Category: Art/Culture/Movies

Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol I)

by philg

We are informed that Donald Trump has attacked America’s museums in general and the Smithsonian in particular. “Will Museums Fight Back Against Trump?” (New York Times, August 22, 2025):

The president’s attacks on the Smithsonian Institution and other museums have become an effort to redefine why such places exist.

President Trump has sought to govern with an iron grip the federal bureaucracy, the economy and even the finer details of White House architecture.

He wants to put his stamp on the culture of the nation, too.

The president, once a fixture of tabloids and reality television, is waging a war on the rarefied cultural spaces he says have become too “woke.”

We took our boys (10 and 12) to the de-woked Smithsonian National Museum of American History on October 4, 2025. Just inside the front door, the boys learned that they “belong” in girls’ sports just as soon as they raise their hands and say “we identify as girls”. It’s not a matter up for debate, but simply “fair play” when “transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality”. The Smithsonian certainly doesn’t mention that there are any dissenters (“haters”) from this dogma, though, as we would find throughout the museum every sign is translated into Spanish (but not Arabic, Chinese, Somali, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, or any of the other languages of migrants who make America great).

There’s a lot of explanation for the womanly skateboarder at right:

Our primary objective was to see the lowrider show (see also Lowriders in Fort Worth for these machines in their native increasingly-Islamic element). Spanish 101: the word for “lowriding” is “El lowriding”.

The de-woked curators remind us that American Hispanics claim victimhood going back at least 75 years:

(The discrimination was so bad that an additional 50 million Latinx migrated to the U.S. during the ensuing years? See also “Inhuman treatment” of immigrants in the U.S.)

If I can get our Honda Odyssey’s batteries to stop failing (the most recent 4-year AGM battery survived for about 1.5 years) it would be awesome to find the paint shop that did this one:

The depth of color isn’t achievable with a wrap, I don’t think.

Father of the Year Daniel Tovar made a lowrider for his daughter:

One hundred percent of the people described and depicted in the exhibit as actually building lowriders of significance had traditional male names and appeared to identify as men (moustaches, male attire, etc.):

(the dapper gentlemen is Sonny Madrid, who founded Lowrider magazine in 1977)

The gift shop, on the other hand, explains that it is actually Latinas who are responsible for lowriders:

To be continued…

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Hillwood Estate in Northwest DC

by philg

Marjorie Merriweather Post famously built Mar-a-Lago, but lived in that modest $18 million (value used by New York judge) shack only during “the Palm Beach season”. She lived in Northwest Washington, D.C. during the spring and fall and in the Adirondacks during the summer. Her DC place, cozy by Mar-a-Lago standards, opened as a museum in 1977 and somehow I missed it while growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. My excuses: I started working full-time at NASA (on Pioneer Venus in 1978); I was too young to drive; the museum is nowhere near the Metro; despite high crime rates, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t send the National Guard into the city (he was too busy appeasing the Ayatollahs).

Ms. Post loved dogs, decorative art, orchids, Japanese gardens, and aviation (her private four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount ferried everything but the gardens with her among the three estates).

The Museum costs $20/adult, but it is free for federal government workers suffering the trauma of receiving 100 percent pay for 0 percent work:

Like most other American museums, it’s also free for those wise enough to refrain from work (see How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT)):

… offering free admission to those receiving SNAP benefits. Present your EBT card upon check in at the visitor center. and receive complimentary entry for 4 guests.

Ms, Post was apparently prescient regarding the kind of society that the U.S. would one day become. A sculpture on the outside of her mansion shows a youth with a swan:

ABC (“Three of four suspects were apprehended” but, as far as I can tell from searching, our noble media never updated us regarding the names or backgrounds of any of the suspects):

The “mansion” itself is unremarkable compared to Mar-a-Lago and, but the contents and gardens are spectacular. A hillside Japanese garden is small, but awesome, and contains some of the stone lanterns that are virtually impossible for consumers to buy today (cheap cast concrete versions are available):

Ms. Post loved her dogs and built a cemetery for them, as well as for the departed canines belonging to family and staff members, on the estate grounds:

Ms. Post built a greenhouse for her orchids (note the modest Islamic dress; in any group of people in Washington, D.C. in October 2025 there was typically at least one person wearing hijab or abaya and at least one person wearing a COVID-19 mask (both indoors and out)):

Some fake iOS background blurring:

The interior is jammed with interesting objects so it is impossible to do justice to them. There are a couple of Fabergé eggs (maybe Optimus can make replicas of these for all of us?):

Here’s an idea of how much there is to see in the “icon room”:

Ms. Post collected a ton of figurines that included dogs. A few examples:

Homage to the highest tech devices of the day:

A couple of personal favorites:

Let’s exist through the COVID-19-safe gift shop:

As far as I can tell, 100 percent of the objects in the museum and estate were made either by East Asians or white Europeans. Ms. Post’s prime years coincided with an almost complete shutdown of immigration to the U.S. Nonetheless, the gift shop reminds us that we should celebration immigration/diversity:

We are informed by Science that there are at least 74 gender IDs, but most of the books for sale celebrate the achievements of people who identified with 1 out of 74:

I wonder if today’s insanely rich people, who are far richer than Marjorie Merriweather Post ever was, will one day leave us beautiful estates in which to wander. It doesn’t seem as though we’re going to get this, though. When Bill Gates sends $200 billion to Africa, for example, it doesn’t even leave a lasting mark on Africa (there are more needy Africans today than ever before, I think). So let’s raise a plastic glass before we eat our Costco ramen to the woman who left Americans this evidence of what the dining experience used to be:

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Starved of migrants, the Metropolitan Opera decides to migrate to Saudi Arabia

by philg

In June we learned that undocumented migrants were big customers for the Metropolitan Opera (AP):

Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.

The solution to a migration-related problem is always… more migration. September: “The Met Opera Turns to Saudi Arabia to Help Solve Its Financial Woes” (New York Times).

The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most renowned performing arts companies, is turning to Saudi Arabia to help it solve some of the most severe financial problems in its 142-year history.

The company has reached a lucrative agreement with the kingdom that calls for it to perform there for three weeks each winter. While neither the Met nor the Saudis disclosed financial terms when they announced a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, the deal is expected to bring the Met more than $100 million.

The Met hopes the agreement will help it emerge from a period of acute financial woes. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has withdrawn more than a third of the money in its endowment fund to help it cover operating costs — about $120 million overall, including $50 million to help pay for the season that ended in June. The withdrawals have raised questions about the viability of staging live opera on a grand scale in the 21st century.

As we prepare for Bisexual Awareness Week (Sept 16-23) and LGBT History Month (October) and Trans Awareness Month (November), it will be interesting to think about how the Met’s LGBTQ+-themed lighting will be used in Saudi Arabia:

Here’s what the new opera house in suburban Riyadh will look like when it opens in 2028, but before the Met’s rainbow lighting scheme is applied:

The Met began spending in a whole new direction in 2021 (NYT):

“The Met Opera Has a Gay Conductor. Yes, That Matters.” (NYT, 2019):

Mr. Nézet-Séguin — who has been openly gay for his entire professional career and nonchalant enough about it to post a smiling partners’ beach selfie on Instagram — is impossible to miss.

“The fact that he’s so comfortable with who he is is part of what makes him a powerful, effective artistic leader,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview. “Because he is proud of who he is, and that’s very important.”

ChatGPT:

In Saudi Arabia, engaging in same-sex sexual activity—whether between two men or two women—is illegal under the country’s interpretation of Islamic (Sharia) law. The legal consequences are extremely severe and can vary depending on the specifics of the case and judicial discretion. Same-sex acts are considered sodomy or illicit sexual intercourse (zina) and are punishable by death under traditional Wahhabi interpretations of Sharia law. Even when the death penalty is not applied, those convicted may face indefinite prison sentences, flogging, financial penalties, or deportation in the case of foreign nationals. … Saudi Arabia enforces some of the strictest laws against same-sex relations in the world. Punishments include—but are not limited to—execution, flogging, prolonged imprisonment, hefty fines, and deportation.

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Humanoid robots to paint giant murals?

by philg

The Murakami show at the Cleveland Museum of Art includes some murals that would be awesome to have in a kid’s room if only a humanoid robot could be adapted to do the work of either applying wallpaper or directly painting.

Another area where the robot could work… recreating Sol LeWitt murals in the home. Different color schemes for every holiday.

Note that the museum’s permanent collection is free, even to those who have jobs (see How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT)). Separately, a fair number of visitors were #Scientifically masked:

For my friends in health care, the artist’s conception of what a nurse looks like:

Circling back to the principal theme for today… if you had nearly-free high-skill labor from a robot would you use some of it to have wall murals in your house? Or would it make more sense to cover a wall in large tiles of flat-screen TVs and do this electronically?

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Toronto Symphony does an “inverse private”

by philg

I’ve been reading The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, a collection of New Yorker magazine articles, in order to develop some understanding of what our neighbors down in Palm Beach go through. One chapter is devoted to “privates” in which successful music stars perform at corporate events and private parties, e.g., for a birthday or a wedding. The costs range from $250,000 to $24 million (Beyoncé in Dubai) for something that was considered shameful during the Classic Rock period. Artists who express solidarity with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ are delighted to perform in Muslim countries where homosexual acts are punishable by imprisonment or death. Artists are also happy to perform for various dictators, e.g., in Central Asia. That said, our much-loved stars do have some scruples. With the exception of some Christian bands, no artist will agree to work a Chick-fil-A corporate event.

A recent New York Times article covers a kind of “inverse private” in which the musicians stay where they normally perform and the rich douche comes to them:

The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.

He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.

Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.

“I had watched the videos and heard the recordings,” Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of ComputerTalk Technology in Toronto, said in an interview. “I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick. So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”

He added: “I can afford to do it, that’s the main thing. So when it came across my mind, I said, ‘Hey, maybe I should give it a try.’”

This man is my hero!

How’s the book, you might ask? There are a lot of interesting tidbits. Just be aware that it is the New Yorker and, therefore, all of the world’s ills are blamed on the existence of Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular. Trump is mentioned roughly every three pages, despite his apparent lack of connection to any of the events chronicled. The author never explains why California is plagued by inequality, a high poverty rate, and envy given that nearly everyone there is a Democrat. If Republicans were eliminated, rich Democrats would give most of their money to social justice nonprofits and to community-building (Andrew Carnegie is cited approvingly for his funding of libraries). There would be no war (just as Andrew Carnegie prevented any wars from happening in Europe via his 1910 founding of a peace institute). The author never explains why rich Democrats can’t do all of this starting right now.

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Elio Movie Review

by philg

Downtown Boise has quite a few movie theaters and my “escape from the Florida heat” plan featured 100-degree temps so I dragged a somewhat reluctant 10-year-old to see Elio, a movie about a Latinx boy who ascends into the heavens to join the “Communiverse”. Hard SciFi fans will be disappointed to learn that all of the universe’s life forms are able to breathe the same atmosphere and drink the same drink. The bad guy who ultimately is turned into a good guy bears a strong resemblance to Satan in The South Park Movie. Queers for Palestine members will be disappointed to see “Jennifer Jew” in the credits.

All of the good humans in the movie are Latinx and/or Black. The senior military officers are Latinx and female. The military base is Latinx (“Montez Air Force Base” in a city called “Montez”). The big bad bully kid is… white male.

I’m not sure why this movie gets 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Star Wars is more interesting in terms of trying to conjure up what an alien society might be like. Elio envisions a universe inhabited entirely by Jar Jar Binks’s spiritual and intellectual cousins (plus a few bad guys who are, in fact, all male (the movie does not seem to envision anything beyond the gender binary).

Separately, here’s a Communiverse F-86 aircraft shared during the Korean War by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. From the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho (not to be confused with NAMBLA):

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Los Angeles Art Museums

by philg

In case you need to duck into a #SafeSpace to escape the completely unnecessary military occupation of entirely peaceful Los Angeles, some recent photos from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Broad (both free, even to those who aren’t smart enough to have SNAP/EBT cards). The Broad:

It’s apparently rare for a Black person to enter the Broad, but in case one does his/her/zir/their flag is ready:

Size Matters (LA MOCA; Alfonso Gonzalez, Jr.):

Did you know that “artists are marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation” (LA MOCA)?

It’s important to look at the world through a “queer lens”:

If children want to adopt the queer lens they can start in the gift shop:

Equality is so important that artists who don’t identify as “women” are excluded from books in the same gift shop (the late great Louise Nevelson, who explicitly said that she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “woman artist” is pigeonholed as a “woman sculptor”):

The gift shop was a Black-free environment rich in books regarding the Black Queer lifestyle (also a book about abortion care):

Did a Deplorable get into the museum woodpile or does the painting make fun of the Deplorables? (Christine Tien Wang):

A painting about the Black body in a museum where I didn’t see any Black employees or visitors:

A painting about “LGBTQ+ rights activism” and “the AIDS epidemic” (which is not in any way a “gay disease”?):

Speaking of a virus that is not in any way “gay”, if you’re concerned about SARS-CoV-2 infection, Science says that the best job you can choose is one in which you’re guaranteed to be exposed to hundreds of potentially infected humans every day (extra points for the below-the-nose mask):

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Conclave movie notes

by philg

(spoiler alert)

My notes to a group chat:

Just watched movie Conclave about choosing a Pope. The bad guys are the conservatives who say that male Catholics shouldn’t go to the bathhouse and have sex with five different guys every night. What the movie calls “liberal” cardinals are heroes. They suggest continuing a program of throwing out everything that was sacred to Catholics in the 19th century. The best of the cardinals, who ultimately wins, is a hermaphrodite. He/she says “I am as God made me” and claims that being a hermaphrodite makes him/her a way better Pope. The movie’s villain is a cardinal who wants Muslims out of Italy, partly due to the potential for jihad, and points out that Muslims don’t tolerate the presence of Christians in Muslim countries.

A friend:

So basically a Netflix show

Here’s someone who might have been pope:

From the same article on Cardinal Robert Sarah:

“By losing its faith, Europe has also lost its reason to be. It is experiencing a lethal decline and is becoming a new civilization, one that is cut off from its Christian roots.”​

“All migrants who arrive in Europe are penniless, without work, without dignity,” Sarah reportedly said. “This is what the Church wants? The Church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that has become mass migration.”​

“If truth no longer exists, if everything is relative, then man becomes a slave to his passions.”

Sarah argued that gender ideology is an affront to God’s creation and cannot fundamentally change whether a person is male or female in “The Day is Now Far Spent.”

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Boston Museum of Fine Arts Trip Report

by philg

A friend and I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on April 12, 2025. Our experience started in the coffee shop where we were urged to wash bananas before eating even though no sink was provided for visitors. We were also reminded that “the Black male body … has been … criminalized” (this will be Karmelo Anthony’s defense against his wrongful prosecution for murdering Austin Metcalf?):

How about this task for our future AI overlords: custom stained glass for every house? Here’s what rich people were able to get from Tiffany and John La Farge back in the Gilded Age:

Optimus isn’t ready yet to fabricate the glass, but we can check in with ChatGPT’s response to “Please design me a stained glass window that depicts a happy golden retriever chasing a squirrel with palm trees and orchids in the background”:

(People keep saying that AI will be deflationary, but that makes sense to me only if human wants are finite. If I can get AI to design and install a custom wrap for our car every 6-12 months at a reasonable cost then I would pay for that whereas right now it is mostly businesses with a commercial imperative that will pay for wraps.)

At a van Gogh exhibit, we learned about teenage rebellion in the bad old days: put on a suit and go to work.

The French family that van Gogh painted literally went extinct (though only a conspiracy theorist would say that they’ve been replaced by migrants):

Visitors and staff had both voluntarily entered the crowded museum in reliance on inexpensive face masks as protection from aerosol viruses:

Children learn about art, and the importance of voluntarily entering crowded indoor environments while wearing a mask, from a docent:

The museum posts the idea that the ideal life for a woman is to have “autonomy”, defined by “with no kids or husbands”, so that they can “explore their identities”:

The museum had organized an exhibition by a Black artist who was an expert on Blackness and social justice. Wikipedia says that he married a white woman and then the two of them moved to Black-free Mexico. It would have been interesting to discuss this body of work with Black visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, but I didn’t see any during my three hours there.

I posted the following on Facebook with a prefix of “Team of Harvard PhDs labels two bathrooms:”

(A loyal reader here and on Facebook pointed out that the discourse on restrooms and gender should properly be posted in multiple languages and also Braille. Given the recent influx of migrants to Maskachusetts, why not versions in Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Spanish?)

A Trump-hating, Musk-hating, Hamas-loving MIT PhD read the “Team of Harvard PhDs” prefix literally:

I don’t see any evidence of Harvard or Ph.D.’s being involved. Is it safe to assume that you are just making that up, or do you actually have information related to that? (For non-Bostonians, it’s worth noting that Phil is having his hissy fit at the MFA, which is not affiliated with Harvard… and is not even particularly close to Harvard)

A Manhattan-based immigration/asylum profiteer responded

Who cares.

to which I followed up with

who cares? How about the intellectual elites who wrote the epic-length sign depicted above? … like Jeffrey Epstein, that sign didn’t hang itself. And I don’t think it wrote itself either!

(The idea is that people who follow Joe Biden’s example and fly the trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag don’t actually care about Rainbow Flagism?)

Over lunch, my Boston-based friend (highly educated and paid) said that all of the young people in Gaza should be entitled to move to and live forever in the U.S. When I asked why those who attacked Israel get priority over poor, sick, disabled, and elderly folks in the poorest African countries, she said that they too should be able to move to the U.S. In fact, “I don’t think countries or borders should exist.”

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The Last Breath (Hollywood version)

by philg

Back in 2019, I watched a documentary about a diving accident (see Movie: The Last Breath). This year, I watched the Hollywood version. It’s the same director, but upgraded to meet the diversity quotas imposed by Hollywood for Oscar eligibility:

It’s difficult for three guys to have sex with each other while hundreds of feet down under the North Sea, so an Academy-approved LGBTQ+ theme was not going to be possible. The real-life individuals in this drama all appear to be white males (Scottish and English; see photo below (source), though perhaps David Yuasa has some Asian heritage). The filmmakers nimbly substitute an East Asian guy as one of the divers, a Maori actor as the captain, and a female as the ship’s first officer (maybe these last two aren’t doing their respective victimhood groups any image favors given that it was entirely the ship’s fault). I don’t think that it helped Oscar eligibility, but they put an American actor (Woody Harrelson) with an American accent in as one of the Scottish divers.

The dramatization is more dramatic and has much higher production values than the documentary (which includes a lot of 2012 footage from the ship, the ROV, etc.).

I recommend the movie. There’s not too much colorful language, especially considering how dire the situation got, and there is no sex despite the Academy’s attempt to make everything LGBTQ+. Therefore, our 9-year-old didn’t learn anything new about things that we don’t want him to learn about.

Related:

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