Judenrein

In 1973, the first Monopoly World Tournament took place at Grossinger’s Hotel in Liberty, New York. Less than a decade-and-a-half later the hotel—the Star Beet of the Borscht Belt—closed for good.

About a week-and-a-half ago, the derelict remains of the grand resort were engulfed by a great fire. Sic transit gloria mundi!

I learned of the fate of Grossinger’s remains from this report by NPR: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/19/1118549797/huge-blaze-engulfs-grossingers-hotel-inspiration-for-dirty-dancing

The headline of the article proclaimed that Grossinger’s was famous because it supposedly inspired the movie “Dirty Dancing”: 

A huge blaze engulfs Grossinger's Hotel, the location that inspired 'Dirty Dancing.' 

Three lines of the article were about the movie, but only one sentence told the reader what the hotel was all about: 

Hundreds of thousands of vacationers made their way to the Catskills to visit the spot.

But who were those vacationers? On that NPR is shtum.

The New York Times, to its shame, in the headline for its fire report also saw fit to link Grossinger’s to the same crappy movie:

Catskills Hotel That Inspired ‘Dirty Dancing’ Suffers Devastating Fire.

And the Times waited seven paragraphs to answer what NPR declined to say—that Grossinger’s was part of “a vibrant vacation scene for a primarily Jewish clientele.” 

And what did they come for?

Not to buy the deed for the Boardwalk or to pass Go and collect $200.

But for rest, relaxation, lots of good food, and great entertainment (so many comedians, singers, and actors got their start in the Borscht Belt).

It wasn’t the goyishe dirty dancers who quaffed the red stuff in the Borscht Belt. 

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The flames that engulfed the remains of the great Grossinger’s Hotel were not as hot as I was when I read the NPR article (and later saw the Times headline). 

Here are some other headlines:

Fire hits vacant Grossinger's hotel, once a Catskills jewel that became 'Dirty Dancing' inspiration

ABC

Building at the Catskills' famed Grossinger's resort, an inspiration for "Dirty Dancing," burns down in massive fire

CBS

And in the ultimate disgrace:

Fire destroys building at Grossinger’s Catskills resort, the inspiration for ‘Dirty Dancing’

NY Jewish Week 

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Who needs the Christian Nationalists to eliminate the Jews when a pop culture reference can make decades of a strong cultural heritage disappear?

 

Don't Send in the Clowns

OK, class, it’s time for a quiz.

What does this picture have to do with Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

You in the back playing with your cell phone—what do you have to say?

Oh, er, that looks like a clown—a woman clown. I don’t think that that has anything to do with Hamlet. I mean, he was a prince, right? And a guy. Not a clown, and not a woman, right?

Well now, take a look at this second picture. I ask the same question: What does this picture have to do with Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

You there, spooning yogurt into your mouth—what do you have to say?

Well [gulp], what he said. That’s a lady clown, not a prince of Denmark.

You two are half right; the first picture is from a magazine advertisement advertising magazine advertisements. It’s from 1970. The second picture is from the front cover of a DVD recording of a 2018 production of Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. 

But maybe, on second thought, both your answers are correct. While the recording is allegedly of Shakespeare’s tragedy, one must wonder what in hell it has to do with the play Shakespeare wrote. [I leave aside for now the issue of whether a woman should play the Prince.] Why is Hamlet made up and dressed as a clown? What in the text signals that? Then again, even if there was clear reason for the Prince to be a clown, why is he dressed in white? Hamlet himself (in Act I, Scene 2) refers to his “inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black.” Which is a sign of his continuing mourning for his father. Is the wearing of white meant to be a vitiating or elimination of Hamlet’s deep-seated feeling? 

I have no intention of ever watching the Globe’s production to record other abominations.   

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Classic theater and opera are unfortunately hostages to directors who harbor IDEAS. These ideas are put to work overriding the intentions of the original creator—playwright or composer/librettist.  

Simon Brett in his 1997 satirical mystery novel Sicken and So Die has landed his fourth-rate actor-hero, Charles Paris, a part in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Unfortunately, the original director succumbs to food poisoning and is replaced by an avant-garde Romanian director, who has an IDEA: the cast will play the comedy nude. Except for the fact that there’s a murder, the book is wonderfully funny and absurd.

Perhaps the most famous 20th century example of a director imposing his IDEA on a Shakespearean play is the case of Peter Brooks’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which appeared in New York in 1971. Brendan Gill, in his New Yorker review, notes that 

And Clive Barnes, who raved about the production in the New York Times [“the greatest production of Shakespeare I have ever seen in my life”], wrote of “an Oberon on a trapeze, a Puck who juggles with plates or dashes across the scene on Tarzan rope or runs on stilts.” [Here is a video of some plate spinning.]  

  

All that was mind-boggling stupidity enough, but perhaps worst of all was having characters on their knees speaking Shakespeare’s great verse affectlessly.

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Gill was “miserable” during the evening and wondered what Brooks’ intention was.

Mr. Gill, staying the course, had a stronger stomach than me; I walked out very early in the evening and went home to a welcome cup of tea. I figured if I wanted a circus, I would buy popcorn and wait for the elephants.

 

Bottoms Up!

A

Fifth

of 

Jim Beam

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A

Fifth 

of

Johnnie Walker

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A 

Fifth

of 

Donald Trump

Round and Round

We have the Hebrews to thank, it has been said, for giving us the belief that history is linear and not circular. It was, however, a member of the tribe, Karl Marx, who claimed that history does repeat itself: appearing first as tragedy, and then as farce.

I was never a believer in the circularity of history, whether manifesting itself as reincarnation, the transmigration of souls, or Yeats’ “A Vision,”* most prominently displayed in his great poem “The Second Coming.” However, recently, I have found reason to share Marx’s view about historical repetition, although I’m not sure that his formulation is correct, or if the reverse is true—history appears first as farce and only later as tragedy.

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Since in the last few years I have had more spare time than I know what to do with it (yes, I know that I could engage in saving the whales or mining crypto), I have undertaken a kind of historical research by trawling the archives of The New Yorker magazine. I am on my second go-round; having begun this tour in 1940, I am now into the autumn of 1971. What has stood out most prominently this time around is that the state of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was uncannily like what we face today, a half-century on.

In this blog post I have gathered together many cartoons and comments from back then which I think you will plainly recognize as distant mirror images of our own time.

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Now on to the political.

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2022

Former President Donald Trump called for the US Department of Education's abolition during his Saturday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas.

Trump told a crowd that prohibitions need to be brought in on teaching "inappropriate racial, sexual and political material" to American schoolchildren.

"If federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education," he continued.

https://news.yahoo.com/crowd-cheers-trump-calls-abolition-093209367.html

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Philip Hamburger visited Kent, Ohio in 1971, one year after Ohio National Guardsmen murdered four Kent State students who were protesting US actions in South East Asia. Here's what one local interviewee said:

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2022

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Saturday said “no one can convince” her that the rioters behind the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol were not anti-fascist protesters 

https://news.yahoo.com/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-no-193748469.html

"As another example, the sting they did involving Gretchen Whitmer was fake. Just like those who instigated January 6. It was a fake deal. Fake. It was a fake deal," Trump said. . . . 

Trump also alluded to conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot being orchestrated by FBI agents, propagated by his allies, including Ted Cruz and Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-jan-6-riot-gretchen-whitmer-kidnap-plot-fake-cpac-2022-8

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l. E. Sissman 

Review of Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968

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And Finally:

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*  “All things are subject to a cycle of changes, which can be regarded as bi-polar, passing from a state of objectivity to one of subjectivity before returning to objectivity again. This can be seen as a form of oscillation, or a circuit around a wheel, and divides experience into the two halves of objectivity and subjectivity.”

(Got that?)

https://www.yeatsvision.com/Overview.html#AV