This little clip of my mom is taken from a longer film of my parents’ honeymoon. She was 24 or 25 when this film was shot, depending on which birth certificate you believe.

I think the exposure needs a little tweaking. There are still some things I need to learn about my tools.

I want to reveal the secret right at the beginning of my post. The magic flute is music and its power to comfort and change hearts. When the music is as sublime as Mozart’s you can really believe in magic.

Last night my wife and I were enchanted by Lyric Opera’s charming and affecting new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 Singspiel, a form that includes both music and spoken dialogue, the Magic Flute. The production is one of the finest and most creative we’ve seen at Lyric and I’ve had season tickets there for more than 35 years.

The work is imagined as taking place in a suburban backyard circa 1960 as a performance put on by the children of the neighborhood. The set designer put a nearly fullscale Cape Cod house on the Lyric stage. There are Disney references galore: Prince Charming (Tamino), Snow White (Pamina), the witch in Snow White, Maleficent (The Queen of the Night), and probably others I didn’t identify.

It isn’t often that the best vocal performances in a production of Magic Flute are by Tamino and Pamina but that was the case in this one. Matthew Polenzani as Tamino and Christiane Karg as Pamina were the vocal standouts in the cast.

Magic Flute has the widest vocal range of any opera in the common repertoire. Sarastro’s part has a lower tessitura and The Queen of the Night’s a higher tessitura than any other opera in the common repertoire. There are performers who build their entire careers performing Sarastro or the Queen of the Night. One, the other, or both of the performers filling those roles are frequently the standouts in a performance of the Magic Flute. Sadly, that was not the case in this production. Our Sarastro and Queen of the Night gave workmanlike performances but not much beyond that.

But the production! The sets, costumes, the kids, the dogs (sometimes wearing manes to impersonate lions), the animal outfits, the concept, the staging are all among the best we’ve ever seen at Lyric.

For those who’ve seen the Magic Flute before this production is a delight. For those for whom it’s their first Magic Flute if not their first opera as well it might be confusing and I’d recommend boning up on the opera a bit to understand what’s going on.

There are still a few performances left. See this production if you can.

The Critics

John Von Rhein at the Chicago Tribune:

Yes, it’s that hoariest of operatic cliches, the show within a show, this one laced with nostalgic nods to familiar Disney characters and TV sitcom iconography of the period. The directorial conceit, while a huge stretch, didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of the opening performance Saturday night at the Civic Opera House, and the audience responded with cheers.

In fact, once you accept the basic premise of Australian director Neil Armfield’s production, it’s easy to tune it out and focus on the essentials — Mozart’s glorious music and what Lyric’s gifted international performers do with that music.

The new “Magic Flute” replaces the well-worn August Everding production Lyric trotted out at regular intervals over the last 30 years. I liked its gentle storybook whimsy, but its replacement has its own childlike sensibility that should wear well with most adults and kids.

Kyle Macmillan at the Sun-Times:

Australian director Neil Armfield, who has staged two previous Lyric offerings, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 2010-11, has set this interpretation in an Austrian expatriate enclave in an idealized 1960s “Leave it to Beaver” vision of suburban Oak Park, Ill.

In this conceit, the neighborhood children mount “The Magic Flute” with the help, obviously, of some first-rate professional singers who just happen to be around, and dozens of parents sit on lawn chairs in the back yard to take it all in.

What results is a kind of opera within an opera, with the action taking place around an amazingly realistic two-story house, which rotates on a massive stage turntable and is set against a striking, star-specked night sky. (Dale Ferguson served as designer for both the sets and costumes, which are a combination of picture-perfect 1960s middle-class apparel for the residents and suitably fantastical garb for the opera’s characters.)

It must be said that Armfield admirably carries through his concept, and there are some no doubt appealing moments, such as a dozen children in adorable Halloween-like costumes portraying a group of animals in Act 1. And, of course, the three mysterious boy genii who usually seem other-worldly come across as perfectly natural here.

That said, it’s not hard to see this production as directorial over-reach. In many ways, the staging distances audiences from the story rather than bringing them closer. Instead of having to wrap their imaginations around one fantasy, here they suddenly have to contend with two.

Lawrence Johnson at Chicago Classical Review:

Director Neil Armfield–helming his first Zauberflöte–has transplanted Mozart’s timeless fantasy into suburban America, c.1962 judging by the costumes. In this demythologized staging, the opera is put on by children–clearly musically sophisticated ones–in their backyard. Befitting the “hey kids, let’s put on an opera” theme, the costumes and effects are homemade and cheerfully chintzy: the serpent is made of cardboard boxes and golden glitter is tossed at magical moments. An onstage audience of parents and neighbors watches the patio show from lawn chairs, applauding the action, like the play within a play in Pagliacci.

Dale Ferguson’s unit set is a massive, revolving bilevel house. The Queen of the Night makes her appearance from a second-floor balcony, Tamino and Papageno hide in a basement shed, and the signs for the three temple doors are hand-written on cardboard.

Mozart’s score is such fail-safe titanium that even the dubious concept and mundane visuals are not fatal. Once past the initial setup, the action is played straight for the most part and, aided enormously by an excellent cast, one is simply carried away by Mozart’s remarkable music.

Deanna Isaacs at Chicago Reader:

This conceit, by Australian director Neil Armfield, could be an excuse for skimping on production costs. The flashiest parts of the story—a man-eating dragon, an awe-inspiring temple, trials by fire and water—are definitely tamed by it. But it doesn’t feel shortchanged: on the contrary, it looks like money (and a lot of thought) was lavishly spent to create the perfect illusion of a ragtag kids’ show, complete with a cardboard-box monster (by Blair Thomas), ancient priests draped in sheets and chenille bedspreads, and family pooches in a walk-on as fearsome lions. “Neighbors” are both participants in the show and the onstage audience.
Sets and costumes (by Aussie designer Dale Ferguson) draw on the pop culture baby boomers grew up on: Princess Pamina (exceptional soprano Christiane Karg) is decked out in her Snow White costume and hair; her mom (impressive coloratura Kathryn Lewek) is a dead ringer for Disney’s evil queen, and Tamino ( British tenor Andrew Staples through January 8, then local favorite Matthew Polenzani) is the familiar Prince Charming in his bow-and-arrow hunting outfit.

It’s also a concept that could turn too cute in a hurry, but it doesn’t. While some of the serious and problematic spots in the libretto have been softened, its Enlightenment message of the need for reason, wisdom, and equality is intact, along with Mozart’s enchanting score.

Memorable performances among the uniformly solid cast include tenor Rodell Rosel, who turns the problematic villain Monostatos into a nasty/funny scene stealer; bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as the easy-living, mate-seeking bird catcher Papagano; and the three “wise boys,” local youngsters Casey Lyons, Parker Scribner, and Asher Alcantara. Rory MacDonald conducts the Lyric Opera orchestra and chorus.

At DC-based Al-Monitor a collection of pundits present their predictions for the Middle East in 2017. The overview is that 2017 will be a good deal like 2016; not much is likely to change. In Iraq one of the pundits predicts the expulsion of DAESH from Mosul in 2017 which, sadly, may be too optimistic. The tough fighting is just beginning and the Iraqi forces have taken heavy casualties as well as DAESH. I found this the most interesting prediction about Iraq:

A major conflict will erupt in 2017 between the Arabs and the Kurds over disputed areas. Violent conflicts will continue in minority areas in Iraq (Ninevah plain and Sinjar in Ninevah province). This will make it more difficult for displaced Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks to return to these regions. In light of the failure to preserve minority groups’ rights in the negotiations for peace agreements, minority groups that are involved with the conflict but not active participants will not be able to be part of the settlement process. Minorities could be kept on the sidelines while the fate of their homeland is determined in the post-IS phase.

With the developments in Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq the prospects for multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states in the Middle East seem to grow dimmer with each passing day.

The collected predictions are here (PDF).

Some sense from Chase Norlin on H-1B visas at RealClearPolitics:

In a letter dated November 14, a lobbying group whose members included Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, and Google urged President-elect Donald Trump to increase the number. “The U.S. immigration system must allow more high-skilled graduates and workers to stay in the United States and contribute to our economy,” wrote Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association. Last week, tech big shots like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Trump in New York. You can bet the pitch was similar.

Their economic argument, that the industry suffers from a shortage of workers, is false and misleading. Big tech companies take advantage of the H1B program to drive their bottom line. The law permits companies to lay off their own employees in favor of foreign workers doing the work in the states or overseas. Think about that. The law does more than look the other way at firms that hire foreign workers instead of American citizens; it allows companies to ditch their own employees so they can hire foreign nationals. Remember the recent story about laid-off Disney workers who were forced to train their foreign replacements?

Not surprisingly, tech firms use the provision to their advantage. In late 2014, Microsoft laid off 21,000 workers. In September 2015, Hewlett Packard announced it was cutting 25,000 to 30,000 workers. That was on top of the 55,000 jobs it slashed the year before.

Another problem with the H1B program is the law rewards companies for outsourcing their training programs. About half, or 40,000 of the visas handed out each year, don’t go to firms such as Microsoft, Apple or Facebook, the companies we think about when we hear H1B. They go to professional offshore outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, which received 9,000 H1B’s last year.

The evidence that large tech firms actually need to bring workers in from overseas is extremely slim. There are any number of ways to reform the present system including my suggestion of a central clearing house for job offers accompanied by increased penalties for offering jobs at below the prevailing wage (notionally a requirement for bringing in a workers on an H-1B).

An outright ban on replacing present workers with imported workers doesn’t sound out of line, either.

Since he was the primary camera man, there isn’t a lot of footage of my father in the home movies I’ve had digitized. This is one of the relatively rare clips of him.

I wonder what we or he would’ve thought if we’d known that within five years of this clip having been taken he’d be dead?

He was a good-looking guy, particularly as a younger man, blond and athletic. I don’t look much like him. I look more like a Schneider.

At PBS News Hour economist Eswar Pasad muses over the future of the Chinese economy, wondering if it will collapse like a house of cards?

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the brittleness of China’s economy. Moreover, its political structure appears to have become even more rigid under President Xi Jinping, raising the risk that political and social stability might unravel suddenly and dramatically if adverse shocks to the economy or other events were to break the Communist Party’s tight control of society and the state. Indeed, one could make a plausible argument that a relatively modest trigger could set off a destabilizing chain of events. President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of setting off a trade war could be one such trigger that hurts exports, creates more bad loans and causes economic disruption. On the other hand, Western prognostications of the likelihood of such disastrous outcomes are probably overstated. It is quite likely that the government will, in fact, be able to manage the economic, social and political tensions it faces — although the lack of flexibility in China’s economic and institutional frameworks means that there are likely to be many missteps and stumbles along the way. No matter what happens with China’s growth, one thing that is certain is that the economy is in for a wild and interesting ride in the years to come.

I think a more apt analogy than a house of cards is toppling domino tiles. Dominos is, after all, a Chinese game. The Chinese economy has many, many tiles: state-owned enterprises, the large number of poor subsistence farmers, the government-owned banks, local governments, the Chinese Communist Party, and so on and so on. China’s economic growth has depended on the interdependencies of these “tiles”. When one tile is removed from the chain or the process has reached its fruition, the dominos, in this case economic growth, stop toppling.

The CCP wants to maintain its own power. It does so by promoting growth in a stable context. Local governments are given certain growth goals. They satisfy these by channeling low-cost, subsidized loans from the government-owned banks to state-owned enterprises. The state-owned enterprises have expanded production and need workers. They offer jobs to subsistence farmers.

The chain has many dependencies. You’ve got to be able to offer subsidized loans. There will be many non-productive loans. That requires a certain opacity (in contradiction of its WTO obligations) in Chinese banking.

Another dependency is agricultural productivity. That has been increased by, among other strategies, dumping enormous amounts of fertilizer into the soil. That has declining benefits over time.

The question is less whether the process will end rather than which factors will cause it to arrive at its end.

Let me answer the question Lee Drutman and Kevin R. Kosar ask in their piece at RealClearPolicy, “Does Congress want to govern?”, right off the bat. No. Congress does not want to govern. That’s why again and again over the last 60 years they’ve abrogated their power to the Executive Branch.

What Congress wants to do is posture and send messages back to the folks at home so they’ll be re-elected again and again (and again and again).

Here’s what they have to say:

Speaker Ryan’s “A Better Way” agenda declares: “The people granted Congress the power to write laws, raise revenues, and spend and borrow money on behalf of the United States. There is no power more consequential …Yet for decades, Congress has let this power atrophy — thereby depriving the people of their voice.” Similarly, Senator Mike Lee last year launched the Article I Project on the premise that, “the federal government is broken, and congressional weakness is to blame … Congress has handed many of its constitutional responsibilities to the Executive Branch.”

Congressional Republicans who sounded these alarms about executive overreach may well have had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in mind. But as Donald Trump prepares to assume office, these calls for congressional re-assertion have become increasingly bipartisan.

All of which prompts the question: How much will Congress let President Trump get away with? The answer? Probably more than they should. Congress has grown weak relative to the executive branch, and Speaker Ryan is right: legislators, themselves, are largely to blame.

Will the Congress finally muster some intestinal fortitude and start doing its job? I hope for it but don’t expect it.

I see that more attention is being paid to something I pointed out long ago. In real terms Millennials are earning less than previous age cohorts did at the same stage in life. The Associated Press reports:

SOUTH MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Baby Boomers: your millennial children are worse off than you.

With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.

The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.

The AP mentions another point I’ve made here from time to time:

The declining fortunes of millennials could impact boomers who are retired or on the cusp of retirement. Payroll taxes from millennials helps to finance the Social Security and Medicare benefits that many boomers receive — programs that Trump has said won’t be subject to spending cuts. And those same boomers will need younger generations to buy their homes and invest in the financial markets to protect their own savings.

Sadly, the AP failed to link to the actual study and a quick search didn’t turn it up. Unless this is it.

What remains unmentioned is that Millennials have significantly less job security than previous age cohorts have had at their age. Once upon a time in the mists of the different past, having been hired a worker could expect to work for the same employer until retirement. No longer.

There are many reasons for these changes. My own personal belief is that discrimination continues to be a factor both in hiring and pay and a higher proportion of Millennials are black or Hispanic than was the case among the Baby Boomers.

I also wonder if the Millennials are more educated or just more credentialed?

A factor that goes unmentioned: incomes are likely to be correlated with parental incomes. My income is more like my father’s than it is like the income of other people in my age cohort and I suspect that’s true even when controlling for educational attainment. Not all diplomas are created equal.

I think it’s obvious that more than any other factor lower incomes are the price of globalization. Comparing the percentages of college grads between Americans today and 30 or 50 years ago is specious. There are more college-educated Indians than there are Americans at all levels of educational attainment. It’s a small world after all and when employers regularly reach out to offshore resources your diploma just isn’t worth as much as it used to be.

Yesterday evening I received, at long last, the results of the home movies, slides, and videos I sent out for digitization. It took about twelve weeks—nearly a month longer than I expected.

The digitization company, Legacy Media Productions, did a good job. There were some pleasant surprises and a few disappointments. Among the pleasant surprises was the considerable amount of footage from my parents’ honeymoon in Canada and their trip to Mexico in the 1940s after World War II.

Among the disappointments were the photographic dry plates. They were, indeed, from my dad’s trip to Europe in 1938. Sadly, there were no candids among them.

The video above is one of the joys. It’s a very brief clip from my parents’ wedding, more than 70 years ago. I don’t know who the infant in the few frames at the end of the clip is. I’m still trying to master the editing tools I have and don’t quite have the hang of precision editing.

Please leave feedback in the comments on whether you can view the clip and what sort of device you’re using. This is a learning process.

I plan to keep this post at the top for the rest of the day.