WilliamM

The new film 1917 is about The First World War. Hitler is still an obsession with film and TV many decades after his death How many books and films are there about Vietnam? Back to World War One. Over one hundred years later Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is essential to understanding the period just before the First World War. Most people have at least some vague idea of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his assassination in Sarajevo and the beginning of the Great War, the most written about subject ever.

Amazing and very discouraging. Caro is still writing about Medicare, still early in the Johnson Administration Robert Caro’s Papers Headed to New-York Historical Society After decades of dogged (and still unfinished) efforts to chronicle every detail about Lyndon B. Johnson, the master biographer’s vast paper trail has found a permanent home. Robert Caro in his office in Manhattan this month.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times By Jennifer Schuessler Jan. 8, 2020Updated 9:15 a.m. ET Robert Caro is famous for colossal biographies of colossal figures. “The Power Broker,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Robert Moses, weighed in at nearly 1,300 pages. His as-yet-unfinished biography of Lyndon B. Johnson — he likes to call the volume-in-progress “the fifth of a projected three” — totals 3,444 pages and counting. The books are already monumental. And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself. The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library. And just as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation in its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done. “It’s like a true weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” he said last week in his office off Central Park West, where he was surrounded by hulking filing cabinets, piles of heavily scribbled-on legal pads and — tantalizingly — a wooden box holding typed pages of the eagerly awaited final Johnson volume. In discussing the plans for the permanent exhibition, he repeatedly stressed the permanent part. “With most archives, there’s a big splash, then two or three months later, it’s time for the next,” Mr. Caro said. “But I wanted something that wouldn’t go away.” A “I want people to be able to see how I gather my material and how I turn it into books, how I write,” he continued. “In my opinion, the quality of the prose is just as important in nonfiction as in fiction.” The archive will be among the largest of a single individual in the historical society’s collection. It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the LBJ Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. “This is an archive that will illuminate the 20th century through two outsize figures, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses,” she said. “It’s also the record of an extraordinary writer and thinker. Bob Caro is a historian whose methodology is of equal importance to the actual materials in his archive.” Mr. Caro has been talking a lot about those methods lately. Last spring, he published “Working,” an anecdote-rich collection of essays and interviews offered, he said, as a kind of promissory note on a proper memoir, which he has already started outlining. And the final volume of the Johnson biography? Don’t worry, he’s working on it. In fact, he said, checking the sheet of paper in the Smith-Corona Electra 210 on his desk, he has typed 604 manuscript pages so far. Asked where he was in the story, Mr. Caro paused, looking mildly stricken. But he allowed that he’s currently on a section relating to the creation of Medicare in 1965, with the debacle of Vietnam and Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968, to come. (Johnson died in 1973.) “It’s going to be a very long book,” he said. Mr. Caro’s office is a kind of museum of analog writing practices, including corkboards displaying the outline for his book.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Image A file folder holding transcripts of interviews gives a long-ago piece of advice: “With Busby the key thing is simply to SHUT UP!”Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Image A page from one of Mr. Caro’s reporting notebooks, with parts that have been turned into typed transcripts crossed out. (He does not use a tape recorder.)Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Mr. Caro — who will keep some of his materials in his office until he’s done with the biography — is protective of details of work in progress. But looking into his notebooks and file drawers (sample tab: “Johnson Personal: Ruthlessness”), he was expansive, offering anecdotes within anecdotes about the events and people he was trying to reconstruct, and about how he and his wife and longtime research partner, Ina Caro, found sources, secured interviews and tracked down documents. (Neither the historical society nor Mr. Caro would disclose financial details of the acquisition, though Mr. Caro said the price was “more generous than I expected.”) Mr. Caro’s current office, which he moved to last summer, is itself a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world, down to a closet holding some of his 11 stockpiled Smith Coronas, ready to be cannibalized for parts. ADVERTISEMENT ry I A view into Mr. Caro’s files holding transcripts and notes from thousands of interviews. “All I can really think about as I go through the files is what I left out,” he said.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times An elaborate typed outline of his book in progress is tacked to corkboards lining the walls. Mr. Caro — who writes his first drafts by hand on legal pads — pulled out a thick binder to show how he writes each sentence from the outline on a loose sheet of lined paper. Next, he lists interviews and documents that support the point, all indexed according to a complicated, idiosyncratic system. But the real guts of the operation are in an adjacent room, in the files and cabinets holding his interview notes and other documents, including diaries and notes given to him over the years by Johnson associates and other journalists. Mr. Caro popped open a cabinet filled with reporter’s notebooks and pulled a purple Scribbletex pad labeled “LBJ I”; inside were his first interviews, with Lady Bird Johnson and Sam Houston Johnson, the president’s brother. He then pulled out “LBJ XXXII,” flipping through pages covered with neatly handwritten notes and, on one page, a list of cryptic numbers. “I hate flying, so I always write out how many minutes are left,” he said, laughing. One of his rules — Mr. Caro does not use a tape recorder — is to always type up his interview notes before going to bed, so as not to forget facial expressions or other details. “He can’t seem to sit still,” reads a note atop a transcript of one of his interviews with Moses. On a folder holding his 22 formal interviews with Horace Busby, a longtime Johnson aide, Mr. Caro pointed out a long-ago scribbled reminder: “With Busby the key thing is to SHUT UP! He doesn’t want to hear one word from you. His eyes get bored the minute you open your mouth to say anything.” As the interview drew to a close, Mr. Caro pulled out the photocopy of one of his most famous discoveries: an unpublished memoir by Luis Salas, a Texas election judge, explaining how he had helped Johnson eke out an 87-vote victory in his 1948 Senate race, by assigning him votes cast for his opponent. In “Working,” Mr. Caro describes how in 1986, a decade into work on the Johnson biography, he finally tracked Mr. Salas down in a mobile home near Houston. Mr. Caro was seeking hard proof that the election had been stolen. In the middle of their interview, Mr. Salas suddenly fished the manuscript out of a trunk, saying, “I have written it all down.” In his office, Mr. Caro read aloud a passage that might serve as a gloss on his own exhaustive, still-unfinished work. “Maybe I pass away before I see my book published,” Mr. Salas wrote, “but someday it will come out because it is part of the history of the United States, and people have the right to know the exact truth.”

Musical Events January 13, 2020 Issue Operatic Shows of Force At the Met, a new production of “Wozzeck” stays relentlessly focussed on war, and a young soprano brings prodigious power to “The Queen of Spades.” https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alex-ross By Alex Ross January 6, 2020 The New Yorker Your judgment of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which runs through January 22nd, may depend on how you classify it. The director is the South African artist William Kentridge, who is steeped in the Central European Expressionist milieu from which Berg’s ferocious anti-military opera emerged. If the staging is considered as an entry in Kentridge’s multimedia œuvre, it delivers a potent distillation of signature motifs: brusque drawings and prints of wounded faces and ravaged landscapes; stop-action animation of spasmodically jerking figures; photographic collages and cinematic montages. If, however, you measure the work against the emotional breadth of Berg’s opera, you may find it wanting. On opening night, I admired the virtuosity of the director’s technique but wished that he had paid more heed to the desperate inner lives of the characters. Kentridge has transplanted “Wozzeck” from the early-nineteenth-century setting of Berg’s libretto to the period of the First World War. This makes good sense, since Berg served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1915 to 1918 and began composing the opera during the conflict. Berg fashioned the libretto directly from Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, “Woyzeck,” an unblinking portrayal of an ordinary soldier’s degradation by military discipline and medical experiment. Berg wrote of Wozzeck, “There is a bit of me in this character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.” Büchner’s text, fragmentary in form and corrosive in tone, is famously prophetic of twentieth-century concerns. Berg could hardly have found anything more modern among the playwrights of his own period; the young Bertolt Brecht was one of many under Büchner’s spell. Yet Berg brings to bear his own preoccupations—in particular, a nostalgia for a shattered fin-de-siècle world. Although the music of “Wozzeck” is ostensibly atonal, glimmers of Wagner, Puccini, Mahler, and Strauss shine through the work’s dark façade. The most piercing lyricism is reserved for Wozzeck’s common-law wife, Marie, who falls victim to his madness. Her monologue at the beginning of Act III, in which she reads from the Bible and ponders her child’s bleak future, is obviously modelled on Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” scene in Verdi’s “Otello.” It is this half-buried Romantic dimension that goes missing in Kentridge’s production. Although the Great War looms over every moment of the staging, it never becomes clear whether we are experiencing Wozzeck’s nightmarish premonitions of the conflict or his shell-shocked recollections of it. Characters often wear gas masks, hobble on crutches, and have bandages on their heads. Maps of troop movements in Flanders are projected onto a large screen behind the stage. The sets, designed by Sabine Theunissen, deploy sculptural accumulations of junk to render the locales where Wozzeck experiences successive humiliations: a captain’s quarters, a doctor’s laboratory, a tavern garden, a soldiers’ barracks. Greta Goiris, the costume designer, applies fantastical touches to drab uniforms and workaday wear. A blood-red gown for Marie stands out against a mostly black-and-white color scheme. Kentridge is at his best when crowds fill the stage, matching the teeming density of his visual aesthetic. His most bravura gesture comes in Act III, as Wozzeck staggers away from the pond where he has murdered Marie and into a bar full of drunkenly dancing figures. Berg prepares the change of scene with two enormous orchestral crescendos on the single note B, the second louder than the first. Kentridge made the inspired decision to have dancers enter during the second crescendo, both on the stage and on the screen at the back. They appear to be emanating from the concentrated beam of sound. Much less successful is Kentridge’s illustration of the overpowering final interlude, which follows Wozzeck’s death, by drowning. The triple-forte climax of the passage was marked by a groaningly obvious sequence of explosions on the screen. The unremitting focus on war iconography blotted out the opera’s main narrative thrust: the deterioration of Wozzeck’s mind in the grip of military routine. Crucially, in Büchner’s scenario, the soldier is not at war but serving in a town regiment; violence explodes from the machinery of the system. The baritone Peter Mattei, who took the lead role, is one of the finest singing actors in opera, but in this staging he had little opportunity to trace the character’s arc toward madness; too often he seemed like an extra in a larger tableau. Elza van den Heever, as Marie, was similarly sidelined by the pervasive imagery of masculine aggression. Psychology has never been Kentridge’s strong suit as a director—it was also a blind spot in his previous Met productions, of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and of Berg’s “Lulu”—but here the characterizations are weaker than ever. It’s instructive to compare this brilliant but somehow hollow affair with “The Head and the Load,” Kentridge’s monumental theatrical tribute to African soldiers who served in the Great War. It played at the Park Avenue Armory at the end of 2018; I saw it in Amsterdam last May. Many of the same visual tropes were employed in that production, yet its episodic, pageantlike structure proved a better counterweight to Kentridge’s thematic obsessions. In “Wozzeck,” his agenda is too often at cross-purposes with that of Berg, for whom psychology was everything. The one singer who held his own amid the swirl of images was the tenor Gerhard Siegel, who delivered the part of the Captain with cartoonish flair and precisely biting diction. He was, perhaps not incidentally, the cast’s only native German speaker. Mattei and van den Heever both sang superbly, but the blunt force of Büchner’s language didn’t always register. I had similar reservations about the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He showed unerring command of Berg’s devilishly difficult score, but he dispatched it too cleanly and efficiently. His pristine account of the final interlude failed to convey its melancholy collapse into the Mahlerian past. In all, this was a “Wozzeck” lacking in both horror and humanity.

Rentafriend seems irrelevant to the basic purpose. Right?

How is this so different than making friends in general?

How is this so different than making friends in general?

To my best friend: I could hear you fucking. and then taking those sheets out to dry on the line when you forget your were almost naked. To be fair, it only happened once

To my best friend: I could hear you fucking. and then taking those sheets out to dry on the line when you forget your were almost naked. To be fair, it only happened once

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday

I am in no way questioning Australian ability to deal with unpredictable and tragic weather. I was there during the1998 Sydney to Hobart boat race.

I am in no way questioning Australian ability to deal with unpredictable and tragic weather. I was there during the1998 Sydney to Hobart boat race.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't get involved, but I attended the tournament in the 1990s Nineteen ninety five I believe. Superb, more enjoyable than the French Open and almost as good as the US Open.

He is doing more than "trying it out" It is possible the tournament may be a significant health hazard to players and everyone else.

New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/sports/Australian-Open-fire.html As Fires Spread, So Do Player Concerns Ahead of the Australian Open By Ben Rothenberg Jan. 6, 2020Updated 4:34 p.m. ET BRISBANE, Australia — The start of the Australian Open is now less than two weeks away, and the wildfires ravaging the country’s southeast have forced the relocation of a second-tier men’s tennis tournament and stirred concern that the first Grand Slam tournament of the year could also be disrupted. With at least 25 people killed and hundreds of homes lost in the fires, and winds blowing smoke toward several large metropolitan areas, including Melbourne, the site of the Open, tennis has become an afterthought instead of maintaining its usual status as a centerpiece of the Australian summer. Calling its decision “unprecedented,” Tennis Australia on Friday announced the relocation of the Canberra International, which was scheduled to begin on Monday in the Australian capital. The event was moved nearly 400 miles southwest to Bendigo, a town in Victoria about two hours northwest of Melbourne. The air quality in Canberra has been rated the worst of any major city in the world and was deemed too poor even for the tournament to be held indoors. Liam Broady, a British player ranked 240th, was one of more than 100 players who had planned to start the 2020 tennis season at the Challenger event in Canberra. When he arrived, he found the city streets largely empty and the sun unable to pierce the thick ash in the air, making it dark in the late afternoon. Conditions in Melbourne, host of the Open, fluctuated last week, reaching their worst on Friday when the city was downwind of the East Gippsland fire. Shifting winds have sometimes carried smoke from nearby fires into the city. Denis Kudla, an American player who trained in Melbourne on Friday before heading to Bendigo, said he could not inhale or exhale fully without coughing during his practice session. “If it’s anything like yesterday, I don’t think it would be safe over a two-, three-week period,” Kudla said of potential conditions for the Australian Open. “You could play, but who knows what damage we’re actually causing to ourselves? It can’t be good.” Two weeks of main draw play in the Australian Open are scheduled to begin on Jan. 20, with the tournament’s qualifying rounds starting a week earlier. Novak Djokovic, a seven-time Australian Open champion and the president of the ATP player council, said Saturday that he planned to put air quality considerations on the agenda for the pretournament player meeting in Melbourne. The topic has come up before, related to playing amid air pollution in China. “If it continues the same way and if the quality of air is affected in Melbourne or Sydney, I think Tennis Australia probably will be forced to, I think, create some rules about it,” Djokovic said. Tennis officials in Australia have said they do not plan to move any other events, but they have “committed substantial extra resources” to monitor the air quality, Craig Tiley, the Australian Open tournament director and Tennis Australia chief executive, said in a statement over the weekend. “Assessing the likelihood of smoke-induced interruptions is a bit like how we treat heat and rain,” Tiley added. “We have experts who analyze all available live data as specific to our sites as possible and consult regularly with tournament officials and, in the case of heat and smoke, medical experts.” He continued: “The health of players, fans and staff is a priority at all times and we will continue to make these decisions with that in mind.” Sydney is the most affected city hosting tennis this week. The ATP Cup, a new team competition, began on Friday with round-robin play in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The knockout rounds will shift to Sydney on Thursday. Tim Henman, the captain of the British team in the competition, played down the impact on his players “in the context of what this country is going through.” The effect on cities is largely dependent on which way the wind is blowing. With unfavorable winds on Friday, the conditions were bad enough to set off smoke detectors at AAMI Park in Melbourne, where a soccer match between Melbourne City and Western United was played as scheduled. Western United Coach Mark Rudan said afterward that he thought the game should have been postponed because of the smoke. “Some of the players came back into the rooms and said they struggled to breathe, felt it down their throat and lungs,” Rudan told The Herald Sun in Melbourne. “But clearly there’s rules and the doctors know what’s safe and what isn’t. It was testing conditions; I commend both sets of players.” Tennis could prove tougher: A 90-minute soccer game is often less than half the length of a match at the Australian Open, particularly on the men’s side, where matches are best-of-five sets. In 2012, the men’s final between Djokovic and Rafael Nadal lasted 5 hours 53 minutes. “Nothing has ever been close to postponing or canceling a Slam, so this is going to be a tough decision, naturally,” Kudla said. “But if the smoke gets worse, I couldn’t imagine potentially playing a four-, five-hour match and not coughing like crazy postmatch trying to recover and feeling awful.” As players and organizers wait to see if the air quality in Australia deteriorates further, relief efforts have begun within the tennis community. “The inordinate loss of people, wildlife, stock, homes, schools and businesses is going to require an extraordinarily widespread effort to get these families and communities back on their feet,” Tiley said. “Our aim is for tennis to play a significant role where we can to help that recovery.” IA] Tennis Australia is organizing a charity exhibition match on Jan. 15 in Melbourne and donating $100 for every ace hit during the Australian summer to the Australian Red Cross. The aces initiative follows the lead of the Australian star Nick Kyrgios, a Canberra native, who pledged $200 to relief efforts for each ace he hits, a gesture since matched by many other players. In his victory over Jan-Lennard Struff in his first ATP Cup match on Friday in Brisbane, Kyrgios hit 20 aces. “It’s tough to go out there and concentrate on tennis, to be honest,” said Kyrgios, whose mother, Norlaila, remains in Canberra. “Every ace I was hitting, that’s all I was thinking about. Every time I stepped up to the line, that’s all I was thinking about.” Sydney this weekend

I am surprised you had worked for the same company for almost 20 years at a fairly young age.