Reshaping the Weirdness of Oz to Something New

I have not yet read the novel “Wicked,” but I do plan to, having recently seen the musical movie of the same title.

“The Wizard of Oz” was always a bit of a strange tale to me. I read the book when I was young, and it was OK but not one of my favorites. That also sums up my feelings about the 1939 movie, too—it’s OK, it was on TV in my childhood and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that I was all that gaga over.

Never mind, the world of “Wicked” is a radical re-imagining of L Frank Baum’s and Hollywood’s imaginings, and Oz isn’t exactly the same. Yes, in the 1939 movie, the wizard was willing to hoodwink the crowd with his tricks—but in Wicked, we see a much darker Wizard of Oz.

And I like it. It’s relevant to today. I feel that we follow too many wizards in our lives now—fakers whose only talent is to play to the crowd, and who feel that you unite folks by giving them someone to hate.

My wife saw the stage musical “Wicked” in London, but I have not experienced the stage show, so the movie was my first introduction to this alternative alternate reality. I am a fan, and I find myself really enjoying the songs, too.

When they do work, musicals can be magical. I think part of what they do is what the songs in the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” did—the singing is a convention that allows the characters to think aloud, to reveal themselves. It also helps like a musical when there is a great ensemble song.

“Wicked” is wickedly good partly due to the quality of its songs. It’s also good because of they way in which both the songs and the plot beyond the songs subverts expectations of what or who is truly wicked.

I liked that Glinda (or Guh-Linda), while good at heart, is also vain and shallow. That the most intelligent and empathetic characters, Elphaba, is the one who will be falsely branded as “wicked.” That much of the social life of Shiz concerns ephemeral fads and shallow criteria of what or who will be popular—sort of like school actually was, although more high school than university.

Wikipedia image of book cover.

Popularity as a goal is a strong cultural force in this era of orange ogre Presidents and social media and success measured by clicks—and “Wicked” is partly a rumination on how far some people may go in order to achieve popularity.

Plus, it has all those scary parallels with the world we inhabit: “What you need to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” Yikes, Mr. Wizard, that’s so sadly true and sad that it seems so true.

I don’t have an opinion of the way Wicked was “Hobbit”-fied—that is, a shorter story was somehow expanded, for “The Hobbit” was a short children’s book somehow morphed into a trilogy of movies. For “Wicked” a Broadway play was somehow doubled in length and made into two movies.

Poster from www.Wickedmovie.com web site.

I do think that the pace of the first movie was a bit slow at times—I liked the climatic song, but it just went on for a bit too long.

Yet, I can only judge the movie, not it in comparison to the stage show. And I give the movie two thumbs way up. I am excited for part two to come out later this year so this wicked saga can continue. I predict that it’s going to popular, even without a makeover from Gah-Linda.

A Gripping Tale of Mutiny and Murder

My spring break 2025 book.

Life in the British Navy in the early 1700s was quite rough—hard work, authoritarian power structure, harsh penalties—and then there are the diseases. Humans packed together in poorly ventilated, unclean conditions lends itself to raging infectious diseases.

And then, months into a slow voyage dependent on the winds blowing your ship, scurvy. An account I read recently vividly describes what scurvy was like, and it was hell.

I’ve long been a fan of Erik Larson and his books based on historic events. He’s a storyteller who uses literary tools to tell truths.

And recently, on the recommendation of my daughter Nina, I’ve read a book by an author who is new to me, who pulls the same magic that Larson does. It’s David Grann, and I just read his 2023 book “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.”

The ship The Wager was a merchant vessel converted to naval use. British sea power would come to rule the world in the next century, but that lay in the future when The Wager left England as part of a squadron that was tasked with attacking Spanish shipping during a war between the U.K. and Spain.

A newly promoted Captain, David Cheap, obtained his first command due to some command shuffles. The ill-fated Wager had trouble staying with its group as the little wooden vessels were pounded by merciless storms as they attempted to pass from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by sailing around South America.

And the Wager found itself alone, when it also, unfortunately, found rocks off of a desolate island. The ship was pounded by the rocks and damaged beyond sailing, although the wreck, in poor shape, was there on the rocks for some time.

The depleted, demoralized crew were facing winter weather with few provisions and no shelter. On their long journey from England, they had lost many crew members to disease, and most were debilitated by scurvy at the time of the shipwreck. (Desperate, the crew ate wild celery, one of the few foods they found on what they named Wager Island—and, ironically, the fresh vegetable cured their scurvy).

While stranded, the crew broke into factions, some loyal to the captain, others forming their own encampment. They were visited by indigenous people who aided them with food, but they plotted against their helpers, who abandoned them.

1744 painting depicts The Wager. From Wikimedia Commons via Wikipedia.

So much goes wrong There is so much suffering. As starvation and tensions rise, a misunderstanding leads to the captain shooting and killing a sailor.

Eventually, the crew manages to enlarge and repair some small boats. An attempt to head north and continue the Wager’s original mission doesn’t go well, and after that much of the crew abandons the captain on Wager Island and attempts to head to Brazil, where they could potentially find transport back to England.

When survivors start to show up in England, more troubles await them. The Navy doesn’t treat mutiny lightly, and the long arm of the law has to be contended with. And, months after some survivors reach England, the captain, very much alive, unexpectedly shows up.

The Navy sets a court-martial trial to ascertain the facts. Should the captain be tried for murder? The crew tried for mutiny?

After all the suffering and the time spent trying to get home, it’s almost heartbreaking that home turns out to be filled with different kinds of dangers.

Anyway, I found the book gripping. The needs and ambitions and desires of men lead them to contradictions and difficulties that make one glad to be born in these troubled times rather than those.

The books didn’t have any jump scares, but it did have, like life, lots of unexpected twists and turns. It’s a story that is well told, well worth the read.

Is Cedar Rapids Fading into a News Desert?

Front page of Jan. 31 edition.

On Jan. 14, the Gazette, the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids, announced that it’s following the trend of many other newspapers in the U.S.: Daily will soon not mean every day.

Starting Feb. 17, the Gazette will print only three editions per week, on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise, news of the community will be available via the Gazette’s web site.

Meanwhile, the cost of a print subscription remains the same. The Gazette is making an iffy gamble that people are willing to pay, in effect, much more per printed paper. Their argument, made in a follow-up column by editor Zack Kucharski, is that their cost of reporting the news justifies the continued price.

We’ll see. My wife and I are still discussing what we might do—I am sure we’ll still want the Sunday paper, but if the others papers are available online, is paying for the very occasional print product worth it? Reading the Gazette is a daily habit, it gets passed around the breakfast table, and I don’t think my relationship with the digital product will be the same. But it cannot be a daily habit if the paper no longer is delivered daily.

Well, the Gazette isn’t the only paper that I have an online relationship with. I subscribe to The New York Times, and enjoy skimming its list of stories and picking what I want to read, so the idea of treating a “paper” as an online source is not alien to me.

I hope The Gazette can make its digital presence a bit easier. With the NYT, for example, it was “one and done.” I subscribed, signed on, and their app just keeps me signed on. On both my PC and my phone, the Times seems to know who I am, instantly.

As a print subscriber to The Gazette, I’m supposed to have full digital access to their site, too—but it’s not as smooth. It seems very frequently the Gazette demands that I sign in. In my digital life, I have multiple usernames and passwords, and remembering which applies to The Gazette is not easy for me, and there have been days that I just give up and prefer not to read a Gazette story on their web site rather than find and dig through my password file.

So please, Gazette, if I’m going to depend on your app, keep at it making the app more user friendly. Aim for NYT-level ease.

Gazette web site.

Another issue is that the print Gazette gets passed between my wife and I, and our grandson when he is staying with us. When we’re accessing digital content, only one username or password works, I assume. Is there a way that 2 or 3 “readers” can be associated with a digital subscription so my wife could just as easily install the app and access content as a “household” subscriber who lives with me?

Those are technical issue, adjustments I’m sure The Gazette will consider. The larger issue, to me, is what this change means to The Gazette and to my local news environment.

I know the situation is different, but the same forces that the Gazette contends with have changed the nature of the university newspaper, the Mount Mercy Times, that I advise. We made the decision to cease print operations altogether, as it was be coming too expensive and our readers were out of the print habit anyway.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the status of the Times is not great. Our staff has slowly shrunk, our frequency of updating our news has declined and our online readership has not grown as it should. I hope to encourage students to try some new strategies to boost the Times, but first I must recruit more students, and somehow that was easier when there was a print artifact that reminded everyone that student journalism exists at Mount Mercy University.

I hope that The Gazette can maintain a sense of status and strength when it become more ephemeral, when it’s just dancing digits rather than ink on a page. I’ll miss the morning tug of war over who gets section A first, and the experience of skimming the headlines in my hands rather than on the tiny screen of my phone.

Too many communities in the U.S. have become news deserts. That’s not happening here yet, but it does sort of feel like we’re going from a lush news jungle to a drier, dicey news savanna, where the desert no longer seems so far away.

As a customer, paying the same for less product doesn’t make me happy. But as an old news person, a former newspaper editor, I hope the Gazette finds a way where so many papers have stumbled. Society as a whole is no longer as willing to pay for news, and that has left too many of our citizens subsisting on the junk food of social media disinformation, rather than the richer, healthier diet that a quality daily newspaper provides.

The daily Gazette isn’t perfect. But it will leave a hole, for me, when it is no longer there.

So, from a disgruntled customer, to the Gazette: Good luck. I hope you find a way to make it work but I’m worried.