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The man made mistakes. No one will deny that. But, he later admitted to discounting one group of Church abuse survivors because they were accusing a friend of his. After he saw the evidence, he made a formal public apology to them and had a private audience with them while he was visiting their home country. He was as open as a Pontiff can be about accepting LGBTQIA people as human beings which was a step in the right direction and something a later pope can build on.

He emphasized that life was sacred and told governments not to condemn women who made the choice to abort, but rather to provide better care to them and their children so that the choice might not need to be made. And, like John Paul II, he said, if life is sacred, then the death penalty has got to go. As someone who has been viscerally anti-death penalty at least since I saw the movie Oliver at age 6 or 7, this made me happy even as it outraged many conservative Catholics, especially here in the U.S.

I am not Catholic. I did spend 4 years in Catholic school and took the religion classes. This is deep for world Catholics and we had best hope that we again get a pastoral pope and not an academic/policy pope like Benedict.

In my post from March of 2013, I referred to Pope Francis as a transitional Pope: an Italian, but one from the new world, older so he probably couldn't have too much effect on policy. Instead, he proved to be a robust man who reigned for 13 years. In my opinion, he was a good man for his times, and I hope he's prepared the way for the next pope to be more responsive to the worldwide congregation he'll serve.

If you're interested in the traditions and practicalities for the next few weeks, allow me to recommend the books (and films) of Conclave by Robert Harris which covers the current method for papal election. John Paul renounced the regalia of the papacy. John Paul II expanded the college of cardinals and made changes to the voting pool. If you're over 80, you are still a Prince of the Church, but you have no voice in the conclave. For the older method -- a tradition that goes back at least 500 years and probably longer -- I recommend The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West. John Paul II was the last pope to be elected that way. It's also a good read for those who don't remember the Cold War as the tensions of that time come through well.

ETA: Is anyone else worried about J.D. Vance insisting on meeting with Pope Francis yesterday? I mean, the smell of brimstone might have killed him.

I have five cousins on my father's side of the family; the three around my age are by Uncle's first wife. His only daughter is a year older than Sis and just lost her elder son. My oldest cousin, whom I will call Sonny, died this morning never having left the hospital after his admission for extremely low sodium, pneumonia, strep, and flu.

Cousine barely made it from the west coast in time to say goodbye. The brother between her and Sonny will get there tonight.

Sonny went into the navy at 18. He was discharged for mental health by the time he was 20. Schizophrenia runs on his mother's side of the family. Ships in the 1970s were easy to find drugs on. I knew about "drug-induced schizophrenia" (I'm pretty sure it would be called something else these days) from the time I was 13.

Sonny has been in and out of V.A. and charity facilities since he was released from the military. Uncle and, later, Cousine have looked after his finances so that it was virtually impossible for him to score drugs -- other than cigarettes -- and so that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he always had a roof over his head.

We can say that he smoked himself to death. It's true. We can say that he might have been treated differently if schizophrenia were better understood or if his family had realized he was prodromal when he enlisted. That's also true.

I saw him three years ago, for about five minutes, when we went to Blacksburg for Thanksgiving. The last I saw him prior to that was 1972.

This post brought to you by bronchitis! I stopped coughing two days ago, but my ribs hurt. The doctor has put me on three drugs, plus two shots and a nebulizer before I leave her office. If I'd waited until next week to be seen, it would have been pneumonia no matter how many preventive jabs I've had.

ETA: The memorial service is on Friday. Sis has midterms, so I'll drive up Thursday, hopefully with a cell phone.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to answer whether Carter was a good president. He was a humane president who tried to kickstart saving the environment (Michelle Obama's was not the first vegetable garden, but more importantly, Carter had solar panels put in so that the White House was energy independent. Reagan pulled them out to extend the Rose Garden. *sigh)

Carter was bright. He had to be to be an engineer and submariner.

Dad told two stories about him. The first circulated around the Pentagon in early 1977. Carter was given an evacuation plan for the White House and its staff his first day in office. He read it thoroughly and a few days later called in the people in charge of the plans implementation and said, "I want a drill to see if this works." They said something about scheduling one for a month out, and Carter said, "No. Now." What was supposed to take thirty minutes for the president and his family and under three hours for the rest of the staff took over 12 hours. It had never been tested in full and without rerouting traffic days in advance.

The second was more personal. Dad was an intelligence analyst. As such, he wrote papers on a variety of topics: some from direct intelligence feeds, some to precis other reports. They averaged about 30 pages including bibliography, front page precis, and two page summary immediately behind the precis. As intelligence went up the ladder -- Dad was a full Colonel by then so the ladder was somewhat shorter upward than downward -- the precis or summary might be attached to intelligence reports written by his superiors (or written by Dad under his superior's name -- I found out about that in the 1980s), but the full report never reached the Joint Chiefs, much less the President. They had to read more widely and needed the digested versions so that they didn't get bogged down.

Dad received one of his reports back with detailed marginalia in Carter's handwriting. On the one hand, he was impressed with the comments and respected the depth of reading Carter did. On the other hand, the President should never have requested the full report. Had it just been his report, maybe it was a special interest, but apparently, Dad was not the only officer to have that experience.

I think the world might be a better place had Carter had a second term. He was handed a poor economy. The collapse of Iran and the hostage crisis was a bad show, but in no way his fault. Prior presidents had supported the Shah and turned a blind eye to his abuses. Revolution shouldn't have been a surprise. But Carter was blamed.

His record on Human Rights, including lifting the ban on LGBTQ+ people serving in the State Department, is exemplary. His work with Habitat for Humanity was legendary. [https://www.habitat.org/ ]

The Carter Center has done magnificent work including toward the eradication of Guinea Worm disease. [ https://www.cartercenter.org/ ]

I hope we can find another leader with such depth of kindness and commitment to human rights.

Mom died around 11 a.m.

The nurse suggested not watching her being taken to the hearse, so I'm here typing this out. She made it to 90 years and 6 months, so she had a long life and an interesting one. Interesting both in the sense of "living in interesting times" and in the "life is what you make it" interpretation.

Thank you all for your support. I have calls to her surviving friends and family to make. Sis is splitting up the list. I'll probably call some of you that I know in real life tomorrow.

Sweet, the dancing demon, for all my Buffy peeps, died this weekend. He's the second DC to Broadway star to die recently (after China Rivera). I don't think I ever saw him live, though I may have when he was with Dance Theater of Harlem. I do know that out of the blue I really wanted to rewatch the dance scenes in Idlewild the other day which he choreographed.

I've spent the last few days sick. Not COVID, just a sore throat, cough, and a rash. I'm better, which is good. I have a mild superstition about starting the new year the way I intend to go on and hacking out a lung didn't bode well for the year.

But Tom Wilkinson died yesterday, and I'm deeply sad. I saw him as Horatio in Hamlet in 1980. The fact that I was noticing Horatio probably doesn't bode well for the leading man's Hamlet, but I found him compelling. So compelling that I tried to see him in the smaller production where he was the lead called The Maid's Tragedy. I was unsuccessful, but I did go into the clearing by The Other Place, where the play was being performed, and listen to Nick Bicat's gorgeous score for the production.

A year later, I go on my junior semester abroad in London -- it's not so abroad when you're living in Brussels -- and I wonder if I'll see Tom Wilkinson in anything. I was literally in the hotel looking for something to watch on TV and stumbled across him in a Play for Today.

The first play we saw for the RSC -- and I think the first play for the class -- was The Love Girl and the Innocent by Solzhenitsyn. I don't know whether it was a good translation; I don't read Russian. The production was excellent and Tom Wilkinson played Nemov, the ex-POW who was pulled from the lines and charged with a political crime. There's a moment, a throwaway line of Nemov's. In the production I saw he referred to trained men doing scutwork as being stuck "like axes in dough." Wilkinson didn't make a production of the line in any way, but it's stuck with me for years, the sheer futility of the Gulags and the system that made them.

We saw lots of RSC productions and many of them had Wilkinson in second leads or supporting roles. The exception was Richard III where I think they cut all his character's lines (Catesby) and The Maid's Tragedy which had a fourteen night run at the Donmar Warehouse. Thanks to cheap student tickets and a willingness to spend hours in line (the seats were first come, first serve), I was able to see it with my friend (later roommate) six times.

It still stands vividly in my mind, and we discovered that the actors hung out at the Crown and Anchor nearby after the show. We went and had our after theater drinks, never approaching them, just enjoying the atmosphere. What we hadn't counted on was that the theater was so small that the actors saw us, too. At different points in the two London runs (my roommate and I saw the second run all fourteen nights), different actors came up to us and asked about our reactions to the production. Domini Blythe was the first. She was very sweet.

During the second run, Tom Wilkinson came up to us and said, "Are you planning to be here every night?" We acknowledged that other than the one night where my roommate had lost the draw and was babysitting, both of us would be there for the run. He nodded and said, "You should have a long service medal minted." Later, just before we left to catch the tube, he gave us his phone number and told us to call him after the play had been over for a week. We did. Tom Wilkinson took the two of us out to dinner.

It was a lovely evening, never any suggestion of something other having a good conversation on a wide range subjects. I had one embarrassing moment when I didn't know what mussels were. My roommate said, "we had them in Brussels, moules." It was completely inadvertent and probably made me seem a complete prat, but I don't know if I'd ever eaten them before we moved to Belgium.

Later, our theater professor asked Wilkinson if he'd speak to the class about British theater and repertory work, which he did. He walked right over to me and my roommate and said, "I didn't know you two were with this outfit." He told a story about why he thought that subsidized theater of all types at all levels, fringe, local, regional, touring, and national was important.

At the end of it, after he'd left, my instructor said, "He may be in favor of socialism, but that man is one of nature's aristocrats."

I was lucky enough to see him in other productions: Ghosts [Ibsen] with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Alving, An Enemy of the People [Ibsen adapted by Arthur Miller] which nearly had me out of my seat the tensions ran so high, Tom and Viv [Michael Hastings] at the Royal Court...

He was a genuinely nice man who happened to be a genuinely good actor. I never felt a false note from him in any role that I saw him in.

May flights of angels sing Tom Wilkinson to his rest.

Current Mood: sad

Young'uns, by which I mean anyone under 50, don't understand the Cold War. Frankly, I completed a certificate in Security Studies, and I still don't get it. But it was a threat. A genuine threat.

When I lived in Mannheim, there was an American base just outside the city limits. There was a day when I was going to the little market at the end of the shopping street, right by the tram stop. It suddenly went silent, and I turned to look where everyone else was staring. Pieces of patriot missiles went past. We were all frozen. Three trucks with nose cones went past. The bells rang the quarter hour. The whole thing took less than a quarter of an hour, but my already pacifist self was completely changed.

Reagan was a saber rattler. Gorbachev wasn't. it is thanks to Gorbachev that the cold war ended without a hot war.

With Perestroika and Glasnost, the world transformed. Germany reunified. Poland was allowed to hold elections. Hungary was freed. Ukraine is a nation, thanks to Gorbachev, as are Georgia, Khazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, and Latvia. [The former Yugoslavia is a separate case.]

When I was taking International Relations, I was told that only international systems could change the world. Single countries couldn't, much less one person. I argued that King John certainly was one man who'd changed the world. Had it been a few years later, I would have argued Gorbachev was the best example.

Think about his legacy. Then think about the fact that young Russians consider him a traitor who betrayed the motherland.

Remember him for his courage and his actions. Remember him for letting freedom return to eastern Europe.

I was lucky enough to see him twice as Mark Twain. He had a huge list of pieces and only used a handful each night, so no two performances were identical. Both performances were great and his approach to a one man show stuck with me. I enjoyed "Give 'em Hell, Harry" and "Will Rogers, U.S.A" -- both performed by James Whitmore -- and the many other one person shows that filled the DC theaters in the early 1970s. I've been lucky enough to see Robert Vaughn as FDR and James Earl Jones as Paul Robeson. But "Mark Twain Tonight" was the only one that changed from performance to performance.

Hal Holbrook was, I think, somewhat underrated as a performer in TV and movies. On stage, and especially as Twain, he was in a class by himself.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/02/hal-holbrook-dies-aged-95-deep-throat-all-the-presidents-men-mark-twain

To quote Siderea: Who turned the death up?

New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/books/ben-bova-dies.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

I was a huge fan of Omni back in the day. I was familiar mostly with Bova's work as an editor, but I know his choices for the magazine back in the 1980s shaped my tastes in Sci-Fi for decades to come.

The Guardian obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/dec/15/tony-winning-broadway-star-ann-reinking-dies-age-71

There's too much death lately.

Mourning for John LeCarre is complicated by the fact that he was my father's favorite fiction author.

Dad was part of Military Intelligence from its inception, soon after my birth 59 years ago, until his retirement. One of his assignments -- 1967-69 -- was as an exchange officer with British Military Intelligence. He was probably familiar with LeCarre's works from the popularity of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, both film and book. But it was his time working for what LeCarre called "the Circus" that really got him into LeCarre's works.

Dad couldn't stand Ian Fleming or the James Bond movies. As he once said to me, "LeCarre gets it right. Most spies are boring little men in raincoats with bad breath."

For me, LeCarre filled in some of my father's background. The recent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie finally showed me a SKIF. Dad had explained them to me, but, as someone who has a hard time visualizing things, this first time seeing them clicked all sorts of pieces into place for me about Dad's career. It also finally made me read the Karla trilogy. My father's favorite was (I originally wrote that as "is") The Honorable Schoolboy which is the only one never filmed. It links to Dad's times (3 tours: 1961-62, 1964-65, 1974-75 when he was Chief Intelligence Officer) in Vietnam.

My favorite LeCarre book is The Secret Pilgrim with my favorite film made from his books being The Russia House -- one of the late Sean Connery's best late roles.

All of LeCarre's books are good descriptions of British and, to a lesser extent, American foreign policy with some interesting speculations about how the secret war is being fought. It is speculation. David Cornwell's cover was blown by the famous traitor Kim Philby just as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was climbing the bestseller charts in the early 1960s. Any books written after that were extrapolation based on Cornwell/LeCarre's earlier career, his analysis of western foreign policy and British politics, and his deep understanding of character.

If anyone wants a good starting point, I like The Russia House which is post cold war and driven by a civilian character. For spy craft, the Karla Trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; Smiley's People) is the gold standard. Some books are better than others (I wouldn't recommend The Little Drummer Girl as a first book by LeCarre, for instance), but none is bad.

We've lost something by losing John LeCarre, nee David Cornwell, a man who became, by his own analysis, more politically left wing as he got older. He was never content to have an opinion without thinking it through and was willing to share his opinion with people through well written and reasoned articles and books.

And for me, I've felt another connection to my father fray and break.

The Guardian Obituary is here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/jan-morris-historian-travel-writer-and-trans-pioneer-dies-aged-94

When it first started, back in the 1970s, Mom subscribed me to People Magazine. I liked it pretty well, but not usually for the cover story. Inside I learned about people who weren't big names who were doing, or had done, something interesting.

I vividly remember the article People did on Jan Morris. I wasn't more than 15 -- probably younger -- and it was the first I'd heard about transitioning. She was so matter of fact about her journey that it never occurred to me that she was extremely brave for speaking about it at the time.

I read the Britannica series which, in the 1980s, was still being published under the name "James Morris" -- possibly due to copyright, possibly due to other factors -- and was amazed at how succinctly the books covered approximately 100 years of time in British and international history. Her accomplishments under her prior name include being the reporter who announced that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had made it to Everest's summit.

I read about Jan Morris now and again. I think I'm going to pick up her book, Hav, and enjoy a great history writer's foray into science fiction. I feel certain she'll amaze me again.

The Guardian's obituary is here: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/25/james-randi-obituary

I'm sad that he's gone; he did so much good by debunking charlatans.

Ian Holm:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jun/19/ian-holm-dies-alien-chariots-of-fire-bilbo-baggins

Rutger Hauer stierf vandaag. Hij zal gemist worden. Uit om te kijken Ladyhawke. {I admit, I can't write that much Dutch without help from Google translate. I did it because my first thought was dat is waar niet.}

The Guardian's obituary includes Roy Batty's final speech. It mentions his Dutch films with Paul Verhoeven -- I love Soldier of Orange -- but no one mentions Ladyhawke.

If you have a chance to watch Soldier of Orange, with subtitles the voices are important, it's about the German invasion of the Netherlands at the beginning of WWII and one person and his friends coming through the war. It has a great moment where some Dutch military stop them and check to make certain they're not German by asking them to pronounce "Scheveningen." There's also a scene where I thought my brain had turned off from translating the Dutch. It took me a few minutes to realize they'd switched to German.

But still, for me, Ladyhawke is his top role.

Vonda N McIntyre wrote the first Star Trek book I ever read. It does intrigue me that her obituary is in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/04/vonda-mcintyre-obituary

He bit. He bit me once (I'm the only one in the family who didn't have blood drawn). He loved attention and smiled when his chest was rubbed. Even in old age, he'd play "goalie" in his own form of soccer, blocking a big ball with his nose or paws and holding a smaller ball in his mouth. All the food in the world belonged to him -- or so he continually tried to convince us. He could be sweet beyond belief. He loved water and would join you in the shower if you left the bathroom door open (I nearly jumped my full height when I felt a nose on my leg when I thought I was alone.). He was a big Westie who loved and protected us. (True fact, he alerted us to genuine burglary attempts twice and at least one earthquake.) He loved me and sought me out whenever I visited.

Last night, suffering from pneumonia and other major problems, Oliver quietly went to sleep permanently. Sis, held the phone to his ear so I could say goodbye and said he recognized my voice. I miss him.

It's been a rough couple of days.

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Guardian Obituary.

Hugh Masekela: 10 Key Performances also from The Guardian.

I was never lucky enough to see him live. He had a club in Brussels, but we seemed only to hear about his appearances after they happened. He lived and played well into his 90s. It's not a common jazz instrument, but he did wonderful things with it.

His obituary in The Guardian

Chef Michel Richard died. His restaurant Central is one that I took out of town guests or other friends to when I needed somewhere nice but not too formal.

When I volunteered at the Smithsonian's Seafood Sustainability event during my unemployment, I was tasked to look after him for the evening book signings. The line for Alton Brown was vast. Maybe three people came up to Chef Richard's table and only one bought a book (I was too broke, sadly). For 45 minutes we talked about his time in Belgium and what it had taught him about food. We discussed restaurants we'd both eaten at and what made the Belgian approach different from the French approach and I don't know what all. We went back and forth on language spoken as one or the other of us groped for a word a reverted to our own tongue, but I just remember that fairly brief meeting as one of genuine kindness.

With my first paycheck, several months later, I took myself and a friend to Central for dinner. It was lovely.

Here are his books:
Happy in the Kitchen,

Sweet Magic

and
Home Cooking with a French Accent which is only available second hand.

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Entries tagged with r.i.p.

R.I.P. Pope Francis

Another Family Death

RIP James E Carter

R.I.P.

R.I.P. Hinton Battle

Tom Wilkinson

Mikhail Gorbachev R.I.P.

R.I.P. Hal Holbrook

R.I.P. Ben Bova

R.I.P.: Ann Reinking

RIP: John LeCarre

RIP: Jan Morris

R.I.P. James Randi

RIP

R.I.P. Rutger Hauer

Is Sad

Oliver