilton’s accomplishment.

I would say your comment is generous to a fault. The “healthy progress” of swapping out heritage Americans with POX and ethnics to retell the American story has led us to the very unhealthy current year regression to ethnocentric triumphalism and slaked vengeance fueled by intractable envy.

You have a binding national mythos.
That mythos is hijacked by outsiders.
The outsiders at first adhere to the basic precepts of that mythos, “using their own cultural language”.
Then the utterly predictable happens: the outsiders become the insiders and change that mythos, pulling it up by the root and planting their own replacement mythos which, naturally, elevates their groups to mythic status and denigrates the achievements celebrated by the people who still bitterly cling to the original myths.
End game: Erasure of history, substituted with a new and false history.

The fact of it is that national myths and history itself are tightly bound with racial continuity. If you disrupt the latter, the former are doomed to desecration and defilement.

Everything “cultural” in our time is sheer parasitism and zero real creativity. In Hollywood, remakes, re-imaginings, re-boots,updates, new-looks, etc. Broadway today is pure parasitism. Hit musicals made from hit blockbuster movies, rather than the other way around. “Wicked” is pure parasitism.

And with SJW racial “re-imaginings” of white history/art it is pure parasitism of another kind, and a damning admission. There is nothing equivalently interesting or inspiring that any POC – as such in America, not as nationals of their own country, I mean – could present as the color-correct equivalent of “Hamilton.”

Where? The inspiring Story of Haiti? Where is the great song and dance musical of “L’Overture!”? “We are all immigrants in Haiti/Let’s live together in harmony.”

I saw a number from “Hamilton” and it was utterly insipid, whether as lyrics for a musical or as rap. Utterly sub-Schoolhouse Rock. Artistically, in every way, a total joke, compared to “1776,” a popular musical and film about the Revolutionary War and its personalities.

The biggest obvious mark against legitimate love for “Hamilton” — without my ever having to sit through it myself — is the fact that I am not aware of any breakout number that people actually love and which stands by itself. Nor as popular radio rap that anyone listens to, let alone real-deal street rap. That would be cawny.

Or even a number that is interesting in its larger thematic framing such as “Saltpeter and Pins” (male/female concerns and knowledge, complementarity) or “Is anybody there/Does anybody care” (Deist wondering about Providence yet unable to pray) from “1776.

And then the whole Orwellian mind-flip of: “Ok, we’re tearing down old and prominent statues of historic ‘slaveowners’ when just five minutes ago Libs were congratulating themselves and praising this production in which POCs are portraying these same ‘slaveowners’ favorably?!?!?”

And these same people will just roll with suddenly now banning “Hamilton” yet continue tongue-bathing themselves without a hitch.

A couple years ago I happened to be at the home of a rich old NYC Lib Trump-hater type of guy whom I did not know at all; and it happened that he had just seen “Hamilton” on B’way. He is someone who grew up in NYC during golden age of B’way and has surely seen plenty of the greats.

He opined that although admittedly he did not really like the rap music, he was glad he had gone to see it “for the virtue of it.” (quote!) Including, I inferred, his being able to signal this virtue and tell people he had seen it.

Sickening to me, though I had to shut up in the circumstances. Anyway, there’s the depth of actual love for “Hamilton” from its patrons and purported fans.

I’m a big fan of Hamilton after my then 12 y/o daughter introduced me to the soundtrack a couple years ago. It’s fantastic.

There are some fast talking lyrics, but that’s hardly new, and it isn’t really rap. I don’t know how anyone can justify perl clutching.

Saw the show this year and was less moved than by the music. Certainly I did notice the lack of white performers, but what’s wrong with that! Hamilton is a great story and we ahould be flattered people of color feel the same way.

It’s disappointing to see my fellow commenters thrashing a performance few have experienced for themselves. Rejecting it, in many cases, because of the skin color of the performers. That’s my definition of racism.

Steve – glad you watched it and formed your own opinion. We have different taste. No problem with that.

Even Kaep’ the modern day Ali, was tagged with a rape beef in Florida that got, ” resolved” with a ya I banged her but she wanted it. So much she filed a police report subsequently it seems. Tag teem to according to the report.

These are narrative Kills. Ive seen NBC literally cut away in haste when people start veering from the script.

I would never watch this trash. It is total cultural appropriation. He has black and hispanic people doing what they could never do – create this country. If he wanted to be so edgy and politically correct, why did he not give women the leading roles?

I don’t know why but I always thought the Illiad could be the basis for a great rap video.

He can if the entire MSM not only excuses, but applauds him for it.

No good source but probably true: a Dutch anon claims that today in Scheveningen was a massive popular demonstration against hyper-aggressive sexual harassment by recently arrived Muslims. The lyingpress says it doesn’t happen but numerous videos and reports show young women being aggressively harassed, which is consistent with Muslim sexual mores and Muslim theology, since the theory goes this will force the young women to dress more modestly. This follows a massive police action involving many arrests (of unspecified background) and the discovery of modern torture chambers in cargo containers, and stockpiling of materials to impersonate police officers. It also follows a [cough cough, Muslim] rage attack with a hatchet in Scheveningen.

I have come to the conclusion that I no longer have the ability to understand America anymore.

If, when I was in High School back in the Seventies, and some teacher (it would have probably been that guy with the leisure suit and the comb-over with gold medallions) had come to me and my friends and said “Guys, I have this great idea! To make American history appeal to Black Youth, we’ll do a musical about the Founding Fathers! But – dig this! – we’ll make them minorities! They can sing Motown songs, and talk jive, and to make the British square and uncool, we’ll make King George a gay guy! We’ll get a Puerto Rican to be Alexander Hamilton! Groovy, huh?” We would have all put our heads in our hands, and then explained that 1) no, this was not cool, it was stupid and patronizing, 2) if WE thought that it was stupid and patronizing, it was nothing compared to what Black Youth would think of it, and 3) if anything, Blacks disliked Puerto Ricans far more than they did whites, and 4) the only part that might appeal to anyone in the “Black Community”was making King George gay. Nobody said “cringeworthy” back then, but that term would most certainly have described our reaction to this idea.

So someone does this today, and it’s a huge hit. I stand in awe.

Particularly one, like Biden, who is not (NOT I Say) suffering from senile dementia. I know he’s not because the NYT told me so.

I completely agree with you.

I’d rather stick needles in my eye than listen to hip hop for three hours.

This. A thousand times this.

Celebrating mediocrity because it was made by Diversity has been a big thing since the Civil Rights movement. Mostly done for blacks, but also for browns, reds, yellows, homos, and gyno-Americans.

It begins as highlighting one Diversity as “exceptional” even when they haven’t done anything exceptional.

Then it morphs into “all contributions by X Diverse group are equal to those of Straight White Males” (cultural equality/relevancy).

Then it becomes “all contributions by X Diverse group are SUPERIOR to Straight White Males”.

I recall one documentary special on blacks—I think on the Great Migration l—where they spent about a few minutes of an hour-long program celebrating migrating blacks for inventing the box lunch. Seriously, the documentations made it seem like blacks were the only people who ever traveled with food in a box in the form of a sandwich and a fruit to wet the whistle when no water was available, and that this was somehow a great achievement.

That box lunch moment illustrated nicely what the Hamilton hype has become: Diversity doing something minor (and likewise Diversity claiming they did it alone) and lefties pretending its a Titanic achievement. Steve hit the nail on the head, the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Hamilton will likely end up like the film version of Tom Jones, which was hyped beyond belief at the time by left-wing cultural critics because it broke with the Hays Code with sex but once the hype stops everyone ignores it because, really, its quite poor. I wonder if Miranda knows he didn’t make a good musical, but will continue to play into left-wing celebration of Diversity for his future projects to make sure his name (and bank account) is bigger than it should be.

Also, he’s a POS who celebrates terrorists.

hRm, Bubba “noose” goes viral then immediately signs w/ the Dre Multi-level Marketing (MLM) scam a week later to hawk t-shirts and masks and overpriced headphones

almost like all of this was planned in advance

And… it begins:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The showrunners of the Tony Award winning musical ‘Hamilton’ have been criticized for (insert controversy here). It seems like Lin Manuel Miranda can’t catch a break, or the show in general. Recently, #CancelHamilton gained traction on social media, complaining about the show portraying a man who owned slaves in a positive light. This started as the show debuts on Disney Plus.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/494162-cancel-hamilton-black-lives-matter/

Yeah, my sister and niece love it and know all the lyrics. Although my niece also likes Drake and some rappers, so she isn’t ignorant of the distinction between real rap and this musical stuff.

Although we’re past the point when a sane person should’ve realized the NY Times is not a reliable news source, its funny to note that in 2016 they tried to gin up a controversy on Trump’s health, and when their commenters pointed out that Hillary was about the same age and we’d had no verified health reports on her and also she was literally showing signs of ill health and alcoholism, the NY Times simply mentioned she was four years younger and did nothing more, and continued to try to hammer Trump on his health.

Then Hillary collapsed on 9/11, and the NY Times wrote a few stories about it, and then stated that since her personal doctor had said she was fine, she was fine, no more questions need be asked. But they muffled their Trump-health attacks after that.

So this is the NY Times reaction now: hush up the comments section on Democrats’ health so as to not force them to be embarrassed when their commenters point out the huge hypocrisy and big story they are missing.

You’d think being a reliable, we-don’t-hate-whitey news source would be a better plan.

Last summer I paid an exorbitant amount for a trip to NYC for my family, the centerpiece was Hamilton (we got tickets for a “steal” – $450 per.

I had resisted listening to all but a few songs.

The cast I saw (Hamilton was played by the excellent Austin Scott, with much better pipes than LMM) was in most ways superior to the original, esp Burr, although it seems like Leslie Odom has done well.

You all are being hard on the songs, which seem to steadily resolve to more traditional broadway fare as the show progresses.

A lot of the lyrics in the rappier songs – all of which are pretty clever – get lost in the acoustics of Richard Rogers theater.

I was less impressed with what NYC had become in the 15 years since i had last been there. They have somehow moved out all the gritty things that made MYC interesting, and kept all the gritty things that made MYC unlivable.

Anyway, adolescent and teen girls are fascinated with Hamilton because of the affair and the complexity of Hamilton’s relationship with the Schuyler sisters. And everyone loves the king.

Also LMM wrote many of the songs in Moana and probably was a big reason that show did so well its opening weekend. But, there was less interest in the mary poppins sequel and the show on HBO thst both featured LMM so go figure.

T.S. Eliot’s plays like The Cocktail Party were prestigious in New York theater after WWII.

Eliot wrote that play while a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Oppenheimer had labored to get Eliot to come to the IAS, and then later lamented that all he did while he was there was write The Cocktail Party, which he (Oppenheimer) thought to be his worst work.

Say, speaking of that, how about a Broadway musical about Oppenheimer?

Forced to watch on Disney by wife and daughter, could only endure about 20 minutes. Asinine, infantile, idiotic low talent crap if ever I saw it. I am completely perplexed, confounded and amazed that this thing had any traction whatsoever.
Frustratingly stupid, if only Puerto Rican independence had succeeded.

This is a bit off-topic but very ISteve-ish: If you make any comment on the New York Times comments pages that mentions (even in passing) the possibility that Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive decline, the comment is automatically blocked

Positively Stalinist, or, to keep it current, North Korean.

I find this fondness for censorship by liberals to be bizarre.

It brings to mind the current campaign by huge corporations against Facebook because Facebook isn’t censoring “hateful” and “misleading” content enough, even though Zuck’s newly appointed Ministry of Truth has banned tons of content, including Unz!

It’s as if a high school principal banned the Junior Republican newspaper but not the Junior Democratic newspaper at the specific request of the Democrats. Now, in my old fashioned way of thinking, even if I were a Democrat I would not be on board with that even if I thought the Republicans were totally retarded fags. I mean, leaving aside the First Amendment stuff, it’s the optics: Are you afraid of debating these people? Is there something you’re trying to hide? Is it really a good look to be de-platforming your opponents?

It’s the old adage about “absolute power” I guess.

the endless rhymes about the Constitutional Convention

Are John Lansing and Robert Yates mentioned at all? These anti-Hamiltons were New York’s other delegates. Hamilton left for a while, during which they stormed out in anger at the tyranny developing before their eyes. (I wonder if some of this fear stemmed from Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which authorized the War of Southern Aggression.)

To Hamilton’s credit, upon his return he refused to cast votes, as he knew he couldn’t represent the whole state. Were only downstaters that ethical today!

So why not invent a musical about a boyish hero rising through war and politics only to die in a duel

Or one about a frustrated Highlands pederast trying to round up village bairns for his summer camp. When parents demur, he guns down the entire kindergarten class. This leads to a wave of emotion in which Englishmen lose their centuries-old right to possess pistols. The narrator could be a world-famous tennis champion who was in the building at the time.

Call it Hamilton Twa.

By the way, Miranda is a rare Broadway composer with a wife and kids. Interestingly, the one all-white character in Hamilton is King George III, who is portrayed as a mincing flamer. That’s a very old American stereotype about the English as gay that I haven’t seen much of lately.

I think that that is probably because Americans have had more exposure to non-elite Brits and their culture in the last 20 years. Elite Brit culture has a Gay-ish tinge (Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, John Addington Symonds, EM Forster, the Cambridge Apostles and the cult of “the higher sodomy,” etc), and a lot of Americans tended to be ignorant of what was going on in the UK below the Oxbridge veneer.

I remember once talking to a woman back in the mid-’90s who had an idealized “Masterpiece Theatre” vision of Britain, but who had her illusions shattered after a visit to the sceptred isle……

I liked Rap better when Gilbert and Sullivan did it.

I agree. Did you ever see Topsy-Turvy? It’s a very good Mike Leigh film about G&S and the making of The Mikado. It captures the feeling of the time – as near as I can tell – just about perfectly. I wish that Leigh, while he had the cast assembled, had made a few companion films of actual performances of a few G&S operattas just as D’Oyly-Carte would have produced them in the 1880s.

On the other hand …

https://www.leftvoice.org/why-hamilton-is-the-most-right-wing-musical-on-broadway

About 10 years ago I played a few youtubes of the iconic 60s/70s female folk vocalists for my young niece. Her reaction: She did not think that Joni Mitchell, Judith Durham (The Seekers) or Melanie were especially good. I attributed her reaction to a phenomenon whereby one’s brain becomes wired for the music that one hears growing up. But what would explain someone of my ancient age thinking that the music of Hamilton is excellent? Such a contemporary of mine did not go through high school being wired for that music. Is she really able to rewire? Is my “early wiring” theory all wrong? Is a contemporary of mine faking her professed enthusiasm for Hamilton’s rap music? Was Joan Baez actually just not any good? I don’t get it.

Uncle Vanya’s been on Broadway.

Not buying.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=old+people+in+the+1920s

What hits you about these is that their voices are rustic, but you don’t hear full-bore Southern accents.

Theodore Bilbo was a generation younger than the Southerners on the first video, and he has a pronounced accent:

but who had her illusions shattered after a visit to the sceptred isle……

She couldn’t find a palatable meal and without a doubt she had trouble locating people who were consistently sober and blessed with a full set of teeth.

Similarly: fitness trainers at exercise clubs (ex: Planet Fitness) tend to be disproportionately black. They seem to be a chance for suburban white women to safely flirt with fit black men.

Thus providing a safe, controlled real-life opportunity to move one step further beyond the brainwashing propagated by TV and the movies.

Those bastards are in Orlando now.

# mass immigration

Broadway is — well, was — for tourists, an estimated 65 percent of theatergoers. And they’re not showing up to see Chekhov, Ibsen or O’Neill

You can get good drama closer to home. You can also get good musicals, especially the touring ones, closer to home, as well. Only highbrow types go to Broadway to see good drama or even a quality musical. Most go for the latest spectacle.

But good drama is easier to find closer to home because you only need actors who can act – and usually a small number of them, at that. A good Broadway musical needs a whole troupe of actors who can sing, act and dance, and look good doing it, and good directors and choreographers, etc., to make them look even better doing it.

As I wrote in a comment on Steve’s post about the Mankiw piece: “I thought it really funny at the height of the mania that everyone in respectable Manhattan was falling over themselves to attend what was essentially Schoolhouse Rap Takes Broadway!!”

https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-i-paid-2500-for-a-hamilton-ticket-im-happy-about-it/#comment-1619823

Bubba Wallace has a totally insignificant fan following, Beats has higher name recognition than he does.

Feel that burn, Bubba.

My parents brought me on a trip to England back in the 90s, and my father hired a driver to take us around. This driver spoke in what I think was a country Midlands accent so thick that at first we weren’t initially certain if he was speaking English. I recall my mother saying, “And here I thought all English people talked like Pierce Brosnan!”

Hey it could be worse! Imagine Morgan Freeman in the role of Ed Sullivan and introducing four black Beatles to anxious, pre-syncope American teenage girls! First they came for Christopher Columbus…

Of course that’s the real reason but also of course that can’t be presented as the reason. In order for Sleepy Joe to duck out of the debates the Dems are going to have to come up with some semi-plausible reason other than that. It doesn’t have to be a particularly good reason, just something that will give them cover among the true believers who aren’t going to poke at that reason very hard. Thus Friedman’s trial balloon.

Of course Trump has done the same with his tax returns. Instead of the real reason (it would be embarrassing to reveal that Trump pays hardly any income tax due to the depreciation deduction for real estate) he keeps saying that his tax returns are “under audit”. Of course for someone like Trump, his returns routinely get audited every year so there will never be a time when that excuse will go away, at least not while he is still running for office.

No one seems to have commented on or noticed that Miranda is what in other circumstances (e.g. if he killed a black guy) is called a “white Hispanic”. While the Spanish never implemented the one-drop rule (and therefore even the Latino elite tend to have a touch of the tar brush unless they are from the more recent Lebanese immigration) I would bet that Lin Manuel has maybe 90% European DNA if not more.

I would bet that had Miranda come to prominence this year, the year in which Black Lives Really Really Matter, someone would have noticed that he is basically a person of pallor despite his island heritage. If having slave owning ancestors is bad, then I would bet that Miranda falls on the bad side.

In another America (the old bad America), Manny Miranda would have declared himself white (“Miranda is an Italian name”) and have been done with it. But now the bread is buttered on the other side.

By the way, Miranda is a rare Broadway composer with a wife and kids.

As is Robert Lopez, who comes off as more feminine than his tough Jewish partner on Avenue Q, who’s a member of LA’s gay men’s choir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lopez

Lopez is part Philippine, and Miranda Puerto Rican, so I guess we got something out of the Spanish-American War.

Oh, and “El Cumbanchero”:

This is so cool. Today I was thinking about something Obama said and now there is an Obama tread so I can post it. Obama famously said…”If I had a son he’d LOOK like Trayvon Martin.” He did not say, he’d act like Trayvon, or Freddy or Gentle Mike or George. He was so far from being black that he would not associate with people like that. When I see a Freddy or George meet their end I don’t say, “Oh my God, that could have been me .” Or my son, or son in law or friend. Actually I don’t know any low life multi time offending criminals. But in the hood when they see a brother getting cuffed or wrestled to the ground they think, “Oh, that could be me, or my sons, or my bro or my baby daddy or my fiance.” The arrest and consequences are not part of their thought process. And Obama was one of the most devisive people to ever walk across the American stage.

Negative. VERY negative. Stuff’s airborne, gives neurological damage, coming back, while Big Pharma is basically trying to make cash by suborning scientific research. Not uplifting and there are people who need to make close contact with non-racist nooses.

In fact, if I were an Alien with enormous computational capabilities, I would probably engineer a virus like that to stir things up a bit and get the earthlings seriously occupied as well as some chill-out time to reflect on their wicked ways. So far, it’s evidently not working.

” I can’t even go out for an evening of simple entertainment – including classic tales that I’m deeply familiar with – without being woke.”

The BBC’s A Christmas Carol last year featured a black Mrs Cratchit, who Scrooge lusted after. I can’t remember that being in Dickens.

I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief, but come on.

The writer is Steven Knight, whose TV series Peaky Blinders, a fantasy about an imaginary 1920s gang of Irish Brummies, also featured black gang members. He seems to specialise in retro-fitting black people into past times the way Andrew Davies retro-fits sex and nudity into Jane Austen. Steve has a better phrase to describe the retro-fitting which escapes me at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Knight

Hungarians do this better than Taiwanese students, but with odd choices of headwear.

The old guys from Missouri sound pretty much like Mark Twain. Maybe a bit of the drawl is missing.
People forget how fast languages can change. See the changes from Marvell to Milton to Samuel Johnson. Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson probably wouldn’t have understood each other, had they hypothetically met with a time machine, the way you, an American, cannot understand a modern Cumbrian dialect, which are pretty conservative.
See min. 15:30

Reconstructed Shakesperean English sounds almost like a foreign language, as different as, say, broad Scots and English .

The Last Real Calvinist, doubt I will see “Hamilton” even for free as rap does not appeal to me. But the other night while semi couch riden and too lazy to fetch the remote I watched “The Music Man.” This musical was huge when I was young and now, with closed caption, so you really can know the lyrics, so lame. And worse of all, they even reworked some songs into the play more than once.

I wonder why gays haven’t protested against that portrayal of King George as a mincing flamer, and why that didn’t prevent the show from becoming a hit.

The math half of the old SAT was an entirely different ballgame than the verbal half. There were far too many problems, mostly not multi-parters or conceptual (i.e. a trig rule you’d memorized) to justify more than 5 seconds on any given one. You have to speed-run it, which is not a strategy for the verbal part. Back in the analogy words era, maybe, you could blaze through the high-contrast option lists. But the last time I saw a sample verbal Reading Comp w/ a half-dozen questions each (~6-7 years ago) the subtle distinctions between answers seemed proportionate to the “obviousness,” for lack of better word, of the prompt. Dunno know about Lin’s test but Id argue the modern SAT verbal is quasi-analytical and highly loaded toward intuition-of-test-maker’s-intent. Maybe it’s good for the colleges to get rid of it, so long as they replace with something more regionalized, niche. FWIW, the ACT separates the knock-em-out math section from a science section, which is indeed a challenge if you’re rusty on your AP chem/bio/physics. Hey, has there already been a flouncy, flamboyant Tupac and/or Biggie Broadway musical? And if not, Is that a lacuna which pleases or which offends certified BLack ppl? Things that make you go “Hmmm”

Giani, just throw a few more “fucks’ in there and you’re good. For a interesting time watch a low budget all black movie such as “Belly” in closed caption and try to figure out WTF are they saying?

I heard about someone who went along thinking it was a traditional musical and left at the interval. It must be really bad if you don’t like hip-hop and puerile storytelling.

Why? On the off chance that it is even feasible, the ports of PR will be immediately contracted out to Port of HK or Dubai Port Trust and then we will have all the cold version of Cuba again. Can the president just get rid of U.S. territory without Congress etc? How to deport U.S. Citizens? May be by instituting a scheme so that they can sell it to US Government in an auction? Like Bahamas etc., sell passports for some $100K or so. If it becomes successful, how do you say no to Mexicans, Chinese etc.,

Gentry upper middle class whites love it the most. Even moreso they love posting on social media how “We got tickets!!!” with a selfie of them in the audience.

They simultaneously get to show off how cultured they are, along with a low key flex because of the cost of the tickets and travel involved.

Bonus if they have their kids sporting Hamilton t-shirts or hat as a memento afterwards.

It’s practically a rite of passage. It’s like going to Mecca or Graceland for them.

If there was no social media to show off to their fellow good whites, it likely wouldn’t have done as well as it has.

Maybe our “elites” are truly silly people.

Many are truly silly people. The luxury taste that affords 4-figure Broadway show tickets enables the same elite crowd to hold many luxury opinions they inflict on the rest of us at great inconvenience, yet cost them nothing, in their “money is no bar” world.

And frivolous might be more appropriate than luxury.

I remember once talking to a woman back in the mid-’90s who had an idealized “Masterpiece Theatre” vision of Britain, but who had her illusions shattered after a visit to the sceptred isle……

I once knew a girl who spent a post-graduate year in London. She went there with visions of of Shakespeare, Brideshead, and scones with clotted cream.

The ubiquitous darts tournaments and slapper soap operas were not exactly what she had been expecting.

I have comments in moderation. Please approve.

Not buying.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=old+people+in+the+1920s

What hits you about these is that their voices are rustic, but you don’t hear full-bore Southern accents.

Theodore Bilbo was a generation younger than the Southerners on the first video, and he has a pronounced accent:

It’s important to remember that an individual’s accent will change over time. For example, Queen Elizabeth’s accent is not quite what it was decades ago…..

You may not, however, expect to find the same traces in an 89-year-old monarch. Yet Harrington’s studies have shown that even the Queen’s accent has subtly shifted to a more standard, “middle class” Southern English accent over the decades. Where she once said the word “lost” with the same vowel sound as “law”, it is now closer to the more common sound you may hear when Londoner Adele sings “I ain’t lost, just wandering”; family is no longer pronounced “femileh”.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160202-has-the-queen-become-frightfully-common#:~:text=You%20may%20not%2C%20however%2C%20expect,English%20accent%20over%20the%20decades.

Also, listening to those recording, it’s interesting to note how rhoticity has increased over time in the various Anglo-American accents…..Doubtless we are seeing the impact of the General America (GA) accent as the USA’s unofficial standard……

Here is a link to Tanner Greer’s review of Hamilton from 2018. Not his usual fare; he mostly writes about US-China relations and Chinese history (modern and ancient). To my surprise, he liked it.

A Short Defense of the Musical Hamilton

Hamilton is an affirmation. “This story is also our story. We too claim these values.” It is true, the leading lights of the American revolution were not black or Hispanic. But if you have even the teeniest belief that the principles they fought for are as valuable to black and Hispanic Americans as they are to the rest of the country, then you must support this musical’s aims. For the play is correct: the story is their story. This is America. The story belongs to all of us.

One of the things that I liked about the John Adams miniseries was how it attempted to give the various historical personages in the film authentic “period” accents. Here’s a scene depicting a cabinet meeting involving Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington:

Adams seems to be speaking in a version the old-style northeastern patrician accent (cf FDR, TR, etc). Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton, in contrast, are speaking in a fashion that sounds strongly reminiscent of the British West Country.

There’s a difference between liking the idea of the musical and liking the musical.

Cloudbuster, Eisenhower led the Allies to victory in Europe and then served well as a president, but was never in combat.

OT, just in case anyone keeps count of hate hoaxes:

https://www.eastoregonian.com/news/local/county-commission-candidate-confesses-to-writing-racist-letter/article_352052b0-bfba-11ea-8e32-67b1b9e99a65.html

Nothing on Althea Bernstein though.

Off topic, but I might be confused.

Can a Tucker Carlson watcher help me out with this?

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=kUu8H_1594189068&p=1

Most people–especially ethnic minorities with a bullhorn–never understand, never comprehend the consequences and second order effects of the policy they advocate.

New York politicians haven’t yet thought about the consequences of no tourism in NYC. Broadway is closed through the end of the year. The zero-risk crowd won’t allow any theatre to re-open at capacity, so the theatre economics will only work for off-Broadway and experimental theatre. The related employment and tax base is gone–unlikely to return. People get on with their lives–and make commitments elsewhere.

Why come to NYC, ever, when the reason to come–entertainment, sports, music venues, restaurants, bars, clubs that depend on a full house for the excitement and buzz of a crowd is gone.

The City that never sleeps is barely awake, in a slumber, and that’s not going to change much or soon.

+10 on the Met Opera Streams. https://www.metopera.org/user-information/nightly-met-opera-streams/

If you think yourself at all interested in opera, watch Mozart’s Cos fan tutte anytime between 7:30 pm tonight through 6:30 pm tomorrow.

https://www.metopera.org/link/8601ccf66b394032b83d5776cab34177.aspx?upc=811357017470

If I were parachuted into a great seat at one of the better Hamilton productions, a $1000+ seat. I would last 10 minutes before bolting for the exits. Me and this hip-hop gibberish do not mix well. I could care less how clever the lyrics are, and the last thing I need to see is these ninnies of color jumping about and declaiming.

I guess white women ninnies will have to be their fan base….though I don’t get that one. Obama voters?

Us proles have finally been able to watch “Hamilton.“ There’s much better and much worse hip hop. It’s probably a lot better than nipsey hustle, a guy who I’m still not quite sure who he is. Hip hop has an impressive cannon. Tribe called quest, wu tang, biggie smalls, dr. Dre, slim shady. All of them have verbal prowess, good producers, and a good ear for beats with poppy melody. I was expecting the hamilton music to actually be pretty good, I think my expectations were a bit too high. Who knows why that could be.

Everything “cultural” in our time is sheer parasitism and zero real creativity. In Hollywood, remakes, re-imaginings, re-boots,updates, new-looks, etc. Broadway today is pure parasitism. Hit musicals made from hit blockbuster movies, rather than the other way around. “Wicked” is pure parasitism.

That’s not the problem. Elizabethan drama was equally “parasitic”. All but one of Shakespeare’s plays (one of the weaker ones) was an adaptation of earlier works. The old saw “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is so common it’s been attributed to many different people.

The source of our cultural sickness lies elsewhere.

There was also a big pharma tax credit for PR that expired in 2006. Bill Clinton signed it.

Then he should be charged with a hate crime, and the book thrown at him.

Steve, this is an incredibly perceptive comment. I would give it the Sailer gilt edge, if I could. (You haven’t been giving those out much recently.)

Hamilton was a bastards bastard. He was twice removed from his actual paternal father.

Who is Hamiltons original audience? Boomer Jews who dont listen to rap music.

Funny you should say that. The one guy in my circle of acquaintances* who admits to having paid full price for tix to Hamilton on Broadway for himself & his boyfriend is, precisely, a boomer jew who doesn’t listen to rap music.

The more people like the play Hamilton, the more I like the book “Burr” by Vidal.

Mrs. ic1000 is one of those female superfans who traveled far to see the play. My exposure was via CD, to the musical numbers, and from there to the Chernow biography.

To my surprise, I like the CDs. Not the plot, or the dopey current-events asides, or the rap. I was surprised and moved that Miranda cast George Washington as the father figure. Yes, he was a slaveholder, but… the play sets his heroic and positive features against that. Hamilton and Washington succeed in founding the nation together.

I didn’t expect subtlety, or an anti-hateful view that puts 1776 ahead of 1619. Of course, Miranda on Twitter has already fixed that. It being The Current Year and all.

Anyway, it was a shock to watch the Disney version on TV. The choreography is jarring, with actors and extras crowding the small stage to jump about. The between-songs dialog is, er, childish. Each number ends with over-the-top hoots and whistles from the live audience, recalling the smug praise of every agitprop skit on that NBC show airing late on Saturdays.

FWIW, the college-aged next generation of ic1000s declined the invitation to enjoy the entire production.

Vidal is a far overrated writer. He was promoted simply because he was homosexual, nasty to right wingers, and “shocking” in all the communist-approved ways (i.e. anti-Christian/anti-Western).

In reality, he was a miserable self-loathing hack who used a cliched device in much of his novel writing—contrarian views of historical events, with such contrarian views predictably aligning with communist arguments.

Buckley promoted him by becoming his public enemy, while Buckley was leading the controlled opposition of the right while indulging in the love that dare not speak its name in his private time, much to Vidal’s amusement.

I saw the Broadway across America version in San Antonio. I forget who played Hamilton but he was definitely a better singer than LMM. The show was great.

I don’t really understand the disdainful commentary about LMM and Hamilton here on Unz. It makes me think I need to get a better class of ‘friends.’

Mike, you’d better not watch ‘Yesterday’

Join the queue.

“I once knew a girl who spent a post-graduate year in London. She went there with visions of of Shakespeare, Brideshead, and scones with clotted cream.”

If she was studying, she could have done Durham, Exeter or St Andrews and maybe left with illusions intact. And Stratford itself is very white – there are probably more black people on the RSC stage (zero in the audience) than you could find in the town.

But London hasn’t been an English city for decades, save for Royal funerals and Olympic Games.

Who is Irish. I gave up explaining to people that my mother did not, in fact, sound like Mrs. Doubtfire because my mother was Irish while Mrs. Doubtfire was, in fact, Robin Williams.

Even funnier are the Yanks who go to Ireland with visions of The Quiet Man swimming in their heads.

Having gained independence, Puerto Ricans will take Belt and Road largess to build a naval base for China. Since they are not adept at generating wealth, they need international friends with benefits.

I wouldn’t see Hamilton if they gave me a free ticket and a $2,500 bribe.

Finally, A “wall” with Mexico paid for by Mexicans!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/mexico-border-towns-stop-americans-crossing-covid-19-coronavirus

The quality of Covid is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
……

I never thought Bubba would be this cruel. He is pushing $25 Chinese headphones that sell for $250, and most of them, to Kids of Kolor. Well I guess I’m naive. For years athletes have had absolutely
no qualms picking the pockets of poor kids, many of them their own people, by allowing their sneakers to be sold for that kind of money. They don’t care, being Black seems to be not so much about loving your own people and more about hating on the Cracker.

I have no problem with people not listening to rap music and I’m not suggesting they should.

I’ve grown out of it myself so I can see why someone who didn’t grow up with it wouldn’t care. But I can certainly still tell the difference between good rap and bad rap.

However, imagine I said I don’t like ballet, I’ve never seen ballet, never thought about ballet, but I just saw a ballet and it’s the best thing ever. Why would my opinion matter?

Except rap is way more popular than ballet. There are a LOT of informed rap fans and none of them listen to Hamilton.

Everything “cultural” in our time is sheer parasitism and zero real creativity.

The first written stories are 4-5000 years old. By the time 300BC came around people were already writing that there was “nothing new under the Sun”. Facades might change, but every story has already been written.

The media will applaud whatever Biden does in the debates. If they use the COVID outbreak to avoid meeting in person, Biden can debate with help of a real time teleprompter. If the Dems want to go hard, they could use a Deep Fake AI Biden for the debate.

A Deep Fake President controlled by the Deep State may be the eventual result.

I’ve seen speculative reconstructions uttered, and I could understand them.

Buckley promoted him by becoming his public enemy, while Buckley was leading the controlled opposition of the right while indulging in the love that dare not speak its name in his private time, much to Vidal’s amusement.

Thanks for the fantasy. Been an education.

Fantastic? Go listen to Abbey Road you putz!

Although Mrs. Doubtfire claims to be English in the movie, her accent sounds partly Scottish and mostly Robin Williams. Which is really about right if you accept the premise of the movie, which is that the character is faking the accent.

Perhaps the best way to hang on to the achievements of Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin et al, is to rewrite history so that they were all black. Perhaps some of them even kept white slaves.

Hmmm. The other evening while at the last German restaurant in Chicago an off-duty drinking buddy mused about whether recombinant genetic science might someday enable the sickle cell gene to be spliced into the genetic sequence of culex mosquito. People say some crazy stuff at a beer hall putsch.

I like that they set up the pure air deal as some sort of refutation of Trump pointing out the obvious. NPR and the New Yorker marry insipidly childish Trump hate to crossword-solving poetry-quoting minds, and these guys are like a cartoon depiction of DPRK propaganda reasoning.

Right. Also didn’t lead troops while President, which was one of my stipulations. We have lots of Presidents who were former military leaders.

What’s your point ? Bilbo was a race realist , he believed in separation of the races . You believe in mongrelization . And you post this sh*t up here for what ? To smear an honorable man and a legally elected representative of the American people . Read his book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization” and deny the truth and prescience of what he says .

I don’t think Joni Mitchell was that good. Joan Baez was a better singer, but I don’t care for either of them.

The problem with popular music is not just that young people’s brains get “wired” to like certain sounds, it’s that the music is all entangled with the period’s Zeitgeist, from the sound to the lyrics to the hair and clothes and even posture and physical condition of the singers. Joan Baez’s voice would probably sound great singing old Scottish folk songs, but I can’t stand to listen to even a few lines of her music.

I also don’t like the music of my own generation or modern music. And I was never caught up in the Zeitgeist of any of them.

I don’t know how many people there are like me in the modern world or what percentage of the dissident right or iSteve readers are like me, but basically I don’t like any popular music post-WWII. A lot of traditional ethnic music sounds good to me. I have a taste for the shrill sounds that characterize a lot of primitive music (e.g., Japanese Noh-gaku, Micronesian choral music, Breton bagpipes), but the music that actually gets re-played by me in my home for enjoyment:
baroque and classical instrumental (I like oboe, harpsichord and horn);
waltzes;
opera;
monastic chant;
occassionally, Celtic music or jazz.

I tried to appreciate metal and punk, but I just don’t get it.

Trump’s tax returns almost certainly have nothing new in them, and handing them over after the gigantic debacle that was the fake impeachment and the years of “Russia” lying would be an atrocity. As with those scams the real goal would be to persecute anyone who ever had lunch with him, not to actually learn anything.
That Biden’s being kept from a debate because he makes Trump sound relatively intelligent can be inferred by plenty of available performances, and has to do with how cheap and obvious the pretense of democracy really is. Trump as Putin’s puppet never made any internal sense but Biden cannot possibly be other than somebody’s puppet or placeholder.
Completely abandoning the pretense of democracy is bigger than Trump doing some New York City normal labor union deal thirty years ago.

This puts Ross Douthat’s skinny dipping with Buckley in a new light.

small college profs

How many from Dordt? How many from Northwestern?

It wasn’t Chernow who was such a good biographer it was Hamilton himself.

True.

I agree. But we both know it won’t happen. He’ll get a misdemeanor. Not even an arrest record to make him a little uncomfortable.

Hamilton was a bastards bastard. He was twice removed from his actual paternal father.

According to Burr, Hamilton was a son of a bitch.

“ If there was no social media to show off to their fellow good whites, it likely wouldn’t have done as well as it has.”

100% on target. It’s just another virtue signal and brag. Social media is a disaster for the world.

Take the $2500, go see it and laugh your head off like Max Cady.

As Jimbo says, anything he does will be spun appropriately to the masses. Remember that among the ruling class it’s now seen as an act of courage to refuse to engage with the opposition. Why give Evil any quarter, after all? It’s an act of virtue to lie, slander, deplatform, destroy–actually whatever you want. So long as you’re the good guys. That’s where we are now.

Of course some minority of people will identify it as an act of cowardice, but Biden wasn’t going to get their votes anyway. Is this question being wagered in the online pools? I’d still bet he’s going to show up for at least one (more than one if the first doesn’t go well) but keep in mind that Hillary had some of the debate questions fed to her team in advance. And the MSM pretty much ignored that story. Deny deny deny!

Once WikiLeaks exposed the Podesta emails, however, even the Washington Post admitted it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/donna-brazile-is-totally-not-sorry-for-leaking-cnn-debate-questions-to-hillary-clinton/

But ever-trustworthy Snopes is still calling it “Fake News”–over and over:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-received-debate-questions-week-before-debate/

Roland Martin and Donna Brazile:

Since you broke the taboo by observing rap is not much of a high art, can I confess here that I never understood what is so great about jazz either to call it original American art form? It sounds sort of random notes being played to my ears.

Why? Because PR has cost this nation dearly over the decades, and given us nothing but destitute migrants. Yes there would be logistical issues, but aren’t there always?

Why haven’t Haiti or Jamaica or the DR done this already? What could or would we do to them that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do to an independent PR?

Andrew Davies retro-fits sex and nudity into Jane Austen

Really?! Which one? I thought I’d seen all of his JA shows.

Americans grow up with the notion that Brits are our cultural betters. They represent the highest refinement of the Anglosphere. They speak proper and dignified English. Having an English accent opens doors and thighs like no other.

Adulthood is when we finally discover soccer hooligans, regional accents and drunken women passed out on the sidewalk in miniskirts

Steve, this is an incredibly perceptive comment. I would give it the Sailer gilt edge, if I could. (You haven’t been giving those out much recently.)

I got one of the last Gold Boxes. It’s on my mantel, and I am not giving it back.

I have an autistic cousin and someone asked what his special gift was because of Rainman.

…Buckley was leading the controlled opposition of the right while indulging in the love that dare not speak its name …

Any evidence for this claim?

Because you remembered the written and modernized texts.

The director of Immortal Beloved in the commentary voice-over says largely the same thing, rejecting Beatlemania.

I’m being serious. I read half of Ron Chernow biography on Hamilton and found it informative. Chernow strongly supported the theory that Hamilton’s actual father was the merchant Thomas Stevens. Both Hamilton and Steven’s biological son looked very similar and Steven actually funded Hamilton’s education to Kings College, today known as Columbia University. (He had to write a poem for a contest. I think it had to do with a recent big storm that messed up his home island.) Steven never took any interest to Hamilton’s other brother who was likely an actual Hamilton.

So there’s a great chance Hamilton was a double bastard. Essentially pawned off by Steven’s to Hamilton “step-daddy” and just considered a typical bastard. (Things were a lot more sly before DNA testing.) Of course this likely digs into Hamilton’s obsession concerning his own legitimacy throughout his life. Strangely enough, this somehow may have influenced Hamilton’s habit of essentially “putting women on a pedestal.” That women are pure and graceful creatures made of holy light. He always seemed to fall for any “damsel in distress” kind of social situation.

He fell for Benedict Arnold’s wife’s hysteria act while Arnold escaped through the back door to avoid getting arrested for treason. Then, there was the Hamilton “sex scandal.” When a women was in distress and only Hamilton could save her from the bad husband. Today, you’d call Hamilton a white knight beta.

The book does a great job covering these two events, but the “Drunk History” series are a lot more funny! Note that for Arnold’s wife, Hamilton really fell for the insanity act. (Though he’s not included in this video.)

Chernow also takes a nasty brush toward Burr almost immediately in the book. He never considers Burr a true founding father despite also serving under General Washington with Hamilton as officers during the Revolutionary War.

According to Burr, Hamilton was a son of a bitch.

Which, as a friend of mine likes to say, is better than having a bitch of a son…..

Correction: The Snopes link points to the story about the primary debates, which (AFAIK) remain unproven. When I typed in Hillary received debate questions in advance that’s what DDG brought up.

Thanks ONLY to WikiLeaks, Brazile was caught red-handed, and admitted the facts, sort of, but laid all the blame on the fact that she’d been hacked. Because being hacked is worse than any crime she may have committed 😉

Roland Martin continued to deny and once the leaks exposed him he went completely incommunicado. And of course the MSM can’t be bothered to pursue that. Privilege!

Some enterprising reporter with nothing to lose should start interviewing pro athletes about their opinions and print all the insane conspiracy theories they believe.

There are a significant number of NBA players who believe the world to be flat, although several have retracted in the face of criticism. If we had an actual subversive right wing, it would utilize the BLM opportunity to acquaint a broad cross section of America with the innermost thoughts of Black athletes and the like. A consummation devoutly to be wished.

I’m only familiar with Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire” series and a few essays on the American Empire written within the last decade before his death. (Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan have some overlapping views on US foreign policy strangely enough.)

I’m a absolute sucker for historical fiction and found the “Narratives of Empire” series (the ones I’ve read) quite enjoyable. As a millennial, some novels from the 1970s are superb in their clear cut cynicism on politics and human nature. (Think about the Harry Flashman Series and books by the pimp historian Iceberg Slim.) True, they likely started the US cultural slide toward the gutter, but at least they could write far better than their successors. If Vidal was a hack by 1970s standards, he’s a Shakespeare in comparison to current hacks like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’s writing is so bad that Vidal likely wouldn’t touch any of his black bodies even if money was offered.

Also, VoxDay’s blog has gathered some fascinating nuggets on the late Buckley and his homosexuality.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/04/this-explains-so-much.html

That two narcissistic gay men despised one another on account of politics and filed lawsuits and private investigators against each other is pretty funny.

Also, great documentary here…

Popular art tends to undergo long, slow processes of growth in complexity and sophistication, followed by sudden paroxysms of ruthless simplification. Personally, I like the difficult stuff- give me Pope and Dryden for poetry, Baroque trumpet concertos, and densely-packed allegory paintings stuffed with classical and biblical characters (and Jo Stafford, for that matter)- but humans as a whole seem to sometimes lose patience with that sort of thing. Rock and Roll followed the same progression, to some extent- “Be-Bop-a-Lula” in 1956 eventually led to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975, just before the stripped-down sound of Punk Rock began to explode. Hip-hop might someday grow more complex and eventually produce genuine high culture, but the increasingly diverse and lower-IQ profile of modern music audiences tends to work against this. I also think hip-hop as a genre can probably acquit itself better as poetry than as music- there’s just not enough melody there.

Or one about a frustrated Highlands pederast trying to round up village bairns for his summer camp. When parents demur, he guns down the entire kindergarten class. This leads to a wave of emotion in which Englishmen lose their centuries-old right to possess pistols. The narrator could be a world-famous tennis champion who was in the building at the time.

Now that requires dilation. Do tell Reg, do tell.

I once heard Dave Belasco say you couldn’t stage a play today if it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.

Yeah, we Calvinists have watched much of the Andrew Davies oevre, and I’m wondering which scenes with his Austen heroines cavorting about in the altogether I’ve missed.

Or is this a reference to the male butt in ‘Sanditon’?

What if we played some rap music?

What did he pay for his hotel room, did he say?

you obviously know little about songwriting. Look at the sheet music to Things We Said Today or The Only Living Boy in New York: many pop songs are meticulously complex

I have the same feeling. Theatrical Negro fatigue.

If you ever do see one, you realize that the plots were usually thinner than tissue paper and the dialog was wooden so for modern audiences they are hard to sit thru. Back in the day, the main point of seeing a musical was always the songs so they didn’t want to invest too much in the book. As long as you came out of the show humming a memorable tune everything was great. It was supposed to be an evening of light entertainment, not something that made you think about the great issues of the day so an implausible plot just good enough to keep the show going in between songs was good enough. They were not writing Shakespeare for the ages – shows were supposed to be disposable and no one expected them to be revived 100 years later, or even next season. Sometimes a hit song or two from a show would prove to be a perennial but not the show itself.

Well, does he have one?

I’ve been watching the new Perry Mason series. They spent $70 million on it but frankly it is dragging – it shouldn’t take 8 hours on screen to solve 1 murder. In 8 screen hours Miss Marple could have solved 8 murders AND had several cups of tea as well.

But anyway, among the characters on the show are evil white cops, a black beat patrolman who does the right thing despite the threats made against him by said evil white cops, a secretary who is a sort of feminist advocate and most improbably, Perry’s next door neighbor, a prosperous and sexually liberated Latina pilot who summons Perry for a zipless roll in the hay any time her itch needs scratching and who keeps offering to buy Perry’s family farm so she can expand her aerodrome. The show is set in 1932. In all of LA in 1932, indeed in the entire Estados Unidos, I don’t think that there was even 1 Wise Latina who fit this description at that time – Lupe seems to have time traveled directly from 2020.

It’s all really a shame because the show is gorgeous looking. They really have meticulously recreated the look and feel of Depression Era LA. When the action flashes back to WWI (Perry suffers from PTSD), then have staged a complete WWI trench battle, again down to the last bayonet and puttee. You can see how they spent $70 million on this but it would have been better not to have so many obligatory retconned 2020 cliches thrown in. Whatever realism they achieve with the meticulous costumes and sets is completely lost when said 1932 costumed characters start spouting 2020 dogma.

You may already know this, but he played himself in a few episodes of the 2nd-to-last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, working with Larry David on a new musical. I was prepared to dislike him, but he had some appeal.

On topic, broadly at least: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cancel-culture-targets-broadway-hit-hamilton-racial-politics-grow-more-uncompromising

Type Buckley’s name into the VDARE search engine. I believe there is one article by John O’Sullivan (or Brimelow) concerning Buckley getting visited by Goldman Sachs concerning foreign policy and about support for another Iraq War during the 1990s. I remember it talked about Buckley spending enormous amounts of money living like a plutocrat. (I remember “plutocrat” was in there, sorry no time to find it.)

(The graph isn’t directly related, but it’s nice.)

Just imagine some nasty love triangle with Buckley and Vidal fighting over Christopher Hitchens.

Buckley: “You stole my queer you queer!”

Vidal: “Well, try and take him back you crypto-fascist!”

“I like the difficult stuff — give me Pope and Dryden for poetry….”

Wait a second here… you think Pope and Dryden are difficult? Are you sure you read poetry?

Because of Raymond Burr’s well-known sexual proclivities, how was it possible not to present the 2020’s Perry Mason as a poofer?

Wouldn’t surprise me if Hamilton was inspired by the Simpsons’ Planet of the Apes skit.

https://roymcclure.co.uk/

Amusingly there is a firm of Chartered Surveyors near me founded by a Roy McClure.

When I was about eight my mother bought tickets for Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ so my father could take my brother and I whilst she was visiting family. My father took us home after half an hour, bored out of our minds we were ruining the whole performance with our fidgeting and noise.

If you understand what’s going on in The Cherry Orchard, then you realize we’re living in it right now.

And, in a somewhat ironically Orwellian pique, they came for Orwell:

In addition to being a gov snitch, fraud George Orwell spent WWII demonizing the USSR as it defeated Nazism

As the Red Army sacrificed millions fighting Hitler, and as the Nazi regime shoved Jews into gas chambers, Orwell was writing Animal Farm

Vile man https://t.co/m2gBhpG93o

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 8, 2020

Ha, pretty much, except dial the incomprehensibility up by another 25% or so. To complete the picture, he was in his 60s and had a wheezy, breathy manner to his speech.

lmao.

“It’s Bill Gates’s favorite musical!” is all the tagline you need to understand its a Diversity-preaching, bad-music infested, Cult Marx blackwashing of history.

But I guess saps like you think BLM are good guys, no?

Simp.

I did see a cheap Broadway matinee of some Ibsen thing 40 years ago because the evil patriarchal white male was longtime great TV villain Simon Oakland!

No.

Why should I imagine that?

The British used to savour irony and, given a complicated history, be tolerant if gently cynical. Americans, as our host has pointed out, may be culturally more German liking slapstick humor and earnestness and straightforwardness.

Neither culture seems to rest easy in this post-modern world.

look to the top of the ponzi/food chain & you see Dr. Dre/Jay-Z (who owns Kanye’s _ss) and…David Geffen and Jimmy Iovine as well as other related vampires. Evil people all.

Vidal was a fine writer who was serious about himself and his work. Admittedly I enjoyed most his memoir Palimpsest where he is able to let himself go. (He buggered Jack Kerouac one night then had to lend lend him a dollar to go back to his mother.) His historical novels I find flat.

He was also funny. True he affected not to like America much. But Iraq and Libya and the Clintons and yes Trump showed him to be prescient.

A friend of mine interviewed him for a big newspaper before his decline into caricature. He said privately that Vidal was unpleasant in person.

I saw my first performance of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I was 16. I was very impressed.

If memory serves, John Gielgud once called Chekhov the world’s second greatest playwright (Shakespeare being first, naturally). I’m not sure that I would go that far, what with Ibsen and Strindberg to reckon with, but Chekhov definitely makes the top ten.

A liberal friend was a “fan” of Hamilton – even had the dvd and 2017 calendar. My friend is no fan of rap in general. I suspect that she’s a fan because good White liberals are fans. My friend is a part of the liberal hive mind that lauded Hamilton a few years ago and now condemns it. I wonder if she’ll toss out her dvd,

Do you sincerely believe that you would understand an Elizabethan Englishman? The grammar and phonological system are quite different, and so is the vocabulary. Only experts understand Shakespeare without notes. In a couple of generations, English-speaking readers (if they still exist at all) will read Shakespeare in translation, as they do now Chaucer.
Why, you probably wouldn’t understand a modern Cockney accent, not to mention a Glaswegian accent!

Vidal left his $37 million fortune to Harvard. He may well have been in a state of reduced mental capacity when he made this decision, but it is nevertheless surprising for someone who neither attended Harvard nor any other university, and who dismissed any suggestion that he might have regretted this choice.

As for your friend’s observation that Vidal wasn’t pleasant in person, I would have been a bit shocked if it had been otherwise.

Thomas Hamilton, a Scots oddball who should never have had a gun licence, shot and killed a large number of small kids in a school in Dunblane, Scotland. One of the kids he missed was Andy Murray.

Both Conservative and then Labour governments ignored the murky licensing issues (there were a LOT of complaints/rumours about him) and just banned handguns for everyone except criminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre#Perpetrator

“Evidence of previous police interaction with Hamilton was presented to the Cullen Inquiry but was later sealed under a closure order to prevent publication for 100 years. The official reason for sealing the documents was to protect the identities of children, but this led to accusations of a coverup intended to protect the reputations of officials.”

“most improbably, Perry’s next door neighbor, a prosperous and sexually liberated Latina pilot who summons Perry for a zipless roll in the hay any time her itch needs scratching and who keeps offering to buy Perry’s family farm so she can expand her aerodrome”

Sounds like she may have been partly modelled on Pancho Barnes, who appears in Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Barnes

Admittedly I enjoyed most his memoir Palimpsest

You’re assuming it was a memoir. The man wrote historical fiction for a living.

My recollection was that the estate was valued at $14 million. Or was that just the California property?

Harvard’s legal counsel tried to swindle his nephew Burr Steers out of a piece of property Vidal had left him, by concealing the codicil which delineated the bequest. When they finally disgorged it, they hid it in a mess of other documentation so Steers and his mother would miss a filing deadline.

What’s ugh about Vidal’s will is that the man had an outstanding debt to his sister he’d never paid and he had three other siblings. All four siblings have children. His promissory note to sister Nina was unacknowledged, and his nephew Burr was the only one who received a bequest. Howard Auster’s family got nothing. Friends got nothing. He made no charitable bequests and leaves everything to the philanthropic body with just about the largest endowment of any in the country. It was a big upraised middle finger.

Bingo.

This is what 95% of Affirmative Action is about. Get installed somewhere higher than you could qualify to access by any ladder other than quotas…then fail upwards into the lushly upholstered bosom of Mama Grievance and her sister Civil Rights Lawsuit Settlement.

The British used to savour irony and, given a complicated history, be tolerant if gently cynical. Americans, as our host has pointed out, may be culturally more German liking slapstick humor and earnestness and straightforwardness.

I’m always uneasy with those kinds of distinctions. Lots of American writers are quite skilled when it comes to deploying irony and cynicism (Benjamin Franklin, Twain, Bierce, Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Thurber, etc).

Because it’s funny. Even if you only have a cursory knowledge of these three individuals.

Looking back, Hitchen’s was a bisexual who tried to walk the bipartisan tightrope between neoconservatism and neoliberal interventionism; something that could provide enormous prizes back in the late 1990s and early 2000s and especially after 9/11.

(*Vidal was never really a liberal interventionist but he travelled in those circles and sold books on their cultural sensibilities.)

He was also once seen as Vidal’s literary heir yet remained a close friend of Bill Buckley Jr.

If either he or Buckley were still alive I’d bet substantial money they’d be Never Trumpers. You’d have alt right slogans like “Buck The Cuck” about breaking away from Buckley conservatism.

I guess it’s “funnier” for those who experienced 9/11 during grade school. After Buckley and Hitchens supported the Iraq invasion, that ultimately marked when National Review was utterly destroyed by the left. They were verbally beaten and criticized and rightfully so. They continually lost support for a number of years with the election of Barack Obama and the Democrats 2008 supermajority marked the crowning achievement of defeat. Bright kids who watched the news saw one Republican defeat and Bush scandal after another. It makes sense so many millennials became paleoconservatives after watching all that. Hell, some would became national socialists rather than Buckley conservatives.

Your liberal friend is an “ally”, and “allies” do what they are told to do when they are told to do it.

Because “allies” are robotic NPC’s.

Nothing personal.

It was a broad-brush observation. I read in the memoir of (the late, I think) Phillip Knightley, an Australian journalist, of his fondness for British eccentrics who flourished in a country that had known so much triumph and disappointment and who realized how fragile were the achievements of man. Or something like that. IIRC his example were in London; no doubt gone now.

I think both Americans and British had in common a feeling that everything, at least in their own countries, would work out in the end.

I dislike both.

The black guy is Paul Drake.🙄

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