LETTER FROM TANGIER: 7/3/25

THAT VENICE WEDDING/WASHINGTON, D.C./THIS GAUDIER GREEDIER GILDED AGE/AND BEES/FINALLY/BEES …

“It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, ‘What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? Let us give it all up.”

Mark Twain from “The Gilded Age”

1.

I woke up this morning full of vague longings during this, my self-improvement summer here in Tangier. It is also my last summer in my 60s; next summer will be my first one in my 70s. Having gotten up around 6:30 a.m., I watched the sun continue to rise over the bay from this dining table next to a terrace in an apartment high above the kasbah where I so luckily sit and begin each day writing whatever sentences wake along with me. I am now in my third week of being back in the gym four times a week. I am doing 100 pushups a night before bed along with 100 reps of ab exercises. I am in the midst of extensive dental work, both cosmetic and restorative. I am never without a book to read for an hour or so each day. I relish the writing and the discipline this column and its deadlines have put into my life. I am not only grateful - but also deeply aware of the gratitude - for this readership and its subscriber base. I am baking cakes again and giving them away piece-by-piece. I am baking a lemon one this morning - Wednesday - and a coffee/walnut one this weekend. I’ll fashion an upcoming RECIPES & REVIEWS around that latter cake since one of those columns is overdue. The discipline does slip from time to time but I don’t fret over that like I tended to do before since I know I’ll get it done on its schedule if not mine. I have learned to give my writing its own agency as I am reclaiming mine in more productive ways.

I am taking as well long meditative daily walks up and down the hills here in Tangier to go along with my dieting in order to lose those awfully stubborn ten pounds that beset one my age as such pounds sit with such sullen satisfaction along one’s midsection. So I’m also sautéing lots of salmon in olive oil with garlic and vegetables for my one main meal a day around 6 or 7 each evening. On those hilly walks I am often in mindful prayer, in meditation, not harried at all, something I learned when I walked the Camino, the utter stillness within the moving forward, the onward that is my pilgrim’s mantra. Most of all, I continue to hone the concept of being a conduit for kindness and not just its receptacle where it goes to die so that the practical rigor of my being its instrument is a part of my exercise routine in its way instead of its rigor mortis - the dead weight of kindness not paid forward - adding to the waistline weight I’m carrying around. Kindness too is what I’m shedding but doing so by sharing it, allowing it to flow through me toward others. I learned about the feel of such a flow when I broke my shoulder a couple of years ago in Paris. I not only was practically kind as a response to all the kindness shown to me but also visualized its flowing over that shoulder and, more important, my deeper brokenness. I truly believe that flow of kindness healed me. It continues to do so.

I have settled, in fact, on kindness in this chapter of my life as a form of political activism. I have come to see simple kindness as a revolutionary act in a world where vulgarity and cruelty are now celebrated as the conduits themselves for fascistic power. The false prestige of fame. Oligarchical wealth. The holding pattern where hypocrisy hovers in a mimicry of motion, its fumes the exhaust from the few fuming at the rest of us for our gall to call them out for the flotsam and jetsam of their gloating and their flaunting of all that others do not have.

This latest Gilded Age reached this past week an apex of lowness in the doubling-down, doubled-image of it all in Washington and Venice, a world of gigabytes and gondolas and the cosseted corseted crash of the wantonly cash-weary floating about in the latter like lacquered litter while bogging down in the former with brokered tax breaks and deaths dealt out to the millions in America and around the globe from not only a stacked deck but also the purposeful lack of medical care and HIV drugs and the imminent shutting of rural hospitals and nursing homes. During all this, gulags which had been quickly built in stretches of Florida swamps where alligators swim, were being celebrated as was the subsequent selling of merchandise based on them. This caused the ugly gleeful thrill that has not only always glued fascists together when such places are concentrated side-by-side but are now also campily monetized in this newest wrinkle of America’s version of fascism, its branding of gulags with nicknames on t-shirts and even more baseball caps as the technofascist oligarchs who hold these other fascists in class-conscious contempt mosey on along iteration after iteration but never alas into the sunset. This is where America is at this present moment. Gulags are being branded and merchandised after the Trump Vance Murkowski Big Ugly Bill was passed in the Senate that had as one of its most dangerous features the additional funding by tens of billions - an increase of 1500% - for ICE’s masked Gestapo-like thugs and more and more such gulags and the military equipment in service to each.

It sickens.

It saddens.

And there is the stench that drifts all the way over here to Tangier in the morning air not of a revived greatness but the collapse of a country being destroyed from within as all fascist regimes do to the countries where they rise then ultimately collapse in on themselves. This week the construction of that collapse began with the codification of such cruelty in Washington and the vulgar display of such decadent wealth at almost the same moment in Venice. The conflation did not confuse the issue. It clarified it.

And yet it is the woe I have been feeling every day about all this for some time now (an existential public sadness that makes all the private sadnesses in my life feel deeper) that led me last month to turn so inward by redefining my need to do so as self-improvement. What’s the use of struggling and toiling and worrying anymore, I wondered, let me give it all up for personal betterment. But this morning it also felt selfish, an act of vanity to focus on myself in such a time. How does one shed guilt along with the pounds and the kindness one gives away? I’m working through that. This column is a part of it, the confessional aspect of owning guilt and then the getting on with it.

So much of life as an older person is that getting on with it in any way that works best for us. For me, it has become a life lived as a pilgrimage - a grand life lived in a simple manner, or a simple one lived in a grand one. But I am aware there is, yes, a mannered element to it all. Writing about it adds to that. But it is finally all I am. All I have left. I wake. I write. I walk. I wonder. I give away some cake. I find a way to be better, or feel that I gesturally am in a performative sense. And maybe just maybe if I keep doing that I actually will be someday. Through the overarching existential woe, there are those daily realties: wake, write, walk, wonder. They ground me. They are now my home.

I guess in some way the heartbreak that America causes me gives me now a sense of my former home more than America itself does. That sense of home too is existential But even writing that sentence is just proclaiming another reality which has always been true for me since I was a little sissy boy who grew up in 1960s Mississippi behind the enemy lines of the Civil Rights Movement. My whole life - the limning of it for so long with political passion - has been a living amends for having to navigate racism without agency as an orphan child and to discover and decipher and thus redefine goodness in those who loved me unconditionally and saved my life because I knew that there was such political evil in them which I witnessed through the conduit of their racism. But within the continually mined agency of my adult self I no longer have to redefine goodness embedded in political evil. I see now how it warps whatever was once good in someone. Standing against fascism and racism and bigotry does not, however, make you a good person in and of itself. It alone certainly doesn’t make me one. But there is no goodness to be found in being a fascist and supporting an American version of fascism again and again in the last 12 years. Because those who support it are no longer conned. That is a fiction we tell ourselves to rationalize reaching out to those we otherwise love. They are fascists. Full stop. It is that love we feel for the fascists in our lives that keeps us unbalanced and which they weaponize against us: our own continued love for them. Having grown up around segregationists, I call it the Mississippi Maneuver, love being the lever used against you to make you question if you are putting too much store in your own politics by giving a pass to all whom you find politically abhorrent. They get to keep their politics You have to question yours. But we are no longer even talking about politics because fascism foregoes politics in order to foist a systemic authoritarianism upon a populace. There is a through line though from such segregationists back then to such fascists today, from those who picnicked at lynchings to those who gleefully sell and buy gulag branded merchandise.

My whole life from that Mississippi childhood to this elder pilgrim phase has been about seeing my reality as clearly as possible and then redefining it in a way that makes it habitable for my sanity and budgets and aesthetics and my most innate impulse to understand it in an artistic and narrative way. I have always lived a redefined life, chapter after chapter of it lined up like those varied plants lined up along the terrace out there above the kasbah and that farther crescent of a beach, the combers that can’t quite clutch it, the tide the trust that lets them try. I have spent 69 years getting to this table in Tangier to witness the trust of each try. The sun hovers higher, then higher in the sky. And there - there - is the sudden lower hovering of a bee before me on the terrace. They are everywhere in Tangier, these bees, but they do not feel menacing. They instead meld into the city’s light and give such light its hum of life. The lone one before me breakfasts on the many varied terraced plants. I take its photo and am terribly touched this morning by it all, a woe that has awakened me to improvement and the beauty of nature that will not be denied by human vulgarity nor tyrannized by our cruelty. I sit now staring at the bee redefining its need as an act of kindness to the plant on which it feeds and, feeding on another, then another, chapter after chapter of them, showing a deeper kindness to me (and thus to you) by letting me watch it being who it is and just doing what it does. It too is getting on with it. And so begins another day in Tangier. I am being taught by one lone bee how to do what I do and, no matter what, to carry on. How grand it is to recognize there is the hum of life in that, the simple hum of it.

2.

And then there is the getting on with it of fame and politics and uber-wealth and the tribal transactional trade-offs that are redefined as friendships that truss it all up like women’s corsets did back during an earlier Gilded Age as both a tortured metaphor and an aesthetic instrument of … well … torture. I’ll get to more about that next.

But first I had to place the above photos side-by-side because when I saw Leo’s lowered cap heading to that Venice wedding as he tried to escape the notice of the paparazzi it reminded me of Big Gretch’s raised binders trying to escape as well the notice of the Oval Office photographers in D.C. In real estate, location is all. And so it is at times a statement about who someone actually is. Neither of these people were really trying to escape; they were instead trying not to be caught. They had the agency in their fame and their power not to be exactly where they were. We don’t see them, but we do.

Moreover, Leo is a climate activist as too supposedly is the bride - which is, you know, rich considering the pollutants and carbon released into the world from all the private jets and the armada of yachts that arrived for this decadent do. Yep, the exhaust fumes of hypocrisy were also enough to make you choke. It’s way past giving me a chuckle.

3.

The first corset above is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is from the 1880s, the height of that earlier Gilded Age. It was designed by the Worcester Corset Company. The second photo is one of the Venice bride wearing a corseted dress by Schiaparelli. It is from 2025. Her grasping groom is clutching the fingers of the hand that showcases her diamond engagement ring. Titanic was the name of a ship that tragically sank during the earlier Gilded Age but it is also the adjective that best describes that ring as well the bride’s remarkably enhanced breasts that are both aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, to her now-husband but also rather practical since they could keep her buoyed in case of any maritime accidents concerning his yacht and prove that she is as unsinkable as Molly Brown who was a passenger on the, yep, Titanic.

The bride’s love of corsets - or her husband’s - was even a main headline in The New York Times the other day. It was given the prominent top right-hand corner in the paper’s digital version on the same day that the senate was passing that hideously ugly and cruel bill that codifies America’s continued turn to high-tech oligarchical theocratic fascism and Netanyahu had ordered the bombing of a seaside cafe, al-Baqa, in Gaza where bohemian young people went to sign onto its wifi and find some sort of respite from the carnage he continues unabated and with American bombs to unleash upon them. That day they became the carnage. I live a life in cafes around the world - so much of my time each day is spent sitting in them among such young people and young families. I know the sense of community such cafes bring into lives. They bring it into mine. I am writing this paragraph right now in one in Tangier. I decry and condemn such evil - yes, evil - whether it is a cafe, My Coffee Shop, destroyed in Tel Aviv by a terrorist suicide bomber in 2002 or the al-Baqa in Gaza this week by what has become nothing but terrorism from on high disguised as war.

To see that corset story given more prominence than the bombing of that Gaza cafe and all the deaths it caused felt personal to a cafe habitué like me where I sit in so many this summer in mostly Muslim North Africa.

It broke my heart.

There was nothing existential about its feeling broken.

3.

I have always wanted to visit Venice and the shit-show shenanigans this past week won’t stop my wanting to got there at some point. I did tell a new friend here in Tangier the other day when we were talking in yet another little cafe I frequent about my pilgrim’s life that there are certain places I won’t go right now although I have always longed to visit them. “I won’t go back to America for maybe four years because of Trump,” I told him. “And I won’t go to Budapest because of Orban. I won’t go to Tel Aviv because of Netanyahu. And I won’t go to St. Petersburg because of Putin.”

And I know that Venice has always had a history of folks of a wealthy hedonistic who-cares-about-the-hoi-polloi ilk partying during earlier periods that pointed up their emptiness in direct proportion to their fabulousness. Sybarites side-by-side with Titians and titans and the timeless allure of eating cold pasta for breakfast in an ornate palazzo after having been out all night doing God knows what but thankfully The Old Guy Who Passes For God In Such A Catholic City can keep a secret until you happen upon a cathedral where confessions are heard and you seek as an afterthought some forgiveness but initially just a cool spot amidst some carved marble to marvel not at it but at your lark of a life.

I have long been fascinated by Peggy Guggenheim and her own life there. But lately I’ve been reading up on Venetian doyenne Luisa Casati. Here is how Judith Thurman’s story about her in The New Yorker begins: “Few priestesses of fashion have been better endowed for their vocation than Luisa Casati, a Milanese aristocrat who was born in 1881 to immense wealth, and who, having probably spent more money on clothes and jewels than any queen in history, died penniless in 1957. The Marchesa was exceptionally tall and cadaverous, with a head shaped like a dagger and a little, feral face that was swamped by incandescent eyes. She brightened their pupils with belladonna and blackened their contours with kohl or India ink, gluing a two-inch fringe of false lashes and strips of black velvet to the lids. Her cheekbones were vertiginous, her nose aquiline, her mouth a lurid gash. She powdered her skin a fungal white and dyed her hair to resemble a corona of flames. This alarming mask, as Cocteau observed, gave men the illusion that the woman who wore it had willfully ravaged a great beauty—a beauty she didn’t, in fact, possess.”

The first photo of her is by Man Ray. The second two photos by Paolo Roversi are not of Casati but of Tilda Swinton posing as her for Acne Paper Sweden.

I would have probably found a way to criticize Casati’s hedonistic vanity and flamboyance during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini if I had been alive back then and it is only because of the distance of time that I am more titillated by her than repulsed.

I confess it.

4.

There is a part of me that doesn’t begrudge anyone seeking their tribe whether they be oligarchs who are loyal to each other within friendships based on their being in the same rarified realm trying to live their lives as honorably as they can - I knew I few at that vulgar display of a wedding this week but was honestly disappointed in their being a part of it - or we cafe folk who find each other in war-torn regions or arrondissements or Manhattan’s outer boroughs or around yet another little corner in London. I happened upon members of my Tangier one at the Gallery Kent where photographer and portraitist Johnny Rozsa there at my side is having an art opening on July 10th as part of a group show to coincide with the weekend charity events chaired by Madison Cox centered around a one-night only performance of The Cherry Orchard directed by Rob Ashford - who lives part of the year here with his husband, Kevin Ryan, in YSL’s old place - which will star Kenneth Branagh, Penelope Wilton, Gillian Anderson, Derek Jacobi, Luke Thallon, and Michelle Dockery. It will be presented at Veere Grenney’s mountain estate. That’s Veere in the blue shirt with the gallery’s owner Aziza Laraki Perellon. Veere’s sister, Sarah Gruppy, and Stephenie Bergman are the other artists in the show. I am heading to Rob’s home, Villa Leon l’African, to begin a bit of reporting this afternoon about the production and the upcoming weekend of activities for a story I’ve been assigned about it all.

5.

The first photo is of the bride a couple of years ago eating some pizza after a state dinner when Biden was in the White House proving that oligarchical power is amorally fungible even if it was not fascistic in its earlier iteration when her then fiancé was finding his place card at a different kind of table. The second photo is of my new friend Fatima who comes into one of the cafes I frequent in Tangier where the barista will offer her a coffee for free in the way that the elderly are revered here and shown both kindness and respect. She’s eating a piece of cake I gave her along with the bottle of water I offered her, too. I love when she blows me a kiss and smiles. In some way my days now center around eliciting Fatima’s smile.

6.

BEES WERE BETTER

by Naomi Shihab Nye

In college, people were always breaking up.

We broke up in parking lots,

beside fountains.

Two people broke up

across a table from me

at the library.

I could not sit at that table again

though I did not know them.

I studied bees, who were able

to convey messages through dancing

and could find their ways

home to their hives

even if someone put up a blockade of sheets

and boards and wire.

Bees had radar in their wings and brains

that humans could barely understand.

I wrote a paper proclaiming

their brilliance and superiority

and revised it at a small café

featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers

in silver honeypots

at every table.

(Above: Bees and pastry shops go together here. This is one of my favorites in the kasbah. Patisserie Bab Al Madina.)

HUM

by Mary Oliver

What is this dark hum among the roses?

The bees have gone simple, sipping,

that’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication?

They’re small creatures and they are

filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not

moan in happiness? The little

worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.

Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand

that life is a blessing. I have found them — haven’t you? —

stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings

a little tattered — so much flying about, to the hive,

then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,

should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.

I think there isn’t anything in this world I don’t

admire. If there is, I don’t know what it is. I

haven’t met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,

and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and

read books, I have to

take them off and bend close to study and

understand what is happening. It’s not hard, it’s in fact

as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,

it’s love almost too fierce to endure, the bee

nuzzling like that into the blouse

of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course

the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over

all of us.

7.

Onward …