George Hunka - George Hunka

I was right the first time

On the day after the election in November, I published a post called “Republic of morons” here; after some due consideration, I removed it, feeling that perhaps it was a bit too harsh on any of those who might have voted for Donald J. Trump, a few of whom I know (and if you’re reading this, you know who you are too). After the events of the past few days, I regret its removal. Since Monday, the President of the United States has:

Destroyed the hopes of men, women, and children seeking asylum from war-torn, poverty-ridden, and (other) criminal governments
To quote the New York Times, issued an executive order that “effectively defines transgender Americans out of existence”
Mocked a bishop of the Episcopal Church who urged him to compassion for others
Removed the Spanish-language Web site for the executive branch
Cheerfully opened the corridors of power and influence to a bunch of bullet-headed tech bros
Pardoned those who cheerfully and violently attacked police and security agents attempting to protect the nation’s legislative branch and its members
Bowed out of both the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the World Health Organization

At the National Cathedral services yesterday, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, looked Trump straight in the eye and said, “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.” She went on to say, “The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

After midnight last night, Trump posted his response on Truth Social:

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t

And, according to NPR, “After the service on Tuesday, Republican U.S. Representative Mike Collins from Georgia posted a video clip on X of Budde’s sermon along with the text, ‘The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.'”

Trump was elected on a platform of fear, bigotry, and greed, and this is the platform that apparently appealed to 77,303,568 voters in November. Whether or not they admit it, the voters are to blame.

I repost that original November entry below — noting that Jonathan Swift was an Anglican clergyman as well. I’m still not sure about how I plan to spend the next four years, but I think it’s obligatory on all of us to stand against it.

Jonathan Swift was right.

On CNN the handwringing began several hours ago, and it’s likely to go on for days and days. I dread the mawkish elegies for democracy I am expecting from the Atlantic, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is getting into the act with an (understandably) craven congratulatory message on x.com.

This is not to say that the Atlantic, Snyder, and Applebaum will be wrong, or that Zelenskyy isn’t playing as careful a game as he can. But in all this handwringing, the emphasis has been on how the Democrats and the Harris campaign blew it this time. Unfortunately we now have proof that all those Hallmark-card Benetton-ad sentiments about the American voter were based on a profound misunderstanding of the ability for that voter to practice even a modicum of critical thinking, and how narrowly that voter sees their self-interest, whether it’s the price of eggs or religious and cultural belief. Never mind, really, that Trump wound up over and over again in bankruptcy court, even losing money on a gambling casino, or that he regularly sat down for dinner with anti-Semites and racists. Never mind the grotesque misogyny, the careless personal smears, the crude jokes, the daily chaos of his first term, the disparagement of scientific fact, the deep-rooted xenophobia, the shameless pandering, the felony convictions, the sexual assaults, the religious hypocrisy, the philistinism, the breathtaking greed and corruption, the threats of retribution, the incitements to violence — the constant regurgitation of every possible stupidity of which the human mind is capable.

Last night, he won, fair and square. And I know people who voted for him. God bless America.

No, it wasn’t the fault of the Democrats or Kamala Harris. It was the fault of the American voter; this is what they want. The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will now become a quaint and very expensive museum rather than a celebration of the democratic spirit in America.

So what to do next? I had been hoping to spend the next four years of my sixth decade bereft of the constant stomach-churning irresponsibility and unpredictability, the constant insults to the human spirit, of Trump’s first term, but those who voted for Trump have decided to deny me that. I blame them for that the most (though perhaps this is only proof that I can be as selfish as they are).

Oh, well. I can still turn to the elegance of Vienna and the German language, as well as the charms of Philadelphia. My family continues to give me the greatest pleasures, outstripping even those of Vienna and Philadelphia. There is good wine to drink, good music to listen to, good writing to read. There’s also my dwindling ability to do what I can to promote kindness, peace, and decency (though I seem to be in the minority here, based on the election results).

And laughter, they say, is the best medicine. I can continue to turn to the great American satire of Mark Twain (“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” he wrote — wishful thinking, but I’ll take what I can get) and H.L. Mencken, to whom perhaps I should have been listening more closely. I doubted their misanthropy and mistrust of the American citizen; clearly, I was wrong.

And there is also Jonathan Swift, with whom I shall sign off today. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, the adventurer finds himself at the court of the Brobdingnagian king. “He desired I would give him as exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as fond as princes commonly are of their own customs (for so he conjectured of other monarchs, by my former discourses), he should be glad to hear of anything that might deserve imitation,” Gulliver (yclept Grildig in this country) explains. Gulliver describes the government of England to the Brobdingnagian king at considerable length. And, although England is a constitutional monarchy and the United States a representative democracy, I think the king’s response remains valid. Quoth Gulliver:

[The king] was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once put it, in much the same spirit, “Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.”

Go Birds

When I was in Philadelphia late last year, preparing a move back to my hometown in the not-too-distant future, I was settling up my bill at the club, and just as I said my goodbye to the bartender, she nodded at me and said, “Go Birds” — with a somewhat cynical, flat affect, a tone that’s not uncommon to Philadelphians. I hadn’t heard the phrase before (I hadn’t been in the city for quite some time), and sensing my confusion, she said, “It’s something we say to each other here. Go Birds. You’ll get used to it.”

Now that the Eagles have a good shot at the Super Bowl again — after having won in 2018 and lost in 2023 — I’m putting on my Eagles cap. As a native-born Philadelphian, I have an obligation to do so, though I’m more of a baseball than a football fan myself. (The post-season performance of the Phillies last year was a nightmare from which I’m still trying to awake.) More than any enthusiasm for the game, I’m loyal to a city that takes its sports teams very seriously, even if on occasion its sports teams and their corporate owners treat their fans reprehensibly.

The phrase has transcended its original purpose as an expression of fandom and become — well, become a sign of affection, especially for the city itself. In 2023, shortly after the Eagles lost the Super Bowl, Philadelphian Hannah Workman wrote:

Even though the Phillies just lost the World Series and the Eagles just lost the Super Bowl, I still have hope for the remaining Philadelphia teams. Losing those championships after being underdogs and making it to the finals was something that really captured the “essence” of Philadelphia. … Philadelphians and anyone who roots for Philly sports teams have a special connection, and seeing it come to life while away from family at college has been so special. I may miss home, but when I hear the phrase, “Go Birds,” I don’t feel quite as alone.

Even non-Philadelphians appreciate the feeling. “I don’t have any specific issue with Philadelphia as a city, but the general animosity I feel towards Philly sports fans and their … passionate reputation tends to color the city as a whole for me,” Ned Donovan wrote a few days ago on Medium. He continues:

It’s fascinating, then, how language and colloquialisms can evolve beyond their original meaning. “Go Birds” isn’t just a rally cry for a football team — it’s a Philadelphia love language. It’s a way of saying “I see you, I acknowledge you, we’re in this together.” In a city known for its hardened exterior, these two words serve as a handshake of solidarity, a gentle reminder that beneath the tough facade beats a heart of gold.

“I still don’t like Philadelphia. Probably never will,” Donovan concludes. Of course, former Eagles center Jason Kelce’s “No one likes us and we don’t care” is the only reasonable response to such a sentiment:

So yeah, I’ll be watching the Eagles take on the Washington Commanders next Sunday. Go Birds? Goddamn right, Go Birds.

In memoriam: Richard Foreman

One night in 2003, I showed up at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery for Panic! (How to Be Happy!), that year’s offering from Richard Foreman. The year before I’d first visited the theater for Maria del Bosco and written — quite enthusiastically, I suppose — at my blog about my experience. But on that 2003 occasion I went to the box office to pick up my tickets; standing next to it were Foreman (instantly recognizable — rumor had it that he’d been in the running for the role of Mary Wilkes’ ex-husband, the “homunculus,” in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a part that eventually went to Foreman’s downtown playwright colleague Wallace Shawn) and his wife, Kate Manheim. When I mentioned my name to the box office manager to retrieve my tickets, Foreman walked over to me and said, “I’ve been waiting for you! I’m Richard Foreman. I really appreciate what you’ve been writing about my work.”

To say I was flabbergasted at this would be to understate my reaction, but as I came to know Richard over the following years, I came to realize that I was no exception. I mean, why should he care what I wrote? I was no academic, nor was I a member of the professional critical class — I maintained a modest little blog, for crying out loud. But among his most memorable qualities — he shuffled off this mortal coil just this past Saturday, January 4 — was a generosity, kindness, and acceptance of the human condition that affected all those who knew him.

Over the years that followed, I wrote more about Richard’s work, following up on my early enthusiasm for his production of The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center in 1976. (That same day, in the afternoon, I saw Gielgud and Richardson in the New York premiere of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. That was quite a Saturday.) A trip to the Drama Book Shop then rewarded me with his first collection, Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos (New York University Press), which had just been published and a copy of which is at my side as I write this.

I saw most of Richard’s work that followed Maria del Bosco; we met infrequently but always pleasantly for coffee and conversation after that; he was kind enough to attend the premiere of one of my own plays a few years later, followed by his enthusiastic approval; we casually discussed the possibility of my writing some kind of biography of him — a project that, thankfully for both of us, never panned out; and even today the home page for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater memorializes a 2015 celebration of his work that I moderated with Richard and his long-time friend, filmmaker Ken Jordan. I never really recovered from that initial excitement of our first meeting, and I recall the near impossibility of “moderating” such an entertaining, self-effacing raconteur.

(I also remember talking to Richard about my attending one of his productions; I told him I’d try to do so on the date he suggested, but it all depended on whether I could get a babysitter for my two young children. “Bring the kids!” Richard said. “Children love my plays!”)

My writing about Richard’s work was an attempt to come to terms with his extraordinary sense of the possibilities of theater for the individual consciousness. As a writer — as any writer, I suppose — I felt the need to articulate just what it was in my experience of the world that led me to my own reaction, and this included my experience of Foreman’s constructed theatrical world.

What made his theater so special and revolutionary was his attempt to undermine every single moment of a traditional theatrical experience, from character and plot to light and sound, to radically disorient the spectator, throwing that spectator back on his or her own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual resources. What a character said violently contradicted what a character did; stasis would be interrupted by physical, visual, and aural dance and chaos; and all of this was centered in the experience of the live human body, speaking, singing, dancing, and talking. As Foreman sat, Godlike, on a throne held together by duct tape during the performance, cuing light and sound himself across a phantasmagoric, P.T. Barnum-style spectacle of wavering perspective, he was never really in control, just as we’re never fully in control of the world as it presents itself to us.

All of this was in the service of sensual liberation: to perceive the world anew, and to realize that the world was what we made of it as individuals. Throwing off the shibboleths and cliches of a constructed world made for us by religion or politics or corporations or tradition, we were encouraged to make a world for ourselves. Needless to say, for Richard, this had — or, at least, could have — profound political, social, cultural, and sensual consequences for every single spectator. If 100 people sat in his theater watching Maria del Bosco, they saw 100 different plays; the same could be said for any play, I suppose, but that truth was never at the center of the deliberate aesthetic program as it was for Richard.

This was a profound challenge not only to the theatergoer, but the critic too, and everybody else. Our success or failure at meeting this challenge was entirely up to us. Of course, Richard himself put it best, in his Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater:

But I want a theater that frustrates our habitual way of seeing, and by so doing, frees the impulse from the objects in our culture to which it is invariably linked. I want to demagnetize impulse from the objects it becomes attached to. We rarely allow ourselves the psychic detachment from habit that would allow us to perceive the impulse as it rises inside us, unconnected to the objects we desire. But it’s impulse that’s primary, not the object we’ve been trained to fix it upon. It is the impulse that is your deep truth, not the object that seems to call it forth. The impulse is the vibrating, lively thing that you really are. And that is what I want to return to: the very thing you really are.

I have only to add that Richard changed my life — as he changed the lives of so many others — and that I’ve looked at the world differently since being exposed to his plays and his person. A glass raised, then, to his memory.

Below is a collection of my writings about Richard and his work that I put together not long ago.

Continue reading “In memoriam: Richard Foreman”

Sound all around

This Friday night, November 15, at 7:30 pm, my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken will take to the stage at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music and present Piano 360, a program of new and recent immersive musical works “surrounding the audience with a spatial audio ring of speakers,” according to the DiMenna Center’s page for this event. On the program are new compositions by Elizabeth Hoffman (which includes a few texts by yours truly), Ellen Fishman, and Natasha Barrett, as well as contemporary masterpieces by Alvin Lucier, Hugues Dufourt, and Jonathan Harvey.

Tickets for this event are available here; the DiMenna Center is at 450 West 37th Street here in New York. We’ll hope to see you there.

25 years of Mineshaft

The mailman slipped me the latest issue of Mineshaft #45 last week — the 25th anniversary issue of the magazine that published its first issue back in the last century. I read through just about the whole thing in one sitting, but “read” may not be entirely accurate: each issue is a world in itself of visual and linguistic acrobatics from writers and artists old and new. It seems churlish to pick out just a few highlights, since Mineshaft is best read from first page to last, but in #45 you’ll find:

First, that splendid, endlessly fascinating wraparound cover by Aaron Horkey
Simone F. Baumann’s depiction of her very brief career in a hooker bar
A memoir of pre-teen transvestism by Billy Childish
Mary Fleener’s comic travelogue through the current state of the humanities in academia
R. Crumb’s portraits of two great blues masters
Drew Friedman’s rendering of popular Chaplin imitators

And there’s more, much more, besides.

In the sixth part of his continuing saga about life with Mineshaft, publisher/editor Everett Rand muses upon the magazine’s continuing appeal. “[The] magazine is an attempt, by me, to keep control of my world. I’ve always enjoyed the possibility of living in art, rather than always being stuck in real life. That’s what a great painting or book does for me. They give me another world that I can step into and inhabit for a while.” He continues:

My own editorial vision … is always pushing artists and writers to send us their best work, and there’s no money in it. People can resent this, or not have the time for it. … Despite the sacrifice and hardship, I think people come on board because of the community, in order to be a part of the experience. The generosity of the Mineshaft community is really what keeps Mineshaft alive. Everybody comes together to help make something tangible, that is nicely put together, and that otherwise wouldn’t exist. It’s not practical and you have to be a bit of a dreamer and idealist. The readers are a big part of this community too.

It is, it must be said, not a big community. Only 1,350 copies of Mineshaft #45 were printed, but that community is always inviting new members who want to share that world with the contributors, and the community’s arms are always open. That’s why you should subscribe. Each issue is a new universe, a brief time away from what Rand calls “real life” (though, I suggest, that life is no more nor less real than that found in the pages of Mineshaft). “Long live MINESHAFT!” Crumb says. How can I disagree?