When You're Walter Gotell, Life's Never Easy
Now Playing: The Pretty Things--"Buzz the Jerk"

Blerg. 

A commentary on the last few days (with apologies and thanks to Tina Fey).

It's already getting better, what with the movies and the soups and all, but I just wanted a memento for posterity. The weather fits, at least.

Off to cut up tuna!

Look Out, Honey, 'Cause I'm Using Technology
Now Playing: Carl Maria von Weber--"Overture" to "Der Freischutz"

"The alchemist says your HMO was destroyed in a goblin attack."

I apparently need to learn more about World of Warcraft so I can mock it more accurately.

So barely a day after I write the first paragraph of the previous entry, I have my own personal Larry Craig moment at work. I find Craig a terribly amusing figure--these secretly sybaritic gay-bashers usually are, and Craig's a little more brazen than most. It helps that he's a colossal embarrassment to people who've done their level best to ruin the country for the past seven years. I'd never heard anything about the cult of bathroom toetapping (I guess I move in the wrong circles), but such moved through my mind as I did something a couple of days ago that every one of the people reading this has done--on the toilet. Fluffy (who I wanted to have certified at least five times today, God help me) installed new locks on the bathrooms (bathroom locks are good things to have in a public place, I'm sure we'll all agree) and very nice they looked, too. So I... performed my ablutions in a fair amount of confidence I wouldn't be disturbed. No sooner had I finished than I heard a splintering sound and looked up to see the door open, the wooden base of the lock fractured and some dope in a shirt and tie standing there with a suitably shamefaced look on his mug. Either he realized what a stupid thing he'd done or he sensed I wasn't into him. Was this part of some dipshit management training seminar way back when? Did "Brad" (let's call him such) have to wrench open doors to show he wouldn't take no for an answer, that he was a winner? I pictured him in a disused portion of some dismal office park, straining to pull yet another door open to the sound of his seminar leader clapping his hands, shrieking "earn this, Brad!" with a dog-eared copy of Sun Xi lying at his feet. But then I do these things.

 And if it has to happen, having the overture to Der Freischutz as your incidental music works great--I'm really trying to keep my face straight as I type this.

Equinox (1970): The Criterion Collection is an ongoing gem, having released probably hundreds of classic movies with full DVD extras, the masterpieces of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (no filmmakers have ever come closer to creating genuine magic on screen, I think) such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), and probably their most famous movie, The Red Shoes (1948), receiving particularly sumptuous treatment. Curiously, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the best of the lot and one of my ten favorite movies ever, hasn't yet, so far as I know. So why the Criterion people did Equinox I'll never know. An uncharitable part of me suspects that they, like many "serious" film critics, look down on horror and fantasy movies and decided Equinox was good enough to "represent," which, if true, was very, very wrong. There's an interview with horror writer/icon Forrest Ackerman that tries to explain the importance of the movie which was probably wasted on me, but then that was only because the movie wasn't very good (I guess). A "kid" named David (who looks older than I am) winds up in a hospital with a cross clenched in his hand and babbling about assorted nonsense. A reporter and doctor piece together his story and find out that he and three friends went off to find their professor friend who vanished in a nearby state park. A park ranger with prominent eyebrows tells them that the professor probably went back to the city. Despite some sort of alleged training in the occult, David fails to see anything wrong with the ranger being named "Asmodeus." There's some ancient book (I suspect this had something to do with Sam Raimi's original inspirations for the Evil Dead movies), monsters, other worlds, lots of running around, and wooden acting from the two romantic leads. The two mildly comic sidekicks fare much better, although much of the comedy comes unintentionally from the girl's rapidly shifting hair-lengths (her boyfriend played by Franklin Boers, later to become Frank Bonner and WKRP In Cincinnati's lustful Herb Tarlick). What distinguishes Equinox--to a point--is the model work on a number of monsters that menace the party. It doesn't quite rise to the level of Harryhausen, but it has its own rough-hewn charm, and it's rather impressive that it all started out on a student project for less than $7,000. Still, the sometimes clever special effects (watching the clay human "victims" get tossed around is genuinely hilarious) fail to make this much of a flick worth watching.

Green For Danger (1946): Criterion gets back to what it does best in releasing Sidney Gilliat's little gem of a whodunit from the immediate postwar British cinema. A couple of mysterious deaths take place in the wake of V-1 attacks on a rural English hospital, and Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard (Alastair Sim) finds himself called in to deal with the matter.  I made the huge mistake of reading Geoffrey O'Brien's superb introductory essay before writing this, and now feel horribly inadequate, my limbs all shrivelled up like a dead cockroach. He explains it with a verve and authority that I could never manage, but the movie's still a lot of fun, mixing the tropes and visual themes of the wartime drama, mystery, and, in a couple of places, horror movie, while remaining a fun, brisk little thriller. It helps that the original story was changed from the Blitz of 1940 to the V-1s of 1944, both fresher in the mind and sneakier in the attack, ratcheting up the tension. While the great Trevor Howard, Leo Genn (just as genially oily as he'd be twenty-five years later in Pete Walker's mildly disappointing sleaze classic Die Screaming, Marianne), and Megs Jenkins are excellent as some of the hospital suspects, it's Sim's show, as he perfectly inhabits a deceptively buffoonish Columbo-like detective who, even when he seems to have everything in hand, doesn't quite have all the answers. This would probably make a great bookend to a "Sim night"--Green For Danger, A Christmas Carol (1951; Sim's still probably the best Scrooge of all time), and The Belles of St. Trinian's (1955), not that I'm trying to give anyone ideas.

Dungeon Girls And Mutant Squash
Now Playing: Lily Allen--"Everything's Just Wonderful"

Something I struggle to avoid in writing the blog is a rote recitation of the various things I've done or experienced--shows, parties, movies, books, walking--without some sort of context. One of the most frequent accusations made against blogs is that they're nothing more than narcissistic navel-gazing, which I find a little churlish. Many are, but all too often the accusations are made by paid writers studying pop culture for various publications, which really amounts to navel-gazing writ large and therefore renders them hypocrites of the first water (and nervous nellies--remember how the internet was going to make books obsolete?). In their defense, I suspect it's really their justified fear of the notion that anyone can write interesting and quality stuff for anonymous consumption, whether the material consists of weighty thoughts on politics and philosophy or "what I ate for breakfast"--a "celebrated journalist" on the British Horror Films forum once tore into a several-page rant on the subject, essentially accusing bloggers of stealing the bread from his children's mouths. My own reaction, sadly, has been to internalize this attitude and minimize the purely personal details (which usually aren't that interesting anyway) and lean more towards the cultural and culinary criticism that I enjoy doing in the first place. It becomes a problem when my social life overheats to the degree that it has recently.

Simply put, I am... seeing somebody. I don't want to write too much about it because of the whole aforementioned "personal downplay" mode, but also, I think, in a weird way, because I want it to stay ours. Suffice it to say, she's terrific, and it's an unusually pleasant meeting of circumstances: I've known her slightly for some time but don't really know much about her, and vice versa. So we're somewhat familiar with each other but there's still a lot to learn, which I think will be very, very fun. It occurred over the course of a weekend involving both a pumpkin-carving party and a happily abortive attempt to see The Darjeeling Limited at the Michigan Theater (it was sold out). This wasn't entirely a bad thing, especially as I have issues with Wes Anderson. I enjoyed Bottle Rocket (1996) and loved Rushmore (1998; although in the latter's case, it was probably more the soundtrack than anything else), but found The Royal Tenenbaums (2002; she disagrees, but who the hell names their falcon Mordecai?) a militantly twee toothache. I didn't bother to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and have heard a few negative rumblings over Darjeeling. Apparently Laura and Steve tried to get into the Q-n-A session with Anderson and that lovable scamp Jason Schwartzman at Borders a week ago, only to find themselves barred because they weren't "with the University" (for most cultural events in Ann Arbor, a vital requirement for "personhood"). Fortunately (for me, anyway, because it was hilarious), they got to watch the whole thing on a TV screen set up on the first floor. The same thing happened to me when Rackham Auditorium was too packed to hear Jeffrey Eugenides; Middlesex worshipper that I am, I found the concept a little too well-meaningly weird, and left. The intereview was, by all accounts, a cacophony of ass-kissing, with Schwartzman shamelessly mugging to the crowd at the end. The stench of phony Klostermanesque irony that ruined a perfectly good cultural moment in the late 90s hung over the whole idea of The Darjeeling Limited from the get-go, and I wasn't that sorry we couldn't get in. We all went to the Eight-Ball and had a better time than I thought we would, as I'd only gotten two hours of sleep from the night before.

 Mean Girls (2004): As relatively independent as I like to think myself from the world of celebrity obsessions, I have only myself to blame for not seeing this enjoyable little flick before, and all down to fear of what  Lindsay Lohan performance looked like in this day and age. The only other movie I'd really seen her in before was the lackluster remake (Lackluster? A remake? No!) several years before of The Parent Trap, and she wasn't that bad (the reason to see that one is that Natasha Richardson has never looked better). Besides, I love Tina Fey. 30 Rock could have been a stultifying landslide of smug in-jokes and tired hipster snark a la Wet Hot American Summer--excepting, of course, that canoe rescue scene and the great Paul Rudd--and it's instead one of the funniest comedies out there right now, and largely down to the quality and timing of the writing. Mean Girls doesn't quite rise to that level (although few things can) and gets a little preachy at the end, but it's a lot of fun and funny with it. Caddy (Lohan) and her parents return from the African bush to America, where Caddy has to maneuver the minefield of high school social life, especially the title characters (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried). While finding allies in an understanding teacher (Fey) and a nonconformist friend (Lizzy Caplan), Caddy finds herself seduced by the more privileged lifestyle and has to make some tough choices. That last bit is the original proposition, with Solzhenitsyn's quip about the line between good and evil made flesh in an American high school (pretentious but true). Though onetime Party of Five moppet Chabert's rather entertaining as the deceptively saccharine Gretchen, the lovely Caplan's the best reason to see the movie besides Fey's writing--she actually makes me wish I'd watched The Class while it was on.

Oh, this is pretty sweet, too.

The Unknown Evil of Chard
Now Playing: Laura Veirs--"Cannon Fodder"

Now that I'm nominally, more or less, a sous-chef, I get to have even more mildly pretentious thoughts about the way I approach my job, which, with the definite exception of my boss and the moderate exception of the money (I should be paid more--in real terms, not in the way everyone should be paid more--but it could be worse), I greatly enjoy. I'm more firmly convinced, too, that my leaving the new restaurant was the right decision. I need to devote my full energies to the cafe and I've also come to the conclusion that there are a good many things about haute cuisine that I find rather silly. The place where I worked for two months is, as my chef of two months put it, pretty much as high-end as Ann Arbor gets. People who go there pay for both taste and presentation, and so I see the point of some of the things I did, like peeling asparagus stalks to be batter-fried (thus wasting perfectly good asparagus). Straining stocks, though, left a weird taste in my mouth. Most stocks involve the same basic ingredients that their eventual soups will--generally a mirepoix of onions, garlic, celery, often carrot, with meat or poultry carcasses if desired--and the necessity to pour it throuhg a large strainer and then through a fine chinois lined with a towel or cheesecloth is just a little too precious. It didn't help that as number of chefs and cooks of my present and past acquaintance seem to approach their craft as a kind of macho accessory, indulging in needless persnicketude for the sake of looking mysterious and authoritative; it's basically a way of showing how big their cocks are, something in which I want no--okay, little--part.

 I tried to drown my partial sorrrows Friday night with limited success. The Blind Pig seemed curiously lame (although I know a fair number of people who might think "seemed curiously" should be replaced with "was as always") and the music was a slight letdown. Part of it was down to me going out for the first time in... three months, I think, with a probably depressurization effect. I didn't feel like moving around, and was unable to properly say hello to a good many people I'd have liked to greet. The day, too, had already been so terrific that the evening already had a three-fourths chance of disillusion. I didn't stay to hear Great Lakes Myth Society (you know, the reason I was there)--they're always good, but I'd been put nearly to sleep by their predecessors Frontier Ruckus, who follow this well-trodden alt-country groove that comes close to proving Chuck Klosterman isn't entirely full of shit (make careful note that I said "comes close"--he's still a great example of everything wretched about my demographic). He had made the observation that most alt-folk/country bands make the tropes of pre-Grand Ole Opry country a fetish, singing about situations and characters they'd have rarely encountered in real life, making rural poverty and the fast-disappearing, alternately culturally worshipped and institutionally fucked-over agricultural existence in this country an aesthetic accessory. As with a lot of stereotypes, there are enough anecdotal examples to make such generalizations stick a little in the mind without any actual widespread proof (Klosterman's terribly good at bad-faith, self-serving "populism"--he's sort of the "hip" David Brooks). Nevertheless, Frontier Ruckus provided the former that night, at least to my likely prejudiced ears--it all seemed so mopey. In fairness, maybe I'd heard too many livelier bands of the type before to sit still without wiping my eyes. Samar and Ricardo stopped by, and I got to say an all-too-brief hello to the always friendly John Krohn, former producer for the Casionauts. Best of all, speaking of the Casionauts, there was also the pleasant surprise of "Deastro," the opening act, who delivered an unexpectedly blistering and melodic performance on drums and presumably pre-programmed keyboard, sometimes reminding me of the Casionauts, sometimes of Arcade Fire. It was an interesting bit of programming on the Pig's part, and his show was the highlight of the evening.

 This weekend also saw the first of my quasi-official experiments in soup-making at home. I'd made vichysoisse and stracciatella before, the first of which was pretty good, the second of which lacked appeal, but had no thought of offering the results to the cafe. I'd brought two in before--garlic and roasted red pepper soup and a black bean and pumpkin soup with a spicy flavor given by ginger and cumin. The second's been quite popular, while the first, though it looks great and has a lot of potential, lacks heft (I've often thought potatoes and mushrooms might do the trick, and may try them out at home). I've since built up a backlog of the soups I wanted to try, and did the first one Saturday.

Caldo Verde (Portuguese greens soup)

1 1/2 tbsp olive or veggie oil, 1 medium chopped onion, and 2 cloves garlic

Heat and stir in soup pot 5-10 mins or until tender, not browned.

8 cups of water (or 6 cups water and 2 cups chicken or veggie stock), 4 medium potatoes, thinly sliced, 1 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp pepper

Stir in, bring to boil, reduce heat, and simmer until potatoes soft (20 mins?). Remove pot from heat and mash potatoes in pot to provide chunkiness. Return to heat.

1/2 tsp veggie oil, 6 oz linguica or chorizo sausage, thinly sliced

Brown in skillet over medium-high heat. Add to soup pot. Pour 1 cup of soup into skillet, scrape up browned bits and return to soup pot. Simmer 5 mins.

4 cups shredded kale, Swiss chard, or collards

Add and simmer 5 mins.

2 tbsp lemon juice

Add and serve in warmed bowls.

Hmmm. The recipe came from the All About Soups and Stews volume of the Joy of Cooking series, so I suppose caldo verde must have gone hand in hand with Harvey Wallbangers for the man when he got home to Levittown from his grey flannel job in the city after wondering why Adlai Stevenson even bothered running for President. I thought it lacked heft, but then I'm not a natural soup-eater; I'm just apparently good at making them (I don't say this as a boast--it's a matter of genuine puzzlement to me that I'm good at making soups for work but not all that wild about eating them). For me, soups should be a comfort food, thick and filling (insert joke). I like soups that come closer to the consistency of stews--thin, fluid soups don't really rock my world. Caldo verde turned out to be a bit runny for my taste, even after I let it simmer down for something like an hour. The cooking itself was, as it usually is, very enjoyable--I had the outside door open so the fire alarm wouldn't go off, Joy Division (anyone who thought John Simm was a deceptive marvel as Joy Division guitarist and New Order frontman Bernard Sumner in 24 Hour Party People should check out his deliriously awesome performance as the Master in the last three episodes of the latest Doctor Who series--he really is something to see), Elliott Smith, Feist and Ennio Morricone were on the stereo, and Saturday afternoons are almost by their very nature a pleasure. It was interesting working with chorizo for the first time, especially as I found out that the bit I'd sampled the night before hadn't in fact been "like pepperoncini" but instead had been raw chorizo. Cooked, it was great, with the sharp paprika-inflected taste (still wary about paprika) slightly modified by the surrounding soup. The potatoes worked out trememdously well; slicing them with a chef's knife almost came out to mandoline quality and they cooked relatively fast. If only the rest of it turned out so well... I remain undaunted, though, as I'm guessing part of my culinary education is figuring out what doesn't work as much as the opposite. With caldo verde... it'd look a lot better with cream. There's no doubt about it, especially with the contrasting colors of the greens and chorizo; the latter in particular stains the whole thing a brownish-red. I wonder about the greens, too. I'm pretty sure I've eaten chard in salads (probably when I couldn't get any kale, rapini or arugula at the farmers' market--one sign of my present discrimination/pretentiousness vis-avis salads is that I now find spinach and romaine a little bland and can't even think about iceberg lettuce without my gorge rising), but the taste when cooked is supposed to be lighter and less insistent than the other greens specified in the recipe. I've eaten and enjoyed both kale and collards, and wonder if the whole wouldn't have been better had Hiller's actually had kale when I went there and had I not chosen collards instead of the unknown evil of chard. That was too good, by the way, to pass up; usually in the entry titles I go for some cheesy song lyric or movie line--inapposite, too as I just pull them out of my ass because they sound good--but that's a keeper, eh?* It's unfortunate, as chard's a rather attractive green, much like a well-built fern. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've saved four or five quarts, and may try adding cream later.

*Cf. the great Patrick Magee in Zulu--"Damn you, Chard! Damn all you butchers!"

**The best thing about the process, of course, is that I got to use my new food processor! I can see why so many cooks fall in love with theirs. Mine's ridiculously noisy, but I think it's just showing off.

Here Come Them Drums
Now Playing: Sondre Lerche--"Virtue and Wine"

What a day. Gorgeous outside, I have a lovely early morning coffee with my friend and colleague (first coffee I think I've had in years), a relatively stress-free day at work, am officially confirmed sous-chef at my job (mind you, again it's the same thing I've pretty much been doing for the past couple of years, with inventory thrown in), receive a few unexpected compliments and relax in the cool sun and shadow watching pretty girls pass by and chatting with aforementioned colleague and husband.

And Great Lakes Myth Society has yet to play the Blind Pig tonight. I'll have to remember this one.

His Final Biscuits
Now Playing: Ananda Shankar--"Streets of Calcutta"

A weird but good weekend--the autumnal equinox, Yom Kippur, Penn State at Michigan, my final weekend at "the other restaurant," and I just found out that a a guy I know in Iraq returned safe and sound! I think the one down-side must have been Brett Somers' passing (first Charles Nelson Reilly and now this!). RIP, Brett.

 Zoey Dean, Some Like It Hot: An A-List Novel (2006): I dimly remember a personal pledge made at the beginning of the year to venture outside my literary comfort zone a little, reading Tim LaHaye and Larry Jenkins' "Rapture" thriller Left Behind in January. The pledge fell into abeyance (not necessarily because of Left Behind; once you get past the absolutely ludicrous premise, it's actually pretty not-all-that-bad in certain places), until I was in the Borders entrance on day and noticed this thing sitting deservedly on the bargain shelves. I figured a bit of trash was just what I needed--the A-List series appeared to be the saga of ridiculously wealthy Beverly Hills teens, and a fitting successor to my Left Behind adventure. "It's prom season, and no town does prom like Tinsel Town. Ben is back for the summer--" oh, for God's sake, there are romantic complications and shocking revelations about various characters' parents' pasts, much of which can only be found after wading through an avalanche of detailed clothing, furniture, and various other consumer goods descriptions, generally focusing on designer names. There are three main characters--Anna, Cammie, and Sam. Anna's beautiful and good, Cammie's beautiful and bitchy, and Sam is beautiful and... well, sassy, which is unsurprising in this context, as she's also worried about her weight (not-"perfect"=sassy). Insofar as the story's involving at all, it's usually in the company of Sam, whose plan to make a documentary about the sorry losers at her high school who actually want to have something as declasse as prom becomes a kinder, gentler one towards the end. Cammie's also surprisingly entertaining, especially after accidentally burning down a classic Hollywood hotel and feeling mildly guilty about it. Anna is boring and pretentious, having a boyfriend whose idea of playful fondling is to hit her with pillows and make her say "Ben is the king!" three times in French. Quel dommage! There were moments when I just had to put the book down and look around in astonishment at the prose. It's breathtakingly awful, but often amusingly so (certainly enough to keep me reading, obviously). The one genuinely sore spot I found was the "fun" they have with a dorky clinical intern who has to chaperone one of their friends, on leave from rehab, to prom, which probably results in his losing his job. Tee hee. Zoey Dean apparently "divides her time between Beverly Hills and several small islands in the Caribbean" and "is currently working on her next juicy A-LIST novel, at an undisclosed location." All several of her, apparently. Some highlights:

"The words [to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet] had struck her in their simple profundity. Not only had she memorized the verse, but she'd also hand-lettered the words on an index card and put the card inside the top desk drawer in her private study. (That year, her mother's designer had redone Anna's bedroom and adjoining study suite in Chinese antiques from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Anna's new desk had been made from priceless huanghuali hardwood whose hand-carved pieces fit together without glue or nails.)" (50)

It's terribly, terribly important that we know this about Anna's bedroom, "adjoining study suite," and desk. In fairness, it's not so much the description I mind as the furniture catalog style in which it's rendered.

"Her eyes searched his. 'I really think... if we're honest with each other, we can be...' She searched for the right words. 'Far from the madding crowd.'

"He pointed at her playfully. 'Thomas Hardy. You thought I wouldn't know.'

" 'The sky was clear--remarkably clear--and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse,' Anna half-whispered. 'Isn't that amazing, that one man could write something like that?'

"Ben's strong hands circled her slender waist. 'I think you're amazing.' " (52)

This scene conjures up a mental image of a harried, down-on-her-luck English graduate component of "Zoey's" probable gestalt desperately trying to rustle up enough money to take the GREs, scribbling frantically in a 6-by-6 cubicle provided by Alloy Entertainment (the book's publishers) on her portion of the story, later confronted by an angry, cigar-chomping editor with "Thomas Hardy? What the fuck is this???"

"Sam was a Hollywood kid who knew every Hollywood trick in the book. And now she new something else; the truth about making love for the first time feeling beautiful in the eyes of a boy who adored you. Compared to this, drunken sex sucked ass." (185)

Actually, that was pretty funny, but the "you" after "adored" is pretty jarring.

"As for Amy, Twilla, and Heatherly, they were a triumvirate of blond, redhead, and brunette, but each with at least one facial feature that would knock them off the pretty list. Ben hated to admit this, but it was true. Twilla's eyes were too close-set; Amy's lips were almost painfully thin; and Heatherly's nose resembled a snowball that had been thrown at her face and smushed on impact. Ben was, of course, polite and friendly, complimenting their dresses, etc." (237)

That's just in case you thought you could make the "A-List." Ben's the "sensitive" one, incidentally (although he's also Anna's boyfriend, which explains much).

" 'Careful of your heads, ladies and gentlemen,' [the pilot] called over the sound of the engine, and offered a hand to help them into the copter, a commercial version of Marine One, the official helicopter of the president of the United States." (249)

I don't know what I found funnier--the fact that Sam and the gang took a chopper to prom (because limos are so gauche) or that "Zoey" found it necessary to bring in and slowly describe "Marine One, the official helicopter of the president of the United States," though an opportunity was missed, I think, to go the whole hog and identify "Marine One" as a "noun." Sometimes Some Like It Hot (come to think of it, "Zoey" had a lot of nerve naming it after one of the funniest movies ever--and unexpectedly the second Billy Wilder reference in as many entries; he and Peter Graves are starting to usurp this thing wholesale) reminds me of an Encyclopedia Brown adventure with sex, booze, drugs, and plastic surgery (regrettably, a delightful alternative, the Modern Humorist classic "Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated MP3s" seems to have gone off-line). 

If I had the choice to read it again, I wouldn't.

Overlord (1975): I first read about this in Entertainment Weekly, probably about the time it was released on DVD for the can't-thank-them-enough Criterion Collection, having never heard of it before. Using archival Second World War footage from Britain's Imperial War Museum for what seems like half the movie, filmmaker Stuart Cooper portrays the journey of Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) from callow, dreamy army recruit, through training and the inevitably short wartime romance, to his eventual fate at the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. While aiming for a kitchen-sink realism that it mostly achieves, Overlord also has a faintly hallucinatory patina, due to the bucolic nature of the countryside filming, the eerie calmness with which the soldiers face potential death in combat, and Paul Glass' pastoral, Vaughan Williamsy score. Stirner is excellent as a young man both utterly heedless of his situation and accepting of it at the same time. The very good cast is pretty much entirely made of unknowns, although Davyd Harries, as the wisecracking Welshman Jack (his explanation as to why he was never made an officer is one of the film's highlights), went on to a pretty decent career in British TV and films (among his roles was Shapp in the controversial 1979 Doctor Who story "The Armageddon Factor"). Overlord's a haunting movie, but a weird mix--both behind and ahead of its time, combining the anti-Establishment bitterness of 60s flicks like How I Won The War with the nearly Zen stasis of 90s productions like The Thin Red Line.

 

Muerte Para Las Almejas!
Now Playing: The Polyphonic Spree--"Younger Yesterday"

This Saturday will be my last day at the new job. After almost two months, I've been forced to conclude that I can't do both jobs and give them the energy they both deserve, mainly because it's kicking my ass. As the season will only get busier, it would be unfair to them for me to keep working there with a progressively declining rate of effort (and unfair to me as... it's kicking my ass). The plot thickened after I was made "head cook" at my main job a few weeks ago. Don't be fooled--it's really just the job I've been doing for the past three years at greatly expanded hours with much more baking. The good thing is that I'll start doing a lot of R&D at home, which I eagerly anticipate. It's a shame, sort of, as the new crowd is a pretty decent sort, although a little prone to the kind of macho bluster that stereotype generally assigns kitchen workers (if I have to hear anyone say "fatties"--nothing to do with marijuana--one more time...). The results? I"m a little over a grand richer, I've received confirmation of my cooking skills from yet another independent source (everyone said they'd be sorry to see me go), I've managed to save a fair amount of money by not going out as often as I used to (although I miss my friends, and it'll definitely be nice to hang out again), and I've picked up a nice little grab-bag of other prep skills, which will stand me in good stead, if not in my main job, then in my cooking research at home. I've also discovered that I really don't want to end up in the world of fine dining. I suspected this before, but it was nice to have it confirmed. More on that later, maybe.

 Stalag 17 (1953): William Holden never quite became the "brand-name" star that semi-contemporaries such as Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne did, which is a shame, because he was a great actor and made some fantastic movies, several with one of Hollywood's greatest directors, Billy Wilder. It may have been because he never really established an easily identifiable on-screen persona, as with Wayne's Paleolithic masculinity and Stewart's aw-shucks shambling (belied in the latter's case with Anthony Mann's tough Westerns and the Hitchcock masterpieces like Rear Window and Vertigo, but still his main folk memory, I think). He came pretty close in some of his movies with Wilder, though, particularly in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Stalag, with a hard-bitten cynicism that probably came too close to that of Humphrey Bogart (his co-star in the next Wilder collaboration, 1954's Sabrina) for him to make it his own. In Stalag, accurately described by Leonard Maltin as the "grandaddy of all World War II POW movies," he plays Sgt. Sefton, an inmate in a German camp for Air Corps sergeants, and widely suspected by his fellows of being the stoolie responsible for all their escape plans going awry. Wilder was one of Hollywood's greatest masters of genre-blending, with liberal dollops of comedy (particularly courtesy of Robert Strauss as the lascivious "Animal," Harvey Lembeck--the future Eric von Zipper in the "Frankie and Annette" Beach Party movies--as the wisecracking Shapiro, and this other guy whose name I don't remember who does genuinely entertaining movie-star impressions) mixed in with the grim seriousness of the situation. While The Great Escape (1963) is a much greater cinematic experience, I think Stalag 17 is actually a better movie. Sefton's the "hero," but it's quite clear that he's more than willing to go out for himself when the circumstances demand it. The paranoia engendered by the stoolie's actions make the moral situation much more ambiguous than in the later POW escape movies, and it's a testament to Wilder's ability that the drama and comedy are so expertly blended (the only false notes being the rather rushed bit in which everyone discovers the stoolie's identity, and one jarringly uncharacteristic move by Sefton towards the end). Peter Graves is in it, too, by the way. That makes two blog entries in a row. You know, people used to make jokes about Michael Caine, but he's fucking everywhere!!! One couldn't take leave of it, either, without mentioning Otto Preminger's hilarious, Werner Klemperer-inspiring performance as the commandant (who finds it necessary to put on his boots when getting a call from Berlin and then take them off again when he hangs up).

Lily Allen, Alright, Still... (2007): I probably first read about Lily Allen in Entertainment Weekly, and just as probably rolled my eyes both at the shit-talking she was apparently doing concerning the eight billion or so other hip-hoppy young female British warblers currently extant, and at the revelation that her father was Keith Allen. The latter is an actor with whom I've never had a particular problem, although one's encouraged to check out this glorious review of an apparently awful movie from 1993 with a decidedly gimlet eye cast upon Mr. Allen's thespian talents. So imagine my surprise when I was at Aubree's in Ypsilanti one day and heard a wonderfully catchy little song on the speakers that I later discovered was Lily Allen's "Smile." That was the last I heard of it for a while; you'd think with the five Dave Matthews songs 107.1 plays every hour, they'd have time to play a few more Allen tunes, but apparently not. Then my friend in Akron sent me a few mix CDs, one of them with another Allen song, "Take What You Take." The rest of the CD doesn't quite live up to these two catchy numbers, but it's rather good, with "Everything's Just Wonderful" and "Nan You're A Window Shopper" particular highlights. The sound's a pretty good example of the pan-genre stuff that presently exemplifies the zeitgeist, with hip-hop and folky elements softened and mixed by  Mark Ronson's production and Allen's at once vulgar and refreshing delivery, particularly on "Knock 'Em Out." Every time I think that global music's irrevocably sliding in quality, something like this comes along and informs me that, no, I'm just getting prematurely old. 

Mollusks, Not Bacon
Now Playing: Lindisfarne--"No Time To Lose"

I've been at two jobs now for nearly a month, and find I have little energy to do much besides work and recuperate from doing so, my only day off being Sunday. As a result, there really hasn't been much to blog about (not that there usually is, but you know what I mean). I haven't seen any movies lately, mostly sticking to the reading and the music appreciation (the latter including something I've been meaning to do for ages--see below). My social life's taken a wee bit of a dive (naturally, within the first week of working I miss out because of my schedule on being an extra in a suburban cowboy spectacular and attending a horror movie marathon), but I suspected that would happen going in. It's fine, though, as I'm doing something new and learning new things. That seems to be going around a bit--one friend of mine is going to start sinigng at a local restaurant in the evenings and another just got a sweet teaching job at EMU. There's definitely change in the air, only partially cheapened by the floods of incoming students tramping past the house and making the rafters shake (quite literally) with the sounds of "beer pong," possibly the dumbest waste of time I ever remember seeing.* "As a result, I expect the blog entries will get fewer and farther in between, eventually leading to a desire to end the thing with some dignity. Until that happens, though, I suppose I should forge ahead as if things were normal." I was going to write that without comment, but the ongoing example of a friend of mine (and her lovely thoughts about my own stuff) has convinced me to keep it going, even if it does just turn into film/book/music reviews and recipes (as, oh, opposed to my thoughts on walking around a self-satisfied small Michigan city every day). Thanks, Margot.

 The Tyrannicide Brief (2005): Geoffrey Robertson is an internationally renowned human rights lawyer practicing in Britain, one who's already written several books on the subject and has acted in several trials of high-profile nasties, most famously Pinochet and Malawi's Hastings Banda. In the course of unrelated research, he came across mention of John Cooke, a seventeenth-century English lawyer who wound up with the "dubious" distinction of prosecuting the treason case against Charles I at the close of the English Civil War in 1649. His instrumental role in the latter's conviction and execution made him a marked man on the coming of the Restoration in 1660, at which time he was hanged, drawn and quartered. In The Tyrannicide Brief, Robertson aims at nothing less than removing the "dubious" from the "distinction." The English Civil War (or British Civil Wars, as historian Trevor Royle termed them in his recent and excellent book of the same name) has been one of the most historically controversial conflicts on record: its legacy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced both modern Britain and the United States, but its revolutionaries have always been looked at askance by succeeding generations. Parliament and its army of "Roundheads" established the groundwork for many of the liberties citizens in most functioning democracies presently enjoy, but they also numbered among their ranks fanatical Puritan killjoys and eventually succumbed to the temptations of dictatorship. Conversely, the Stuart monarchs obsessively fixated on divine right and made war on their own people to the tune of tens of thousands dead, but their alleged dash and the continuing appeal of royal glamour have helped to rehabilitate them in the eyes of posterity. "Roundheads of John Cooke's stamp are in short supply in modern Britain, where 'radical barristers' are contradictions in terms and former political firebrands kiss the monarch's hand on taking their oath of cabinet office or self-importantly stroke their ermine in the House of Peers. Monarchy still exerts its vainglorious magic, from Eurostarry princesses to feudal Suaid royals to the virgin-deflowering King of Swaziland." As the preceding passage from page 7 might imply, Robertson aims at restoring the honor and importance of the "English Republic" and its adherents, both then and now. With me, he's preaching to the choir (particularly with my own republic in such a worrisome condition, with another head of state who thinks the law beneath him), but it's interesting to see how he does it. Cooke was a notable figure not only in his fateful 1649 "brief" (which he took after many of his colleagues had fled to avoid doing so); he was also a legal and political thinker of political foresight, advocating reforms that would in some cases not come about for another three and a half centuries (if you live in Canada or Western Euope, anyway--we're still waiting on a few). Robertson's brief history of the war itself and its political repercussions is pithy and concise, and he clearly has fun with his cast of supporting characters, especially the lusty John Lilburne, soldier, politician, free-speech pioneer and legal cause-celebre. His central point, though, turns on the trial and execution of the king. In this undertaking he could conceivably be accused of anachronism (which he implicitly acknowledges), as there was little precedent for trying and convicting a monarch, even one who routinely violated long-standing laws and who arguably broke the presumed reciprocal contract between the monarch and people. Robertson sees Charles' trial as the ground zero for much of international human rights law, focusing on the similarities between Charles and present-day defendants like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, who were tried for pretty much the same thing (although in foreign-imposed and international courts, to be sure, however much they deserved it). His presentation of the trial as the beginning of a historical continuum gives his argument a force it might not have had otherwise, and reminds the reader that ideals have to start somewhere. 

 Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen: When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I remember seeing the ads on PBS for James Levine's ground-breakingly traditional (!) Met production of "the cycle", hosted (for some reason) by Peter Graves. It looked utterly daunting (as did opera in general) and I stayed well away, encouraged both by Wagner's dismal personal reputation and the accessibility of user-friendly orchestral excerpts. After getting interested in opera a few years ago, I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to deal with the thing, "warming up" by listening to Tannhauser and Lohengrin, as well as catching bits of Walkure and Siegfried on CBC 2 for the opening of the new Four Seasons Centre in Toronto. For one of the high-water marks of "Western culture," it's pretty good, actualyl. Rheingold, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung were from the classic Georg Solti recording of the early 60s, with Birgit Nilsson as Brunnhilde, Wolfgang Windgassen as Siegfried, and George London as Wotan, while Walkure was the one I could have seen as a kid on TV, with Hildegarde Behrens as Brunnhilde and James Morris as Wotan. Considering all the ink that's been spilled over the meaning of the work, it stays fairly close to its legendary origins (as the Nibelungenlied, a medieval cycle of stories based, like the Arthurian legends which gave Wagner two other operas, on real-life events around the fall of the Roman Empire--Attila the Hun shows up as "Etzel"). Alberich, leader of the dwarfish Nibelungs, steals the eponymous Ring from the saucy Rhinemaidens, loses it to Wotan, who loses it to... for the next fifteen hours or so of listening time, everyone--gods, demigods, mortals--runs around trying to get it back and at the same time unwittingly (?) cause the downfall of the gods and the birth of human wisdom by the end of Gotterdammerung. As one might expect, it can be very heavy going, but there are some fairly sprightly passages as well. Brunnhilde's a terrific heroine that, like many in opera, is rather badly served by the other characters (and arguably by her creator), but has some great moments, especially her farewell to Wotan at the end of Walkure and her closing aria at the end of Gotterdammerung. The "evil" in the stopry springs more from the greed of gods like Wotan than typical "villains," but Mime in Siegfried does a pretty good job at injecting a little cackling, hand-rubbing malevolence into the proceedings, which I found pretty refreshing. The sheer length can be draining, but not if you listen to them as intended, on four successive nights (I got three but had to break for the last one due to work). I doubt I'll complain about other operas being long again--as far as Puccini goes, you can listen to both Tosca and Turandot back to back in the space of any of the last three operas in the Ring. As with most operas, I suspect it's better on stage, and hope to see it there one day, not just to say I've done so.

 Phantom of the Cinematheque (2005): For the past four yuears, I've been going more or less regularly every Sunday afternoon to the University of MIchigan's Cinema Guild showings, stalwartly maintained by my friend Lou, who's finally decided to turn it over, especially after getting the teaching job mentioned earlier. The very last film (until new management sends out an email) was, fittingly enough a documentary portrait of Henri Langlois, film-lover par excellence and the man behind France's venerable Cinematheque Francaise, the national film archive and de facto global blueprint for film archives. It's a compelling story, especially for people like us who think little of gathering in a musty classroom--often on brilliant days outside--to watch obscure flicks. Langlois turned down making films for collecting and maintaining them, staying a step ahead of the Nazis during the occupation and frequently doing the same with the French government during the 1950s and 1960s. In the process he became a hero to the filmmaking community in France and throghout the world. His sudden firing by de Gaulle's government in 1968, largely at the instigation of Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, helped to spark the Paris riots later that year. Truffaut, Godard and countless others banded together to denounce the government's action and make Langlois' firing an international shame. Here was a man who stuck to his guns and did his best to live life his way and preserve cultural treasures, not just so they could stay preserved but so that people could enjoy and learn from them. Langlois' example is prety damn inspiring (especially in a world where the pressure to conform is often unbearably strong), and it was a great choice to round out a welcome Sunday tradition. And good luck, Lou.

*Although not quite as dumb as seeing a fight break out as a result (over "respect," if I remember rightly); that was glorious.

The Moral Cost of Horseradish
Now Playing: Kevin Ayers--"Song From The Bottom Of A Well"
Well, after three years or so of looking, I finally have a second job. I'll be working as a prep cook at the restaurant next door three nights a week, and just finished my trial shift two nights ago. The people seem friendly and so far there's hardly any of that bullied-at-school mentality so beloved of the country's more celebrated chefs (and, one would expect, the town's). "Chef" himself seems a reasonable fellow and is well-liked by his workers, who are quite likable themselves. While I know this view comes based on a mere night's experience, I do have a good feeling about the place that doesn't derive from a sickening gratitude that my paychecks will clear (which is what happened at the beginning of my "main" job). For my trial, I readied a ginger tamarind sauce for cooking, made horseradish, and tied strip steaks. The second was more than a little interesting; I was told that shredding horseradish is ten times worse than slicing onions, which is true to an extent. For those who don't know, horseradish comes from a tuber-like root that when peeled with a knife has a woody texture to it; it reminded me of whittling sticks when I was a boy. The acidity packs much more of a punch than with onions, but only at minute-spaced intervals or so, whereas onions hang in the air for a good half-minute. I suspect they were just telling me that as a form of hazing, and if that's all I can expect, I should probably be grateful. Here's hoping it turns out as enjoyable as my present job, minus the irritation factor of la jefa. 

Jungle Drums of Marquette
Now Playing: Moby Grape--"Bitter Wind"

I haven't taken an honest-to-God vacation in five years, ever since I went to visit my friend Karen in Santa Barbara for spring break back when I was teaching in Akron. A week of doing little but going to the beach and just hanging out, apart from a visit to Hearst's folly of San Simeon up the Pacific coast, was just what a needed, and I forgot how heavenly it could be. Fortunately, circumstances intervened this year to get me out of town during the Ann Arbor Art Fair, that annual plague that attracts a host of suckers from around the country to pay out the nose for what looks to my prejudiced eyes like overpriced crap. The streets are closed off and clogged with pedestrians flaunting the mobility, if not the charm, of tortoises, and I had already decided to try something drastic this year to avoid the Art Fair blues. Three years of this has taken much of the shine off people-watching. I had some vague idea of visiting another part of Michigan, as the only time I'd ever really broken the Detroit-Ann Arbor cordon except for a day trip to Lansing was my train trip to Chicago, and then I never got out in-state.

 I mentioned the plan to my friend and Planned Parenthood volunteer coordinator Jessica, as I usually while away this time of year helping to man their booth at some point in the non-profit section of the Fair, in which we're usually placed as entertainingly close to the "Right To Life" people (or whatever they call themselves these days) as possible. She countered byh inviting me to come along with her and her friends to the Hiawatha Music Festival in Marquette on the shores of Lake Superior, the unofficial capital of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This was well beyond what I was thinking (Petoskey, maybe) and so I immediately agreed, despite the first impression (later confirmed) that Hiawatha was basically "hippie camp." So I drove up with her and our friend Ricardo a week ago.

 We camped out in Marquette Tourist Park, about ten or fifteen minutes' walk away from the lake. Ricardo and I shared an absent friend's tent, and from then on we basically just milled around, doing whatever. The music itself didn't particularly interest me that much, apart from the klezmer stylings of Yid Vicious, but that wasn't important as I spent just about every waking hour swimming. The park was on the shores of the Dead River, which until a few years ago had been dammed up to form a lake right on the park's edges. One day it spectacularly flooded, somehow bypassing the dam and washing around the side to continue on its regular course to the lake. This minor cataclysm left behind a wasteland of a valley, which by my visit had become quite beautiful, with a dozen different shades of shrubs and grasses, best seen at sunset, and plenty of deep stretches of water. God, it was good to swim again, and in a place where I could simply swim (roll around, do underwater handstands, etc.)  as opposed to the regimented laps demanded by Ann Arbor area pools. I found my present "happy place" at a stretch of river below the bridge, past the park, where the bottom was deep and sandy, as opposed to the shallower and rockier bits more accessible from the campsite. The lake itself was frequently too cold for any effective wallowing, apart from the soft beaches at Little Presque Isle and the puicturesque cliffs at Black Rocks on Grande Presque Isle, where the water was so clear and the bottom so rocky that it could have been a picture from some Caribbean resort brochure, had the water not been so fucking cold. I wasn't quite up to diving off the cliffs, ubt got plenty of time in the water regardless, and will hopefully regard the chill in Ann Arbor pools with a lolt less trepidation in future. We also stopped at the (much warmer) Lake Michigan on our way back to Ann Arbor, so that's two Great Lakes I got to swim on this trip.

 Sunday morning, I took advantage of my characteristically (and usually unwanted) early rising to walk into town (took about an hour) while everyone else was asleep. Marquette really is a nice little city, with an attractive downtown area set on hills rolling right down to Lake Superior, with the famous Ore Dock front and center. The latter took iron ore off the trains that came in from the interior and chucked them into the cargo holds of waiting freighters (like the ill-starred Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975), and still stands as one of the city's most prominent landmarks. I got a fantastic vantage point of Marquette Bay and the lake beyond from the hillside monument to the town's namesake, the famous Father Jacques, S.J. We'd eaten at the Vierling brewery downtown our first day, where I got to sample one of the local staples, the storied whitefish, eaten in grilled form on an open-faced sandwich (along with some delicious "Russian blue cheese" dressing that tastes a lot lke the apricot gorgonzola spread we make at the cafe). The people I met were friendly and not at all Ann Arbor-like, especially at the "Coffee Cup," where I stopped for a croissant, and the weather was nice and crisp. Particularly fun was checking out the outside of the old courthouse, where Otto Preminger's 1959 classic Anatomy of a Murder was filmed (featuring a hilarious reference to women's underwear, a fiery Ben Gazzara performance, and inspiring Tim Monger's Great Lakes Myth Society song "Marquette County, 1959"). Otherwise, it was basically drinking and huddling around the campfire listening to Mike Waite, John Churchville and others play guitar, and worrying about very little.

 After my trip, I now understand the intense Michigan loyalty that seems to drive many creative types I know, especially local musicians. Seeing the rest of the state as opposed to the often depressing environs of Detroit and the anything-but-progressive haughtiness of Ann Arbor gave me a new perspective on things--the Upper Peninsula's gorgeous, but much of the northern part of the Lower Peninsula, with its charming roadside flora (including some otherworldly-looking trees that reminded me of old watercolors of southern Australia) appealed as well, and riding the Mackinaw Bridge to GLMS' "Across the Bridge" gave me a sense of their music like few other things could.

It's not so bad here, really.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007): I bought it as soon as I got back and read it that night. The whole thing. It took me about six to seven hours. This is somewhat bizarre as I'm by no means a Harry Potter fanatic. I rather enjoy the stories, but find it hard sometimes to get into Rowling's occasionally leaden, color-by-numbers prose. I've also never understood genuine "fandom"--Doctor Who's been my favorite TV show since before I was ten, but I've never been to a convention and have never felt the desire to go. As with Lord of the Rings, too, I think the movies are actually better (with the exception of the first two; I mean, Chris Columbus? Honestly). Fortunately, I found a lot to enjoy in this one, and thought it ended rather well. The plot isn't tied as tightly to the Hogwarts school schedule as in previous entries, and I think that frees up the characters and story to a positive degree. A fair number of characters die (someone else who'd read it already posted elsewhere that some people died who shouldn't have, and vice versa--draw yor own conclusions), but then this has been fairly common knowledge for some time. Severus Snape fulfils his destiny as one of the most interesting characters in fantasy fiction; I think Rowling's creation, with all its flaws, is redeemed pretty much by Snape's existence--the chapter entitled "The Prince's Tale" is a beaut (certain plot details, too, enable Rowling to use a more cinematic technique than usual, which helps). There were a few genuine disappointments. While most fantasy since Tolkien steals rather obviously from its primary forefather (fair enough, since Tolkien did it himself), the main idea was a little too reminiscent of other horror/fantasy stories and too blatantly telegraphed (to be sure, it crops up in my own stuff a lot, but if I may be vulgar, I'm not getting paid towers of gold to write it). I'd also made a personal prediction about the fate of a very minor character who I'd hoped would play a vital and unexpectedly sinister role towards the end, a prediction thwarted. Missed opportunity, I say. Overall, though, it's finally over, and on a relative high note. Hopefully there will be bucketloads of kids interested in reading when they mightn't have been otherwise (that did happen, right?), and at least it was a worthier reason to look forward to the summer than those lackluster Star Wars prequels.