December 13, 2025

Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" ballet first performed in St. Petersburg, December 1892.

"The Nutcracker is Tchaikovsky's masterpiece. He said beforehand that he would write music that would make everyone weep! [from his diary: 'As it always is after a weeping fit, old crybaby' 'slept like the dead and awoke refreshed, but with a new supply of tears which flow ceaselessly.'] I danced in The Nutcracker as a child in the Mariinsky Theater. ... Tchaikovsky remained a child all his life, he felt things like a child. He liked the German idea that man in his highest development approaches the child. Tchaikovsky loved children as themselves, not as future adults. Children contain maximum possibilities. Those possibilities often do not develop, they are lost. In every person the best, the most important part is that which remains from his childhood.

"The Nutcracker is a story by E.T.A. Hoffman that was incredibly popular in Russia. ... a serious thing wrapped into a fairy tale. The girl Marie gets a Christmas present, a toy nutcracker. At night she learns that the Nutcracker is a bewitched prince, on whom the Mouse King has declared war. Marie saves the Nutcracker from the mice. The grateful Nutcracker brings her to the kingdom of toys and sweets and then marries her. Of course ... Marie may have dreamed the whole thing. Petipa [choreographer], since he did not read German, got all the names wrong in his Nutcracker. Petipa calls the girl Clara, while in Hoffman Clara is the name of Marie's doll. ... Petipa was French. He never did learn how to speak Russian well. People say that when Petipa tried to speak Russian, he came up with all sorts of inadvertent obscenities.

"The second act of Nutcracker is more French than German ... at the time in Paris there was a fad for special spectacles in which various sweets were depicted by dancers. Actually, Nutcracker's second act is an enormous balletic sweetshop. In Petersburg there was a store like that ... had sweets and fruits from all over the world, like in 'A Thousand and One Nights.' I used to walk past and look in the windows often. ... Everything that appears in the second act of Nutcracker is a candy or something tasty. Or a toy. The Sugar Plum Fairy is a piece of candy and the dewdrops are made of sugar. The Buffon is a candy cane. It's all sugar!"

Soloman Volkov, "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky"

After Clara/Marie saves him from the wicked Mouse King and breaks the spell, the Nutcracker becomes a real boy and they dance a beautiful innocent young love pas de deux. The Royal Ballet.

Waltz of the Snowflakes ends Act 1. The New York City Ballet, George Balanchine's 1954 choreography.



Act 2. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Bolshoi Ballet.



Sugar Plum Fairy and guy we don't know what candy he is pas de deux. To me the music expresses bittersweet loss, the end of childhood and fairy tales and innocent dreams of candy and toys, music to make everyone weep. The Royal Ballet.

September 14, 2018

"Elite" the insult, a word that now means its opposite

Calling Democrats "out-of-touch liberal elites" really annoys me. Like "establishment," "elites" has become meaningless. I came across a short article from 2010, "'Elite the insult," in the Economist (Obama's election must've revived the popularity of "elite," and you can't turn around without bumping into "liberal elites" these days). Can't they find some new words to change the meaning of and mindlessly repeat over and over for the next election cycle? Political insults used to be quite creative, like the word "mugwump."

"Bleeding heart liberal" used to be a common insult for Democrats. Seems like a compliment today. Things became more and more hateful and nasty until it seemed politics wasn't politics any more but a religious war. I didn't care for the way G.W. Bush used the word "evil," but at least it was directed toward people or countries that were accused of terrorism and the like. When the Democratic candidate in the last election was regularly referred to as evil, that crosses the line of civilized behavior.

I saw a comment somewhere online that I thought was so true, referring to the nasty and hateful: "Their version of empathy is to put yourself in the position of the Other as if the Other were a giant asshole too."

From the article:

"What's the worst thing you can call someone in American politics today? If you read the papers or watch cable news on the wrong day, you just might think it's 'elite.' My 1973 OED describes 'elite' (third sense) as the choice part or flower (of society or any body of persons). If redacted today, the OED might include an obsolescent flag on that 'choice part or flower' definition, and a new sense should be added, 'one's out-of-touch political opponents.' 'Anyone with whom one disagrees, and who is perceived to have an unjustifiably large role in society or politics.'

"Elite's meaning has become remarkably plastic, and in politics in particular, it is a fighting word. How did that happen? ... First, the counterculture attacked the old elites (the titans of industry, the Washington class, the military brass) as out of touch, making authenticity, not authority, the greatest value one can aspire to. Then the counterculture overreached, Nixon found his 'silent majority,' and railed against his own bugbear elites: the now familiar culprits in academia, Hollywood and the press. Both left and right seek the 'real' and shun the 'elites,' and a word has come to mean its opposite; the worst, most harmful class of society, not the 'choicest part or flower.' A strange trip for a word, but these things happen."

http://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/10/27/elite-the-insult

April 19, 2017

Writing about food: Peggy Knickerbocker, "Sandwich Sub Culture"

"My parents were often grumpy on Sunday mornings. It was the fifties, after all, and they consumed a lot of martinis on Saturday nights during that decade. Having had too much fun the night before, they were in the mood for a relaxing day outdoors with my brother and me. We knew something was up when my mother asked us to pick up a few loaves of French bread and some hard rolls on our way home from church.

"My mother took the warm loaves of bread from us, sliced off the tops, and pulled out the spongy centers. Into the largest loaf she stuffed chicken that she had cut into pieces and cooked with port and orange zest, a recipe inspired by Alice B. Toklas. She then replaced the top of the loaf and wrapped it tightly in linen towels to retain the moisture and warmth. Depending on her mood, she filled the other loaves and rolls with all sorts of concoctions. In one she stuffed olives coated in chopped parsley; in another she tucked sliced cherry tomatoes, feta, and red onions tossed with olive oil; in a third she added red and green peppers cooked with olive oil, garlic, anchovies, and oregano ... . And there was always at least one roll filled with caramelized onions. Offering to help, we cooked some Italian fennel sausages to fill a baguette.

"We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to one of our secret picnic spots under a grove of eucalyptus trees. There we spread out the red blanket and unwrapped the towels covering the bread. Using the towels as napkins, we each got a fork to dip into the various salads and savories my mother had prepared. We ate the chicken with our fingers, and as the pieces disappeared, we were left with the tasty remains of bread. Our parents often brought a fully stocked wicker picnic basket into which my father stashed a shaker of martinis. My brother and I usually settled for slightly warm ginger ale. For dessert, we ate some of my famous lemon squares or a box of gingersnaps, perfect with the Maxwell House coffee my mother brought in an old metal navy thermos. If the air got chilly or it started to rain, the meal was lots of fun to eat in a deserted barn, or we would park the car on a country road and pass the stuffed rolls around, licking our fingers a lot in the process. Whether we ate inside or out ultimately didn't matter; we always drove home fat and happy. And with every last crust of bread eaten, there were never any messy plates to worry about."