The ugly subway and the ugly Subway

Yesterday afternoon, I stepped onto a DC Metro train and found myself on the Ugly Car. By that, I mean only a subway car which was fairly crowded and where each passenger seemed to have at least one physical characteristic that was extraordinarily ugly. Any type of physical ugliness you can think of was well represented on the car. “How”, I said to myself, “did I ever get onto this particular car?”

Well, I’m not exactly stupid you know, and I figured it out pretty quickly. I think I was on the car because I fit right in. I hope I look good in my new sunshades and balaclava.

Today, finding myself in Fairfax at lunch time, I wanted something quick and cheap and reliable, so I went into a Subway at the first strip center that I passed. Subway is still quick and cheap (6″ sandwich, chips and a drink for only $6), but is it reliable? I think it has gone down, down, downhill.

OK, the whole wheat rolls are still OK (even if they aren’t really whole wheat), but the selection of fillings seems to have deteriorated – diced chicken with various sauces, sliced turkey, veggie patties, black forest ham, etc. I am not sure what is missing, but it sure is boring. I used to like getting the veggie patty with tomatoes, olives, pickles and bell peppers and put barbecue sauce on it. Some time ago, Subway stopped carrying barbecue sauce, so now, you are limited to ranch/mayonnaise type sauces, it seems. The patty is not the same any more. The tuna lacks style, the chicken combos just aren’t that interesting, turkey sounds dull, ham I don’t want.

All in all, it was a pretty ugly lunch. The chips were too salty, even if I took them first through a makeshift desalination process, and the drink was Dr. Pepper, which I don’t really like, but I selected so I wouldn’t drink too much soda.

I don’t know. Perhaps my approach is wrong. I will do it differently the next time I go into a Subway – scheduled for 2016.

Gush Etzion, Gabriel Allon, and Charles Bragg (6 cents)

The Movie: “Dubak -The Palestian Jew” is a very interesting one hour film directed by Israeli film maker Ella Alterman, shown tonight at the JCC. The director was present for a talk-back after the movie.

It is a biopic focused on an unusual West Bank resident, who unfortunately died of a heart attack during the filming, cutting short what was to have been a much longer film. Dubak lived in the Gush Etzion bloc, a religious block of settlements east of Jerusalem created after the 1967 war by proponents of a Greater Israel. But he was unusual.

A descendent of Jews who first came to the area in the 1850s, he felt his roots there, and stated that he didn’t care what country he was in. He would fight for his land and the right to live there, but whether he lived in an Israeli state or a Palestinian state was unimportant to him.

One of his four sons was killed by a terrorist in the 1990s. He was greatly affected, as one would expect, and redirected his life. He settled in the valley that his ancestors had settled in, he planted trees and vines and vegetables, and built stone fences. He took children from the Jewish settlements who were having trouble fitting in (academically, socially, whatever) and had them work with him, treating them sternly but very positively. He devoted time to searching for missing hikers, and found quite a number of them; he knew the hills and valleys well, and his co-workers in this task were the Bedouins. He was very close to the Beduoins and they seemed to respect and like him. Everyone did.

He was, I thought, a very confused person, searching for the answers, finding them only in the land. And his early death (he was quite overweight) affected that land, I am sure. For there was no one to continue of his programs. His kids were too sophisticated, too normal. His wife (not in the film) is, according to Alterman, very different from her husband; she is the daughter of an American rabbi.

I thought Alterman caught her subject well. A friend of Dubak’s in the audience agreed. I think Dubak’s unique life and thought process raise many, many questions, none of which have complete answers, and all of which should.

The Book: “The Messenger” by Daniel Silva. A fine book to read when you have a cold and want something that will keep your attention (and not lead you to close your eyes) and which you can finish in a day or two. And, yes, Gabriel Allon comes out just fine, even deciding it’s time to marry Chiara (although of course he doesn’t quite do it in the book). But it’s a tough ride – he witnesses a terrorist attack on the Vatican which kills hundreds, he moves back and forth between Italy and Israel and CIA headquarters in McLean, he saves the life of the Pope (one of his close friends, of course) as well as the life of the President of the United States, he gets a young Phillips Gallery curator into a heap of trouble and sort-of barely extracts her, he penetrates the secrets of one of the world’s largest corporations to see how they fund and control al-Quaeda and other terrorist activites, and he has some wonderful meals at some exquisite Caribbean restaurants. What more can you want?

The second book. Charles Bragg’s “Asylum Earth”. Great drawings, nonsensical writings that look like things that I write. I can’t say it’s classic literature. But you have to like stories about St. Francis of Azusa who loved animals so much. He got a lion to lie down with a lamb; they looked so nice. He wondered why, when he looked at them later in the day, the lamb had decided to leave. He thought that God made bats blind so they couldn’t see how ugly they were. And “the gentle and saintly Francis could not even bring himself to swat a mosquito….. He died of malaria.”

If a Muslim can pray 5 times a day, and a Jew can pray 3 times a day, why can’t I write a blog post 1 time a day?

Don’t bother me! I’m busy reading a Daniel Silva book.

Hungry on 17th Street?

If you get hungry on Connecticut Avenue, near DuPont Circle, no problem. Ditto, if you walk east about 5 blocks to 14th Street. But what if you are in-between, on 17th Street, between P and R, another strip with a large number of eating places? You may be in trouble.

We wanted to get dinner before a 7:30 curtain at Theater J on Saturday night. We first walked into Hank’s Oyster Bar, a popular small restaurant on Q Street, just off 17th. It may be fine if you want oysters or some other crustacean to eat, but if you want fish? The choices were sable and Portuguese sardines, neither a strong favorite. Want meat? Well, on Thursday night, it’s pork chops. Ditto, again.

We thought of the other restaurants that we were familiar with. Sushi Taro has become much too upscale, Komi even more so. Annie’s, Trio and Peppers have the opposite problem. Bua Thai is too boring, Cafe Luna the same.

We decided (with time moving along) we needed to go somewhere new, and that somewhere turned out to be Floriana, which has opened sometime recently in a building that used to house the Mercury Grill. It was just about 6 when we entered this old red-brick townhouse with its New Orleans bordello-lite decor, and we were the only customers (there might have been some in the English basement bar; there were, when we left an hour later). To our surprise, after sitting and eating for an hour or so, we were still the only ones in the restaurant. Thursday night is a pretty busy night. Is this typical? If so, how long can they last?

On the positive side, on Thursday nights, you can get drinks made from Skyy vodka for $3. That’s quite a bargain (and may explain the crowd in the bar below). On the negative side, the dinner rolls looked like they had been made before the turn of the millennium and just taken from the freezer. (My father used to judge a restaurant by its coffee – if it served good coffee, you could be assured that everything else would be good. I once spent some time with the late seer-real estate agent Jeanne Dixon, who told me that she judged restaurants, on the same basis, by the quality and variety of their potato dishes. I tend to extrapolate from the bread.) Once, the rolls were served, I figured it might be downhill from there.

And it was. My wife had tuna, which was fair. I had chicken, which was fair. Not good, not bad. Certainly, you had no problem eating it, but you never would say: I think we ought to come back and have this again.

Our waitress seemed friendly and attentive, until I asked her why she charged us $2 more for the tuna than the menu price. She then turned very cold and said, “Georgio [I think] the manager will handle that.”. He told me that they just lowered the price on the menu and the computer must not have caught up. I doubt this; certainly, it did not look like we were given brand new menus. He told us he would adjust the computer, and then he gave me 2 one-dollar bills. He was very brusque, which I didn’t appreciate, so rather than simply take the $2, I told him that there was a sales tax (10% for restaurants in the District), a tip based on the full cost, etc. I would have expected that they would have redid the bill – but they didn’t. He grumbled, and handed me another dollar, saying, strangely, “we don’t have quarters”. OK, I said, and left, never again to visit Floriana.

The Good Old Days

I have just read two books about the good old days, “The Politics of Rage” by Dan T. Carter (a biography of George Wallace) and “The Unmaking of a President” by Herbert Y. Schandler (the story of the Vietnam War and the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson). The good old days.

Dan T. Carter was a history professor at Emery University, and later went to the University of South Carolina, from which he retired in 2007. His book on George Wallace, published in 1995, is highly regarded, and rightly so. Not only is it a fascinating biography of former Alabama governor and two-time presidential candidate Wallace, but provides a broader history of the 20th century civil rights movement in the United States, and serves as a reminder of all the people and all of the events which so many of us lived through. Wallace as a poor, small town southern boy, as a boxer, a soldier and finally a politician, and how his politics turned more and more segregationist as time went to, becoming so influential that the Republican party, during the second Nixon campaign, began to emulate him, thus birthing the Southern Strategy. Only after Wallace was shot at a political rally in 1972 did he begin to slow down and realize his limits and, eventually, perhaps even to realize the wrongness of his earlier ways, as he toned down his rhetoric and sought forgiveness from many of his former targets. But it is the picture of America that is really important to remember, much more so than the personality of Wallace. For it is America that allowed Wallace to become a fairly series candidate, and certainly an influential politician. Thinking of himself first, perhaps, as a southern states-rights advocate for whom segregation was one important facet of a states rights campaign, he changed his mind when he began to campaign in the North – in Wisconsin and and Indiana, and when he gave the speech at Harvard that I remember so well boycotting. Then, it was that he discovered, to his great surprise, that all of American was the South. And to a significant extent, he was correct.

Schandler’s book is less well know, written in 1977 as an expanded Ph.D. thesis at Harvard and published by the Princeton University Press. It is an account of the politics of the Vietnam War during the Johnson years. Not an account of the war itself (although certain important trends and events are discussed), but an account of the discussions that went on between the White House, Defense Department, Military and State Department about how the war should be carried out – do you expand the bombing or curtail it and for what reason, with what expectations; how do domestic concerns affect the way you fight the war; how does the ability of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to fend for itself influence your actions; can you continue to avoid a call up of the Reserves, and should you; how thinly stretched in the American army; what are the ultimate goals, possibilities and expectations. Much sounds like what must be happening now, as the government ponders Afghanistan and Iraq. But there are differences – clearly the media (with all its focus on body kill counts, etc.) was not privy to the discussions in the way they seem to be today, and the highly partisan nature of today’s debate was notably absence in the 1960s. Again, it was reliving the past, reading about (in new ways) those familiar names: Johnson, Humphrey, Clifford, Vance, McNamara, Rusk, Westmoreland and all the others.

Why did Johnson decide not to seek reelection in 1968? For one thing, his polling numbers had dropped dramatically; it would not be easy. For another, he probably did believe that the need to campaign and to posture for votes would affect both the decisions about the war, and about various competing domestic issues. For a third, he was simply worn out (and in fact, he lived only about four more years, dying at the relatively young age of 64).

This was a very well researched book, and probably is not easy to find today. But it is working looking for, and reading.

I was Lost in Yonkers last night.

At Theater J, and recommend that others leave the GPS at home and follow suit.

As a literary work, I am not sure that Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” deserved the Pulitzer Prize that it received, but it is clearly a play that is an audience pleaser if well performed and well directed, and the Theater J production is all of that.

The story line: It is 1942, in Yonkers. Embittered German refugee, now living in Yonkers, saw two of her six children die, and the four others each in their own way develop abnormally, presumably in part based on her overly strict, hands-off, dour parenting (her husband died young). Her living children include Eddie, a weak, inoffensive man, somewhat afraid of his shadow, whose own wife has recently died (and who was estranged from his mother while he was married) and who must go on the road selling scrap iron to make enough money to pay off some major debts; Louie, estranged from his mother from time to time, who appears to be a (minor?) thug and bagman, and whose personality is as strong as his brother’s is weak; Gert, who is so nervous that she can’t even speak a full sentence without having to breathe in the last phrase; and Bella, who is an adult, but still a child, with an addled brain, but an extraordinary amount of warmth and humanity, and who lives and works (in the candy store) with her mother. When Eddie announces he is going on the road for ten months, he leaves his 13 and 15 year old sons to live with their grandmother, and it is the goings on, most of which are unpleasant and show tremendous familial dysfunction, that the audience follows until a kind of denouement is reached upon Eddie’s return.

So, with Bella we have a little of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”, and with Eddie and his two sons a little of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. But Simon adds his own touches of course, as he puts these and other story lines together, and turns it into a comedy of great poignancy.

Some of the lines are extremely clever, and each of the characters fascinating (although I wonder if the play would have been a bit stronger if Eddie had only existed off-stage, rather than bookending the script with his going and coming).

“Lost in Yonkers” is often referred to as a coming of age play, about the two boys, Jay and Arty, but in fact the central characters are the mother and Bella. And especially Bella, played at Theater J by Holly Twyford in extraordinary fashion, drawing you in to sympathize with her limitations, and to marvel at her buoyancy, her sense of tragedy and her continual recovery and optimism.

There was a cast talk-back last night after the show. It seemed that the majority of the large audience remained, and the conversation was as interesting as the show itself. Surprising to me was the fact that at least three audience members had German grandmothers/mothers (I forget which), who were precisely the woman played so well by Tana Hicken. Tough, bitter, strict and – at least from the outside – unloving. And that Kevin Bergen, who played Uncle Louie, really had an Uncle Louie (not his name), who, like the character in the play, would show up unannounced and say that he had to stay a few days, or a few weeks, who carried the same black satchel that Louie carried, who had to duck as he walked by the front windows. And then there was the audience member who said that she was a step mother of two children with disabilities and saw characteristics of her children in the precise way that Twyford played Bella. And a discussion about whether this family, clearly Jewish in that the mother escaped anti-Semitic Germany, but not Jewish at all in any of the other elements of the script.

So the play appears to be universal in its appeal and in the ability of the audience to relate to it. And perhaps that it is this universality that led to a two year run on Broadway and a Pulitzer Prize.

Strange Evening with Howard Sachar (13 cents)

Howard Sachar, Professor emeritus of Modern European History, spoke Wednesday night at the Jewish Community Center, the last night of the Center’s Literary Festival. Having read over the years several of Sachar’s many books on Jewish and Middle Eastern history, I was looking forward to hearing him speak on the current state of Israel.

Sachar, in his early 80s, is tall and dapper and gentlemanly. His speech pattern is precise, his delivery very friendly, and he gives the impression of great oral elegance. This made him a joy to sit and listen to, with only one problem. The problem was the content of his speech.

Israel and the Palestinians, he said, will never agree to terms with each other. And an international mediator won’t help. What is required, Sachar maintains, is that the world powers (this seems to mean the US, Britain and certain unnamed countries, perhaps operating through the United Nations) must impose a settlement on the two middle eastern neighbors. Not with a “what do you think?”, but with a “here’s what you are going to do”.

This is the only way disputes have ever been settled, he said, hearkening back as far as the 17th century Treaty of Westphalia, and moving on through the decisions made after the Napoleonic Wars, and World Wars I and II. The creation of states, the dismantling of states, all without a vote of the states being affected. It is time, he says, for the today’s powers to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors.

What? How does he think this would work? Who are these powerful nations, and why does he think that they could come to an agreement, even if they exist? Are the powerful nations all Christian, telling Jews and Moslems what to do? Does he expect that any Moslem nations will be involved and that we can sit down with, say, Saudi Arabia and come up with a proposal equally acceptable to all? Isn’t he concerned that Saudi Arabia itself is a bit vulnerable to anti-monarchic fundamentalists, for example?

And did the world powers that set European boundaries after the world war have to impose their decisions on a country with atomic weaponry? Or a country run by terrorists? And, what is even more, all the examples he gave were examples of countries who had participating in and who won a war dictating to the losers as a part of the treaty terms, and where they (so they thought) had a mechanism to monitor implementation of, and enforce against violations of, their decisions.

The US is not in a war with Israel or Palestine. And the only settlements reached by powerful nations affecting smaller nations outside a war situation are those settling colonial boundaries in the 19th century, or the Munich agreement between Britain and Nazi Germany which resulted in the transfer of the Sudentenland to Germany. And we know how successful that was.

Sachar impressed everyone with his intellect and his ability to deliver a very good speech. But I think his conclusions had everyone shaking their heads in bewilderment.

Movie, Lectures, Food

The Movie: One more East German film at the Goethe Institute, ‘The Tango Player’ (or ‘Der Tangospieler’), a 1989 film released after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification of the two Germanys. I thought that it was an extremely boring film but, at the same time, an excellent portrayal of the central character and his dilemma in re-entering East German life in 1968 after a 21 month prison term for a ‘political crime’. So, I have to blame it on the director, I guess.

Professor Darrow is, by all accounts, a successful history professor at a university in Leipzig, who also happens to be a good pianist. He is asked to help out at a student cabaret when the regular pianist becomes ill, and is unfortunate to be arrested as two Stasi members in the audience believe that at least one of the pieces is subversive. No one seems to believe that he knew nothing about the text of the songs, that he was only der Tangospieler.

He comes out of prison, loses his girlfriend, his father’s respect, his job, etc. He decides he will no longer play the piano or teach history – he tries to get a job as a truck driver, but no one will hire a former professor/political prisoner as a truck driver. So he is jobless in a Communist society which worships employment. His potential new girl friend tells him to disappear, to straighten out his life, get rid of his bitterness, and then come back if he wants to.

But he is so bitter. And, to make it worse, during the time he was in prison, 1966-1967, society opened up somewhat and everyone agrees that he never would be sentenced for the same ‘crime’ (even if you discount his lack of knowledge) in 1968, when protesters are enjoying Prague Spring, and everyone is so optimistic about the future. So he feels doubly set upon.

Leipzig was clearly a provincial city during this period. Darrow runs into his lawyer and into the judge who sentenced him several times after his release. Initially, trying to hold down his feelings of revenge, he eventually succumbs and attacks the judge in a park, increasing his problems with the system and deepening his increasing psychiatric problems. He is threatened with prosecution unless he returns to society, so he takes a job as a waiter on a North Sea resort, and soon realizes that this is not the life for him, so he is going to have to compromise with society.

A good psychological study of a true victim, whose position as a victim makes him sensitive, perhaps overly so, to the faults of the society in which he has spent his entire adult life.

The Lectures. First, Orly Rahminian gave a fascinating power point lecture at the Library of Congress of the “Image of the Jew in Iranian Society”. Rahminian is a graduate student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Middle Eastern Studies. The lecture topic is her thesis topic, and she has been spending time as a fellow of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research demonstrates that anti-Semitism is a long time feature of Iranian (and of Moslem and especially Shiite Moslem) society, where Jews were considered, as a religious matter, unclean, and contact with them was very limited. It was only during the years of the Shah, the Pahlavi regime, that anti-Semitism seemed to have receded into the past, only to re-emerge with the 1979 revolution. What was interesting to me was how similar the images of the Jew in Persian society are to images in European history. Was it because they were looking at similar Jewish populations (which would raise some uncomfortable questions), was it because there was contact between Moslems and Christians so that they were feeding on each other (which raises other questions), or was it because both religions were breakaways from Judaism giving adherents of both the necessity to demonize Judaism in order to legitimize themselves.

The second lecture, also at the LOC, was by Daniel Pinto, a Brazilian diplomat and student of the Jewish presence in Brazil. Talking about the early movement of Portuguese Jews to new world Portuguese colony Brazil (where there was no Inquisition), the entry of the Inquisition and the resulting hiding of Jewish practices, the immigration of Jews over the centuries from the middle east and Europe and their important role, continuing until today, in Brazilian society, a society that has lacked any strong history of anti-semitic activity.

Food. Another dinner at new Acacia Bistro on Connecticut Avenue, where the food is good but the menu, a combination of small plates and entree dishes, meat tapas and cheese tapas, is so confusing. A lunch at the Iron Gate in where I normally have the excellent tuna or salmon, but decided instead to get a salad with chicken, and quickly realized I made a mistake. And last night, at the Asia Spice in Chinatown, where I had a Japanese meal – sashimi donburi, which had 8 large pieces of raw fish (tuna, salmon, yellowjack, and something I couldn’t identify) over a bowl of warm rice with a nice sweet sauce and not too much of it, a delicious deep green seaweed, and grated dalkon radish. And it was excellent.

The Alchemist (36 cents)

1. The Play. I don’t think we would have gone to see the Shakespeare Theater’s production of Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist”, if we hadn’t won tickets in a raffle this summer. But we did go, without great expectation, Thursday night. We had heard that the 16th century language was hard to follow, and that it was a silly play.

Well, it is silly, but there was no challenge with the language (which in fact seems much easier to follow than almost-contemporary Shakespeare), and the slapstick antics make the play appear to be almost contemporary. It is a satirical play in its substance and a farce in its style. I confess ignorance to its original setting and context, so I don’t know if there were other farces in Elizabethan England. We think of French theater when we think of farces, but there was nothing French about this one.

The wealthy owner of the house leaves London to escape the plague, his trusted butler remaining behind. Taking advantage of his freedom, the butler and two friends, one male and one female, take over the house and use it as their base for a series of con schemes, to defraud the general populace of their hard earned jewels and money, as they cater to their greed. The lead con is an “alchemist”, who has discovered the philosopher’s stone that can turn everyone’s wishes into gold, as well as the ability to bring good luck in gambling ventures, and attract beautiful women galore.

In order to do this, the three schemers take on various personna, in order to meet the needs and expectation of their various clients. This adds a great twist to the normal farce, where people are shuffled in and out of many stage doors as others arrive of whom they must be kept in ignorance. Here, in addition, each time, someone new arrives, our alchemist himself must step into a closet and change his clothes and identity, which each outfit more elaborate than the last.

The production is highly professional, the cast strong, the set works like a charm, and the costumes are flawless.

So who is satired? Alchemists and their foolishness, con artists, gamblers, lawyers, churchmen, money grubbers, drug dealers – an entire raft of fascinating types who seem as relevant to the 21st century as they must have been to the 16th.