from my Substack archives: Perfect album for today, how come I know Marla Maples, and holding on for 80 000 rabbits. Cindy Phillips, June 30, 2025
The noise of post-Glastonbury furore is overshadowed by the sobering reminder of Operation Hummingbird. Such a lovely name for what ended on Night of the Long Knives on the 30th of June 1934. The Nazis bestowed poetic names on the holocaust, you must give them that. It is a beautiful language, after all, and they were educated, cultured men, the Nazis. To a modern child who knows nothing of history, Kristallnacht will probably evoke twinkling delight.
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I can’t watch any news tonight. In contrast to sweet, authentic human being Robert Smith pouring love out at the audience at Glastonbury Music Festival, there’s the cacophony of Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” chant, that people are saying crossed the line from protest performance art into hate speech. The BBC streamed it live, which made it worse. (Fire that outdoor broadcast personnel immediately, and why hasn’t Bob Dylan stopped them using that name?) Now there’s a police investigation about it all, people’s travel visas got pulled, and everyone’s arguing about free speech versus incitement to war. It’s wild. Uncomfortably similar to the prelude to Night of the Long Knives, not in scale obviously, but in how quickly things can turn when emotion and politics mix. One moment you’re shouting slogans in your crochet dress at a music festival, young and in love and maybe a little bit stoned, next thing the state’s cracking down hard.
During Operation Hummingbird, the internet tells me,” at least 85 people were killed in what became a sweeping purge, though the actual number may have been in the hundreds, with some estimates as high as 700 to 1,000. As with all purges, its effect was to tighten Hitler’s control over the military and make it clear who held ultimate power. The judiciary, once a symbol of principle and fairness, quickly moved to justify the suspension of legal norms in a show of loyalty. Centuries of legal tradition were discarded with barely a murmur of protest. From that point forward, Hitler no longer merely operated within the law – he became the law. In a speech to the Reichstag, he proclaimed himself the supreme administrator of justice for the German people, and few dared to challenge him.”* (There’s a link in my refs at the bottom of this post that’ll give you more detailed research about calculation of the lives lost).
As the Night of the Long Knives progressed that night of 30th June 1934, on the other side of the world, in Three Rivers Michigan, Harry Bouton Blackstone Jr. was born. Despite the dreadful, evil energy that must have permeated the globe that night in and for a long time after – much as the Glastonbury fallout is doing tonight – Harry grew up to be a famous American stage magician and TV personality. Over the course of his career, he is said to have pulled over 80,000 rabbits from his sleeves and hats. It is the most joyful thing I imagined today. Eighty thousand rabbits! I hope the rabbits were cared for kindly
When Harry Blackstone died, on the 14th of May 1997, the newspaper headlines were all about the separation of Donald Trump and Marla Maples, his only American wife. I can remember reading in Vanity Fair that Dominic Dunne may have based the central characters in his 1990 novel An Inconvenient Woman on the Trumps. I was 33 at the time of the Trump split. Vanity Fair was an occasional treat from a second hand bookstore. Nobody could afford it new, of course. I bought heaps at a time. I have had had a massive crush on the editor, Graydon Carter, since my teens. In Trump Solo (May 1997), Mark Singer captured “a rare glimpse of Donald Trump in a moment of personal quietude, during his separation from Marla Maples. Stripped of his usual bombast, Trump came across as subdued, though not without flashes of theatrical self-regard—floating plans for a monumental bronze Columbus statue and joking about washing his hands after shaking thousands. The piece revealed a man preoccupied with image, craving attention yet withholding vulnerability, even in private turmoil. Singer portrayed Trump as someone who confided in no one, performing ceaselessly even for himself.” Looking back, one couldn’t help but wonder how Singer might have edited the piece—had he been clairvoyant enough to foresee what that lonely theatre of ego would eventually become.
I remember 1997 particularly clearly because I was getting divorced, I was depressed, and doing what I now understand to be dangerous isolation. I cleaned and rearranged the furniture in my new rented flat obsessively until the downstairs neighbour complained at 2 am on a couple of nights, and then I read all those Vanity Fair mags over and over for a few months. That’s how I know so much about Trump and Marla’s divorce. People are always shocked I know anything at all about modern politics, me having my head in the history books all the time. She’s lovely, Marla. His only American wife, you know? She’s my friend on Instagram now. She once liked a picture of my cat. She’s a vegan hippie these days. Trump wasn’t much a Vanity Fair guy, he liked television more. It wasn’t governance he craved then, but attention. The presidency would come later. He just wanted to stay famous, stay loud, and keep the myth alive. A crass guy.
We need Harry Blackstone Junior back, we really need those 80 000 rabbits out of a hat round about now. Which brings me to how I know everything about Glenn Barrie Shorrock, of Little Mountain Band, who was born on this day in 1944. In the 1980s I was a spotty art student in East London, and the Bonza Bay hotel had the kind of village pub that hosted resident bands for a couple of months at a time. My parents befriended one of these, The Silver Creek River Band, because they went there for a steak and a bit of letting their hair down on Friday nights. One of the band members, who claimed he had never worn shoes in his life, and had a beard down to his belt buckle, frequently came to our house for Sunday lunch. My mom always felt sorry for the musicians who had to be away from their families, in poky hotel rooms, for months at a time. This guy gave me his copy of Diamante Cocktail after he heard me playing the song Reminiscing repeatedly on my crappy tape deck in my bedroom one afternoon. I was overjoyed; the album had been a feature in the garage parties of my teenage years. I played it until my dad said I was damaging his record player needle. I’m going to take a few deep breaths, find the album on Spotify, and do a bit of that arm-waving 1970s dancing in my lounge right now.
Sources:
*Mark Singer, “Trump Solo,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1997. Also collected in Character Studies and later expanded in Trump and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
**(edited from) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
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