Did the Red Sox Err in Firing Alex Cora?

The answer to the above question is yes. I’m a Yankees fan, but even though Cora is a cheater who cost the Yankees a World Series bid in both 2017 when he skippered the Astros and again in 2018 with the Red Sox, but I’d trade Aaron Boone for Alex Cora any day of the week. What made Cora’s cheating all the more galling is that he’s a very good tactician who doesn’t need to cheat. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred chose to suspend Cora for the 2020 season. Personally, I believe he and several others who got off scot-free (hello Jose Altuve) damaged the reputation of the game and should have been banned for five years, but that wasn’t what MLB decided.

 

Move the clock forward. Over the weekend the Red Sox fired Cora and six of his coaches. Cheating had nothing to do with it. Red Sox Director of Baseball Operations–a title to Red Sox use instead of General Manager–Craig Breslow made the call. At the time the Red Sox were in last place with a 10-17 record. To paraphrase an old baseball adage, no team on a long winning streak is as good as they look, nor is any as bad as they look when losing. Maybe you fire a good manager toward the end of the year, but Cora was just 27 games into a 162-game season. By my math he had 135 games to right the ship!

 

Exactly who was calling for Cora’s head on a platter? The Red Sox infamously went 86 years (1918-2004) without a World Series championship. Think of it. Some sources will tell you that the Red Sox have won 9 World Series championships, but that’s funny accounting. There was no American League team in Boston until 1901 and they were called the Americans when they won in 1903. They weren’t the Red Sox until 1908, and didn’t play in Fenway Park until 1912. (Note: Early Boston teams called the Bees, the Doves, Red Caps, Red Stockings, Rustlers, and Beaneaters played in the National League and eventually became the Braves.) During the “live ball” era from 1920 on, the Red Sox won zero World Series championships.

 

The Red Sox had considerable success in the dead ball era, but it was not until the 21^st century it mastered the baseball as we know it today. If we think of a World Series title as the ultimate measure of a manager’s worthiness, there are just three Red Sox managers who can boast such success: Terry Francona (2004, 2007), John Farrell (2013), and Alex Cora (2018). Only Joe Cronin (1071 wins in 13 years) and Francona (744) won more games as a Red Sox manager than Cora’s 621 over 8 years. It hasn’t escaped notice that during his 12-year pitching career Breslow was 23-30.

 

What did in Alex Cora? Not another cheating scandal; it was a relative lack of success with a flawed roster and Breslow’s quick trigger as he seeks to shape the team in his own image.  Thus, he handed over the reins to AAA manager Chad Tracey, the theory being that he managed many of the younger Red Sox players in the minors. To repeat a point I’ve made elsewhere, very few MLB teams (over-) hype their prospects like the Red Sox. They gave big contract extensions to several youngsters before they even made the team. Roman Anthony makes sense, but Wilyer Abreu, Brayan Bello, Kristian Campbell, Jarren Duran, Marcello Mayer, and Ceddane Rafaela? Maybe they will become good players but other than flash some good leather, none of them has yet justified a multi-million contract. Whose idea was it to throw $90 million over five years to Masataka Yoshido? Or to trade Rafael Devers, one of the few players on the roster with power? Who thinks that 5’6” Caleb Durbin is the answer at third? Not the Braves, Yankees, or Brewers who had him in their systems.

 

Don’t get me wrong. Payton Tolle and Connelly Early look like legitimate Sox prospects. Nor should anyone think Garrett Crochet will have a 6.30 ERA by the end of the 2026 season.  Or that the Yankees will continue to win at a .643 clip over the next 134 games. The firing of Alex Cora is a portrait of administrative ineptitude, not of Alex Cora’s ability.

 

Rob Weir

Good Ideas: The Wonder of Stars

When I was in grade school, my Aunt Evelyn took me to Philadelphia to see my great Uncle Dave and Aunt Pearl. My visit involved a trip to the Fels Planetarium. I was, so to speak, star-struck! We went into an old building–allegedly the second oldest planetarium in the US–the lights dimmed, and the only things visible was a projector and the only sound was that of our guide. He took us on a journey across the cosmos, which was decidedly smaller than the one we now know. (Only a few galaxies beyond our own, and no Big Bang, quarks, black holes, telescopes in space, or human space flights.) I was enthralled!

I never wanted to be an astronaut, but going to the Fels and perusing my Great Uncle Dave’s entire collection of National Geographic magazines for articles on outer space was an eye opener. At one point I could look into the sky and pick out a few constellations. (Full disclosure: I never did figure out how anyone could imagine Zodiac figures in the stars.) Many years later, my boyhood met my young adulthood. 

 

The Old Fels Planetarium*

 

My college had several courses for non-majors nicknamed “(fill in the black) for Poets.” To qualify for a teaching license, I had to take one called “Basic Physical Science,” that was divided into three four-week graded units: Biology, Physics, and Astronomy. I took the first two in high school, though I was such a right-brained guy that Mr. Science would have renounced me if I were his only son! The Bio part was boring, but I eked out a C. Physics was another matter. I loved the first week of Chem with my hippie/dippy prof, but then disaster hit in the form of an emergency appendectomy. I missed three weeks of school and flat-out flunked Chem. I needed to have at least a C to get credit for the course. Next up, Astronomy. My boyhood enthusiasm was rekindled and I aced it. My transcript has a C+ for the course, but I’m sure I would have gotten a B or B+ if my appendix hadn’t burst.

Forgive the long intro, but I smiled from ear-to-ear when I read about a local middle school program sponsored by the Northampton Education Foundation (NEF) to interest kids in astronomy. It’s a good idea on its own, but NEF contact [sic] Llama Maynard worked with the middle school’s Matt Heaney on a way to bring a Fels Planetarium-like experience to the kids. Who among us does not love a simple solution to a complex problem? Theirs was a pop-up planetarium!

 

Pop-Up Planetarium

 

A what? The idea was an inflatable dome fashioned from black opaque material. Once blown up it looks a bit like a Coleman tent crossed with a flat-bottomed Hostess Snowball. A slit on one side allows students to enter, take a chair, and enjoy a show like mine at the Fels, except it was brought up-to-date. Kids spoke of the excitement of seeing a supernova, learning how galaxies formed, and traveling through Saturn’s rings. They even witnessed a simulation of the Big Bang. Now that’s creative teaching for impressionable young folks.

Who knows what they will carry with them from the experience. An uptick in telescope sales? An obsession with star charts? Future space voyagers? I’m still not going up there until science builds something akin to the Star Trek Enterprise. But if the planetarium experience sticks and inspires some young “poet” to get a good grade in a college science class, the pop-up planetarium will have been a very good idea!

 

Rob Weir

 

* I may be wrong, but I believe the old Fels was abandoned and that the new one is inside of the Franklin Institute.  

 

 

 

Midnight Black: A Guilty Pleasure?

 

 

 

MIDNIGHT BLACK (2025)

By Mark Greaney

Berkley Publishing Group, 528 pages.

★★★

 

As a kid I devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. They resonated with the Cold War rhetoric that was in vogue back then, with the British Bond’s SPECTRE organization wearing the white hats and saving the world from the evil Russian SMERSH. Although SMERSH was once an actual Russian amalgam of three counterintelligence groups, in Fleming novels SMERSH was an organization of Russian spies and intelligence officers seeking to undermine global democracy. SPECTRE was analogous to MI-5, the British version of the CIA.

 

If you didn’t think about that kind of stuff as much as I did, it was essentially akin to “Spy vs. Spy” comic strips in Mad Magazine with the commies in black and the bumbling “good(ish)” guys in white. If I’m honest, fantasizing about Bond’s girlfriends had something to do with my love of Ian Fleming books. Oddly, though, I never cared for James Bond movies– beyond looking at the so-called Bond “girls”– as the films were too cheesy for me. When I hit high school, I put all that stuff behind me; the Vietnam War nudged me toward Quakerism and an embrace of pacifism.

 

I don’t talk about it much, but every now and then I’m like the reformed smoker who sneaks a cigarette in that I pick up a spy novel for the frisson of a cheap thrill. Midnight Black is Book # 14 of author Mark Greaney’s “Gray Man” series and the second book of his I’ve read. I despise all military jargon, weapons, and things war-related, but I have to give Greaney credit for being very good at what he does. Put another way, Midnight Black was a novel I hated to like. It’s cliched, a throwback to the hottest days of the Cold War, sexist, and so macho it makes Rambo seem like a sissy.

 

Greaney’s “Gray Man” is Court(land) Gentry, code named “Violator.” (Is there any bloody point to code names when both sides of a conflict know who you mean?) He is a decided Rambo-type, a rogue CIA agent who is in and out of the organization depending on who is responsible for reining in his multiple violations of protocol. His one-time handler Matthew Hanley has been demoted to a posting in Bogota and the new guy in the big leather chair keeps Court a veritable prisoner on a military compound, though Court is a manly man who is hard to contain. He’s impossible to do so once he’s told that “Anthem,” his Russian lover Zoya Zakharova, was executed. He simply refuses to believe it and makes plans to smuggle himself inside of Russia, find her, and bring her back to the United States. He continues in that planning even though he has no idea where to look and is told trying to get into Russia is a suicide mission. WWRD? (What Would Rambo Do?)

 

Midnight Black takes us all over Eastern and Northern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Finland…) and places Court and all those he contacts in extreme jeopardy. He connects with “Romantic,” Zack Hightower, a sometime partner, sometime rival, as well as various contacts seeking to undermine the Russian Federation, CIA folks working on the sly without permission, and seafaring folk who might get him into Russia or might sell him out for a song. Just like Rambo, Court decides a small team is all that’s needed to take out huge military units. And, of course, Anthem is not dead; she’s in a Russian gulag in Mordovia, as is a popular dissident, Nadai Yarovaya who the West wants to spring from prison but won’t go unless her husband is also freed from a nearby gulag. I guess if you’re going to take out three separate gulags you want to keep things small.  

 

Court is resourceful and exploits splits within the Russian intelligence community. Frankly, the plot line is absurd, with one impossible obstacle piled upon another a The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight fashion. I can’t really assess all of the hardware, explosives, tactics, and military alignments mentioned in the book as I know nothing about such matters. Again, though, the novel is akin to Fleming’s James Bond in that it’s all about the kill, the thrill, and the kiss, not plausibility. Keep a towel handy to wipe up the testosterone.

 

Rob Weir

(Code Name: Shamefaced)

 

 

  

 

Witches and Relics in the Time of Plague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE STONE WITCH OF FLORENCE (2024)

By Anna Rasche

Park Row, 368 pages

★★★★

 

If you’ve ever studied medieval history, there’s much to like about The Stone Witch of Florence. If you’re a serious scholar of the period, there much that might annoy you. As a recovering medievalist it had elements that made me grab it: witchcraft, the Black Death, church corruption, and just enough accuracy to dissuade me from screaming, “Rubbish!” and hurling it across the room.

 

This is a historical novel written by a gemmologist that flirts with fantasy, folklore, and feminist wish fulfilment in blurring the rare with the customary. As modern Wiccans remind us, the word “witch” is often defined by whatever eyes are looking at it. What word would you attribute to a woman who uses gemstones to heal? Is she a folk physician, a heretic, a rock-wielding mesmerist, a threat to public health?

 

In her debut novel Anna Rache juxtaposes her beleaguered heroine Ginevra de Gasparo with church beliefs in the efficacy of relics. It is 1348, the year the Plague begins to ravage the Italian peninsula. (Think medieval; there’s no such thing as a unified Italian nation-state.) Prior to the outbreak of the Plague, Ginevra’s great ambition was to become a member of the physician’s guild of Florence, which got her banned from the city. Some women were allowed to join guilds, but not many. But let’s not romanticize a medieval physician whose practices of using leeches, bleedings, blistering, and unguents in ways that often differed from the “cures” of witches only in the gender of the applicant. 

 

The terms Plague and Black Death are often used interchangeably though they were not the same thing. The Beath Death looked scarier, with the patient’s body growing pus-filed buboes. Yet it was the most-survivable form of plague; the highly contagious airborne pneumonic plague had a death rate of close to 100 percent. Patients went from health to death in less than a day. (Shades of the early days of Covid, anyone?) Depending on where you were, the Plague carried off between 30-60 percent of the entire population between 1348-51. So were “stone witches” such as Ginevra blamed and burned at the stake? No; witch killings gathered steam between the 15^th-17^th centuries.  In the mid-14^th, it was often the case that only heretics believed in witches at all. Ginevra was allowed back to an increasingly-empty Florence with a vague promise from Inquisitor Michele (male) that he might support her application to the guild.

 

There is a catch, of course. Ginevra is also drawn into what is more of a crisis of public faith than of public health. Michele wants Ginevra’s aid in finding out who is stealing relics from local churches. It is a matter of urgency. After all, if what remains of the populace concludes that faith can’t save them, what need is there for the church, priests, or inquisitors? As Rache writes, “Florentines were not exactly known known as the most pious of peoples.” Pre-Plague Florence was as much a city of bankers, merchants, and luxury, despite its fame for holding numerous important relics. One by one they disappear–the left arm of San Filippo Apostolo, the leg of the martyr Miniato, the skull of San Zenobio, and other items deemed sacred and miraculous? What is to be made of vials of colored water left in their place?

 

All of this builds a strange symbiosis between Michele and Ginevra, though her strongest alliance is with the  wealthy Lucia, who supports her and aids in investigating the mystery of missing relics. As happened so often during the Plague, wealthy men fled the cities for the allegedly miasma-free air of the countryside. In an odd way, the rich were right about that. We now know that fleas hosted by black rats and bred in filthy medieval cities were big culprits in spreading the Plague.

 

The Stone Witch of Florence is an unusual novel. Does Rasche intend us to contrast the official veneration of magical relics with the presumed superstition of Ginerva’s Plague immunity with her pure crystal quartz, her energy with garnet, and her ability to drink men under the table with a piece of amethyst under her tongue? Probably. Are we to draw conclusions about power versus the poor? However you read this novel, rest assured it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

News of the World is Sweet–In a Good Way

 

 

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD (2020)

Directed by Paul Greenglass

Universal Pictures, 118 minutes, PG-13 (cowboy violence, a few swears)

★★★★

 

Say the name “Tom Hanks” and eyes will roll. For those who like movies with grit, snark, and a walk on the wild side, Hanks evokes Mr. Rogers (or, worse, Forrest Gump). But sometimes there is something to be said for wholesomeness. News of the World is one such movie. It is based on a successful novel of the same name by Paulette Giles in which director Paul Greenglass largely parallels Giles’ book, except that the latter was more successful than the money-losing movie.

 

News of the World is a Western that wears its heart on its tattered sleeve. By 1870, the American Civil War had been over for five years, though the South had a long way to go in terms of economic recovery. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) eeks out a meagre living by traveling from town to town with a stack of (semi-) recent newspapers. Literacy among white commoners was considerably lower than in the North. Kidd’s job involves reading random newspaper stories to anyone who pays ten cents to hear him. Like a good teacher, Kidd mixes humorous tales with hard news (economics, foreign rebellions, disaster stories) and his dry-wit delivery and public lecturing skills make him popular as long as he keeps moving and doesn’t draw often from the same well.  

 

After leaving Wichita Falls, he encounters a disturbing scene: an overturned wagon and a black man lynched from a tree. He hears rustling nearby and finds a young girl (Helena Zenger) in hiding. She speaks no English and when the U.S, occupying soldiers come by they advise him to take her to an Army fort in Castroville, some 400 miles out of his way. Kidd makes a stop in Dallas hoping that that some old friends will take the girl in, but she’s far too willful. He also stops at an inn run by a former lover, the widow Gannett (Elizabeth Marvel), who tells Kidd that the girl he calls “Johanna” speaks Kiowa and was taken in a raid six years earlier. By all looks and demeanor she is Kiowa, though an occasional German word pops out.

 

The movie is essentially a sojourn across dangerous lands in which Kidd and Johanna learn from each other. It would be hard to exaggerate exactly how dangerous their journey is. They encounter three ex-Confederate roughnecks who offer to “buy” Johanna, presumably for their sexual pleasure. They hightail it out of town pursued by the sleazy horndogs and have a classic shootout in which Kidd and his young charge hide out in a rocky hillside. Johanna’s ingenuous solution to how to compensate for running out of ammunition is a cool scene.

 

There are hostile Native tribes and In Erath County, Kidd sees firsthand how lawless Texas has become. A cattleman named Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy) has set up a rogue state within Texas in which his word, laws, and racist values prevail. In this case, Kidd’s intellect and silver tongue save the day and they leave with an acolyte named Calley (Fred Hechinger) in tow for a few life lessons before setting off on his own.

 

Kidd and Johanna arrive in Castroville only to learn that there won’t be a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in place for three months, so it’s off to a farming settlement where records indicate her German-speaking aunt and uncle live. To them, though, Johanna is expected to earn her keep on the farm. This sets the table for realizations and a happy ending. In the movie this comes a bit too fast to be completely believable, but it’s in keeping with the novel.

 

News of the World isn’t a classic, but it’s sweet and satisfying. Hanks is very good in the role of a man who saw enough violence to last him a lifetime and is driven to do the right thing, not the most convenient one. Learn the name Helena Zenger, a German-born actress now in her teens. Her translucent paleness serves to accentuate her vulnerability. When being stubborn or throwing a tantrum, her face flushes as if the underside of her skin is afire. Her acting chops are such that she communicates clearly though for much of the movie her words mean nothing to Hanks or the audience–unless you happen to speak Kiowa! Very few people saw this film, but give it a try.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Sandwich: Gynocentric but Funny and Poignant

 

 

 

 

SANDWICH (2024)

By Catherine Newman

Harper, 226 pages.

★★★

 

 

Sandwich is the most gynocentric novel I’ve read in years. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy this work from Catherine Newman, but sometimes it’s hard book for males to grasp. The novel’s central character, Rachel (aka/ Rocky) dwells on subjects such as childbirth, menopause, oral sex, her vagina, sagging breasts, and how much she misses pregnancy. Lest you think me insensitive, Sandwich is also very funny, touching, and poignant. Plus, Rocky is seriously neurotic, has few filters, and is blissfully unaware of how others within hearing range might squirm over her topics of conversation. Besides, ladies, how would you feel about a novel that dwelt upon urinary tract infections, distended testicles, varicose veins, sexual dysfunction, “war” stories, and passing gas?  Thought so!

 

For those who don’t live in New England, Sandwich is also a town on Cape Cod. If you think of Cape Cod as the flexing arm extending into the ocean, Sandwich is located atop the muscle after you cross the Sagamore Bridge onto the Cape. It’s where Rocky and her husband Nick have vacationed every summer for twenty years–always in the same cottage. Nick is the one who should bear the nickname Rocky, as he’s loyal, steady, handy, and as patient as Rachel is manic. He always listens, though he suspects he only understands about 65% of what Rocky says. We readers think he might be overestimating! They have two wonderful children, twenty-year-old Willa and her older brother Jamie. Both have flown the proverbial coop and Jamie arrives with his serious girlfriend Maya, though he and Willa often speak like a bonded pair despite the fact that Willa identifies as a lesbian and a vegetarian, though she eats seafood. Because. The Cape!  

 

Rocky and Nick are in their fifties, though you can be excused for thinking of them as older and refugees from Woodstock. They are incredibly laidback, not because their kids are grown, but because that’s just the way there were and are. One example of this is Rocky’s relief that her daughter is gay so she doesn’t have to worry about her getting pregnant. Or, at least he was relieved until Nick reminded her that lesbians can have children by choice! But Rocky always finds things to fret over, including worrying that her daughter might be menstruating in an ocean where sharks are sometimes present!

 

Rocky is a classic born-to-be-a-mom type and Nick has come to accept that he’ll always be number three to Jamie and Willa. We get a no-topics-barred look at family dynamics during a week at the beach. Even Grandma and Grandpa get into the act for a few days. Newman has a true gift for turning annoying moments into comedy. The first thing that happens when they enter their modest (and in need of upgrades) vacation house is that the toilet overflows. When Willa complains of the smell, Nick yells out that he’s “knee-deep in sewage.” Rocky insists that’s not true, but because Willa is a “Daddy’s girl” she’s more inclined to believe him! The fact that Maya adores Jamie and his entire family doesn’t leave much room for an outbreak of elegance. And who has visited the Cape that can’t relate to this visit to the local bakery? “Forty minutes later, we are walking back to the cottage with two lattes, four chocolate croissants, one scone, three baguettes, and a receipt for sixty-five dollars.”

 

More serious issues are discussed–abortion, feminism, anxiety, therapy, politics, still birth, grandpa’s dementia–but mostly we get Rocky’s memories of past trips to the Cape, Rocky’s worried thoughts, and the joy of people reveling in one another’s company. If laughter is the best therapy, Rocky’s neuroses don’t have a chance! When Jamie discovers toasted almond bars in the freezer left behind by the previous resident. Rocky has a “bad feeling” about eating any, but Jamie wins the day by a four-to-one vote: “… you feel like maybe the people who stayed here last week… [are] playing the long game of booking this place last October so that they could plant a poisoned ice-cream novelty and kill us.” Leave to Nick to remember a time when they were younger and Rocky baked a cake in a cat litter pan! As they prepare to leave and muse over their favorite things, Rocky thinks: “…the fact of us together and alive. The kids… are so grown! So young. Mine and not mine, as ever they have been. Maybe my grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding.”

 

Rob Weir

 

 

On Display at the BMAC

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

Brattleboro, Vermont

Through July 5, 2026

 

  

By now you’ve heard my many praises for the BMAC (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center), the little Vermont museum that could. Here are a few of the exhibitions in progress. 

 

 

 

The biggest show is Elegy for the Consumed by Jude Griebel. He is a Canadian who now lives in Brooklyn. Griebel works in materials ranging from wood, clay, textiles, and ceramics to paper, acrylics, and resins. He begins with the observation that humans often anthropomorphize animals. You need but spend ten minutes with Facebook videos to see how we impose human characteristics on dogs, cats, bears, rabbits, birds, fish, and even a hamburger. The last of these is part of his point. 

 

 

 

How is it that we simultaneously buy into so many of Disney’s talking animals and then eat them? Why do we put designs of Nemo on the dinner plates upon which we serve fish and chips? Or call our dachshunds “wiener dogs?” I wasn’t able to determine if Griebel is a vegetarian–his PR material mentions only that he understands farm culture from having grown up in Alberta–but there is an implied critique of the human consumption of animals in his work. Numerous works are hyperrealist animals in table-ready poses. As satire, they provoke us emotionally. Does a broiled chicken in a human pose make us laugh or imply a form of cannibalism? As curator Sarah Freeman asserts, Griebel’s work “is not intended as a manifesto against meat eating, yet it calls us to question our unthinking acceptance of a world order that puts humans at the top of the pyramid, perhaps at our own peril.” What do you think or feel about this small sample of the exhibit? Pure whimsy, or something else?

 

 

 

Perhaps you, like I, grew up amazed by the variety of birdlife as seen in the plates of books from John James Audubon, the field guides of Roger Tory Peterson, Elizabth Gould, or Alexander Wilson. As a kid, I used to stare at them and wonder why I never saw such showy and exotic birds, blissfully unaware of the fact that maybe different parts of North America or countries across the oceans might have different birds. As you can infer from that last sentence, my fascination with ornithology developed before I knew what it meant and long before I ever heard of Charles Darwin! I still love birds, though I never became a devoted bird watcher who spent $5,000 on a lens longer than a Cadillac Esplanade ESV.

 

Illustrator Robin Crofut-Brittingham has done a series she calls Migrations that situates birds of a feather, as it were. She places birds in vaulted watercolor frames of vegetation. Each arch groups numerous birds from the same part of the world. These are tranquil and informative. They are also representative of a terrarium of the sort that old-style museums display (or used to display) taxidermal birds.  

 

But Crofut-Brittingham, who lives in Montreal, also has the imagination of a fabulist. She too anthropomorphizes. In her larger works, she imbues her fantastic birds with human characteristics, sometimes in jeopardy but also as naked, painted women with bird masks (or heads?) riding ruminants through lush vegetation, some holding hunting birds and others with the demeanor of forest Amazons.  

 

 

 

Deirdre Hyde grew up in London, but relocated to Costa Rica. Her Fragments of a Tropical Life is a reflection of her world in collage, painting, and fabric. I wish this exhibit had been a bit larger, but from what I saw I infer that Hyde prefers the rain forest to the wet streets of London!

 

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Time and Again a Journey Through the Past

 

TIME AND AGAIN (1970)

By Jack Finney

Simon and Schuster, 398 pages.

★★★

 

I’ve long been a fan of time travel books. Back in 1970, I read Time and Again by Jack Finney. I had forgotten about it until it reappeared from the deep recesses of a closet. It’s not science fiction per se. In a little-discussed aspect of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the present, the future, and the past exist in the same time block. Don’t push me any further as my physics and mathematics are not up to the task, but it’s connected to space-time theory. Apparently, Einstein also believed that traveling into the future would be easier than going back in time, which could violate causality principles. From what I gather, he didn’t think a machine could be built that could travel fast (or slowly) enough to allow time travel. 

 

Einstein’s name carries more gravitas than that of the average science fiction writer, which explains why Einstein is so often invoked in time travel novels. Finney’s Time and Again is one of them. Its 1970 publication date coincided with American trips to the moon, the Cold War, the first Earth Day, and bookstands selling non-fiction books such as Future Shock, The Population Bomb, and The Year of the Quiet Sun. Logician/mathematician Kurt Gödel’s 1949 “rotating universes” theorem allowed for travel to the past, as would later quantum physics (though not for people).

 

Is it possible? That’s way above my pay grade, but novelists have found it irresistible. Finney’s fictional character Si(las) Morely is the central figure of a government-funded program in Time After Time. His handler Dr. Danzinger believed that a properly trained candidate could literally walk from the present into the past after a regimen of familiarization, self-hypnosis, and pre-preparation, a novel (ahem!) way of changing the position of the observer. New Yorker Si Morely is housed in the Dakota Hotel, grows a beard, wears 19^th century clothing, and reads period newspapers as a prelude for a stroll into the New York City of 1882. His task is to watch a man who is enigmatically linked to Kate, Si’s 1970 girlfriend, mail a letter at the post office. Si is a professional illustrator also asked to keep notes and make sketches of things he observes. Si has his doubts until the day he gazes across 72^nd Street at snowy Central Park and indeed walks into the past. He is naturally astonished.

 

Thinking back to 1970, New York was not then a nice place. Like many U.S. cities of 1970s, the air and water were polluted and the streets were crowded, noisy, filthy, and crime-riven. Racial tension, garbage strikes, abandoned buildings, and homelessness were prevalent. Hippies commandeered Washington Square, the Bowery was a repository of alcoholics, and the city was close to insolvency. Imagine Morely’s astonishment of watching families joyously riding sleighs, farmsteads within sight of the Dakota, boarding horse-drawn trolleys or steam-driven trains on the Ninth Avenue El, being able to see the Museum of Natural History sitting alone, viewing the arm and torch of the future Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, or climbing the stairs of the Trinity Church steeple, then the city’s tallest structure!

 

Si makes several trips back and forth to 1970 and 1882–once with Kate–and each time immerses himself deeper in the world of 1882. In good Victorian style, a melodramatic side story develops. Si was supposed to be careful not to alter history, though he finds himself falling in love with Julia, a woman at his boarding house. She is betrothed to Jake Pickering, whom Si suspects is a rogue. To say more would be a spoiler. Finney does a good job of ratcheting the tension of a wild chase, a discovery, and a fire. If that’s not melodrama, I don’t know what is.

 

A final way in which Time and Again is very much tied to 1970 is that today we would label parts of the book sexist, not in a physically abusive way but certainly in its gender assumptions. Finney’s book is called “An Illustrated Novel” for its use of period photos and sketches, some of which are invented and others pulled from archival sources. Its greatest virtue is taking us inside the worldview of 1882. Sit down, take a chaw of tobacco, and try to hit the spittoon! If you could journey to the past, where would you go and would you stay?

 

 Rob Weir

 

 

Oddly Enough, Mickey 17 is Charming

  

 

 

 

Mickey 17 (2025)

Directed by Bong Joon Ho

Warner Bros. Pictures, 137 minutes, R (language, violence, sexual content, substance abuse)

★★★★

 

After the award-winning Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho made Mickey 17, which made nearly $132 million. Yet, it lost tons of money because Warner’s budget was more than $250 million. Many fans of Parasite called the film an artistic failure, though I liked it.

 

Mickey 17 is a science-fiction/slapstick/black comedy that borrows elements from numerous other films, though its script is based on the eponymous Edward Ashton novel. It is filled with in-jokes and satire. Joon is an English football fan and modeled several characters on players. Others are parodies of politicians, religious figures, scientists, and businessmen.  

In the year 2050, the Earth is beset with great environmental damage. The scientific and political establishments seek to transplant human beings to an allegedly idyllic planet called Niflheim. The long journey is headed by failed lawmaker Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffolo), a composite of bombastic politicians like Donald Trump, Mussolini, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior. The crew consists largely of individuals who haven’t done well on earth. Timo (Steven Yeu) owes a loan shark a lot of money and is unaware that the Elon Musk-like Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore) is aboard the ship to collect the debt at any cost, including cutting Timo into five pieces. Nothing has gone right for Micky Barnes (Robert Pattison) whose sole friend is the obnoxious and unreliable Timo. In a satire of agreement statements, Mickey’s volunteers to be an expendable without reading the contract conditions. He just wants a new start and a better look at the recruiter’s legs.

 

Expendable is true to its title. Mickey is a lab rat to test dangerous vaccines, foods, and poisons. His 17 designation means he has died 16 previous times, plopped into a copier holding his memories and DNA patterns, and “reprinted” Mickey is surprisingly popular among the crew, partly because everyone wants to know, “What’s it like to die?” They–each Mickey has personality differences– do, however, have a serious girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who doesn’t like the way Mickeys are treated. Once they “die” they are tossed like so much garbage into an incinerator to be melted for the next Mickey.  

 

Predictably, Marshall and his insufferable wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) are greedy little monsters who live and eat high on the hog, suck up to politicians, look like TV evangelists, pray on their knees, and justify their grubby existences by playing the God card. As you might also anticipate, Niflheim is no Garden of Eden. It is largely a wind-and-snow swept desert. Nor is it uninhabited. Creatures Mickey 17 calls Creepers occupy caves and allegedly have a fondness for human flesh. They look like a cross between eyebrow lice and boxing gloves. Mickey 17’s problem magnifies when he reports that he is being swarmed by the Creepers. The lab crew assumes Mickey has been eaten and print Mickey 18 (also Pattison), a more arrogant and confident version of 17. In fact, Big Mama Creeper saves Mickey 17. He and 18 wrestle around over the incinerator pits, but just when it looks as if one will vanquish the other, they must break off their battles lest they be discovered and both thrown into the soup (and no more Mickeys will be printed). It doesn’t help that 18 has the best sex with Nasha she’s ever had or that a widowed harpy name Kai (Anamarie Vartolomei) tries to bed 17, who sees her for what she is. But when Kai finds out there are two Mickeys, she tries to manipulate both.

 

Star Trek aficionados will recognize that the Creepers are a variant of the rock-eating “horta” and that one doesn’t mess with the little ones. When the megalomaniacal Marshalls kill a small Creeper, Mama is on the warpath and thousands of Creepers surround the spaceship as the geeky Dorothy (Patricia Ferran) frantically seeks to perfect a communications translator. There is a happy ending in that the Marshalls are deposed, the problem of multiple Mickeys is resolved, Timo is not cut into five pieces, and crew mates (especially Dorothy) cuddle baby Creepers.

 

Sounds awful, right? It’s strangely and inexplicably charming. Pattison is wonderful as both 17 and 18, Ruffalo chews the scenery, and Ackie is adorable and fierce. Yes, it’s a dumb script but … in a good way!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

[RW1] 

 

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 [RW1]