Culture notes

 "The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information."  (Wikipedia)

Someone should have told Gina Rinehart, described as the richest woman in Australia.  Rinehart is unhappy with a portrait of her recently unveiled in the National Gallery in Canberra.  She has repeatedly demanded that the work by Vincent Namatjira be removed from view.  So now, instead of museum-goers in one city, it has been seen all over the world.

I think we can agree it's not flattering.  If you're worth more than $30 billion, why not get in touch with the artist and just buy it?  Then you can destroy it, as Churchill is said to have done with the Graham Sutherland portrait presented to him on his eightieth birthday.  

Probably happened a lot when some titled git decided his Holbein portrait looked more like a Bosch.  We will never know.  

They both did better than King Charles III, whose coronation portrait by Jonathan Yeo has been described in words like "facile" and "satanic."  Wearing the uniform of the Welsh Guards and standing before what appears to be a burning building, the king is accompanied by a butterfly said to symbolize his metamorphosis from prince to king.  Of course he's more complicated than this, as Jonathan Jones observes, but it's an official portrait that no more reflects the real person than the State Opening of Parliament speech.  Anyway, it looks like him, apart from the hands which seem to belong to Dorian Gray.

 
In his three years as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken has aged as if he were the president himself.  He seems to have spent most of his time in the air, flying from one catastrophic war to another while monitoring brushfires that could get out of control.  So who can begrudge him a little relaxation?  In a  Kyiv basement club the former frontman of Coalition of the Willing picked up a guitar and led the house band in Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."  I was unable to find any of the performance online but I'm sure heads are exploding all over rightwing media.  Mike Johnson can lead half the Congress to New York to violate Trump's gag order for him, but how dare Tony unwind with a little music and some Ukrainian beer?  Impeach!

Some representatives of the Lenape Nation are seeking reparations from the Netherlands for the way Dutch traders acquired the island of Manhattan in the 17th century.  As the Amsterdam Museum opens a show called "Manahahtaanung or Manhattan?  The Indigenous Story Behind New York," they point out that the government apologized for its role in the African and Caribbean slave trade but has so far slighted the Lenape, now dispersed as far away as Ontario.  The show travels to New York next year but I'll be very surprised if the boro is renamed Manahahtaanung ("place of the hickories").  

I haven't checked but I think I still have a Netflix subscription -- the last thing I watched was Maestro, Bradley Cooper's life of Leonard Bernstein with lots of sex and smoking but very little music and no politics.  It might be time to cancel now that Netflix and the NFL are expanding their partnership, which will probably lead to another price increase and greater indifference on my part.  According to today's Guardian, fans who must watch every NFL game will have to find over $1,600 next season for cable TV, Netflix, Peacock, Amazon Prime and several other platforms.  How much money do the owners need to make?  Some teams don't get paid as much as Shohei Ohtani.

It's impossible to escape the war in Gaza.  "I was looking forward to speaking next week at UMass Amherst," wrote Colson Whitehead.  "But calling the cops on peaceful protesters is a shameful act.  I have to withdraw as your commencement speaker.  I give all my best wishes and congratulations to the class of '24 and pray for the safety of the Palestinian people, the return of the hostages, and an end to this terrible war."  The Concertgebouw cancelled two concerts by the Jerusalem Quartet "due to announced demonstrations, and the recent developments surrounding protests in Amsterdam."  

If you thought Trump's many promises of dictatorship "on day one" and the detailed outline of the fascists' plans in Project 2025 are what S.J. Perelman would have called "so much chin music," this is how seriously they take them:  J.D. Wolf of Meidas Touch actually looked into the God Bless the USA Bible ($59.99 wherever dubious books are sold) and found more than bad song lyrics and a lot of flags.  The selection of patriotic apocrypha includes the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and a curiously truncated Constitution which omits Amendments 11 through 27.  In the Greenwood/Trump USA no abolition of slavery, no birthright citizenship (detested by the white nationalists), no voting rights, electoral college, votes for women and eighteen-year-olds, presidential term limits, abolition of poll taxes, or presidential removal if he becomes demented and starts blabbering about Hannibal Lecter.  I'm only surprised at their problem with the electoral college, since Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.  Or was that also "RIGGED AND STOLLEN"?  It should have been repealed in 2000, after the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush.  Then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Example:  To a vastly amused Hugh Hewitt, Trump disparaged LeBron James and then said that when he stood next to Hillary Clinton, "she came up to his belt buckle," which is "not a good look."  All those hours of listening to Stormy Daniels seem to have stimulated the impotent but smutty part of his remaining brain.  And after all these years he still can't shake his case of Hillary Derangement Syndrome.  She had the guts to attend his inauguration.  He and the mem slunk out the back door of the White House to avoid the Bidens.  Loser.