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      in Television

      Embrace the Insightful Gibberish of ‘Pingu’

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      This children’s show teaches everyone, even adults, to find meaning in made-up language. In the unreal early days of the pandemic, when it seemed foolish to try to comprehend the enormity of what we were collectively living through, a clay penguin reacquainted me with the clarifying power of gibberish. “Pingu” is a stop-​motion children’s television show about the titular character, a penguin tyke who lives with his family in a little igloo village at the South Pole. Initially, the episodes appear to be light five-minute affairs about the small dramas of toddler penguinhood: Pingu spits his veggies into the toilet; a municipal penguin employee turns Pingu’s play area into a parking spot. But with a balance of farce and sentiment, the show also gestures toward some of early life’s more complicated realities — sibling rivalries, parental punishment and the loneliness of childhood. Created by the German animator Otmar Gutmann, “Pingu” premiered in Europe in the early 1990s and became a worldwide phenomenon; but unlike other global cultural crazes, the show did not need to be dubbed or subtitled. Nothing could be lost in translation because there was nothing to translate. Every “Pingu” character speaks the language of Penguinese, which sounds like Thai, Indonesian, Italian, something in between or something else entirely. Yet, despite the lingo’s seeming inscrutability, it is mysteriously — hilariously — comprehensible. Take the following scene: Pingu finds himself caught between a whistling kettle, a ringing phone and his father gruffly dictating commands at him. His eyes dart around the room — kettle, phone, dad, kettle, dad, phone, kettle. The overwhelmed little penguin’s voice rises from confusion to panic to wails of despair, and he dissolves into a puddle of tears, covering his watery eyes with tiny flippers. Pingu’s mom then waddles into the frame, and with motherly resolve, takes the teapot off the boil, hangs up the phone in a nonnegotiable tone and gives the blubbering Pingu a pat on the head. We, of course, don’t know what any character has actually said. But based on body language, vocal inflection and a recognizable family dynamic, viewers intuit the scene’s meaning. Each of us conjures our own associations — in my case, maternal competence, paternal annoyance — to complement the story. The result, straddling the boundary between familiarity and strangeness, is the magic of “Pingu.”The language of ‘Pingu’ is built upon the wisdom of children: The border between sense and nonsense is poorly guarded. Rewatching the show after 25 years was an oddly unmediated, even moving experience, like dreaming or getting stoned. Emotions became sounds, language lost its hard edges and I recovered a small glimpse of childhood perception. My first brush with “Pingu” came when my Canadian cousin, a more cultured toddler than I, once brought a VHS tape of the series with her during a visit. I dimly remember watching an episode on a Sunday morning, while squeezed together in bed with my family. The show was a revelation. “Pingu” did not speak two languages, one to children, another to adults. There was no hierarchy of comprehension, no winking jokes meant to soar over young heads to keep the adults in the room vaguely interested. The language of “Pingu” is built upon the wisdom of children: The border between sense and nonsense is poorly guarded. There is raw, ridiculous power in expressing oneself through noise alone. It’s a truth adults tend to forget. As we age, we are asked to convert our emotions into more socially acceptable forms of articulation. But sometimes we have feelings that speech is ill equipped to convey, which demand audible expression nonetheless, in the form of yowls, bleats and groans.The art of speaking without words is known as “grammelot.” It’s a tradition that had its high point in the raucous early professional theaters of Commedia dell’arte (which inspired Molière, Rossini and Puccini) but may go back as far as the Greco-​Roman mimes. Theatrical troupes made up of professional actors and the occasional charlatan traversed Renaissance Europe performing plays in improvised language. Their gibberish often served as a form of mutual intelligibility with audiences, both literate and not, with whom they otherwise couldn’t communicate. In their vowel-rich dialect, these actors spoke through the ascending and descending scales of real language without using real words, tapping into a subterranean world of sense. And so it is with “Pingu,” which extends the democratic conceit of grammelot from the stage to television, accessible to all regardless of education or age. Carlo Bonomi, the Italian clown who voiced every character on “Pingu,” practiced grammelot as a young man and was perhaps one of its best living representatives until his death this August at 85. Today grammelot has largely disappeared and is kept alive only by a handful of troupes around the world. But in one of the strange, unpredictable ways cultural forms from the distant past weave themselves into the contemporary moment, it lives on in an anthropomorphic clay penguin.“Pingu” enjoys a second life online, where it is tailor-made for internet meme culture. There are “Pingu” NFTs and Maoist “Pingu” YouTube videos, and a Google search for “noot noot” — the sound Pingu makes when he feels strongly about something — returns more than 1.3 million results. But the untranslatable original maintains its sway over me. Watch it, and you’ll realize that the preverbal is not just the province of tots but a reservoir of meaning that lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness — if only we stop to listen.Gabriel Rom is a freelance journalist based in New York City. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

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      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

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      in Theater

      ‘A Perfect Party’ That Celebrates All Its Guests

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      Trusty Sidekick Theater Company has created an outdoor adventure for young people on the autism spectrum.Like many festive occasions, “A Perfect Party for Trees” involves giving and receiving presents: a pine cone, a jar of found objects, a song, even a badger and a bird (both are inventively portrayed by puppets). But perhaps the greatest gift this new play offers its audience is intangible: the freedom to be themselves.The show’s producer, the Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, has created an interactive woodland adventure for children ages 5 and older who are on the autism spectrum. In the show, which is filled with music, young spectators become part of the cast and can participate — or not — while happily defying the constraining conventions of traditional theater. Sit still? This production is a promenade. Be quiet? Please sing along. Don’t get your hands dirty? The plot of “A Perfect Party” includes treasure boxes, filled with trinkets and real dirt, that children can dig into.“It feels like a celebration of this audience instead of a segregation of this audience,” Leigh Walter, Trusty Sidekick’s executive creative producer and the play’s director, said in a recent interview with the show’s creative team. “It’s us, like, going into a public space and throwing a party like we’re throwing a party.”City parks provide the convivial setting. Originally scheduled to debut in June on the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park in Castile, N.Y. — a coronavirus outbreak in the cast ended that plan — “A Perfect Party” will now have multiple performances, all free, on Sunday at the Little Island Storytelling Festival in Manhattan and Sept. 23 to 25 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Email registration is strongly encouraged, though walk-ups are allowed, space permitting.)John Rankin III, left, as the Beekeeper, and Jesse Greenberg as the Bear.Leah ReddyThe show is a birthday tribute to the spirit of the forest. Two quirky characters — the Beekeeper (John Rankin III) and the Bear (Jesse Greenberg) — join forces with Ms. Branch (Naeemah Z. Maddox), a cheerful delivery person who transports both the birthday presents that the cast and the audience create and the offerings that the forest spirit unexpectedly leaves.Arriving in acorn-shaped containers, the spirit’s gifts include the Badger, assembled on the spot from a sock, a cushion and a couple of back scratchers, and the Thrush, whose components are a gourd, a handkerchief and a penny whistle. Designed by Eric Wright, a founder of the Puppet Kitchen, these transformative animals underscore that objects, like people, can play many roles.“We’re trying to create this perfect party for the spirit to come out and visit us,” Walter said. “And all along the way as well, our characters are sort of stumbling along in this story of self-acceptance, really of discovering themselves.”Trusty Sidekick is undergoing its own process of self-discovery. A pioneer in theater for audiences with autism — it has created two such commissions for Lincoln Center, whose Big Umbrella Festival for children on the spectrum is also this weekend — the company is staking new territory with this mobile, open-air play.“I wanted to see what we could do to give all the characters a little story arc and have the audience move with that story arc,” said Marty Allen, the show’s playwright.Because the spectators change locations twice during each 45-minute performance, Greenberg and Maddox, who are also the production’s composers, chose percussive, acoustic instruments that are easily transportable, including a kalimba (thumb piano), a pandereta (hand-held drum) and a West African bell. (At one point, children can choose from a variety of small instruments to join in.) The main musical source, however, is a lightweight glockenspiel, which Greenberg plays with yarn mallets, yielding a softer, more ethereal sound.Cast and audience members celebrating with a collective interactive puppet, the Spirit of the Trees, in a rehearsal of the show’s finale.Leah Reddy “We definitely wanted textures and timbres that would be clear, but not too intense,” he said.Reactions to sound, however, were just one consideration. In creating theater for audiences who might find certain sensations stressful, Trusty Sidekick not only tried out aspects of the show in classrooms of autistic children but also, for the first time, brought people on the spectrum onto the creative team.“There’s the common saying, ‘If you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum,’” said Andrew M. Duff, the play’s associate director, who was diagnosed when he was 2. In addition to making audience members comfortable by incorporating repetitive gestures and rhythms into the show, Trusty Sidekick will email registering families an intake form about their children’s individual sensitivities. The company can then take the responses into account when performing.Every moment of interactivity is also a choice: Audience members who don’t want to dig with their fingers can use small shovels or simply “supervise”; those who don’t want the treasure boxes’ unearthed trinkets to become gifts can hang onto them during the show.Children might even “chuck the box and dirt,” Duff said. He added, “I think my job, more than anything, was just to encourage our cast and crew to not only be prepared for that, but to look for moments of encouragement in these styles of play.”“A Perfect Party” ultimately teaches that perfection is illusory: In life, the different, the unusual, the flawed can often be the most prized. When a speech to that effect was cut during the play’s development, Twig Hu, the show’s 18-year-old assistant director, who is also on the spectrum, asked that it be restored. “It was important for people to hear,” she said.Trusty Sidekick, which also produces theater for general audiences, wants these children to know that they won’t be judged. However they choose to participate, Allen said, “there’s just not a wrong way to be here with us.” More

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      in Music

      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

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      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

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      in Music

      Morgan Taylor, Inventive Children’s Performer, Dies at 52

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      His popular character Gustafer Yellowgold was aimed at youngsters and, more generally, “people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”Morgan Taylor, a children’s performer who with fanciful songs and hand-drawn animation drew youngsters into the world of Gustafer Yellowgold, a saffron-colored explorer from the sun who shared a house with an eel and enjoyed music by a rock band made up of bees, died on Aug. 11 in Miamisburg, Ohio, near Dayton. He was 52.His death, in a hospital, was caused by sepsis, said his wife, Rachel Loshak. Mr. Taylor, who lived in Chatham, N.Y., was visiting family and friends in Ohio when he became ill.First in his native Ohio and then, beginning in 1999, in New York City, Mr. Taylor toiled for years in relative obscurity as a guitarist in minor rock bands and a sound engineer. Occasionally, for his own amusement, he would record nutty songs he’d written. About 20 years ago, his wife, a singer-songwriter, suggested he try writing a children’s book, and he went back and gave those nutty, just-for-him songs another listen.“I had accidentally built this entire universe in these scattered pieces that all fit together as I wrote song after song over the years,” he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2011. “All I had to do was shake the sieve.”One ditty in particular, “I’m From the Sun,” inspired him to create Gustafer Yellowgold, whom Mr. Taylor introduced in 2005 in a CD and DVD, both called “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Wide Wild World.” He developed a stage show to go with that release, singing songs from the record while animated videos he had made played on a screen.Mr. Taylor said his Gustafer songs and stories — two of his albums received Grammy nominations — were “about the roller coaster childhood can be.”The target audience was younger children, but Mr. Taylor was nothing at all like Raffi or the Wiggles. His songs had a rock sensibility and, he hoped, wouldn’t make parents cringe.“It’s really for adults,” he said in 2011, “and it’s really for people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”He performed his Gustafer shows all over the country, including at Symphony Space in Manhattan, where Darren Critz, the director of performing arts programs, was always glad to book him.“Morgan’s music, through Gustafer Yellowgold, reflected everything a parent could dream to see in their kids’ lives: joy, a love for life, creativity, wonder, and even a touch of rebellion,” Mr. Critz said by email. “All of it encouraged kids just to be who they were, and to never stop growing into who they wanted to become. What a great gift for parents to be able to share these ideals with their kids through music, rather than a pep talk that would inevitably bring about toddler-style eye-rolls.”Mr. Taylor released a series of Gustafer CDs and DVDs over the years, and they grew more ambitious as they went along. “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock” (2011), his fourth release, was the first to have a narrative thread (Gustafer searches for the toe end of the longest sock in the universe), which carried through all 10 songs.“For me it’s easy to make up stuff that’s freaky and funny,” he told The Dayton Daily News of Ohio that year. “The challenge is to pull it into some semblance of organization, so I thought it was important to have a plot. It was a good challenge for me because it’s easy to be absurd, but I wanted it to be absurd and linear.”Mr. Taylor’s songs were full of colorful word juxtapositions — one was called “Wisconsin Poncho,” another “Melter Swelter” — and the kind of absurd plotting that makes perfect sense to a child. The song and video “Gravy Insane,” for instance, told the story of a family of bats that was adept at making gravy and had to establish an impromptu gravy store on the roadside when its gravy-laden truck jackknifed (“’cause bats can’t drive,” the lyric explained) and the spilled cargo drew a crowd.“Gravy Insane” appeared on “Dark Pie Concerns,” a 2015 Gustafer release that was nominated for a Grammy Award for best children’s album. “Brighter Side,” released in 2017, was also nominated.Morgan Andrew Taylor was born on Sept. 5, 1969, in Kettering, Ohio, near Dayton, to Gordon and Elizabeth (Young) Taylor. At his memorial service on Aug. 18 at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, among the stories told about him was one that noted his ability, as a child, to imitate an assortment of sounds convincingly. His version of the end-of-the-period school bell was so accurate that he would sometimes get his class dismissed early by employing it, leaving whichever teacher he victimized baffled as to why no other classes were funneling into the hallways as Mr. Taylor and his classmates were sent on their way.He graduated from Kettering High School and attended a local college for a time, though he never completed a degree. More formative than classroom learning, he said, was his discovery in 1988 of the Minnesota rock band Trip Shakespeare.“I was completely blown away and became obsessed with their music,” he told The Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minn., in 2011. The infatuation is why, when he developed Gustafer’s origin story years later, he had the creature arrive on Earth by landing in a Minnesota lake.After playing in bands in Ohio, Mr. Taylor moved to New York in 1999. He found a job as a sound engineer at the Living Room, a Lower East Side club that showcased local musicians. Ms. Loshak sometimes performed there, and, as Mr. Taylor recounted to The New York Times in 2006, one night “she stayed after her gig, and we talked, and all of a sudden the sun was coming up and we were kissing on a street corner.”They married in 2004. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their two sons, Harvey and Ridley; his mother; a brother, Grant; and a sister, Ann Wiseman.Mr. Taylor built Gustafer Yellowgold into a modest franchise, which included plush toys he designed. He also had a radio show on WKNY in Kingston, N.Y., and had recently created a podcast about Trip Shakespeare.John Munson, that group’s bassist, memorialized Mr. Taylor in a statement.“He made the realities of growing up less scary for all of us,” he said, “parents and children alike.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Bluey’ Is About Everything, Especially Music

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      “Ladies and gentlemen! I will now play for you the ‘Rondo alla Turca.’”From the first scene of “Bluey,” the hit Australian canine cartoon that amusingly, frankly and ever-so-understandingly takes the hands of children and parents through the escapades of the Heeler family of heelers, classical music is as much a part of playtime as the toys scattered around their suburban Brisbane home.Bandit, the stay-at-home, try-to-work father who, with Chilli, his wife, has become the idol and the envy of parents everywhere for his willingness to entertain his children anywhere, anytime, anyhow, is on the floor, with his 6-year-old daughter, Bluey, draped over his knees. He cracks his knuckles, takes on airs and tickles her mercilessly to the tune of the Mozart sonata. Bluey’s adorable 4-year-old sister, Bingo, watches, begging to be the piano herself.“Magic Xylophone,” the first seven-minute installment of the three seasons currently streaming on Disney+, is notionally about the importance of taking turns. But like most episodes of “Bluey,” it’s also about far more than the immediate lessons it teaches through the Heelers’ antics, at least in the giggly way that the show is “about” everything from family and friendship to marriage and mortality.Amid the slapstick, “Magic Xylophone” is about the power of music to transform us. Bingo finds a xylophone in a toy box, one with the make-believe ability to freeze people in place. Once stuck, they can be subjected to all manner of embarrassments — such as when the girls’ target is their father — or pleaded with to share, as when Bingo ensnares Bluey. All the while, we learn that “Bluey” is going to be no ordinary children’s show in another way, too: This is a show that repays listening, as well as watching.As the girls have their fun, the Mozart sticks around, becoming the basis for a strikingly well-crafted score that stays enchantingly true to the spirit of the original material even as it deviates wildly while the girls argue with their mother, or suffers from comical wrong notes when Bluey and Bingo fight. By the end, Mozart’s rondo has found its way to major-key joy, and the girls have, too, sitting arm in arm as their father sprays himself in the face with a hose.“BLUEY” DID NOT NEED to have music this good. “Peppa Pig,” for instance, its predecessor in fickle toddlers’ hearts, sometimes plinks and plonks to make a point, but its music usually does little more than start and end another episode in its endless cacophony of oinks.But the producers of “Bluey” intend its episodes to be thought about as short films instead of televisual fodder, and the scoring has a cinematic quality that helps make it the kind of show that parents might want to actually watch rather than curse from a distance.“I always knew that music was going to be almost half the show,” Joe Brumm, its creator, said in an interview, explaining his admiration for the role of sound in films like “True Romance,” “The Truman Show” and “The Thin Red Line.”“I didn’t want the usual kids’ TV scoring,” he continued. “Some shows just use one track for an entire season, or a variation of it. I’d worked on ‘Charlie and Lola’ years ago, and they had a couple of musicians who played multiple instruments, and every episode had its own score. So that was the norm for me; it’s definitely not the norm for a lot of shows.”The music of “Bluey” is a collaborative endeavor, but it is primarily the task of its composer, Joff Bush. Bush, 37, switched from jazz piano to composition as a student at the Queensland Conservatorium, and he later attended the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He leads weekly, hourslong Wednesday sessions, at which Brumm and others talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode while he improvises at the piano, before later writing a score. It’s work that Brumm is so proud of that he has given Bush his own character in tribute, a musician called Busker.Far from every episode of “Bluey” uses classical music, and Bush’s tastes are eclectic. Some of its more than a hundred shows take inspiration from folk, jazz or rock, and almost all of them are then filtered through what Brumm calls the distinctively “jangly” sound that comes from Bush’s collection of old guitars and his habit of ignoring his mistakes. Even when Bush does color with the classical canon, there is a charmingly offbeat oddness to his work, something that helpfully reminds you that no real family could possibly be as agreeable, as forgiving or as functional as the Heelers, however much your children might reason otherwise.“There’s a humanness to it, I hope,” Bush said.THERE IS A LONG HISTORY entwining classical music with animation, one that dates back well beyond Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit!” to strains of Wagner in “What’s Opera, Doc?” “If cartoons have become associated over time with any one musical genre, it is classical music,” the musicologist Daniel Goldmark writes in his book “Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.”But the Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s to the ’50s used classical music as an “endless source of jokes at the expense of concert hall culture,” Goldmark writes. When concert music and opera were more prominent than they are now, many viewers had certain expectations about Romantic-era music — Wagner most of all — that could easily be subverted, and puncturing its pretensions with a cartoon rabbit was anyway inherently funny.“We do actually steal that approach, sometimes,” Bush said, “taking these grand things and messing with them.”Sometimes Bush does that with glee: A squabble in “Ice Cream” gets sprinkled with absurd grace when Bluey and Bingo waltz, tongues wagging, to Tchaikovsky; their divalike cousin Muffin has become associated with music from “Carmen”; even Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” gets trotted out in “Escape” as the girls dream of chasing down parents who dare venture out for a night. Sometimes the nods are less obvious, as when Elgar drifts in to accompany a crowning ceremony in the backyard paradise of “Rug Island.”Bush is certainly interested in breaking down elitist ideas of what classical music should be — in showing, as he puts it, “that these are great pieces of music, and they don’t have to be heard in a concert hall where we’re all sitting quiet. They can be for everybody.”But Bush — unlike the composers of the Warner Bros. era, and at a time when classical music is less widely known if still set high on its lonely pedestal — tends to do this less through satire or mockery than by remaining somewhat faithful to the composers themselves, whether to the cheekiness of Mozart or to the intricacy of Bach.And there is a lot of Bach in “Bluey”: a Brandenburg Concerto’s counterpoint as a girl-gang’s game of nail salon on a tree stump intertwines with their fathers’ manly-man efforts to chop it up in “Stumpfest,” for example, or a prelude from “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” its already disjointed theme broken up by Bush and made to flow only when the girls successfully deliver a love letter that resolves a parental fight about the trash in “Postman.”There are also episodes that reward thought, like “Bingo.” Bluey goes out for the day, leaving Bingo to struggle by herself while Chilli endures her own traumas trying to fix a toilet. Bush chose a solo piece to illustrate solo play, Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” for piano. “The melody is this little loop,” he said, “it’s this idea of Bingo starting again and getting stuck.”There’s a deeper message in that choice of music. The Mozart looks so simple on the page — and sounds like it, too — that it’s easy to forget that it can be devilishly hard to get right. So too is playtime, for children on their own. Or plumbing.“Any pre-Romantic music, you’ve got free rein,” Bush said. “So much of that is about the beauty of the music itself, rather than ‘This is a sad piece; be sad.’” You can really mess with the music a lot more, without hitting on any meanings.”“THERE’S NOTHING WORTHY going on,” Brumm insists when asked whether this is all part of a grand plan to educate children in music appreciation, à la Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” even if as an occasional classical listener he sees nothing wrong with getting them interested in it. Bach is available to use without a licensing fee, after all, and the composer isn’t around to protest a misuse.During weekly sessions where the show’s creators talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode, Bush improvises at the piano, before later writing a score.Natalie Grono for The New York TimesBush feels likewise, as much as he revels in seeding slivers of Saint-Saëns across an episode so that he can drop the big entry from that composer’s “Organ” Symphony at the climactic moment in “Calypso.”“I don’t think we ever approach it from the place of getting kids into classical music, or anything like that,” he said. “It’s always about the story, about what feels right and fits.”Nowhere is that narrative honesty more brutally effective than in “Sleepytime,” Bush’s balletic masterpiece, which turns the nightly nightmare of getting a family some sleep into an outer-space emotional epic to the sounds of Gustav Holst.Using “Jupiter” from Holst’s “The Planets” for “Sleepytime” was Brumm’s idea, but Bush’s execution is sublime. Carefully, he teases the intervals of its famous theme whenever we glimpse parental affection, giving it an ethereality when cuddles are involved, or an impudence when Bluey pops up to ask for a glass of water then inevitably needs Bandit’s help as she goes to pee.Only when Bingo finally keeps her promise of sleeping in her own bed — “I’m a big girl now,” she tells the sun, a symbol of Chilli’s comforting embrace in a dream inspired by a book about the solar system — does Bush unfurl Holst’s melody in its full splendor, marking the glow, the nobility, the certainty of a mother’s love.“There’s a time in a child’s life when they are starting to build their own identity, and their own independence,” Bush said. “The idea that they are going alone but their parents’ love will always be there is such a powerful one. It needed to be something like ‘Jupiter’ that is bigger than what it is.”You know what’s coming, and when it does, it lands with the devastation of an asteroid strike; the domestic turns into something sublime. Good luck not crying. More

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      Reckoning With Memories of Budapest

      by

      In early April, when my flight arrived at Ferenc Liszt International Airport, László Borsos was waiting for me at the arrivals gate. I hadn’t seen the man in 28 years. I scanned the crowd and found him standing there with a wild grin on his face, his glasses dangling elegantly over a white collared shirt.After a quick hug, and with a wave of his hand, he gestured for me to hurry along; he was parked just beyond the sliding glass doors. And so, feeling myself slip back into an old habit, I threw my duffel bag over my shoulder, shook my head in disbelief and did what for four years as a child had been part of my daily routine: I followed him outside for a ride through Budapest.Budapest’s Castle District, in the distance, framed through a stained-glass window in the Parliament building.A university student peruses the selection at a small bookshop near the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.St. Stephen’s Basilica, named after the first King of Hungary.It would be nearly impossible to overstate how dramatically the course of my life changed when my family moved to Hungary in the early 1990s. Both of my parents grew up in Ohio — my mother in a poor corner of Youngstown, and my father in a middle-class neighborhood in the sleepy town of Dover. When I was born in 1985, the last of three children, we lived in a small split-level house in Austintown, a suburb of Youngstown. My dad, one of the few people in my extended family with a college degree, was 11 years into a promising but as-yet unexceptional career as a finance manager at General Electric. Neither of my parents had ventured far from their childhood circumstances.In 1989, though, as political reforms swept through Central and Eastern Europe, General Electric strode into Hungary and purchased a light-bulb manufacturer, Tungsram, then one of the country’s largest and most iconic brands. The acquisition, orchestrated by Jack Welch, made for front-page news — and my dad, riding the wave of a stunning historical moment, accepted an overseas assignment to help introduce capitalist practices to a business with a long-running communist past.My dad, Karl, on the right, with Ferenc Musits, the chief accountant at the Tungsram factory in the city of Nagykanizsa, in the early ’90s.Seated in between my elder siblings, Nicholas and Emelia, in 1994. My mom, Sophia, ever busy behind the scenes (and as a result rarely in front of the camera), took the photo.We arrived in Budapest in the summer of 1990 — with my grandmother improbably in tow — to find our reality entirely transformed. My brother, sister and I were enrolled in an international school, where, unlike in suburban Ohio, our classmates’ nationalities spanned the globe. My parents, who until then had barely left the United States, were soon shepherding us on trips to Krakow, Madrid, Rome. We bought a brand-new Volvo station wagon. And perhaps most lavish of all, which to my parents must have been a comically unfathomable luxury: General Electric hired us a driver — a man named László, who arrived each morning in his impeccably clean Opel Kadett to ferry my siblings and me across the city to our school.László Borsos in April. Hired by General Electric as our private driver in 1990, he now owns and operates his own taxi business. When he learned from my mom that I was traveling to Budapest, he insisted on picking me up at the airport.In the 32 years since then, Hungary has undergone its own dramatic transformation. Once considered the most entrepreneurial and Western-friendly of the former Eastern Bloc nations, it has, of late, become a poster child of nationalism, illiberalism and the erosion of democratic values, offering a political vision that has been emulated in Poland and admired by populist figures in France, Italy and the United States.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, now the longest serving elected leader in Europe, has steadily consolidated power by rewriting the Constitution, overhauling election laws to favor his Fidesz party, undermining the independence of the courts and bringing most of the country’s media under the control of his political allies. The influence of his autocratic tendencies has also seeped into the country’s civic and cultural life, leading to the expulsion of a liberal university and affecting the leadership and offerings at theaters and museums.I sensed some of the troubling undercurrents within minutes of my arrival, when László, on our drive from the airport, began echoing Kremlin-friendly conspiracies about the war in Ukraine, which have been widely disseminated via the state-owned media and pro-government news outlets.A pro-Ukraine rally, held in late April near the Parliament, drew many hundreds of supporters.A nearby pro-Russia rally, held the same day in Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square, a few hundred feet away, drew a much smaller and less lively crowd — and an unexpected array of flags.Supporters of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom, or Our Homeland Movement, a far-right political party that campaigns on conspiracy theories, homophobia and anti-Roma racism, gathered outside the Ukrainian Embassy in early June. Once a fringe group, the party won parliamentary representation in the national elections held in April.Despite its modest size and economic output (its population, under 10 million, is roughly that of Michigan, and its G.D.P. roughly that of Kansas), Hungary has garnered outsize media attention in recent years because of Mr. Orbán’s self-described illiberal agenda. A number of Western journalists have descended on its capital and returned either with ominous reports about the country’s lurch toward autocracy or with obsequious interviews extolling Mr. Orbán’s conservative values. Meanwhile, amid the steady stream of polarized dispatches, I felt as though my increasingly distant memories and personal impressions of the place were being supplanted by a series of politicized caricatures.And so, earlier this year, after spending much of the pandemic traveling around the United States, I opted to push the limits of remote work and settle for a while in the city where I formed my earliest lasting memories. My hope was that I could retrace certain elements of my childhood, dust off my long-dormant language skills, reconnect with old family friends, assess the city’s political reality and, perhaps most important, get to know the place — learn its rhythms, appreciate its culture, observe the life of everyday Hungarians — from the loftier perch of adulthood.Tram 49 passes in front of the Great Market Hall. Like many of Budapest’s well-known buildings, the hall was built around the time of the country’s millennial celebration in 1896.Inside, customers line up in front of a meat vendor.The market’s airy interior.If Hungary has become the European Union’s most defiant state, then Budapest has become Hungary’s most defiantly liberal enclave — to the extent that short-term visitors to the city might easily miss the signs of a tense political environment.The opposition parties are noisy. Protests are commonplace. In part as a response to the passage of recent anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, the Budapest Pride march has drawn huge crowds in recent years, and L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly venues are on the rise. Even the existence of progressive community centers — like Auróra, a social hub that offers a bar and a concert venue and has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups — suggests a kind of political and intellectual tolerance.And yet behind many of the organizations that are out of step with the ruling party’s politics is a story of instability — regarding funding, legal protection, reputation. According to a 2022 report by the Artistic Freedom Initiative, Hungarian artists and institutions that oppose Fidesz “find it increasingly difficult — and some speculate even futile — to earn state support without yielding to governmental demands and thus compromising their artistic or personal integrity.”Mikszáth Kálmán Square, in District 8, is often crowded with university students in the afternoons and evenings.Kolibri Kávézó, a small artisanal cafe. Famous for its fin-de-siècle coffee houses, Budapest is now home to dozens of trendy third-wave shops.The underground concert venue at Auróra, a social hub that has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups.No contemporary portrait of Budapest could overlook its grandeur: its opulent architecture, its stirring public spaces, its many richly appointed interiors. The bathhouses — Gellért in particular, with its Art Nouveau ornamentation and stunningly beautiful tiles — are among the city’s most treasured attractions. (Hungary is rich with thermal water springs; there are 123 in Budapest alone.)Other highlights include the Hungarian State Opera House, which reopened this year after an extensive restoration, and the newly minted Museum of Ethnography, part of an ambitious development project — opposed by local politicians — to transform Budapest’s main park into a must-visit cultural hub for tourists and locals.Two of the thermal pools at Gellért. To the right, just through the archway, is a cold plunge pool and a steam room.The main hall of the opera house during a performance of “Mefistofele” in late April. The chandelier, which weighs more than three tons, illuminates a fresco by the German-Hungarian painter Károly Lotz.Concertgoers during an intermission.The swooping lines of the new Museum of Ethnography, which opened in May. (The museum was previously housed in a building opposite the Parliament.)Working New York hours in Central Europe meant that my days were largely free until 3 p.m. (after which I worked until around 11 p.m.), leaving me with an abundance of time in the mornings and early afternoons to explore the city.Some days I spent in single-minded pursuit of specific artists: the architectural splendors of Ödön Lechner, whose work has come to define the Hungarian Secession movement, a localized expression of Art Nouveau; or the mosaics and stained-glass art of Miksa Róth, whose legacy is scattered throughout the city.The Royal Postal Savings Bank, which opened in the early 1900s, is one of Ödön Lechner’s masterworks. Now home to the Hungarian State Treasury, the building showcases a range of Hungarian folk motifs — though the striking details on the roof are largely hidden from view at street level. (When a contemporary pointed this out, Lechner is rumored to have said, “The birds will see them.”)The Hungarian Institute of Geology, another of Lechner’s designs.Inside the Institute of Geology. The mosaics and fossil-like sculptural forms were designed to evoke the interior of a cave.Other days I spent roaming more freely, poking my head into the charming courtyards of unassuming residential buildings or visiting with former teachers and old family friends.Exploring America’s National ParksThe glories of the U.S. national park system draw hundreds of millions of visitors each year.Hidden Gems: These days, serenity in nature can be elusive. But even the most popular parks have overlooked treasures.The Less-Traveled Road: When it comes to America’s national parks, it’s not all about Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Try these lesser-known options.Ready for an Adventure: Not sure what to bring with you on your trip to a national park? Here is a list of essential gear, and these are the best apps to download.National Park Booking App: Traveler and travel industry frustration is growing with Recreation.gov, the online portal to book federal land accommodations and access.On rambles through familiar places, I felt the nostalgic potency of long-ago memories bubbling up to the surface: Here was the apartment building where Balázs Szokolay, our beloved piano teacher, lived with his mother, a sculptor. Here was our school, where, during the Persian Gulf war, the Hungarian police stationed armed guards at the gate. Here was the park where, when curiosity got the best of him, my brother ignited his shoelace with a match.In the afternoons, my feet sore from walking, I often settled in to work at a cafe or at one of the city’s many publicly accessible (and unexpectedly resplendent) libraries.Two neighbors chat in the interior of a residential building in District 8.The interior courtyard of a residential building in District 5, near Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square.A study room inside the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.The library inside the Hungarian Parliament building.My favorite pastime, though, was meandering through Budapest’s grand cemeteries: Kerepesi in District 8, Farkasréti in District 12, Kozma Street in District 10. All three lie outside the popular tourist zones, which meant that, coming and going, I came to appreciate a broader swath of the city.I found that the cemeteries, filled with gorgeous statues from a range of eras, some exhibiting elements of Socialist Realism and others classically suggestive of the life’s work of the people buried beneath them, were microcosms of Budapest itself: trimmed and stately in their well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at their fringes.The grave of Lujza Blaha, a Hungarian actress known as “the nation’s nightingale,” at Kerepesi Cemetery, the burial grounds for some of Hungary’s most famous figures — from sculptors and scientists to poets and politicians.An ill-kept grave in the far reaches of Kerepesi. The cemetery is a microcosm of Budapest: trimmed and stately in its well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at its fringes.The Schmidl Mausoleum, built in the early 1900s for Sándor and Róza Schmidl, is a magnificent example of Hungary’s Jewish funerary art.It was the small, quiet moments that I savored the most: at first strolling past, then waving at, then eventually stopping to meet Erika Bajkó, who ran a small dog-grooming business around the corner from my apartment near Rákóczi Square; glancing up at the domed ceiling inside the entranceway to Széchenyi Baths; making an emotionally charged pilgrimage to my old home in Törökvész, a neighborhood in the Buda hills; joining the evening crowds at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge, where the heavy winds over the Danube helped wash away the late-spring and early-summer heat; studying the poetry of Miklós Radnóti, a celebrated Hungarian writer who was murdered in the Holocaust, as I wandered through the neighborhood where he lived.A woman walks two dogs past a groomer, Dog Diva, near Rákóczi Square.The dome in the entrance hall at Széchenyi Baths.An evening crowd gathers at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge.“I cannot know what this landscape means to others,” begins what is perhaps Mr. Radnóti’s most famous poem, completed less than a year before his death in 1944. Touching on themes of patriotism, foreign perception and national identity, it offers an instructive comparison of the appreciations of the land by the native-born poet and a passing enemy airman:Through his binoculars he sees the factory and the fields,but I see the worker who trembles for his toil,the forest, the whistling orchard, the grapes and graves,among the graves a grandma, weeping softly,and what from above is a railway or factory to be destroyedis just a watchman’s house; the watchman stands outsideholding a red flag, surrounded by several children,and in the courtyard of the factories a sheepdog frolics;and there’s the park with footprints of past loves …If you want to truly know this place, he seems to be telling us, then be attuned to its details, its people, the joy and suffering hidden in its everyday moments.A statue of Miklós Radnóti in Újlipótváros, or New Leopold Town.The Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, in the courtyard behind the the Dohány Street Synagogue. By the end of the Holocaust, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered.A small crowd of tourists watches the sun set over the Danube River from an overlook on Gellért Hill.At Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant recommended to me by Tas Tobias, whose website, Offbeat Budapest, highlights the city from a local’s perspective, I earned my first Magyar nickname: Pityu, a diminutive of István, the Hungarian form of Stephen.Charmed by my attempts to order from a menu that lacked any hint of English, Erzsébet Varga, the chef, balked at my choice of two dishes containing pickled vegetables — they wouldn’t sit well in my stomach, one of the regulars explained with a laugh — and instead delivered the most delicious bowl of goulash I’d find anywhere on my trip.A group of regulars gathers for lunch at Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant in the outer part of District 8.A bowl of goulash sits beside a basket of bread and a handwritten menu, which changes daily.Ferenc Oláh, who runs the restaurant with Erzsébet Varga, his wife, holds up a picture of him and his father, who was also a restaurateur.Ferenc and Erzsébet in the restaurant’s kitchen. As with traditional diners in America, Budapest’s authentic étkezdes, once ubiquitous, are slowly vanishing, giving way to trendier cafes that cater to younger crowds.And yet, as the weeks went by, I found it increasingly difficult to overlook Hungary’s political backdrop. Nearly all of the young people I met in Budapest expressed a nagging malaise about their country’s future. A few, of course, supported the ruling party, but most were vehemently opposed. Many had friends who, noting the political headwinds and a relative lack of economic opportunity, had departed for Paris, London, Vienna. Others were sticking it out, though the landslide victory by Fidesz in the elections in April — despite an unlikely coalition made up of wildly divergent opposition parties — left them with a gnawing sense of hopelessness.Heroes’ Square, which serves as a gateway to Városliget, or City Park, seen before, during and after sunset. (I learned to roller-blade here in the early ’90s.)In mid-May I met András Török, a Budapest-born writer and city historian, at a colorful cafe in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town, a historic neighborhood in the center of the city. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” updated regularly since it was first published in 1989, is as playful as it is insightful and had helped me reacquaint myself with the city. (Another project he manages, Fortepan, which was founded by Miklós Tamási, offers a staggeringly rich collection of old Hungarian photographs.)We spoke briefly about the optimism many locals had experienced in the late ’80s and early ’90s — “Suddenly the color of ink I used in my fountain pen, which I ceremoniously bought in Vienna every year, was available in the corner shop,” he said wistfully — before turning to present-day concerns.“The victory by Fidesz was so devastating that it’s obvious people want this system,” he said. “It’s an epoch in Hungarian history now,” he added, referring to Mr. Orbán’s tenure.As a response, he said, many of those disheartened by the ruling party have taken an inward turn. “I cultivate my own garden; I write my books,” Mr. Török, who is 68, said. “I talk to my grandchildren and to my friends — and I try to enjoy my life.”“And,” he added, “I accept that I will never in my lifetime see the Hungary I’d like to see.”András Török near a park in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” is a playful and insightful introduction to the city.Of course, supporters of Mr. Orbán’s, a minority in Budapest but a majority in Hungary overall, don’t express the same pessimism. At the Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district — where, during my childhood, I marveled at the overwhelming assemblage of Soviet memorabilia — I met Erika Román, who was selling a range of textiles. Declaring her ardent support for Mr. Orbán, she explained that “Hungary is a little country,” and that “Hungary is for Hungarians.”Behind that sentiment, which is widely popular throughout the country, lies the belief that true Hungarian identity — threatened by globalist progressives and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, whom Mr. Orbán considers to be existential threats to the European way of life — is inextricably bound with race and religion.“There are more people living in New York City than in the entire country of Hungary,” the conservative writer Rod Dreher points out in a recent article, “which is partly why the Hungarians are so anxious about being assimilated out of existence.”A row of shops at Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district.Erika Román, a vendor at the market. “Hungary is a little country,” she told me after expressing her support for Viktor Orbán. “And Hungary is for Hungarians.”The more I reflected on Hungary’s autocratic turn, the more I was haunted by something Mr. Török mentioned during our digressive conversation in May.To experience Hungary’s transformation from totalitarianism to free democracy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he said, was a wonderful thing. “Earlier I’d thought that I had been born at the wrong time,” he said. “But then I realized: Oh! I was born at the right time after all!”A home video taken in 1992 shows the condition of Mátyás-templom, or Matthias Church, in the heart of the Castle District.And yet he had “a sort of secret fear in the back of my mind,” he said, that the transformation had happened entirely too quickly — so quickly, as others have argued, that Hungarians, having lived for 40 years behind the Iron Curtain, weren’t given enough time to appreciate or internalize their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.“We seemed to have been given a free lunch by Gorbachev and Reagan,” he said. “And I think we are learning now, somehow, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”Matthias Church in early May. Over the course of its eclectic history, the building has seen the crowning of Hungarian kings and served for 150 years — during the Ottoman occupation — as a mosque.A building project in the Castle District. Efforts to restore and reconstruct certain historic buildings are aimed at drawing more tourists and creating an expression of Mr. Orbán’s brand of nationalism.The roof of Matthias Church. The tiles were made by Hungary’s celebrated Zsolnay porcelain factory, which also supplied tiles for the Parliament building, the Gellért baths and several buildings designed by the renowned Hungarian architect Ödön Lechner — including the two buildings, the Royal Postal Savings Bank and the Hungarian Institute of Geology, shown earlier in this essay.How much, I began to wonder, had General Electric’s quick entry into Eastern Bloc markets — which, despite high hopes, quickly led to labor tensions and slashed payrolls and ultimately proved to be more fraught than expected — helped hasten Hungary’s too-rapid transformation? How much had the frenzied reach of American capitalism helped set the stage for Mr. Orbán’s rise?How much, I wondered, had that earlier tide of history helped shape today’s?The crumbling entrance to a Tungsram site in Budapest, photographed in late May. Tungsram, which was finally sold by General Electric in 2018, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.In late May, I caught wind — through 444.hu, a self-consciously edgy news site, and, alongside Telex and HVG, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent outlets — that a sprawling field of poppies had bloomed in District 15, near the edge of the city. I hopped on a bus for the 40-minute ride, gazing out the window as we wended our way through timeworn residential areas and past Soviet-era panel housing estates.Exiting the bus near a discount grocery store, I looked out across its parking lot and saw a vast sea of brilliant red petals that stretched for half a mile toward the M3 motorway.A field of poppies that bloomed on the outskirts of Budapest, at the edge of in District 15, in May.The immense field, within city limits, sat just beside a set of residential towers.A bee drifts toward a flower to collect pollen.The flowers, of course, weren’t long for this world — merely a momentary splash of vibrancy in Budapest’s weary periphery. Nor was the field itself destined to last: It would soon be paved to make room for a housing development.How fitting, I thought, since transience, in the end, was one of Hungary’s abiding lessons. After my family moved back to Ohio, where the homogeneous suburban scene accentuated the richness of the culture we’d left behind, I learned that the only constant I could rely on was the promise of constant change. So much simply faded away. My parents divorced. My international-school friends scattered like seeds. My grandmother was withered by cancer. In time, Tungsram would decay, as would General Electric, as would the influence of Western liberalism.But Budapest, in my memory, stands like a land before time. No doubt that’s why I feel such a connection to the place. No doubt that’s why it feels like home.With my grandmother, Natalie Faunda, on Margaret Island — which sits in the middle of the Danube River, between Buda and Pest — in 1990.My family at an overlook on Gellért Hill in ’92 or ’93.Standing on the outskirts of Budapest, watching the poppies dance in the wind and contemplating the ephemerality of this age-old city, I was reminded of a quote from Péter Molnár Gál, a Hungarian critic, that I’d read in Mr. Török’s guidebook.“In Budapest,” he writes, “you can’t dunk your bread in the same sauce twice. The city is going through a time of transition. As it has been doing for five hundred years.”By then, I think, wrestling with the past and the present, I’d begun to see the central question about Hungary’s future as one that posits pessimism and optimism as equally naïve: If the historical tides of the last 30 years are anything of a guide, then how could we ever hope to know what the next tide will bring?The Buda Castle after nightfall.Stephen Hiltner is an editor and photojournalist on The New York Times’s Travel desk, where he edits and contributes to the weekly World Through a Lens column. His last essay was about a kayaking trip through Florida’s Everglades. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.Got a question, comment or tip? Send him an email or drop a note in the comments section.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. 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