“I felt like a child watching a horror film.”

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Naomi

I did and I do, but it wasn’t I who said that. It was Christian Tetzlaff, a German violinist who is gifted in a way I’ve never encountered before in a musician, in all the years I’ve gone to concerts.

All serious musicians are marvels. That’s why they’re up on that stage, making music. But Tetzlaff is the only one whose performances I get tickets for, not only for the music but for the musician playing it. Using merely four strings he somehow talks to us, tells us about life without words, which is I think what the composers he plays were intending when they wrote the music.

So when Tetzlaff plays Bartok, he is sharing with us Bartok’s voice. It is intense and glorious — and far beyond my description of what I get from wordless music using the only tools I have: words.

I was, therefore, what the Brits call chuffed when in the New York Times this morning I saw in a headline that a renowned German violinist was canceling his spring U.S. tour because of what America has become. Even before I scrolled into the article, I knew it would be Christian Tetzlaff.

“I felt like a child watching a horror film,” he said in an interview.

On Friday, Mr. Tetzlaff, 58, a renowned violinist who frequently performs in the United States, said that he was canceling an eight-city tour of the country with his quartet this spring — including a stop at Carnegie Hall — and that he was unlikely to perform again in America unless the government reversed course.

“There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” he said. “I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts.”

That is a perfect description of what I’m feeling today, as perfect as Tetzlaff’s music-making, which I won’t be hearing again live this year.

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I’ve been feeling oddly vengeful lately. What have I done about it?

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Naomi

Several things, but the big one is…I’m re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

I’d been evading a re-read for the last several years because I’ve always found the betrayal of Dantès unbearable, even though it stimulates a yearning for what happens in the rest of the story.

It’s a set up and I know it’s a set up. Well, it works. Elaborately.

Of course, the Count, né Edmund Dantès, has to get obscenely rich in order to pursue his enemies with intelligence and subtlety. (I don’t know whether it’s the age our White House is living in or my age, but as the Count buys horses and houses and richly decorates them in a couple of hours, my bookkeeping head is totaling the expenditures and wondering whether he’ll run out of money.)

I’m mentally lining up my enemies against a wall in one of the Count’s gardens and doing them in even before he deals with his enemies. I don’t have his patience. I don’t have his money, either, but I’ve got all the mod cons.

First, though, I’ll finish the book.

 

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What do you want Hakeem to do? Maybe this…

Posted on February 25, 2025 by Naomi

Last night, I listened to Rachel Maddow interviewing Hakeen Jeffries, who was at that moment in the House working to kill a MAGA finance bill which would kill a lot of people in this country and around the world.

Rachel asked him all the right questions in line with, “What are you doing to address Democratic voters who are critical of what they see as your inaction?” I think she actually used the word spineless.

Hakeem answered by, first, telling her what the Dems were able to do, what they had the power to do in the current horrible circumstances, and then he told her what they were doing and intending to do.

I listened carefully but was feeling sort of “I need to hear more, Hakeem,” even though I knew he was giving us details of everything he and the other Democrats were doing to ward off catastrophe.

Afterward, I thought that what I yearned for him to say was…impossible. Because what we want him to do — actually, we want to do it ourselves but we’re sitting in front of the screen watching this horrible mess —

Well, today, I caught this in the Times which, on a daily basis, gives us the best stuff from late night hosts, and here was Jimmy Kimmel saying exactly what we wanted Hakeem to do:

“I mean, seriously, if that guy walked into your office and told you he was there to start making cuts, everybody would jump on him and put him in a headlock, right? You’d zip-tie him and hold him until the cops showed up.” — Jimmy Kimmel

It’s what we yearn for, right? So we’re yelling at Hakeem to do it. Without directly telling him what we want him to do, at which point he’d undoubtedly explain why he doesn’t have the legal power to do it.

With or without legal power, what we all want is physically to grab Elon, do a citizens’ arrest, cuff him (anyway you want to read that), haul him off to somewhere and STOP HIM FROM ROMPING THROUGH OUR GOVERNMENT!! WHICH WE PAY OUR TAXES TO SUPPORT!!!

We don’t want to hear from him ever again.

And we New Yorkers don’t want him ripping $80 million in federal funds we got from Joe Biden’s FEMA right out of our City’s bank account (Citibank, to be specific). Which Elon, a/k/a the federal government, did. Funds we need to help the new immigrants. But the feds, a/k/a Elon, didn’t notify our comptroller that they took our funds. Our comptroller found out when he was checking our bank accounts and noticed that $80 million was mysteriously missing.

We don’t pay taxes to Elon or his espionage gang, do we? (Yes, espionage. What else to call it? If he were doing this to a corporation he did not control, it would be called corporate espionage.)

ARRRRRRHGHGHGHHGH!!!

There. I did this for all of us, so you can stop yelling at Hakeem.

 

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