In Paris, renovation work for a new retail store wound up revealing a treasure concealed within the wall. NYT
Alex Bolen, the chief executive of Oscar de la Renta, planned to have his new store in Paris open around this week, just in time for the couture shows. He planned to have a presence in the city even if he didn’t have a show. He had it all figured out.
Then, last summer, in the middle of renovations, Mr. Bolen got a call from his architect, Nathalie Ryan.
“‘We made a discovery,’†he remembered her saying. On the other end of the phone, Mr. Bolen cringed. The last time he received a call like that about a store, their plans to move a wall had to be scrapped because of fears the building would collapse. He asked what, exactly, the discovery was.
“You have to come and see,†she told him.
So, gritting his teeth, he got on a plane from New York. Ms. Ryan took him to the second floor of what would be the shop, where workers were busily clearing out detritus, and gestured toward the end of the space. Mr. Bolen, she said, blinked. Then he said: “No, it’s not possible.â€
Something had been hidden behind a wall, and it wasn’t asbestos. It was a 10-by-20-foot oil painting of an elaborately coifed and dressed 17th-century marquis and assorted courtiers entering the city of Jerusalem.
“It’s very rare and exceptional, for many reasons,†said Benoît Janson, of the restoration specialists Nouvelle Tendance, who is overseeing work on the canvas. Namely, “its historical and aesthetic quality and size.†…
Demolition was halted to figure out what the painting was and how it came to be in what was about to be a shop. Seeing the aristocrats on horseback and the mosque in the picture, Mr. Bolen said, visions of Crusaders and Knights Templar began to dance in his head. “I think maybe I have seen too many movies,†he said. …
So when the painting was found, and it became clear Mr. Bolen would have to talk to the building’s owners, whom he had never met (the lease had been negotiated through a broker), his relative was able to make the introductions. Another de La Rochefoucauld, who happened to work at the Louvre, got a recommendation for an art historian: Stephane Pinta of the Cabinet Turquin, an expert in old-master paintings.
Mr. Pinta determined that the painting was an oil on canvas created in 1674 by Arnould de Vuez, a painter who worked with Charles Le Brun, the first painter to Louis XIV and designer of interiors of the Château de Versailles. After working with Le Brun, de Vuez, who was known for getting involved in duels of honor, was forced to flee France and ended up in Constantinople.
Mr. Pinta traced the painting to a plate that was reproduced in the 1900 book “Odyssey of an Ambassador: The Travels of the Marquis de Nointel, 1670-1680†by Albert Vandal, which told the story of the travels of Charles-Marie-François Olier, Marquis de Nointel et d’Angervilliers, Louis XIV’s ambassador to the Ottoman Court. On Page 129, there is a rotogravure of an artwork depicting the Marquis de Nointel arriving in Jerusalem with great pomp and circumstance — the painting on the wall.
But how it ended up glued to that wall, no one knew, nor why it was covered up. There was speculation that maybe it happened during World War II, given the setting. It could be “a fog-of-war issue,†Mr. Bolen said.
You take a culture with the keenest appreciation of impermanence, simplicity, and imperfection and a wistful love of Nature and you add Commerce and the influence of American popular culture, and you get this!
Here are 15:09 of Japanese commercials brimming with kawaii, moe, chibi and served up with the special kind of twistedness only the Japanese can manage.
NBC News special correspondent and former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw apologized Sunday evening for remarks he made on “Meet the Press” earlier in the day about Hispanic assimilation, after the comments triggered backlash.
During a panel discussion about the fight for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Brokaw said: “On the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important new constituent in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats.”
He continued, “Also, I hear, when I push people a little harder, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.’ I mean, that’s also a part of it. It’s the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other.” He did not explain who had told him this.
Brokaw went on to say: “I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.”
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America in the course of the last century has become a country of cowards, opportunists, and trimmers.
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.â€
Long-time Federal and State Prosecutor George Parry has some comments on the pre-dawn FBI paramilitary operation mounted last Friday to arrest 66-year-old, wealthy, advisor-to-presidents Roger Stone.
Long ago, as a Special Attorney with the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, I participated in planning and — in a handful of instances — executing arrests of members of La Cosa Nostra and their associates. From personal observation, I early on concluded that, in apprehending mobsters, one of the primary threats to agent safety was the risk of fratricide, i.e., one amped-up, anxious and heavily armed agent accidentally shooting some other amped-up, anxious and heavily armed agent. The FBI, ATF, and other federal agents with whom I was privileged to work shared that concern. For that reason, they planned operations meticulously and kept the number of arresting agents to the absolute minimum in order to reduce the risk of injury or error.
To that end, I opted whenever possible to avoid arrests altogether by having defense counsel surrender their clients at the marshal’s lock up during regular business hours. From the media’s standpoint, the visuals must have been underwhelming. But then, we didn’t much care about meeting the needs of the news media. Having targets surrender was simple, held down down costs, and reduced the risk of harm to one and all.
This is not to say that we never made arrests. Sometimes, we had no choice.
I recall one early morning arrest of a violence-prone mobster. The assigned agents were aware that the target was at a bar with his girlfriend. Since we wanted to take him at his home so that the premises could be searched incident to arrest, the agents parked outside his residence and waited for him to show up.
Around 6:00 A.M., the target arrived and went inside with his girlfriend. Two FBI agents (the total number needed to take down this dangerous felon and conduct the search) knocked on the door. A split second later, the target stepped outside, slammed the door behind him, and announced, “Okay, let’s go.â€
By this tactic, he had cleverly defeated our plan to search his residence.
Despite the target’s extensive criminal record, one of the agents said to him, “Vinnie [not his real name], if you promise to behave, I won’t put you in cuffs.†The violent felon smiled and said, “Deal.†Thus, he was transported without handcuffs or incident to the federal building where he was processed.
That’s how the old Hoover era FBI rolled.
But today, with the example of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI’s recent daring dawn raid and arrest of serial false declarant Roger Stone, it is apparent that my ancient generation of federal law enforcement had it all wrong. Team Mueller’s use of 29 agents plus CNN video support elements were confronted with a challenging tactical problem. Despite the fact that Stone has no prior criminal record, he is nevertheless 66 years old. This is an age when people are sometimes cranky and disagreeable. Obviously, those 29 agents were necessary to establish tactical dominance and to quickly subdue this lawless false declarant. Hopefully, the overwhelming show of force prevented Stone from making any further false declarations during the course of his arrest.
And, equally important, the visuals of the assault broadcast by the CNN tactical elements undoubtedly will serve as a deterrent to others who may harbor thoughts of uttering untruths sworn or otherwise.
All of which leads me to shake my wooly gray head and wonder aloud if any of these two-fisted crime fighters who took down the cunning and dangerous Roger Stone are in any way embarrassed by their participation in this vaudeville act.
I mean, come on! 29 agents? Seriously? Once upon a time, you could have invaded a small country with that much firepower much less arrest a white haired gadfly who allegedly lied to the authorities. Is the wimp quotient really that high in today’s FBI?
Or was there some other reason for this televised silliness? Could it be that Mueller and his team of Hillary Clinton acolytes are trying to fool us with their comedy act? Is this ridiculous armed raid supposed to distract us from the humiliating fact that the Team Mueller elephant has once again given birth to a mouse? Is this an act of misdirection calculated to obscure the fact that Mueller’s Hillary Clinton fan club seems incapable of bringing nothing but process crime indictments devoid of any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion?
There was obviously no justification whatsoever for that pre-dawn raid, which was clearly a flagrant abuse of power and authority intended to cow and humiliate the arrested ally of a political adversary.
Donald Trump is President of the United States, and he should tolerate neither this kind of official misconduct nor a Special Counsel and a Federal Police Agency waging war against himself and his Administration under color of the Law.
Trump should pardon Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Mannafort, and everybody else on Mueller’s list of indictments, fire Mueller, announce that he is firing everyone currently employed by the FBI and CIA, abolishing those two current agencies, and creating a new replacement of the latter Intelligence Service. There never should have been a Federal United States Secret Police in the first place. Trump should then announce a new investigation aimed at prosecuting people misusing offices and laws of the United States to attack an elected president for treason.
BuzzFeed has announced that it plans to lay off 15 percent of its overall workforce next week. In a message to employees on Wednesday, CEO Jonah Peretti explained that although revenue has grown rapidly, “unfortunately, revenue growth by itself isn’t enough to be successful in the long run…”
BuzzFeed says it employs about 1,450 people and has offices in 18 cities around the world. More than 200 people across the company are expected to lose their jobs in the coming round of layoffs — just over a year after another restructuring effort resulted in about 100 lost jobs, mostly on the business side of its operations.
The Huffington Post is also laying off a bunch of people, as is the Gannett newspaper chain. Even DC Comics is laying people off this week. It’s a tough time for the publishing industry.
I’m not glad to hear about anybody who works for a living getting laid off. It’s happened to me before, it’ll probably happen to me again, and I don’t wish it on anybody. But if it needs to happen, there’s one subset within this group of unemployed scribblers who have not earned my sympathy: Anybody who joined the mob against those Covington Catholic kids. …
There you are just minding your own business, rage-mobbing a group of children, and 48 hours later you’re out on your ass. No good deed goes unpunished, huh?
Sorry to pick on that guy, but… damn. If that were me, if my karma were that instant, I might take some time to think about the life decisions that brought me to that point.
Some of these “journalists” stopped tormenting those kids when the truth came out. Some of them have pivoted and are now coming up with different angles of attack. And maybe some of them have learned something from their enormous mistake with very serious real-world consequences. Anything’s possible, I guess.
But this is going to follow that kid for the rest of his life. He’s always going to be the “Racist MAGA Hat Kid.” Our betters haven’t stopped Trump, but at least they showed that guy.
I guess that’s where I draw the line, attacking kids for the red hats they bought that same day and dared to wear in public. If you saw the hats and instantly knew everything you needed to know about those boys, maybe you’re a lousy journalist and you need to find a new job anyway.
Is that too cruel? Is that spiking the ball? Well, sorry if you don’t like me speaking truth to power. And these people have very real power, which they’ve abused to spread a disgusting lie so widely, so quickly, that those harmless Catholic schoolboys are now scared for their lives. If these people had their way, that kid — who did literally nothing but smile while an old man banged a drum inches from his face — would’ve been expelled already.
If you’re one of the people who has done this to those kids, sorry I’m not sorry you’re looking for a new job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When the Weekly Standard shut down last month, a lot of Trumpkins rejoiced along with their idol because the magazine had dared to stand up to him. That’s not what this is. I have no love for Trump. But attacking a bunch of kids just for daring to put on his hats? What the hell is wrong with these parasites?
I’m not jumping for joy about anybody getting laid off. But after watching the behavior of these self-appointed guardians of the truth over the past week, if you could see the look on my face right now…
You’d have expected the audience to be made up of the usual hip New York Experimental Film crowd, but actually that night it was full of Lithuanian Americans desperate to catch a look at their Fatherland.
The film (I’m remembering back over 40 years) was not very experimental, or arty, at all. It was really much more like a home movie. And Lithuania was startlingly poor and primitive. I remember that Mekas received accommodation at his relatives’ collective farm being given a pile of straw to sleep on.
Mekas clearly had bent over backward to avoid politics. If he had not, the Soviet authorities were holding lots of relatives of his hostage, and he would certainly never be visiting Lithuania again, if he’d expressed negative opinions of the system.
The audience, however, of hot-blooded, anti-Soviet Lithuanians was not happy with Mekas’s restraint. He got no cinematic questions, but he was deluged with demands that he openly condemn Communism and the Soviet Occupation.
The poor film-maker was nonplussed. He wanted to talk film. His audience wanted to fight Communism.
I met him, and found out that he was a Lutheran from Northern Lithuania.
