Pirandello’s famous title needs only a little tweaking to cover the current crisis at the Kennedy Center. An absurdist wind be a-blowin’ from that riverside, Georgetown-adjacent, wedding cake/airport terminal (architectural observers have not been kind to the building) as performers and institutions flee, leaving a Beckettian wilderness.

Surely the first authentically post-name-change programming should be John Cage’s 4’33” – a work devoid of controversial content. Beckett’s own Endgame should be next, evoking a landscape where botheration about things like gender is rather beside the point. The beauty of these two masterpieces – and nihilistic works like them – is that they fairly demand little to no attendance, so that the collapse of the Center’s audience base will seem apposite rather than embarrassing.

… Opry will move in to take its place.

***********

The authority of the board to overrule Congress and rename the center is disputed, and The [NY] Times has continued to refer to its legal name.

Ex-Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia
Appears to be rather a Nazia
Although not Trump's first
And far from his worst
For his loss we can only say grazia

‘Judge Tosses Trump’s $15B Defamation Suit Against New York Times‘

His friend Trump has venous insufficiency. Epstein himself had … call it penous insufficiency. He was unable – or the good Lord didn’t grant him enough time – to eternalize his erection, to unbound his boner, to superannuate his stiffy.

Age/death caught up with both men; yet Epstein now enjoys the immortality he so passionately sought!

UD thought his 2019 suicide was the end of his Kafkan run, but she was very very wrong. He’s the talk of the town, the thing the Dems think will bring the prez down, the thing that will turn Trump’s smile to a frown.

Color UD amazed. Everyone knew Trump was a sexual degenerate when they voted for him. UD doesn’t understand why he needs to care about late-entry evidence. I’m watching the whole thing with bafflement.

O sole mio!
He was my sun!
Now Leonard Leo
Has come undone

He is a sleazebag
He has b.o.
His brand-new name tag:
STINKBUTT LEO

O porco, o porco Dio!
Disgusting Leo
Sta in front a me

… is pleased to see that Jonathan Chait compares Trumpy America to Hungary throughout this essay.

[T]he parallels to Hungary are striking. Orbán’s economy has suffered a brain drain as the regime’s cronyism drives its great minds to work in freer societies. Trump’s policies have shown early signs of producing a similar outcome, as would-be international students must now consider whether pursuing an American degree is worth risking getting detained by ICE or having their visa revoked abruptly over minor legal infractions.

But the Gryphon said no.

******************

“Aha,” said Mr UD. “Clearly Justice Roberts must be impeached.”

*******************

As for the judge in question, he is what my Aunt Goldie would have called a fency schmency person — snooty private schools, Yale, etc.

Fun tidbits:

Took a gap year and coached women’s basketball.

Shakespeare freak who “played a crown prosecutor in The Trial of Hamlet that was presented at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.”

Oh, and the dude ruled in Trump’s favor in the case involving whether he could maintain the privacy of his tax returns.

The correct social attitudes, plus a fierce Second Amendment defender.

As one of the last acts of his presidency, Biden has issued preemptive pardons for Fauci and several other national heroes and heroines who pissed off whatzisname by pursuing truth, justice, and the American way.

Er, not exactly. But color UD impressed by the soft-spoken thing Trump did for half of his convention speech.

… Youngstown State’s secretive, Trumpian trustees have named a prominent election denier president! Wow.

… But the dictator who loves me the most is… Orban of Turkey!“

Fox … is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network…

One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. [LOL] He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie... [LOOOL]

“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8. [This is the moment to visit all of UD’s UBU/TRUMP/TRUBU posts over many years. (Scroll down.)]

*********************

Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

***********

UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.