This glitzy 2016 is appropriate for the day. I truly wish a happy new year for the world and most especially for the people I know and care about. Long ago I was told that people react to their names -- of course that's a very old idea. We know there are name ceremonies in many folk traditions and that in some groups a person has a secret, personal name that is not revealed to others.  I suppose my last name, "calender" has me pondering on New Year's Eve and on birthdays, mine and others.  Ponder I do, and have as long as I remember. I rarely go out to parties or such on New Year's Eve. I assess and mediatate and throw the I  Ching - a very long time habit.

I feel it has been a good year for me; good health, some accomplishment, a sense of being very creative in many ways that is extremely satisfying, a kind of harvest of many years of learning to write and quilt and, laterly, especially write poetry.  If this is the autumn of life, as I tried to say in a quilt I made this fall, it is a colorful and beautiful one.

Not so for the world in general. I have difficulty thinking about all the awful things I read and hear. I find the terrorism, whether the extremism of ISIS or the home grown madness of random shootings, of police shootings of, often, unarmed people, and the bigotted ugliness of the Republican candidates for President, depressing and stupid. Meanwhile the weather around the world, the degradation of our natural resources, including the seas themselves is awful for the human suffering already happening and the increase in suffering it is bringing. 

I have been thinking about "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold's despairing poem that tends with these  painful lines:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!  For the world which seems to
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Has really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That was a hundred years ago; it is still true. I can only agree with his first ten words (and the exclamation point) -- we must be true to those we love, to those we care for in any way. We must live with love and kindness despite the state of the world.  We can do very little, one at a time, to influence the ignorant armies that clash by night. But we can do all we can to make the small world around us a place of refuge and peace. We can resist the hate and bigotry that seems to be infesting so much of the world and of our country.

Christmas time

Some bright quilt blocks are about as Christmasy as it's going to be this year.  I  have a small poinsettia (because Rachel doesn't like them and it was given to her by a co-worker). I never decorate for Christmas  and barely celebrate it so this is my "ho-ho-ho!" 

With the temperature above 60 today, it's a lot like being in Florida for the holiday.  I really like red, I have a lot of red in my living room and I have not been without a red raincoat for half my life, I think. The current one needs replacement but that will only happen if I find another red one.  I actually have an "undercover detective" beige trenchcoat  but it doesn't feel as right as the old red raincoat does.  And talking about it today is not out of place although the sun is now shining. We had something near two inches of rain in the night and more is predicted for this afternoon or evening. The morning newscaster assured his litsteners that Santa Claus would make his rounds. 

The quilt of red squares is the throw that's on the back of my beige sofa and the fancy log cabin quilt was sold at the time I moved from New York City to Cape Cod.  I hope its owners are enjoying it. I enjoyed making it and am proud of it.

Magic Flute for the Whole Family (Except Grumpy Gramma)

Mozart's Magic Flute was given a  Las Vegas magic show production at the Metropolitan Opera in 2004 with a stage full of amazing puppetry by Julie Taymor. The photo shows Papageno, the Bird Catcher, who is the comic relief and entirely charming in anybody's production of the opera. I was undecided about going to this simulcast yesterday because I've seen mysterious Magic Flute production, feel I  don't really understand what Mozart was doing with this, his last opera. I know he was expressing his understanding of the Masonic tenets but I'm unclear whether the"war" between the Queen of the Night and Sarastero, a light or sun "god?" is about good and evil or about men triumphing over women.  Those sorts of thoughts and analyses are not pertinent to this production.

Whatever Mozart was saying isn't important because the opera has become a "family" spectacle complete with a new rhymed text that is too close to Mother Goose for Dr. Suess.  The opera has been cut down to under two hours -- fine!  It's a cartoon, a prince and princess have to undergo trials before they can get together and finally the evil queen is "disappeared".  I came away from the theatre thinking that as I grow older I become more and more liberal politically and more and more conservative culturally.  I've seen too many "new" productions of operas and classic dramas tarted up to appeal to today's taste.  I certainly am glad opera now expects the singers to also act (no more "park and bark" static productions!) but a stage full of serpents, birds both flying and dancing en pointe, and various esoteric symbols all thrown together in one witches' cauldron of florescent colors doesn't appeal to me.

Beautiful Bolshoi Ballet

The Lady of the Camillias was the ballet that was "simulcast" from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow on Sunday. I have never seen or heard about it although I had heard of John Cranko of the Stuttgart Ballet whose idea it was. But he died before finishing it so it's really the work of John Neumeyer and has mostly been done in Germany. This was the Bolshoi's first production and it was spectacular and marvelous. It's a full-length (very long, in fact) costume ballet that tells both the story of Marguerite (renamed Violetta when Verdi used this story for La Traviata) and Armond. It is paralleled by the story of Manon Lescaut and  Des Grieux, also the subject of an opera.  The music is all Chopin.

Cranko and Neumeyer were very influenced by Stanislavski's acting techniques so that the dancers were cast for appearance and acting ability -- it was superb! -- to the point of being told that every movement must reflect the emotion of the moment. Mostly in ballet technique and dancing comes far ahead of acting, but in this case, they were equally important and equally well done.  Sets, lights, and the many, many costumes were equally expressive. The various Chopin music was exactly right -- some with piano alone and some piano and orchestra.

Seeing this ballet was absolutely fascinating. I felt I was seeing a work of art that went beyond the wonderfulness of ballet -- and ballet is to me always very wonderful. 

For a change the sometimes awkward intermission features (which are done in English, French and Russian) was an important addition helping me understand what I was seeing.  I'm totally delighted that I only have to drive about 15 miles to see something of this sort which I could never see otherwise.

Turkey Da

Cape Cod is full of wild turkeys.  These three paraded across our lawn one day last winter -- I sit at my computer looking over the lawn, beyond some low plantings beneath my window. As I worked I saw three ugly, wrinkled red, gray and black heads moving above the shurbs. I grabbed a camera and hurried out to photograph them.  They are the only ones that I've seen on our lawn, but I have seem plenty of their uncles, siblings and cousins all sorts of places.  Four or five are at home on the Cape Cod Community College campus. They stop traffic when they decide to cross the roads which they do as they wish, caring nothing for whatever might be coming.

I have yet to hear about any being hit. A fatally close encounter would be hard on a small car, probably of little importance on a big SUV or any kind of truck.  I've thought about turkey fatalities (to the turkey, not the humans) and wrote a short story called "Bringing Home the Turkey" in which one is killed early on Thanksgiving morning. The young man who hits it is tender hearted and full of remorse and of an ethical and ecological frame of mind. He and his girl friend planned to ignore Thanksgiving but he takes the dead bird home, feeling the only ethical thing to do is to eat it. "It should not give up its life in vain."  Unsurpringly, he finds a number of videos on You Tube that tell how to prepare and cook wild turkey. 

The story is humorous -- how else to treat such an incident! -- and was read as a dramatic reading at a gathering of  a group I  belong to called Blithe Spirits.  And it will be read this afternoon at our Thanksgiving dinner, probably between main course and dessert.  Rachel has invited a house full -- it will be eleven adults (counting two high school age nephews who are in physical size and appetite adult) and five children from 2 to 8.  The family has a dramatic bent so I think I will hear a good reading and we will laugh enough to prepare us for the rich desserts.

Classic French movies

The Tuesday afternoon free film series at the Cape Cod Comunity College usually shows foreign films. Often I have not seen them but I had seen the two shown in the last two weeks, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring -- a pair that tell a story that is classic in French film, so well told, so full of place and social commentary that it seems to have been made from a grand, classic novel. In fact, there is no novel, the two are the  creation of the film maker.

They are set in early 20th century in a small town and countryside around it, in Provence, life is not easy, much depends on water from natural springs and the unpredictable rains of summer. Ugolin returns from military service determined to earn his living growing carnations to sell in the local market.  He is mentored by his uncle, a local landowner, intent on maintaining his family's lost status in the area. 

A newcomer arrives to live in the near-by house, once a part of  the estate. He is a hunchback from the "city" with books on agriculture, a wife and a little daughter. He is a menace with his plans to raise rabbits and plant a garden.  A spring is stopped up so that when summer drought arrives, the newcomer's plans are ruined.  One  thing leads to another and eventually Jean dies trying to dynamite a well. The neighbors unstop the well, but the little girl sees them as the family is leaving.

Ten years later the little girl, now a beautiful young woman, returns to the house, lives alone, raising goats. Ugolin falls madly in love with her but he is both ugly and lumpish and totally under his
uncle's plotting rule. Through a beautifully paced series of events the girl (Manon) discovers the source the town's water supply and in her turn stops that spring. That is only the first of the twists at the end of the story. It is so well known that it's not a spoiler to say that eventually the uncle discovers the hunchback was a son he  didn't know he had and remorse for his greed leaves both men dead.

This synopsis does not do justice to the richness of the story.  Yves Montand is the uncle. The films are complex, beautifully acted and filmed in an area that is stark, and fascinating.  I rarely either see films twice or read books twice, but this was very worth seeing again. 
 

Cloud. What cloud?

All our computer files are stored "in the cloud".  Well, I'm a very literal person.  Not so literal as to look up in the sky and wonder which cloud has my files in it.  But I do picture something cloud-like when I hear or read that comment.

In the editorial section of Sunday's New York Times was an article about the cloud.  Surprise. There is no cloud.

There are hundreds -- yea, thousands -- of fiber optic cables all over the country, although there is wifi, as we know, the information get carried and stored on  cables.  No one is entirely sure where all those cables are.  They know that several exchange points exist where many come togehter in such a way as to send on information. But these cables are vulnerable to disaster -- earth quakes and man-made disruptions, things like ship anchors being dropped on a stretch of cables in the bottom of San Francisco Bay and severing some or many.  Like, of course, vandals, terrorists and so on. Severed cables that disrupted data flow could stop small and many very large systems.

I'm a lover of metaphors, but a great many metaphors we come across are inaccurate, give a mistaken idea of what a thing is like. So I'm muttering to myself this week ... what cloud?  No cloud.  Oh, oh-oh.