We’ve been lucky with the weather in NYC this September. Many bright, warm days The aftermath of the powerful hurricane that has devastated areas of the South East is now giving us a little rain. Not so lucky there where hurricane Helene was deadly across five states after making landfall on Thursday. Some of the worst flooding the South has seen in 100 years has cut millions off from power and swept away entire towns during its push along the Southeast and into Appalachia.

 

Other social events included dinner with K.D. before she decamps to Texas and lunch with K.S. at Tartine located at the corner where W11th street crosses W4th street. Anyone who thinks that Manhattan streets are laid out logically has never visited Greenwich Village.

We were also set to see M.A .for lunch but that was aborted by a message saying she had fallen in her apartment and was on her way to the hospital.

Fortunately that latter part was jumping the gun and she is recovering from her bruises at home with nothing broken. 

 

The Silence

Intrepid Ed News published my article The Silence of the Associations. It asks a simple question:   How can it be that NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) and other educational organisations in the US that have been active and earnest in their support of gender theory in schools have not yet commented – or publicly reflected – on the significance of the Cass Review?

Are they hoping that this medical educational scandal will just go away?

Can they help schools untangle themselves from this ideological mess? 

Books and Films

Books read this month include Meaning Loss by Sanje Ratnavale (reviewed here), The Train to Nowhere by Anita Leslie, Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay, Murder in the Basement by Anthony Berkeley, and a wonderful trip back to childhood with Tuffy, the Tug Boat.

I’ve just started The Walls Have Ears by Helen Fry about the Secret Information Service in WW2. 

One of the key players is Arthur Rawlinson who had served with the West Surrey Regiment in WW1 and  transferred to intelligence duties in France from 1917 to 1918 with MI1(a), the section of military intelligence that dealt with prisoners of war.

At the outbreak of WW2 Rawlinson was called up, given an emergency commission, posted to MI1(H), and worked at the Tower of London. He became deputy director of Military Intelligence (Prisoners of War) and, later, head of MI19.

Between the wars, Rawlinson had a career as a screenwriter and worked on the script for the Hitchcock film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

That took me off to watch the film which I had seen before but hardly remembered.  Rawlinson is listed in the opening credits as a scenario developer and the film is full of melodrama, intrigue and devilish foreign elements bent of death and destruction. Hitchcock took the title from a G.K.Chesterton story to which he had film rights. I haven’t read it so that’s up next.

I was very taken with some of the elements of the film. The quick switch from comedy to terror for example. one moment the dancers are swirling on the floor and becoming entangled in the wool unravelling from knitting and the next they are in shock pointing to hole in the window made by the killer’s bullet.

From high farce to horror in seconds.

I loved how Hitchcock shows the scene change from Switzerland to London with the snow covered Alps fading away and the lights of Piccadilly emerging: All the booze thats fit to drink:  Black and White, Sandeman, Guinness, Schweppes.

The macabre dentist scene in Wapping again has elements of farce (misplaced here) and scar-faced Peter Lorre with his blond patch comb-over makes for a very nasty villain. (He didn’t have any English and learned his part phonetically.)  

Lots of other cinematic goodies to enjoy along with a bit of a clunky plot, a clever scene in the Royal Albert Hall (not exactly done with mirrors but almost) and an over-the-top shoot out.

Jacob Lawrence and Elephants

On Friday we visited the D.C. Moore Gallery  in Chelsea to see the Jacob Lawrence “Builders” exhibition before it closed . 

There were vintage reminders at the exhibit that this is election season. 

One Hundred Life-Size Elephant Sculptures Thunder into Meatpacking District 

Created over a five-year period by artisians from India, the Migrating Elephants exhibit is raising money for local conservation causes in each city it visits. In NYC, its second US stop, the exhibit is raising money for the Wild Bird Foundation.

 

Who Do You Want to Win?

The world is on fire, and in his column in the Sunday Times today, Matthew Syed says it’s time to take a side. Here are his last three paragraphs: 

When the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets that the brilliantly targeted attack on pagers by the Israel Defence Forces is a war crime, despite a stunningly low attritional ratio of innocents to combatants, while failing to condemn the thousands of rockets fired from southern Lebanon into Israel, I hope you see my point. She has drunk the propaganda, titrated into western consciousness from bots across the autocratic world, that the US is evil, Israel a colonialist oppressor, and their actions are inherently tainted. By this estimate, the Normandy landings were a violation of international humanitarian law, since innocent people died, never mind that the operation was central to the defeat of Nazism — a secular fanaticism whose psychological contours are not so very different from the fundamentalism of Hamas, Hezbollah and Isis.

Again, you might feel the division of the world into two forces is binary, even Manichaean, but I suggest there are hinge moments in history where simplicity is an asset. There are obviously legitimate tactical considerations in the Middle East, Ukraine and Taiwan (perhaps the most strategically important theatre of all due to its role in the production of advanced semiconductors). But let us remember Churchill’s words: “It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.”

The mists are lifting, and with them, I hope, our sense of purpose. We should stand with freedom. With democracy. With hope. Not just for ourselves but for the future of humanity.