Once again, I write to you with my knees jammed against my chest, from the comfort of El Al Economy, as Bernice and I make our way across the Mediterranean to Lisbon.

Actually, we’re quite relieved that Bernice is sitting in her window seat, because, for a brief period yesterday, it was touch and go whether she would be sitting there, or, indeed, anywhere on the plane. At 1:45 yesterday afternoon, an email from El Al dropped into my inbox, informing me that I could now check in online for today’s flight. All went smoothly until it came to filling in Bernice’s passport details, when I noticed – goodness knows how, but how fortunate that I did – that I had made the booking for a Mrs Bernice Browmnstein, with a rogue interloper ‘m’.

Pausing only to panic fleetingly, I attempted to amend the spelling. However, this proved impossible. I realised that I had to get the ticket reissued under Bernice’s correct name, as it appears on her passport. A link on the check-in page opened a WhatsApp dialog for me, allowing me to bang my head against a brick bot, who offered me a generous menu to choose from. Unfortunately, ‘Correct a Misspelled Name’ was not one of the options.

When I attempted to explain to the bot what I needed, it chastised me for an unrecognisable response, and gaily repeated its list of options. Eventually, I accepted defeat, and chose the closest option to what I wanted: ‘Cancel your booking’. I must admit that I chose this with a certain amount of trepidation, fearing that the bot might take me at my word and blithely cancel our booking and then ask whether there was anything else it could help me with today.

Fortunately, it chose instead to inform me that cancellation was, as it were, above its payscale, and it was transferring me to a human agent. A follow-up message informed me that my request was being queued and the agent would strike up a conversation as soon as possible.

I decided that it was worth opening an assault on a second front, since the clock was ticking, so I phoned El Al’s customer support service. After I had made a ‘fairly close’ selection from another menu that didn’t offer me what I wanted, I heard the usual three rings, followed by muzak, followed by a message informing me that I was 40^th in the queue, and the waiting time was estimated to be 30 minutes. A minute later, I was offered the option to request a callback and hang up. I accepted the offer, only to be informed, after my acceptance was accepted, that my call would be returned within 24 hours. Since that window potentially took us beyond our departure time, I decided that call back was not such an attractive option, and immediately called again, to discover bad and good news: I was now 44^th in the queue, but the waiting time was still only 30 minutes. Clearly, I thought, a new shift of agents had started, who were some 10% more efficient than the workers they had replaced.

Over the next 20 minutes, I received repeated updates, as my place in the queue progressed healthily from 44 to 40, then 36, then 32. However, slightly less healthily, the expected waiting time remained constant at 30 minutes, and I began to realise that this was not quite as sophisticated an algorithm as I had at first imagined.

It was, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when, 20 minutes in, a very pleasant gentleman answered the phone, immediately understood my problem, saw the error online, asked me to email him a photo of Bernice’s passport, and confirmed that he had requested a reissuing of the ticket. 50 minutes later, he called me again, to inform me that the ticket had been reissued with the spelling corrected, and I could now check in, which I did, with much relief. It would have been such a pain to have to unpack the suitcases just to take out the two items Bernice was taking with for herself.

I am taking this whole experience as an indication that I have become a little too blasé about international travel, and I need to be rather more in the moment when making arrangements in future.

Needless to say, all of this excitement got the adrenaline flowing, and helped us through the last stages of working through our checklist for Portugal. Since we were flying on a Monday, we had many last-minute things to do on Sunday. This was even truer than usual, since this last Shabbat was my brother-in-law David’s 80^th birthday, and the family celebrations had stretched from 11AM on Friday till after Shabbat. By the time we arrived home we were all partied out and not really up to confronting the checklist.

So, Sunday was quite a busy day! However, we managed to get everything done. We found ourselves left with little enough excess fruit to make the bag we hung on our neighbour’s front door not embarrassingly large. All the other leftovers fitted comfortably in the freezer. This morning, virtually all we had left to do was to wash up the breakfast dishes BY HAND(!), empty all the bins, remember to transfer the 2 kilo of cheese from the freezer to the suitcases (a mantra we had been chanting for over a day) and close all the doors.

Our taxi driver arrived five minutes early, as always, and, since he had allowed a generous amount of time to get to the airport, and we had allowed our usual ludicrous amount of time at the airport before boarding, Bernice remained perfectly calm throughout the drive, which was through fairly heavy traffic. This trip, for the first time, we decided to take a taxi from home to the airport, rather than to Jerusalem train station. We have eventually accepted the fact that struggling to lift two cases, two carry-ons and two backpacks onto the security scanner at the railway station and then down an escalator and a lift to the platform is not a dignified way for people our age to behave.

The airport was uncannily quiet when we arrived at 10AM. (For those of you who don’t know, Ben Gurion is usually a buzzing hive of activity at almost any time of day or night.) Our driver dropped us off at 9:57, and we were through security, baggage drop off, hand luggage check and passport control by 10:27. The longest queue was, unsurprisingly, at duty free, where we picked up our usual four bottles of wine, one for each of the next four Shabbatot. Fortunately, the usual 1+1 offer meant that we paid no more than we would have done in our local supermarket or vintner’s.)

Finally, time for a confession. I led you to believe that I was writing this post on the plane. This was because I fully expected to be writing the bulk of it there. However, as mentioned above, we were through all of the various stages of reaching the departure lounge unusually quickly, only to discover that the café Aroma has indeed closed at the airport. This left me with enough time to write this entire post before our flight is even called. In fact, it has just been called now, so….see you in Penamacor.

Hello from Penamacor. It’s now 10:45 on Monday evening (or 12:45 in real money), and we arrived at the house half an hour ago after a very easy and smooth passage through the airport at Lisbon, a very swift car pick-up, and an easy drive through a clear and dry evening. As always, the last 35 kilometres, on winding back-roads, was tiring, but we arrived in good shape and better spirits to a warm welcome from Tslil, Micha’el and Lua. Now it’s straight to bed, ready to face the onslaught from the boys at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning. Can’t wait!!

When looking for a petri dish in which to develop philosophical arguments, I don’t automatically turn to the annual media awards season, but this year these awards are proving to be a fertile breeding ground. I thought we might ponder a few questions together.

Is it theoretically possible for an actor to win the award for best actor and best actress for the same film? As you probably know, unless you have been on a space station for the last couple of months, the musical (if that’s the word I’m looking for) Emilia Pérez has been taking the movie world by storm. It has so far garnered 87 wins and 225 nominations.

(There is an entire blog to be written exploring the reasons why it has attracted this almost record-equalling amount of recognition. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that no small part of this is the motion picture industry raising its collective middle finger to the 47^th president of the United States.)

The 87 awards include the following wins: Cannes Jury Prize; European Film award for best actress and best director; Satellite award for best original score; Cannes Film Festival award for best actress (won jointly by four people – in what universe does that make sense?); Golden Globe award for best foreign language film. The film has also been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actress.

It has also garnered more outraged attention than any other film this season. It raises questions about the ‘appropriation’ by outsiders of another culture’s concerns and issues. The French director Jaques Audiard freely admits that he had no interest in making the film ‘realistic’ in its cultural depictions. Many Mexicans are apparently up in arms about the perceived ‘shallowness’ of the film’s handling of the problems of drug cartel violence and the mass disappearance of citizens, as well as about the Mexican accents.

My personal outrage is reserved more for the staggering and laughable inanity of one of the non-Spanish language songs in the film. (Thanks to my good friend for pointing me towards this song.) If you haven’t yet seen the clip featuring the song Vaginoplasty, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink, sit down, and watch this excerpt. Before you do, let me give you the plot background. The female singer is a lawyer who has been hired by a Mexican drug cartel lord to discreetly arrange for him to transition to a woman, which will enable him both to ‘disappear’ and to finally become his (her) true self. Now you are as ready as I can make you for the song. Off you go. I’ll wait here for you.

It’s difficult to single out one element for particular attention here, given that the tune sounds like something my five-year-old grandson just improvised and the staging makes no sense at all. But I think, after watching it, you will agree that the lyric deserves a special mention, being both fatuous and repetitive, in addition to not answering the ostensible dramatic trigger for the song (the lawyer learns neither the risks involved in the transition surgery process nor the time needed) and neither scanning nor rhyming.

Blogger’s Note: For reasons that will become clear, in the following paragraphs, I follow the practice that became common in the 2000s, of using ‘actor’ as a gender-neutral term applicable to thespians of both sexes.

So, our first philosophical question is this. Suppose there is a remake of Emilia Pérez whose pre-transition scenes are filmed with a male actor playing the part of the drug lord, and whose post-transition scenes are filmed with the same actor, after the actor has, in real life, transitioned to a female. Is it theoretically possible for this actor to be nominated for both the best actor and the best actress awards? If the actor wins both awards, is the best actor Oscar considered to have been awarded posthumously, or can the actor themself collect it? (Asking for a friend.)

Speaking of raising the dead, the Grammy award ceremony just took place, and featured another interesting philosophical question. Winner of the Best Rock Performance was Now and Then, a song written by John Lennon and featuring The Beatles. Our philosophical question is: What constitutes a performance in the arts?

Again, for those who’ve been on the space station, here’s the back story. John Lennon wrote Now and Then, and recorded it as a solo home demo, in 1977. After his death in 1980, the song was considered as a ‘reunion’ single for the 1995-6 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology. George Harrison added some guitar tracks and overdubs as part of this. However, production difficulties proved too great, and the idea was shelved. In 2021 (20 years after George Harrison died), Peter Jackson commissioned machine-learning-assisted audio restoration technology for his documentary The Beatles: Get Back. This technology enabled extraction of Lennon’s voice from the 1977 demo, with a result that was of sufficiently high quality to make it possible to build a recording of Now and Then around it, with additional lyrics by Paul McCartney, featuring contributions on guitar, drum and vocals by Ringo Starr and a beautiful(?) creepy(?) eerie(?) evocative(?) video. You can watch and hear it here.

This ‘assemblage’ has now been awarded Performance of the Year by the Grammys. If one of the performers recorded his contribution over 47 years ago, another added his contribution 30 years ago, and only the other two were performing while hearing, and, in some sense, feeding off, the contributions of John and George, is that, technically, a ‘performance, by The Beatles’? Is the voice of John that we hear on the recording actually John’s voice? Is it less John’s voice than any recording of a singer is that singer’s voice? Does any of this matter?

Which brings us neatly back to this year’s Oscars. Another contender for best film is The Brutalist, a biopic of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to the USA after the Shoah. It was recently revealed that, for sequences in which the film’s leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, the film’s editor (himself Hungarian-born) used AI software produced by a company called Respeecher to tweak the actors’ vowel sounds, making them sound convincingly Hungarian.

The outrage this has generated appears to be because the filmmakers were not up-front about this tweak. In films in which similar techniques have been used openly, no such outrage has resulted. In the case of The Brutalist, there has been debate about whether the leading actors should now be eligible for acting Oscars. (Brody and Jones have been nominated for best actor and best supporting actress, respectively. [Blogger’s note: I was going to write “respectively, obviously”, but, in the light of this week’s first story, not as much can be taken foir granted as used to be the case.)

There is a philosophical debate to be had here about the particular point, if any, at which such tweaking of a performance makes the actor ineligible. Suppose Hugh Grant’s voice were to be digitally manipulated to simulate a perfect Lower East Side accent for a role. Suppose 5’ 6” (168 cm) -tall Alan Ladd were given an orange crate to stand on for close-up scenes with his leading lady, or a trench were dug for her to stand in (as, apparently, happened). Suppose all of Matt Damon’s stunts in the Bourne films were performed by a double. Suppose each of an actor’s scenes in a particular film were spliced together in the editing room from hundreds of different takes of each scene. Suppose an actor’s physical appearance on screen were digitally manipulated, to express emotion or to convey complexity through body-language. Is there a point at which such manipulation renders it meaningless to talk about the actor’s performance, or, at every point in the development of cinema, does whatever is technically possible become acceptable?

At this point, I should probably make it clear that, this week at least, I offer questions rather than answers. I’m really not sure where I stand on any of this, but I strongly suspect that these are discussions we will increasingly be having, as technology develops.

All I know for sure is that, based on Karla Sofía Gascón’s appearance and demeanour at the Golden Globes, I found excellent her/his/their portrayal of a woman in the brief clips I have seen from Emilia Pérez after the drug lord undergoes surgery. But that’s really another story.