And the seas are rolling easy as they did so long ago

[sovay]

My access to LJ has been on the fritz for hours [edit: apologies for any duplicate crossposts that may result]. I had a wonderful time seeing the solstice in with poetry, song, pomegranates, and biryani at sairaali's last night. kythryne brought her guitar and led "Turning Toward the Morning," "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Give Yourself to Love," and other sunward songs. One of Saira and M.'s landlords, home for the holidays, set up a stockpot of Feuerzangenbowle over the restaurant-quality stovetop and I can vouch for its sheer entertainingness as a tradition that combines the best aspects of Christmas punch and lighting a plum pudding on fire. The results taste like very good mulled wine with a slick of recently flaming rum floating on top. Saira has also successfully reconstructed one of the cocktails from Sarma—the Aslan's Reviver, with yogurt, raki, and green chartreuse—and I just sort of wandered around with one of those for a while. I got a glimpse of B. visiting from the D.C. area and of gaudior's Fox, who is just two months old now and huge. I got home after midnight and have spent the majority of today either working or helping my mother make batches of her traditional holiday fudge. More than five things totally make a post. Mostly political.

1. Courtesy of rinue: Don't Be a Sucker! (1947). A strikingly timely short film made by the U.S. Department of War following World War II, explicitly recapitulating the history of Nazi Germany in order to warn against racist and fascist tendencies in America. It's of its time and it's still relevant. The metaphor is con artistry, a shell game of flattery and blame, splintering a potential majority opposition into vulnerable factions in order to isolate scapegoats and get a clear shot at the marks who can be persuaded that they are the "real" Germans/Americans, though the film's internal narrator (a mustache-less, bespectacled Paul Lukas, himself Hungarian-Jewish; real-life German-Jewish refugee Felix Bressart appears similarly in flashback as an anti-Nazi professor) acutely makes the point that when you add up the discountable, destroyable minorities, the target audience ends up being very far from demographically dominant, which of course only makes them feel more like the righteous, embattled defenders of the "real" Germany/America. "Hans and thousands of others like him, all playing a sucker's game. They gambled with other people's liberty and of course they lost their own." The lesson, obviously, is to stick together despite axes of difference and rhetorical efforts to divide. Don't get distracted. Don't fracture. Lines about union-smashing and the "abolition of truth" may also resonate these days. Frankly, for all the simplification of Hitler's rise to power and the propaganda of America as an egalitarian nation of diversity, it is still a more sophisticated discussion of the subject than I had expected to find in this country not two years after the end of the war, which only means that I underestimated the past. "Remember when you hear this kind of talk, somebody's going to get something out of it and isn't going to be you." And still people ask, "But if we allow it to go on, what's going to become of us real Americans?"

2. Relatedly, please enjoy Chuck Wendig swearing about reality.

3. Less enjoyably, like most people I know I have been following the situation with the neo-Nazis in Whitefish. I appreciate that the Daily Inter Lake's editorial call for resistance and support does not rely only on the Christmas holiday to invoke interfaith solidarity. I hope the next attempt to address the situation publicly does not also get canceled. Comments full of anti-Semitic trolls, obviously.

4. In memory of Marion Pritchard, great-grandmother of my ungodchild and a seriously badass human being.

5. Taking a break from Nazis: I appreciate Obama's invocation of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect Atlantic and Arctic waters from offshore drilling and his—finally—decision to dismantle NSEERS to protect Muslim and Arab residents of the United States from Trump's promised registry and deportations. I hope we have a federal court and some remnants of government that will uphold these actions in the coming year.

6. Donald Trump wants more nuclear weapons. I was just coveting a book about Werner Heisenberg's letters to his wife Elisabeth "Li" Schumacher during World War II. He didn't want to give the A-bomb to the Nazis, it now really looks like. I didn't want to give them to Trump long before his pick for national security advisor started fraternizing with Austria's FPÖ. Look, we're back to Nazis. Couldn't we just revisit the really cool parts of the twentieth century instead?

7. Michèle Morgan has died. I don't think I ever saw her in anything other than Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), but she is excellent there. I should look up some of her other films.

Okay, so a mostly political post these days looks crazily depressing. So while reading about Gabriel Byrne pursuant to a discussion I'm having with heliopausa about the characterization of Professor Bhaer in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994), I discovered that he got the role in no small part because he kept calling Armstrong for an audition: Alcott's original novel was one of his childhood imprints and he desperately wanted to be part of a screen version. That delighted me to no end (and explained a point which had puzzled me for twenty-two years: not having seen Byrne before, I assumed from the film that he was German and was then extremely confused to find out he was Irish). This gallery of stills quite seriously suggests that I may unconsciously have attempted to adopt some of his sartorial choices. I can live with this.

Comments

[kore]

I actually don't "like" Byrne as Bhaer -- he's too young, too pretty, too radical! -- but it's basically like Alan Rickman as Col Brandon, I am helpless to resist. Bhaer he is.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Re 7., I saw the obituaries, and wondered whether you knew Quai des Brumes...

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

The metaphor is con artistry, a shell game of flattery and blame, splintering a potential majority opposition into vulnerable factions in order to isolate scapegoats and get a clear shot at the marks who can be persuaded that they are the "real" Germans/Americans

I think I've mentioned Black Legion (1937) a few times. The KKK offshoot in that movie is blatantly a con game as well as a hate group -- the leaders have found a way to not only recruit their own private army, but get their soldiers to pay for the privilege, via dues plus having to buy the uniforms and regalia. The other thing is that Bogart's wife, ignorant of her husband's involvement in the Black Legion, is otoh far more aware than he of how the local economy actually works at ground level -- while he celebrates his factory promotion (got because the Legion killed off his more-qualified immigrant co-worker), his wife worries whether they can afford a chicken dinner because that nice old Polish farmer who used to sell chicken locally at a reasonable price has mysteriously vanished...

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

In fairness, I found a cocktail blogger on the internet who reconstructed it. I didn't have a chance of reverse engineering it myself :)
The proportions for the Aslan's reviver were

2oz yogurt
1oz simple syrup
1oz raki
1/2 oz green chartreuse
3/4 oz lemon juice
splash orange blossom water (which I replaced with two dashes orange bitters, because I couldn't find my bottle of orange blossom water)
Garnish with orange twist (which I didn't bother with)

[gwynnega]

I love Felix Bressart. I don't think I'd ever seen him in a non-comedic role before. Don't Be a Sucker! is very well done and all too relevant.

The 1994 Little Women isn't my favorite film adaptation of the book (mainly because I don't buy Winona Ryder as Jo), but I do love Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer and Claire Danes as Beth. I was just watching the 1949 version last night, which is my favorite, casting-wise, except for the rather jarring choice of Rossano Brazzi as Bhaer. (Speaking of Paul Lukas, I rather like his version of Bhaer in the 1933 film.)

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

a more sophisticated discussion of the subject than I had expected to find in this country not two years after the end of the war, which only means that I underestimated the past.

This was, I suppose, the kind of sophisticated discussion which was beaten out of people (not always just metaphorically) by McCarthyism just a few years later.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the Marion Pritchard piece. Magnificent!

Nine

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Marion Pritchard! I've been thinking of her constantly these last couple of months. I had no idea she was a relative of (I've lost track of who your ungodchild is, sorry). That's very cool.

She's my hero. There are not a lot of people where I can say that with no qualifications or details, but she is one. I am sorry to see her go, but pleased beyond measure that she lived to get old and died full of honors.

I've seen her speak twice. Once as a preteen, in my mother's company, and once as a teenager on my own initiative. She was tiny and energetic, looked like she weighed as much as two or three feathers, and in her crisp, measured Dutch voice, she told fearsome stories and punctuated them with horribly funny one-liners.

Not all of which were hers. She thought this was so funny that she told it on both occasions when I saw her, years apart. One of her friends -- I'm pretty sure this was Karel Poons, whom she was helping conceal -- was a ballet dancer who was in danger from Nazis on two axes, being Jewish and gay. He spent a very short time hiding out at the house of one of the other resistance members, and sharing her bed to pretend there was only one person living in the house. Then he stormed back to Marion Pritchard and said, "You've got to get me out of there. She's trying to make me into a straight man and I can't take it."

Having typed that entire anecdote, I don't find it funny anymore, I think it's just one more look at how crappy Karel Poons' situation was, but apparently Pritchard and Poons thought it was hilarious.

And now I realize I've never looked up Karel Poons' later life. I am tremendously relieved to report that he lived through the war, and returned to Amsterdam afterwards to pick up his dance career again. There's an oral history interview with him here, which I unfortunately can't watch just now because I'm in a restaurant: http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504679

I once spoke one-on-one with Pritchard and was so overawed that I couldn't think of any good questions to ask her. She had said that there was nothing to eat for the last six months of the war, so I asked her, "How did you survive?" She gave me a tired look and said, "We didn't." I have no idea what she meant by that. But I can guess -- I'm betting that she and her housemates were reduced to eating roadkill or picking dry beans out of horse crap, or something else distasteful enough that she didn't want to have to tell a kid about it right then.

My mother and I heard her mention shooting a man, in passing, in the earlier lecture we heard. She then changed the subject, presumably because she didn't want to make the whole lecture hour The Story Of That Time I Killed A Dude. Mom then sent me home and went to a small private reception where other adults pressed Pritchard into telling the whole story. This is just Mom's recounting of Pritchard's account of something that had happened decades earlier, but it seems real enough to recount.

Germans (I assume the Gestapo) and a local policeman came over to Pritchard's safehouse, were shown a seemingly-empty home, and left. Then the local policeman came back on his own, just as the Jewish family members were coming out of the hiding place.

So how did Marion Pritchard take down a whole grown man all by her tiny little self? He gloated. He stood there like a cinema villain, going, "Ha, ha, ha, I KNEW it! I KNEW there was something funny here! I got you all. I'ma be promoted to detective! I'ma join the Gestapo like a big boy! Wooo!" (probably not his actual words but I think it's close). And while he stood there patting himself on the back, Pritchard got a gun out of a side table and shot him dead. They were either so far from other houses that the gunshot wasn't heard, or their neighbors knew all about it and said "Good riddance."

Then a helpful undertaker put the dead policeman into the bottom of the coffin of someone who was about to be buried for unrelated reasons, and somewhere out there, the two bodies lie in one grave, and there they'll lie until future archaeologists come along and are confused. Not everything Marion Pritchard did makes such a unified story, but that's the easiest to tell.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Marion_Pritchard.html