Goldendale, Washington

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 Goldendale is a town in Washington state, in Klickitat County not far north of the Columbia River. The sign at the city limits used to read like this (maybe it still does):

 

 

 

WELCOME TO GOLDENDALE

THE GOLDEN GATE

TO THE EVERGREEN STATE

 

 

When we made our yearly visits to my my paternal grandmother, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldendale was the last real town we passed through before we arrived at her house. We usually stopped for a burger. I wish I could remember the name of the burger place, because it was excellent.

 

 

Partner and I have passed through Goldendale a few times over the past fifteen years. It’s bigger than I remember, but I see from Wikipedia that it has less than four thousand residents, so it’s still pretty small.

 

 

In June 1918, astronomers William Campbell and Heber Curtis came to Goldendale to view a solar eclipse. This was an especially important eclipse, because Einstein’s theories predicted that the light of stars close to the sun would be deflected slightly, and everyone wanted to see whether or not it was true.

 

 

The Goldendale data (which wasn’t terrific) did not confirm Einstein’s theories. Luckily, other viewings over the next few years confirmed that Einstein was correct.

 

 

But Goldendale turns out to be a great place to have an observatory. The air is clear, and the weather is mostly cloudless. There’s a permanent observatory there now, in its own state park.

 

 

And here’s the thing: my father (who was six years old at the time) was only a few miles away from Campbell and Curtis, on his parents’ ranch, as Campbell and Curtis performed their observations.

 

 

The world is a very small place after all.

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Bears of the USA

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Bears are back in New England!

 

 

A bear was sighted in North Kingstown, Rhode Island only a few days ago. And there have been bears sighted on Cape Cod too. (Which is interesting, because they’d either have to clamber over one of the two bridges to the Cape, or ride on top of a vehicle to get there. Or swim. Or ride a floating log across the Cape Cod Canal. Or commandeer someone’s Humvee. Nothing’s impossible.)

 

 

Well, it’s like the Middle Ages around here.  The bear here in Rhode Island knocked over a chicken coop and made off with one of the chickens!

 

 

Our stuffed polar bear, Carbuncle, has his own thoughts on the subject. (Carbuncle, you might recall, won the Financial Times crossword puzzle contest about a year ago. This is a picture of him wandering the neighborhood last winter):

 

 

 

 

First of all: Carbuncle is glad that the bears are back. He’s less lonely now.

 

 

Second: Carbuncle wonders what kind of bears are back. Polar bears? Probably not. Ah well. Less competition for those tasty seals:

 

 

 

 

Also: will this mean less pick-a-nick baskets for Carbuncle to steal from friends and neighbors?

 

 

I direct you to the following cartoon for more information:

 

 

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For National Poetry Month: "Some Trees," by John Ashbery

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April is National Poetry Month. And today – April 18 – is “Poem In Your Pocket” day. Today’s the day to carry your favorite poem with you, and give it to people, and let people know.

 

 

I don’t have a single favorite poem. It depends on my mood, which is sometimes a little somber. But it’s April, so let’s have a brighter one today – a very early one by John Ashbery:

 

 

 

Some Trees

 

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

 

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

 

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

 

And glad not to have invented 
Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

 

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.

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Gerard Butler

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Partner and I saw “Olympus Has Fallen” last weekend when we were down on Cape Cod.

 

 

Oh dear. It’s dreadful. If you really want to see it, here’s what you do: queue up “Independence Day” and “Die Hard” and “Red Dawn” one after another, and hit yourself on the head very hard with a ball peen hammer while you’re watching them.

 

 

Here’s a quick plot summary, with spoilers: North Koreans make a (very unlikely) commando attack on the White House. The North Koreans have incredible space-age weapons, and evidently all we Americans have is handguns. The American President (Aaron Eckhart) is a charming weenie who gives the North Koreans two-thirds of the computer codes they want, because “they’ll never get the third part.” Naturally, they figure out the third part on their own.

 

 

But that’s okay: a superhuman Secret Service operative, played by Gerard Butler, kills all the North Koreans and saves the President (and, incidentally, the United States of America).

 

 

Which brings us to Gerard Butler.

 

 

You might remember Gerard as King Leonidas in “300,” gigantic and bearded and powerful and angry. Well, god bless him, that’s pretty much his schtick. He’s big and dark and nicely built, and has blue eyes which range from Warm to Stern to Threatening. He’s one of those men on whom stubble looks not only good, but natural.

 

 

He’s a co-producer of this movie, so you’d expect his character to be The Hero, and you’d be right. He’s a friend of the Weenie President, and a second (and much better) father to the Weenie President’s son.

 

 

Also, he’s an unstoppable killer.

 

 

A while back, I wrote about Victor Mature, and the uses of big handsome muscular men in the movies.

 

 

“Olympus Has Fallen” establishes that nothing has changed.

 

 

We love you, Gerard, the way audiences loved Victor in the 1950s.

 

 

Now: please make better movies.

 

 

Over and out!

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Famous last words

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Funny how someone’s always hanging around to jot down the last words of well-known people. 

 

 

These last words fall into (many) categories:

 

 

Incomprehensible: “Moose Indian” (Thoreau).

 

 

Moral / religious: “See in what peace a Christian can die!” (Addison).

 

 

Visionary: “Mozart . . .” (Gustav Mahler).

 

 

Egotistical: “What an artist dies with me!” (Nero).

 

 

Mysterious: “More light!” (Goethe).

 

 

Sardonic: “Are they lighting the fires already?” (Voltaire).

 

 

Stoic: “Livia, remember the days of our married life” (Augustus Caesar).

 

 

But let’s face it: the moment of death is probably very scary.

 

 

So let’s think of the boxer Buddy Baer, who sat up in bed a moment before he died, and said, simply:

 

 

“Oh my god, here I go!”

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Horsemeat

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There’s been a recent scare in Europe over the use of horsemeat in prepared foods. It showed up in one country after another (evidently a processing plant in Romania was providing the horseflesh).

 

Then, most shockingly, it was in some of the stuff sold in Ikea.

 

Ikea! Nice sweet friendly Ikea!

 

It’s nothing to me. I’ve eaten horsemeat knowingly. There was a cunning little butchershop in Morocco with a nice painting of a racehorse over the door; it took me a while to figure out what that meant, but I got it after a while. Then I realized that the Belgian lady who owned the snack shop downtown was using horsemeat in her hamburgers. (It turns out that horsemeat has a pleasant flavor, sweeter than beef, and doesn’t change color very much when it’s cooked, so it still looks a little raw when you eat it.) I used to take American friends there, just to see how they’d react. Most didn’t notice a thing. One friend sent his burger back, because he thought it was underdone, and couldn’t understand why the meat was still pinkish. I never had the heart to tell him.

 

 

It’s all cultural. I had rabbit and frog in France last October, because how often do you see them on the menu in the United States? The rabbit was delicious; the frog was a little muddy and fishy. I love squid (which is much more palatable as “calamari”), but still struggle a little with octopus, which has a very strong smell and taste. I had paella a long time ago in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and found a tiny starfish in the rice, and wasn’t sure if it was for decoration or meant to be eaten. (I didn’t eat it. Even I have my limits.) I love sushi, and one of my favorites is unagi, which is eel with plum sauce. Eel! Horrible slimy snaky eel!

 

 

Herewith one of my favorite I’ll-never-make-this recipes:

 

 

Stewed Dog (to be served over rice)

3 kg dog meat*
1 1/2 cups vinegar
60 peppercorns, crushed
6 tablespoons salt
12 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 cup oil
6 cups onion, sliced
3 cups tomato sauce
10 cups water
6 cups red pepper, cut into strips
6 pieces bay leaf
1 teaspoon tabasco sauce
1 1/2 cups liver spread**
1 whole fresh pineapple, cut ½” thick

1. First, kill a medium sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire.

2. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later (may be used in other recpies)

3. Cut meat into 1″ cubes. Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt and garlic for 2 hours.

4. Fry meat in oil using a large wok over an open fire, then add onions and chopped pineapple and saute until tender.

5. Pour in tomato sauce and boiling water, add green pepper, bay leaf and tabasco.

6. Cover and simmer over warm coals until meat is tender. Blend in liver spread and cook for additional 5-7 minutes.

* You can substitute lamb for dog. The taste is similar, but not as pungent.
** Smooth liver pate will do as well.

 

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For Sunday: Paul Evans sings "Seven Litttle Girls"

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Here’s a song I remember very clearly from my childhood, performed by its writer, Paul Evans. It was often on the radio in the early 1960s; it’s what you call a “novelty hit.”

 

 

Listen to it until it gets stuck in your mind, as it’s still stuck in mine, after fifty years.

 

 

Keep your mind on your driving,

Keep your hands on the wheel;

Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead;

We’re having fun

Sitting in the back seat,

Kissing and a-hugging with Fred!

 

 

 

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Tulipa tarda

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All of the early bulbs are blooming at once this year: squill, and snowdrops, and hyacinths, and daffodils, and crocus. The tulips are holding off, as always.

 

 

Except Tulipa tarda.

 

 

Funny: the name, Tulipa tarda, means “late tulip.” But hereabouts, it blooms before all of the other tulips. It’s a botanical tulip, which means that it was never hybridized; it still grows wild on the plateaus of central Asia.

 

 

It is a small tulip, with bright yellow-and-white starlike flowers on short stems. Most hybridized tulips bloom for a year or two and then die away; Tulipa tarda goes on and on for years and years.

 

 

I love hybridized tulips, don’t get me wrong. They can be extraordinary: the parrots, and the lilies, and the Rembrandts. The colors and shapes are beautiful.

 

 

But one of the charms of spring bulbs is their simplicity. We don’t look for lots of variation in our crocus, or our squill, or our snowdrops: we just love looking out the window and seeing hundreds of them thronging the garden.

 

 

That’s what I love about Tulipa tarda. They are simple and unextraordinary and still very beautiful. They pop up from the grass and shine up at you like little stars.

 

 

If you want something different and easy and charming in your garden in early spring, go buy a few T. tarda bulbs.

 

 

You won’t regret it.

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Annette Funicello

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Annette Funicello passed away on Monday. It wasn’t a surprise; she’s been sick for a long time – she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987, and has been battling it ever since.

 

 

But it is a very sad occasion for me.

 

 

Annette was my very first television crush, back in the late 1950s / early 1960s, when she was one of the original Mousketeers. She was so pretty! And she was always smiling!

 

 

Annette had a singing career, and she even had her own TV show for a while. Then, in the mid-1960s, there were the Beach Party movies with Frankie Avalon. I never tire of seeing those beach movies; they are eternal 1960s summer, with no shadow of Vietnam or the counterculture. Annette is always the Good Girl; Frankie is always tempted by the Bad Girl (Connie Stevens, or Luciana Paluzzi, or whomever), but he always comes back to Annette.

 

 

Annette did occasional gigs in the 70s and 80s, but not much. Then, after her MS was diagnosed in 1987, she and Frankie Avalon made the dreadful-but-loveable “Back to the Beach,” with Connie Stevens and Pee-Wee Herman. It’s a twenty-years-later beach movie, which tries to recapture the feeling of those madcap stupid 1960s beach movies. It fails, naturally.

 

 

But who cares? It was fun. I watched it three or four times, because I loved Annette.

 

 

And I still do.

 

 

Rest in peace, sweetheart.

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Victor Mature

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Turner Classic Movies has been showing an awful lot of Victor Mature pictures lately: “The Robe” and “Demetrius and the Gladiators” on Easter, and “My Gal Sal” not long after.

 

 

Oh, you don’t know him? See the above photo. Victor Mature (which was, believe it or not, his real name) was a big handsome Italian-American who appeared in a whole bunch of movies in the 1940s and 1950s. He was every cliché you could think of: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested. He was tall, dark, and handsome. His shirt seemed to come off in every single movie he was in. (Even as the songwriter Paul Dresser in “My Gal Sal,” he gets tarred and feathered, and we get to see Carole Landis gently clean the tar and feathers from his immense torso.)

 

 

Hollywood is all about pretty girls and handsome men. Back in the 1990s, the house movie reviewer for “Premiere” magazine, Libby Gelman-Waxner (who was really Paul Rudnick), answered a letter from a reader thusly (I paraphrase):

 

 

Dear Libby: You seem to like or dislike movies based on whether or not you’re attracted to the lead actors. Libby: that’s not what movies are all about. (signed: Reader.)

Dear Reader: Oh yes it is.

 

 

The above photo is from “Samson and Delilah,” in which the lovely but very petite Hedy Lamarr played Delilah. This inspired Groucho Marx’s great comment (which I’ve bowdlerized slightly): “I don’t like seeing movies in which the men’s breasts are bigger than the women’s.”

 

 

But you can’t deny that Victor had That Certain Something.

 

 

There were lots of other big lugs in movies in those days – Aldo Ray, Gilbert Roland, Jack Carson, Stewart Granger, even Keenan Wynn. They were all big and beefy.

 

 

But none of them had big dark vulnerable eyes like Victor Mature.

 

 

We miss you, Victor.

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