drawing

WASHINGTON — Sen. Lindsey Graham, the son of pool hall owners who rose to become one of his generation’s more influential U.S. politicians at home and abroad, is being eulogized Tuesday as a “swashbuckling” public servant and “true American original” during memorial services in Washington.

Graham’s remains arrived at the U.S. Capitol, where the Republican served for more than 30 years as an indefatigable dealmaker who talked and laughed and badgered his colleagues into action. His flag-draped casket was carried inside by an armed forces team, in recognition of his military service.

Later, a funeral will be held at Washington National Cathedral with lawmakers and foreign leaders, a testament to his stature on the global stage.

“Lindsey was a towering figure,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, adding there was “no one more capable of cracking up a room.”

“I look forward to the days when you make us all laugh again,” said Thune (R-S.D.), choking back tears.

President Trump is expected to deliver remarks at the cathedral, alongside Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity and other conservative leaders.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyplan to be in attendance, a nod to Graham’s role as a foremost believer in the power of the U.S. and its military to intervene in the world’s problems.

It’s the start of two days of services, with burial Wednesday in Graham’s home state of South Carolina. Joint Base Charleston will be renamed in his honor, the White House said.

Graham died suddenly on July 11 at his home in Washington of a likely aortic tear, according to preliminary findings. He had just returned from a whirlwind trip to a NATO summit in Turkey, where he celebrated his birthday, and a visit to Ukraine. He was 71.

A place of honor to ‘say our final goodbyes’

The morning service in the Capitol Rotunda provided a place of tribute where former presidents and military leaders and other prominent Americans have been memorialized.

Vice President JD Vance along with several Cabinet officials and former senators, including Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, were in attendance, as was acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, who faces a rocky Senate confirmation for the job.

Vance described Graham as a “swashbuckling” figure — “who swashbuckled into the Senate” with his suit jacket open — and was impossible not to like.

“A true American original,” Vance said.

First elected to Congress in the 1994 Republican revolt that swept the GOP to power, Graham was part of a new era of conservatives to take their seats in the House — and among the first Republicans from his Southern state since Reconstruction.

Mascaro, Kinnard and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this story.

“We’re putting on social, immersive figure drawing events for neurodivergent, queer nerds,” says Jennifer Martina, the producer at Nest of Friends, the nonprofit production company that stages biweekly figure drawing at Geeky Teas & Games in Burbank.

Martina and artist Sketkh Williams, Sketch by Sketkh’s host, provide a welcoming atmosphere across identities, skill levels and nerdy interests, while also playing to their own backgrounds in theater. The sessions feature dramatic lighting, staging and soundtracks, and use professional cosplayers as models. Embodying characters from “Star Wars,” video games, anime and other IP, these pros don’t just dress the part, they take pains to hit their characters’ canonical stances for attendees to capture.

For Martina and Williams, the events are an alternative to nude or more traditional figure drawing sessions. “That just doesn’t interest us,” says Martina. “We’re both theatrical people, so for us part of putting on a show is seeing characters, some cool costume design and a theme.”

• Best for: Practiced amateurs with nerdy interests
• When: Every other Thursday at 7:30 p.m.
• Ticket price: Starts at $23.18

WASHINGTON — California’s two Democratic senators on Thursday criticized the Trump administration after it requested $87.6 billion from Congress to address some of the nation’s most “urgent needs” but omitted funding for victims of last year’s Los Angeles wildfires.

“Donald Trump’s desire to punish Los Angeles and the state of California for not voting for him, means once again that thousands of Angelinos are left watching this administration fight for anything but them, their businesses, and their communities,” Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff said in a joint statement.

“These fires did not discriminate based on party or political preference. Neither should this administration,” they added.

The omission is the latest strain in a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over federal disaster aid, and it comes after Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met with President Trump at the Oval Office in April to request the funding.

At the meeting, Trump signaled his commitment to working with local officials to help with disaster recovery efforts. The officials asked for $16 billion that would be split between the city and county. The money would consist primarily of disbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency flagged for communities hit by the fires, part of a $33.9-billion wildfire relief funding request made by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Two months later, those talks have yet to yield results sought by local leaders.

The budget request, submitted by the Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday, mostly seeks funding for the Pentagon to address costs related to the Iran war. It also includes $11.1 billion in economic assistance for American farmers, $1.4 billion to address the Ebola virus outbreak in Central Africa, $500 million to support “ongoing efforts to complete restorations and construction projects” across the nation’s capital and $1 billion to boost the pensions of workers at General Motors that were cut as a result of the automaker’s bankruptcy.

“I urge the Congress to take action on these important and urgent requests as soon as possible,” White House budget director Russell Vought wrote in a letter addressed to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Vought said the administration was open to discussing “additional relief for other urgent matters.” The White House did not immediately respond when asked why the budget request did not mention the Eaton and Palisades disaster relief funds.

State leaders, including Newsom, have repeatedly accused the Trump administration of stonewalling billions in wildfire aid. The governor visited Washington in December to meet with lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to push for the funding.

The governor also attempted to meet with FEMA about the matter, but said his request was denied. Newsom, a political foe of Trump’s, would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to talk about the recovery efforts.

What does it mean to lack ambition in a country that worships wealth? It means you are a capitalist wallflower, a laggard with a serious character flaw. No field of endeavor is immune from this attitude, the art world least of all. But artists with a desire for riches and fame must not declare their intentions so brazenly. At a time when the plastic arts are about as marginalized as they ever have been, and media buzz is generated by dead painters whose works sell for enormous sums at auction, creation in and of itself has little value unless it is lashed to something marketable.

With his new novel “Contrapposto,” Dave Eggers has written a big-hearted, deeply moving story about the choices artists make, or don’t make, to square up their own notions of success and happiness. The book is dual bildungsroman, following two friends across the long span of their lives from adolescence to their 70s, as they fall in and out of each other’s lives, make their way in the world, and fumble around for meaning and purpose in their art.

The protagonist in “Contrapposto” is Rob “Cricket” Dibb, an underclass Midwestern kid, raised by a single mother in a North Indiana suburb that’s about as nowheresville as it gets for budding artists with dreams of glory. Cricket doesn’t dream big. He’s just trying to endure without bodily harm, seeking refuge from his mother’s abusive boyfriend in the basement with his grandfather Silas, who teaches him about jazz and the beauty of a glorious sunset. He draws so he doesn’t have to think. Immersion in art is his escape hatch from the dreariness of his pinched world: “The drawing meant nothing, would never mean anything to anyone, but it was true to how he saw it. His hand had recorded what he saw and felt about this thing. He was an ugly, common creature who could occasionally freeze time. That was enough.”

Cricket’s apprenticeship is decidedly informal. No full scholarship rides to Bard or Pratt for him; instead he saves up to enroll himself in a life drawing class in Chicago, where he discovers the beauty of applying rigor and rules to his work, how to break down pictures into the geometry of circles and squares, planes and angles. “He measured proportions and improved,” writes Eggers. “He grew more confident with each pass on his drawing, and realized … that much of the rightness of the drawing, of any drawing, came through time and diligence and discernment.”

He meets his slightly older schoolmate Olympia, one of Eggers’ most beguiling creations, when she implores him to scrawl scatological bathroom graffiti on a playground structure in Old-English typography. Unlike Cricket, Olympia is earnest and sincere about her art in the way that only a young person untainted by cynicism can be. She claims to inhabit the soul of Albert Camus, and flings around aphorisms about art that fly over Cricket’s head. She is an aesthete, someone who likes to go to the race track just to revel in the colors on display there. She wants to create an art scene in their little world. “You know all the great art movements have friends at their core, right?,” she tells Cricket. “A lot of time they’re jammed together by some critics and the artists reject the name and the association. But think about Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Did you know they dated for a while?”

Cricket is beguiled by her, and Olympia in turn is taken in by Cricket’s talent. When the local library pulls a few of Cricket’s semi-nude life drawing portraits down for fear of offending their patrons, Olympia becomes his advocate and champion. In contrast to Cricket, who skates along with no end plan, Olympia is a committed careerist, an artist who insists on a captive audience to justify her work. She wants to earn money as an artist; Cricket just wants to be left alone. This push and pull between the two frame Eggers’ novel across the six decades of his narrative.

One of many joys of “Contrapposto” is observing Cricket’s artistic awakening via the mentors who guide him into his artistic consciousness. Marcus Carpenter, a wizened sage in battered work boots (one imagines him as the art world analogue to the late novelist Jim Harrison), is the moral conscience of the novel, fighting the good fight for personal expression and railing against the “new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it.” Carpenter plucks Cricket from arts college and its meaningless pontificating to his “atelier in the corn,” a ramshackle Victorian where Cricket learns how to transmute what he sees with color and light. “The talented have talent,” Carpenter tells Cricket during one of his endearing rants. “The untalented have theories.”

From there, Cicket’s life is a crooked line. He doesn’t abandon art, but he can’t summon the urge to sell himself or his work, to graft his joy in making things onto the caprices of the marketplace. As Eggers jumps through time, we find Cricket working as an intern in an art gallery, an arid, lifeless space where nothing inspiring can possibly exist. As a young man he works as a ship-breaker in Turkey; in middle-age, we find him in a coastal town in Cambodia, making replicas of great paintings for tourists. Olympia, his elusive love and sporadic muse, flits in and out of his life as she works her way up the tiers of the art world’s ziggurat. She gently berates him for his timidity: “This is how artists have power. We sell work. You’re implying there’s nobility in powerlessness. That’s been an idiotic trope for too long — that participating in the business side of it taints you. Do you know how dumb that is? That artists have to be these fragile little wood nymphs that are too precious to touch the money?”

As “Contrapposto” arrives at its beautiful, life-affirming conclusion, we are left pondering the significance of artistic endeavor in a world that commodifies everything, including our bodies and brains. At a time when even the greatest achievements are debased in a culture that gives equal weight to meretricious novelty, is it even worth the trouble? Eggers’ brilliant novel has the answer: Follow your bliss. In the final analysis, it is all that matters.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”