Long talk with Phil last night--We've had three or four good long gab-fests over the last three weeks, discussing: The stupendously ugly and vital version of Handel's Teseo rendered up by the Potsdam Opera in 2005, with (never before heard of) Maria Riccarda Wesseling as the world's scariest, most horrifying, dead-on perfect Medea, whereof I had just sent Phil, via email, her two major arias. We talked about how curiously close--nay, identical with--Frau Wesseling's Medea comes to the terrific yin-ness of Mother Kali and her Aztec basaltic realization as Coatlicue.

Thence we expatiated over: (item) The appalling, insane, pointless horrors of the U.S./NATO murder of civilians (what they call "warfare") in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, and the Yemen; (item) the humiliation and outrage ("the same as in torture," I pointed out) of the TSA's (Transportation Security Administration's) sexual molestation of airplane passengers [I urged Phil not to come to the United States as he plans to do next month--or, if he does, at least to wear a kilt (sans slip, cela va sans dire), because, curiously--according to what I've just read online, of heartfelt but unofficial statements of actual TSA fondlers, gropers, fingerers and twisters--"Having to frisk a man in a kilt constitutes constitutes sexual harassment of us!" No shit, I did read that, and that is apparently how these miserable, non-unionized fascist scum feel about their bizarrely obscene duties]; and (item) the YouTube videos I sent Phil of Roberto Bolle, notably as the Hunter in Swan Lake; and (item) the videos I couldn't find immediately of Bolle portraying/dancing the Classic Eros, and being totally frontally nude at the Neapolitan Opera: These, after all, being videos intended to be seen by Phil's ex-step-son, who has recently found his métier as a dancer ("and a damned fine one," says Phil), and who, although he has recently "come out," as they say, is still only sixteen years old.