West Side Story


The duet “One Hand, One Heart” was recorded live on camera at the Cloisters

I have seen four of the nominees for Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards — Don’t Look Up, Dune, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story. I’m rooting for West Side Story.

Only people my age will have grown up hearing multiple versions of the songs — the original cast, the cast of the 1961 film, and the 1984 recording conducted by Leonard Bernstein and sung by opera stars including Kiri Te Kanawa. Given all those performances, it’s apparent how difficult it would be to surpass all those performances and set a new standard. In our time, who could have brought that off other than Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner?

And it isn’t just the singing. It’s also the visuals, including the choreography and the vivid, constantly moving scenery (though there are a few quiet moments in scenes set at the Cloisters, “up above Harlem,” as Tony says). Even the drama — the parts that are not sung or danced — are compelling, though we know the story. Out on the streets, don’t miss out on the constant stream of 1950s cars! From the refrigerators to the ice cream sundae glasses, the retro visuals are beautiful (and accurate). Every member of the supporting cast is ridiculously talented, especially Mike Faist as Riff and Ariana DeBose as Anita. Rita Moreno, now age 90 and who portrayed Anita in the 1961 version, sings “Somewhere.” Some of the songs, including “Somewhere,” were recorded live, on camera. The Spanish accents and the untranslated Spanish make the story much more real. A trans character, Anybodys, played by the nonbinary Iris Menas, got West Side Story banned in such places as Saudi Arabia.

At 1:24 in the video, when “One Hand, One Heart” begins, watch Ansel Elgort’s throat, not only for the perfectly controlled and subtle vibrato but also for proof that the song was sung live on camera.

West Side Story can be streamed on Disney+ and HBO Max. The 2022 Academy Awards will be March 27.

For solidarity with Ukraine: Pierogi !


Pierogi with roasted Brussels sprouts and Impossible vegan chicken nuggets

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article (with a recipe) on pierogi, written by an American with Ukrainian ancestry. I read the article and could hardly wait to make pierogi. The article is “Making Ukrainian pierogi roots me to my family tree.”

I reduced the recipe by more than half, and I still have pierogi for another day. They’re not hard to make. It’s just a long process. I used yellow potatoes, and for the cheese I used Gruyere — the perfect cheese for comfort food. The Impossible fake chicken nuggets are the best I’ve tried. It has been years since I’ve eaten chicken, but I don’t think I’d know the difference. I didn’t have any sour cream, darn it.

Oil: Why can’t we ever learn?


The 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770 that belonged to Emperor Hirohito. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here we are once again in that most familiar of geopolitical pickles. The advocates of progress and democracy still have the oil leash tight around their necks, jerking them around and holding them back. The other end of the leash is held by oligarchs, despots, and the greediest and most powerful corporations in the world. We could have freed ourselves by now, but we haven’t. We like our oil too much.

I must hasten to confess how much fun it has been to have lived during the Oil Age. Cars! Labor-saving machines! World travel for the middle class! McMansions, heated and cooled! Lots of food! Lots of stuff! It has been a wonderful lifelong party, with oil in the punchbowl. The industrialization made possible by coal certainly changed the world, but it has been oil, more than any other thing, that has shaped the world we live in now and that made possible a precarious global population of 7.75 billion. The price of punch fluctuates, but the bowl is always full, at least in the rich countries. Back in the 1970s when they told us that we were running out of oil, they were wrong, and they probably were lying.

President Jimmy Carter learned what happens to governments that try to wean people off of oil. It’s the only sensible government policy, but people won’t go along with it. Today, as many people see it, one of the chief responsibilities of government is to keep the cheap oil flowing. Republicans, and all the other servants of oligarchs, despots, and greed, are happy to oblige. It’s clear that we’ll never be weaned off of oil until we can keep the party going on some other punch — renewables, we hope.

Normally I stay home and mind my own business. But the computer went haywire in my four-year-old Fiat 500. That took me first to a garage about seven miles from home for a new battery, which I hoped would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I had to take the Fiat to the dealership in Winston-Salem, 25 miles away. (The problem was diagnosed as a bad wheel speed sensor at the left front wheel.) Everywhere I went, people were complaining about the price of gasoline. At the Fiat-Chrysler dealer, there was not a single Fiat on the lot. Americans (unlike Europeans) hate little Fiats, and most models of Fiat are not even sold in the U.S. anymore. Instead, the dealer’s lot was acres of enormous and heavy vehicles — big trucks and SUVs. That’s what most Americans drive these days. The assumption, clearly, is that the cheap gas will keep flowing. Many people, obviously, can afford gasoline (though they still complain about the price of it). Many poor people, on the other hand, spend nearly 20 percent of their income just on gasoline. Oil is one of the key reasons for the sorry state of our politics. Given a choice between progress and cheap gas, cheap gas will get most people’s vote.

Americans, per capita, use at least five time more oil per capita than the people of China or India. That is a geopolitical weakness for America. And just look at the problems that Germany is having at present because of its need for Russian gas.

This is not going to be a feckless lecture on driving smaller cars and using less gasoline. What we do as individuals is a drop in the bucket, which is part of why we feel so powerless. What matters globally is what the advocates of progress and democracy are politically empowered to do, which will require a loosening of the oil leash. As for our love for cars and our dependency on them, electric vehicles and renewable energy may bring new political possibilities by freeing us from the oil leash. That’s a benefit above and beyond the necessity of just going easier on the earth. Just think how our politics could change if oil no longer mattered.

I wonder, though, whether I will ever be able to buy an electric vehicle as efficient and affordable as my little Fiat. I don’t have the slightest need for a hulking 3-ton electric truck or SUV, but it’s likely that that’s what most Americans are going to want. There’s still something very crazy about that.

Update: Slate has posted a good article about this: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?: When it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”

Vikings: Valhalla

Were the Vikings really this crude? Must a television series about the Vikings rely on such crude plots? I’ve watched only the first episode of this new season, but so far it’s all about revenge, jealousy, lust, and greed.

It begs the question, is there any continuous thread of human character from the medieval Vikings to the super-civilized Scandinavian peoples of today? I don’t know nearly enough to even try to answer that question, but somehow it seems likely. For example, consider Viking art, or this article on the Viking attitude toward animals. According to the article:

“‘The hierarchy we see today, where people dominate animals, did not exist,’ says Hanne Lovise Aannestad, an archaeologist and researcher at the Museum of Cultural History.”

The Vikings, it seems, saw animals as divine kindred. Whereas the Christians taught them that animals are feelingless and inferior beings to be used in any old way — dominion theology. Which idea is more primitive?

This crudeness of plot and dialogue is one of the mistakes that Game of Thrones did not make. In Vikings, where are the artists, the storytellers, the ship engineers, the ocean navigators, the people who learned and taught other languages? Must everyone swing a blade, including the women? And the hair! Scroungy hair at sea is one thing, but must we imagine that the Vikings couldn’t tame their hair, and make it beautiful, when they were indoors, feasting or debating?

I’ll probably watch an another episode or two before I bail. The best fun I get from Vikings, I confess, is cheering for the pagans against the obnoxious Christians.

Vikings: Valhalla can be streamed on Netflix.

Country comfort food

Biscuits are a misdemeanor. Fried biscuits are a felony.

The fact that it’s February is justification enough for comfort food. But the parlous condition of the world at the moment, with Putin (hopefully) knocked back onto his heels in Ukraine, is even more justification. Pinto beans, biscuits, and slaw are a Southern staple. Onions are always served with pinto beans. Danish Havarti is not exactly a Southern staple, but it’s a comfort food that goes ever so nicely with beans, slaw, and biscuits.

I was surprised to learn that not all Havarti comes from Denmark. I buy it at Trader Joe’s. I need to check on the source, but it’s possible that it comes from Wisconsin or Canada. According to the Wikipedia article, Havarti is a staple in Denmark, where 17,000 metric tons are produced each year. I can certainly testify that, in Danish hotels (which don’t necessarily reflect the kitchen tables of the Danish population), the breakfast buffets always include huge loaves of Havarti, mounted on a rotating-wire device for slicing.

Fry your biscuits in (what else) an iron skillet. I shortened the biscuits above with butter and fried them in olive oil.

The Urkainian national anthem

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post on Facebook, writes this morning:

“The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.

“The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: ‘Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.’

“That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.”

Though the Ukrainian national anthem sounds as though it was written for this very moment in history, its origins are in the 19th Century, and it was banned during the Soviet years: Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia.

Nay, thou art not dead, Ukraine, see, thy glory’s born again,
And the skies, O brethren, upon us smile once more!
As in Springtime melts the snow, so shall melt away the foe,
And we shall be masters in our own home.

The new LGBT numbers


Augustine of Hippo with his hair on fire. Philippe de Champaigne, circa 1645. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A new Gallup poll includes a surprising new statistic. That is that 20.8 percent of Generation Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. What’s surprising is that this change is happening so fast, not that the change is occurring. And no matter what religionists may think, this is a return to the pre-Christian normal, not some sort of breakdown in society.

It is a breakdown, though, in the iron grip of Augustinian religion. I am very happy for Generation Z, but this should multiply our sadness for so many millions of lives made miserable, for 2,000 years, by the church. It’s clearer now just how many millions of lives that was.

Alfred Kinsey shocked the world back in the 1940s with his study of male sexuality. Many said that Kinsey’s numbers, which were based on behavior rather than identity, must have been wrong. Now Kinsey’s numbers and contemporary polls are starting to align. Depending on which of Kinsey’s numbers one compares with contemporary polls, we may be even more surprised by the generation after Generation Z.

There is another sad element here. That is that the young people of Generation Z have little awareness of the history that brought them these gains. The short version is that they can thank the Boomers for it. It was the Boomers and their friends who rose up in great enough numbers not to put up with it anymore and to start society on its return to the norm.

You’re welcome, Generation Z.

Beneath the tips of the iceberg


Jill Stein (1) and Michael Flynn (2) with Vladimir Putin (3), December 10, 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post this morning on Facebook, is clear about the right-wing plan:

“Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

Richardson always chooses her words very carefully, aware that she is writing the first draft of history, and so “brought into the open” are the right words. It has been easy enough to identify, by connecting the dots, the most deadly struggle in the world today. That is the coordinated attempt by the kleptocratic global oligarchy to defeat democracy, to install corrupt right-wing governments everywhere possible, to reverse the post-World War II order, to keep oil billionaires rich for as long as possible, to subvert the rule of law to serve kleptocracy while using the law and the prisons against the opposition, and to force as many people as possible to live in right-wing police states, slaving for as little pay as possible, without social safety nets, to make the rich richer. Not only is it clear now what they are trying to do, it’s also clear who is on which side.

The installation of Donald Trump in the White House and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are features of the same plan. Yes, Putin meddled in the 2016 election. Yes, Trump has some sort of connection to Russia or Russian money that we still don’t know about. Many of the agents of the oligarchy have been exposed, for example Michael Flynn, who actually became Trump’s National Security Advisor. As Wikipedia mentions, “Flynn suggested the president should suspend the Constitution, silence the press, and hold a new election under military authority.” Just what Putin wanted.

It’s all of a piece, all part of the same plan. Though Trump failed to retain power long enough to back Putin’s military moves toward the west, Trump succeeded spectactularly at making the Republican Party part of the fascist project and educating susceptible Americans as fascists. The American systems of right-wing propaganda and Putin’s propaganda were aligned, leveraged by the malevolent use of technology. Just imagine how much more hopeless the global situation would be today if Trump were still in power, if the United States supported Russia’s military moves against democracy, if Trump was still in a position to strangle NATO, and if Americans were still being propagandized by a Trump White House.

There is still much that we don’t know, of course. The full extent of Trump’s criminality and treason is not yet known. The full details of the global plan to destroy democracy are not yet known by the public, though no doubt the Jan. 6 committee in the U.S. House of Representatives will reveal a great deal in its hearings this year. One of the elements of the plan that continues to puzzle me, though, is how some left-wing extremists came to be a part of it. I am thinking of the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and of so-called journalists — but actually propagandists and conspirators — such as Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange.

Who knows what Putin still has up his sleeve. But the invasion of Ukraine, I suspect (and hope) was a Hail Mary move. If Trump were still installed in the White House, then crushing Ukraine would have been a cakewalk. Putin is said to be a gambler and a risk-taker. The odds for Putin may look poor at the moment, with the United States and NATO up against him. Nevertheless, many people will die, and the economic destruction will be felt around the world. I am not the first to say it by any means, but it’s worth repeating: We are all Ukrainians now.

‘Typewriters are haunted’


Tom Hanks in California Typewriter ⬆︎

Twenty years ago, typewriters were headed toward extinction. No new typewriters of any quality were being made. The surviving typewriters were deteriorating, unused and unloved, and many were being junked. Around 2010, typewriters started making a comeback, particularly among young people who were born after the Golden Age of typewriters who were intrigued by the typewriters’ elegance, magic, and retro quality. In 2017, Tom Hanks, who is a typewriter collector, made a beautiful documentary, California Typewriter. That documentary gave new energy to the movement to save, and use, old typewriters.

I acquired my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My career was in newspaper newsrooms, so I have been around typewriters all my life. I confess that, around 1985, fascinated by computers, I stopped using typewriters. But around 1997 I salvaged an IBM Selectric III from the basement of the San Francisco Examiner and had it restored. A couple of weeks ago, while wasting time on eBay, I came across an Adler 21d electric — a huge office machine that weighs almost 45 pounds — and I bought it. It looked almost new, but it needed help. I’d collect typewriters if I could. But, unlike Tom Hanks, I don’t have anywhere to put 250 typewriters. Two or three well chosen, and well loved, typewriters will have to do for me.

California Typewriter interviews a good many people, but it focuses on a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco. It’s horrifying, but the typewriter shop closed in 2017 not long after Tom Hanks made his documentary.

There is a line in the documentary, spoken by a poet or writer, “Typewriters are haunted.” That is it exactly. There is something about old typewriters that is alive, that has a clear personality, a kind of mechanical spirit that is made happy when someone uses them to write. One pushes words into a computer. But a typewriter’s magic is that it pulls the words out. I thought I must have been the only person in the world who sometimes writes on a typewriter, then scans the typewritten page to get the text into a computer. Thanks to California Typewriter, now I see that I’m not the only one.

The biggest problem with owning, using, or collecting typewriters these days is that the number of typewriter shops and typewriter mechanics continues to dwindle. With my IBM Selectric III, I was fortunate to get a full restoration done by a technician trained by IBM who was in his eighties at the time. That was ten years ago, and the Selectric continues to work perfectly. With my Adler 21d electric, I was able to get some help (and a diagnosis of the typewriter’s problems) from Ed at A.B.C. Office Systems near Asheville, North Carolina — the nearest remaining typewriter shop near me. Because I’m mechanically minded and have some pretty good tools, I was able to do much of the work myself to get the Adler typewriter back into working condition.

Manual typewriters are much easier to find and easier to restore. I have a fetish for electric typewriters, though. They’re faster, easier to use for hours at a time, and somehow they seem more alive to me. The electric typewriters made in the 1970s by Adler, in West Germany, particularly fascinate me. I regard those Adler electrics as the apex of typewriter engineering and manufacturing before the IBM Selectrics came out with the “golf ball” typewriters as opposed to the typewriters with little hammers.

As someone in the documentary points out, typewriters — good ones, anyway — will never be made again. The typewriters we have now, and the neglected typewriters that we can save, are the only typewriters we will ever have.

Often even typewriter lovers know very little about the long history of typewriters, or how the office machine industry, through the turn of the century and the world wars, led straight to the development of computers. Below I mention a book that discusses some of this history.


A writer writes, in California Typewriter ⬆︎

California Typewriter trailer, on YouTube ⬆︎


My recently acquired Adler 21d electric typewriter ⬆︎

My video on restoring my Adler 21d typewriter ⬆︎

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. James W. Cortada. Princeton University Press, 1993. 350 pages.

Typewriters were an important part of the technologies that led to today’s computers. This book concludes, in fact, that because of the extraordinary demand for efficiently moving data to support the allied armies during World War II, “one could conclude that democracy could not be saved without the typewriter.”

The machines that saved democracy — including typewriters, calculators, and the earliest computers — are in museums now, if they were lucky. Less lucky examples of some very beautiful mechanical technology are waiting for us to find them, preserve them, and even use them. The luckiest old machines of all those that are still being used.

The academic left

Those of us who identify with the left are, to a remarkable degree, intellectually on our own. We read a lot, certainly, including the output of liberal and even leftist pundits. We may be members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, but the Democratic coalition includes a broad range of political interests, and thus the party makes no effort to tell us what to think. A few months ago I was wondering: Is there any publication that is smart enough and wise enough to make being a leftist a little less lonely? I had subscribed to The Nation for a while, but I quickly grew tired of its low-information, often strident, and heat-of-the-moment articles. I don’t even check their web site anymore. The biggest portion of political commentary (or propaganda, if you wish), both on the left and the right, is aimed at feeding our anger for the purpose of keeping us engaged.

We leftists are certainly capable of forming our own opinions about the train of daily political dramas. We can reason from our moral and political values (fairness, justice, caring, equality). And we may subscribe to well developed philosophical theories (for me that would be John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice). But each of us has limited knowledge, and taking a strong position on a particular issue had best be done with a reasonably good knowledge of that issue. That is the great weakness of the professional punditry. Day after day, though they are experts on nothing, they have to keep cranking it out. Members of think tanks (such as the Brookings Institution) can do a somewhat better job, because they are expected to spend some time on research, and they have areas of expertise. If you follow a serious magazine such as The Atlantic (which is not a leftist magazine by any means), you may find that the weakest articles are written by the staff (who are cranking it out), and the strongest articles are written by people who write only about subjects where they have some expertise and have done the research.

So then, what if there was a magazine with a staff of only four (and thus with no one cranking out articles), a magazine in which all the articles are written by the leading academics in a given area — people whose profession is not punditry but research and expertise. Dissent magazine is that type of magazine.

That I was not familiar with Dissent magazine and had to go looking for it is not terribly embarrassing. Its circulation is only about 5,000, maybe less. I think it would be safe to say that it is an elite publication. It is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It’s a quarterly, with a subscription price of $30 a year. The magazine was founded in 1954. It has a history of punching above its weight, if you measure the weight by the number of subscribers. When Dissent observed its 60th birthday in 2013, there were flattering articles: “A Lion of the Left Wing Celebrates Six Decades“, in the New York Times; and “A Modest Utopia: Sixty Years of Dissent,” by George Packer in the New Yorker. If you are a leftist, you will not be embarrassed by having a copy of it seen on your desk.

The caricature of leftist academic writing and thinking is that it’s opaque and loaded down with postmodern jargon, with a lingering Marxist fetish. With Dissent magazine that is not the case. The focus of the winter 2022 issue is “Beyond Bidenomics.” Except for an article on the Chilean economy, “The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?”, I read it cover to cover. There are advantages, I think, for a quarterly publication: altitude, enough altitude to provide some perspective and to stand clear of the daily media circus. Even monthly publications have to do some cranking. And I suspect that one reason for the narcissistic vacuousness of the way-overrated New Yorker is that the New Yorker has to crank that stuff out once a week.

You can check on Dissent magazine on its web site.