Good morning. What’s wrong with diversity today? It’s boring, says Mark Bauerlein: “Diversity has no plot. Or rather, it has half a plot, or one-fourth or one-fifth. I mean this in a literary sense. The elements of a diversity drama are bare and simple. In the beginning was the man, the white man, the straight white man, the Christian straight white man. And then there were many—women, blacks, browns, Hindus, Haitians, gays . . . it’s a storyline that is applied to our country, colleges, movies, and corporations, whether they fail or succeed in diversity. That’s it, the story is set.”

Yolanda Bonnell doesn’t want white critics reviewing her new show about “women of an Indigenous family navigating addiction and intergenerational trauma” because “they lack cultural understanding”: “To be clear, white people are welcome to attend the show. It’s important to have witnesses present to understand the ongoing effects of colonialism. And we are totally fine with a person of colour giving us a bad review. It’s not the review we’re worried about, it’s the voice behind it.” I gotta hand it to Yolanda. This is one heck of a marketing idea. Her show’s gonna be packed.

Dominic Green surveys a selection of “motivational, self-affirming podcasts”: “If you really must work, Bruce Daisley’s Eat Sleep Work Repeat is full of life-hacking tips on how to maximise your commercial potential. This podcast, like yoga and other harmful physical exertions, offers to ease you off the hamster wheel of ambition but actually gives you tips for scrambling even faster. For British publication, the book of the pod was retitled The Joy of Work, presumably because Eat Sleep Work Repeat sounded like a gulag memoir.”

Before Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, there was Madame Yale’s Guide to Beauty: “Madame Yale said her ‘Blood Tonic’ would ‘drive impurities from the system as the rain drives the debris along the gutters.’”

Sondheim at 90: “Though Sondheim was already famous on Broadway for his work on West Side Story and Gypsy, as well as the two previous shows for which he had written not only lyrics but the music as well (a hit called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a huge flop called Anyone Can Whistle), Company established him as a creative force in his own right, an artist in touch with the hopes and fears of urban America. It ran for 705 performances—three more than Gypsy—and won Tonys for best musical, best music, and best lyrics. All at once, Sondheim was a star. A half-century later, the great innovator of postwar musical comedy is now its grand old man, the Irving Berlin of our time. At 90, Sondheim is the last living link to the heyday of the school-of-Hammerstein musical.”

How Fraktur became the font of Nazi Germany: “At first, blackletter typefaces remained popular in many parts of Protestant Europe, but one by one, the other Protestant countries began to give in to the temptations of Roman type. Until finally Germany was the lone holdout, particularly the specific typeface known as Fraktur, which eventually became a shorthand term for all German blackletter type. Part of the reason why Fraktur remained popular in Germany was because, unlike the people in other Protestant countries, Germans had no cohesive state until late into the 1800s. One of the only things unifying the German identity was its language, and Fraktur came to be seen as a central part of that. Fraktur’s connection with nationalism only got stronger in the 19th century when Germany was invaded by Napoleon—the occupying French had their Roman letters, and the Germans had Fraktur.”

Langston Hughes in Spain: “Canceling a 60-day tour through Russia that he was slated to lead, Langston Hughes left to cover the Spanish Civil War on June 30th, 1937. The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him abroad to write “trench-coat prose” about black Americans volunteering in the International Brigades.”

Essay of the Day:

“Inigo Philbrick is a Ponzi-scheming gallerist who got in over his head.” Now he’s missing. Joseph Bullmore tells the story in Airmail:

“His prodigy pedigree was nearly flawless. There was the patrician East Coast family that could trace its roots back to New England’s founding fathers; the education at Goldsmiths, University of London (alma mater of the Young British Artists and the petri dish of Cool Britannia); the internship at White Cube, and the tutelage under its owner, super-gallerist Jay Jopling. Even the voice was impressive: a baritone, mid-Atlantic drawl with an old-money gravitas. The Boston Brahmin by way of Dover Street. Like a young George Plimpton with an auction paddle. When I asked people who met him for their impressions of the man, the adjective that kept popping up was ‘smooth.’ One friend simply wrote, ‘Good perfumes.’

“Inigo Philbrick was born in Redding, Connecticut, in 1987. His father, Harry Philbrick, ran the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and was later the head of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum and founded Philadelphia Contemporary. According to Kenny Schachter—an art journalist and former friend of the dealer who was stung in one of Philbrick’s alleged frauds—the senior Philbrick’s résumé lent Inigo ‘a foundation of knowledge but not a load of dough, so he’s informed and hungry.’ Well bred, but not sheltered. Sophisticated, but never spoiled. ‘The young dealer … has kept a low profile as a secondary trader well known among the cognoscenti for being shrewd and having a mind of his own,’ Schachter wrote on Artnet News in December 2018. This was, he concluded, ‘a rarity in the market.’”

Read the rest.

Photos: Oregon

Poem: Boris Dralyuk, “My Hollywood: A Triptych”

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