Margaret Dumont

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 TCM recently ran a Marx Brothers marathon.  I caught bits of “Horse Feathers,” and afterward my very favorite, “Duck Soup.”

 

 

I like so many things about the Marx Brothers' movies: the freedom, the cleverness of the dialogue, the stupid obviousness of the slapstick bits, the bizarre/surreal quality of many of the gags, even the sudden lapses into sentimentality when they stop to sing a song.

 

 

And I am always thankful when Margaret Dumont shows up.

 

 

She is the grand dame who reigns over seven of the Marx Brothers’ movies: the hostess, the millionairess, the unlikely love-interest.  She is handsome and stately, like an ocean liner.  She has a rich plummy voice, slipping from reedy alto to fluting soprano.  She is not at all physical; she generally stands in one place and lets the Marx Brothers run around her like squirrels around an oak tree.  She was with the brothers on Broadway in “Cocoanuts” in the 1920s; when they made it into a movie a few years later, she and the brothers reprised their stage roles.  This is how Groucho described the action in 1930, in a letter to his friend Arthur Sheekman:

 

 

“I arise in the morning and before I have had my clothes on ten minutes, I am over at the theater doing the ordering scene.  Then follows thirty minutes of Harpo climbing up Dumont’s leg, and the shirt scene, and then to the dressing room for what I imagine is going to be a good long rest.  I am no more than seated with the Morning World, when the buzzer rings and I am downstairs again doing the ordering scene, and Harpo is back again at Dumont’s leg.”

 

 

Dumont is queenly and oblivious, the perfect foil.  She does reaction shots, seemingly unaware of what she’s reacting to.  Groucho later said that, after filming the “Duck Soup” scene in which Groucho shouts “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did!”, Dumont came over to him and said: “Julie [his real name was Julius], what does that line mean?”  

 

 

(I think Dumont was smarter than this.  She’d been on stage for years, after all, and she was no dummy.  Here’s one of her quotes from IMDB: “I'm not a stooge, I'm the best straight woman in Hollywood. There's an art to playing it straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.”)

 

 

Film critic Cecelia Ager said it best: “Somebody somewhere should erect a statue to Margaret Dumont, with a plaque reading: “Dedicated to the woman who took an awful lot of guff from the Marx Brothers through the years, and answered it with courage and steadfastness.”

 

 

Dumont passed away in 1965, just days after doing a television reenactment (with Groucho!) of their big musical number from 1930’s “Animal Crackers”: “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” 

 

 

Her real name was Daisy Baker.

 

 

Rest in peace, Daisy.

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Movie review: “The Artist”

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Partner and I have not seen very many of this year’s Academy Award nominees: only “The Descendants” and “The Help,” in fact.  We decided to remedy this by going to “The Artist” last weekend.

 

 

Hmm.

 

 

If you haven’t heard, this is a modern black-and-white silent movie (well, “silent” in that it has no spoken dialogue; there’s a lively musical background patched together from classic film scores, old songs, and some new music.)  The plot is a marriage of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “A Star is Born,” with lots of other movies thrown in.  In brief: it’s 1927.  George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a handsome leading man who absolutely refuses to do talkies.  Peppy Martin (Berenice Bejo) is a cute newcomer who becomes a talkie sensation.  His downward path crosses her upward path, and . . .

 

 

Yes, well.  It’s nice, and funny, and well-directed (which I especially appreciate after seeing the catastrophically-directed  “Iron Lady” two weeks ago).  Dujardin and Bejo are fun to watch: he’s a pastiche of Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, and Gene Kelly, with a killer smile, and she’s a combo of Joan Crawford (when she was very very very young), Carole Lombard, Clara Bow, Debbie Reynolds, and maybe some Ginger Rogers.  There’s a cute dog who does tricks and follows Dujardin everywhere.  The movie’s packed with all-star performances: John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller.

 

 

It’s also a game of Trivial Pursuit in movie form.  I caught references to at least two dozen different movies: “Citizen Kane,” “Grand Hotel,” “Dinner at Eight,” “The Band Wagon.”  I’m sure I missed two dozen others. When Dujardin and his wife have breakfast together and she digs into her grapefruit, I flinched a little.  When Dujardin clowns with his food (in tandem with his dog) – well, who else but Chaplin?

 

 

It’s charming, but not very moving.  There are melancholy moments – Dujardin’s retreat into depression as his career goes sour, Bejo’s anxious attempts to watch over him from afar – but your heart tells you that all will be well in the end, and (forgive me if I spoil the movie for you) your heart would be right about that.   “A Star Is Born” had a sad ending, remember, but “Singin’ in the Rain” did not . . .

 

 

But not every movie needs to tear your heart out.  This is a shiny little gem of a movie; maybe it ain’t a diamond, but it’s been polished to a very high luster. 

 

 

Okay.  Only six more movies to see before Oscar night . . . .

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For Sunday: Neneh Cherry sings "Buffalo Stance"

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Another 1980s video!  This one grew more and more appealing as I watched it over and over again, trudging on the treadmill.   I like the goofy graphics, and the almost-serious lyrics:

 

 

No moneyman can win my love

It’s sweetness that I’m thinking of

We always hang in a Buffalo Stance

We do the dive every time we dance

I’ll give you love, baby, not romance,

I’ll make a move, nothing left to chance,

So don’t you get fresh with me!

 

 

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SOPA, PIPA, piracy, lending, and freedom

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I wrote about SOPA and PIPA a few weeks ago.  It now looks as if Congress is going to try again to push these pieces of legislation through, in a very slightly altered format.  The corporations are pushing them, you see; they feel that they’re losing money, and that the only way to prevent this is to prevent people from posting stuff like songs, and quotes, and interviews, and video clips, and chapters from books, and maybe sometimes whole books.

 

 

I hate the idea of an author or an artist losing money.  Authors and artists deserve to be paid for their work.  However: I keep thinking of the analogy of lending.  I buy a book, and it’s good, and I want my friends to share the pleasure, so I lend it to them.  Am I violating a law?  (Last summer I read “The Hunger Games,” and enjoyed it enough to go out and buy the two sequels in hard cover.  To this date I have not read them; I’m saving them.  But I have lent them to at least five people, who have adored them.  Have I done anything wrong?)

 

 

I was delighted to read the following from an author I enjoy very much, Neil Gaiman:

 

 

“… Places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.

 

“I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

 

“What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”

 

 

I apologize for the long quote.  But he speaks well, doesn’t he?

 

 

I asked myself his questions.  When I was in school, how did I discover my favorite authors? 

 

 

Let’s see:

 

 

-        I stupidly bought “The Two Towers” through the old Scholastic Books network (do they still exist?) and couldn’t make head or tail of it.  (It begins with the line: “Aragorn sped up the hill,” for God’s sake.  Who the hell is Aragorn?)  My eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Lorenz, lent me his copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” and then it all made sense.  And then he lent me “The Return of the King.” He was a good man.

-        Our school librarian, no doubt now long dead, Catherine Schwarz, was always feeding me books through the library system.  It was through her that I discovered E. B. White, and Don Marquis, and Harry Golden, and T. S. Eliot.

-        In the Battle Ground Public Library, where I spent occasional evenings waiting to be picked up after school, they used to perch books up on the tops of the shelves.  Among them: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “A Wizard of Earthsea.”  I read both, and now I am a fanatical lover of both Thomas Pynchon and Ursula LeGuin.

 

 

Do libraries pirate things?

 

 

Did Mr. Lorenz pirate Tolkien when he lent me his copies?

 

 

Do I pirate the Hunger Games books when I lend them?

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

Keep fighting back against these Internet-control bills, kids.

 

 

I think this may be an important battle to win.

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The effect of Tom Brady on middle-aged women and gay men

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The day after the big Patriots-Ravens game, everyone was talking about the Patriots victory, and about Tom Brady. 

 

 

This is an approximation of the conversation between me and my workfriends Cathleen and Apollonia:

 

 

“I didn’t think he was cute before.  I’m sort of coming around to him.”

 

 

“Oh, he’s just fine.”

 

 

“Meh.  Not my type.”

 

 

“Well, but he’s growing into his looks, finally.  He used to look kind of gangling and boyish.  He’s filled out very nicely.”

 

 

“I’ll say.”

 

 

“Do you remember when he hosted Saturday Night Live ten years ago? He was cute.  He did a sketch about sexual harassment, and he just wore his underwear, and none of the women in the office considered it sexual harassment.”

 

 

“What kind of underwear?”  (Okay, that was Apollonia.)

 

 

“Tighty whiteys.”  (This was me. The vision is stamped on my memory.  See the above photo if you’ve never seen the sketch itself; I couldn’t find the clip online.  NBC guards its property jealously.)

 

 

“Oh,” said Cathleen (okay, we’re all out of the closet now).  “I would have pictured something more elegant.  You know.”  She gestured downward.  “Not boxers, but something really nice and form-fitting.”

 

“These were mighty form-fitting,” I said.

 

 

“Oh my God!” Apollonia burst out.  “What are we doing?  What kind of people are we?  Why are we having this conversation?”

 

 

Cathleen and I paused for a moment.  Then we both smiled.  “Because,” I said, “we find the subject fascinating.”

 

 

(And to think I spent all those years not caring about sports!)

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Paula Deen, diabetes queen

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I have written about Paula Deen at least twice before.  She is one of those (you should pardon the expression) larger-than-life people who command your attention.


Her backstory is admirable.  She had something like agoraphobia, needed to work, started cooking and baking and selling food, and is now a small industry herself.  She is cheerful and funny.


Her recipes are atrocious.  Do I need to tell you again about her “English Peas” fiasco?  Not to mention the fist-sized balls of peanut butter and powdered sugar, or the bread pudding made with Krispy Kreme donuts. 


Paula, you see, discovered some years ago that primates like us crave sugar and fat. So: her recipes revolve around those two things.  (I will not soon forget her show on which two big muscular guys carried a huge block of butter to her on stage, as if it were a royal palanquin.  Or the recent incident in which a  muscleguy smeared butter on his abs and commanded Paula to lick it off.  And she did!  And then rode him around the stage.  But I digress.)


Paula discovered a couple of years ago that – gosh! – she had developed adult-onset (type 2) diabetes.


She did not speak of this until very recently, when she struck a deal with a drug company, Novo Nordisk, to become their spokeswoman.


Guess how she’s dealing with her (at least partially self-inflicted) disease?


She’s walking on a treadmill.  She’s not drinking sweet tea anymore.  She is (presumably) taking medication.


She continues, however, to be a spokeswoman for Bad Sugary Fatty Food.


Kids: turn away from her.  Don’t watch her show anymore.  Ignore her.  I did a few years ago, after the Krispy Kreme bread pudding.  She’s a freak.  She’s cute and winsome, but she’s not a role model.


Even Fox News agrees with me.  And how often do you suppose that happens?

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Joe Paterno

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I watched ESPN’s SportsCenter the other night while I was on the treadmill at the health club.  (The mere fact that I am watching sports programming should be taken as a sign that 2012 is definitely going to be the end of the world.)

 

 

I can’t endure listening to sportscasters, for the most part; they do nothing but spout empty clichés.  Before the game, they pretend to know what’s going to happen; after the game, they take all the credit if they were right, and make excuses for the losers if they were wrong.

 

 

But then you have the special features.

 

 

Joe Paterno died this past weekend, and one of his former players came on to reminisce about him.  This went relatively well until we got to the end.  This is a paraphrase: “Of course he was very frail, and naturally he was also very ill.  But I think it’s fair to say that he died, at least partly, of a broken heart.  And I hold the Board of Trustees, and the media, responsible for that.”

 

 

A little later he said: “Joe was very generous.  He always thought of others first: his team, his family, his friends.”

 

 

To her credit, the newscaster interviewing him did not react (actually, she was extraordinarily neutral, which I think spoke for itself).  She thanked him, and gave him her condolences.

 

 

I am nowhere near as calm or as classy as that.

 

 

I would have added something like: “Of course, Joe didn’t think too much about the children who might have been abused by Jerry Sandusky. Maybe they were being abused and maybe they weren’t.  So who cares, right?”

 

 

Or: “Man, I know what you mean.  You’re a saint, and you lead a perfect life, and then you just protect one child abuser from prosecution, and all of a sudden you’re a bad guy.” 

 

 

Mmph.

 

 

Tact will never be my long suit.

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Tim Thomas, Barack Obama, and free speech

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 I was checking my BlackBerry yesterday when I was brought up with an “Urk!” by the following Providence Journal newsbrief:

 

 

 Bruins goalie Tim Thomas, the biggest hero of the team's Stanley Cup championship run of last year, declined to join his teammates during today's visit to the White House. Team officials indicated that the decision had to do with political differences.

 

 

Partner is a big hockey fan.  I have a hard time watching the game with him: too fast, too violent, and I can’t even see the damned puck most of the time.  But I rejoiced with him when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup last year, and enjoyed watching the local victory celebrations.

 

 

Thomas was certainly the team hero: he’s widely considered to be the main reason they won the Cup.

 

 

But he cannot meet the President, or be seen at the White House, because he does not agree with him.

 

 

 

I could not stop thinking about this.  I investigated a bit further, and found that he is not only a far-right true believer, but a follower of Glenn Beck. 

 

 

Yikes!

 

 

I would have gladly forgiven him his beliefs, however, given that he’s such an excellent player.

 

 

But then he had to go thumb his nose at the White House.

 

 

Some questions:

• What if it had been me and a president I detested – like, let’s say, George W. Bush?  It would have been tempting to snub him.  But, then again, it would have depended largely upon the reason for the invitation.  If it were for a personal achievement, like winning the Nobel Prize, I’d have told him to go stuff himself.  If it were this kind of honor – a team being celebrated as a group – I might well have swallowed my pride and gone, for the sake of my teammates.  Because – really – what would I have to lose by standing alongside someone with whom I disagreed?
• Does Tim Thomas agree politically with all of his teammates?  I certainly hope so.  If he should ever learn that they don’t agree with him, he might not agree to appear on the same ice with them.
• Does Tim Thomas think that President Obama is trying to make political points by appearing with a popular sports team?  Really, think about that one. If you stand alongside the President, which one of you will people notice first?  And (last I looked), New England / Boston athletes are generally detested by the rest of the country.  Obama’s doing the Bruins a favor, not vice versa.

 

 

 

 

Greg Wyshynski, a hockey blogger for Yahoo!, wrote a comment about this on Monday.  He makes the point that the team general manager and team president both tried to talk Thomas into going – in fact, they could have compelled his attendance - but in the end they gave up and respected his wishes.  He’s an American; he can do any damn fool thing he likes.

 

 

(Wyshynski makes a false comparison of Thomas’s no-show at the White House to Rangers player Sean Avery’s public support for gay marriage, and says that both are governed by free speech.  This is not an excellent comparison.  Thomas can say what he likes, and hold whatever beliefs he likes; that’s free speech.  Snubbing a White House invitation because you don’t like the current occupant is bad manners.)

 

 

And Wyshynski ends by pointing out that free speech has consequences.  This is his very well-written conclusion: “This is the moment when Tim Thomas, the most valuable player to his team last June, did something that detracted from his teammates' celebration. This is the moment when, for better or worse, he becomes something more than the blue-collar hockey player from Flint with the great backstory and the sterling save percentage. And as long as he's willing to accept that his absence from an event that even Tomas Kaberle attended has overshadowed this day and changed his profile as an athlete, then like Cam Neely I'll respect the decision.”

 

 

Same here.

 

 

Thomas may be a great hockey player, but he ain’t no hero around these parts no more.

 

 

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SOPA and PIPA

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As a citizen of the Internet, I assume you’re aware of SOPA/PIPA.  It looks as if both houses of Congress have tabled the original versions of the legislation (largely because of the huge anti-SOPA/PIPA movement here on the Net), and are rewriting them to be more specific.

 

 

I am uninformed, and can only tell you my feelings on these pieces of legislation.

 

 

Very simply: I was alarmed by them. 

 

 

Supposedly they were all about stopping piracy, and that’s fine.  But the corporations pushing the legislation were playing a double game: they were pretending that it was all about cracking down on websites (mostly outside the USA) that illegally distribute movies and music and such, while they were really thinking of the law’s very real application within the USA as well.

 

 

Did you notice the word “corporations” in the above paragraph?

 

 

Exactly.

 

 

“Piracy” can be very broadly defined.  “Piracy” could be something as innocent as a Tumblr blogger posting Disney images.  “Piracy” could be posting a link to a song you like, or a video clip. 

 

 

Which means that almost all of us out here posting our favorite quotes and links and clips on our blogs and on Facebook are pirates!

 

 

Not so, not so, croon the pro-legislation people.  We’re only after the real pirates.  David Pogue, who alternates between intelligence and toadydom, decided that the Google / Wikipedia approach – to black out their websites in protest – was an overreaction, and that they were siding with the pirates.

 

 

Well, yes, David, they were.  This is because we are all part of a big incestuous system called the Internet, and it’s all about trading information.  And Google, and Wikipedia, and all the rest, were perfectly aware that, once the legislation was in place, it would not be used merely to go after Swedish and Korean and Russian sites, but to go after sites here in the USA too.  Sites like mine and yours and everyone's.

 

 

How much of a pirate am I?  Not very much.  Last summer I watched the “Thor” preview on a probably-pirate Russian website, but – hey – a two-minute trailer?  If I go to Hell, or prison, it will not be for that particular transgression.  And sometimes I scoop up images to use in my blogs or on Facebook, and I do not always inquire about their copyrights.  And sometimes I quote books and poems and all kinds of things, and I do not add complete copyright information (though I try hard to credit the authors).

 

 

But I suspect that I too would be in violation at some point down the road if SOPA/PIPA in their original forms were enacted.

 

 

Because that’s what corporations do.  They restrict access. 

 

 

The Internet is a zoo. I love the depictions of it on shows like “Futurama” and “The Simpsons,” with people actually entering it as if it were a place, flying around among buildings marked GOOGLE and FACEBOOK and ONLINE GAMBLING and NAPSTER.  And that’s exactly what it's like. 

 

 

Frankly, it has always seemed to me that I have the right to share media with my friends.  It’s like handing a newspaper or magazine to another person so that they can read something.  I paid for it; am I the only person who can read it?  Really?  And how exactly are you going to enforce that?

 

 

I didn’t call my congressmen this time.  But if this legislation comes up again, in anything like its current form, I will.

 

 

So there, David Pogue.

 

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Music video: Vanessa Carlton sings “A Thousand Miles”

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If this song sounds familiar to you, that’s because Zales used an instrumental version of it in their TV advertisements for a long time.

 

 

The tune beguiled me for a long time until I finally looked it up and discovered the waifish Vanessa Carlton. 

 

 

(This, incidentally, is one of my eat-ice-cream-and-cry-softly-to-myself songs.  So nyah.  You know you’ve got one too.)

 

 

(And probably more than one.)

 

 

 

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The iPhone 5: dream big!

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Tatiana, one of my student employees, sent me a link to a YouTube video a few weeks ago.  “You have to see this,” she messaged.

 

 

I was as blown away as she was.

 

 

It it (if you’re too lazy to follow the link) a conceptual video of the features the iPhone 5 might have. In brief: as thin as a playing card. Able to display a virtual keyboard (which can be manipulated and enlarged) on the desktop below the phone. Able to display 3-D graphics.

 

 

This is delicious.

 

 

Now, I realize this is all pie-in-the-sky.  It’s a wish list.  Of course it is!  The technology isn’t there yet.

 

 

But you know what?  It will be. And sooner than you think.

 

 

As I’ve said before, I am no friend of Apple.  I was one of their biggest fans, back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Then they became provincial and unfriendly, and I realized that the PC world – broad and dull as it was – was the world of the future.

 

 

Well, here we are in 2012, and what do you know? The iPhone and the iPad are way ahead of the pack.

 

 

Believe me, I know.  I bought a Kobo Literati reader about a year ago. It was slow, unhappy, pathetic.  Then a B&N Nook (reconditioned): nicer, but unable to do a lot of stuff.

 

 

Then the office gifted me an iPad, and it was as if someone turned on the light in a very dark room.

 

 

The iPhone 5 video is laden with comments about how ridiculous it is: “maybe in 2050,” one of them snarks.

 

 

Listen, junior: a lifetime ago – in 1995 – we were just getting the Internet in our offices.  We didn’t know quite what it would do, but we were very excited.  I remember one of my officemates telling me that she’d actually logged into the Aer Lingus website! I ran over to see.  And it was –

 

 

A picture of an airplane.  And nothing more.

 

 

This is it? we said. This is what the Internet is all about?

 

 

Well, of course it wasn’t.   Seventeen years later, we’re streaming movies and TV directly to our mobile devices and our televisions. We’re shopping online.  We’re doing everything online.

 

 

And these stupid commentators think that it will take another forty years to achieve a few more advances? 

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

We must be good at this evolution stuff.  We do it so fast.

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Selaginella kraussiana

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I was charging around Eastside Marketplace recently, buying chips and sardines and onions and other necessary things, when I made a detour through the garden section.

 

 

And I found the most adorable little display of potted plants.

 

 

They were frothy little yellow-green fellows, with fern-like fronds, tipped with silver.  They were labeled “FROSTY FERN.”

 

 

But I recognized them right away.   They were Selaginella (sp. kraussiana).  

 

 

I purchased one immediately.

 

 

Maybe you’ve seen them.  They are cousins of the “resurrection plant” found in souvenir shops and joke-shops: those dried brown masses that you immerse in water until they unfold into (unattractive) masses of living foliage. 

 

 

Selaginella are club-mosses, actually, although they’re part of a group called the “fern allies,” because they resemble ferns.  I used to find their relatives when I was a kid, up in the Cascades, kicking around when my family was picking huckleberries; they’re stiff, low-growing, intricate little plants. 

 

 

I find, when I look them up online, that Selaginella is an invasive species in New Zealand, a pest, a nuisance.  I don’t think they’ve reached the nuisance level here in the USA: I don’t think the climate allows them to grow so freely.

 

 

I brought my little Selaginella home, and repotted it right away.  It is bright and charming.  My south-facing window might be a little bright for it (club mosses prefer dim light), but we’ll see.

 

 

I looked online to find out how to care for my new Selaginella, and kept finding comments like this: “I am very taken by these small plants.  I am charmed by them.  I don’t know why.”

 

 

I think I know why. They are modest and attractive, compact and neat.They brrr nicely against your hand when you touch them (unlike my cacti, which snag my clothes and wound me constantly).  They are green and fresh. 

 

 

And they need constant care: they need moisture and shade. 

 

 

I just don’t hope I don’t kill it.

 

 

Pray for it, kids.

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Northwest winter

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You are sick of listening to me moan and groan about the unseasonal weather, and climate change, and all such hippie tree-hugger liberal talk, I know.  So I will zip my lip and say no more.

 

 

(Rhode Island has hardly had any snow this winter so far, by the way.  Our winter has been positively balmy.  I walked downtown with no coat - just a sweater - the other day.  The grass is still pretty springy and fresh in most places around Providence, and I’ve seen things blooming.  In January.)

 

 

(Oops.  Zip the lip.  Sorry.)

 

 

This winter reminds me of the typical Northwest winter: cool, cloudy, dark, often foggy and rainy.  It’s the kind of winter that engenders “cabin fever”: you stay inside with your loved ones, waiting for spring, until you just can’t stand them any longer, and then you get out the shotgun.

 

 

Dark foggy weather doesn’t frighten me.  I grew up in the Northwest.  It’s nothin’.  By April, we’ll be tearing off our winter underwear and dancing among the daffodils.  For now –

 

 

Well, but still.  You have to make it through the darkness.

 

 

A few years ago, Partner and I were driving through rural Oregon.  It was midsummer, and the hills were covered with beautiful firs and pines, and the sky was wonderfully blue.  “I could live here,” Partner said.

 

 

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m picturing this in mid-December.  You wouldn’t even be able to see those hills, the fog would be so thick.  It’d get light around ten in the morning, and dark again by four in the afternoon.  From November through mid-February.”

 

 

Partner regarded me mildly.  He has only ever seen the Northwest in summertime, and I think he has only ever seen it rain there once, one day in Portland.  He doesn’t really believe me.

 

 

But oh yes it’s true.

 

 

(Oh, did I mention that it’s snowing in Egypt this winter?  Yeah.  Oh, and they’re having a huge and extremely unseasonal windstorm – with hundred-mile-an-hour winds – on the central Oregon coast.)

 

 

(Huh!)

 

 

(Enjoy the future, kids.  It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.)

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Movie review: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

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We saw “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” on Monday. (Yes, two movies in one weekend.  Partner and I are decadent capitalists, I know.  We also had Chinese food at an excellent little neighborhood place near the theater both times.  So sue us.)

 

 

The movie is a dark little exercise in Cold War espionage.  If you need cheering up, do not see this movie.  Gary Oldman, as spy supreme George Smiley, seldom changes his facial expression through the whole two hours: he does a sort of neutral thing with his eyes and lips, and that’s the keynote of the whole production.

 

 

Simply stated, the plot is: “There’s a double agent, George.  Go find him.”

 

 

Who is it?  The arrogant Toby Jones? The smooth Colin Firth? The bullyish Ciaran Hinds?  The timid David Dencik?  Oldman himself?  (You can’t make any assumptions in a movie like this.)   Maybe one of the lower-level agents: the lean and sympathetic Mark Strong, or the intense Benedict Cumberbatch, or the 1970s-handsome Tom Hardy?

 

 

I won’t tell you.

 

 

You cannot miss a moment of this movie.  If you do, you’ll miss a bit of overheard dialogue, or a little piece of character exposition, or someone’s name that you didn’t catch before.  We didn't even go to the bathroom for the whole two hours, and let me tell you, that is a near-miracle for the two of us oldsters.   I was straining to catch every word, and I still missed a few things (Partner and I caught each other up over egg rolls and pork fried rice after the movie).  

 

 

I can only tell you that I suspected the right person.

 

 

(Of course, I suspected all of them.)

 

 

If you want a time-travel ride back to 1973, with gray moody landscapes of London and Budapest and Paris, and lots of top-notch acting, you should see this.

 

 

Bring your brain along, and your ear trumpet.  You’ll need both.

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Jersey shore, season five

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 The new season of “Jersey Shore” blew in unexpectedly; I thought our DVR was mistakenly recording old episodes from previous seasons.  Then we saw Pauly D. on a talk show, and saw clips from the new season, and thought: oh my god, we’re missing it!

 

 

As with the (rancid) cream of the reality shows – “Bridezillas,” “A List: New York,” “A List: Dallas” – you can’t look away.  It’s like that scene in “A Christmas Story” when Ralphie’s little brother plunges his face onto his plate and begins to eat like a pig at his mother’s urging, and both of them are screaming with laughter.  It’s disgusting, but you have to watch it.

 

 

We are (as of this writing) only two episodes into the new season.  I know from Internet scuttlebutt that this season did not go well; apparently there was serious dissention among the Seaside Heights Eight, and word went out that a few guidos / guidettes went home for good. 

 

 

They are, I think, mostly sick of each other.  The show took them directly from Florence (where, according to Vinnie, they did “everything you can possibly do,” ha ha, yes they certainly took advantage of the opportunity to broaden their minds) to Seaside Heights, giving them no time to spend with their families and friends in between.  This (I’m sure) was meant to ramp up the tension level on the show, and it worked like a charm.  Mike and Nicole (aka Sitch and Snooki) are at one another’s throats.  Vinnie, who used to seem a tiny bit smarter and calmer than the others, is now completely worn out, and contemplating leaving the house.  Jenny (aka JWOWW) is an exhausted den mother, trying to sort out arguments and calm everyone down while serving snacks.  (Who knew she’d be the mature one?)  The others – Ron, Sammi, Deena, Paulie – are watching quietly from the sidelines, waiting for the whole thing to implode, so they can go off and do their spinoff MTV shows and QVC jewelry hours and Xenadrine ads.

 

 

But still we cannot look away.  We look, and we see:

 

-        Snooki drinking the juice out of the pickle jar;

-        Snooki wearing panties with JIONNI (her boyfriend’s name) written on the butt;

-        Situation and his friend Unit (!) spraying one another with – what? – bronzer? cologne? – in a bizarre dance-like ritual;

-        Paulie getting too much exposure at the tanning salon, and ending up looking like a burnt weenie (he puts Popsicles on his face to ease the pain);

-        Paulie hooking up with a girl who steals his gold-and-diamond chain, then brings it back to the house, no harm done, tee hee.  (I wonder if the show’s producers prompted her to do it?  They had the felony on tape, after all.)

 

 

Who knows what lies ahead? 

 

 

Thank goodness the world ends in December 2012.  There can’t be more than two or three more Jersey Shore series before then!

 

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Movie review: "The Iron Lady"

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We went to see “The Iron Lady” on Saturday.  Correction: we went to see Meryl Streep on Saturday.  If it had been anyone else in the role (with the possible exception of Helen Mirren), I don’t think we would have rushed out to see it.  How much, after all, does anyone really care about the Falklands war?

 

 

Streep does not disappoint.  She becomes Margaret Thacher, beady-eyed and intense, tender and distracted with her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), impatient and dismissive with her ministers and staff.  She has excellent help from Alexandra Roach, who plays Margaret as a young woman.  She has Margaret Thatcher’s look, and her manner.  As the present-day Margaret, tottery and vague, she is truly wonderful.

 

 

But the movie is a near-disaster.

 

 

First off: it’s not one movie, it’s two.  It’s a simple little tear-jerker about an elderly person slowly saying goodbye to all the things she cares about; it’s also a soupy potboiler about British politics in the 1970s and 1980s, with lots of stock footage of strikes and riots and policemen clubbing people in the streets, and at least two (maybe three!) Rocky-style montages of Important Things Happening.  

 

 

And then there is the editing.

 

 

It whirls and swoops.  The camera darts all over the place.  There are cuts within cuts.  The timeline jumps back and forth more than your average episode of "Doctor Who." Worst of all, the editing doesn’t let you watch Meryl act.  The movie keeps cutting away from her face, chopping her scenes up into surreal bits and pieces. 

 

 

I ask you: pretend you’re Phyllida Lloyd, director of “The Iron Lady.”  You are lucky enough to get Meryl Streep to play the lead.  Here’s what you do:

 

-        You organize the sets.

-        You make everyone shush.

-        You point the camera at Meryl, and you keep it there.

-        You sit back in your director’s chair and rub your hands greedily, thinking about your impending Academy Award.

 

Evidently Phyllida Lloyd decided to make something else: a hybrid of “The Whales of August,” “The Buddy Holly Story,” and a perfume commercial.

 

 

It doesn’t work.

 

 

But go see it anyway.  See it for Meryl. 

 

 

It wasn’t her fault.  She did the best she could.

 

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For Sunday: "Here I Go Again," by Whitesnake

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As a young person, I loved popular music; then I got away from it for a long time.  Now I am relearning it (I’m getting a crash course in 1980s music from the videos they show at my health club), and I like a lot of stuff I never thought I would.

 

 

My work acquaintance Apollonia is on her own musical vision quest.  Her favorites are:

 

 

- Anything on the soundtrack of any of the eighty-five “Twilight” movies;

- Any song that mentions the names “Edward” or “Bella” (see above);

- Emo (whatever that is);

- Power ballads.

-

 

Well, we agree on that one. How can you not love power ballads?  The hair!  The guitars!  And they always (or almost always) begin quietly, almost classically, with keyboards and muted strings.  

 

 

Then we cue the crashing guitar chords.

 

 

This video is for Apollonia. I saw it on the treadmill television the other night and found it very stimulating.

 

 

I hope you like it too.

 

 

 

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Happy families and unhappy families

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Tolstoy wrote, famously, that all happy families are alike, and that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

 

 

I have two comments on this:

 

 

a)     I think we say “dysfunctional” nowadays, though I’d hate to read a translation of “Anna Karenina” with the word “dysfunctional” in it;

b)     I do not believe there is any such thing as a happy family.

 

 

I know I sound terribly cynical, but hear me out.

 

 

First of all: yes, I know, mass-murder families, sex-crime families.  Yes, those are really awful, and “dysfunctional” is not a strong enough word to describe them.  But here I have to invoke Woody Allen’s Law, also known as the Horrible/Miserable Divide.  In Woody’s own words, in “Annie Hall”: “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”

 

 

Yes, indeed, we are all lucky to be miserable.

 

 

My family was – what can I tell you? – normal.  We fought.  We did not necessarily like each other very much.  There was strife, and sometimes bad feeling that went on for years.  To use one example, my older sister Darlene and I had no real love for each other after about 1970.  We argued, fought, were terribly snide to one another.  My mother was very close to both of us, and used the traditional method of dealing with these situations: when she was with me, she agreed with me, and when she was with Darlene, she agreed with her. 

 

 

And who can blame her?

 

 

I used to think we were a nightmare family.  Now, with the calm (tranquilized?) perspective of late middle age, I look back and compare us to other families of my acquaintance, and realize that we were pretty much normal.

 

 

But here’s the other thing: I have learned to mistrust people who claim that their family life is/was perfectly happy. 

 

 

I learned this primarily through a school friend who insisted that her family was something between a Currier & Ives etching and “Leave It To Beaver.”  Then I met said family.  Father: abusive.  Mother: passive alcoholic.  Brother: growing up to be a mean-minded tyrant like his father. 

 

 

Lovely!

 

 

I was talking about this with a student acquaintance, and she was astonished. Her family, she said, was very close.  They actually like each other.

 

 

Well, I suppose miracles happen.

 

 

But I have my doubts.

 

 

Learn to love the misery, kids.  Remember: you should be thankful that you're miserable.  

 

 

Because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

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Recipe: Ricotta cookies

 

 

 

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It’s nice to add a new recipe to the repertory.  This is a nice pleasant cookie – soft, sweet but not too sweet, with gentle overtones of vanilla and lemon – and a nice sugary (but not overbearing) glaze on top.  (You can decorate them with colored sugar if you are so moved.  I thought about it, but didn’t bother.  They’re very good as is.)

 

 

I found this recipe in one of those local magazines that you pick up for free – something like “Rhode Island Local,” I forget.  It was in an ad for Supreme Ricotta, a local brand.  It looked interesting and simple, and like nothing I’d ever made before.  I made a batch for Partner and myself as a test – and, believe me, Partner pulls no punches where baked goods are concerned – and these passed the test.  I will bake more of these in future.

 

 

(Postscript: I described this recipe to Apollonia and she cried, “Egg biscuits!  You moron, you’ve rediscovered the recipe for egg biscuits!”  Yes, of course they are, I knew I recognized them from somewhere.  They’re a traditional Rhode Island recipe.  It’s nice to be able to make them at home, though.)

 

 

Herewith the recipe:

 

 

-        ½ cup (one stick) butter, softened

-        1 cup sugar

-        1 egg

-        1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

-        1 cup ricotta (I used Stop & Shop, but use what you like, or what you can find)

-        The zest of one lemon (the original recipe called for lemon extract, but the zest is nicer, and gives you a chance to scrape the skin off several of your knuckles)

-        2 cups flour

-        ½ teaspoon baking powder

-        ½ teaspoon baking soda

-        Powdered sugar

-        Milk

 

 

1)     Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2)     In a large bowl, cream butter with sugar.

3)     Add egg and vanilla, and mix thoroughly.

4)     Add ricotta and lemon zest.  Mix for one minute.

5)     In a separate bowl, combine flour with baking powder and baking soda.

6)     Add flour mixture to ricotta mixture, and mix well.

7)     Drop in teaspoonsful on a cookie sheet.  (Do yourself a favor, invest $2.49 in a roll of parchment paper.  Line your cookie sheet with parchment paper.  You’ll never regret it.  Nothing will ever stick again.) 

8)     Bake for 9-11 minutes, or until cookies are brown on the bottom (they took almost exactly nine minutes in my (very fast) oven). 

9)     Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes.  Ice them with a mixture of powdered sugar and milk (only a few drops of milk for maybe two or three tablespoons of powdered sugar, mixed in a small bowl).  A few drops of icing are enough for each cookie; it’ll spread around.

 

 

 

Makes 3-4 dozen cookies, depending on how generous you were with the cookie dough.  I like them a little smaller; they’re easier to deal with later, and you can get more of them on a cookie sheet.  (By the way, I’ve reduced the original recipe by half.  What were those people thinking of?  We don’t have ten kids each anymore!  However: Partner and I polished off a plate of 30+ cookies in about two days . . . . )

 

 

Also – hippie alert! – I used soy milk in the icing.  It was very nice.

 

 

Don’t say I never done you no favors.  This recipe is one.

 

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Dog collar

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I was walking home the other evening when I met a neighbor – a cute neighbor, sort of a younger Dan Hedaya – with his cute black-and-white dog.  The dog was wearing one of those awful lampshades around its neck.  “What happened?” I said, gesturing to the dog.

 

 

“He had a procedure,” the owner said.  “He's nine years old.  Look how he keeps bumping his cone!”

 

 

The dog came toward me, looking sad and winsome.  His collar was scuffed from previous encounters.  His eyes said: I had a Procedure.  Don't you feel sorry for me?

 

 

How could I not?  I patted the poor dog on the head.  “In nine years,” the owner said, “he's never gotten this much attention.”

 

 

So keep that in mind, all you young things out there.

 

 

Illness has its uses.

 

 

But you have to be at least a little cute to make it work. 

 

 

A recipe a week

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Partner and I watch “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!” almost every night.  “Jeopardy!” is one of our retirement plans: I’m supposed to go on the show and do a Ken Jennings and win a million dollars.  As the years pass and my mind turns to coleslaw, however, this is becoming less and less of a possibility.  Then there’s “Wheel,” with the genteel Pat Sajak and the lovely Vanna White.  One of my favorite moments of the show is the very ending, where Pat tries to make conversation with Vanna; she is amazingly obtuse in a Gracie Allen way (without seeming to realize it), and says the most charmingly silly things.

 

 

But I respect her for this: just before the New Year, Pat asked Vanna for her New Year’s resolutions, and she said that she was going to try a new recipe once a week, every week.

 

 

What an excellent idea!

 

 

I collect cookbooks. I rip recipes out of magazines and newspapers.  Sometimes I go online just to see how one prepares stewed dog or roasts a gazelle hump.  But do I make these recipes?  I do not.  I just allow them to accumulate.  For a while I was pasting them in a big notebook (yes, I know, I’m an elderly housewife, I do things like that), but that got tiresome too.  Now I just keep piling them up in a big heap.

 

 

But if Vanna can do it, so can I!

 

 

I made ricotta cookies (AKA egg biscuits) at Christmastime, and they were very nice.  I will make them again.  They have definitely joined the regular rotation.  (I will post the recipe soon.  I recommend them.)

 

 

In search of the next interesting new recipe, I pulled out the Ladies’ Society cookbook distributed by the Methodist Church in Overton, Nebraska circa 1950.  (I think I got it on eBay; I bought one cookbook, and the person I bought it from asked if I wanted a whole bunch more, and I said “Why not?”, and she sent me about twenty bizarre and wonderful cookbooks from all over the USA.)  The Nebraska cookbook was well-loved by its previous owner; it has little notes like “Good!” and “Needs sugar” and “Try with black walnuts” written over some of the recipes.

 

 

One – a recipe for lemon refrigerator cookies – was marked “TRY.”

 

 

Who am I to argue?  I tried.

 

 

Mmph.  A little too lemony, if anything, and the second batch burned to a crisp.  Apparently “ten minutes at 400 degrees” meant something different in 1950 than it does now.  But they had a nice light texture (they reminded me of my mother’s refrigerator cookies, but they were better, if anything), and I brightened them up with a little powdered-sugar-and-milk glaze.  I will refine them further and let you know when the recipe is a complete success.

 

 

Next week: who knows?  Sachertorte?  Tarte tatin?  Sand tarts?  Fairy cake?

 

 

Ideas are welcome.  So are recipes. 

 

 

Write me, kids.  And make it interesting.

 

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