Double Booked

I'm getting a late start blogging this morning, having slept in a bit. Olga and Dave are still snoring away. Ah, Saturday!

I had a busy day yesterday, first at work and then having double-booked myself for social events in the evening. I told the LGBTQ+ Affinity Group at work (yes, we still have one of those, as Trump's tentacles have not reached us here) that I would go with them to a museum exhibit, and Dave told a co-worker that we would have dinner with her and her husband. To be fair, he checked with me first and I said yes -- I forgot about the museum thing.

The exhibit access was for 4:30 p.m. and our dinner was at 5:30 (early!) but nonetheless I managed to do both. I had to leave the exhibit early; I'll probably go back and finish it another time.

Here's a shot from the show, at the Tate Modern, which focuses on queer performance artist Leigh Bowery. I'd never heard of Bowery before, but it was a fascinating show about how he arose as a sort of "club kid" on London's nightclub scene in the early 1980s and eventually grew into an artist who explored the boundaries of clothing and body image. Above are some of his clothes from the early and mid-'80s, which he designed himself, against Star Trek wallpaper (!) identical to some used on the walls of his flat and documented in a film from that time.

I only made it through three rooms of the exhibit before I had to take off and catch the tube to Marylebone to meet Dave. We had dinner at Fischer's, a Viennese restaurant; I had pork sausages and Dave had schnitzel. We enjoyed the food.

It was during dinner that Dave, scrolling his phone, turned to me and asked if I'd heard about Trump and Zelenskyy's meeting at the White House. He told us how Trump and Vance had scolded Zelenskyy in front of the press corps, and their peace proposal had fallen apart. It was immediately clear to me that the whole thing was a setup from the start, meant to humiliate Zelenskyy and pressure him to accede to Russia's demands. Trump is working on behalf of Putin.

(Tom Friedman, in a column about the meeting, called it an "obviously planned ambush" and pointed out that it is unprecedented for a U.S. president to side "with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.")

So I managed to survive my double-booked evening, but not without some degree of stomach upset. Once again, who have we become as a country? What does the USA stand for?

(Top: Marylebone at sunset, on my way to Fischer's.)