Books or eReaders

 

"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators"

                                                                            -- Stephen Fry

With this quote, I have a new favorite philosopher. Stephen Fry! You know, Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster. 

 

          That's him on the right as Jeeves.                             He'll be 65, August 24. 

                                                                                       Look at all the books behind him!                 

I don't remember when I first saw the very funny British comedy Jeeves and Wooster, I was certainly
an adult, probably over 50 when it aired in the U.S., probably on PBS, which has little to do with the topic of this blog post -- the contentious question Books or eReaders?

I do remember learning to read, though not exactly when. According to my mother, I was three. I  do very clearly remember actually learning. I would sit under the ironing board while my mother ironed and read to her. When I came to a word I didn't know, I'd spell it and she'd tell me what it was. By the time I was in the second grade, we were reading as a family. My mother, younger brother, and I would take turns reading aloud. Daddy enjoyed listening. There was no Amazon then and our town didn't have a public library so we read Momma's books from when she was a child.

My favorites were Johanna Spyri's Heidi and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. By the by, did you know that that book's proper title is Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse and it's one of the best selling novels of all time?! I didn't, either. Ain't Wikipedia grand!

             

I also don't remember when I got my first eReader, but I'm on my third one so however long it takes to wear out two of them, it's been that long ago.

Books or eBooks is a question that seems almost limited to my generation these days. To be honest, I really don't understand the fanatic loyalty to hard copy books that some of my peers seem to cherish.

At our age, vision is very often not as good as it used to be. You can adjust the light available on your eReader. You can adjust the font size. You can even have your eReader read to you. And eReader attributes that I appreciate are not needing to keep up with a bookmark or page number if you lose your bookmark. Not to mention, that if the book you're reading is lengthy and you like to read in bed, you don't have to worry about breaking your face if you fall asleep and drop the book.

Another thing about eReaders that I especially like is the ease with which you can acquire another book. I don't know about you, but I experience low-level panic if I finish a book and haven't another at hand to start. This can quickly lead to financial ruin if you automatically turn to an online book vender  in the middle of the night. A definite eReader negative.

But, spend a few pleasant moments with a librarian at your local public library and you'll learn how to download a digital book from the library for free. You don't even have to worry about late fees, because the digital book automatically reverts to the library on exactly the right date. Or, as icing on the cake, you can go online and renew the loan if you need more time to finish the book. You have the same 24/7 access to books as with an online vender, but the money you need to pay your electric bill is safe. 

When I first went digital, I said I'd never buy another hard copy book. Well, let me just say, I still can't take my credit card into an area where books are being sold or I'll get into financial trouble. I still bring hardcopy books home from the library. I cherish books people give me as gifts. I love the "Little Free Libraries" scattered around my town. And I even rescue and mend books I find lying on park benches.

So my answer to the question "Books or eReaders" is a resounding YES!!!

P.S. I like stairs and elevators, too,

especially if they're ornate and take me where I want to go.

Freedom of Choice

 

The statue on top of this building is called "Freedom." 

Buckle up. You're in for a history lesson!

In 1854, Sculptor Thomas Crawford, originally from New York, was commissioned to design and complete a full-size plaster model of the statue "Freedom" in his studio in Rome, Italy. All nineteen and one-half feet of her. 

Jefferson Davis (yes, indeed, that Jefferson Davis) was in charge of the then ongoing construction of the Capitol building and all it decorations. There was a kerfuffle between the New Yorker and slave-holding Mississippian. Crawford had originally crowned Freedom with the liberty cap, a symbol of an emancipated slave. Needless to say, Davis being the boss, won the tussle. 

Crawford died in 1857 before the full-size plaster model could be shipped to the United States. In the spring of 1858, divided into six crates, she set sail for New York. During her voyage the ship began taking on water and put in at Gibraltar for repairs. The ship left Gibraltar only to begin leaking again and ending up in Bermuda. After stopping there in storage for a while, Freedom, or at least half of her, arrived in New York City in December, 1858. Finally all parts of the plaster model arrived in Washington, D.C. in late March 1859.

Casting of Freedom in bronze at the Mills Foundry outside Washington, D.C., began in 1860. The work was interrupted in 1861 by the Civil War and again when the foreman in charge of the casting went on strike. Instead of paying him higher wages, Mills turned the project over to Philip Reid, one of his slaves working at the foundry. Reid presided over the rest of the casting and assembly of the figure. Freedom was finished by the end of 1862. On December 2, 1863, a year and a half before the end of the Civil War and eleven months after the Emancipation Proclamation, former slaves completed the installation of this bronze woman called Freedom to her pedestal atop the Capitol of the United States. 

I find it ironic that "Freedom" a.) is personified as a woman; b.) that her design had to be approved by a slave-holding man; and c.) that she was finished and raised to her pedestal by slaves and newly-freed slaves.

Just like that beautiful statue standing high above Washington, D. C., women's rights, indeed almost everyone's rights, have followed a long and torturous path from that grand Declaration of Independence and the nascent days of The Constitution. And it looks like we've still got a ways to go.

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie and his Alice's Restaurant, "Freedom" is what I come here to talk about. Not a statue, or a symbol, but the real freedom for American citizens to make life-changing (even life-or-death) decisions about their own medical care -- specifically women citizens and anyone with a uterus. The Freedom of Choice. And that is exactly what I mean Freedom of Choice. NOT pro-abortion. And having only one choice, is no choice at all.

There are as many experiences of pregnancy as there are people who have been or are pregnant. 

I have a friend whose mother was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy, but she exercised her freedom of choice and carried my friend to term. And I'm glad she did. That instance, however, did not in any way involve a "law" or a court's decision.

What about governmental regulations? 

In 1970 when Air Force Capt. Susan Struck, a career officer serving as a nurse in Vietnam got pregnant, she was transferred to a base in Washington, one of the few states where abortion was then legal. Not only was pregnancy a reason to discharge her, albeit honorably, but the regulation extended beyond that "The commission of any woman officer will be terminated with the least practicable delay when it is established that she...has given birth to a living child while in commissioned officer status."

Despite Struck's plan to give the child up for adoption (which she did) and the fact that she had 60 days of accrued leave for recovery time, a disposition board gave her a choice: Have an abortion on base or leave the military. An abortion or the end of her career? There is no choice here.

Struck's case was brought to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Her attorney in the case was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Although the Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear Struck v. Secretary of Defense, Ginsburg's legal wrangling led to the Air Force's decision to reverse its policy.

                             

Where was Liberty for women among these symbols? And it wasn't just the Air Force. It was the Department of Defense.

And it wasn't just the Federal Government who treated pregnant women differently from men although their pregnancy would not affect their ability to do their job. Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women teachers could be required to take enforced, unpaid leave. Private companies could use pregnancy as a reason to deny disability benefits otherwise available to all employees. (I know, I know. pregnancy is not in and of itself a disability. But sometimes pregnancies do not follow a normal course, and mothers-to-be are put on bedrest or have other restrictions to avoid premature birth or miscarriage.) Businesses could refuse to hire someone because they might become pregnant. (I suppose they still can, but they can't say out loud that is the reason.)

Probably the most important thing about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is that it was passed after the Supreme Court, in 1976, upheld the General Electric Company's right to treat pregnancy-based disability differently than any other nonwork related disability for insurance purposes on the basis that pregnancy-discrimination is not sex discrimination. That 1978 amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress.

"Passed by Congress" to correct what many thought was a wrong decision by the Supreme Court.

The current Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. They said they were returning decisions relating to abortion to the States. Many of us think the current Supreme Court's decision to turn our decisions regarding our own reproductive health over to the various and sundry States was a wrong decision. It's already limiting our Freedom of Choice and endangering not just our reproductive lives but our actual living-and-breathing-free lives. 

Pro Choice is NOT Pro Abortion. It is just what it says. Pro Choice. The Constitution does not give us Freedom. It prohibits government from taking our Freedom away from us.

You and I cannot decide who sits on the Supreme Court of the United States. And we cannot change the fact that it has now given our Freedom of Choice to the State governments to do with as they will.

But we can, together, decide who sits in our State Houses and in our Congress with our votes. It's up to us to protect our Freedom. Our choices this fall will have real life effects on our mothers and sisters, our daughters and granddaughters, on all the men in their lives, and anyone whose lives are directly affected.

It's time to stand up for Freedom.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

 

A book. A movie

Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 book by Delia Owens was her first novel. It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list for 2019 AND for 2020. Okay, so Where the Crawdads Sing is not on this week's New York Times Best Sellers List, but it was on that list for more than 168 weeks.

Owens has a BS in zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis. Her studies of African wildlife behavioral ecology have been published in such scientific, peer-reviewed journals as Nature, the Journal of Mammalogy, and Animal Behaviour.

Although most of her field work was done in Africa, it's safe to say that she knows where from she speaks in describing the world of Where the Crawdads Sing. And she describes the saltwater marshes of the North Carolina coast beautifully.

In the Prologue she sets the scene, and the scene is as great a part of the story as the human characters.

     "Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows

     into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, 

     and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace--as though not built to fly...."

     "Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in 

     clammy forests. [....] There are sounds of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is 

     quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the 

     rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."

 As in all good murder mysteries, Owens gives us a body. 

     "On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp.... 

     A swamp knows all about death, and doesn't necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly 

     not a sin. But this morning two boys from the village rode their bikes out to the old 

     fire tower and ... spotted his denim jacket."

But is it murder or is it suicide? If it is murder, who dunit?

Kya's story begins the first of two timelines in 1952. She is six years old, the youngest of five children.

    

     "The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines 

     with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet except for the low, slow flap of 

     the heron's wings lifting from the lagoon. Kya [...] heard the screen door slap. Standing 

     on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of 

     worn-out suds."

The sound of that screen door shutting was her mother leaving. In the following weeks, Kya's oldest brother and two sisters left, too. Her brother Jodie, seven years older than she, was the last to leave her alone with their father.

 

     "She knew by the way [Jodie] spoke that Pa had slugged him in the face."

     "'Kya, ya be careful, hear. If anybody comes, don't go in the house, they can get ya there. 

     Run deep in the marsh, hide in the bushes. Always cover yo' tracks; I learned ya how. And 

     ya can hide from Pa, too.'"

When I first heard about this book, I was skeptical about so much of the story. A six-year-old left in the care of a physically abusive, alcoholic? The local authorities were aware of the situation and they did nothing?

My initial skepticism of that part of the story evaporated pretty quickly when compared with my own experiences. 

I worked for Oklahoma's welfare department in the 70s, some twenty-five years after this story starts. I'm sorry to say, things were not much different. We had a sexually abusive family. The abuse was documented by older children who had gotten themselves out of the home. They provided us with photos. We took the photos to the local assistant district attorney and were told he didn't want to look at them. Nothing was done. And that was not the only time families were treated differently by the law. Not because they were "swamp rats," like in North Carolina, but because they were "white trash."

Then there was the question of how a six-year-old could survive without parental care and guidance. 

For a period of time after everybody else left, her father stopped drinking so heavily. He taught her about fishing and operating his boat. He had been injured in World War II and received a weekly disability check from which he gave her small amounts of money to buy food and fuel for the boat. But he took to drink again, coming home less and less often until he just never came home again.

The people in the village, for the most part, ignored her or ridiculed her. Over the years, when the authorities took note of Kya, they attempted to literally catch her and put her into "normal" situations like school or a group home. Attempts, she saw as trying to trap her like an animal.

There were a few people in the Barkley Cove community who did befriend her, albeit mostly from a distance -- Jumpin' and Mabel, the African American couple ran the town's equivalent of a convenience store. They treated Kya with kindness and respect and provided what parental guidance she received. Tate, the son of a fisherman, taught her to read and provided her with books from the library. And Chase Andrews, whose daddy owned the local Western Auto store, fed Kya's dream of being accepted in   Barkley Cove.

The salt marshes of North Carolina were Kya's natural habitat. Kya was smart. She learned about life, about survival, from those saltwater marshes. Kya mostly did what she could figure out on her own to do. And, like her mother, she was a talented artist, drawing and painting and describing her world. 

The second timeline weaves in, around, and through Kya's life. It starts in 1969 and covers the investigation of Chase Andrews' death, Kya's murder trial, and the rest of her life. 

The local authorities decided that the manner of death of Chase, a football star and the only child of the closest thing to society in Barkley Cove, must be murder. His status in the community must surely make him immune to suicide, and he was too athletic to just fall from the old fire watch tower. Someone must have lured him up there and pushed him to his death. Chase's clandestine relationship with Kya, the swamp girl, while planning to marry a more acceptable Barkley Cove girl, made Kya the most obvious perpetrator. Her low status, also made her the least able to defend herself -- a slam dunk conviction for the prosecutor and a satisfying solution to the mystery for the townsfolk. 

And now it's a movie!

Where the Crawdads Sing, the film is visually stunning. It was filmed in the saltwater marshes of Louisiana, and they are beautiful. Filled with the natural world, neither the book nor the movie mentions dangers from animals native to saltwater marshes -- I'm thinking, mosquitos and ticks and alligators, all of which can cause death either by disease or predation. Both the book and the movie focus on the most dangerous animal in nature. Man.

Where the Crawdads Sing, the movie, deserves very high marks. 

Kudos to the Producers led by Reese Witherspoon. They knew what they had and produced a movie faithful to the original story. 

To Polly Morgan, Director of Cinematography, for the lush photography.

To Screen Writer Lucy Alibar for fitting the story into the movie's two hour and twenty-five minute time frame.

To Casting Director David Rubin for putting together this wonderful cast.

To the actors including, but not limited to 

           

             Jojo Regina as Little Kya                            Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya

  
                 Sterling Macer Jr.  and  Michael Hyatt                                Harris Dickinson

                           as Jumpin' and Mabel                                                as bad boy Chase

and David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Kya's defense attorney

And certainly, high marks to Director Olivia Newman who knew what she had when the actors gave her good performances.

Both the book and the movie are excellent. Truth be told, you can only read the book. Or you can only see the movie. Each is worth your time on its own. Me? I'm glad I did both.

Negroland, a memoir -- a book review

 

The book cover

Margo Jefferson, do you know who she is? 

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995 for her book reviews and cultural analyses in The New York Times. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) in 2016 for Negroland a memoir which was also short-listed that year for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, an annual British prize for the best non-fiction in the English language. And  this year, 2022, She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. (After reading the book, I googled her, a little research before writing the review. And all I've got to say about these honors is that I am impressed with the organizations. They had the great good sense to recognize and reward her work.)

How did I find out about this book? Since I seldom read reviews before I read the book or watch the movie or listen to the music. My daughter recommended it. While attending a writing program at Skidmore several years ago, my daughter heard Ms. Jefferson read a passage and thought I'd enjoy it. It didn't hurt a bit that one of the blurbs on the dust jacket is from Isabel Wilkerson, an historian whose work I very much admire. My daughter was right.

Okay, so you've read Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming -- if you haven't, do yourself a favor and read it. You can get it free from your local public library. And read my January 14, 2019 blog post reviewing it. (It's available in my blog's archives. Also free.) 

They grew up in the same city, Chicago -- our Michelle and Margo -- but a generation apart. Both are African American. Both are intelligent, well-educated women. And both have achieved great success. Dispite this common ground, I think you'll find Margo Jefferson and Michelle Obama to be as different as a Live Oak and a Coastal Redwood, both beautiful and hardy enough to not only survive but thrive in this hostile world.      . 

Michelle Obama grew up in a working class neighborhood amid a close, extended family. She attended neighborhood schools and was encouraged to get the best education possible. 

Margo Jefferson grew up in a wealthy, highly educated family, her father a doctor and her mother a social worker. They lived in an upper class, becoming integrated, neighborhood. They had famous people from the sciences to the arts as guests in their home. Her parents had a cabin cruiser docked on Lake Michigan. She describes themselves as "The Third Race ... poised between the masses of Negros and all classes of Caucasians. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity." They were the Negro Elite.

Growing up white in Oklahoma at the same time Ms. Jefferson was growing up in Chicago, I knew nothing of The Negro Elite. 

Obama's growing-up world was very like my own and that of my family and friends. I was the daughter of an electrician. My friends included the daughter of Cuban refugees (they had been wealthy and influential before Castro took over), the daughter of an art teacher at the local college (he may have been a professor, that was before I was familiar with academic ranks), the daughter of a highway construction crew boss, and the daughter of the local veterinarian (actually, he got his DVM at the University of Pennsylvania. Who knew that was, and is, an Ivy League school?) The son of a former Governor/US Senator was in my typing class, but I doubt he knew my name. To be honest, I knew nothing of The White Elite.

The one thing Margo Jefferson and I had in common was learning about the world through literature. All kinds of literature -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism and all their various permutations. During her sophomore year in highschool, she was introduced to the essay, "challenging essays -- by E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and James Baldwin."

Jefferson describes the first time she read Baldwin. She quotes from Notes of a Native Son, "Many Thousands Gone."

    The story of the Negro in America is the story of America--or, more precisely it is the story
    of  Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. [The
    Negro in America] is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we 
    helplessly battle."

At that young age, she began her life of critical analyses of the Word. "Who is this 'We'?" she asks. And answers, "It's you, white readers. But what of We, his smaller band of Negro readers? ...the Negro that so many Negroes like me dread having plural relations with."

Back to Baldwin, she quotes him "One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds."

Then she says "'One': a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than 'we.' An 'I' made ubiquitous. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation."

She, that highschool sophomore, continues,
    "Close the book. (Breathe deeply.) James Baldwin is proclaiming right of entry with
    every possessive pronoun, integrating America by means of grammar and syntax. No
    demonstrators hosed into the air and crashing onto pavements, no tear-gassed bodies
    coughing and twisting, no children our age dressed in exhaustively clean, pressed clothes
    to walk shielded by armed guards into schools built to deny them."

You know how some times you are moved by the perfect, most beautifully honest music or painting or movie or a play that gets life so right you see the world differently. I think that's what the best art forms done well do. The artform that has the strongest effect on me is the written word in my language, English. As I read, the words are experienced inside of me, not on a stage or screen across the room. Strong words, direct words put together in ways I'd never thought about, explode in my head, sunbursts glinting off shards of old understandings scattering into the darkness of the past.

In Negroland a memoir, Margo Jefferson did that for me. Over and over in its pages. It is the best  memoir I've ever read.

Margo Jefferson

Truth to tell, I just like the looks of her. She could be in our walking group. And I bet she'd be a great addition at coffee as my friends and I conspire to save the world.

West Side Story -- a review

 

First watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5GJLwWiYSg

This, friends, is the best movie I've ever seen. Yes, just like the original 1957 Broadway play, it is a musical. So if you do not like musicals, you need not watch it. And if you like musicals because they are joyously light entertainment, you may not want to watch it.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet inspired Jerome Robbins' original Broadway production of West Side Story. 

        William Shakespeare 1597                                                        Jerome Robbins 1957        

The young daughter and son of two rich,                             A young Puerto Rican girl and white boy

powerful Veronese families fall in love.                               from poor families fall in love.

Two households, both alike in dignity                                 Two gangs, both alike in poverty 

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),                            in Manhattan's Upper West Side.

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,                         A neighborhood divided by race,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.                     being torn down by Urban Renewal.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes                         Both gangs are losing their "turf."  

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;                         A pair of star-crossed lovers meet.

           ....                                                                              

The fearful passage of their death-marked love                   Hate warps their death-marked love.

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,                          If their love cannot defeat hate.         

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.                     Can death?

West Side Story is set in the mid-1950s in Manhattan's Upper West Side. The blue-collar neighborhood is already stressed by limited resources and racial strife. Add to that Urban Renewal. New York City intended to remake substandard inner city housing and limited or deficient community services into a clean, safe place for people to live. It, however, ended up destroying neighborhoods and displacing poor and powerless people.

Robbins' Broadway musical reimagines Shakespeare's wealthy and powerful Veronese Montagues and Capulets with New York City street gangs. Tony, a former member of the white Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican Sharks. Their love story inflames already explosive neighborhood racial tensions. 

The musical's dark theme focusing on real life, contemporary social problems ending in violence and tragedy expressed in music and dance marked a turning point in American musical theatre.

From the mid-'50s into the '70s, West Side Story's theme was real life experience for the people living in Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood. In April, 1955, Mayor Robert J. Wagner, Jr.'s Slum Clearance Committee approved Lincoln Square for Urban Renewal. Committee Chair Robert Moses defended his forced displacement of poor and minority communities saying, "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."

The Broadway production was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 1958, winning two. The 1961 film adaptation, co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten, including Best Picture. 

2021 Enter Steven Spielberg
Is there anything he can't do? And do it better?

I chose this photo of Spielberg, because in it, he looks like someone I would like to know. Okay, so I've never seen Jaws or Saving Private Ryan and don't intend to, but his movies -- The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Lincoln, The Post, and now the remake of West Side Story make me think he is the kind of man I would like to know.

What is different, 1961 to 2021? Lots and little. The story is the same. 

The cinematography has, as one would expect, changed the most in the 60 years since the first West Side Story movie. Technology, technology! Remember they didn't even have cell phones in 1961. No human had yet stepped on the moon. The movie industry was still dangling space ships from wires.

                

from the 1961 movie                                     from the 2021 production

The new production's light and color seem to heighten the sense of an old neighborhood being torn down to be rebuilt, all shiny and new, for shiny new people because its current residents will not be able to afford to live there.

Top: Rita Moreno as Anita in 1961. Scene shot on a set in a studio.
Bottom: Ariana DeBose as Anita in 2021. Scene shot on the streets of Harlem.

2021 Rita Moreno
as Valentina,
the voice of reason in 
Spielberg's West Side Story

The Sharks' leader and Maria's brother Bernardo

  
1961 Sharks                                              2021 Sharks      

        George Chakiris definitely sexier            David Alvarez, pretty attractive, too  

The Jets' leader and Tony's best friend, Riff

              

                         1961 Jets too cool                                    2021 Jets too eager                                              Russ Tamblyn                                               Mike Faist                 

The Balcony scene

1961

 
Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood

I didn't know if the new Tony and Maria, Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, could come up to Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, but they do. If anything, they seem younger which makes the "love at first sight" premise more believable. And their being so quickly swept away by their passion without regard for the tragically strong passions their own would provoke.

2021

Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler

Leonard Bernstein's music and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics are unchanged, "Almost perfect in every way."

Gustavo Dudemel conducted The New York Philharmonic, recording about 80 percent of the score in New York City. Then the Covid lockdown hit. Shifting to Los Angeles, post production, Dudemel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic to finish recording the music. 

A man named Justin Peck, just 34 years old, did the choreography for Spielberg's movie. It's possible his parents weren't even born when the first West Side Story movie was made.

The music and choreography build a solid emotional base for the story.

Spielberg uses Shakespeare's pacing -- build tension then break it with humor. Let the audience relax, then drop the hammer.

In this production, Spielberg follows the threatening behavior at a school dance and an even more aggressive clash on the street between the two gangs with a decidedly humorous scene in the court room. Tension builds again only to be broken by Maria.

Celebrating her new love, she whirls and twirls through the department store where she works as an after-hours cleaner, singing "I Feel Pretty." It's light-hearted and colorful, but reminds us that Maria and her fellow cleaners are too low on the social register to shop in the store they clean.

When Maria gets off work, the hammer drops.

The Rumble -- 2021
Take overhead photography,
emphasize shadows,
add music, dance,
threaten death.

Murder happens. More murder happens. Nothing can stop the violence except more murder and threat of murder.

The terrible fabric of violence between people, against love, against hope, woven of music and dance will break your heart.

The Wheel of Time

 

by Robert Jordan
and Brandon Sanderson

The Wheel of Time is now a TV series available from a streaming service which shall remain nameless. To say that I am a devotee of the fantasy series would be a gross understatement. To say that I am disappointed in the TV production would completely misstate my reaction to what they've done to Robert Jordan's epic fantasy.

I understand how remote the likelihood is of most people reading any series consisting of  fourteen volumes and a prequel, totaling 10,173 pages in the hardback editions -- not including glossary or appendix page counts. That's 4,410,036 words according to Wikipedia.

Hard to even think about, isn't it.

But that's even more reason that the TV series folk should have more faithfully interpreted Jordan's story. And they could have done. They could use video in place of many of those millions of words.

This is an overview of Robert Jordan's life's work, so ably completed by Brandon Sanderson.

The Plot, simple, time tested, Good versus Evil. Not unlike every war humans have ever fought. At least from your side's point of view.

     Thousands of years before the book series starts, The Creator created a world
     based on the concept of balance with the Wheel of Time to run it. The Wheel,
     driven by the One Power, spins out threads (the lives of men and women) which
     are woven into the Patterns of the Ages. The One Power is divided into saidin 
     which men can channel and saidar which women can channel. Those who could
     channel, both male and female, were the original Aes Sedai. They worked together
     to protect and serve the peoples of the world.

                      
 Ancient Symbol of the                                    Snake eating its tail    

  Aes Sedai, men and women                                   the golden ring              

               (Looks familiar, doesn't it!)                                  Aes Sedai women                               

     Underpinning the sense of balance in this world, there was a destroyer, Shai'tan, 
     the Dark One. The Creator imprisoned Shai'tan away from the Wheel, but during
     The Age of Legends, also long before the series starts, something happens and
     The Dark One's prison is ruptured allowing him to touch the world and corrupt
     some of the powerful and ambitious people to support him. They attempt to
     free him.

     In that Age, the Wheel spun out the Dragon Lews Therin Telamon to defeat
     The Dark One and his followers. Using seven seals, Lews Therin resealed the

     Dark One's prison, but The Dark One cast a taint on saidin, the male half, which
     caused any male channeler to go insane doing all sorts of damage to the world
     and the people around him before he dies. This left the female Aes Sedai to 
     consolidate their power and rule the part of the world on which the series focuses.

     
     Unfortunately the seals Lews Therin used were flawed and by the Third Age,
     which is when Jordan's book series starts, the seals are failing. The Wheel spins
     out a new Dragon to battle The Dark One and his forces.
    

You don't need to know all this before you start the books. You discover it as you read.

The Theme, also simple and time tested. Seemingly ordinary people from ordinary lives do have what it takes to step up and save the world.

     “Egwene and Nynaeve, Rand and Mat and Perrin. All five from Emond’s Field
     in the Two Rivers. Few people had come into the Two Rivers from outside,
     except for occasional peddlers, and merchants once a year to buy wool and tabac.
     Almost no one had ever left. Until the Wheel chose out its ta’veren, and five
     simple country folk could stay where they were no longer. Could be what they were
     no longer.”

Characters. Robert Jordan was not only a master at world building, he drew characters that you can know well enough to recognize on the street in your own world. Each of the five main characters has their own story arc. Indeed, the supporting characters have their story arcs. And even some of the minor characters.

The three young men from Emond's Field are twenty years old, only just coming into adulthood. Egwene is a couple of years younger. Each comes from a stable home and is raised with traditional values. Nynaeve is several years older and holds a position of power in their community. She was trained by the town Wisdom to provide medical care to the Emond's Field people. When her mentor died, she became the Wisdom  and she took on the responsibility for the well-being of the town with a passion. That passion became an obsession focused on the four young people forced out of Emond's Field by the Wheel's will.

These young people travel through their world. They learn about and from the many differing cultures. They flee from and battle against The Dark One and his devotees. And they become powerful enough for Good to defeat Evil.

Now about this TV production.

Contrary to the perverted television series, Perrin was not married at the beginning of the story and did not kill his wife, accident or no. Mat's father was not a drunk and womanizer. Nor was his mother crazy.

For that matter, Egwene's father owned the Winespring Inn and was the town's mayor. Rand's father made the cider and brandy served there and was a respected member of the town council. Egwene's mother cooked the meals served in the inn's common room and was active in the town's Women's Circle. I can assure you, the inn was clean and the patrons there, orderly, even during festival.

And don't get me started on the misbegotten costume designs!

They did do a good job of the Trollocs.

Perhaps if the TV production were intended to fill the niche left empty at the end of Game of Thrones, this abomination might be understandable. Understandable, not acceptable. 

Please, please, please. Enjoy the TV series, if you must. Just remember, it in almost no way reflects Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's well-crafted story.