Alex aka Muscato

And from the second floor…

Extreme close-up of the petaled interior of a flower; the petals are a bright orange, changing to neon yellow at the center.

Conflagration (Interior of a rose), 2020

There’s actually something rather endearing along the lines of “together we’ll try and do our best.”

He sounds like an A-one schlemiel.

But I think of the mountain of _work_ that went in to putting out clear, consistent, reassuring messaging. All gone, as if it never existed.

Photograph of a glass of white wine on a polished wooden table; it is flanked by a bowl of peanuts and a plate of slices of cheese.

We’re having a silly downtown minibreak*;
I don’t know about you, but I do like a good hotel club lounge.

____________
* A word Americans learned from one Miss Bridget Jones, back before she was a tiresome series of romcoms.

DHS plans to spend $38 billion on building concentration camps.

That's enough to fund the NEA for more than 180 years.

Whe it comes to social services, health care, education, and the arts, it's never really about the money.

It’s unwieldy to stage (at best), but I’m an Antony and Cleopatra boy all the way.

Never borscht, for me at least.

Gotta have something to go with all that champagne…

So what shall we be serving the day after it happens?

That phrase did leap out, didn't it?

She was a great boss.

To be fair, the USG has long done less than some Americans might expect. Evacuations, for example, have always been rare (and never free—at least a nominal payback was always part of the deal).

But there was always strong, consistent messaging and an informed live voice on the phone.

Not now.

Once upon a time (“back in my day,” grumbles the old man), State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs was the pearl of the department, rigorously organized and highly proactive in times of crisis.

But now this.

Don’t know that I have ten, but I’d like to put in a good word for Dialogues of the Carmelites and The Mother of Us All.

To date, my sole adjustment to Life During Wartime has been remembering that the coffee I like comes from Jordan and picking up three extra cans from the supermarket, just in case.

I thought it was Evelyn Brent; rare to see PG so solemn.

Black and white portrait photo of Mildred Gillars, who was called Axis Sally by Allied troops. She broadcast disinformation and pop music from Berlin, working to lower the morale of English-speaking forces. She is resolutely blonde and as always carries herself as someone far more attractive than she is.

Scrolling past, I genuinely thought that was Mildred Gilllars, aka Nazi wartime broadcaster Axis Sally.

Thanks to having been a rabid Monty Python fan in my teens, I can hear that title only in a truly appalling Chinese accent in the voice of Graham Chapman.

Janis Ian’s In The Winter; Hymn to Love as sung by either Piaf or Cyndi Lauper.

It didn’t help that the alienated, a major part of their customer base specifically at a time when the stores were already struggling—increasingly disorganized, rarely well stocked, poorly staffed.

Trying to buy something like a matched pair of lamps was a nightmare. Don’t miss the place at all.

Always something in Cairo: we just had an appointment and went to an address in St. Fatima Square; en route, I realized I’d never heard of it, and it turns out to be a whole part of town that, 25 years on, I’d never seen.

Broad avenues, church-dotted, lovely. This city!

Airports are open and functioning normally; everything's perfectly normal here.

City Stars

I remember how thrilled I was when Walz started leaning in on the ”weird” thing—could it be the dems have figured out messaging at last?—and how my heart sank when that was torpedoed. I knew then that it was all but over.

The one time I met a poet whose birthday it happens to be today he was a grade-A Mean Bitchy Queen (tempted to use that word that our Brit friends are so much freer with than we) and so I shall say no more.

Photograph taken facing out from a coffee shop inside a mall in Cairo. Tables and chairs overlook a multistory atrium with mirror-faced escalators in the distance.

Doing my best.

Here’s how tense it was over at the mall this afternoon…

Photograph of the full moon over the edges of Cairo; it glows unnaturally large and red.

I said yesterday I can’t photograph moons, and that remains the case, but tonight’s is too remarkable not to share—full, and a deep, angry red in the eastern sky over Cairo.

If one believed in omens…

I’ve always said—and still do—that I feel safer in Cairo than almost anywhere in the US.