Here There Are Blueberries (4*)

Early in Here There Are Blueberries, a very didactic docudrama, staff at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum debate whether or not they should put on public view a collection of carefree snapshots taken by a convicted war criminal at Auschwitz that don't include a single prisoner.  If only the museum had demonstrated such circumspection in 2017, when they hosted the new president on Holocaust Remembrance Day! Administrators justified their decision on "traditional" grounds after I protested in an angry letter that also marked the end of several thousands of dollars in donations over the previous decade.

Now that I've ground that ax, let me get to the production.  While Here There Are Blueberries lacks the chilling impact of The Zone of Interest, which explored the same theme in moving pictures three years ago, it does offer something new, even for someone who has thoroughly familiarized himself with the Holocaust through reading Primo Levi and visiting multiple concentration camps: testimony of Germans whose grandparents and parents facilitated the murder of six million Jews.

Michael Cerveris, Brandon Flynn and Conrad Ricamora deserve special mention in this regard for managing to make the audience feel almost as sorry for the victims of inherited trauma as the Jewish survivor at the end of the evening (Delia Cunningham, also extraordinarily persuasive in her grief) who discovers an eerily similar cache of photos in both their rarity and the specific moment in time. They chronicle the day of her family's arrival at Auschwitz and the final evidence of their existence of earth, an almost surreal kind of Auschwitz coin flip.

Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich commendably work very hard to bring the importance of thoughtful archivism to life, a heavy lift immeasurably supported by their scenic (Derek McLane) and production (David Bengali) designers. Cast members inform the audience at the play's beginning that the photos are real, but the intensity of the  testimonies left me wondering if they weren't tweaked with the same kind of imagination that made Zone of Interest so potent.

What serves as the play's major revelation came as no surprise but its explanation of how ordinary people--smiling Mädchen in this case--can ignore evil in their midst also should make audience members squirm for more contemporary reasons.  Here There Are Blueberries was first produced prior to October 7 and its genocidal aftermath.

More Holocaust:

Survival in Auschwitz

Auschwitz/Birkenau

Miami Holocaust Memorial

"The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews" (Terezin)

Monsters on Trial (Nuremberg)

Monster Habitat (Dachau)

Leopoldstadt

Buchenwald

The Fantasticks (2*)

 

Neither "Try to Remember," the achingly classic song, beautifully sung by Zane Phillips (Fire Island, but blink and you'll miss him at the end of the trailer), whose hunkiness exceeds his vocal talent, or a diverse and charming cast can revive this moldy chestnut.  The Fantasticks, which first premiered Off Broadway in 1960, ran for 42 years giving me more than enough time to see it in the first flush of youth when I might have been more forgiving of twee treacle.  Now re-jiggered to become a gay love story without the redeeming panache of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the very meta acknowledgment of the show's more modest origins is the most interesting thing about the production.

Elke Sommer (1940 - 2026)

 

And I always thought she was Swedish, because of I'll Take Sweden, a silly movie that titillated me as a 12-year old, even though I now know that Elke Sommer didn't even appear in it.  Instead, I must have been thinking of another Bob Hope turkey, Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! which also starred . . .  Phyllis Diller, who surely was cast as the anti-Elke, or maybe I've got that backwards!  Or more likely it was A Shot in the Dark in which Somer and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau visit a nudist camp, the kind of place I associated with Sweden.  Once again, memory proves unreliable.

1964

In any case, it turns out Sommer was German, born in Berlin through no fault of her own at the height of Naziism.  But to me, she and and Ann-Margret (a year younger and still kicking) were equally alluring, the kind of women I wanted to babysit me (Sommer, in fact, worked as a nanny). In retrospect, I realize they were the sex kittens I wanted to be, even though I'm a perfectly happy cisgender male. 

Somer also colonized my adolescent imagination with a series of smutty Hollywood movies that were an early inkling of my developing fondness for camp and homosexual identity.  

1963

1966

In the end, however, Sommer lingered in my consciousness only as a very pretty face.  I didn't know she painted and I'm not sure I was even aware of the $3.3 million dollar defamation lawsuit she won against Zsa Zsa Gabor, a sum much larger than what either of them would have earned for appearing on "Circus of the Stars" where their feud began (paging Ryan Murphy).

 

But while perusing IMDB this morning I also learned that Sommer and Sharon Tate appeared together in a 1966 Dean Martin spy caper called  The Wrecking Crew, old news to Tate-stan Quentin Tarantino.  In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's the movie for which Tate excitedly buys a ticket to see herself on screen. 

Both women, just three years apart in age, were still in their twenties.  Now that would have been some interesting babysitter talk!

More People I Loved:

Gloria Steinem

David Hockney

Robert Duvall

Catherine O'Hara

David R. Slavitt

Sly Stone

David H. Souter

Pope Francis

Marianne Faithfull

David Lynch

Earl Holliman

Gena Rowlands

Shelley Duvall

Roger Corman

Faith Ringgold

Richard Serra

Alexei Navalny

Pee Wee Herman

Glenda Jackson

George Maharis

Tina Turner

Burt Bacharach

Angela Lansbury

Queen Elizabeth II

Sidney Poitier

Joan Didion

Stephen Sondheim

Edward Albee

Muhammad Ali

David Bowie

Destination Block

Life can be so strange sometimes.  

When I began living in New York City, Halloween was one of my favorite nights because of the parade downtown in the Village.  Gay wit reigned supreme when at least a minion of Joan Crawfords carried Christina dolls and beat them with wire hangers. The event was smaller and more intimate in those days and very DIY; I don't think I've been back since David and I joined as a Punkin' Rocker and a Rock Lobster, respectively.  But the city was different then in other ways, too: a would-be mugger with a stocking pulled over his face nearly ruined the happiest night of my life but instead made the evening even more memorable after we resisted.

Half a century later, Halloween comes to me.  Somehow my brownstone block has morphed into one of the most decorated streets on the Upper West Side with the crowds to prove it.  Many of the neighbors go all-out but I prefer the stoops where creativity trumps deep pockets, not that it makes much difference to the real audience.  Children of all ages have been screaming excitedly all week long.

 

As they have been since late this afternoon.

More Halloween:

Trick or Treat (2016)

Halloween Terror (2017)

Skeletal (2021)

Competitive Decorating (2023)

Downstate (4*)

Pedophiles are human beings, too.

That was my primary takeaway from Downstate, an extraordinarily provocative drama from Bruce Norris, who knows he's playing with fire.  After all, the Booth Theatre's marquee asks, quoting the always unimpeachable New York Post, "How can you miss the play THAT WILL THOROUGHLY PISS OFF HALF OF AMERICA?"

But Downstate mostly made me uncomfortable perhaps because I know what it feels like to be reviled for a sexual orientation that during adolescence I desperately hoped to change, but couldn't.  Still, this engagingly directed (Joe Mantello) and finely acted drama all around strands the audience on a very slippery slope:  how DO you protect children from predators many of whom are a lot more monstrous than the four registered sex offenders that Norris depicts in a group home who have just been paid a visit by one of their former victims? 

Both race and class enter the moral equation, too, muddying things in the way that real life does. The shame that well-to-do Andy still feels after the abuse he experienced at the hands of Fred (Francis Guinan), his mild piano teacher--wrenchingly described by Thomas Sadoski in a scene that recalls a similarly devastating monologue by Leslie Manville in last season's Oedipus in content if not quite in the skill of its delivery--inspires contempt in Dee (K. Todd Freeman, superb), a self-described Black, gay, elderly convict who has served 15 years in prison because he had what appears to have been a consensual relationship with a decades-younger gay teenager. Refusing to recognize the power imbalance, Dee calls what they had love, and offers six years of letters he received from the individual after his conviction as evidence. In Dee's socioeconomically disadvantaged eyes, honky suburban boy Andy doesn't know from suffering.

Gender differences also leak into the house dynamics.  Ivy (Liza Colón-Zayas, as forceful here as she is gratefully accommodating in The Bear), the no-nonsense law enforcement liaison with the men, sees the actions of Felix (Adrian Martinez) and Gio (Al'Jaleel McGhee, the very personification of a live wire) two heterosexual offenders--both of whom cloak themselves in scripture the way their gay housemates do with Diana Ross and Frederic Chopin--through the prism of their young victims.  This explains why Ivy pushes Felix, a Latino parking garage employee and certainly not the brightest bulb in the house, up against a wall. His determination to wish his 15-year-old daughter happy birthday results in the play's most shocking scene.  It also exposes Andy's previously expressed assertion that death may be preferable to life in some circumstances as performative self-pity or possibly just acute depression, depending on your sympathies.

Gio, a loudmouthed hustler whose self-centered antics provide a welcome respite from the play's grimness, is perhaps the most relatable of the men as a "level one" offender which, IMHO, at least means that our judicial system has attempted to recognize that some offenses are worse than others, so long as both the perpetrator and his victim are heterosexual.  Gio insists that any straight man who professes not to be attracted to teenage girls is lying. Norris and Mantello stack the deck a bit here:  it's hard to imagine pert Effie (the inimitable Ivy Wolk, who elevates annoying to an art form), his co-worker at Staples and his smart-assed paramour lacking agency even in infancy.  

While equanimity is certainly a laudable goal in our polarized society, I doubt that Norris will engender much consideration for the way sex offenders are treated. Most people will remain as myopic as Andy's wife Em (Cassie Beck), who represents the 50% of the audience Downstate will piss off or, more likely, the much vaster number of theater-goers who will refuse to see the play on the basis of its subject. Like Ivy says to Dee after he schools her on a tribe in New Guinea where young boys fellate their elders as a rite of passage ((I would have been a lot more dubious about this assertion if I hadn't also recently read an article in The New Yorker about a Nobel- winning prize scientist whose study of this particular tribe enabled his own pedophilia), "you know what you did is wrong."  

What They Said: October 2026

“Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion,” announced Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, at a ceremony in Baghdad marking the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops after two decades.  

“Perhaps what made Leo a success was that he had the charisma of the timid, if you will,” said Charles Mercier, an expert on Catholicism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a postgraduate college in Paris. “Paradoxically, what makes him charismatic is his reserved personality, bordering on shyness. He had a completely different charisma that was, in fact, able to arouse support in French public opinion.”(New York Times, October 1)

*  *  *  *  *

“Credit is like medicine,” said Lauro Gonzalez, a finance and debt professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian research institute. “No one is against it, but in the wrong dose, it can become poison.” 

“Just because a victim’s narrative evolves or changes doesn’t mean it’s untrue,” said Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor. “But grand juries and trials can’t stop at ‘believe women.’” 

“We will all, at some point in our lives, fall,” says Coach Eric Taylor at the end of the "Friday Night Lights" pilot, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. (New York Times, October 3)

*  *  *  *  *

“Should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into Squid Ink coffee or the Port Clyde General Store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultraconservative court,” wrote Becca Shaw Glaser, a columnist for a mid-coast Maine newspaper, under the headline “We Need to Talk about Chief Justice John Roberts Blissfully Summering Off Port Clyde.”“Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.”  

“Growing up, I would visit my grandparents in China in the summers, and my friends there were all pirating ‘Gossip Girl’ to learn English,” said Alice Ma, the 31-year-old founder of Mad Realities, which is behind shows like “Keep the Meter Running,” a digital hit depicting interviews with cabdrivers. “The whole world is kind of obsessed with New York as a backdrop.”(New York Times, October 4)

*  *  *  *  *

“At some point, you do get conditioned by all that’s happened in the past,” said James Henson, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project, expressing skepticism about the Democtratic Senate candidtate's edge in polls. “I mean, you look at the trends and you have to admit that something’s going on. But you still don’t want to believe your lying eyes, because you’ve been burned for so long.” (New York Times, October 7)

*  *  *  *  *

“People become real to us by frustrating us,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once wrote. “If they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.”  (New York Times, October 12) 

*  *  *  *  *

“If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” said Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor at M.I.T.

“We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” wrote Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament.  (New York Times, October 21) 

*  *  *  *  *

“Oh and by the way,” Felicity Green, fashion editor of The Daily Mirror (a British tabloid) wrote in her Nov. 4, 1966, story, “I am assured by Those Who Know that the newest essential for really In-type modes is noise . . . Rustling, I’m told, is out. Rattling is in, so this dress is very in indeed, as the moment you move it sounds like a pop-crazy audience applauding the Beatles.”  

“The Democrats have been librarians for too long,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist, referring to Chris Gallant, a Congressional candidate on Long Island who has leaned into his past as a kink model, as well as a Black Hawk pilot and an air traffic controller.  (New York Times, October 22) 

*  *  *  *  *

“I believe in an Islam that emphasizes God and my responsibility in his creation,” wrote Abdul El-Sayed, MD, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics. “The Islam I practice doesn’t judge people; it seeks to empathize with and empower them.” (New York Times, October 23) 

*  *  *  *  *

“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” said James Talarico, Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.”  (New York Times, October 24) 

*  *  *  *  *

“The homosexual clique was a problem,” Abe Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the New York Times wrote in his journal, “because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, ‘better’ than the others — the old breed.”  

“That was hurtful, and it gives us a chip on our shoulder — one that I still have today,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo. “People look down on us. You’re the Rust Belt. Your team loses four Super Bowls. You have the Blizzard of ’77, which was on Johnny Carson late-night jokes. People mocked us all the time. So that’s been our psyche. And I just thought, ‘But we’re not losers.’” (New York Times, October 25) 

*  *  *  *  *

“I am concerned that we have an overheating of expectations,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster who worked on the 2024 campaigns of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris. “People often assume in a wave you win everything, and what happens in a modern wave is you win far more than normal.”  (New York Times, October 26) 

*  *  *  *  *

“What does Xi [Jinping] want his legacy to be? I think first and foremost, it is a stronger Communist Party, perhaps even more than a stronger China,” said Neil Thomas, a senior fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The first is the foremost prerequisite for the latter as far as he’s concerned.”  (New York Times, October 27) 

*  *  *  *  *

“When you want attendance to pop at your park or in your company, you don’t put in a carousel, you don’t put in a scrambler, you put in a roller coaster, and you name it ‘The Demon’ or ‘The Bat’ or ‘The Beast’ or whatever,” said Dennis Speigel, a global theme-park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. “And people come out in droves to ride it.”   (New York Times, October 28) 

*  *  *  *  *

“The ball is now in [Gadi] Eisenkot’s court. Whoever wants to remove Netanyahu and change his policies — we are ready to cooperate to topple his government,” said Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List alliance, an Arab political party that won more seats in Israel's inconclusive parliamentary elections this week than ever before due to high turn-out.  

“It’s wartime," said André Janones, who masterminded a WhatsApp channel called "Lula’s Army" that contributed to the defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate who had been expected to win Brazil's presidential election.  "The time we’re living through today is not the time for us to do what we’d like to do. It’s the moment for us to do what needs to be done.” (New York Times, October 30) 

The Living Realm (5*)

Jordan Tannahill almost lost me with the ecstasy-inducing teeter totter in the woods, but there's so much to admire about this unique, irreligious meditation on the meaning of human existence and the importance of gay community that I overcame my strong aversion to the supernatural.

The poetic metaphors in The Living Realm come fast and furious from this short novel's get go.  Three friends are sunbathing on the Teufelssee, a lake in the Grunewald, "the forest that lay at the edge of Berlin like its shadow."  Our unnamed narrator, an archaeologist who trained at Cambridge, moved to Berlin in 1991, at the height of the AIDS pandemic.  Now, during a summer marked by Europe's worst drought in centuries, climate change has exposed history's past traumas, too.

As the Earth baked like a hot stone, the lake remained, even as the continent’s mightiest rivers ran dry and yielded their secrets . . . Scattered across the riverbed of the Danube lay the remains of Nazi battleships, like corpses resting in the positions in which they fell.

The narrator has begun experiencing the psychological equivalent of this stripping away through encounters with people from his past, most of whom lost their lives to AIDS. Although Tannahill is three decades older than his narrator, he nails the prevailing mood among gay men before the development of protease inhibitors in this description of his HIV-positive boyfriend, the first person he spots in the Grunewald and with whom he eventually ends up communing on the aforementioned teeter totter.

Everything about Lukas felt present tense, he had always lived as if no distant future existed, at least not for him, and this was how I loved him, as a deeply burning present. It was too painful to allow ourselves the fantasy of future projection, to imagine what it might have been like to grow old together, because we both knew, without having to say it, that we had been robbed.

Yet the narrator's memories aren't all tragic, and Tannahill employs them to reinforce his primary theme.

We watched the snow blow out from the sides of the train like wings as we crossed over the highest trestle on the continent, soaring above the turquoise ribbon of the Mala Rijeka, below us a winterscape of medieval villages dotting a valley like a Bruegel painting, and as we did, Lukas muttered to himself that even if humans lived another million years, they would never create anything so beautiful as Europe. I thought of all the old regimes, old empires, old faiths layered on top of one another like geological strata as we passed through forests that, within a matter of months, would echo with gunfire, before we plunged through another tunnel, and in the darkness I found my own face suddenly staring back at itself in the window. 

Now retired, the narrator also experiences survivor's guilt when he sees Sebastian, another lover who also seroconverts.

Why had I not boarded that train with Sebastian? Why hadn’t I found a way to write or call him? Why had I never visited him in Regensburg? There was only one simple truth, now abundantly clear—I had been a coward. Too spineless, too terrified of sickness and death to be even proximate to it, I had somehow convinced myself I had no further obligation to Sebastian, our passions having already cooled the week of his departure at the first appearance of conflict, a passing dalliance from which I had been lucky to emerge unscathed. I let myself imagine that Sebastian had eventually returned to Berlin, and was living contentedly with new lovers, perhaps a steady partner, and that the decision to let our contact lapse had been a silent and gently mutual one. I could see now, all too clearly, that it had been a heartless one, made unilaterally without a shred of compassion or grace.

The narrator's recent intervention to rescue his elderly landlady from a nasty fall suggests that his retrospective self-assessment may be a little too harsh; it also gives Tannahill an opportunity to connect her world with his when the landlady (with whom he's never before had a real conversation) explains why the Grunewald is such a good place for sledding during the winter months: it rests atop the smashed bricks that she and other Trümmerfrauen removed after the Allies bombed Berlin to smithereens at the end of World War II. 

She thought to herself: Is this how we are to live now? Like vultures, on the corpse of our own city?

Birgit, a fellow archaeologist, and particularly Gabor, a political refugee from Viktor Orban's Hungary, fear their friend has lost his mind when he casually mentions his pursuits of Lukas and Sebastian, as if they were corporeal.  Birgit diagnoses him with delayed onset of PTSD while Gabor, in the flush of a new relationship, stops speaking to him altogether until the narrator receives an actual medical evaluation.  After unexploded military ordnance threatens Teufelssee, the friend group re-forms and briefly increases by one.

The four of us spent the next several hours sitting together like a troop of saggy-titted gorillas, plucking from one another’s heads jokes and stories and half-recalled gossip, encountering friends, laughing at the antics of strangers, and at times sitting in silence, reading and reapplying sunscreen to each other’s backs.

Tannahill's ghost story soon morphs into something entirely different with the help of Elsa, a wild boar the friends have misguidedly rescued from euthanasia after she goes viral.  The narrator fully embraces the pagan and finds peace in the circle of life.  The ending of The Living Realm reminded me of a day decades ago when I drove my motorcycle to Croton-on-Hudson through peak autumn foliage--something I'd never really experienced before--and explicitly identified the divinity of nature in my mind for the first time.

The Living Realm also proves that the intense thrill I felt upon seeing Prince Faggot last year wasn't a fluke; Tannahill has an uncanny ability to precisely imagine scenarios that fall well outside of his personal experience (the narrator and Brigit, a dyke who conducts fisting seminars (!), listen to the Au Pairs, a rather obscure British band that contemptuously explored contemporary sexual politics) and describe some that don't with an understanding that I found to be instantly meshed with my own sensibility given that I explored a similar connection at more prosaic length in Homosaic, my memoir:  

Gabor had once said to me that he believed cruising was the arena in which we best applied our tens of thousands of years of evolution as hunter-gatherers. I think a part of me was drawn to cruising for very much the same reasons other men loved to fish, less so for the catch itself than for the discrete rewards of patience, for the many long minutes of waiting spent in stillness, feeling time dissolve into place. It was about the careful observation of a landscape and the gradual accumulation, over many years, of a knowledge of that landscape; to know that in a certain grove, at a certain hour, on certain days of the year, men would congregate, or that if a man disappeared down a particular path, what the chances were that he would reappear in one or another clearing. One came to learn the intricate variations of eye contact, sustained and averted, how to distinguish an accidental brushing-past versus intentional contact, what was an invitation, and what was a rejection, how many times men would do a full tour of the paths before they decided to settle for who was there, and how likely they were to settle for you.

I can't wait to see what Tannahill does next.