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Roberto Ignacio Díaz

@robertissimus.bsky.social
1K followers 676 following 580 posts

Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at USC | Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. | Author of “Latin America and the Transports of Opera” | Platonic Cyclist, Real Public Transit Rider | 🇨🇺🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇱🇩🇰🇵🇦🇨🇦🇲🇽🇵🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺🇻🇪🇪🇸🇮🇷🇰🇷

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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 18h
The old U.S. Embassy in London, designed by Eero Saarinen, now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel, readapted by David Chipperfield — not the worst metamorphosis, I suppose. The old eagle on top is now in the terrace of the, uh, Eagle Bar, presiding over Grosvenor Square as it has since the early 1960s.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Never really “got” Ana Mendieta, but after seeing the show at the Tate Modern, I’m in love with those silhouettes, the drawings on leaves, and the markings of our passing through this Earth everywhere. A sublime exhibition, worth the trip across the gray Atlantic.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Love you forever, Eero Saarinen, midcentury man.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Carlos Fuentes, aged nine, in a mural by Roberto Cueva del Río at the MacVeagh House, the 1910 Beaux Arts mansion serving as the Mexican embassy in Washington when Fuentes’s father was counselor in the 1930s. It’s now the Mexican Cultural Institute; the boy’s eyes remain as perceptive as ever.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Late summer, early fall. Sunday, drizzly sunset. A view of Maryland and the Potomac and West Virginia.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Late summer, early fall. Not a big fan of FLW myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking how much Jim would’ve have enjoyed Fallingwater. He would’ve have smiled through the entire tour and would’ve marveled at the iconic view — which, I confess, I did find most wondrous.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Trains and churches of Cumberland, Maryland.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oops: *marching* !
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Matching for Tibet this morning along Connecticut Avenue.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Awesome news for Los Angeles and surely too for Velázquez’s formidable Conde-Duque, who now gets to live in California.
getty.edu
Getty Acquires Rediscovered Diego Velázquez Painting | Getty News
“Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares” strengthens Getty’s collection of 17th-century European paintings.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
“His ego wants what it wants. He lives in a city that he evidently hates and that […] hates him back. But Trump’s obsession with these vulgar memorials to his own vanity is a reminder of the darkness around him, of his hostility to democracy, his loathing of honor, and his disordered mind.”
theatlantic.com
Trump’s Monumental Obsession
The president fantasizes about a capital city full of memorials—to himself.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Because nothing says impeccable grooming as his tiny Stars and Stripes pocket squares.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Late summer in D.C. | Blue Skies.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
… She fired a Gun to the Leaward, upon which our Colors were run up: within an hours time she came up with in Speaking distance and hailed us: — Where from? — From Boston! Whither bound? To Russia!” “A Traveled First Lady: Travels of Louisa Catherine Adams”
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
“17 September 1809 “We had not seen a Vessel since we passed Fair Isle in the North Sea — We had had a gale all day and night and the Swell was frightful — The Swell continued terrific — At about five o clock in the Afternoon a British Brig was discovered. …
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Me too. I think it’s the Colombian ambassador’s residence — almost an icon somehow.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Late summer in Washington, D.C., and the sky is blue. Despite it all, this city will be fine. Then again, it would be good to have more control over our own affairs, if you catch my drift.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
As usual, the readers of the Washington Post (if not its editorial board) gets it right.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Even “Blue” is being forced out of the Kennedy Center by Trump-appointed board. As some have suggested, this may well be the first step on demolishing the whole thing. Are we going to sit idly by as the Man in the White House exerts his power of destruction?
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
“They felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” “The Education of Henry Adams,” Chapter XXV
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It was actually at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2016 — a weekday morning when I was fortunate enough to be there all by myself; well, me with many copies of myself!
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Such sadness after so much joy.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Vertigo Belle de Jour Late Spring Fanny and Alexander In the Mood for Love
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Literary birth of a D.C. landmark, the Exorcist steps: “She turned a wistful look to her right, where, beside the house, a precipitous plunge of old stone steps fell away to M Street far below […]” William Peter Blatty, “The Exorcist”
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
From the timeline of my friend Paco in Madrid, from whom I’ve learned so much about Spain.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
He does sound … wondrous: “I like wealth being created.”
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Las rechazadas por Wordle sería difícil: un texto pentasílabo. Pero hazlo con las de Queen Bee. Titúlalo “Actant Canto”!
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Es raro lo que incluyen y lo que no. Tienen LOCO pero no CANTO, por ejemplo.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Borges would like a word.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
More like 1898 — when folks were remembering the Maine, Spain was being threatened, etc. #pedant
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Braved the humid heat to visit with the magnificent eleventh-century “Vishnu Reclining on the Serpent Ananda,” who is in at the National Museum of Asian Art all the way from the National Museum of Cambodia — reassembled for the first time in all his elongated gorgeousness.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Wait, there’s more!
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Flora of the District of Columbia in early summer, as Ozu would have it.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
wapo.st/4uTjWpM
wapo.st
This photo on the National Mall captivated the country decades ago. The real story behind it remained a mystery — until now.
In 1974, a group of friends met the unthinkable with a lavish celebration. The real story behind a photo that captured the moment remained a mystery until now.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Haunted by this image. What an awesome country America can be. We surely will be touched again by those better angels President Lincoln talked about. (There’s a link to the WaPo story behind the image in the comments.)
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
D.C. peeps, forget the algae and you-know-who and go see “Joan Miró and the United States” at the Phillips Collection. Today was my second visit and I loved the show even more than the first time.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
Con mi papá en una biblioteca perdida de Santiago de Cuba en 1961 o 1962. #FathersDay
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
D.C. peeps, it’s best to stay away from the Mall for now — at least until after the Fourth. It looks like a junkyard, apart from the algae and peeling paint in the reflecting pool — the saddest image for America’s 250th. As always, everything Donald Trump touches dies.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
In love with this melancholy head from the Kingdom of Benin at the National Museum of African Art — “a very rare late-15th-century copper alloy trophy head, likely of a defeated enemy — one of the earliest known examples of this genre of figurate cast sculpture from the kingdom.”
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
The larger story — a labyrinthine tale in which enslavers and their descendants unfortunately prevail. robertissimus.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/v...
robertissimus.wordpress.com
VIII – The Triangle
How to view that old portrait?  How to regard it?  Was it even Jean-Baptiste Gué?  We know it depicts a figure identified as an architect from Cap-Français. But was this our fourth great-grandfathe…
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
LOL. And call it the Trump Lincoln Memorial.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Even when it looks blue, teams of workers are needed to remove all the green stuff.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
In the realm of the algae.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Una maravilla, y sí, qué actores!
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Setsuko Hara, born in Yokohama on this date in 1920. Here she is in “Late Spring,” a radiant image of happiness.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
The sun sets over the Potomac all the way to Georgetown. Make no mistake: that name may be off the Kennedy Center, but the future doesn’t look rosy for the performing arts in D.C. The Washington National Opera has no home and the National Symphony Orchestra has yet to get a budget for next year.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
As seen at the Hirshhorn yesterday afternoon: Bacon, Lam, Mitchell, Diebenkorn. What a cool refuge from the humid heat and, worse,Trump’s wild circus on the Mall.
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Roberto Ignacio Díaz @robertissimus.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
What goes up …
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