Whatever Happened to Dilbert?

 The only comic strip I read every day until a week or so ago was Dilbert by Scott Adams. It reminded me of the old Doonesbury. Both had an incredibly good ear that enabled them to come up with perfect zinger for the last panel. And nobody covered the territory Dilbert did: the people in the cubicles at work and all the b.s. that people in corporate settings put up with every day. You were almost guaranteed a good laugh each morning.

So, then Adams goes rogue and puts out some YouTube video that has a bunch of totally racist screeds and this is the most classic cancellation situation. By the end of the weekend, he had lost about two-thirds of his 2000 or so newspapers that carried his strip. They got one line out of him while all this was happening: "By Monday I won't have a paper left."

Today, the Washington Post had an article about the whole business. It picked up on earlier stuff, including a shorter piece in the Times. The line they took was that he had been playing on the edge for quite a while and now he finally went over. He had introduced a black character and apparently had started presenting some unacceptable stuff around him. There was more, too. 

I suppose I took some minor notice that he had been pushing the edge, but I guess I didn't want to see it. I just liked his strip and anticipated what great punchline he would come up with in that last panel. And right to the end, he usually did. 

It turns out that his politics had become increasingly right-wing. He was a Trumper. I've seen this happen to people. Something starts to go somewhere inside them and their resentment pushes them to go off the right-wing deep end. Usually, however, they really obviously lose their cool. He didn't--at least from my standpoint.

People have come back from this kind of fall. But all the signs so far are that if he isn't doubling down, he's making no effort to apologize, at the least, and do the required public penance testifying that he's seen the light. There have been plenty of cases where people have pulled this kind of stunt and saved themselves, but I don't think he's interested in that or that he even cares.

Why? Maybe he's made so much money over these bountiful years that he doesn't need to work anymore. He put out two books at least, he was honored with awards from his peer cartoonists, and I figure he did well on those books and other projects. I'll keep wondering, though, why he decided to do this right now. I can't believe he thought he'd get away with the stuff he put out on the video.

The bottom line is: what about me? I just miss every morning,as I now pass the comics, an unusually sharp source of a light moment with material drawn from the workplace, something I studied in college and something I've learned something about in the various workplaces I've inhabited over the years. 

I was enough of an enthusiast that I went to hear Adams at FOSE, the Federal Office Systems Exhibition, more than a few years ago. It was a trade show for government people in DC at the Convention Center that mostly was filled with salespeople pushing IT systems and related stuff. He did about an hour's turn before an audience of a few hundred people. He was funny and he seemed to enjoy showing some strips that he had never published because they went over the edge.

Not that I expected his current imbroglio based on this presentation. I could see how he couldn't put this stuff in the strip in the paper, but if it had been as bad as his video, they wouldn't have let him present this at the show and he probably would have self-destructed all those years ago.

His ear for corporate-speak was superb and the villainous yet comic personalities of the boss and the super-boss were right on point. He said in the FOSE presentation that his favorite character was Wally, the bald-headed guy with a single hair who was always figuring out how to get along without doing any real work.

I guess he achieved the goal of being Wally--except Wally was funny.

The Fabelmans

 Steven Spielberg's biographical pic has received generally good notices, none of which I read before seeing it recently. It's good but there are a few points I'll raise with respect to its overall impact. After reviewing his lengthy bio in Wikipedia, it appears that the film tracks his real life closely. There were changes but none of any great significance.

Parents are played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, who are excellent. Williams is a superb actress but at times I wasn't entirely sure about where her character was coming from or going. Mainly, this was likely due to her being a free spirit, married to a computer engineer who is on a path to ultimate success in Silicon Valley. She is the main character, along with Gabriel LaBelle as Spielberg from his young adult stage onward. I guess in the end she wasn't easy to understand. Maybe that's my fault.

There are several great cameos: Judd Hirsch is the best as Steven's eccentric granduncle, but Jeannie Berlin returns as an aged grandmom or aunt, and famed director David Lynch ("Twin Peaks", "Blue Velvet") comes on as aged legendary director John Ford near the end. 

As would probably be true with any teen, Steven suffers from the moves from New Jersey to Phoenix to California (Saratoga, I think). At the last stop, he winds up in an All-American high school that doesn't include Americans like him. They also omitted the first place on his itinerary: the Bronx. He dates a girl imbued with Christianity and is plunged into a world of blond school heroes of both sexes, for whom he is an object of scorn.

The picture appears to be about his family--including his three sisters--but it does understandably focus on him. It probably ran about an hour or so too long at 2 hrs 31 min. Spielberg co-authored the screenplay with playwright Tony Kushner and it's also decent. In the end, for whatever reasons specified above, the whole just came up a bit short for me.

Wuthering Heights

 On Saturday, we went to Berkeley to see Wuthering Heights at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. This presentation was an adaptation by Emma Rice which originated in Britain with the Young Vic of Bristol and a group called Wise Children. She added music and a character identified as The Moors, reflecting that crucial element of Emily Bronte's novel: the Yorkshire moors where she and her sisters and brother grew up and lived most of their short lives.

Wuthering Heights needs some changes from the novel to work onstage. But some aspects of this novel can't really be altered all that much. The critical moment--the climax--comes when Heathcliff returns just as Cathy is going to expire. This classic scene draws the audience in, much as it undoubtedly did in the 1938 movie starring Laurence Olivier in possibly his greatest romantic role, with Merle Oberon as Cathy. It ends the long first act just as it concludes the first half of the novel. 

Everything that comes after it--in the novel, the movie, or onstage--always seems somewhat anticlimactic to me. The novel's story is told by a long-time family servitor, Nelly, who for whatever reason is absent from this production. No great matter--since we really don't need or even want a narrator. One other character I missed was the servant at Wuthering Heights, the house, a scary sort of presence named Joseph. In the novel, he adds to the weird atmosphere of Wuthering Heights.

Many of the cast members played several parts, which was fine. One actor played Cathy's husband, the weak Edgar Linton, as well as Lockwood, the visitor who inspires Nelly to tell the whole story. Both Heathcliff and Cathy were well-played. Heathcliff had the power that is crucial to the character, and Cathy was both strong and weird--then in one line, she lets out that she went and married Linton when Heathcliff disappeared for three years because she thought marrying into that family would make her "a great lady."

She, of course, undervalued the wild and violent love that had grown between Heathcliff and her, as each saw that the other contained something of themself. The second act features the next generation, as well as a Heathcliff who aims to control the actions of everyone else, and the weak Edgar Linton who wants to guide his daughter, also Cathy, away from any involvement with Heathcliff or his slight son Linton, who, though ridiculously slight and weak, exudes determination. 

There's also Hareton, son of Cathy's older brother, Hindley, who when he inherited Wuthering Heights, abused Heathcliff and for his pains, turned to drink, from whhich he dies, after his wife Frances died in childbirth giving birth to Hareton. None of the three new second-generation characters can come close to the power generated between Heathcliff and Cathy.

It's a compelling story and it was exciting to see it onstage, but it remains a highly challenging piece to turn into a successful drama in the theater.

 

The Bay Area Boards

Out here visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons in the usual Bay Area balmy air with just the slightest bit of cool edge.  We enjoyed a lot of outdoor time, heading to Half Moon Bay for the tree tunnel and then a hike that included visiting the tidepools at maximum low tide to see lots of sealife like stars and anemones and crabs. Another trip was to Rancho San Antonio, with its great trails through fields and forest. A few more parks in Cupertino and Sunnyvale provided more wonderful hours to savor.

As far as indoors is concerned, we made it back to the War Memorial to catch the San Francisco Opera's new production of La Traviata. A chestnut, to be sure, but with three fine principals, a highly impressive one. Pretty Yende, who's been receiving many great notices in the leading houses, was a fine Violetta, and tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought youth and authority to Alfredo, while the veteran Simone Piazzola, whom I'd not seen before (not that I'd caught the others either) handled the tricky role of Giorgio Germont very capably.

I've always felt that Traviata proceeded from the magnificent musical experience of Act I, delightful musically from start to its finish with the last high notes of Sempre libera. Act II is always more complicated, and it became more so because the house needed several minutes to change from the first to the second scene--from Violetta's country place to Flora's decadent party. There's a lot of good music, too, but the flow is entirely different from the first act and a lot longer. Act III, to me, is gen,erally disappointing, and I've never seen any opera company make it work at the level of the first two acts.

Excitement also arrived in the form of a false alarm that emptied the house about a half hour before the curtain was to go up. Handled fairly badly, eventually the proceedings got going only a few minutes behind. A critic once speculated that opera orchestras, in his case, the Met's, know Traviata so well that they could probably perform the score backwards. That does not take away from the delight of the opera--the music and the singing. 

More to follow.

Leopoldstadt

 I've seen more Tom Stoppard plays than most people have. Jumpers, Travesties, New-Found-Land, Dirty Linen. My wife's favorites, seen many years ago, are the one-acters The Real Inspector Hound and After Magritte. Walking down from those tight balcony seats (not that there's much more room in the orchestra), one remark I overheard was "Stoppard's usually more cerebral." 

Indeed, he usually has been: lots of wit, clever lines, paradoxes. He didn't need any of that in this play, and there was not much of it. At 82, he explored what has been described as his new-found past: he was born in Czechoslovakia, left with his mother in 1938, was adopted by his English stepfather, and says he never knew that his mother's family was Jewish. This was the same basic account given by Madeleine Albright, coming from the same country.

While we tend to be skeptical about anyone who says they never knew about those things, I've seen enough of families maintaining secrets of that kind to accept it at face value. Whatever, Stoppard did change his style for this outing. He even took a much-used model--the large Jewish family, often well-off and in Vienna, coming to realize that assimilation never happened and failing to recognize the impending tragedy.

Yes, this theme is not a new one. Yet Stoppard handles it masterfully. The conversations amid the hubbub and tumult taking place in the main room of the family's apartment present a picture that comes across as real--in 1899, 1909, 1924, 1938, and 1955. All is positive, if not wildly optimistic at the turn of the century, yet some of the leading characters are already seeing the fly in the ointment. By 1909, they come face to face with anti-Semitism. It's coming closer in the 20's and needless to say, by 1938, the knock arrives on the door.

Perhaps the most insightful scene, however, is the mid-50's one. Most of the characters have vanished--their destinations are announced, and they were not good ones. But a returning son encounters one who stayed, and starts to grasp what he never knew because no one desired to tell him. His adoptive father had unsuccessfully warned the assemblage in 1938 but clearly did not want to brief his newly-acquired son about the tragic story he anticipated, witnessed, and tried his hardest to get this family to recognize and act accordingly. 

The production is superb, as, with the same director and production staff, it apparently was in London, where the play premiered in 2020. I recognized some familiar New York theatrical names in the cast here, and everyone seemed to be performing at a high level. It's another of those problem plays, as Shaw would have likely called this one, that you may not want to see but which you will value highly after sitting through the 2 1/2-hour uninterrupted drama.

The Media Blew the Message and the Campaign

The "big foots"--the major media titans who write for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the other papers that garner the most attention in the U.S. blew the 2022 midterm election.  And the rest of the pack--including the TV networks, both the three "legacy" ones and the newer cable ones such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, followed right along and sometimes even led the charge.

They bought hook, line and sinker all the BS that the Republicans cleverly and carefully put out at crucial times in the campaign that claimed that the GOP was riding a "red tidal wave" to massive victory and landslide. Yes, they probably will take the House and possibly the Senate, but there was no wave. There are lots of reasons for this result, but all were downplayed or ignored by Big Media.

First, inflation is certainly always a key issue. Republicans ran on that. Those who pointed out that a lot of it was due to there being a war on in Ukraine which wreaks havoc with farm prices, energy costs, and military budgets. There's also been a supply chain breakdown only beginning to be fixed, which was caused by the pandemic disrupting normal manufacturing processes. It was difficult to get it going again.

Crime was an issue but not anywhere as big as the Rupert Murdoch purveyer of phony news, the New York Post, made it out to be. Crime overall has declined. In some places, including New York, however, murder numbers are up. A.J. Liebling, the greatest press critic, once noted that Hearst sent newsboys out screaming, "Horrible crime! Throw'd a baby off a bus!" about an incident that occurred in Lahore, Pakistan, but which they made sound like it happened in Columbus Circle in New York City.

Democrats were at fault for not taking the issue on and trying to avoid it, along with inflation. There are answers and they are not easy to present, but you get nowhere if you don't try. Yes, the Dems ran a terrible campaign but they still did well, and much more important, they didn't make the Big Media swallow phony Republican polls that said a red wave was upon us. That is the unpardonable crime, that these media outfits that conduct their own polling, accepted the phony stuff and ballyhooed it to the rafters.

We're getting some decent analysis weeks after the damage was done and days after the election was over. Dana Milbank laid it out in the Washington Post today and Monica Hesse showed how abortion and women's rights were right up there in the calculus of decisive issues for the election, while the Big Media poohpoohed it as of minimal concern. Wrong. This issue elected a lot of Democrats. It now seems clear that this issue, which the Democrats campaigned hard on, was a correct one for them to push, and it worked in many places.

The media poobahs and Beltway insiders discounted the significance of Alito's reactionary decision in the Dobbs case because to them, it was old news. Not so for the voters. That's why a lot of the election deniers went down. That and the other maligned issue--the future of democracy when people were running who vowed to disregard the will of the people as expressed by their votes and totally corrupt our elections. And yes, they are still there ready to frustrate the electorate.

Amazingly, people cared about this. The Times is a recidivist violator. They blew up the Hillary Clinton e-mail brouhaha so that it helped Trump win in 2016. Compared to his thousands of lies and corruption, it was a big nothing. They have yet to fess up to the evidence on their hands in that effort to bend over backwards to "be fair" to the GOP liars.  

Likewise, they overemphasized James Comey's disgusting violation of Justice Department policy shortly before the 2016 Election Day by announcing the reopening of the e-mail investigation. Comey also said Hillary should be charged, a decision he is supposed to have nothing to do with--it's the responsibility of the Justice Department lawyers and legal leadership, not him. He's a cop.

Ed Murrow was right way back in the '50s when he took on Senator Joe McCarthy when no one else would. "Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'" --our society, beginning with the media, built up and communicated McCarthy's phony charges and lies. It now seems that the media, and many of us, learned very little from that now ancient experience. Just as they passed on all of Trump's lies and took years to call them what they were and are, they accepted unquestioningly poll numbers created of whole cloth. There should be no Pulitzer Prizes this year.

'Mr. Saturday Night'

 Very much enjoyed a performance tonight of Mr. Saturday Night, the musical adaptation of the movie made more than two decades starring Billy Crystal. The musical on Broadway also stars Crystal. The other principal from the movie, playing his same role, was David Paymer, who played the lead character's brother. 

Although the musical has taken some of the sharp edges off Crystal's character, a once successful but now almost forgotten comedian named Buddy Young, Jr. Buddy is more interesting once those edges are weakened. In the movie, he becomes so nasty as he declines in respect that you begin to lose interest in him. Although the second act here remains problematic for that reason, it's better conceived than the movie.

Reviews of the musical were less than stellar. The Times generally endorsed it as worth seeing but pointed off some deficiencies, some of which include the ones I mentioned above. I now feel those deficiencies resulted from the problems with the character, not Crystal's performance. 

The musical does a great job at conveying what comedy was like in the Catskills--the "Borscht Belt" of the 1950's. The music will not be confused with scores by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, or Lerner & Loewe, but it was suited to the show and had what the friend with whom I attended the performance called its vaudeville sound.

This was a rare instance for me of appreciating Broadway amplification in it carrying the sound to seats far back in the top balcony. Usually the acoustics of old Broadway theaters diminish the attractiveness of the sound amplification creates in these houses. Crystal was superb, even given the vagaries of the role. Randy Graff played his wife, a new role, very impressively and Paymer, as in the movie, was a strong force for good. Shoshana Bean was excellent as Buddy's daughter.

The insiders through whom my friend secured the tickets downplayed the show and suggested we'd better off seeing Six. I may indeed want to see that show, but neither of us understood the basis for the insiders' dismissive view of this show. The older audience applauded like crazy and got into the show by applauding Crystal's staged shtick in his comedy act. It's only around for another week so I'd recommend it heartedly.