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Buenos Aires Social Club

My first article is up on my new Substack page – a subscription service for longer form articles. Mostly they will be on food, wine, and travel, much like my SaltShaker blog, but with more depth to them. For the moment, the subscription is free, with an eye towards paid subscriptions (already available for those who want to support my writing) down the line.

This first piece is a dive into the world of Social Clubs here in Buenos Aires – neighborhood sports, social, and activities centers, some of which have restaurants in them. Often quite good, and usually notedly cheaper than similar standalone restaurants.

Click here to read Buenos Aires Social Club: Lunching on the cheap at your neighborhood sports and social center.

 

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Ye Adidas!

The Adidas controversy…

Should it have been controversial at all? I mean, “Ye” was not only blatantly anti-semitic – not something new for him – but he outright defied Adidas to part ways with him, doubling down on the anti-semitism. Should be an easy call. Yes, you can point to Adidas’ founding history with its founders having been members of the Nazi party. But who cares? That was August 1949, not August 2022. Every German corporation that was founded in that era had ties to the Nazi party. Many American and other nationality companies had ties to the Nazi Party. Want to get upset about that? Go read IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. This finger-pointing is just an iteration of Godwin’s Law, and irrelevant to the discussion.

So, why not just “part ways” with Ye, call him on his bluff? It should be as simple as “choose a side” to be remembered in history for. And sure, that’s my gut level reaction. Any rational person would do that, right?

And that’s the issue. Adidas took “days” to respond to Ye’s statements with anything more than that they were reviewing their partnership with him. Because Adidas isn’t a person. Adidas doesn’t have a gut reaction. I’d bet that most of the people who’ve been screaming for Adidas to cut ties with Ye immediately are against, say, the Citizens United decision. They’ve probably been railing for years against treating corporations like people.

When it comes down to it, Adidas was facing losing 20% of their gross profits. That’s going to affect a whole lot of people, not just Adidas’ bottom line, which was already on a downward trend. The likelihood is that a large number of people will lose their jobs. Dozens? Hundreds? More? And, despite it being the “right thing” to do, the markets won’t care. Adidas’ 125,000 stockholders are going to take a hit, and probably a huge one. I’m betting that the opening of the stock exchange today is going to see a massive sell off and plunge in price. [It did – a 5% drop at the opening bell, though surprisingly, by end of day it had recovered most of that to close at only 1% down.]

Also, who knows what their contract with Ye involves as penalties for breaking ties with him? It could be even more costly in the short run.

Even if Adidas were a person and not a corporation, who among us would make an immediate ethical decision knowing that it would cost us 20% of our annual income and destroy the income of various friends and family? Ethical or not, I’d bet most of us would want to take a beat and figure things out. We might well know our ultimate decision, but we’d want time to plan how to lessen the impact on ourselves and others.

So Adidas took four or five days to make a decision. No doubt there were a lot of people involved in making it. I’d guess no more than a handful, if any, were not in favor on a gut level of ending their relationship with him. But Adidas is a corporation, not a person, and the board and executives and shareholder groups had to consider not just being on the right side of history in the long run, but the health and survivability of the company in the short run.

I’m glad they did the moral thing in the end. And while on that gut level I wish they’d done it faster, I hope they figured out a responsible approach for themselves, their employees, their contractors, and their investors.

 

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Banned in 2022 #2

Picking up with a few more of the books that were “banned” this year. Again, not banned in total, but a scattering of school boards voting to remove them from all or some (generally grade specific) school libraries. I went into a bit more detail about the whole movement this direction in the first post.

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe

This book has come to be known as one of the most banned, or at least most requested to be banned books of late. The general claim of those who want it banned is that it’s pornographic. The general claim of those who don’t want it banned is that it’s a frank and much needed discussion of coming to grips with gender identity.

I’ll say, they’re both right.

This is a graphic novel, a comic book, if you will. It’s well drawn, it’s well written. It is, indeed, a very open autobiography of the author’s process of self-discovery in terms of “er” gender identity. The author chooses the pronoun set of e/im/er along the way. While I can’t personally identify with the particular identity struggle, I well remember how much I would have loved to have access to books that would have helped me with the struggle of identifying being gay, and what it was all about. Some of it was simple lack of existence back in the early 70s, but even of those books that did exist, I don’t think any were in our school libraries, and my recollection is that the few in our public library were near impossible to check out without blatant attention being paid. I’d read them at the library and reshelve them myself. On that basis, I side with the supporters.

On the other hand, what about the pornography claim? Is it just an attempt, as the author and friends say, to get rid of the book? I guess that comes down to how you define pornography – the old, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it”. It’s not pornographic in the sense of having blatant images of penises and vaginas going at it in one combination or another. On the other hand, it includes scenes of naked guys, gals, and other, angled in ways that genitalia aren’t visible… going at it. It includes frank descriptions of both masturbation and masturbation fantasies. It includes a description of giving a blowjob. It includes talking about smelling and tasting one’s own and one’s partners “juices”. And more; all accompanied by illustrations.

Now, is that pornography? It certainly, to me anyway, would qualify as “soft porn”. But at the same time, when I was growing up, we didn’t have the internet. We might here and there spend some time with a “nudie magazine”, but, certainly I’d never seen one that was gay themed. I’d venture that most high school students these days have long ago mastered finding hardcore porn on the web and the depictions in this book will probably barely register. At a younger age? I understand parental concern, especially as (I’m guessing) younger kids may well not have access to or have seen the more blatant stuff. Yet.

This one’s a tough call.


Lawn Boy, by Jonathan Evison

Honestly, I’m not quite sure what the controversy is over this book. The claims seem to be that it’s some sort of celebration and graphic illustration of pedophilia. The other side says it’s just an attempt to cancel the experience of a poor, biracial kid… “like the author”, as the tag “semi-autobiographical” gets appended time and again.

Let’s start with the last part of that. It’s not really autobiographical. The author himself says it’s not based on his life, but rather was inspired by one of his nephews who is biracial, though apparently neither poor nor being raised by a single mom. On the other side, Evison was raised by a single mom. From anything I’ve been able to find online, it doesn’t quite sound like it was the intense struggle. I mean, Evison grew up on Bainbridge Island, median family income over $160k, 90+% white. I’m not discounting that his family might have been one of the few hundred on the entire island who are at the low end of the income strata, but we’re not talking West Compton here. He talks about having gone through several jobs in his teen years, sort of drifting from one to the next. Sounds like half the teens I’ve ever met, regardless of income level.

But let’s set that all aside – I could be totally wrong about his life – I’m basing it on what I can find on the web. To the book!

Is it pedophilic? No. Just a plain no. I’ve read and reread the passages that get quoted, which indeed are about some sexual experimentation the protagonist has had. But it’s all kids or teens with other kids or teens. Actually, “all” is a stretch. It’s a return, several times, to a few experiences with one other kid that started when he was ten years old. And now he’s miffed that in their early 20s, the other kid, now also a young adult, married, with family, doesn’t want to acknowledge that they used to diddle each other. A lot of young boys “mess around”. There were no adults involved, and with all the rereading of the passages I’ve done, it would take a special kind of warped mind to make the jump that because it’s an adult writing the book, it’s really about his creepy obsession with young boys. He’s writing a coming of age novel. Of course it’s going to involve young boys and teens. Tempest in a teapot, as they say.

Here’s where I have issues with the book. It’s written in the first person, and this middle aged white guy writing it just doesn’t come across as a 20-something Mexican-American kid. Not even a little bit. Instead, it comes across to me like “I, author, am going to try to dumb down my speaking patterns to show you how a young, biracial person would talk. As much as I can, because, you know, I can’t quite dumb myself down that much.” My negative about the book is that it comes across as blatantly racist and condescending on the part of the author. After that, I couldn’t care less about a couple of ten year olds touching each other’s wee-wees. I’m actually surprised that it gets as much support from the woke world as it does – it was so noticeable to me that I’d have thought they’d have trashed the book for that.


All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson

Okay… I’m going to be treading on thin ice here with this one. Pretty much everyone who criticizes this book, regardless of their criticisms, gets immediately and loudly labeled as racist and transphobic. The banning attempts seem mostly related to a trio of passages in the book that are graphically sexual – one a situation of the author being molested as a child by an older family member, the other two descriptions of their (Johnson identifies as non-binary and uses they/them/their pronouns) first consensual sexual experiences.

Let’s start with the outcry against the critics. It’s not automatically racist or transphobic to criticize a book simply because it was written by a person of color or a trans or non-binary person. It’s not “they’re being mean to me because of my identity”. Not everyone is a good writer, and being black, brown, or trans does not auto-endow anyone with literary ability. So let’s look at the book.

First, the sexual stuff. It’s there. It’s graphic. Again, as I noted above, it’s probably far less graphic than 99% of what teens can find on the internet, and watch videos of. But it is there. On the other hand, it’s a yawn, because… this is just a poorly written book. It’s a series of autobiographical essays, but rather than exuding any personality, emotion, or warmth, chapter after chapter comes across like a high school book report that was written the night before it was due. Even the graphic sex comes across like a reporter felt the need to include something in a WaPo article on sexual molestation or homosexual activity. Now, in an autobiographical book, it’s not unexpected that it’s written as if the author is the center of the universe. Better writers might not do that, but most do. It’s a natural tendency when talking about your own life.

But Johnson carries this to an extreme. Everything is all about them. As a small child, they and their brother get jumped while walking down an alleyway in a sketchy area of town. They, in retrospect, conclude that this was their first time being gay-bashed. They were five years old. The older kids, known local bullies, jumped them, beat them up, and took their lunch money. No one used a slur, no one tried anything sexual. Later in life, Johnson relates the trauma of coming to grips with their identify on finding out that the name they’ve been called for the first few years of life is actually their middle name, not their first name. This is, apparently, akin to the trauma of discovering one’s gender isn’t what one thought it was, albeit both names are boy’s names. The author, despite the trauma of being misnamed, regularly uses the “deadname” of a trans cousin, because “it’s funny”, and uses stereotypical slang and slurs against others. But when similar word choices are directed at themself (this is hard to use pronouns this way), it’s suddenly offensive and soul destroying. Johnson even claims to have invented an entire subculture of LGBT language, starting with the use of “Honey Chile”. Johnson was born in 1985. I have gay friends from the south who were using it, and other of his “inventions” in the 70s.

And more. The credit given to Nina Simone for the 1965 song “Strange Fruit”. The song was first performed by Billie Holiday in 1939, from a 1937 poem written by a Jewish poet, Lewis Allen, as a protest against lynching. The jumble of Abraham Lincoln quotes taken out of context and chronological order to make it seem like he was never anti-slavery, rather than that it was a slow development and change later in life. Even simple things like dates – a claim that the day of the 9/11 attack was his first day of his junior year of high school… really? A high school that doesn’t start classes until mid-September? And starts on a Tuesday? I’d venture they were at least a week or two into classes by then. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I’m betting not. And of course, the attack deeply affected Johnson’s personal gender and racial identity.

I wish I could see the positives that supporters of the book see – the explorations of “young, black, queer identity” – and no doubt they’re interwoven into the book. But they’re so obscured by self-importance and bad writing that they’re lost. I wouldn’t ban this book based on a trio of graphic sexual encounters, but on the basis of being a book that should have been not just better written, but had a decent editor involved. I find myself trying to imagine any decent editor who would have let this one get past them. Unless they were afraid they’d be canceled as racist and transphobic for taking a blue pencil to it.

 

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Don’t Say… ?

There has been a lot of outcry over the “Don’t Say Gay” bill debated and recently passed by the Florida legislature (HB1557/SB1834). On one side, the claim is that the bill prohibits any school teacher or administrator or third party in a school from ever mentioning anything related to gender identity and/or sexuality. On the other side, the claim is that the bill simply asserts the rights of parents to have a say in what their children learn about those topics. Since the only thing I’ve seen in relation to this has been a lot of social media and news reports, all without any citation, and all with a lot of hand-wringing, I decided to read the bill myself.

Now, not being a lawyer, I can’t delve into what might be possible because of specific wording. Legal scholars and lawyers will no doubt argue the fine points in court cases to come where this new law gets tested. But the bill is basically only three pages, and nothing that comes across as deeply mystifying legalese, so I’m going to give it a stab.

Edit: I’ve been asked to give bullet-points about my conclusions, and you can read on to flesh out the details:

  • This law only applies to public schools
  • This law applies to all grades, not just the GOP touted “it’s only kindergarten through third grade kids”. That’s just one sentence out of the bill, the rest applies to all grades. 
  • This law leaves vulnerable kids, particularly LGBTQIA+ kids, without a safety net for counseling, making it “talk to your parents” or nothing, and obligating school employees to notify parents of anything kids say about their sexuality or identity.
  • By leaving the definition of “age appropriate” vague, this law puts the onus of defining it on state employees whose jobs are beholden to elected officials, while taking those officials off the hook for making what might turn out to be unpopular decisions.
  • Edit: This all didn’t age well, as over the next 10 months, Governor DeSantis, by executive fiat, extended all these restrictions through the rest of elementary school, and then on to secondary school; upped the ante on book-banning in school libraries, while cheering on private forays into public libraries and bookstores as well. And then, another couple of months later, got the legislature to codify it into law. Also added in prohibitions on teachers and school employees “using” pronouns or asking students what theirs are, and prohibited trans students (well, trans people in general) from using public restrooms unless they correspond to their birth gender, regardless of whether they’ve undergone any medical transition procedures, subject to genital examination, DNA testing, and the potential for arrest for using the wrong bathroom.

First, this bill does not apply to all schools. It applies specifically and only to public schools. What a private school chooses to teach and how they interact with parents is not addressed.

Second, and probably where much of the debate comes from, is the introductory paragraph, which is a litany of more than a dozen assertions about what the purpose of the bill is. Most of it relates to parental notification and involvement in school approaches to the well-being, both physical and mental, of students.

The basic assertion is that the school and its personnel are not to undertake any actions in the realm of a student’s well-being without either prior involvement of the parents in the decision, or if something happens in the moment, without notifying the parents. In the midst of the litany is a reference to not encouraging classroom discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity in “primary grade levels”. But let’s get into the actual bill, since the preamble doesn’t contain any details of anything enforceable.

The first section of the actual bill requires that a school adopt clear policies for notifying a parent if their child seeks help, or a teacher notices an issue, around their physical, mental, well-being. It requires that the school recommend the child talk to their parent first, and that the parent give permission for the school to be involved in the process. It carves out a clear exception for cases of suspected child abuse that might involve a parent.

But, the troubling part of this is, as someone who began to “come out” as gay during high school, and had friends who did as well, being able to talk to a teacher or counselor about it because of fear of parental reaction, was really important. Had they been prohibited from talking to me about it, I’m not sure where I’d have sought out support. Well, I actually do – since most of the counseling I got ended up being from my rabbi, who was open about having a conversation and not talking to my parents about it, though he did encourage me to do so.

In the same vein, the second section prohibits the school from requiring students to fill out questionnaires or participate in activities that might lead them to openly discuss issues of their physical, mental, or emotional well-being in the school, as opposed to talking to their parents about them (same exception in regard to potential child abuse cases).

Again, the same issue arises… since some of these sorts of issues (at this point, nothing’s been mentioned in the meat of the bill about sexual orientation or gender identity, but we are headed that way) are ones that many kids have reasonable concerns about talking to their parents about. Taking away the option for counseling and support without parental notification or permission leaves vulnerable kids even more at risk for not getting support.

Section three is clearly the one where the “Don’t Say Gay” moniker comes from. But honestly, to me, this is the least troubling part of the bill. The first two sections, as I noted, are where I see a real issue. The only thing that this section prohibits is “classroom instruction” by teachers, administrators, or third parties about sexual orientation or gender identity, for students who are in kindergarten through third grade. From fourth grade on, there’s no prohibition, though there’s an oddly phrased sentence about such classes being age appropriate, not defined, which obviously could be subject to a variety of interpretations. The big issue here is it leaves that definition in the hands of the department of education, which could well make up all sorts of reasons for not teaching about these topics to various grade levels, depending on political pressures from state officials.

While it’s possible that a six year-old could have questions or concerns that might be addressed in counseling (back to the first section), I have to agree that kids of that age don’t need to have those conversations in class. The bill doesn’t prohibit a teacher or administrator from answering questions about such topics, it prohibits making it a part of the curriculum. Could the term “classroom instruction” be misused to castigate a teacher for their approach to answering questions? I suppose, but I imagine that’s in the arena of fine points that will end up in a courtroom.

Section four is pretty innocuous, and probably no different from what every department of education law includes – that any support services offered by school personnel must adhere to guidelines established by the school system and the state’s department of education. Obviously, those guidelines could be altered to be something horrific, but that’s not part of this bill.

Section five requires that the school notify parents at the beginning of the school year what sorts of health services and counseling the school makes available to both students and their parents. Pretty standard.

Section six requires that the schools notify and receive permission from a parent before administering either physical or mental health questionnaires to their kids.

Section seven basically just establishes the details of what parental notification and permission involves, and parental remedies if a school violates any of the above rules.

In sum, my biggest concern revolves around the lack of access to outside support for vulnerable kids that is built into the first two sections of this bill, now law, that goes into effect this July.

I understand the impetus that many, if not most parents, have to be involved in the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of their kids, and to not have an “outsider” having those conversations. At the same time, they might want to take a momentary step back, and think about their own childhood and teen years, and whether there were issues that they really needed to talk to someone other than their parents about.

Prohibiting any sort of counseling or conversation with a student in this arena on the part of school personnel without parental involvement is short-sighted, and is more likely to create more serious well-being issues for kids. Obviously there need to be some lines that aren’t to be crossed, but the way those two sections of the bill are worded aren’t where the line ought to be. And including vaguely worded phrases like “age appropriate” or “developmentally appropriate” in the law, with the definition of those left to a group of employees of the state, beholden to the governor and/or legislature for their employment, is a slippery slope to nowhere good.

[The bill can be found here: Senate/House bill

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Banned in 2022 #1

Of late, there’s been much brouhaha over the “banning” of books. In some cases these have not been actual banning, but have been portrayed as such, for example, as I write this, one of the most talked about ones is Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust. At least as of now, it hasn’t been banned, by anyone, it was removed as a text from a single high school course held at two high schools in McGinn Country, Tennessee, affecting around 50-60 students a year. It remains on the library shelves of the schools involved, it wasn’t burned (well, it might have been included in some staged book burnings by some hysterical townsfolk, but they had to go out and buy their own copies). It is to be replaced with a different text… which one is the source of much speculation and agitation on the part of outsiders who haven’t a clue. Now, that may well change, but that whole situation has more or less dropped out of the news cycle, so we may never know.

The latest that came to my attention was the school board in Wentzville, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, with a population of about 39,000, although the school district covers a population of 85,000, of whom, about 17,400 are students, at 22 different schools. So this has a bit more impact than the case above. Depending on which news report you read, either four or six or eight books were not just removed from all curricula, but also from all public school library shelves in January 2022. They’re still available at bookstores in town, and the school board has no say in that, and it’s apparently caused a jump in sales of those books, albeit only about 120 copies between them – a grand total of roughly 15 copies of each book. Whether those were sold to kids or to parents who wanted to know what the fuss was about, it’s not clear.

But, it got me interested, as I’d not read any of them, though two of them were already on my reading stack. So, just what is the fuss all about? I decided to start my dive into these books with the graphic novels from the two situations.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

The Wentzville school board said the removal was for scenes of nudity, profanity, and, treating the death of a parent as a joke. The article, ardently progressive, asserts that it was because the author is a lesbian, and the book normalized the LGBTQIA+ community. So I read it. And the thing is, the book has nudity, and even a graphic sex scene between two women, it has a huge quantity of profanity, and, her father’s death is treated by her as a big joke. Nothing about the way either her or her father’s sexuality is handled in the book could remotely be considered normalizing.

She portrays her father as the worst sort of gay stereotype: alternating between mincing sissy (her words) and overbearing autocrat (yet somehow loving of his children, though she’s loathe to admit that), who, after she learns that he has possibly had sex (no proof is given, just a claim by her estranged mother, who was suing for divorce and who it seems had affairs of her own), with men, including a couple of younger men (17-19 years old), assumes that that means he was a pederast, lusting after prepubescent boys on the playground and altar boys in church; with “unwholesome morality” (her words, again); and riddled with guilt from his unnatural (her word) urges, to the point where horror of horrors, he seeks out professional help from a therapist (though he never tells her why he was seeing a therapist, this is an assumption on her part). And she assumes that all this guilt and activity on her father’s part led him to commit suicide, despite there being no evidence that he committed suicide – all evidence points to an accidental death in a car versus pedestrian accident. And she turns his death, funeral, and visits to the cemetery, into a litany of humor.

To top it off, she blithely, towards the end, talks about the obliviousness of her father when he’s teaching an English class that includes a book with a closeted protagonist, and accuses him of the worst sort of cognitive dissonance because her 40-something year old married father didn’t choose that moment in front of a class of college students to out himself, and is therefore guilty of perpetuating stereotypes. She ought to take a look in the mirror.

As to style… the book lacks any real dialogue, instead being a first person narration. Still, an odd choice for a graphic novel purportedly about the relationship between a few family members. But maybe that fits, since most of what she relates seems to be her imaginings about things that may well have never happened. The writing style is emotionless – perhaps that’s intentional to make it all seem very bleak, but at the same time, it makes it a bore to read. As to the profanity, they’re right. The captions are packed with it – however, it’s of the innocuous sort that comes from a person who can’t seem to complete a cogent thought without throwing in one of those words. We all know someone like that – they’re not really cursing, they’re just talking, and they use words that some people find objectionable the way other people use “umm”.

Hell, I’d probably vote to take this book off of public school library shelves too, partially, perhaps, for the reasons the school board gave, all of which were accurate, but more because it’s a horrifically stereotyped portrayal of an unhappily closeted gay father of the boomer generation, and a seemingly reluctant out of the closet lesbian daughter with a whole lot of emotional and empathy issues.


Maus I & II, by Art Spiegelman

I have mixed feelings about the “ban” on this book, which might be hinted at by my opening paragraph, though a deeper look into the situation bothers me more than it did originally. Again, the book is not actually banned, it was just removed “as a text” from a class being taught about the Holocaust, with the intention to replace it with a different book. To me, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, unless the book chosen to replace it is one that whitewashes over what happened. But, reading through the transcript of the school board meeting makes it more troubling. The ten members of the school board, one by one, when questioned, admit they’ve never read the book. They’re relying on some reviews and blog posts about it for their assessment.

Next, and just as concerning, it turns out that the particular unit of study on the Holocaust that the two high schools offer was actually designed around Maus. Literally the entire course curriculum is based on the book, with supporting materials that include other readings, videos, and interviews with Holocaust survivors, all good things, included. In order to replace it, they have to completely redesign the curriculum for the study unit, not just select another book, because the supporting materials and lectures all have to mesh with whatever new text they select. That makes this clearly a much more long-term project, and at the least means likely not offering this course of study for at least one or two school years. It’s also worth noting that most of the ten school board members were on the school board when they approved the design of this same course, around the same book.

So what was the school board’s reasoning? Three things, all related to “we think this book is too adult for the age of the students being taught the material”, particularly “rough language”, i.e., profanity, nudity, and graphic scenes of death. The critics of their move point out that none of those things, particularly the level of them that appear in the book(s) rises to the level of what these same kids see on the internet every day. And while the board admits that’s true, they also assert that that doesn’t mean they have to intentionally put those things in front of kids as part of a class. The critics also point out, rightly, that any study of the Holocaust is going to be disturbing for students, but that that discomfort is part of what students need to experience in order to understand what happened. Making it graphic makes it more real than simply reading a text.

The dismissal of the board’s concerns by saying that the graphic panels use animals – mice, pigs, dogs, cats… rather than human figures… is a spurious one. They’re clearly intended to evoke particular caricatures of Jews, Poles, and Geman Nazis – which may actually make them more intense than if the author had used humans.

So on to my own thoughts on reading this. The book was published in two parts originally. These days there’s a “complete” version, but what I had access to were the original two, so I’m going to separate them. The first book is basically an interview that the author conducted with his father about the years leading up to, and the early years of World War 2. It’s a look at the lives of he and his family, how they coped with ever increasing restrictions on their activities and lives over a several year period.

As best I could find, the only profanity in the first book was a single use of “god dammit” by the author swearing at his father for having destroyed his wife’s diaries. The author’s upset comes from his lack of source material (which he hadn’t known existed until that moment to begin with), and shows a remarkable lack of empathy for what his father went through. It was all about himself and his project. There is no nudity in the first book that I saw, and not anything that I’d really consider graphic violence – there are several references to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but they’re not shown. And even the street violence is more pointed to than shown.

Book two is a continuation of his father’s story, through his internment at Auschwitz and later Dachau. Much of the book is also set in modern day, with the author talking about the success of his first book, and, spending most of the time arguing with and chastising his father. Like the book above by Bechdel, the relationship of the author to his father is a strained one, and he spends almost more time berating him than he does listening to him. His father is portrayed as a stereotypical whiny, poor-English speaking Jew who does little more than scrimp and hoard money, try to cheat people, and is racist to boot. The author comes across as more interested in his personal success and comfort than anything about his family. The book’s subtitle of “And here my trouble began” seem more related to how put-out he feels about even having to help his aging father, and how it impacts his daily routine.

In terms of the school board’s concerns, as best I could find, there’s no profanity in this volume, the only nudity is a two panel scene at the start of his father’s internment in Auschwitz with a half dozen naked men (mice) in a shower, and then getting dressed. In terms of graphic violence, it’s certainly talked about, but for the most part, not pictured. Even a scene that was specifically referenced, of a man who’d been shot lying in a pool of his own blood, most of the panel and the man’s body is blocked out by the caption box. A graphic scene of his mother’s suicide was also mentioned, however, as best I could find, doesn’t appear in either volume, though her suicide is mentioned a couple of times, with no details given.

While personally I’m not big on graphic novels, I found these to be well written, well illustrated, and engaging. I can see why they were chosen as a way of capturing the attention of the age group they’re intended for. So, overall, on this one, I think the school board’s decision was pretty stupid. They admitted they’d never read the books. Their objections to specific material aren’t supported by what is actually in the books. And the fact that the entire curriculum needs to be rewritten and redesigned because of this removal seems a waste of a lot of time that had gone into the (successful) implementation of this program.

On the flipside, I haven’t seen any evidence that supports the critics’ point of view, much of which, I’d note, is driven by the author himself and his publisher. Unless there’s some secret agenda to simply never re-do this study unit, there’s nothing to indicate any anti-semitism, nor plans to eliminate the Holocaust from the school’s curriculum. While I think a better approach if they didn’t like this book would have been to first read it, and then if they still felt the same way, to propose the redesign, but keep the current design in play until the new one was ready, would have made more sense, and avoided a lot of media hysteria and blowback.

[Edit: While it has not been kept on as the core textbook of the course on the Holocaust, and I haven’t found any reference to what it was replace with, it was decided not to ban the Maus books from the school libraries, and they remain available to students to read. Which kind of makes the claims of the school board a bit suspect – perhaps they were just trying to appease a few upset parents about a classroom text?]

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Action Dragons!

An article in the latest issue of Blackbelt magazine laid out the 20 best martial arts films of all time. The article is one worth paying attention to, as the opinion maker is Dr. Craig D. Reid, who is the author of the canonical books when it comes to martial arts films, the various “Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Films of…” series. He’s probably seen and written about more films of the genre than anyone out there. And for the magazine, he’s written a new “20 best” list three times now, roughly seven to eight years apart – 2005, 2012, 2020. Interestingly, few films have remained the same between the lists, which might indicate that films have just gotten better with time, except that, for example, the current list features quite a few films from the 1970s and 1980s, that didn’t appear on earlier lists.

So what happened to the ones he thought were better back then than he does now? Of course, it may simply be an intent not to repeat recommendations, totally understandable, and no one ever takes the word “best” in those lists as gospel. I decided, given that we still have plenty of downtime in Argentina’s quarantine, which continues, seven months plus in, to watch my way through his lists (at the moment just the 2012 and 2020 lists, as I haven’t found the 2005 list online anywhere). In no particular order (well, actually the order I was able to find copies of the films to watch). Spoilers ahead….

I’m immediately off on a tangent, as one of the recommended films in 2019 was the new “remake” of Enter the Fat Dragonwhich came out this year. Before getting to that, I decided to jump back to the original, which came out in 1978 and starred Sammo Hung, now one of the preeminent directors of martial arts films. The film was produced as a parody of the Bruce Lee film Way of the Dragon, albeit the title is a play on another Lee film, Enter the Dragon. In this film, 26-year old Hung plays a young man who has grown up on a pig farm, who idolizes and tries to emulate Bruce Lee, at least in fighting, if not spirit, whose father decides to send him to “the city” to work for his uncle and get some exposure to the outside world. Now, first off, Hung isn’t fat. He may be a little chubby, stocky, in the midsection, but really, he’s pretty much solid muscle, and he moves faster and more agilely than a whole of slim and trim martial artists out there. As one would expect from the farm boy goes to the big city trope, he gets himself into constant trouble because he doesn’t understand the ins and outs of urban life, and his first reaction to virtually anything amiss is to start a fight. In general, he wins, time after time, mostly against young street thugs, but at the cost of some level of damage, destruction, and dismay to things and people around him. By the end, after a culminating fight scene taking on three experts in different fighting styles, and only sort of barely being the hero of the day, he decides he’s had enough of the big city and heads back to the pig farm. I had seen this film before, years ago (the English subtitled version didn’t come out until 1999, and an English dubbed version wasn’t released until 2019, though both used the original 35mm cut transferred to DVD – the dubbed version was done by a German company, initially into German, and there are a few points where they forgot to re-dub English over German, but not enough to make it hard to follow). Biggest negative for me was probably the stereotyping of a Japanese and a Black character, both played by Chinese actors made up in ridiculous looking “costume” for lack of a better term. Then again, it was intended as a parody of the wave of Bruce Lee style “Bruceploitation” films of the 70s, so that may have been intentionally overdone as a spoof.

Now, it turns out that watching the 1978 version while, not a waste of time, really has nothing to do with the 2019 Enter the Fat Dragonstarring Donnie Yen, one of my favorite martial arts actors. There’s literally nothing about them other than the title that’s the same. Yen, who’s in damned good shape for someone who was 55 years old at the time of the filming, is trim, muscled, and in “fighting shape”. He plays a Hong Kong police sergeant who can never quite seem to get things right – if there’s any similarity to the original film it’s that while he’s great at tracking down and capturing the bad guys, he always leaves a trail of destruction in his wake. After one particularly egregious offense, his supervisor relegates him to desk duty in the evidence locker; and his girlfriend, a local TV star, dumps him. In a depression, over seven months of deskbound monotony, he slowly eats himself to an extra 60-70 pounds of fat. For inexplicable reasons, he’s pulled from the evidence room to handle a prisoner transport to Tokyo, where he quickly becomes embroiled in travails as it turns out that, and here’s where some solid racism comes in, all Japanese, and particularly Japanese police, are corrupt, untrustworthy, lying, scheming human beings, as opposed, of course, to the noble Chinese like him, who must now, while on foreign soil, destroy an entire yakusa operation and bring down the corrupt police department, single-handedly. It’s kind of off-putting, as is the way he reunites with his estranged girlfriend, suddenly, in Tokyo, where she just happens to suddenly be hanging out with said yakusa. As a story, I can’t say that this one wowed me, but damn, Yen has some moves. Even in the fat suit that apparently took hours to get him into, he still manages to don some upscale apparel, and leaps, jumps, punches, kicks, handles various classic Chinese weapons, some solid hardcore parkour, and more, with three really great fight scenes – one on the streets, one in the Tsukiji fish market, and one on the catwalks of the Tokyo Tower. The film is worth watching just for those.

In a switch up from the high minded view of the Chinese vs others of the two previous films, Jet Li’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate casts the Chinese as the bad guys this time. The brutish Tartars, which whom he allies himself, turn out to be the good guys. In particular, court officials from the notorious “East Bureau” and “West Bureau”, as well as various courtiers to the Emperor, who, himself, does not make an appearance. Jet Li plays a sort of vengeful Robin Hood-ish character… well, no, not exactly, as he’s not out robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but simply hunting down the corrupt and rich officials and killing them. That’s, more or less, the plot. There’s some vague romance background as well, never fully realized, there’s some treasure, but it’s more a backdrop and never comes to anything. It’s really just about Li’s character, Zhao Huai’an, tracking down and killing these folk. He particularly despises eunuchs and makes sure to subject them to overly grisly deaths when possible. There are, in line with the movie’s title, a lot of flying swords. And knives. And other things. Seemingly endless flying weapons, including one antagonist who has the ability to turn his sword into boomeranging shards of blade. And sometimes those who wield them fly too. Zhao faces off against his biggest enemy in a final fight literally connected by a chain, while whirling around in a tornado, including a moment when they land on a flying bit of a building and continue the flight on “firmer footing” as the flooring spins madly in the clouds. The fight scenes are cool in a science fiction-y way, with great choreography, albeit ridiculously unbelievable. It’s fun, pure escapism, and a tad bloodthirsty.

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One Leaf, Every Day

By request from a friend who is the editor for the The World Congress of GLBT Jews, I wrote up this little piece for their High Holidays 5781/2020 newsletter, which came out today.

Taking on reading a long, intricate novel can be a daunting task, especially if you’re expected to not just read it, but study and discuss it. When it popped into my awareness that a new cycle of the Daf Yomi was starting at the beginning of 2020, an idea began to form. Like many Americans of my generation, I was brought up in a Jewish household that started off somewhat leaning Conservative, but moved more and more towards Reform as the years went on. I knew the Talmud existed, occasionally our rabbi would drop a pearl of wisdom into a sermon or conversation. But I never studied it.

It was enough to have learned the basics of the Torah, and a bit from other books of the bible. The Talmud was relegated to the world of yeshiva boys and Yentl. It was in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. An English version didn’t exist until 2012, just in time for the last Daf Yomi cycle, even that was just a “beta version”, and its 22 volumes rang in with a price tag in the thousands of dollars. But this time around, taking on studying “a page a day”, or to be pedantic, “a leaf a day”, since it’s two pages back to back, of the 2,711 leaves, had the advantage of the online treasure trove of Jewish texts, Sefaria, making the entire thing available for free. There’s even an app.

I’m not particularly religious. I have my moments. Upfront, I wanted to approach what I “knew” to be the rabbinic laws around the Torah from the perspective of a cultural observer. Assuming it to be dry reading, I figured a week or two into the project I’d probably abandon it, with a shrug, hey, gave it a try. Within a day or so, I was hooked. Imagine, if you will, a group of rabbis, sages, priests, and wise men, sitting around, day after day, for years, starting off with a discussion of a legal point, and going off on the tangents that any group of intimate friends might. And someone is writing it all down. All of it. Every digression, every one-off comment.

What starts with a point of law leads into tangents on topics as varied as food and cooking, construction, sorcery and demons, and sex. A lot of sex. They have provided fodder for a running daily twitter-ish commentary that I’ve been publishing that runs the gamut from recipes for fig cakes; whether Jesus’ (yes, that one) cooking skills are not up to par; bathhouse etiquette; appropriate gifts to the mothers of young boys you’ve molested; to how to cruise the marketplace and not look “too gay”. It’s been going on nine months now, twenty minutes or so over my morning coffee, and I’ve found myself fascinated with a look back at the culture of our ancestors from centuries, if not millennia, past. Only around seven more years to go.

Dan is an author, sommelier, chef, and restaurateur living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Hopefully his highly rated “closed-door” restaurant Casa Saltshaker will open again soon, post pandemic.

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Hidings in Plain Sight

We’re in quarantine, and what is there to do besides lots of TV, movies, online surfing, gaming, and reading. A couple of friends recommended the new book Hiding in Plain Sightby Sarah Kendzior, a journalist, about the “rise of” Donald Trump. When I sought it out, it turned out there a whole slew of books with the title Hiding in Plain Sight, and what the heck, it was a “project”.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America 

Sarah Kendzior

I hate to say it, but… yawn, and no. Given her background in journalism and her history of pointing to “the dark times”, I have to say I expected a hell of a lot more. Basically the book is a bunch of repackaged info from various articles and opinion pieces we’ve been subjected to over the last four years plus since Trump became a prominent figure in the political world. Her primary news source seems to be Buzzfeed, and while not to denigrate them as a news source, they’re certainly not the be all and end all of political and economic news. Other than a brief glance at Trump’s early years, one would think on reading this book that he, the state of the U.S. both economically and politically, all began somewhere around the year 2000, during the Bush 2 years, and that it all came as a complete shift in the landscape of America from that moment on, and took everyone by surprise. Except her, of course, because she’s been sounding the alarm since then, basically the year she graduated from college. How prescient. The book focuses much on Trump’s connection to Russia, both to the Putin government and to shadowy crime figures in the Russian mafia in New York City, some named, some not – the vast majority of it based on his real estate dealings with various Russians, and little else. She also stoops to the tired, anti-semitic tropes of various “Jewish” finance figures – and before anyone jumps to point out that some of those figures Trump dealt with were, indeed, Jewish, let me just point out in return, she doesn’t refer to any of the myriad of other finance figures he’s dealt with over the years as “Christian”, “Muslim”, “Hindu”, “Buddhist”, or any other religions – but she makes sure to identify each Jew as a Jew, even down to reminding us more than once that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “one of them”. I finished off the book feeling like a needed a shower. Not just from the possibility that some or even all, of what she wrote might be true (I’m not discounting that it may well be), but from her blatant biases. ☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Street Kid’s Journey from Female to Male

Zane Thimmesch-Gill

Not a book I would normally gravitate towards, but I’m glad I read it. It was a fascinating first person memoir of a “FTM”, or female to male, transgender teen, ostracized from, at the time, “her” family, following through to a mix of attempts at foster home living, living on the street, living in shelters, and more. All the while, she does her best to maintain high school and later, college studies, while coming to grips with one form of gender dysphoria that ultimately leads her partially down the path to a transition to being male. While we don’t know the eventual outcome, it’s clear that there’s no one path for him. For the most part the book is highly engaging, and paints a picture of a life that most of us can’t begin to imagine. At times it seems a bit overblown, and I found myself thinking, “how could you react to this situation like this, where someone is trying to help/be kind”, but, I’ve also never been in the situation, and no doubt there are psychological and physiological factors that I can’t fathom without having lived it. Worth a read. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: Eluding the Nazis in Occupied France

Sarah Lew Miller

A quick read. Understandably, given the subject matter – a teenage Jewish girl’s story of her family’s survival during WWII, it’s kind of hard not to compare it to the more famous work of Anne Frank. But it’s not the same story – different countries, different situations, different outcomes. It lacks some of the intensity of the famed Diary, mostly because she, and her family, are able to basically continue to live their lives. They get jobs, they find places to live, they have neighbors and friends, they have people who help them and care for them. It’s still a very poignant story, and a reminder of a time not all that long ago. And, of course, given the times we’re living in, it’s difficult not to also consider the lives of people around the world during the current pandemic, and the different levels of existence that different people, in various cultures, are experiencing. Well worth a read. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Incredible True Story of a German-Jewish Teenager’s Struggle to Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland

Betty Lauer

Staying in virtually the same theme, we once again have a teenager’s diary, in essence, of the same. So, I’ll start it with the same opening as the previous review…. Understandably, given the subject matter – a teenage Jewish girl’s story of her family’s survival during WWII, it’s kind of hard not to compare it to the more famous work of Anne Frank. But it’s not the same story – different countries, different situations, different outcomes. The book is well written, and although phrased in first person, is, as above, an “as told to”, by the author. The life of young Berta Weissberger, and the place and time that the book covers, are actually pretty interesting, a bit more so, or perhaps it’s just the quality of the writing, than the previous book. The biggest issue in this book is that the book is almost as interminable as the six years it covers – it goes on for nearly 600 pages, detailing day to day life in, at times, excruciatingly unnecessary detail, as one day after another often looks much like the previous day. Still, I found it an engaging read and worth recommending. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Shelby Belgarden Mystery

Valerie Sherrard

Without meaning to be flip about it, this is the sort of book that people who like this sort of book will like. It’s a cute mystery, a bit “Nancy Drew” – all teenage girls and giggles and crushes and the like. As such, it’s not my cup of tea, but then, I’m not the target audience for the book either. It’s clearly a “YA” book aimed at the teen set of the female gender. Maybe because I read a lot of mysteries, or maybe just because the author makes sure to point out the clues, several of them repeatedly, in a sort of “this will be on the test” manner, but I’d basically worked out the whole thing by a little over halfway through the book. If you’re a teenage girl who likes easy reading mysteries, you may well enjoy this. ☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight

Lucy Felthouse

I… just can’t. I’m not even sure if it was well written, it was just so far outside my personal comfort zone to read that I couldn’t give you an honest assessment of that. Nothing red flagged me with major grammar or spelling typos, so, there’s that. But, basically, it’s a soft-porn novel that pretends to be about a supposed professional, experienced spy. One who just turns to jelly when a handsome man looks at her, and a) can’t get her and his clothes off fast enough, b) immediately heads into the “oooh, a man likes me and he’s sexy and kisses well, maybe I should give it all up for love, and c) can’t keep her mind on her job. Professional…? I don’t get the hype and high reviews for this book – unless they’re all coming from very, very, lonely people. ☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight

Mary Ellis

A well written, fast paced, easy read of a private detective novel. I like the style, I found the principal characters likable. And, I don’t mind that there’s a clear Catholic bent to both the writing and the story – I assume that that’s the author’s background and she brings what she knows to make the novel work. But, there are negatives. The secondary characters are a bit caricatured, right out of central casting stereotypes for Italian Americans; the Catholicism takes momentary negative turns with snide or disparaging remarks or thoughts on the part of the principals towards other Christians, and, no doubt the horror to end all horrors, those of either lapsed faith, or… can we use the word, atheists; and last, while not limited to this author, why does it seem like every female detective needs to fall head over heals in love with some guy who she randomly meets on a case? (If anyone can point me to a detective series with a strong female protagonist who doesn’t go that route, I’m interested!) It was still an enjoyable read, though the negatives are enough that I don’t find myself moved to continue on to other books in the series. ☆☆☆

This seems a good place wrap up this post, with a septet of books delved into. There are plenty more of the same name, plus a slew of Hide in Plain Sight, or just In Plain Sight. On the fiction side they seem to bounce between romance and detective novels, while on the non-fiction side, there’s a hunt for Nazis, a bible truths tome, a book of investing essays, and more. Whether I come back to this venture remains to be seen. It was an interesting approach to finding things to read that I might not normally be on the lookout for, and instead, I might just try something similar with another title. Time will tell.

 

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