2007 – The Five Best of Everything

I have tried to list my five best experiences in each category. I did not try to rank within the five best. Assume that they are all highly recommended. Here goes:

The best restaurant meals (in town)

1. Luigino (fish)

2. Viridiana (fish and more)

3. Zaytinya (Turkish tapas)

4. Oyemel (Mexican tapas)

5. Arcadiana (fish and more)

The best restaurant meals (away from town)

1. Blue Fish (Memphis) fish

2. Benny Dagim (Jerusalem) maybe best fish anywhere

3. Bar Mut (Barcelona) tapas bar par excellance

4. La Polpa (Barcelona) three-course meals

5. Cafe Francesca (Barcelona) – coffee house and evening bar

The best novels (fiction)

1. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

2. Thomas Butler, The Way of All Flesh

3. Joyce Carol Oates, The Grave Digger’s Daughter

4. Maeve Medved, Mail

5. Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

The most interesting (to me) non-fiction books (the toughest category to condense):

1. Ralph Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (nuclear tests in the Pacific)

2. David Horowitz, Radical Son (hard core radical turns hard core conservative)

3. Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark (St. Louis and the Upper Mississippi in the fur trading days)

4. Robert Gates, From the Shadows (current Secretary of Defense talks about his days at the CIA)

5. Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza (the Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 17th century)

Best Documentary Movies:

1. “Live and Become” – Ethiopian boy in Israel

2. “A Mighty Heart” – Daniel Pearl’s death in Pakistan

3. “The Great Communist Bank Robbery” – the strange crime in 1959 Bucharest

4. “The Jews of Libya”

5. “Miss Universe 1929″ – Jewish girl from Vienna

Best Fictional Movies:

1. “The Education of Fairies” at the DC Film Festival

2. “My Mexican Shiva” at the DC Film Festival

3. “Avenue Montaigne” at the Avalon

4. “Once” at the Avalon

5. “Tehillim” at Jewish Film Festival

The best theater

1. “Either/Or” at Theater J

2. “Shylock” at Theater J

3. “My Children, My Africa” at Studio

4. “The Jew of Malta” at Shakespeare

5. “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Be” at National

Best Concerts

1. The William Kapell International Piano Competition tryouts at U. of Md.

2. The William Kapell International Piano Competition finals at U. of Md.

3. The Teapacks at the State Theater in Falls Church

4. Little Red at the Maritime Republic of Eastport

5. Jorge Drexler and Tanya Libertad at Listner

Best Museum Exhibitions (in town)

1. Portraits from London’s National Gallery at the Portrait Gallery.

2. Annie Leibowitz at the Corcoran

3. Ansel Adams at the Corcoran

4. Edward Hopper at the National Gallery

5. Portugal at the Sackler

Best Museum Exhibits (out of town)

1. Yad Vashem (Jerusalem)

2. Barcelona Exhibit at Met (NYC)

3. Dali Theatre Museum (Figueres

Best Lecture/Presentations

1. Daniel Schor and Marvin Kalb (Adas Israel)

2. Vienna Jewish Community Historic Documents (Holocaust Memorial Museum)

3. James McDonald papers on Europe during the 1930s and 1940s (Holocaust Memorial Museum)

4. Prof. Haim-Vidal Sephiha on Sephardic experiences during Holocaust (Holocaust Memorial Museum)

5. Eilon Adar on water policy in the middle east (AABGU)

Annie Leibowitz, Schlemiel the First, and a little food

On the day after Christmas, the Corcoran was jammed.  People were flocking in to see the two world class photography exhibits on display, Ansel Adams and Annie Leibowitz.

We had seen the Ansel Adams a few weeks ago.  His technique and the structure of his black and white nature photography is extraordinary.  The Leibowitz exhibit is very different.  It is a retrospective of 15 years of her work.  Most extraordinary are the photographs she took of entertainers, literary figures, politicians.  These are by and large color, posed settings, and they are masterful.  Not to be missed.  The exhibit also includes her home photographs of her family (could be missed) and of Susan Sontag, particularly during her last illness (should be missed), and an interesting wall of photos from which the pictures in the exhibit were taken.  The remarkable thing about this wall is how much better the photographs look after they have been edited, polished, enlarged, mounted and framed for exhibit.  You don’t normally get to see this before and after comparison, and you think (I think) that the finished product is exactly what comes out of the camera.  Wrong.

After a nice meal at Sushi Taro, we went to see Schlemiel the First at Theater J.  It was a lot of fun, and the audience enjoyed it.  (We had seen it in a modified concert version the year before.)  The music was great (keep that clarinetist!), and the humorous lyrics and rhymes are wonderful.

It was not perfect, though, and I (I am embarrassed to say) have to agree with Peter Marks where he said that the actors didn’t quite get the rhythm of this kind of Jewish, shtetl, slapstick humor.  The cast was primarily not Jewish, as it turns out.  Perhaps there is a reason that the most memorable Tevyes were Zero Mostel, Theodore Bikel, Topol and Herschel Bernardi.

Sweeney Todd (another Dickens paraphrase), It was the Best of Movies, It was the Worst of Movies

Sweeney Todd, of course, is the story of the demon barber of Fleet Street, whose idyllic life with beautiful wife and child was fatally interrupted when the evil Judge Turpin, having set his heart on Mrs. Todd, arranged to have Sweeney arrested on a trumped up charge and exiled from the country.  Sweeney returns after fifteen years at sea with revenge already on his mind, when he learns that his wife has taken arsenic, and his daughter had been made the ward (and putative fiance) of Judge Turpin.  Allying himself with Mrs. Lovett, whose pie store is in need of new menu items, he sets himself up as a barber in the second floor loft where he used to live above the pie shop.  One thing leads to another, and barber Todd (an alias, by the way) becomes throat slasher Todd, whose victims become the filling of Mrs. Lovett’s now highly sought after meat pies.  But because the bad guys can’t win, virtually everyone (other than daughter Joanna, her “how did I get in this mess?” boyfriend, and the little urchin boy who used to help (believe it or not) Borat fleece the world (OK, not Borat, but he sure looked and acted like him), who were the sole survivors of the characters in the drama.  Mrs. Lovett dies, Judge Turpin dies, Sweeney dies and even Sweeney’s old wife (whose arsenic had not been fatal) dies at Sweeney’s unknowing hands.

Now, a show like this requires something to make it palatable.  And of course that something is Sondheim.

I have seen Sweeney a number of times, and think it a terrific show, but it can only be terrific if reality and credibility can be suspended long enough to allow you to process the plot without having to deal with all of its implications.  This is done on the stage with various theatrical conventions (so that reality is disguised as something else), and a lot of campiness and joie de vivre.  And extraordinary musical, dramatic and comedic talent.
The movie lacked the following: campiness, joie de vivre, extraordinary musical talent and extraordinary comedic talent.  What it did have was beautiful cinematography, which made late 19th century London come alive, and a lot of gushing too-red blood.

It had something else.  Johnny Depp, who I thought played Todd just right.  I wish the rest of the cast was up to his standards, and I wish it had some of those qualities that it lacked, because it could have been a great movie.

But it wasn’t in most respects.  If you can take the plot, go see it for Depp and the scenes of London.  Yes, it was the best of movies, but unfortunately it was also the worst of movies.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”

We think we are living in bad times and, in many respects, we are.  Very dangerous times, as we are reminded by events like the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the potential increasing destabilization in much of the Muslim world.  But I was born on November 26, 1942.  I have a copy of a newspaper from the day of my birth, the Honolulu Advertiser.  Here are the front page headlines:

Jap naval force attemping to reinforce Buna shattered.  “Sailing into Japanese naval forces off the north coast of New Guinea, American and Allied Flying Fortresses, B-25s, and Beaufort bombers shattered a fourth attempt by the enemy in the last few weeks to land reinfocements in a desperate bid to hold the Buna-Gona beachhead, it was announced in a communique today.”

Allied Prisoners Tell of Cruelty of Italian Guards at Benghazi.  “British and South African officers and men, prisoners whom Axis forces left behind when they fled from Benghazi, asserted today that Italian guards starved them, beat them with whips, and in some instances shot and killed prisoners for no apparent reason.”

6,000 of foe slain in day by Russians; Reds capture 15,000 prisoners. “The Red Army killed 6,000 Axis troops Wednesday and captured 15,000 prisoners, three railroad stations and eight populated places in the tremendous new offensive on the Stalingrad front, thus Bringing Axis casualties in the six day Soviet offensive to more than 200,000 in killed and captured”

Reds mopping up newly won area in the south.  “Military observers believed tonight that the Russians, while continuing to hold the initiative in the whole Stalingrad area, probably did not make any great advance today in any sector.”

Nazis send 65,000 agents into Italy  “Diplomatic travelers who passed through Italy a week ago said today an estimated 65,000 civilian clad Germans entered and spread throughout Italy during October and November”

Large scale offensive at hand in Tunisia “Anglo-American forces are on the point of launching a large scale offensive in Tunisia, reports from North Africa said today, as battles on land and in the air increased steadily in ferocity and size and an early and decisive test of strength was indicated.”

Santa Clause will come, anyway.

Make Sure You Read the Fine Print

Bradley Food and Beverage of Bethesda is a very nice specialty grocery store and non-ethnic delicatessen and carry-out. I stopped there to get a sandwich (chose the tuna on multi-grain) after my haircut this morning. Although I have been there several times, this was the first time that I looked carefully at the menu on the wall at the deli counter. One of their offerings is a “Kosher-style sub” sandwich, with roast beef, pastrami, corned beef and swiss cheese”. Oh, well.

On its website (www.bradleyfood.com), there is no mention of the kosher style sub in its listing of specialty sandwiches.  In its listing of platters, however, there is a “kosher deli platter”.  Filled with several kinds of meats, the shop is careful to note that they will leave off the cheese……if you ask.

A warning?

I am driving north on 18th Street towards Adams Morgan.  I stop at a red light at Florida Avenue.  It is about 3 p.m.

A man crosses  18th Street in front of my car.  He is short, thin, middle aged, not particularly well dressed.  As he crosses in front of the car, he looks at me.  I look back.  He gives me an almost imperceptible nod.  I respond.  He turns right, south, after he crosses.

The next thing I hear is the back seat door of my car, passenger side, opening.  I turn around, and there he is.  He asks me if I could give him a ride “over there”, pointing just to the building across Florida Avenue.  I say “no, go away.  Close that door.  Close that door” rather forcefully.  He says “OK”, closes the door, and walks away.

The only thing I can think of is that, if there had been something in the back seat of my car, like my briefcase, or a computer bag, or anything, he could have taken it.  I was alone in the car.  The light was about to turn green.  There were cars behind me.  There is no way I could have followed or caught him in time, especially if he went into one of the buildings, or alleys, in that neighborhood.

Perhaps he really wanted a ride across the intersection.  Perhaps he thought he recognized me.  It was raining; perhaps he thought I just looked friendly.

But I doubt it.

Kinky Friedman and George Eliot

I had never read any of Kinky Friedman’s book, so when I started Spanking Watson yesterday, I did not know what to expect.  Well, I knew it was a mystery, and would at least strive for some elements of humor, and would probably not be entirely politically correct.  But I did not know what to expect regarding that important characteristic of a book – quality.  Well, based on the first 50 pages, I would say that quality is lacking.  I could not bring myself to continue.

I knew I needed something entirely different.  So I reached back to the classics and picked up George Eliot’s Silas Marner, which I had never read and which met my most important goal, to find a book short enough that I might start and finish it the same day.  And I did.

And surprisingly (because, honestly, I thought I would find the book tedious), I enjoyed it, and it was a nice accompaniment to Invitation to the Waltz that I wrote about yesterday.  You all probably know the story:  Silas, accused of a crime he did not commit, loses faith in humanity, leaves his home town and takes up a hermit like existence in a rural county where he makes and sells his weavings, collects and counts his money, and let’s the world go by.  Tragedy hits Silas, a robbery and his savings are gone,  but not too long later, one snowy night, a two year old girl wanders into his cabin, her opium-besotted  mother dead in a snow bank outside.  Silas raises the girl as his own.

Well, the girl is the son of the brother of the robber (it’s a long story, although a short book), although it is sixteen years later that that is known, and the father wants to claim his daughter and raise her in much more wealth and elegance than Silas can offer.   But she refuses, marries the boy next door and might even live happily ever after.

I know that this synopsis does not do justice to the book.  The two brothers and their families are as central to the book as Silas Marner is.  But you can elaborate on my short review if you want.  You can get the plot on line at any number of places and, of course, you can read the book.

Even if you read it and hated it in high school, I think you should try it again.  You need to be a bit more worldly than the typical 15 year old to appreciate it, I would think.

Who would have thought? (one cent)

Who would have thought that I would have yesterday read a book called Invitation to a Waltz by an author I had never heard of, Rosamond Lehmann. I picked up this book on my way to the gym because it was the right size and weight, and was under 200 pages long.

The book is a fairly easy read. England, sometime in the early 20th century. Country house. Old-line, but not particularly wealthy family. Two daughters, the youngest 17, the oldest a few years older. Home schooled, untraveled, very naive to the world.

A neighboring family is having a ball, and the girls are invited. The focus is on the younger, Olivia, who will be attending her first affair as a grown up. Her life becomes focused on what she will wear, and who will be there. And how nervous she will be, because it is her older sister who is the family beauty.

The night of the ball arrives and she goes. There will be 23 dances. Everyone has a dance card, and the dance cards begin to fill. But not many people approach Olivia. But then the music starts playing, people introduce themselves, and she finds partners for some (if not all) of the dances.

Each of these partners is a bit different – the stiff young man who is going to become a curate, the intellectual with the odd personality that everyone makes fun of, the widow who is lonely and likes to strike up acquaintances with young ladies, the more normal boys who are friends or relatives of her neighbors or friends.

There is no “plot”. The ball is over, and not much has changed. But there has been a brief entry of Olivia into the world. And you know when she gets there on a more permanent basis, she will do all right.

Rosamond Lehmann lived from 1901 to 1990, born into a family of “German, Jewish, Scottish and American origin”, according to her biography on everything2.com. This means that her father was born Jewish in Germany (he immigrated to Britain in his 40s), and her mother was from the U.S., and of Scottish ancestry. And she lived quite a full life, starting out (as you might imagine) in a country house with an older sister, whom she believed (perhaps correctly) that her parents favored. But she married and divorced quite young, remarried, this time to Wogan Philipps, a Communist who went off to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War (and who later became the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, where he served both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords!), got divorced a second time, and became involved with another man (Goronwy Rees, a journalist and also a communist who apparently for at least a short time was a spy for the USSR) until she opened the paper one morning to see that he had become engaged to someone else. Then she and British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis) set up house for almost a decade, although Cecil did have another wife. Eventually, he did get divorced, but at the same time left Lehmann to marry someone else.

Tragedy occurred when her young daughter was stricken with polio in Indonesia and quickly died. This was 1958, and for almost a decade, Rosamond disappeared from view, though still doing some writing and become interested in psychic matters.

In her later years, in addition to being president if British PEN and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she became the vice president of the College of Psychic Studies.

The Week That Was (1 cent)

1. The Movies: can you lead a double life? The double life led by Michele Morgan in the 1951 film “The Strange Madame X”  had no chance of success (in fact, if this were real, rather than cinematic, life, she would have been stopped long before the end of the film). Irene (played by Morgan) was the beautiful and highly socially active wife of a very prominent Parisian publisher; she was also the mistress of a struggling cabinet maker. She had told the her lover that she was the maid to the wife of the publisher. Leading these two lives, she managed to get pregnant (by the cabinet maker) and her husband, knowing something was up, sent her to Switzerland to have the baby (or preferably an abortion) since he did not want children, as they would ruin their social activities. She has the child (does the husband even know that?) and places her with two women who live near her lover. This makes sense to the lover (who wants to marry, but is told he must wait), as Irene needs to be on duty 24-not quite 7 at her mistress’s house. You can imagine that this does not quite work out the way she hoped. In the 2007 film, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, about the Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks) who single handedly found the funding for an escalated war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but at the same time was “good time Charlie”, leading a life filled with girls, drinks and drugs. This kind of a double life seems to work much better: look at Bill Clinton, for example, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, and Jack Kennedy. Thinking logically, this type of double living should be no more likely of success than that of Irene. But it is often successful, for long periods of time, and when uncovered does not seem to do much damage to the individual involved. You can come up with a lot of rationalizations, the most obvious being male vs. female. But this does not satisfy me. There is something more to it than that.

Oh, by the way, “Madame X” gets a C, and “Charlie Wilson” a B+.

2. The Books. I reported on Liberators, which I highly recommend. I also read the first three short stories of J. California Cooper’s The Matter is Life, which I might have enjoyed more if I were an older African American woman from the lower economic classes, but I am not.

3. Theatre. On Monday, I went to a Forum Theatre reading of “Iphigenia 2.0″ by Charles Mee. The audience was much too small, but this is another example of theater outdistancing audiences in Washington, and an example of how difficult it is to get a crowd to the H Street Playhouse, in NE. The reading went very well; there were twelve actors involved, and Hannah was the director of the reading.

Iphigenia and Antigone, the heroine of the fully performed play now running at the Forum, have much in common. They both determine to sacrifice themselves for their view of what is best for family and society. Antigone, because she wants to bury her dead brother, although he was a ne’er do well and rebel against the social order, and Iphigenia, who, although her father Agamemnon determines not to follow the wishes of his army and sacrifice his daughter to prove his solidarity with them, decides that her father should murder her and set the example he has decided against. They are both brave, headstrong, foolish and selfish young women, and well played by Katie Atkinson and Simone Zvi.

On Thursday, it was time for the Studio’s “Shining City”, a well reviewed Irish play that has either won, or been nominated for, a number of playwriting awards. I found it shallow and disappointing. One act, several scenes, 90 minutes. A inexperienced psychologist in Dublin. His patient is having problems seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife, and wonders if he will ever be normal again. He himself is beset by problems, since he has told his fiance and the mother of his child that he thinks they should break up; his fiance is aghast, since this is clearly not the result of anything she has done. He decides to have a homosexual experience for reasons unclear. He decides to go back to his fiance and move to Limerick (or so he says). His one patient is totally back to normal and brings him a Tiffany lamp as a present. His fiance appears as a ghost. This is a play? (It was saved by Ed Gero’s performance; but any play can be saved by Ed Gero).

4. Food. Kanlaya Thai Restaurant on Thursday evening before the awful Caps/Canadiens hockey game was good as usual (we had a vegetarian meal). Oyamel, the latest in the Jaleo/Zaytinya tapas empire, is, if a little pricey, excellent. We had lunch on Saturday, sharing scrambled egg and greens on a crisp corn taco, plaintains stuff with black beans, and small pieces of snapper (Veracruzana) and trout (tomatillo). Friday lunch at Sesto Senso: always good, this time a vegetable/fava bean soup, and chicken. Thursday supper at Logan Tavern: ordered their “big salad” with ahi tuna, but had to send the tuna back. Stringy and tasteless. They replaced it with salmon, which was quite good, but the experience was not the best.

5. The Museum. At the National Gallery yesterday, we saw the crowded Turner exhibit. 140 oils and water colors, apparently the largest collection of Turners ever assembled in the U.S. I was disappointed. I guess I don’t like Turner. There are a lot of “power of nature” paintings: wild seascapes, eerie lighting, rough landscapes. There are a lot of battle pictures, sea and land, centered on the Napoleonic Wars. There are classical history paintings, the gods, make believe classical architectural scenes. And there are many later works that are verging on impressionism. But I just don’t find any of them interesting. Turner was clearly quite prolific; he also died in his 70s owning a lot of his art work, as he apparently many paintings (of those assembled) to the Tate in London upon his death.  In addition, many of his works bear great similarities to other of his works. It seemed to me like he had found a formula and stuck to it. Apparently, he was a master of technique and introduced some new styles of work into English painting. I accept this. But he didn’t do it with any great sense of, at least to me, of artistic layout. We also saw that exhibit on American snapshots, from the collection of a donor named Jackson. There were several rooms of snap shots, some as old as the late 19th century. But, when it comes right down to it, they were only snap shots.

How Quickly We Forget (one cent)

I have been reading a book entitled Liberators: Fighting onTwo Fronts in World War II, by Lou Potter (with William Miles and Nina Rosenblum), published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1992. It’s an oversized (almost coffee table) book, with both text and pictures dealing with Afro-Americans in the American military during the second world war. It is a fascinating book, both with respect to the heroic efforts of black troops in both Europe and the Pacific (including their important role in liberating the German death camps), and with respect to how blacks were treated in this country in general during the 1930s and 1940s, and in particular how African Americans in the military were treated by their white military colleagues and by residents of the communities located near the military bases where they were stationed.

How were they treated? In one word, appallingly.

How quickly we forget what America was like before the Civil Rights Movement and the civil rights legislation, and how different society was then. Extraordinarily different.

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in St. Louis. St. Louis was a segregated city. No, we didn’t have segregated drinking fountains (I don’t think), or bathrooms (at least I don’t recall any), but other than that we were in the deep South. Of course, the schools were segregated (I remember in 8th grade, when two black girls and one black boy were unceremoniously dumped into my class in the middle of a day, with no advance notice whatsoever; no big deal, I thought, and wondered where they had gone to school the day before, but some people were aghast at the idea). The restaurants were all segregated; I remember sometime in the late 1950s eating at a Howard Johnson’s with my grandmother, who was surprised to see a black family at a nearby table (“Look at them”, she said, and I did and wondered what she was talking about). The hotels were segregated (you remember the stories of the visiting sports clubs, of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby who could not stay with the rest of the teams, and no one seemed to care). The sports facilities themselves were segregated (you could attend a baseball game at Sportsman’s Park if you were black, as long as you sat on the bench seats in the right field “pavilion”). The movies were segregated, and the parks (Shaw Park in Clayton closed its swimming pool for a few years in order not to have to let blacks swim with whites). Blacks could not get retail jobs in establishments that served whites.

And if course, being a young white boy, I saw very few blacks. Almost the only ones I saw were domestics, including Alice Tennyson, who lived in the basement of my grandparents’ house in less than perfect accommodations. And then I saw blacks when I drove with my father downtown, and we crossed through Mill Creek Valley, the area east of Grand Avenue torn down in the late 1950s for none too successful redevelopment under a major urban renewal plan.

I did not know there was a parallel black society, and that there were some educated and wealthy black St. Louisans. It never would have occurred to me, just as it never occurred to me that anything was wrong with the way society operated.

Then one day, after looking at the shadows in Plato’s cave and thinking I was seeing reality, the blinders came off. And I couldn’t believe what I saw. And I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t seen before.

We have come a long, long way. But people (of all colors) still think along racial, and sometimes racist, lines, and the African Americans are still victimized (sometimes, they are victims of their own making, of course) to the detriment of all of our citizens. And, frankly, the lessening of today’s lingering racial and economic divisions seem well down the list of national priorities.

What is the key to improvement?  Time?  Education?  Affirmative action?  No affirmative action? Requirement for universal national service?  I don’t think anyone has a clue.  And that is bad.