Seeking Ferret

Bad Shabbos

Jews do not dance in this movie.

But it was nonetheless an incredible movie and I loved it so much and I laughed all the way through.

The film is a farce in the vein of a Neil Simon play- a modern Orthodox Upper West Side family prepares for a Shabbos dinner made fraught by the fact that the Catholic parents of the son's fiancee (who is in the process of converting) are visiting from Wisconsin. This process becomes a lot more complicated when a dead body, that the family has to conceal, turns up.

I love a precise farce and this is an incredibly well composed one that manages to squeeze multiple jokes out of every setpiece through callbacks and reaction shots and brilliant use of the limited set. The whole audience was constantly laughing for the entire movie.

I especially loved the incredible Talmud jokes, which testified to a writing team that not only is familiar with the text of the Talmud but also its vibes. I still laugh every time I think of the challah.

And I loved that it is a movie about a family sticking together through thick and thin. I remember complaining about This Is Where I Leave You that for all the funny moments the inescapable truth at the end is that this family doesn't like each other very much, and I found that deflated my enjoyment a lot. In this movie, for all the family dysfunction and disagreement, when things go down they team up to be dysfunctional together.

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

I wasn't quite sure what this book wanted to be, it was doing three genres of middlebrow novel all at once and not quite pulling any of them off, but in the end I was not too unhappy to have kept with it.

Sara Marsala, our heroine, is the daughter of a messy Italian-American family. She is dealing with a divorce, the failure of her restaurant, and a general sense of failure and helplessness. When her beloved aunt dies, her aunt's will sends her back to the Old Country of rural Sicily, to Find Her Roots and see if an old deed for a plot of land in Sicily, passed down from her great-grandmother who never made it to America, is still valid. When she arrives in Sicily she is informed that her great grandmother was Murdered, contradicting family lote, and the plot is afoot.

The book tries to be a historical fiction novel about life in early 20th century Sicily, an action packed murder mystery, and an eat pray love European adventure, and the three visions of the book war with each other, not helped by lazy plotting with unjustified expository leaps obscuring story details I wanted to see fleshed out.

But it's the wanted to see fleshed out that frustrated me, because the story concept works and there are some really great characters both in the historical flashbacks and the modern narrative and I really was hoping that things would get worked out with just a bit more craft.

Ha! A couple years ago I ranted about Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast, which I thought perpetuated some misleading myths about how science works even though she was probably at least partially right about some problems with American reading education. Now Hanford is back with a three part followup series. I feel vindicated.

In my previous essay I questioned why we didn't see a magical school bucking the educational winds, where they used the science of reading and every student was an expert reader. Even if Hanford were wrong, I argued, one would typically expect outliers. Here Hanford shows us a school bucking educational trends and every student is an expert reader- and it doesn't exactly use the science of reading!

The premise of the new miniseries is that there is a school in a poor district of Ohio that has consistently delivered far better reading test scores than would be expected- nearly every student in this school district can read. And yet! Ohio state law changes inspired by Hanford's podcast were threatening to force this school district to make changes that might disrupt its educational model.

The Ohio school district's main innovations seem to me, based on Hanford's descriptions, to not actually be about the pedagogy, because I've been insisting since the beginning that probably the pedagogy is not the most determinative factor and nobody has convinced me otherwise. Hanford of course disagrees with me. She claims that it is things like an emphasis on teaching students lots of verbal language at an early age, and giving them significant time to practice. But while discussing these strategies and others, she plays recordings of the teachers and what their strategies seem to have in common is that they are extremely high touch, they are being implemented in classrooms with small class sizes, and the teachers are enthusiastic and engaged. My entirely unbacked by science intuition is that these factors matter more than pedagogy. This is why I've always referred to schools like this (ironically) as magic. These are of course the most expensive and difficult strategies to scale, so it's like saying, we've figured out the way to get every student to learn to read! Get more engaged teachers and don't overwhelm them with too many students! But this school district actually does have some clever ideas about the economics of teaching reading, such as enlisting gym teachers and music teachers as auxiliary reading teachers and giving them training, to allow the school to teach reading in small classes without having to add additional reading teachers. And also putting resources into solving problems of truancy so that you aren't wasting teacher time while students aren't there to benefit.

Hanford's starting point in the first series is that the science of reading says that three cuing is harmful and phonetic decoding is helpful, but this time around her theme is that implementation matters, not pedagogical theory, and again I must repeat that I am not an expert on teaching reading and I am talking without any authority, but I am so here for the new Hanford. She spends a lot of time on the intersection of new educational ideas and government's limitations, like the fact that federal law actually prohibits the Department of Education from endorsing specific programs, for fear of government overreach, putting schools in a funny position where they're required to meet specifications in laws like NCLB that can't actually be communicated, pushing them towards unreliable private organizations with unclear ideological objectives for guidance.

The whole thing was way more satisfying than the original series, and since I much prefer praising things to criticizing them, I had to note the improvement.

Wild Faith by Talia Lavin

Recced by lirazel and I wanted to like it, but i found it really frustrating. The meat of it, and the part with the most original reporting, is the last few chapters where Lavin discusses the stories she got when she put out an online call for evangelical Christians to talk about their experiences and many of them shared stories of trauma caused by common evangelical teachings about corporal punishment for children and wives being subject to their husbands. This writing is genuinely harrowing and I think serves mostly effectively as a call for change.

But most of the rest of the book is scattershot ranting, full of lazy conflations and conspiratorial thinking. She uses the Christians who eat shrimp are hypocrites argument along with many other bad arguments. The book is full to the brim of unnecessary bodyshaming of the Christians she doesn't like. It spends a lot of time making fun of evangelical Christians for believing in the devil as if other Christians don't. It spends a bizarre amount of time, given that Lavin is a secular Jew who doesn't believe in any Christian interpretation of scripture, critiquing evangelical textual hermeneutics as if the problem is that they're reading the Bible with the wrong textual strategy. As a Jew who is perfectly happy making fun of Christians most of the time, this book kept insulting my intelligence and I resented it.

FESTIVIDS IS LIVE! The festivids 2024 collection

I requested a vid for the recent D&D film that played with the meta level of the film as a putative campaign, and I got a wonderful vid that works with the many emotional registers of the film by presenting itself as the DM's campaign playlist, jumping from comic songs to epic songs and back with high dexterity. It's a really clever idea that is executed extremely well with great editing matching a wide variety of musical styles. I'm so grateful to the vidder, whoever they are.

Campaign Playlist (0 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Edgin Darvis, Holga Kilgore, Simon Aumar, Doric (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves)
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:

appropriate music can really enhance the rpg experience

As for me, I only managed one vid and I feel like it ought to be possible to figure out what I made, but it's not my most obvious work and I feel like some of the other vids in the collection are doing a fair job of throwing up chaff.

Hugo nominations are likely to open soon and I realized I never wrote anything about my two favorite SF novels published last year. The truth is I don't know what to write.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

The Book of Love, Link's first novel after many years of extremely fine short stories, reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell not in that it's anything like it at all, but in that it's so singularly itself in the same way. It is a self contained world inside a book that lives by its own logic and it was such a bewilderingly delightful journey to read.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

It's Lev Grossman writing Arthurian legend, but as with The Book of Love, I can't find words to put to how much this book made me feel, how full of emotions I was by the time it ended.

The Unteachables by Gordon Korman

There's a throwaway joke in Gordon Korman's 1985 dark comic masterpiece Don't Care High about a former teacher of the year, a brilliantly inspirational teacher who thrived on getting his students to participate in class discussion as a way to get them engaged in active learning. Thrown into the miasma of apathy that is Don Carey High, he ends up having class discussions with himself until he loses track of reality and becomes a burnt out shell of a man.

40 years later, Korman revisits this character archetype at length in The Unteachables, a fascinating book that shows the evolution of Korman's pessimism about the effectiveness of American schooling.

Zachary Kermit was an inspirational young teacher, a teacher of the year, until one of his students stole and sold the answers to a national exam to his classmates, who all got perfect scores. The school administration had spent so much energy hyping up his class's accomplishments that they decided the only way to save face was to blame the teacher. Mr. Kermit ended up in a depressive state, losing his fiancee, losing his enthusiasm for teaching, and living for the dream of early retirement and a fixed benefit pension. Twenty five years later, he is nine months from retirement and the administration, still holding a grudge, decides to assign him to a class of special needs students with apparent personality disorders, the so-called Unteachables, as a way to try to force him to quit before he can collect his pension. His students' needs call out to him and he finds himself reflexively defending them; as the students finally find someone willing to fight for them, they start to figure out how to thrive in school.

The existence of the Unteachables is about as powerful an indictment of the modern school system structure as Korman has ever penned. Parker simply has dyslexia. Rahim and Kiana would be perfectly fine students if not for disruptive problems at home. Barnstorm is such a good athlete teachers have refused to challenge him for fear he'd become academically ineligible to play football. These students should be getting extra support, but for fear of bad test scores weighing down teacher bonuses, they're simply being warehoused with a reluctant babysitter until they can be shuffled off to the high school. It's incredibly damning in a way that feels true to life. And the stuff about Mr. Kermit's pension is persistently incisive in the economic world we live in.

And yet in a classic Korman novel, that would simply be the background status quo the students would have to grapple against. In Son of Interflux, school administration, referred to as The Basement, is a force of nature Simon and his agent T.C. must negotiate against, its interest in pedagogy dwarfed by its interest in avoiding insurance liability. In Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, the teachers are as beleaguered by administration's insistence on tethering the school's fortunes to a broken power generation system, but they remain powerless to do anything to stop it until the book's conclusion. In Don't Care High, the erstwhile teacher of the year and the emotionally devastated guidance counselor remain unable to control the educational aspirations or whims of their student body. Or consider a book like The Toilet Paper Tigers where all of the team improvements adults attribute to the new coach are ultimately the result of the team itself struggling toward self improvement in spite of the coach's ineptitude.

Something has changed. Somehow Korman has started to believe that adults can become part of the solution instead of just part of the problem. Because The Unteachables is a book about an old teacher of the year finding that he can still inspire students, and students and administrators alike learning that an inspirational teacher can change the trajectory of a student's life.

And I don't quite know what to make of it. I think on some level it's a good thing that Korman is coming to a new, more complex vision of the role of teachers in school, but also this vision seems to exist towards the ends of make achieving a happy ending easier to achieve. The students in the story don't really have a serious antagonist they are fighting against, other than their own self-image. There is something satisfyingly messy about the endings to those 1980s/90s Korman novels I grew up with that is missing once adults can help with solving problems. In Semester in the Life, Sean and Raymond triumph, but at the cost of SACGEN II lurking around the corner next semester. But nothing like that can happen in this ending.The Unteachables is not moralistic or preachy, it is still broadly pessimistic about the utility of formal school, but it is too neat.

My Vids for 2024

סיפור הגולם The Golem and the Jinni - Festivid
Ken Sucks Barbie- Festivid
Luminous Beings Star Wars
Burning Down the House Grey's Anatomy

Only 4 vids, the least I've made in a year since I started doing this meme, and this is my tenth year filling out this meme! But it's been quite a year, so my lack of vidding productivity is not surprising. And also סיפור הגולם was quite a consuming project.

Favorite

"Luminous Beings" was a vid I needed to make. The creative experience was one of the most powerful vidding processes I've ever had. At first, every time I rewatched a draft I was crying, and by the end of the process I'd healed enough to not be crying constantly anymore.

Least Favorite

"Ken Sucks" was fun to make but pretty inconsequential? Always my least favorite question of the year. Actually, I guess I always try to answer based on the vids I posted, but I only post the vids I like. I have several vid drafts in some kind of progress that I am not happy with.

Most Successful

Gratifyingly, סיפור הגולם, which was such a personal project that I'm surprised people were moved or impressed by it. So many of the comments were "I haven't read the book, but I still liked this," and that is such a weirdly enjoyable thing to see, that even though I made this with a tiny audience in mind, I did so with sufficient conviction that it was appealing to people outside the target audience.

Most Underappreciated by the Universe
Yeah, I dunno. Maybe "Burning Down the House"? I don't feel tapped into Grey's fandom, wherever it might be, so my Grey's fannishness is always a little awkward.

Most Fun to Make
"Burning Down the House" was a really joyful vidding process, the song was fun and let me build really good motion stuff. It's funny, I always dread vidding Grey's because of how much of it there is, and then I always really like doing it.

Hardest Vid to Make

Obviously סיפור הגולם, but in a satisfying way? Every time I had a problem, I figured out a way to get around the problem. I think a lot of stuff I did last year for Bicycle Race and The Spinning Plates Reel turned out in surprising ways to suggest editing techniques that were useful for constructed reality stuff.

The Things I Learned This Year

Lots of new DVR tricks. This might be the first year I didn't do any vidding in Kdenlive, though I was thinking of going back to it for some quick things coming up. DVR is just so much more flexible and powerful once you get comfortable.

My Goals from Last Year

Target vids for 2025:


-At least 1 Festivid
-At least 1 Equinox vid
-an MCU vid, but I dunno, last year I deferred my MCU vid until Cap4 comes out and now Cap4 isn't coming out until next year, so...
-a TSCC vid, possibly the Coldplay Suite?
-a The Good Place vid

I made a Festivid, but I skipped Equinox because I didn't really like the theme. I continued to defer my MCU vid but Cap4 will be out soon! I did some work on the Good Place vid but need to get back to that. I did not return to the Coldplay Suite except in the sense that the Coldplay Suite is very much The Vid About My Job and so some part of my brain is constantly working on it. So I think there's going to be some repeat goals, I didn't make a lot of progress on my more ambitious goals this year.

Planning for Next Year

Target vids for 2024:

-At least 1 Festivid
-At least 1 Equinox vid
-My Captain Americas vid.
-A The Good Place vid (FroYo)
-My Miranda Bailey vid

Also I really want to get an NAS and get it set up to help organize vidding and other file storage this year. That's probably the real goal.

Here we go again...

Daf 2

The Torah commands Israel to establish courts and enforce justice, but isn't as clear on how to regulate the courts. Masechet Sanhedrin lays out the rules by which courts, both civil and criminal, are regulated. It's not immediately clear to what extent these rules are derived from the Torah or word of God transmitted orally from Sinai, and to what extent these rules are just rules that made sense to the Rabbis as being just and fair and appropriate. A mix, I think.

The first Mishna is about the number of judges required to adjudicate different issues. Typically the division is that civil/monetary/status issues are decided by a Beis Din of 3 judges and potentially capital cases are decided by a Sanhedrin of 23 judges. There are civil issues of greater import that are decided by a court of 5 or 9 judges, and cases of national significance are decided by the Great Sanhedrin of 71 judges. The Mishna is also clearly using this as an opportunity to lay out a list of all of the different kinds of court cases that can exist because rather than laying out some broad systematic principle of this is what makes a three judge case, the Mishna lists out all the different types of cases and individually says that they are judged by three judges. The first daf just goes through the whole first perek of the Mishna, which is unusual and means it's a little hard to hold onto everything when moving at daf yomi pace. I'm not going to go through all the cases mentioned, I assume a lot of them will come back in the Gemara going forward.

I do want to note that cases of raping an unmarried woman are judged by a three judge panel solely on the economic restitution due her father, which is disgusting. I could say more, but I don't intend to talk about it today.

Why 71 on the Great Sanhedrin? The Torah model is Moshe's council of elders, who numbered 70, plus Moshe makes 71. These numbers will always be odd because an even court could lead to a tie vote. Rabbi Yehuda says the Great Sanhedrin is only 70. R' Streinsaltz's gloss is that this is because Moshe did not count as part of the Zakenim, which maybe means that all Rabbi Yehuda is arguing is that similarly the Nasi has the 71st vote but isn't technically on the Sanhedrin. But he could also mean that as a matter of history the Second Temple Sanhedrin only had 70, or that the Third Temple Sanhedrin will for unclear reasons only have 70. R' Rosner brings a hasidic vort that the reason a Sanhedrin is 70 is to emphasize the significance of them being zakenim- it's ideally a group of 70 septuagenarians, because our minds grow and become wiser with time and the best justice comes from experience. And also somehow the fact that as our bodies deteriorate, our minds get stronger is a testimony to our immortal souls and a proof that therefore true justice comes from Hashem. Of course there are plenty of 70 year old assumes, it'll be interesting to see if they Gemara grapples with how to balance things with youthful perspectives. Seems unlikely.

Why 23 on a lesser Sanhedrin that decides capital cases? The basic idea comes from midrashic interpretation of the law of the goel hadam, the family avenger who is allowed to hunt down and kill the person who murdered his relative. The Torah is apparently envisioning this in a sort of tribal law setup where there aren't national courts and a stable criminal code with government law enforcement, so if someone is murdered, it's a tribal/familial obligation to execute justice or else the murderer will just go about their business. Therefore the goel makes a testimony of his intention to kill the murderer in front of his tribe, and only then can he go out and kill. The Torah uses the word edut twice in referring to this testimony, and we use the same gezerah shavah used to derive the size of a minyan to say say this means the goel's testimony must be in front of at least two minyans or 20 judges. We then jump to 22 because separately the Torah warns not to convict based on a rabim, and since that two minyanim concept would allow a person to be convicted based conceptually on a single minyan worth of people and that feels uncomfortably like convicting based on a rabim, we bump it up to 22 so that it's more than just a minimum crowd size. And that then becomes 23 so there can't be a tie.

The metahistorical concept here, though, is that the Torah is dealing with a society wracked by cycles of tribal revenge killings and comes up with a way to sanction these cycles while limiting them, and the Mishna is going a step further by trying to limit tribal violence altogether by unifying that tribal authority into a national legal system where the Beis Din is the only authorized institution that can decide if an execution will be carried out. The goel rather than being an agent of tribal rage is coopted by being deputized an authorized law enforcement official, enforcing the court's justice rather than his own personal sense of justice.

The Mishna concludes by asking how many people must there be in a town with a lesser Sanhedrin of 23 that can hear capital cases. One opinion is 120 people, with no explanation, which I assume is just a legal logic of that's enough people that you can be tried by people who are not your close friends or enemies. The other opinion is it must be a town of at least 230 people based on Moshe's rule in Shoftim that there be a shofet for every ten people, so 23 dayanim requires at least 230.

The Merchant of Venice by the Arlekin Theater Company in residence at the Classic Stage Company, Richard Topol as Shylock and T.R. Knight as Antonio

I said to my date afterward that I wasn't sure if I wanted to see it five more times or never again.

Arlekin's production is set in a low budget late night comedy TV show, The Antonio Show, that is staging the Merchant of Venice, ineptly and with limited resources. This frame doesn't quite make sense, but I think that's part of the point? I don't know, everything about this production is extremely precisely worked out in a way that seems to say five contradictory things at once, it was at once glorious and confounding.

The first thing they establish, indelibly clearly, is that the intention of this production is to laugh at the goyim. I wrote, at some length, about how the Jonathan Munby Globe Merchant invests all of its considerable energy in enlisting the audience on the side of the Venetians, in order to reveal that that audience has sided with the anti-semites, but never for a second does Arlekin want you to think of the Venetians as anything but fools and creatures of oversized, improper appetite. There is a tremendous amount of sex comedy, there are glorious physical comedy set pieces, there are dumb throwaway jokes all over the place, all serving the deliberate goal of trivialize the Venetians.

But more important, beyond the Venetians, the show wants you to think of the Actors-cum-characters as similarly foolish and incompetent. The actor playing Jessica desperately wishes she were playing Juliet instead, setting up a rich vein of metatextual comedy. The actor playing Launcelot is a stagehand recruited at the last minute because the original actor has deserted, leading to a lot of wonderful physical comedy about his ineptitude and lack of preparation, especially a brilliant set piece with a unicycle. And Antonio is the host desperately trying to keep the show going no matter what it takes. He mans cameras when they go abandoned, fixes the set, coaches the actors when they forget their lines. He even performs Salarino and Salanio, as twin handpuppets. This is, best I can tell, the reason for the late night comedy framing. Because they never want you to forget that this play is being staged and that the actors have agency and that somebody scripted this play and somebody directed it and somebody produced it and somebody funded it. Why? Because whoever those people are, they made the decisions that led to Shylock, an absurd anti-semitic character, a fiend in barely-human clothing, appearing on stage. That didn't just happen, someone (many someones) chose to make that happen. And somebody has to actually appear as Shylock. Somebody has to embody those offensive tropes.

That someone is Richard Topol, who in this production is playing both Shylock as well as some version of Richard Topol. As Shylock, Antonio clothes him in a Dracula cape, Groucho Marx glasses, plastic fangs, and then paints his shirt with fake blood. He is the broadest, silliest version of the bloodsucking Jew, and it is not some accident, it is a choice Antonio made and coaxed Richard Topol into performing.

And so the most amazing scene in this stunning, complicated production is Hath Not a Jew Eyes, where the actor character just flat out breaks and refuses to go along with the anti-semitic stereotypes any longer. He throws his costume on the ground, revealing his actual eyes, and asks the sound mixer to shut off the music and delivers the famous speech not as Shylock but as Richard Topol, who has had enough of this shit. His affect is of a man who is completely done, but also someone who is maybe surprised to be done? Who has been going along with the game, accepting that some tolerable level of anti-semitism is the price of survival, and suddenly is not sure how he ended up where he is.

There was a line I felt sure had to be a modern interpolation into the speech: "[The curse never fell upon our nation till now; ]...I never felt it till now". But no, it's there in the original even though it resonated newly with the moment... we keep rediscovering the depths of the hatred they feel for us. We keep discovering new humiliation, and new reasons to mourn.

From this point, a shaken Antonio regroups and tries to finish the play, but the character never finds his center again as the show gallops recklessly through the resolution of the Belmont plot to get us back to the courtroom, where an unmasked Shylock goes through the motions of preparing to take a pound of flesh from a terrified Antonio while a string of hateful Venetians lecture him about mercy. It is like Shylock is in a different play altogether; When Balthazar asks Shylock his name, he replies, "It's Richard" and I gasped.

Meanwhile, Portia appears as Balthazar 'disguised' in a Superman costume, and besides playing into the deliberately shoddy vibes of the play's comedy, it was... something else entirely to see Superman, this Jewish moral fable, this Jewish fantasy of American pursuit of justice and protection for the vulnerable, lecture the Jew Shylock about the quality of mercy. What mercy do the non-Jews have that they haven't stolen from us, and then mocked us for believing in?

Balthazar's legal maneuver is simplified as the play races breathlessly to the finish line, the happy lovers dance as Shylock is sentenced to Antonio's mercy, which he concedes after being reluctantly dragged back on stage, no longer interested in either the theatrical or metatheatrical proceedings, and certainlynot interestedin anything I would call mercy. Then Shylock is bound and brought behind a curtain, which is inscribed with a Jewish star as smoke rises from behind the curtain and a recording plays El Malei Rachamim- God Who is Exalted in Mercy, a prayer recited asking for mercy and elevation for the souls of the deceased. The woman sitting next to us, a little out of control of her emotions, told us/yelled at ys after the show that we just watched him being gassed in Auschwitz and... yes that is what we saw. I can't really offer any explanation of it beyond that. It was very much not okay. That, too, was probably the point.

Every single detail, every prop movement, every character break in the staging was meticulously planned and executed and the result was riveting and thrilling and...sickening. I return to my original conclusion. I don't think I would want to experience this again, but I sure will continue to digest the experience, whether I want to or not.