On a prima donna, useful idiots, Columbia University, Hezbollah, Hong Kong, the Buffett family, and more
Talking with the great mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig in 2014, I said, “Tell me about Callas. How did she treat you?” Ludwig answered, “Fantastic. She was so nice. She was a very nice person. But I read once in a book that a real prima donna has to have, in one year, seven scandals and seven great successes. She lived like that.”
Yes. (And sometimes the scandals can be successes too.)
Angela Gheorghiu, the great Romanian soprano, lives like that as well. Here is the latest:
. . . Gheorghiu caused a stir during a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” in Seoul, halting the orchestra and interrupting her co-star’s mid-show encore, much to the dismay of opera enthusiasts who had eagerly anticipated her performance.
Uh-huh.
More from the article:
After the disruption, the opera continued, but the 59-year-old soprano did not appear for the final curtain call. When bass-baritone Samuel Youn eventually escorted her onto the stage, the audience responded with boos. She briefly walked halfway to the center of the stage, then turned and left, leaving the crowd bewildered.
Ha.
In 2012, I sat down with Gheorghiu at the Plaza Hotel in New York. (A fine evening.) Let me paste for you a paragraph from the resulting piece. It really gives you Gheorghiu.
There are books of opera anecdotes, and I suggest to this soprano that books in the future will have whole chapters devoted to her. Yes, she says, “and I’m not finished yet!” I ask her about one of my favorite stories: Did she really demand hair and makeup for a radio interview? No, she says: There was a photo-shoot the same day as the radio interview. Too bad, I say, it’s such a good story. Yes, she says, “but I have lots of others.”
It was like she was trying to cheer me up . . .
• “Meta bans Russian state media outlet RT for acts of ‘foreign interference.’” That is a headline from Tuesday. The subheading reads, “The U.S. recently imposed sanctions on RT’s parent companies, Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti, accusing them of acting as an arm of Moscow’s intelligence operations.” (To read the article, go here.)
Moscow has been involved in our media, and our politics, for a long time. The Soviets paid a good number of Americans. But many Americans worked for free, so to speak. Worked from the heart. The same is true today.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT. (To read the DOJ’s press release, go here.) This pair funded an American operation called “Tenet Media” — funded it to the tune of $10 million. Tenet was started by another pair, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, husband and wife (or wife and husband). How to describe these two? The popular phrase is “right-wing influencers.”
Under the Tenet umbrella, Chen and Donovan gathered fellow influencers, including Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool. A sample of Pool’s work: “Ukraine is the enemy of this country!” (meaning the United States). To see Mr. Pool in action, watch:
awwww @Timcast is such a good lil’ Russian puppet 🥺🥺🥺 good job, komrade pic.twitter.com/vjQ3fg2vBo
— Destiny (@TheOmniLiberal) August 24, 2024
Apparently, only Tenet Media’s founders, Chen and Donovan, were aware of the company’s funding source (Russia). But shouldn’t the others have been curious?
“Rubin received $400,000 a month for 16 videos, plus a performance bonus and a $100,000 signing bonus,” reports the Washington Post. “Tenet also proved lucrative for Pool, who made $100,000 per episode for a weekly show he hosted.” Man, that’s a lot of dough.
These guys say they were duped. But will they return the money? And sometimes dupes are dopes.
• A different report: “Russia is now throwing all of its disinformation resources behind operations designed to undermine the Harris-Walz campaign, according to a Microsoft report released Tuesday.” In my opinion, that’s a hell of an endorsement.
• All of my life — literally — I’ve been reading about the Rosenberg case: the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 as Soviet spies. The case never seems to end, particularly where Mrs. Rosenberg is concerned. (About her husband, there is little controversy.) A news article from September 10 begins,
A top U.S. government codebreaker who decrypted secret Soviet communications during the Cold War concluded that Ethel Rosenberg knew about her husband’s activities but “did not engage in the work herself,” according to a recently declassified memo that her sons say proves their mother was not a spy and should lead to her exoneration in the sensational 1950s atomic-espionage case.
• For good reason, Columbia University set up a task force on antisemitism. The task force interviewed some 500 students. To read an article on this matter, go here.
In its report, the task force said, “The testimonies of hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students have made clear that the University community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students.”
A co-chairman of the task force, Ester R. Fuchs, remarked, “There has been a view among some that this is not a real problem, so we thought it was important to demonstrate what is actually happening to students.”
More recently, dozens of Columbia faculty signed an open letter criticizing the report. (For an article, go here.) “We write as Jewish faculty,” their letter begins. I will quote them some more.
The report “contributes to a hostile narrative about Columbia.” It “is marked by conspicuous neglectful omissions of context and climate.” It “conflates feelings with facts.”
For her part, Professor Fuchs responded, “I was really gobsmacked — I don’t even know what word to use here — by their dismissal of student experiences as just feelings. It’s just sad, and it’s tragic for students on this campus to have a group of faculty dismiss their experiences as just feelings.”
From afar (I write 47 blocks down the street from Columbia), that sounds about right.
• A news report begins, “A company based in Hungary was responsible for manufacturing the pagers that exploded in Lebanon and Syria in an apparent Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah’s communications network, another firm whose brand was used on the devices said Wednesday.” That is highly interesting.
About the Israeli operation, there has been a lot of chortling. I understand the chortling, very well. I am pleased by any thrust against the likes of Hezbollah. May such operations as the “pager attack” recur. But, according to the report I have cited, two children were killed in the attack. It is well to remember that war is a nasty business — even wars of self-defense. Wars of any type.
And damn those, such as Hezbollah, who cause war.
(You remember what Golda Meir said — roughly this: “One day, in the fullness of time, we may forgive them for killing our children. But it will be impossible to forgive them for making us kill their children.”)
• As I mentioned in a previous Impromptus, two journalists were convicted of sedition in Hong Kong. They are Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam. They are the first to be convicted of sedition in Hong Kong since Britain handed the city over to China in 1997.
Now Chu Kai-pong has been convicted. Also sedition. Another journalist? No, he was arrested, charged, and convicted for wearing a T-shirt that bore a slogan from the democracy movement: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” (For a news story about this, go here.)
Hong Kong was murdered before our eyes. (Here, I borrow language from Perry Link, the American scholar of China.) A great, thriving city was murdered before our eyes. This was a few years ago. But you will understand what I mean when I say: We should still look in on the corpse.
• From the Associated Press we read,
The next generation of Buffetts — Howard, Susie and Peter — is poised to become one of the most powerful forces in philanthropy when their 94-year-old father, the legendary businessman and leader of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, eventually passes away.
I did a podcast with Howard Buffett last March. Very interesting and good guy. Has given over half a billion dollars to Ukraine, in that country’s hour of desperate need. Has lived a multifaceted life.
For a write-up about our podcast — which links to the podcast itself — go here.
Let me quote another paragraph from that wire-service report:
Howard Buffett told The Associated Press he’s learned what his father told him and his siblings about philanthropy was true: “It’s not so easy to give away money if you want to do it smart, if you want to be intelligent about it.”
I knew a lady — a great lady, Martha Apgar — whose husband made a tidy sum in the tire business. Not a Buffett-sized fortune, but a tidy sum. She later set up a foundation. She once said, in exasperation, “Jack Apgar had no idea what he was doing to me when he made all that money.”
Wish you could have heard her. Seen her.
Thanks for joining me, my friends, and catch you soon.
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