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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: How to look your best on Facetime
By
Published: Apr 04, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
WE COULD BE HEROES: BRETT CROZIER… AND HUGH THOMPSON, JR.
by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire columnist. I encourage you to read him daily… and subscribe. If there is a “real deal,” Charlie Pierce defines it. His piece begins:
To measure properly what Captain Brett Crozier, no longer the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, gave up this past week, it’s important to remember that the command of a nuclear aircraft carrier in the modern Navy is the express train to flag rank.
Commanding one of these beasts is essentially to be in charge of a floating city. The TR was built in 2007 at a cost of over $4 billion, and that’s in the dollars of the time. It is almost 1,100 feet long and carries a company of 3,200 souls. It also carries 90 aircraft of various types and is a veritable and massive jukebox of sensors, countermeasures, and processing systems of various types. Mistakes can be both deadly and costly; fourteen years ago, the TR collided with a guided-missile cruiser and its stern was damaged to the tune of $7 million. It is a complicated craft and only the most gifted, brilliant commanders get to run one of them. Brett Crozier was one of those people.
Crozier is a graduate of the Naval Academy and the Naval War College. The TR was his third command. On March 31, while the TR was docked in Guam, a letter that Crozier had written to the Navy Department found its way into the San Francisco Chronicle. There had been an outbreak of the coronavirus on board. More than 100 sailors were sick already and, despite the size of the ship, quarters below were still close enough that many more were likely to develop. Crozier begged the Navy to let him off-load and quarantine the ship’s crew. Crozier did not dispatch his concerns in code. He sent it, as the cryptologists put it, “in the clear.” He was desperate, and it showed.
Read it all to see the video of his sailors cheering Crozier as he left the ship and the remarkable story of another hero, this one in Vietnam.
PATTI BOSWORTH: THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
I often don’t know what I feel until I start to write, so I wasn’t emotional when Susan called to tell me that Patti Bosworth had died. I knew Patti was in the hospital. I knew she had the virus. I knew she was 86. I knew the odds didn’t favor her. Still…
Patti is the first of my friends to go. Her partner, Douglas Schwalbe, died a few hours later. New York is the epicenter of the plague in this country; there will surely be more. But the line from the Cat Stevens song exactly applies: “The first cut is the deepest.”
This cut is very deep. Look at Sheila Weller’s post on Facebook. As I write, 200 people have commented. Some are readers-turned-fans, but most are writers. Scrolling through the comments, I thought: This is like the Honor Roll, with all the “A” students saluting the Ranking Member.
Yes, Patti was accomplished. I praised her Diane Arbus biography before I met her. I read her Jane Fonda opus deep into the night, and though we were friends and I thought I knew her well, I was gobsmacked by the personal revelations in her memoir.
The Times obit will give you the chronology of her long, distinguished career. And this video will give you a glimpse of Patti’s spirit and dedication.
As fine as her books were, Patti was finer as a role model, citizen, friend. She had rubbed shoulders with greatness — the subjects of her books and so many more — but she was a journalist, not a starfucker. There are people who seem warm-hearted, and we think warmly of them, but what we don’t say about them is that they often manufacture their personalities. Patti was warm-hearted and complex, she saw through pretense for a living and she still looked for goodness, and there is no combination of qualities more attractive than that.
A few years ago, Patti and I spent an entire afternoon at Susan’s dining room table, telling stories and laughing our heads off at the absurd stuff we’d witnessed in our long careers in New York. We have good memories for this kind of thing; the stories were nonstop. As was our delight in being together.
A few months ago, I asked Patti to blurb my book, a novel wrapped around a biography. I had a bunch of five-star endorsements — Tina Brown, Stephen Schiff, Nicholas Meyer, Esther Perel, Lucian Turscott, Chris Dickey, and more — but Patti was a biographer, thus especially prized. She read the book and found much to admire, but she wanted less of this and more of that; basically she wished I’d written a different book. The end of her email telling me she wouldn’t give me a blurb read like an apology:
This is just my opinion — obviously others feel differently. I’m really sorry. If you want to talk or email, fine.. I am here & I hope what I am saying doesn’t hurt our friendship, which I treasure.
I replied immediately: “A book is not a friendship test. It’s just a book. You are loved.”
Many times when people die we feel cheated — there was so much we didn’t get to say. But this friendship was open, complete, fulfilling… and now fulfilled. Treasure. Love. How very rare. How very Patti Bosworth.
TODAY’S MUSIC
Mirko and Valerio. Twins. They live in Sicily. They’re 12. In quarantine. Has Coldplay’s “Vida La Vida” ever sounded this good?
TODAY’S POEM
“Poetry is respected only in this country,” said Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” As jokes go, that’s sour. In Russia, it’s also true. And by that standard, Anna Akhmatova — Russia’s most beloved female poet — was lucky. She wasn’t executed.
In 1921, Nikolay Gumilyov, her former husband, was shot without a trial — the first important poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1935, her son, Lee Gumilyov, was arrested. Boris Pasternak wrote to Stalin, and he was released. But he was arrested again in l938, then jailed and tortured for months. Like many other mothers, Akhmatova stood outside Leningrad’s Kresty jail every day, hoping to get a package for her son accepted.
That experience is at the core of “Requiem,” her greatest poem. She worked on it from l935 to 1940. (There was an unofficial ban on her poetry; it’s a measure of the literary climate in the Soviet Union that it wasn’t published until 1963 — in Munich. The complete poem wasn’t published in Russia until 1987.) Here’s “Instead of a Preface,” which launches the poem:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent 17 months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind was a young woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had of course never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
These are the poem’s most famous lines:
Not under the protection of foreign skies
Or saving wings of alien birth,
I was there with my people
There, where my people unhappily were.
ROGER COHEN: “THERE IS NO WAY OUT BUT THROUGH”
This is how Roger Cohen’s column in the Times ends:
It is hard now, here in New York, everywhere really. Reading the numbers. Trying to make sense of them. Seeing the triage tents and portable morgues. Watching small businesses close. The millions suddenly without jobs. The people dying alone, without their loved ones because of the risk of infection. Discarded blue and white latex gloves on a street. Insomnia. Choppers over the city at night. The Zoom gatherings that console but also recall that touch is beyond technology. The way people veer away from a passer-by, the coronavirus swerve. The sirens. The silence that makes the sirens louder.
All this has happened before, not quite like this, but yes. My sister’s photographs are also a memento mori. And the world has come through. Because of people like Craig Smith, the surgeon in chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital who wrote of Covid-19 patients in a moving dispatch to his medical troops, “They survive because we don’t give up.”
It’s coming apart. Take care of it. We don’t give up. We are connected to one another and to generations past and future. There are no strangers here.
FACETIME: TOM FORD TELLS YOU HOW TO LOOK YOUR BEST
In Maureen Dowd’s column:
It’s my first FaceTime, and I’m nervous, having watched all week as even the glossiest cable news shows have downshifted into low-tech “Wayne’s World” basement productions. To shore up confidence beforehand I asked my lighting sensei, Tom Ford, for some tips and he kindly sent these instructions, which you all are welcome to use:
“Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!”
JARED KUSHNER: I, ME, MINE
Yesterday I quoted Kushner: “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
And then I linked to the government document that showed he had it exactly backward.
The next morning, the Washington Post reported, “This description has since been altered and replaced with a new one more in line with what Kushner said. Now, the Strategic National Stockpile is described as a “short-term stopgap buffer” intended “to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies.” The new description also says “many states have products stockpiled.”
“THE ONION” HEADLINE: Jared Kushner Says States Should Have Planned Ahead Before Joining The Union
DONALD TRUMP’S FACE MASK
TRUMP: “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know. Somehow, I just don’t see it for myself.”
FACT CHECK: No foreign leader has visited the White House since early March.
MANY CITIZENS: Hey, go for it, big guy.
MY FACE MASK: AN IDEA
On my way up to Costco, just at the end of a long line, I spotted a woman selling face masks. I was wearing one — white, antiseptic, in no way stylish — but hers were colorful, and, motivated by vanity, I stopped to talk with her. She said she made them by hand, that she had no sewing machine. I thought of The Little Match Girl and knew I had to buy one. I chose a fetching mask — a blue/green/yellow/white tartan, a pattern you’d see on elastic-waisted jammies if they were made, say, by J. Press, the Godfather of Preppie. I paid $5.
Later, I felt dumb. I should have asked for her name and email. I should have shared her information with you. (I’ll look for her today).
Still later, a lightbulb idea: Instead of pitching linen shirts and summer sweaters and such in its daily emails, J. Press might do something useful. Brooks Brothers is already stepping up. From the Brooks press release:
The Company is in the process of converting its New York, North Carolina and Massachusetts factories from manufacturing ties, shirts and suits to now making masks and gowns. Brooks Brothers plans to use these facilities to produce up to 150,000 masks per day on an ongoing basis, to help increase access to protective gear for health care workers and others battling the spread of COVID-19 at the nation’s hospitals and other facilities. The company will also be producing gowns.
Brooks is not what it once was, to put it kindly. The J. Press customer is still Old Money or Recently Rich and Eager to Look Like Old money. So, J. Press: make face masks. In your signature style. And offer them in your daily mails and sell them on your web site. For more than $5. All proceeds to charity. Not possible to do this in your empty work rooms? Ask your customers, also suddenly idle, to pitch in. Do more than give a % of sales to charity. Inspire your clientele. Burnish the brand. Step up.
I want to contact Richard Press or Paul Press or any J. Press executive. Can’t find their email addresses. If you know them, please let me know: HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com
LATE NIGHT
Bach Suite for Solo Cello No. 5 in C Minor, BWV 1011, played by Steven Isserlis.
In the program notes, he writes:
I find it impossible not to think of the story of the Crucifixion in connection with the fifth suite. This is the most darkly dramatic of the six suites — and the closest in spirit to Bach’s two monumental settings of the Passion story. The arresting narrative of the opening leads to the only fugue within the suites (albeit only an implied fugue, since there is never more than one voice heard at any time), the whole Prelude ending with a powerful “tierce de Picardie” — a concluding transformation from minor to major mode — which feels like a statement of faith. The tragic atmosphere of the suite reaches its emotional peak in the desolate loneliness of the famous Sarabande. What an extraordinary movement this is: no discernible melody as such, no particular rhythmic interest, no obvious dynamic changes, no chords — and yet, one of the most powerful pieces of music ever composed.
