Strip both names from it, for neither merits the honour: a reflection upon the ‘Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’

Cecil Stoughton/Lelands Auction

{WP 19 December} ‘Kennedy Center adds Trump’s name to building, despite legal concerns’

The Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: I confess I indulged in no small measure of sentimental reverence for the Kennedy dynasty over many years, but it is time—well past time, in truth—for such nostalgia to be laid to rest. Howsoever towering John F. Kennedy may appear when set beside the present holder of the office—and I do freely acknowledge his true heroism in war—we must at last reckon with the full measure of the man: he was corrupt; his fumbling hand brought the United States perilously close to the brink of a third world war (albeit he was not the architect of that crisis); and he behaved appallingly toward Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, toward Marilyn Monroe, and toward Heaven knoweth how many other women.

The dynasty’s moral deficiencies did not begin nor end with him. Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, held an admiration for Hitler. Ted Kennedy, lionised by many, bore responsibility for a woman’s death. And today we behold Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dragging American public health discourse back unto the intellectual standard of the colonial age—an erstwhile advanced medical system now obliged to genuflect before a man whose understanding is, at best, mediæval.

For generations there hath existed an almost tribal fealty toward the Kennedys within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most especially among the predominantly Irish Catholic working class. Yet these have never been my people. As a nominal Protestant of largely English and German descent, I understood from childhood—keenly and unforgettably—that I did not belong, nor was I welcome, within my overwhelmingly Catholic community situated scarcely ten miles north of Boston. (Think somewhere in the vicinity of Spot Pond). It was no phantom of my imagination; I was told so in the plainest, most wounding terms on countless occasions—most vehemently by the Irish kids, and, to a lesser but still palpable degree, by the Italian ones. Why, then, have I spent so many years idealising the Kennedys, a clan whose mythology I was never invited to share? Only Jacqueline ever embodied genuine grace or dignity.

So let us say it plainly: enough of the Kennedys, and curse the cult built around them. And as for Trump—his name, and that of his brood, deserveth no sanctified place in the public square. Strip both names from the façade. We are not the Soviet Union, and no civilised republic ought to plaster the monuments of its cultural life with the surnames of dubious dynasties.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), somewhere in the vicinity of the Middlesex Fells and severely pissed-off, 19 December 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Rest in Peace, Rob and Michelle Reiner

Getty Images

{Sky News 14 December} “US director and actor Rob Reiner and wife found dead 'with stab wounds' at his LA home”

Rest in peace, Rob and Michelle Reiner. I can scarcely summon the words—there is simply too much tragedy pressing in from every side—yet it is plain we have lost a great actor, a great director, and a great American. Rob Reiner was an indispensable presence in the single most significant and culturally consequential television sitcom ever produced, and then, with remarkable ease, he transformed himself into a filmmaker of true distinction. It was he who gave This Is Spinal Tap to the world—the ne plus ultra of satire and parody, a work so definitive it has never truly been surpassed (no, I have yet to see the new sequel, but shall make a point of it in the coming days).

Of Michelle Reiner I know less offhand, yet the fact that such fundamentally decent, talented people—individuals who contributed so much good to our troubled world—should meet their end in so harrowing a manner only deepens my sense of doom, my conviction that humanity is stumbling towards a darkness of its own making.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Light, shadow, and a woman who knew exactly how to command both: Joan Bennett

Columbia Pictures, 1942

#OTD 1990: Joan Bennett, the distinguished and profoundly adaptable actress, took her final bow at the age of eighty. Born into one of America’s grand theatrical dynasties—her grandmother, parents, and illustrious sisters Constance and Barbara all creatures of the stage and screen—Bennett was seemingly fated for performance. Yet she transcended inheritance, transforming what might have been mere legacy into art fashioned boldly of her own hand.

Over a career that spanned more than sixty years, she became a very mistress of metamorphosis. First the golden ingénue of the early talkies, then—under the darkling, chiaroscuro eye of Fritz Lang—the smouldering brunette heroine of Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, before emerging, in her later years, as a commanding matriarch of theatre, cinema, and television alike.

Few actresses navigated Hollywood’s shifting eras with such poise or intelligence. Joan Bennett remains not merely the descendant of a storied lineage, but its apotheosis: a woman who reinvented herself across the decades with elegance, courage, and a rare, enduring luminosity.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Stretched out as a figure from a Renaissance sketch, a mood of memory rather than shock: Sharon Stone in Playboy, July 1990

Sharon Stone, in Playboy, July 1990—doth bear the languid grace of a figure rescued from a Florentine sketchbook, more muse than siren. The pose recalls not the vaunting gestures of provocation but the serenity of Renaissance study, wherein form setteth itself in measured balance against the shadow, and the body is made a kind of meditation.

Her expression—neither wantonly coy nor stiffly defiant—appears to be caught betwixt thought and dreaming, belonging less unto the realm of the sensual than unto that of memory and inward musing. An archetype of governed fragility: present and yet unknowable, mortal and yet refined to an ideal. A beauty that crieth not aloud, but breatheth gently, like a whispered truth.

Truly, Sharon Stone was among the fairest and most admired women upon the earth at the hour of this shoot, and rose thereafter to become one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing and most gifted actresses in the prime of her days. Of what present course she steereth now I know not, yet I doubt not she remains a bold and dauntless spirit still.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Frank Zappa, who departed this realm on 4 December 1993 and may be currently rolling over continually in his grave, on ‘Death by Nostalgia’

image generated via Google Gemini

Four decades on, nostalgia is just about all we have left. 

"The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia.

"(It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)” 

—from the 1989 memoir, The Real Frank Zappa Book.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Muratura Viva: the quiet suffocation and pious prison of Sister Virginia Maria, the ‘Nun of Monza’

Anne Heywood in The Lady of Monza, 1969.

4 December 1575 — Milan gave birth to one of the most haunting figures of its age: Marianna de Leyva y Marino, whom the chronicles shall later name the Nun of Monza. Her life reads less as a tale of mortal days than as gothic tragedy. Her mother gone before memory could form, her father—aloof, imperious, and full of worldly designs—consigned her at thirteen unto the convent: that most devout of prisons. In sixteenth-century Christendom it was a fate laid upon daughters with grievous frequency, though veiled in sanctimony; the Church styled it devotion, the fathers called it prudence, and the maidens themselves suffered no voice at all. It is a grim practice that remains, alas, persistently alive in certain corners of the globe and within that institution to this very day.

As Sister Virginia Maria, she endured the quiet suffocation of cloistered life until, around twenty-one, desire—or coercion—broke through the walls. Her seducer, the nobleman Giovanni Paolo Osio, already tainted by blood and infamy, drew her into a commerce of the flesh that shocked even the jaded chambers of Lombardy. From their furtive union sprang a child, living witness of the transgression. When discovery loomed, Osio’s response was murder; a fellow sister who dared speak was silenced forever. The crimson deed did eventually seal their destinies: Osio fled justice, but Sister Virginia had no such escape.

The Church tried her, condemned her, and sentenced her to muratura viva—to be literally walled alive. No mere imprisonment, it was a ritualised living death: a stone cell scarcely larger than a coffin, air eked through a narrow grate, and silence unbroken save for the scrape of victuals slid through a hatch. Rations were meagre: sufficient to sustain the body, but never to comfort it. Days, seasons, and years bled into one another in the half-dark, until even the sense of self began to fray. There Sister Virginia Maria remained for thirteen years, until the hierarchy, either moved by her ‘repentance’ or its own convenience, saw fit to loose from those walls a spectre in the shape of a woman.

She lived thereafter—if such ghostly continuance may be called life—within the Monastery of Saint Margaret, her frame doubtless sorely enfeebled, until she reached seventy-four. Her endurance, perchance, may be viewed as a quiet defiance, a sermon preached against the cruelty which clothed itself in piety’s robe.

Across the centuries her legend hath been stirred anew by the arts. In Eriprando Visconti’s film of 1969, The Lady of Monza (also known as The Awful Story of the Nun of Monza), the renowned British actress Anne Heywood lendeth once more a voice unto the tormented sister—a cry rising out of stone and sorrow. Through her portrayal we behold the eternal strife betwixt faith and flesh, puissance and conscience. History nameth it sin; posterity perceiveth therein the fierce and trembling labour of survival.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Where the wholesome became dangerous simply by breathing: Nancy Cameron, POTM for January 1974

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