Margaret Benbow

WHY I DON'T WORSHIP FILM CRITICS, ESPECIALLY NOT THE MALE ONES

2012-01-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

As a college student, I first saw the great old movie LAURA at a campus Film Noir retrospective. I went with my buddy Ron, a budding film critic who took his duties very, very seriously. This was a period when students viewed their films with life-and-death passion. We had seen two members of the Film Society rolling in a frenzied homicidal fight on the floor of the Student Union over a scheduling disagreement. Cups of boiling coffee were flung in faces when some sacred European director was disrespected.

I was eighteen years old, Ron was twenty. We arrived early for LAURA, and for several minutes before the screening I listened, enthralled, as Ron and another young critic, Jared, bitterly quarreled about whether LAURA could really be called a Noir. (SPOILER ALERT) Jared's stance was that it could not, because it had a happy ending.

"You KNOW the detective and Laura are going to get married," he snarled accusingly. "A Noir has to end badly, not with a white wedding and release of doves!"

Ron responded in a flat, deadly, damn-you,-you-ignorant-swine sort of voice. He argued that the detective (Dana Andrews) is hard-edged, jaded, insane, and nasty to his girl--the perfect Noir anti-hero. "If it's got feathers and it quacks, it's a duck," Ron added, somewhat obscurely.

I listened humbly to these 20-year-old cineastes, dazzled by their insights, so uncompromising and pure. As I understood Ron's reasoning, LAURA was Noir because the detective acted like a jerk. This seemed odd, but I accepted it because Ron was dropdead sure of himself.

Both Ron and Jared were wearing trench coats and ironic fedoras. Jared was smoking an actual Gaulois, which his girlfriend said he bought in Chicago when he visited his parents. Ron smoked Benson & Hedges, unfortunately an English-speaking cigarette, but they came in a very cool box that opened like a tiny drawer. Ron and Jared blew smoke in each other's faces as they laughed sneeringly at each other's theories.

The movie started. Halfway through it, the murdered Laura comes alive again. Whoa! I almost jumped out of my seat. But even so, I couldn't help but notice that Ron sighed deeply every time Laura (staggeringly beautiful Gene Tierney) left the room, bent over to look in a cabinet, ascended a staircase, or at any time turned her back to the camera. I heard Ron mumbling mysteriously....

"...Oh Gene, my Gene," he softly murmured to himself. "I could watch you walking away forever."

He explained later, over espresso. We were sitting in the romantic semi-gloom of a little cafe. His dark eyes looked poetically sincere by candlelight.

"You see," he said earnestly, "Gene Tierney had the best backside in Noir. The '40's were the heyday of the girdle, so even Barbara Stanwyck and Jane Russell had this Uni-butt look, all scrunched together and flattened out. But somehow Gene Tierney..." He sighed tenderly, infatuated. "Well, she just always looked...REAL. And of course those slinky silks of hers didn't hurt. YUMMY, you know what I mean?"

I did. So that is why I don't worship film critics, especially the male ones. We assume they're pondering the influence of Kierkegaard on Ingmar Bergman's religious themes, and all the time they could be thinking about Gene Tierney's caboose.

Life's A Feast, And Sometimes You Have To Eat Big!

2011-12-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

I don't know why it is that setting your teeth into a well-browned hunk of hog makes you feel good, but it works for me. For Christmas Day I want meat, and I don't mean a measly, puny, stunted portion of veal, either. I want big, maddeningly fragrant mounds of steer, hog or bird, or maybe all three, drenched with gravy.

Holiday meats should be baked until all you have to do is gently nudge some critical joint, and the whole thing smoothly falls apart into neat little sheaves. This meat is not burned, it is charmed, and you can eat right through the coral bones.

I wonder what spiritual eunuch first banned "cooking odors" from the home? I want to smell that heavy hunters-and-gatherers food baking. Morning of the banquet day you put the standing rib roast or the big boss bird into the oven. If it's a turkey, consider dipping a length of cheesecloth into a pound of melted butter and snugly wrapping up that tom. Now he's your big gilded turkey baby. In the next hours, ragingly delicious smells expand in golden waves from the kitchen.

Then the best time of all comes. You sit down to eat the food you love the best, with those you love the best. A glass or two of crystal white wine, or potent red goes well with this--wines that are the soul of grape, that seem to kiss you back when you smack them. At the end, there are berry pies nestled in buttery crusts. In our family, there's also a hundred-year tradition of serving candied nuts in the same gorgeous, gold-and-green china bowl. I'm sure you know that there are saints' bones that are handled with less reverance than we lavish on that bowl.

Then everyone alternates sipping his or her dark, fine coffee and nibbling the brown-sugar-crusted nuts of the field. We look around the table at three generations of these faces that we love, and every one of us (including the agnostics) thinks, "Thank you, God!"

Favorite Images of Marriage: In Book, Film, and Real Life

2011-11-12T08:09:00.000-08:00

(Dedicated to Dr. Theodore and Kathryn Savides)

How young were you, when you first got a notion of what a marriage should be like? Maybe you were about five, if (like me) you were weaned on the Babar picture books, created by Jean de Brunhoff. Then you know that Babar was a little elephant who bravely met every challenge that an orphan suffered in a harsh world. He was helped by his friend Celeste. We, his peewee readers, went through a lot with Babar and Celeste, and so it was a huge satisfaction to see them finally in their place in the sun, complete with red royal robes and crowns with huge jewels.

Now that Babar was King, he could marry adorable Celeste. Finally! We readers (at least the girls) had been willing them to bring on the wedding for years. The ceremony was gorgeous, but my favorite image happened after the crowds had left and the trumpets were silent.

It's nighttime, and Babar and Celeste are standing together in the sweet darkness. They're side by side, and we see only their silhouettes, Babar in his great big noble robe, Celeste in her snowy wedding dress. They're looking up, silently and happily, into a vast starry sky.

For me, the picture illustrates a saying from Antoine St.-Exupery: "Good partners don't have to be always looking into each other's eyes. But they have to be looking in the same direction."

My favorite marriage image from film comes from the Japanese movie MADADAYO, directed by Akira Kurosawa. The action takes place in Tokyo, during World War II. A very old, respected teacher and his gentle wife have been bombed out of their home. They have only a rickety, three-walled gardener's shack to live in. In the next fifteen seconds, we see their next year unfold in the wheeling of the seasons. Throughout, the old couple are sitting together in the open side of the hut, peacefully looking out, in every weather: first springtime blossoming, then scorching summer, torrential rains and falling leaves and then deep snowscape. The sequence is silent, but profoundly moving. What we see is that, although this couple has lost what most people would call "everything," they are content. They have each other, and an interesting world to look at, and so they have everything.

The feeling of that scene, the closeness, was present in my parents' long marriage. They were married for 61 years. Images flash up: the two of them, young then, with three little girls, standing at dusk in the yard of the worn-out, isolated old farm they'd just bought. Before them were the blue Baraboo bluffs, and behind them the gorgeous green snake of the Wisconsin river. "Did you ever see a more beautiful place?" Dad says, and our Mother (with us clinging to her skirts, and having just seen the incredibly decrepit, ancient farmhouse with its icy drafts that would have chilled a corpse) answers bravely, "I never did."

Ove the years, as all children do, we look to our parents' faces to see what they feel. I know my mother is anxious, early mornings when our father leaves for his job teaching high school in DeForest, because he drives over the frozen Wisconsin River to save time. He leaves the car door open so he can leap to safety if the car goes through. "Dad has good reflexes," she reassures us. I can tell they're happy and content together, many Fall Sundays, washing vegetables from their garden to take to church.

They work so hard. Because they're from the city, they earnestly study government pamphlets to learn how to care for livestock. They carefully prepare a model farrowing bed in the barn for their 600-lb pregnant red sow, Dulcie. It's in a warm, clean corner with soft fresh straw, water, great feed, the works. Dad has done everything possible for that sow except knit her a pink bed jacket. Dulcie should be in hog heaven. And we see their speechless astonishment as huge Dulcie staggers over to the cold, miry, cement corner SHE had earmarked for herself. On another day a furious neighbor comes over with a shotgun, determined to shoot our dog, who'd growled at him. I know some neighbors are afraid of this man, and so am I. I want to run for the hills. But my parents go out together to talk with him. They end up drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Mother sends banana bread home to his wife. Another day a tornado hits our farm. They clean it up, our tiny mother hefting beams until Dad makes her stop. Another year Dad builds a beautiful new home, Mother helping him, learning as they go, because they can't afford builders. Sometimes the glossy new basement is flooded. They clean it up.

The time finally comes when Dad, after many years of night classes and summer school, gets his doctorate in education. It's a fiercely-pursued dream which she always encouraged. We have seen Mother typing his dissertation on the old Remington, six carbons, no mistakes allowed, incredible patience required. Dad becomes a University of Wisconsin dean. I hear a friend say to him, "Now you and Kay have everything."

Dad replied quietly, with a smile, "We have always had everything." And they did.

Doris and Rock and Me! (And With Respectful Admiration for "Augie")

2011-09-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

An editor recently asked me for "your first literary memory." After a lot of pondering I realized it would have to be this incident.

It was a sweet-smelling, balmy summer evening in a little country town, many years ago. My sister and I, sixteen and seventeen (we were "Irish twins") were sitting in the tiny Prairie du Sac movie theater. We were watching the romantic comedy LOVER COME BACK, with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

Because we were innocent to the point of mental disability, we saw nothing bizarre in the fortyish Doris's frantic attempts to preserve her virginity against the lecherous assaults of leering playboy Hudson. She fled his slobbering pursuit in her high heels, both flirting with him and flouncing away from him with such manic energy that she almost bounced right off the screen. She scolded sex-crazed Hudson for his base desires, shaking her finger at him and telling him off, an ash-blond well-built angel in tight-fitting suits.

My sister and I were fascinated, rooting for Doris and filing away her strategies for taming bestial, drooling, skirt-chasing Hudson--who, as became obvious later, was a much better actor than anyone gave him credit for.

The movie was well-started when a huge bulbous man entered and began fumbling his way down the dark aisle, looking for seats. He was holding the hands of two small fair-haired children. Everyone in the theater knew little Wally and April; and everyone knew their father, Augie. August Derleth was a Sauk County native son, and a brilliant regional writer. He also had the biggest girth, and the largest and most exuberant and most fearless personality in the state.

On the screen, at that very moment, Doris Day was kittenishly shaking her blond French Twist and wiggling her derriere as she showered Hudson with maidenly reproaches. Derleth paused in the aisle, looked at the screen, listened to the dialogue for a minute, snorted, and then laid down the most tremendous, awe-inspiring, roof-lifting fart ever heard.

Cee-Cee Chews Me Out

2011-08-29T07:37:00.001-07:00

(I'm going to run again a short series of posts regarding justice matters. ACLU blood runs in my veins, and although I'm often not the righteous champion for justice that I should be...I think people should at least try.)

The background to this post is that I write letters to the editor, early and often. I like to think of these letters as bold and illuminating, but friends keep me from vanity with remarks like, "I see where you were gassing away in the paper again," or simply "blah, blah, blah."

My friend Cee-Cee (not her real name) is a retired policewoman. I met her, if that's the right word, when she called me up very late and out of the blue, to chew me out, grind me up and spit me out for a letter I'd just written. The letter concerned what I saw as a poor judgment call on the part of a police officer.

Cee-Cee is not the officer I wrote about. To this day, I don't know if she was a friend of the officer, or if she just reacted like a lionness to any criticism of a brother or sister in arms.

Keep in mind that this was around midnight. I'd been asleep. Cee-Cee, a stranger to me then, has a voice of mighty thunder when upset, sort of like God and Thor combined. She said, or shouted, that although the facts in my letter were "technically correct," I had written it in a spirit of smug fault-finding and from a place of ignorance. Like most civilians, I had no idea of the thousands of judgment calls which every officer is required to make, often under severe stress. Neither I nor any other civilian would hear about the great majority which turned out to be right.

I was speechless for once. You would be too, if the side of a mountain suddenly split off and fell on your head, or if an avenging angel suddenly swooped down out of heaven and began flogging you like a racehorse. But I come from a long line of bossy teachers and ministers confident in their salvation, and those genes kicked in. I told Cee-Cee the truth. I said I admired the police, because they have such a tough job. I said that I would never say or even think a single harsh word about an officer, as long as he seemed to keep alive in the front of his mind the fact that he'd promised to protect and serve the public. He had not vowed to protect and serve himself.

Cee-Cee said bluntly, "I bet if you ever needed help, you'd be the very first to be yelling for the police to come and save your puny butt!"

"You got that right," I said, "I would be the first, and if there were some word before First, I would be that. If I was threatened by some criminal, I would stand there screaming like a toddler into my cell phone for the police to come and rescue me, to come charging up in their shiny cars and obliterate whoever was menacing me, to sweep me to a place of safety. That is their duty. That's what 'Protect and Serve' means!"

Unexpectedly I heard Cee-Cee's deep, jolly laugh for the first time. She said, "You don't expect much, do you? Just your own squad of knights. Damn, you certainly are a STUBBORN little shit."

I wasn't thrilled to be called a stubborn little shit, but her tone had warmed up. I don't know if she had decided I was mentally delayed and therefore forgivable, but the conversation became much more amicable. She even finally allowed that my letter had been "an honest, though stupid, mistake."

And a few minutes later, after a thoughtful pause, she said slowly, "Not that every single cop who ever existed has been an altar boy or altar girl. There's a story or two I could tell you--no names, though."

"Over a glass of good red," I said. "My treat."

"Deal, " she said, and laughed.

And I think that Cee-Cee is a woman who keeps her word.

"What Were They Thinking!" Movie Moments

2011-08-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

It was Mel Gibson who said, "Without transgression there is no story," and he ought to know.

Movie plots are often pumped up by impossible burning love, vampire thirst, bloodlust, racist outrage, leaps of heroism, outrageous gambles. If the characters just sat down and shut up and behaved themselves, there would be no movie.

So I understand, theoretically, why film heroes sometimes have shocking lapses of judgment. It drives the story. But it also drives us crazy, has taken at least twenty years off my life, and I'll give a few examples which are guaranteed to have you shouting at the movie screen.

I liked the original TWILIGHT (2008), so will only mention in passing some dialogue that would turn any parent's hair white as snow. Of course the premise is that the 17-year-old hero Edward is secretly a vampire (and he's actually more like 117), but a sensitive one. He's madly drawn to his girlfriend Bella's delicious-smelling blood, which he wants to drink like wine, but he struggles against the urge. He tries to warn her not to trust him. He looks at her with stark red irises and says, "I've killed people before."
"I don't care!" is her blithe response.
"I've--wanted to kill you."
"It doesn't matter! Whatever!"

This is the way parents are AFRAID their teenagers think. And now we know.

In Edward's favor, it should be mentioned that he seems to be a Mormon vampire virgin. All of his and Bella's love scenes are very chaste. He also has excellent manners, dresses well and is stinking rich. In fact, most parents would be delighted to have him squire their daughter to prom. But Bella's grumpy old dad Charlie just can't shake the feeling that something about Edward is a little, well, different.

Edward has pale white skin, razor-sharp pointed teeth, and staring eyes that change from blood red (when he's "thirsty") to golden (when he has "hunted"). He's ice-cold to the touch, never sleeps, never comes out when the sun is shining, and never eats food that lies still on the plate. What's not to know, Charlie?

The sci-fi movie THE THING (1951) introduced James Arness in his debut role as a violent giant carrot from outer space. It was also one of the first movies to use the plot device of an unworldly professor, book-smart but earth-stupid, naively trying to bond with a homicidal extraterrestrial
monster. Throughout THE THING, wild-eyed Dr. Carrington is always doddering around, protecting the murderous carrot/beast in the name of science as it slays not only the crew but the odd sled-dog or two. Why does the professor do this? Well, he wants to be BFF with The Thing and enjoy scientific chats with him, even as the drained corpses pile up. In the end the giant man/vegetable is incinerated, and Dr. Carrington survives, but he doesn't really deserve to.

Finally, I have a question about the famous Coliseum battle in GLADIATOR (2000). Our hero Maximus (Russell Crowe) and the other enslaved gladiators are in the huge death ring, looking very nervous since hostile giants, numchuk-swinging dwarves, Roman legions, spike-wheeled chariots and Siberian tigers are about to advance on them fast. And it's at THIS moment, not before, that Maximus asks rather casually, "Say, were any of you guys soldiers? Maybe it would help us if we used some old battle strategies..."

The results are GREAT. Everybody had been a soldier, and within about ten seconds the formerly doomed gladiators are snapping into crack military manuevers at warp speed. After five minutes of boiling excitement they succeeded in using their old army skills to save themselves from massacre. Their enemies are all either dead or on the run. It's a thrilling moment, an unforgettable scene.

So it was only later that I thought this: Why did Maximus wait until the last possible second to ask if the others had been soldiers? They'd all been hanging out together in their cells under the Coliseum with nothing to do but chew the fat. Hadn't the subject ever come up? What if they'd answered him, at that fraught moment, by saying, by saying, "Actually, I was a potato farmer in Thrace," "I plucked a lyre in Thessalonika..."

Well, I guess it really doesn't matter. What matters is that at the end of that scene Maximus is taking a victory gallop around the Coliseum on a gorgeous white stallion. The sand is littered with his defeated enemies, and he's wearing the coolest silver mask in the world, and the stands are jumping with thousands of Romans shrieking their excitement and approval.

It's a very public scene, but the most important part of it is silent: Maximus's grim and private joy, behind that mask, in the fact that the day of his vengeance is almost at hand. His stars and the gods have promised it. And so we should not inquire why he didn't ask earlier if his comrades were soldiers. He knew they would be, because they had to be.

Part 3: ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!

2011-06-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

At first I had to force myself to do these ME!ME!ME! posts. I had to overcome my natural modesty and flower-like delicacy of temperament to blab away about Margaret. But, strangely, it was a lot more fun the second time; and now I can hardly shut up about myself. Talk about Margaret, you say? YAY, WHEE AND WHOOP-DE-DO!!

As before, the format will be question-and-answer. It seems to me that my interviewer was quite a diva this time, but you must judge for yourself.

Q: Hey Margaret, let's begin on a high note! What was your most recent heavenly experience?

M: Biking through a forest when the black locust trees were blossoming. The scent is my favorite one in nature. It's sweet, and warm spirals of fragrance drift out tenderly from the trees.....you get to bike through it and live in it.

Q: What has made you smile recently?

M: Maybe it would take another pet owner, a Dog Person, to appreciate this story. It's definitely gamey, but I can't help it. I was walking my sheltie Rosie yesterday. She has the peculiarity that she won't stand still and take a nice neat dump like other dogs. She just keeps walking. So I trot after her like a dummy with my Baggie, wanting to be a good citizen, and trying to locate her offerings, which are all over the map. Yesterday we walked through a field and she started spewing forth. I frantically stuffed the Baggie with what looked like the real thing, until I took a closer look and saw that I was carefully storing little brown mushrooms. I had to smile.

(Q, a cat owner, cackles with glee) Sorry, excuse me, but it just kills me when I see you dog owners scurrying around so earnestly clutching your bags of dog s--t!

M: Well, f---k you! (The interviewer and I have known each other for a very long time.)

Q: Now, now, behave. What was your most recent experience of really good eatin'?

M: A thick slice of country-cured ham, glazed with orange juice and brown mustard and honey, roasted to a turn...ummm ummm. And with it a glass of Pinot Grigio, glinting with fruit...oh, and a slice of chocolate cherry cake, dense and moist, enrobed in shiny dark chocolate frosting. I couldn't even talk normally while I was eating it. I spoke in sighs.

Q: I hope you're aware that Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins---

M: Are you going to make me swear at you again?

Q: Speaking of sinners, who are your least favorite types?

M: Bullies and liars. Oh, and Peeping Toms must be pretty sick freaks.

Q: Do you believe that, in the end, truth and justice prevail?

M: Yes, I do. I believe this saying: 'The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.'

Q: I agree with you. Now let's talk about movies. It's well known that you adore Japanese films, including those that some people might consider a little...just slightly...well, morbid. So tell me about one that's all upbeat and sparkly, maybe with some romance--

M: There's this movie called THE SAMURAI I LOVED, which is great. There's one romantic scene which I think you'd really enjoy. What's happened is that a noble samurai has been forced to commit hari-kari by his corrupt lord. His young son has to collect the body, and carry it home on a tragic little cart. As he's making this sad trip he's shunned and spat on by cruel villagers. He reaches this high hill, and he just can't get the cart up it. The corpse keeps sliding around and the hill is too steep.

"The poor son is in despair, when suddenly through the forest branches he sees the girl he loves running toward him. She's been ordered to shun him, so she's risking everything to help him. She helps him push the cart up the hill, although the cadaver's feet are practically dangling in her face, and because of her, he's able to bring his father home. Isn't that a beautiful moment?

Q: Well, it's, umm...it's very, err.....yeah, that one sounds special, I'm sure I'd enjoy it a lot. (Makes vomiting motion when she thinks I'm not looking.) Can you think of some romantic scene where nobody dies?

M: (Carelessly) Well, I guess that would have to be an American film...In the movie GREEN CARD, with Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell, there's the world's best kiss at the end. It's just magnificent. He's built sort of like a human polar bear, and she looks like a fairy princess, but they have fantastic chemistry and the kiss is so intense they almost go up in flames.

Q: Nice! Now, that is the type of romantic movie scene I like, the kind without a death cart! To move on, What is a de-stresser for you? What do you do to relax?

M: Oh Jeeze, this makes me sound like such a peasant...but I like to scrub my kitchen for a few minutes in the morning, while the coffee is brewing. While this rich dark fragrance is filling the air. The cleanser has bleach in it, and very slowly and beautifully, day by day, the walls and cabinets are becoming more pale and fair. It's sort of like an ongoing art installation. I have curtains and dish towels with rich red flowers on them...

Q: I'm sorry I have to ask, but when did you notice this fetish for stroking walls?

M: I think of it more as the kind of Zen exercise Mr. Miyagi taught Ralph Macchio in THE KARATE KID. You learn balance and tranquility as you scrub, and it develops strong arm muscles.

Q: I'm still trying to recover from the romantic cart-pushing scene in that hari-kari movie. Tell me a joke!

M: My friend Evelyn, whom I was very fond of, had a favorite joke. The joke is really short and very subversive, and probably goes back to Adam and Eve. You have to picture a meadow. A macho jack rabbit is putting the moves on his rabbit girlfriend. 'This is going to be GREAT,' he boasts, 'wasn't it?' Women always laugh very hard at this joke, males somewhat less so.

Q: (Laughing hard) I like that one! Thanks for the interview. And I'm wondering, do you happen to have a copy of that GREEN CARD movie with the fabulous kiss...?

M: Actually I don't, but I have an excellent Director's Cut DVD of THE SAMURAI I LOVED, it has wonderful extras like longer versions of the Suicide and the Death Cart scenes, in fact we could watch it right now!

Q (Hastily gathering her belongings) Oh dear, I'm devastated to have to pass up this treat, but I need to rush home and cut my cat's toenails. Have a great day! See you soon!

The...Best...Movie...Dance...EVER!!!

2011-05-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

This scene, from the Jim Jarmusch movie DOWN BY LAW, was recommended to me by a dear relative who's a lot better dancer than I am. The actors who are gloriously cutting a rug are Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi. They're married in real life, which makes this scene especially sweet. And do they look as if they're having fun, or what!!???!!!

YouTube-Down By Law-It's Raining
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gotjBxCNhuo

Biking Through Paradise

2011-04-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

I don't drive. I've never had a license. I'm one of those starry-eyed Boomers who was really, really impressed by the early Earth Days. We were told to walk gently upon the earth. I decided on my own that it would be even more fun to pedal briskly over it.

I like, no, love my bike, and I love the road. I bike most days, winter and summer, except when the roads are glittering ice sheets, or during electrical storms. Maybe there'd be a certain glamor in the second or two you'd have as a gloriously blazing human Christmas tree, after being struck by lightning. But the obituary in everyones' minds would be embarrassing: DAMNED FOOL CHARRED WHILE DOING WHEELIES.

Cyclists bike past lovely things, see sights denied to drivers. One of my favorite roads goes through a huge wooded park bursting with wildlife: fox, skunks, coyote and deer which, in November, will try to clash antlers with you. In the early spring I like to see the wild turkeys strutting. They've won their winter death raffle with the coyotes. I haven't seen a black bear yet, but they've already been reported power-walking into the county.

Once a monster turkey gave me a horrible fright. I'd been swinging around the road curves with (I thought) great speed and style. Suddenly smack in the middle of the road was the biggest and angriest tom turkey I'd ever seen. His tailfeathers were in full warlord display. He just stood there on his two fat feet, staring me down with a sneer on his face: "Do you want some, punk?" I knew who would win in a collision, and that my grieving relatives would have to explain I'd been whacked by a turkey. I veered wildly, went airborne and somehow missed him. When I stole a terrified glance over my shoulder, his beady eyes were saying, "Next time."

Another day I rounded a corner and almost hit a jogger who was running straight down the middle of the road. Raging adrenalin took the top of my head off. I barely managed to jolt around him with some frantic steering. I whipped around on the bike seat and began to shout big gobs of steaming verbal abuse when I noticed he was running on two prosthetic legs and flailing a prosthetic arm. I almost fell off the bike. I yelled "My bad!" with a hypocritical smile, and slunk away. I wondered, but didn't ask, if by chance he'd lost his limbs while jogging. I also wondered what would happen if this man and the monster turkey ran into each other. I thought that if the jogger kept his head and craftily deployed his steel fists and feet, he could probably bring the turkey down and then brain him with all his metalwork.

This is my most beautiful biking memory. One morning I was cycling past a lake after dawn. There was lots of thick pearly mist and fog swirling around. At first I thought I was imagining two figures beside the lake, but no, there they were: a tall woman with a flowered garland on her head, dressed all in gleaming white. She stood with her arms extended over the head of a man kneeling before her. He too was garlanded, and both of them looked ecstatically happy. There were red and white flowers spread on the ground in a circle around them. They were saying a gentle ritual of words to each other. I wanted to stop and take a good gawk, but it would have been so boorish to interrupt such a private moment. What was I seeing here? A Wiccan water blessing? Or just a couple with great romantic imagination?

I think the beautiful woman and man were marrying themselves to each other. I was their only witness, invisible to them. They didn't see me, never knew I existed. But when I biked on through the mist, I knew I'd remember them, and I wished them and their marriage well.

"He Likes It Like That": Famous Guys Tell What They Fancy, From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

2011-03-07T07:46:00.001-08:00

There's no accounting for tastes, especially if they belong to Iggy Pop. So let's at least BEGIN with the sublime: Dante Alighieri,the stupendous Italian poet who wrote all of his life about a girl he met exactly twice.

DANTE (13th century creator of the DIVINE COMEDY) first set eyes on his Beatrice when they were children at a May Day party, both bedecked in flowers. He thought about her every single day after that, until he saw her for another brief moment when they were teenagers. The gorgeous maiden, wrapped in a golden haze of honey-colored hair, was with friends, and greeted him by name. This flooded him with a joy so ecstatic, so paralyzing, that he thought he might die. In response he acted like an idiot, and scurried away from her immediately so that he could obsess about her quietly, in private. He never saw her again, but wrote about her until the day he died. This is completely typical of the way writers behave.

BOB DYLAN, musician, ran into his early love SUZE ROTOLO when he was still a scruffy, crazy-haired, penniless kid scrambling for gigs at coffee houses in Greenwich Village. He was 21, she was 17. "I couldn't take my eyes off her," he wrote forty five years later in his autobiography. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. The air was filled with banana leaves. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people. She was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness." And Rotolo was not only a hottie, she was cultured. Dylan absorbed knowledge about books and classical music and political causes from her like a starving wild child meeting civilization for the first time. In the end he married someone else, and so did she. But they never forgot each other.

We can't avoid Iggy Pop (musician) forever, so let's just get this over with.

IGGY POP: (Talking about anything female wearing low-cut jeans) "They are trying to show they're ready to breed, that they're alive in that sector. If somebody has a nice butt I am always interested to take a look at it--that's the monkey in me. I'm there, you know what I mean?"

(Sigh.) I'm afraid we do, Mister Iggy.

Next we have a startling quote from JAVIER BARDEM. As an actor he's definitely on the Sublime side (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, BIUTIFUL), and as a person he's a raving heterosexual. His wife is Penelope Cruz, now glowingly pregnant. But he's also a very cool, very fearless European, and had this to say about Brad Pitt: "I had a great opportunity to meet Brad Pitt a couple of times, what a beauty! He is beautiful and his physicality is so amazing to see. But the beauty comes from different places, the way he talks, the way he's interested in what you're saying. And that body of his is like--WOW! It's amazing, no? He really made me feel very, like...I could fall in love with him! Like a teenager girl getting crazy and going--" At this point in the interview Javier screamed loudly.

I can't imagine a straight American actor being brave enough to do that, can you?

Next we have a comment from TERRENCE HOWARD, actor (HUSTLE AND FLOW, THE BRAVE ONE)that strikes me as a little, I don't know, weird. But maybe it's just me.

The ELLE interviewer asked, "What one item could you find in a woman's house that would prove you weren't compatible?"
TERRENCE HOWARD: "Toilet paper--and no baby wipes--in her bathroom."
Interviewer: "Wait. I don't understand."
TERRENCE HOWARD: "If they're using dry paper, they aren't washing all of themselves. It's just unclean. I explain this, and if she doesn't make the adjustment to baby wipes, I'll know she's not dainty. We have no future. "

Hmmm. Let's cleanse the palate with a refreshingly brainy quote from a great religious writer.

C.S. LEWIS (THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE) was a brilliant English scholar who married his Joyce late in life. She was a feisty, Brooklyn-bred Communist writer, and none of his University friends could stand her. But when he lost her--far too soon, to cancer--he never recovered. "She had a mind as supple and muscular as a panther," he said. He missed everything about her, but above all he missed his companion of the mind.

KEITH RICHARDS (guitarist, pharmaceutical marvel and indestructable old guy) has never known despair for long. He was quite the love man in his younger days, but after marrying Patti Hansen settled into monogamy with a sort of exhausted relief. And this is what he wrote in his notebook a few days after he met her:

"Incredibly I've found a woman. A miracle! I've had (sex) at the snap of a finger, but now I've met a WOMAN! Unbelievably she is the most beautiful (physically) speciman in the WORLD. But that ain't it! It certainly helps but it's her mind, her joy of life and (wonders) she thinks this battered junkie is the guy she loves. I'm over the moon... She loves soul music and reggae, in fact everything. I make her tapes of music which is almost as good as being with her. I send them like love letters. I'm kicking forty and besotted."

Now he is kicking seventy and still besotted with Patti, as she is with him; and that's the happiest possible way to end this post.

ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME! Part 2

2011-01-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

A few months back I crept out, a shy blossom, to timidly and blushingly post my first ME!ME!ME! entry (September 11, 2010). This is a special entry that all bloggers must do at least once, in which they gas on about themselves endlessly...and ONLY about themselves. Somehow or other, God knows how, this turned out to be huge fun for me. Almost as if I was a big flaming ham and not a wee modest posy at all, although that is impossible, of course. In fact I got used to that ME!ME!ME! stuff real fast. So here is the second installment, again in a Question and Answer format.

Q.: So, have you learned to love cilantro? You were sort of struggling there for awhile...

A.: I just hate that nasty ditch weed. You might as well take a stinking moldy corpse-white plant growing above a grave, and roll it around in your soup. The flavor is not just bad, it's EVIL.

A.: What do you feel about cosmetics? A lot of women are going totally bare-faced these days...

Q.: I adore lipstick, and wear it all the time. The colors are so pretty. And a little eye-pencil can be fun. I live in the type of Green and rabidly PC city where a lot of the women feel really smug at going bare-face. They're like, 'Look at me, I don't give a crap, and that's great!' I always want to say to them, 'Where's the virtue in looking like a bleached steer's skull all day? For God's sake prop up the ancient bones with a dot of blush!'

Q.: So you think we're too casual, careless?

A.: I think we're thinking like Popeye: 'I yam what I yam.' But why? At home we put on clothes so dumpy we'd hesitate to donate them to a Salvation Army bin, and we wear them in front of the people we love best in the world. We should do better. My ideal is the French writer Colette. Even when she was 80 years old, she wouldn't let her husband see her in the morning until her hennaed curls were all fluffed up, and she had her eyes lined with kohl and a silk ascot on and the perfume he liked the best. We should take more trouble for each other. We'd be happier.

Q.: I remember you said you talk to yourself. Are you still babbling away?

A.: Yup. More than ever, since the election. Overnight, our nice Blue state became as Red as a maniac's eye.

Q.: I'm sorry I have to ask this, but are you making any headway regarding the Forgiveness thingy? As in forgiving your enemies?

A.: Not really. (Sigh.) I'm afraid the truth is that I don't want to forgive assholes. I want them to suffer.

Q.: Jesus is going to be so mad at you!

A.: You think Jesus likes assholes? He is way too smart for that.

Q.: I've heard you love Japanese movies. Why?

A.: They speak in a clear voice to our minds as well as our hearts. But be warned, a Kyoto ending can rip you up. I just saw a movie whose cheesy American title is THE SAMURAI I LOVED (Japanese title, Autumn Rain of the Cicadas.) The hero and heroine are childhood sweethearts who love each other their whole lives. Because of family tragedies they can never marry. They make heartbreaking sacrifices for each other. They can never embrace until the end...briefly...when they have to part forever. One kiss. Then he's in a canoe and she's in a palanquin, going in opposite directions. He's in agony because he knows he'll never see her again, but he holds himself together--because he doesn't want to hurt her with his pain. Then his canoe floats around a bend in the river. In the next shot of the canoe, we can't see him. Now, did he fall to the bottom of the canoe as though he'd been shot in the heart? Or in his anguish did he jump in the water and commit suicide? What a noble puzzle! And that's the end. Isn't it beautiful?

Q.: Well, it's, umm...I mean, it, ummm...well, it's definitely no barrel of monkeys. One freaking kiss, you said? For their whole lives? I have to ask: What did they get out of their love?

A.: Knowledge that the other person was alive in the world. That someone existed who loved them completely. And a profound, nourishing respect for the other person's---I guess I'd have to say, honor.

Q.: Well, that ain't no Hollywood ending, all right. Let's get back to food. What is one of your happiest mealtime memories?

A.: Wintertimes when I was a child. You have to understand that our state is a real mean sumbitch polar bear in the winter, you don't live here unless you MEAN it. I'd run into the house after school, late on a blue-black icy Friday afternoon, and that polar bear would be roaring after me. Then I'd be in the kitchen, and it would be warm, with a golden light, and would have this ragingly delicious smell of well-browned pork roast. On top of the refrigerator would be sweet rolls and coffee cake rising. My sisters and brothers and I had the whole fine weekend opening up broad and shining before us as we sat down to the table. And our mother and father would be there. So I know about heaven, or as close to it as makes no difference.

Q.: And there was no cilantro?

A.: No cilantro, at all.

Honey-Dripping Cake and the Hungry Crow in the Snow

2010-12-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

Then there was the Christmas a friend sent me plum cake lovingly prepared from King George III's favorite recipe. Yes, we're talking about Crazy George here. So I was doubtful, because you have to wonder what a king who's barking mad likes to put in his food. But it turned out he was sane about cake.

I made a buttery, whiskey-drenched hard sauce and enjoyed a dense slice of the cake. It practically exploded with fat, honey-dripping fruit. The last forkful was in my mouth when I happened to look out the window.

It was that moment of a winter twilight when the snow, late hour and dark sky combine to produce an unearthly, plum-blue shimmer. A lone crow was standing on our icy, bare-bones December lawn. It isn't in a crow to be pitiful, but this crow looked as though, under his brave show of black feathers, his ribs were clapping empty.

On impulse I smeared a big slice of the cake with hard sauce, ran out to the back yard to leave it, and ran back in. When I looked out the window, the crow was swaggering over to the plate, but not fast. A crow is always cool. He takes care of business one step at a time. Right now it was whiskey-scented manna from heaven. Well, he seemed to think, why not?

It was now very dark, and my last view was of the crow's silhouette. His wings flared above the cake, every feather tense with satisfaction. He lifted his head, eye sparkling straight into mine through the dark-silver night air. In his scimitar beak was a giant crystallized cherry.

Perfect BLT's On A Day Of Storm, With Tigers

2010-11-24T05:52:00.000-08:00

There are long grey veils of rain sweeping through the late autumn day, but a friend and I have planned to go to the zoo, and we're going, by God. Ellen insists on bringing the same sandwiches she's always brought to Vernon Park, from childhood onward.

She makes your basic BLT's in my kitchen, adding red onion, twice the usual bacon, plenty of mayo, and luscious late tomatoes. This is all wedged between thickly cut slabs of toasted homemade bread. The bread is of the "noble brick" variety, which is important. Then Ellen puts her big strong palm on the assembled sandwiches and leans all of her majestic weight on them. The flattened product is then wrapped in waxed paper and allowed to grow stone cold as we drive to Vernon Park.

We watch bears cavort wit delight in their daily shower, and it seems perfectly O.K. that we're standing in a heavy cold mist ourselves. We can live just fine in the day drizzling its grey pearls, we just have to put our hoods up. We watch tigers stalk and ripple with their lordly stripes. They chew their way through buckets of bloody treats. If we were more delicate people we'd be disgusted, but instead it makes us crave meat. So we open the waxed paper and eat our BLT's.

I hadn't expected much from these lumpy little doorstops, but I'm astonished at how good they are. The BLT is now a glorious mash with the silky tomato, salty bacon shards and onion bits all smashed together between the indestructable bookends of really good bread, still with the glint of grain. We and the tigers finish our perfect lunches. They lick their paws and we lick our fingers. As we walk away we go through all our various vowels of happy satiation:

"Ahhh...eeee.....I.....ohhhh.....UUUMMMMMMM!!!"

The Most Exquisite Lament for Lost Love in Cinema: Maggie Cheung in ASHES OF TIME REDUX

2010-10-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

ASHES OF TIME REDUX (2008, director Wong Kar-wai) is set in ancient times in China. The narrator and main character is Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), described as "a fallen swordsman driven by greed and heartless to both friend and foe." A mysterious personal disaster has forced him away from normal humans, as though he had some rabies of the soul. He's festering with hate in a hut in a remote desert. There he operates his peculiar business: he's a middleman who hires famous assassins to commit murders. He does this on the dime of rich people with grudges.

Very early in the film Ouyang Feng explains his business to us in terms so stark and icy we're chilled to the bone. He's a handsome young man, and yet it's as though a monster or a skull were speaking to us, so little human feeling does he show. But we sense he was not always this way. And we become obsessed by solving the puzzle: what loss distorted his mind and scorched his heart to this shard?

There are slight hints in the next hour, flashbacks which show Ouyang Feng struggling with a beautiful girl in red, dimly seen swordfights, suggestions of disgrace, flight and exile. But there is not a full explanation until the end of the movie. Then we meet Ouyang Feng's sister-in-law (Maggie Cheung). We are not given this woman's name; but to Ouyang Feng she will always be the only She. He hasn't seen her for ten years. Because of pride and custom, he will never see her again. She will never see him again. And we find out that the terrifying wonder is, their feelings have never changed. Nobody else exists for them or ever will.

The woman (Maggie Cheung) has a remarkable monologue that explains everything we need to know. We can see from her exquisite clothes and refined surroundings that she has a comfortably wealthy marriage and what anyone would call a happy life. Moreover she's very beautiful, with translucent skin and almond eyes. She's wearing red robes, which to Asian eyes denote good fortune. She has a son, which again to Asians would be the height of happiness. And then she speaks, slowly, without gesture, in a quiet voice.She is speaking to a friend of Ouyang Feng's. And what she tells is like a tragic poem:

"We were young. Ouyang Feng never told me how much he wanted me.
It's what I needed to hear.
He was too proud to say it.
He took it for granted I would marry him.
He never imagined that out of spite I would marry his brother.
On my wedding night he wanted me to run away with him,
but I refused.
Why did he want me only when he couldn't have me?
......
Nothing really matters anymore.
I used to think words were so important,
that once spoken they'd last a lifetime.
But looking back, they make no difference.
What is important changes.
I was so sure I won, that the triumph was mine,
until one day I looked in the mirror.
During the best years of my life
the person I love was not by my side.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could go back
into the past...?"

Then she says to Ouyang Feng's friend, very quietly,
"Why didn't you ever tell him
where I was?"
The man replies, "I promised you that I wouldn't."
She says, with a smile more tragic than tears,
"You were too honest."

Then this radiant, still-young creature withdraws into the shadows,
with slow broken movements, like a wounded animal.
And she bows her proud head, and weeps.

Heart-breaking. Terrible. But--wonderful.

RED JACKET: A Poem for my Mother

2010-09-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Savides, September 23 1915 - January 26, 2004.
I also posted this poem last year on my mother's birthday. Happy Birthday, dear Mom!

She was borne away by an engine ornate, fiery and black
on a rescue mission: to oversee an uncle's burial.
Uncle Bill had been the ravenous King Kong
in our family fairy tale, bolting rows of sweet corn
and inhaling ingots of butter at Reunions,
beer bubbling out of his ears, plums up his nose,
his roaring beefy tongue popping with hotdogs
and Scottish curses, a new wife
sitting on his hand every few years.
Suddenly he'd exploded, his pigskin heart
split at every seam

and our mother's calmness was frantically summoned
by the hysterical fourth wife.
Mom rode to the rescue on a dragon-black train,
bolt upright and pushing it all the way. Once there
she ordered the special, jumbo casket,
she blessed the giant's exploded corpuscles
with a gentle veil of white flowers,
dignified his furry pagan paunch in a kingly suit of black.
She directed when cables would lower his bulk,
heavy as a crusader in full mail, to the inner earth
where seethed gobs of minerals, and his ancestors' lacy bones.
Old wives' and young wives' cupid's-bow kisses
colored his big ornery face ravishing shades of rose.
At the funeral lunch, the peach-fed oils of Mother's baked ham
soothed mourners' torn nerve endings.
The precise rectangles of her bar cookies
made them feel they could go on.

At home we shivered in coldest eclipse,
for she was the queen of our tribe of dwarves.
At five years old I fought my baby instinct
to stroke her red jacket in the closet where it glowed.
Finally one midnight the dragon brought her back,
and we breathed warm air again.
I'd heard corpses were green, and rotton-bellied with fear
still had to ask.
Yes, she said; Uncle Bill had been a little green,
but was now shining in heaven,
silvery with Grandma and Father Abraham.
She believed it, too.
When she looked up, all of her beloved dead
were sparkling in the constellations.

My hard little coconut head
processed her words. I looked suspiciously
at those stars, privately had my doubts.
But then I looked into her gentle face and decided,
then and lifelong,
never to tell.

ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!

2010-09-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

Some readers have told me that I can't really call this a blog, until I cough up at least one post in which I gas on about myself endlessly. So here's my stab at it. The usual format is for a phantom "interviewer" to ask a lot of tasteless questions, to which I respond with oily self-congratulation; but just to keep things stirred up I'll be honest here and there.

Q.: What's your favorite scent in nature?

MB: Black locust blossom.

Q.: Do you talk to yourself?

MB: Yes, lots. Sometimes I crack myself up, or argue myself to a standstill. Why not have a great conversation, just because another person happens not to be there at the moment?!

Q.: What are your feelings about cilantro?

MB: I hate it. It's the loco-weed of our decade.

Q.: Do you sweat a lot?

MB: No. There's a saying: "Horses sweat. Men perspire. Ladies glow."

Q.: What movie scene made you laugh so much you fell off your chair?

MB: Sam Kinison as the psycho history teacher raving away at his terrified students in BACK TO SCHOOL. His eyes pop right out of his head and his spittle flies off the screen and onto the audience! I've heard Kinison was a child evangelist in the old days, mesmerizing whole audiences as he ranted at them about hellfire; so no wonder he's so good at this!

Q.: Most sustained comic performance in a movie?

MB: HAS to be Bill Murray as the creepy groundskeeper Carl Spackler in CADDYSHACK. Every crazy squint, every mutter, even his droopy camouflage pants are just brilliant.

Q.: What do you eat to get your strength back when you're feeling blue?

MB: Hot ham and fried egg, heavily peppered, on a toasted onion bagel. With strong mustard, a slice of red onion. And a big old Cuba Libre goes with this just fine. Dark rum, of course.

Q.: What personality types do you despise the most?

MB: Bullies and liars.

Q.: Who is your favorite spiritual leader? Buddha, Yahweh, Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed? Or lots of different gods like in Wagner operas?

MB: Yahweh is such a huge honking name and presence that I'm almost afraid not to choose him. In my mind's eye, to this day, I see his beard of thunder and his gaze of forked lightning just as I did as a child--and I see them with considerable respect. But for me, Jesus Christ of the Gospels is the most ethically sublime. If he actually said and did even a tenth of the things that were attributed to him, he had the most beautiful mind and heart.

Q.: Do you believe in forgiving...or not?

MB: I'm torn. There's a very moving scene in the Japanese movie BRIGHT FUTURE, where a kid has hurt and insulted someone who's been kind to him, a father figure. The kid realizes his mistake and begs for forgiveness. The man just says to him, very simply, "I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive everybody everything."
I know that that's the higher course.

But then there's a tiny little devil in people (including me) that just sort of pops up and enjoys the Spanish saying, "Forgiveness is the first sign of senility." As though holding tight to a good grudge is good for your health, adds salt and red pepper to life. So it's a toss-up.

Well, that's enough gassing on for now. Have a wonderful weekend, folks, and I will now sign off from my REAL BLOG!!!

Lovers In Movies: "Let's raise a glass to the adorable couple!"

2010-08-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

I was a very young teenager when I saw a retro showing of the great old warhorse epic, EL CID. Although at that time I was innocent to the point of idiocy, a sort of emotionally pristine Bubble Girl, I couldn't help but notice this: Roderigo (Charlton Heston) and Chimene (Sophia Loren) were individually attractive people, but when they got together on the screen, some sort of alchemy blazed between them and they became smoking hot. Hubba hubba!

It's fascinating to speculate why certain actor couples generate this warm charisma between themselves, and why others remain as cold as though they were emoting from the coffin. We all have our favorites among the warm ones, and here are a few of mine.

"When the six-foot-two Farrell kisses Gaynor passionately and holds her tiny five-foot frame up in the air, they truly look like a couple blessed by a winged divinity, with the space around them vibrating..."

Dan Callahan wrote this about Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor in the fine old silent, SEVENTH HEAVEN (1927). If anything, his words aren't enough to convey the magic this couple had--for their audiences, and evidently for each other (they were secret lovers for many years.) SEVENTH HEAVEN unfolds like a powerful charm. Diane (Gaynor) is an orphaned waif, savagely abused and close to suicide, when she is saved by the sewage worker Chico (Farrell). He's a bit of a big lug--an arrogant dreamer, feet in the sewer and head in the stars--but she knows his heart is good, and we know it too. He chases away her abuser, carries her to his seventh-floor garret. Diane's delicate face, as she slowly understands that she'll be allowed to live there safely and chastely, has a lovely, poignant wonder and gratitude. Gaynor's whole performance is a marvel, and in fact she won the first Academy Award for an Actress, for her work in this and two other movies (SUNRISE and STREET ANGEL).
This couple is bombarded with cruel challenges in the plot, and puts an adoring audience through the wringer. We root for them so intensely that in present-day showings of the film, at the extraordinary ending (which I don't want to give away), the weeping, exhausted viewers will often chant the final, ecstatic title card:
"Chico...Diane...HEAVEN!"

"Love is too weak a word for what I feel...I LURRRVE you. Y'know, I LOOOVE you, I LUFF you. There are two f's...I have to invent...Of course I love you."
Woody Allen says this to Annie (Diane Keaton) in ANNIE HALL. I've seen the movie many times and it's STILL a shock late in the movie when Annie abandons Woody and New York for a L.A. record mogul. (In real life it was Warren Beatty). How can she just drop our most beloved neurotic actor, with the fuzzy red hair coming out of his ears and the wit, so tasty and spicy, burbling out of his lips in every frame? He's our Woody doll, bristly but cuddly. And she left without even asking!

"I was a vampire; and she had the sweetest blood I'd ever smelled."
Here, Edward Cullen explains his attraction to Bella, in the TWILIGHT franchise.
Edward and Bella meet cute. She walks into a high school classroom where 110-year-old Edward is masquerading as a dewy-faced Junior for the 93rd time. Talk about bored. He gets a whiff of her deliciously pungent Bella blood,which he finds madly seductive. He wants to leap on her like a cougar and tear out her throat just as a greeting. But he's a gentle, courtly soul (apart from the raving-maniacal-bloodsucking-monster thing) and they work it out. There is no reason why a monster can't wear cashmere, and Edward also dresses very well. Author Stephenie Meyers, who created the characters, is a devout Mormon; so although there are rogue vampires in the plot, not nice like Edward, and they basically chomp up and drain whole human populations, even Meyer's BAD vampires don't smoke or say naughty words. Personally, I'm glad.

The best movie couples charm us the way they charm each other. Sometimes there's a particular scene, an interaction that somehow pierces us. I'm thinking now of TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU--which was marketed as a teen flick, but is something more.(For one thing, it's a reimagining of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.) The movie makes poignant viewing now, because it was one of Heath Ledger's earliest roles.

In TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU, the power of the very young star glimmers throughout. He's a high school bad boy (Patrick), tousle-headed like a young lion, glamorously tough. He's hired to romance the Julia Stiles character, Kate--who's reacted to her horrible ex-boyfriend by becoming prickly and bitter. Patrick tries and fails to charm her, and becomes obsessed with conquering the contemptuous girl. Finally there's a scene where Kate is blowing off steam one night at an all-girl dance club. He's followed her, in his leather pants and black shirt, and is laughed at by the other girls as a biological oddity. But from a distance he sees Kate, as both he and we have never seen her: laughing, delighted, moshing madly on the dance floor to the music she loves.

As the camera slowly approaches Patrick's face, the cynicism slowly leaves it. It's almost as though we're watching the crucial moment of the Pinocchio story, where a wooden-headed boy turns into a thinking, feeling human. In the past this high school punk had been waiting for the day when he could win. But now he feels the vitality of this girl's spirit. As he watches her, he looks like a kind angel who is marveling at the sight of a very strong, very sweet earthling. And in this delicate, wordless moment, in his face he shows us a movement of his heart: this is the girl who will be HIS girl, because this is the one he wants.

That Long Ago Summer: Young Husband And Wife In Tomato Field, a poem

2010-08-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Sun beams fell like stones. Glazed
neck and neck we'd stump down the rows
and when we dug in, each spadeful, pure clay,
had us jumping up and down. Over the fence
cows gandered, udders boggling against
broadbeans and trilliums. They looked dimly pleased,
as though dandelions were turning to wine in their
cool green fourth bellies.

But we were human, and we maddened by degrees.
First we'd wilt, endangered flora,
but by noon the sun had grilled us tough.
A beef-jerky man and woman shoveled and hissed.
You'd be brown as an ape man, your hair going berserk.
Our children would rush out, seize my knees. Mama
nuzzled these baby carrots with her
horse lips.

High noon! oh, ready to cry fire I remembered
night storms going straight down, no time
between crash and flash. Here
red lanterns of tomatoes
sizzled on straw. You took a hot mouthful
into your hot mouth, lost breath: a red kiss
gullet-deep, equatorial.

The Best Screen Villain: Wes Studi's MAGUA in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

2010-07-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Watch him: he's like a monstrous dark image of hate, from his raptor's beak of a nose to the Huron war plumes bristling on his shaven naked head. Everything counts: that pulse throbbing in his temple precedes his devoutly-schemed-for homicides by seconds. His very acne scars have a vile eloquence.

He's subtle. See the fascinating night scene of his parlay with the French general Montcalm. These two brilliant insincere minds understand each other so well, and with so few words. Montcalm smoothly explains that the English prisoners are allowed by law to leave safely. LEAVE safely--he doesn't say, REACH THEIR DESTINATION safely. Magua knows he has been given permission to kill them down to the last man and woman.

Which is exactly what he almost does. As a scout, he leads the relieved and complacent party of English prisoners frolicking along to their doom as though to a picnic. Then suddenly he's the god pulling the strings, delivering the first blow in an ecstatic seizure of revenge as the English are ambushed by his warriors, and bloodily hacked apart with gore flooding their red coats.

Even in this scene of carnage, Magua's focus is unearthly: what he wants is the scalp and beating heart of the Englishman Munro, his great enemy. Driving straight through the chaos like a spear to its target, he finds Munro and cripples him--you will never see eyes more remote and murderous than Magua's in this scene--then, not content with simply killing the man, tells Munro with a terrifying icy triumph that he will leave behind him no issue on the earth: his children will be murdered. Thus Magua breaks Munro's heart before he cuts it out and holds it high.

Wes Studi underplays throughout, except for brief moments in the magnificent action scenes when his intensity explodes. He's capable of great nuance just by slight movements of his eyes. Even in the climactic fight with Uncas (Eric Schweig)--the noble and (it has to be said) staggeringly beautiful Mohican warrior who's attempting to rescue Munro's daughter Alice--Magua has a totemic focus. He leaps, parries, stabs, slashes, and throws Uncas down the cliff face--with the efficiency of a violent dance. Even when he cuts Uncas's throat, and the boy is dead, Magua's expression reveals a powerful distaste, as though he feels disgust for the carrion corpse beneath his hand. That look of Studi's seems like an odd choice--until we think about it and realize that it's exactly what Magua would have felt.

Studi's performance keeps hitting us on the back of the head with a shovel. We can't rest for a moment, because he never can while he lives. And as though everything he's done weren't enough, it turns out he had his reasons. His wife and children were murdered by whites. That is what set him on this frenzy.

In a final turn of the blade, Magua's most perfect revenge, we don't get to just hate him. We have to understand him.

Men and Women Talk About The Ex, With Heartbreak and Humor

2010-07-04T12:27:00.000-07:00

"She wanted to take the dogs. But the dogs liked me better."
Mickey Rourke, actor

"I was totally committed to Janet Leigh, she was the star of my heart throughout our marriage, although I did cheat on her constantly from day one."
Tony Curtis, actor. He explains in his autobiography that he was so beautiful as a young man, the girls hunted him down like a dog and he couldn't fight them off.

"He's an asshole, he really is."
Lorrie Moore, writer. Moore was married to a divorce lawyer.

"There's a Spanish saying for a certain type of cold, sadistic, punitive husband: 'He makes her eat ice.' I decided that forty years of eating ice was enough."
J.Z., a friend

"She said to me, 'I'm just not that into you romantically.' And I said to her, 'Then what is it we've been doing?'"
Laura R., about the woman she'd thought of as her lover, D.

"Live by the sword, die by the sword."
Ernest Hemingway, writer, said this about his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway had never forgiven Pfeiffer for being (as he saw it) a home-wrecker who pursued him when he was an innocent lad, and lured him away from his first marriage to sweet Hadley Richardson. He now gloated over the "prairie justice" aspects of allowing himself to be lured away from Pfeiffer by a much younger woman. Martha Gellhorn would become his third wife. However, Hemingway only fully learned about real prairie justice when Gellhorn left him for younger men and for her journalism career.

"I realized why she divorced me in the first place. I was in love with her, but she was not in love with me. For her, I was not the most beautiful thing on the planet."
Terrence Howard, actor

"He's a psychologist. He's also cunning. And what he did was stop talking to me. He withdrew, leaving me to stumble and tremble, to wonder what was happening. And when he did talk, it was to ridicule and threaten. He seemed to enjoy his immense capacity to frighten me...soon after our new baby's birth, there were moments when I confronted my husband, telling him I was lonely and frightened. 'Why are you so cruel?' I'd ask him. 'Why don't you hold your daughter? Why don't you hold the baby? Why don't you love us?'"
Marlena de Blasi, writer. She found a kind and loving second husband, thank God, and describes their courtship in her memoir, A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE.

"It was as if he'd been attracted to me for my exuberance, and then did everything he could to tone it down. Dutifully, I chucked my red shoes into the back of the closet and wore a lot of grey."
Laura Fraser, writer.

"I would never desert her, or let her feel that she was abandoned."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer. Fitzgerald never divorced his mentally ill wife Zelda, although friends urged him to do so.

And finally, this serious but somehow encouraging passage from writer Edmund Wilson's journal about a meeting with Mary Blair when they were in the middle of getting a divorce:

"When I finally left her in her apartment, after dinner, she gave me a human intelligent look, as she said good night, which made me feel her friendliness and her strength: a look of understanding between us on a level above our wrangling. I could count on her, she could count on me."

A Father Has Taken His Very Young Family To Devil's Lake, a poem, by Margaret Benbow

2010-06-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

For Theodore Savides, April 6, 1915- September 14, 2001
(Happy Father's Day, Dear Dad)

A father has taken his very young family
to Devil's Lake. Dinosaur-sided slabs of
rocks the age of stars stare down
from their dizzying tumble
at these lilies of a day.

Little sisters horse around in melted topaz water
noting too late the thrillingly ominous
absence of the father
who can swim underwater for incredible distances
and now in our midst a dazzling sea monster
explodes roaring from the depths laughing
shucking kids like sheaves
on towering gouts of waves
mighty arms gleaming-scaled with shining lake-beads
and we yell with one throat until we see the monster is
Torpedo Dad
our starry but trustworthy giant
and we become giddy
leap around him like tipsy fish
hang from his ears like fond pygmies
use the launching pad of his kind shoulders
for our brave and blazing back-flips.

On Deep Survival: "One who is good at preserving his life..."

2010-06-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

(I've posted this quote from the Tao Te Ching once before, in 2009. However, because it becomes wiser and more valuable the longer you think about it, it's worth saying twice.)

One who is good at preserving his life
does not avoid tigers and rhinoceroses
when he walks in the hills;
nor does he put on armor and take up weapons
when he enters battle.
In this man
the rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn.
The tiger has no place to fasten its claws.
Weapons have no place to admit their blades.
Now,
what is the reason for this?
Because on him there are no mortal spots.

(quote from the Tao Te Ching)

And writer Peter Leschak explains the mystery of survival
this way:
"You must be so alive you simply cannot die."

ANIMAL HEART, a poem, by Margaret Benbow

2010-05-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

Let's say that in the terrible dream

you're lost in a demon wood. Dark shapes
move closer through evil rain.
Angels (those radiant screwups,
all crash and flash) have failed to show

but you're far from alone. That's
your dog's warm muzzle in your cold-sweating
terrified palm. Do you scorn
his simplicity? He is earthy,
like a moving stump or stone
vibrating red waves of funky fur.
Technically he's a meathead, some say:
his brain has but one blood-red lobe.
But you know you're the god-mom within it.
Day in day out
he lies in wait to gnaw your gnarly toes.
His head smells of pork gravy.
Still, he's right there.

Which is better: a glamorously absent angel
whom you pray in vain for long years
will finally swoop to you from his winter palace,
or the animal heart
which stands close,
on your side and by your side,
baring white knife teeth at what threatens,
embracing (goofy and pure) what loves,
and you do the same for him.

Between one flick of hummingbird's wings
and the next, our lives beat by:
fair or dark depending on
who's here with us, who's there,
who cannot be torn away.

Part 2: Cee-Cee Says How To Tell The One Bad Cop Among A Hundred Good Ones, continued

2010-05-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

I was getting pretty weary of Cee-Cee's remarks about "shit-fer-brains civilians," but decided she was on a roll and I shouldn't slow her down. I said, "Why do you blame just Leroy? There must have been other officers involved too."

She said, "But it was on his say-so. He developed the case in the first place. He made a stupid mistake. He trusted bad informants, believed bad information. He WANTED to believe it. It's as though he was working on a math problem and decided that 2 and 2 equals 5 because he liked it better that way. And all of us who came after him and tried to solve the problem were stuck with it, and nothing worked out right because 2 and 2 does not equal 5. Never has, never will. Nothing can work right when the information's wrong.

"So now I see you got your frowny face on," she mocked me. "You're thinking, Why didn't one of the other cops stand up and say, 'What the f--k! We don't have jack squat on this case and Leroy has been feeding us horse s--t!'

"I know this will stun you, but cops are busy. We have battles to fight every day. We're not lounging around the police station saying, 'Well, s--t, I don't have a single thing to do all month so I guess I'll second-guess Leroy's cases for the last five years.' We don't do that. We trust each other. We have to, or we'd never get anything done."

She continued, "I'm not mad because he made the mistake in the first place. Every one of us makes mistakes. Everyone is a fool sometimes. I'm mad because he was an ONGOING fool. Out of vanity he never admitted his mistake. He was thinking like a goddamn civilian instead of a cop."

I bristled, but she paid me no mind,

"A cop has to believe what the evidence tells him. HAS to, or he's no use. A civilian gets to believe whatever the hell he wants. This is also the way crazy people think."

Cee-Cee also said she was involved in the case. "I did what undercover cops do to keep suspects shaken up, it's not in the rulebook. I don't want to talk about everything we did. But we tried to entrap them about twenty million times, there was never a response. We investigated the living crap out of them, and nothing but good things came up. I began to get a real bad feeling. I began to be afraid that these were good folks.

"I was working with my friend Mark, smartest cop I ever knew. He said out loud what I'd been thinking. He said, 'Those people are clean.' And that's what they turned out to be. There was no case.

"It was really about a private feud, some kind of bad feeling between neighbors going back fifteen or twenty years. You wouldn't believe how nasty these can get.
One side got all obsessed and decided to use the police as their personal goon squad to make their enemies suffer. We hate that, but it happens. We fell for it.

"This whole bogus case, every dollar, every minute, every airplane flight, every meal or mile, was on the taxpayer's dime. Every chocolate croissant in a fancy B&B. But this is what bothers me the most: personally I'm O.K. with acting like an asshole on the job, if it's for a good cause. But in this case I'd been acting like an asshole to nice folks. I'd been hurting people I should have been protecting, and protecting people I should have been hurting. I'll never forgive Leroy for that."

I said, "I still don't understand why you believed him in the first place."

She sighed. After a minute she said, "I wish I had a better reason, but he was kind of our star. He LOOKED right. He looked like he belonged on a recruitment poster. Still does. A big strapping guy, real confident, a leader. Bright eyes, great big smile. Mark said, 'Those eyes are TOO bright.' But he liked him too. Everybody did."

She set her wine glass down. We sat quietly for a few minutes. Then I paid the bill, and we wove our way out of the restaurant.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cee-Cee Says: How To Tell The One Bad Cop Among The Hundred Good Ones

2010-04-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

(Before reading this entry, you might want to take another look at my post of August 16, 2009. It describes how Cee-Cee, a retired policewoman, introduced herself to me over the phone and proceeded to flog me like a racehorse for what she considered an incredibly stupid letter-to-the-editor I'd written. By the end of the call we'd stopped screaming at each other, more or less, and I'd said we should meet some time over a glass of good red.)

Cee-Cee and I did meet at a Middle Eastern restaurant which had beautiful rugs on the walls and belly-dancing music, and we did have that glass of red wine. And it was so good we had a few more. It was on her fourth glass that she told me a surefire way she'd discovered, during her career, of spotting the rare bad cop, complete with an example.

"Cops like to be right. Not one of us enjoys admitting to a mistake, especially if it was a big, fat, stupid one. But a good cop will admit it, at least to himself. He'll feel shame and regret. He'll do what he can to make it right, and move on.

"A bad cop will never admit to a mistake unless he's driven to it, kicking and screaming." Here Cee-Cee gave the example of an officer she called Leroy, "because it's not his real name." She spoke for half an hour about a case he'd been involved in. His surveillance included shadowing his suspects on flights and several stays in pleasant domestic cities, at countless meals in good restaurants, the theater, on one occasion the opera, as well as wire-taps and invaded email accounts. After all of this, an unthinkable disaster occurred: the suspects turned out to be innocent. And not only were they innocent, they were as clean as Ivory soap. They had never committed a crime.

"So here we've got Leroy, who should have figured this out after a few months at most. We began to realize he may have falsified information. He liked that cushy investigation. He cost us tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of manhours, he made fools of other officers who trusted him, and by far the worst of it, he caused suffering to the innocent. That's the exact opposite of what we're supposed to be doing. And to this day, Leroy has never admitted he made a mistake.

"Yes, suspects are usually guilty, but once a cop starts assuming that they ALWAYS are, he's in trouble. Every once in awhile, the sonsabitches are innocent. Tormenting an innocent person is the worst thing a cop can do, and the good ones know it. But a bad cop like Leroy will be mad at the innocent. He thinks they did it on purpose to make him look bad. He'll make them suffer, if he can. He'll even put them in danger, if he can. Because if he's arrogant AND druggy, like Leroy, there's no boundaries for him."

I asked, "What happened to him?"

"Oh, we got rid of him. We let him retire young." She swirled wine in her glass, looked at it thoughtfully. "I know I talk a lot of trash about civilians, complain that we have to protect them like babies, but after all, it is all about the goddamn civilians. What else is our job about, except to help all you dumb shit-fer-brains civilians out there live your lives, pursue your happiness, you know?" Then she smiled at me, and drank down the last of her wine.
TO BE CONTINUED

Coming from the Ends of the Earth to Share Dessert, and A Sweet Life...

2010-04-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

The beauty of Marlena de Blasi's memoir A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE is that it's true. In 1992 she was a chef and travel writer, saddened by a ghastly divorce, who reluctantly visited Venice to write articles about the food. He, Fernando, was a middle-aged, somewhat depressed Venetian banker who concealed a blazingly passionate heart beneath his pinstriped vests. He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love at first sight--or rather, half-sight, for as he told her later, he saw only her profile, her wild and unmanageable mass of pinned-up black hair, and a beautiful woolly white coat that covered her to the ankles. He had been agonizingly shy his whole life, and he was afraid to speak to her. She did not notice him at all.

A year later Marlena returned to Venice. The day came when Fernando saw her again, in a cafe, and this time he spoke. She rebuffed the blue-eyed stranger, but he had found his courage and refused to disappear. He spoke no English, she spoke almost no Italian. There were false starts, and a Venetian storm kept them apart, and she fled back to America. This man who had been so shy, self-doubting, and cautious his whole life, pursued her across the ocean with the confidence of an arrow that will absolutely not be deflected from its target. He had found his mate, and that was that.

It took Marlena a little more time to share his feelings. However, in the meantime she cooked him a marvelous meal. It is wonderfully described in her book. The meal ends this way:

"He seems content with silence. I've made a dessert, one I haven't made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand. "Si, questa e la mia faccia," he tells me in a whisper. "Yes, this is my face."

(quote from A Thousand Days In Venice, by Marlena De Blasi)

Drunken Politico Chews Up John Edwards With His Chicken Marsala

2010-04-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

I heard about this incident from a journalist friend. I won't name the locally well-known politician sitting a few tables away in the Italian restaurant. He'd been tossing back the Old Fashioneds along with his Chicken Marsala. That's probably why he felt comfortable sharing his views on what makes a great leader, with everyone in the restaurant. Keep in mind that this happened right after John Edwards' girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, had given tell-all interviews and appeared in show-all photos. And this is what the politician said:

"I always said John Edwards was a weak wad unfit for office, and now look at this mess he's gotten himself into. When a man running for the presidency can't even keep his damn mistress in check, it's pretty sad. Can you see this guy facing down Putin? Here's old Rielle prancing around in her underpants, giving interviews, flaunting the love child--and what's with the love child, anyway? HELLLLOOOOO JOHNNNYYYYY, didn't your high school coach ever tell you that if you're going to play the big game, you got to suit up? Mine did!

"Now compare this guy with natural leaders like John Kennedy or old Lyndon Johnson. Those were real men. They juggled their girlfriends, kept their wives happy, handled things like the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam, and never broke a sweat. Kennedy had DOZENS of mistresses, and you never heard a yip out of those women. Not one! Yes, there were real honest-to-God Alpha males running the government in those days. These days they're all having damn pedicures."

He sighed heavily for good times gone, and ordered another Old Fashioned. "You can depend on this," he said, pointing at the glass, "no matter what happens. And it's about ALL you can depend on."

Aunt Margot's Great Advice about: NASTY GOSSIP

2010-03-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

Maybe my true calling was to be an advice columnist. Ever since I learned to babble, I've been driven to eagerly force huge gobs of unasked-for advice on friends and relatives. I'm just trying to give them a little MUCH NEEDED intelligent direction, but often they're ungrateful. A woman friend might say, "I love you, but buzz off!" A cousin once said wonderingly, "It's amazing how someone can talk like a book and say so many dumb things at the same time." Well, pooh on you, Paul!

But now I have a blog, and can give unfettered advice at great length. If you would like to ask my opinion about something (Please! Please!), put your question in the Comments section. I'll try to have an Aunt Margot's Great (Not Goofy) Advice post every month or so. And this was the first question, a rather serious one.

"Aunt Margot,
I've just heard some pretty nasty, unbelievable gossip about somebody I've known for years. He's not a close friend, but we move in the same circles. He's always seemed like a nice, normal guy, successful at his job, and the gossip doesn't fit what I know about him. But maybe you never do really know someone...How should I treat him? And how can I figure out what to believe?"
(signed) Astonished and Wondering

"Dear Astonished:

I'm no gossip expert. I was raised by sweet, kind parents who never knowingly said a harmful word about anyone. So, I was never inoculated with the Gossip virus. But this is how I'd respond:

A rumor is just a rumor. Moses did not carry it down from the mountaintop engraved on tablets of stone. There is no eleventh commandment which says, "Thou shalt be guilty if enough of us want you to be."

What you should care about is the facts. Google the gossiped-about person all the way through to his back fillings and toenail-parings, if you must. You'll only be joining the 200 million or so fellow Americans, including me, who enjoy this pastime. Look him up in the Circuit Court Access files, which are open to the public in many states. If everything you find out is harmless, or reasonably positive, then the chances are your friend really is nice and normal. You probably aren't acquainted with the next Bernard Madoff, or a debauched monster, or an axe-swinging serial murderer. And, since you're not an idiot, stay focused on actual evidence. Because the next fact, a depressing one, is this:

Unfortunately there are some people of thirty, forty, sixty, eighty and beyond, who have lived their entire lives as Eighth Grade Mean Girls or Zit Boys. They have never moved emotionally beyond their wildly envious, rabidly malicious thirteenth year. The concept of Slander as a harmful (and felonious) activity has no reality for a person like this. There is no rumor so low, unsupported, unlikely, or plainly incredible that they won't do their best to make you believe it.

A chronic nasty gossip is like a drug addict. The high they get is a sense of power. They frantically snuff it, huff it, and gobble it up. They would stuff it into every orifice if they could. A relative who remembers the days when every home had its chamber pot, calls people like this Pot Lickers.

So, Astonished, when you're deciding what to believe about people, remember that reality is always, always your best friend. Don't be one of life's Pot Lickers.

Wishing you well,

Aunt Margot

Of Animals: "They are not underlings..."

2010-03-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

"They are not underlings," wrote naturalist Henry Beston of animals, "they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth."

Glorious and Inglorious Foods and Those Who Cook Them

2010-02-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

We'll begin with a quote from the book A THOUSAND DAYS IN TUSCANY, by Marlena de Blasi. She writes about food (and life in general) like a divinely ecstatic and perceptive madwoman. For example, this is how Marlena describes her husband's kiss:

"My face is burning where he held it a moment ago as he kissed me, and I like the flavor of him that stays with me and mixes with the tastes of coffee and milk and bread, the grains of undissolved sugar on his lips...like a good buttery Gugelhopf (rich bread) he tastes." I'd think her husband would square his shoulders and walk a little prouder after reading that.
De Blasi even lets us know what she's wearing when she roasts a chicken: a little silk dress "scribbled with roses." And here is her description of the preparation:

"I fill the chicken's belly with a handful of garlic, the cloves crushed but not peeled, then rub its bosom to a glisten with olive oil, finally ornamenting it with a thick branch of wild rosemary. After an hour or so in the wood oven, the skin is bronzed and crisp, the juices running out in little golden streams...I set the roasting pan over a quick flame, scraping the bits of caramelized vegetables and the drippings that cling in the pan, blessing it all with splashes of white wine."

By huge contrast, we have Betty MacDonald's description of her grandmother's cooking. "Gammy" was an adored family member but probably only Sweeney Todd could have been a worse cook. The quote is from MacDonald's best-selling memoir, THE EGG AND I:
"Gammy hated waste, and she taught us that you bake a cake with whatever you can lay your hands on." This included a little onion, old moldy jars of jam, a sludge of syrup, leftover bread dough, a few grapes, cherries or dates, and always to use old bacon drippings instead of butter or shortening. "Her cakes were simply dreadful--heavy and tan and full of seeds and pits." Even the family dogs and chickens refused to eat the cakes. They began to "pile up in the yard alarmingly." Fortunately, a neighboring family had less critical tastes. In fact, this family enjoyed eating dog biscuits, relishing the tang of dried blood and bone. Gammy's cakes were a huge hit with them. They gobbled them all up and begged for more.

Patience Gray in her memoir HONEY FROM WEEDS admires the impeccable taste of her friend Irving: "His sense of perfection found expression in cooking." Unfortunately, this led to his flinging a badly cooked duck out of the window in the presence of his famished, astounded dinner guests. The inferior bird got snagged on a drainpipe several stories up. Eventually it had to be retrieved by the Fire Department, complete with ladder. Neighbors had complained, because this happened during hot summer and the bird began to stink tremendously. Hopefully the starving guests got at least a little omelet and a few greens.

When the great film director Akira Kurosawa was a child, he often spent the summer in a remote country village where his father grew up. In his memoir SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY he describes this interaction with an old resident, which took place sixty-five years before he wrote about it:
"Once when I visited a farmer's house, he served me a vegetable dish with miso bean-paste sauce cooked in clamshells--a style called kaiyaki in this part of the country--and fish. While he drank rice wine over his meal, he said to me in thick dialect, "You might wonder what could be interesting about living in a hovel like this and eating slop like this. Well, I tell you, it's interesting just to be alive."

Kenny Shopsin would agree with him, even though he himself never eats slops. Here's a quote from the book EAT ME: THE FOOD AND PHILOSOPHY OF KENNY SHOPSIN.

"I like everything about this life. I like waking up in the morning knowing that I am going to the restaurant to cook, that something unexpected will happen to me in the kitchen, and that no matter what, I will learn something new. I like the actual process of cooking. I like shopping for the food that I cook, and I like my interactions with the people I meet while shopping. I like my customers, and I like working with my kids. It is a simple existence, but for me the beauty is in that simplicity. These are the things that bring me pleasure--and they bring me great pleasure on an extremely regular basis."

And nobody can ask for more than that.

Finally, in an homage to a starry night and companionship and strong tea, we'll close with another quote from Marlena de Blasi:

"Fernando (Marlena's husband) turns back to look at the village, says the firelight becomes the ancient stones. He kisses me gently and holds me...under a raw blue sky sugared in tiny stars we walk back home along the icy road, Fernando leading. We build up the fire and we sit close to it, sipping hot, sweet tea."

"Goddamned Poets," a poem, by Margaret Benbow

2010-02-22T05:59:00.000-08:00

Today a poet friend sent me images of himself
in performance totaling,

unbelievably, 10,000k, crashing into my computer
like an eighteen-wheeler. There

are several different views of him preening at a lectern
so that one could
admire him

from every angle. What is it about poets? He's a
pretty good guy
normally.

I told my brother Larry about this, and said I was glad
to be
blessedly

free from such juvenile vanity
myself.
Larry then brought up

completely
irrelevantly, I feel,

a painful scene at a reading where some punk kid
embarrassed

himself by making the big mistake of supposing
it was his turn to read.

It was MY turn.

Larry said that he "much admired the steely smile
with which you refused to yield the stage,"
but that some might call it vanity.

Oh, bullshit.

Watching A Valentine's Movie With The Honey

2010-02-08T07:12:00.000-08:00

In honor of Valentine's Day, you should consider having a sensuous and sumptuous evening at home with Mr. Honey rather than following the herd to an overbooked, overpriced restaurant, the Chump's Delight, where your champagne and the single rose will break the bank for weeks.

This Valentine's Eve, you can be bohemian young lovers again. Rent a good movie, buy a bottle of red--and this beverage doesn't have to be of a quality to make you speak in tongues, see gold angels, titillate your spark plugs or make your boiler explode. It's just WINE, for Pete's sake. But maybe you SHOULD bring home one of those quiveringly delicious desserts from the deli, say, that dear little cake with the chocolate ganache that you've eyed all year, but feared was too precious and sinful to indulge in. Tonight is the night to indulge.

You've got your favorite romantic movies, I've got mine. Some folks love the classics, like GONE WITH THE WIND. They focus breathlessly on the scene where Rhett carries a passionately squeaking Scarlett up that endless staircase. Hubba hubba! Personally I've never felt the same about that scene, since reading that Clark Gable was forced by a sadistic director to repeat it twenty times. By the last few trudges up the staircase he was trembling, shaking, drenched with sweat, furious at the director, and terrified that he was popping a hernia. Vivien Leigh also shared with friends that she was mentally holding her nose during this scene because of Gable's unhygienic dentures. This is not romantic! Or there's CASABLANCA, but the ending still leaves me thunderstruck. Bogey and Bergman are plainly soulmates. Even their hats look perfect together, yet he forces her to fly off with the freedom-fighter Paul Henreid. Does anyone really doubt that Henreid could fight the Nazis much better without Bergman tripping after him in her spectator pumps?

Rent your choice movie, whatever it might be. Next, make a snack that rounds all bases. Personally, I always like a special popcorn that I drench not only in garlic butter but in paprika and in the deliciously sharp chedder cheese that comes in Kraft dinner mixes. In a once-a-year spirit of abandon, you might even throw away the hard little noodles.

If you're very lucky, you may have inherited from your parents an ancient, enormous hide-a-bed sofa, the original kind that's about the weight of a mammoth elephant. This is not really a sofa at all, but a boulder carved to resemble a sofa. It will probably outlive you, so you might as well enjoy this Rock of Gibralter and soften it with fuzzy afghans.

On Valentine's night, let down the hide-a-bed. Put the magnificently reeking popcorn, the wine and the chocolate delight within easy reach. (And by the way, don't be afraid of the popcorn. Garlic adds character to kisses.) Close the curtains snugly against all of those rampant black ice-gales raging through the February night--but not in here. Then turn on the movie, wrap yourself and your sweetie in the embrace of a warm comforter, and watch a couple like the two of you fall in love as though flinging themselves down a well or catapulted to the stars.

Kenny Shopsin and the Brown Rice Valentine

2010-01-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

I've posted elsewhere about how much I enjoyed Kenny Shopsin's memoir/cookbook/rant, EAT ME: THE FOOD AND PHILOSOPHY OF KENNY SHOPSIN. He's a tough New York diner cook, the best in the city and certainly the most notorious. He says what's on his mind. Not every cookbook writer will tell you he was in Freudian analysis, five days a week, for years. He sometimes uses language that, as the old saying goes, would knock a buzzard off a shithouse. And he's also a loving family man.

The book is a headlong gallop of Shopsin's redhot opinions and fearless recipes, but there is a peaceful spot for your eye to rest on, if you need one. This is the portrait of Shopsin's late wife, Eve, on page 100. It was painted by Sean Lennon. She has a gentle, kind, dark-eyed face and rich, reddish-brown hair. Apparently she put up with her proudly impossible husband with paience and grace. Shopsin is not one of those guys who's drooling tenderness all the time, but you sense that emotion in his memories of Eve. For example, there's his description of a favorite meal they often shared when they were young:

"Around that time Eve and I were in the habit of going to a restaurant on Bleecker Street," where they always ordered a dish called the Brown Rice Special. Oddly, the restaurant claimed it was a salad. Kenny goes on, "It was hot rice and melted cheese drizzled with soy sauce and with a bunch of crunchy vegetables and walnuts strewn throughout. They served it on a cake stand: a big gooey mound of stuff all piled there on top of the pedestal."

The hungry young couple would sit on opposite sides of the Rice Special and attack it with forks, stabbing and securing the luscious nuts and vegetables, digging in with such passion that every single time "we'd end up tipping the f**king cake stand over."

The recipe is now Shopsin's, and I won't reproduce it here (it's on page 101 of the book). But his advice on how to eat the dish has to be told. It's not much of a stretch to see that he is also giving his opinion about how to savor your life:

"The salad is what I call a 'mouth food'...To get a bite you stick your fork through the rice and cheese, and the walnuts are dragged by the cheese. You then take your fork and stab through a vegetable, and you score a little lettuce along with it. You now have a bit of every ingredient in your mouth at the same time, and when you chew, all those flavors and textures transform into something that didn't exist until that moment. If you pick at it and separate the ingredients like a persnickety assh**e, you are not going to have the same experience, and the experience you do have will be inferior."

Shopsin perfected this recipe as an homage to Eve. Many a fine valentine is not made out of chocolate. You can figure out on your own how to make a good version of Kenny and Eve's Brown Rice Special, but better yet, buy the book. And when you eat this food, keep in mind all the meals shared with passion by struggling young lovers in their early days--including, no matter how many years ago it was or how it turned out, your own.

Two Favorite Images Of Marriage, In Book And Film

2010-01-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

Today is the wedding anniversary of some good friends, and I want to honor it with two beautiful images: one from a book I loved as a child, one from the last film of the great director Akira Kurosawa.

I'm a member of the generation that was weaned on the Babar picture books, created by Jean de Brunhoff. Babar is a noble, smart, jolly, kind and loving elephant who bravely meets every challenge that an orphan faces in a harsh world. We, his peewee readers, had suffered with him through incredible hardships which illustrator de Brunhoff didn't whitewash. When Babar's father, the King Elephant, dies from eating a bad mushroom, he's painted a ghastly green. When Babar's mother is shot by wicked hunters in pith helmets, she falls with a look of agony on her face. But Babar meets every challenge bravely, and rises to become King of the Elephants himself. After everything we'd gone through with him, it was a huge satisfaction to see him in his place in the sun, complete with red royal robes (fluffed up with an ermine border) and golden crown.

Now that Babar is King, he can marry his sweet friend and soulmate Celeste. We readers (at least the girls) have been primed for this event for some time, since Babar and Celeste have known each other from childhood. The wedding is a magnificent affair, but my favorite image occurs after all the crowds and pealing bells have left.

A relative very kindly sent me the link to this picture, which is #9:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/09/22/slideshow_080922_babar#slide=1

It's nighttime, and Babar and Celeste are standing outside in the dark. They're side by side, and we see their silhouettes: Babar in his royal robes, Celeste in her snowy wedding dress, both with major crowns. They're looking up, silently and happily, into a vast starry sky.

For me, this picture illustrates a saying which a very wise person told me: "Good partners aren't always gazing into each other's eyes morning, noon and night. But they're looking in the same direction." And my next favorite Marriage image, from the film MADADAYO, also reminds me of this.

MADADAYO was the last film of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The film was greeted by many with savage reviews, and some called it a work of senility. But Kurosawa's senility, if that's what it was, still had lovely flashes of power which would have been considered the peak of achievement for any other director.

In MADADAYO, during World War II, the very old teacher and his wife have been bombed out of their home. They have only a three-walled gardener's hut to live in. In the next fifteen seconds we see their next year in the wheeling of the seasons: the old couple sitting quietly together on the open side of the hut, peacefully looking out, in every weather: through springtime blossoming to scorching summer to storms of leaves to snow. It's a sequence of stunning emotional power, because although they've lost what most people would call "everything," what we sense is their enjoyment and completeness. They have each other, and an interesting world to look at, and so they have everything.

(Happy Anniversary, and many more of them, N. and J.!)

Part 2: New Year's Eve: Billy In Trouble (continued)

2010-01-04T06:14:00.000-08:00

(Blogger's Note: I posted last week's excerpt --New Year's Eve: Billy In Trouble--as a cautionary tale. It was meant to point out to hard-partyers of all ages that there are worse things than boredom. But it turns out I didn't have the heart to leave Billy at the point of being torn limb from limb by backwoods Deliverance-type smashed-drunk savages, or gobbled alive by a wild dog pack, so here's the rest of the excerpt. As it begins, Billy is being thrown out of a speeding car. He is the narrator.)

"...He's throwing up! He'll ruin the car!" Friedelund yelled, and I was seized by enormous hairy hands and flung out the door of the moving car, sailed through at least twenty feet of night air like a shooting star and landed rolling in the ditch. The car peeled out smoking. The dog pack began howling again.

"I stayed put in that ditch, afraid to so much as put my head up. Between the young savages and the wild dogs, I didn't see how I dared stir all night. I lay there shaking as it grew colder and colder. I wondered if people could go crazy from fear.

"I'd just had this thought when headlights swung over the hill and a car followed fast. I thought it was the seven giant kids coming back to finish me off. I tried to crawl away fast and low like a snake, and collapsed. The lights swung over me. I snapped tight into the fetal position, hoping to protect vital organs, and locked my arms over my head. The car slowed, then stopped. There was a pause. Then the car door opened and there was the sound of a great big boot setting itself down with deliberation on gravel. Another boot followed, and after a minute, the boots approached me.

"WHAT THE F--K?"

"I knew that voice. It was Brian Aaltonen, my Uncle Joe's deputy sheriff, and that was Brian's shaving lotion, the very one Joe had teased him about that afternoon. "Whoo hoo!" Joe had said. "Beware all fillies!" Now I lay there with my nose frozen by icy snot to ditch weeds and although I'm not religious I thought silently," Thank you Lord of mercy, thank you Lord God of Hosts for Brian."

"Goddamn it, Billy, your uncle told you he never wanted to find you passed out and buck naked in a ditch somewheres. Was it too much to ask?"

"I'm not naked," I said. My coat and jeans had a hell of a lot of peppermint schnapps spilled on them, but at least I was still wearing them.

Then I couldn't remember moving, but somehow found myself in the front seat of Brian's car. He said, "If you throw up in my car, I'll nail you to the hood like an ornament."

He drove me back to Uncle Joe's without a word. I kept looking at him sideways. Brian dressed for New Year's Eve was a sight to behold. He wore black from head to foot. He had a fine, bulky black leather jacket that made rich sounds when he moved. He was laden in gold, a flash of chains at his neck, but the gold was not brighter than his blond mullet.

I kept expecting a big meaty haranguing lecture from him, but there was none. I couldn't believe it. When we approached Uncle Joe's driveway he turned the engine and lights off.

"Window?" he said, and we coasted right up to my bedroom window.

"See you in church," Brian said. Then I climbed out, and he coasted away. We never mentioned it again.

(excerpt from the novella BILLY IN TROUBLE.)

New Years' Eve: Billy In Trouble

2009-12-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

New Years Eve is usually presented as a time of champagne, carousing in good (or bad) company, and soul kisses at midnight. The following excerpt is taken from a novella called BILLY IN TROUBLE. Billy is a selfish, foul-mouthed, often drunken student who's been sent by his parents to live with religious relatives, in the icy far north of the state, as a punishment. His uncle and aunt go to bed early on New Year's Eve. Billy creeps out hoping to locate some company and excitement, and finds more than he bargained for:

"I climbed out the window, crossed the frozen lawn and began walking down the dark road. I had no plan. There was no one around me. It was lonely. But about a mile down the road I could hear the howling of the wild dog pack Joe had told me about. They just raged around the country and tore a living out of the land with their vicious teeth. A minute later they howled again, closer. Joe had told me what they did to deer: ate them alive and spat out the crunchy bits. I began to picture myself, disembowelled and gobbled up while those big northern stars coldly looked down.

"I was turning to run back to Joe's when headlights surged over the hill, then an old Chevrolet followed with the backend souped up high and shouts and loud music coming from it and even legs hanging out the open windows. I almost wept with joy. The wild dogs weren't going to get me, not this time; but also, I'd been missing kids my age, and here they came, roaring and pillaging right down the hill.

"They knew I was the sheriff's nephew Billy, and I knew they were from those crazy Finn families that lived back in the woods. They were about my age and there were seven of them, ice-blond like ghosts would be if ghosts were born Finns--and they were all related, brothers and sisters and cousins. I never did get it straight. We were all jammed in together. They were all bigger than I was, including the girls, a white-headed giant tribe, and they were at the stage of drunk where you're blazing with the flammable delight of existence. They had names like Helga and Elga and Friedelund. It seemed they'd been having a whale of a time all evening and hadn't finished yet.

"We drove flashing fast like a comet cuts through stars down those deserted country roads, tossing bottles of whiskey and peppermint schnapps back and forth and glugging out of them, stomping our boots and doing some kind of seated jig to the rock music hard enough to pop the rivets in our jeans. Gradually I noticed that several of my new friends had teeth missing, a scar where normally an eyebrow would be, or a nose mashed toward an ear. One of the boys had what looked like a serious head injury, and he laughed about how he'd been piling wood with his dad that afternoon and the old guy thought he was too slow and threw a log at his head to wake him up.

"There was no heat in the car, and you could see the moving road through holes in the floor. There was duct tape over every inch of the car seats, and old and new fast-food wrappers and empty bottles were jammed into every crevice One of the girls dandled me on her knee like an infant, she was that big, and then the old Van Halen song "Jump!" came on and she suddenly jogged me up and down hard with her knee in time to the music so the top of my head kept smashing into the car ceiling. I hoped this was some kind of primeval Finnish seduction. I was timidly making the first moves to feel up her tremendous chest when she whomped me hard with her fist like a mother bear and just about knocked my head off. Even though I feared I wouldn't survive the car ride I laughed with everybody else.

"I never knew kids that were so much fun, until I asked if somebody had a doobie. Then all of a sudden they fell silent, and seven pairs of icy, crystal-pale eyes looked at me with whiskey-bombed malice.

"We don't use them dirty drugs," the drunkest one said in a quiet, deadly voice. They all leaned in toward me, the girls too, clenching their paws into fists, and I began to gag and retch wildly. I was afraid I would faint from terror and these boys and girls, who seemed to exist out of time, would do something terrible to me--maybe eat me, and my bones would join the fast-food wrappers and empty bottles.

"He's throwing up, he'll ruin the car!" somebody shouted, and as I was seized by enormous hairy hands and flung out the door of the moving car I heard the radio solemnly and sweetly begin to play "Lest old acquaintance be forgot..." The car peeled out smoking. The dog pack began howling again.

(excerpt from "Billy in Trouble", a novella)

Winter Wedding: Conjuring For The Bride and Groom, a poem

2009-12-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

A wedding is a curing ceremony.
The priest formally disarms the dark
of spooks, red teeth and loneliness,
but the rest of us know
white satin is so frail, and fate the guest
that's always hungriest and thirstiest.
My ears quiver like tuning forks
to these spells and pledges. I feel us all,
mother, father, sister, brother, friend,
conjuring safety and charmed zones,
fields of honey for the pair.

What could ever be safe enough?
Because they know nothing, nothing.
Furiously we spin from straw
a favorite saint crowning each bedpost,
a Cossack with sword guarding the door,
huge wingspreads unfurling warmth and light
over the baby steps of the couple.
May they take care of their lives.

We can only hope. But this morning
through battering sleet you couldn't stop
with a train, cathedral stone
flowered into biblical beauty.
And at the night dance
we saw the bride's ordinary human hair
turn to a mane of stars.

EATING THE BLACK RADISH: a winter poem, by Margaret Benbow

2009-12-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

"For general winter misery, pioneers used to cut a hole in a big old dirty black radish, and fill it with honey. They let it rot on a plate for a few days, then ate it."
Eleanor Randolph

A big black torpedo of sour and sweet
blows open the airways and routs them out,
old gorgeous ghosts waving their arms like Ivan the Terrible
reeling through the scarlet corridors of the sinuses
and also thoughts born on white nights
of a seven-month winter, small as nose-hairs
but each hair an iron root,
and mental fumes rising from bogs of cabbage soup,
icy firefalls of brandy, so that a man can hardly find
the tight growth lines of his own mind--

all blown sky-high by the black radish bomb:
you're lightning-struck, surprised to be alive:
then ribs of the brain-cave flare outward
to gold air and sun.

"Maximus, I Want To Have Your Baby!"

2009-12-04T09:17:00.001-08:00

Many years ago, I happened to be reading a trashy showbiz rag when I noticed a photo spread of two poor, struggling, raggedy young actors. One of them was blinking at the camera as though he'd never seen one before. Maybe he hadn't. He was strikingly called Jude Law, a cool name like two bold calligraphic slashes. The other unknown actor suffered under a dumpy, commonplace, plumber's-mate kind of name: Russell Crowe. God, you had to feel sorry for the guy. Who would ever remember that? The caption underneath the two grainy pictures asked: WHO IS THE HOTTEST? I took a close look, and then I thought: Are you freaking kidding me?

Here we had young Jude Law, with flossy gold hair and lips like a Southern belle. I don't want to be mean, and it's not his fault, but Jude Law looks like a girl. He always has. These days he looks like an older girl.

And over here we had the strapping young Aussie/New Zealand buck Russell Crowe: laughing at the camera as though he didn't even care that he was obscure. His chestnut curls were in manly disarray, but what counted, then and later, is that he's got something extra in his face. Maybe it's the blood of his Maori great-grandparent, maybe plentiful pints of gleaming beer, or a brain lobe he'd shaken loose with all his thrashing and head-banging in his youthful band. There's a liveliness in his eye.

Crowe's rise to stardom and his filmography are well-known. I'll focus instead on the tribulations of his faithful fans, including me. It's not all peaches and cream, being a Russell faniac. Because the good news is that the man literally breathes talent and fearlessness and a robust appetite for life out of his pores. But the bad news is that if he can get his tit caught in a wringer in public, he will.

There was the time during the BAFTA awards that a producer edited out Russell's recital of a sonnet in his acceptance speech. Russell furiously threatened the man: "You'll never work in Hollywood again!" Doubtless the producer would have wet himself in fear, except that he was an Englishman who'd never worked in Hollywood, and never wanted to. This incident probably cost Crowe the Best Actor Oscar for A BRILLIANT MIND (2001).

Next Russell was vilified in the press when he bounced a phone off a desk clerk's head. Russell was in a New York hotel, lonely, passionately missing his wife and baby Crowe, and the goddamn phone wouldn't work. WE understood perfectly, but the police led him away in handcuffs. Not every actor can rise above handcuffs, but Russell was unfazed. He looked as though he was planning what to have for lunch. Eventually there was a settlement with the desk clerk, well in excess of $100,000. A few more customer complaints like that, and the guy could retire to Palm Beach. "In Australia, we would have settled it over a beer," said Russell.

Then there was the interview I saw, where the newslady was scolding Russell for being on a different continent when his wife Danielle gave birth to their second child. "Oh," he said with a sunny smile, "it will make her happy to get back in shape so she can be Magic Girl for me when we see each other again."

Whoa! In America, for some reason, a guy isn't considered a good father unless he's not only present in the delivery room, but practically has his nose up the birth canal urging on the crowning baby while simultaneously capturing professional-style footage on his video camera. So Russell's remark enraged the Birth Fascists. They thought he was commanding Danielle to lose the lard so he wouldn't be repulsed by her balloon bazooms and gross baby fat when he finally wandered in. But WE knew that both Russell and Danielle were gym rats, and this was probably her wish more than his. And if they hoped to be Magic Boy and Magic Girl together, with a newborn and a toddler, well, good luck with that!

Personally I believe that Russell's true character is within shouting distance of his most famous role, the noble but gentle warrior Maximus Decimus Meridius in GLADIATOR. Maximus is brave, but also wise and tender. And if one dropdead gorgeous killing machine is called for, he is the man for the job. In fact, a geneticist might think that Maximus should be allowed to father all the babies in the world. But there is one tiny, tiny hitch in his behavior in GLADIATOR that troubled this faniac and, for awhile, made me lose faith in my Maximus. (I first worried about this in my October 12 post, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??)

We're all familiar with that moment in the movie when all of the gladiators are in the Coliseum, in the death ring, and feeling very nervous since Siberian tigers and Roman legions and spiked chariots and numchuk-swinging dwarves are about to descend on their trembling enslaved asses. It's at this moment, not before, that Maximus casually asks the others, "Were any of you guys ever in the army? Because it would really help us if we can use our old battle strategies..." It turns out that they are old soldiers and they do snap back into fighting form, and within two minutes Maximus is taking his victory gallop on a white stallion around the Coliseum, prancing over his enemies' corpses. But does he deserve to?

Why, I worried, did he wait until this juncture to ask that question? Wasn't it important? Hadn't they all been together for days in their cells with nothing to do but chew the fat? What if, with the Coliseum's giant tigers' saberteeth breathing down their necks they'd answered, "Actually, I was a potato farmer from Thrace," "I gave the Sultan foot massages in Turkey," etc.

It was troubling. Had Maximus done something dumb? But the fine veteran blogger Cal happened to see my post, and was kind enough to explain Maximus's thinking. Those gladiators were not talkers, even at the best of times. They were seriously mad at the world. And they would not have taken kindly to some big dude shimmying up to them in their cells wanting to practice frenzied battle rollovers with them. "And just let me oil you up a little bit so those nasty breastplates don't chafe!"

Yup, makes sense. Maximus would have known better. So now I'm a true believer again, and can watch GLADIATOR with a tranquil heart.

Daydream For The Partner Of A Picky Eater

2009-11-27T05:53:00.001-08:00

Do you have a partner who tortures you by turning his nose up at all the magnificent dinners (banquets!) you've prepared for him over the years? Well, at least you can get revenge in your dreams.)

Seize your picky eater by his birdy shoulders,
head-butt him with your stony righteous forehead,
nail him in the eye with your eye and snap
O.K. MAN, FUN TIME'S OVER.

Tie him to his chair.
Then roll up wads of angel food cake
and mash them down his throat.
Forcefeed his gaping jaw
slabs of fat bacon,
green pearl strings of peas fresh from the pod,
all the things you're just dying to see him eat.
Tromp crazy-eyed around the kitchen
as you whip up dozen-egg fat-farmer omelets
spraying yolks to the ceiling,
and grease them down his gullet with
big ladles of redeye gravy.

Let a bagel be his belly ring.
Paint his face with daisy cream cheeses,
cram candied pineapple cloying in his armpit hair.
Grow wilder,
peg bananas in his ears,
stuff stink-cheese up his nose,
work guacamole dip through his hair
like ice-green styling mousse.

Finally, crown him with a birthday cake
as big as a tractor tire,
frost it with a pouffy moon cloud of marshmallow whip
and on it perch a single cherry
red, fat, and sweet.

Cabin Fever Frenzy!!!

2009-11-19T10:14:00.000-08:00

Isn't it time Jay Leno found some material about Wisconsinites in winter other than fat jokes? It's completely untrue that there's nothing to do up here in winter except sit around and watch our butts get big. There are many fun things that add sparkle to our seven long, icy, blizzard-battered months. Our winter only SEEMS to be excruciatingly crappy.

For example, my friend Emma says she always stops shaving her legs around Halloween and doesn't pick up a razor again until lilac time. She says there's a morbid fascination in watching her "coat" grow out. She claims that by New Years, she could coax her leg hairs into neat little braids and put ribbons on them, like you would for a prize-winning show pony.

Speaking of leg hairs, it was in February that a highly intelligent, well-respected in-law of mine set a match to the stubble on his lower legs "to see," as he put it to his wife, "what would happen." His theory was that the hairs wouldn't burn. Well, they got really hot and burst into flame. He hastily put out the fire and then had to listen to his wife wonder aloud for several minutes why an up-and-coming young executive, often consulted for his mature wisdom, savvy and business acumen, would light up his leg. He replied huffily, in an offended voice, that he had considered it a CONTROLLED burn.

I recall it was in the winter that some people in the area brought several whoopee cushions down to the street at midnight, and jumped up and down on them. These folks were originally from Illinois, so nobody was surprised. The cushions were LOUD. I woke bolt upright from a beautiful dream about the arctic wilderness. My first horrified impression was that a herd of flatulent polar bears had invaded the foyer, passing gas as they came.

Friend Sam dedicates his cold months to eating food that not only sticks to the ribs but encases them in a puffy flotation vest of blubber. He says this is nature's way. Sam wallows in the butter tubs of many nations, but said that the Land of Braveheart stands alone as a noble monument to hard fat. Scotland is the home of the deep-fried Mars bar. Scots also believe that pizza slices are improved by being boiled in tallow, eaten with scalding grease running down the chin, and chased with pints of bitter dark beer. Sam's favorite export, though, is the king of all pub food, the Scotch Egg. And you can make it at home, if you remember than an authentic Scotch Egg does not use fresh ingredients.

You take a hard-boiled egg that's been sitting around awhile, peel it, and gum it all around with odorous or even downright stinky ground-up swine's private parts. It shouldn't smell good, and if it does, you've failed. At this stage, a cowardly lily-livered cook might fear botulism; but the strong ones forge ahead, like Braveheart would. Roll the egg in seasoned bread crumbs from a dubious old loaf that's been kicked around the barnyard and peed on by cats. Then you deep-fry it in grease you've inherited from your old granny. Drain the egg on a funky old grocery bag that's been moistened by some unspeakable leak. Then Yay, the waiting is over! From now on, it's all BON APPETIT!

This kingly Egg, this majestic cannonball, had 1500 calories, a paunchy 300 grams of fat, and single-handedly acts on an artery like a potato rammed into an exhaust pipe. Sam thinks this is good, because "it keeps the heat in." He eats them all winter, with pickles and beer. "Beer is food," as he puts it.

Then in the spring, Sam advises, you need to clean all the winter crap out of your system with an old-fasioned but effective remedy. Take a really big dose of castor oil, one that would drop a moose, or blast you into outer space. You may feel a little bit weak, disoriented and dazed and not be able to remember your own name afterward, but you'll be as fresh and sweet as those sunny spring crocuses pushing up through all the ancient rotted tires in your yard. And that can only be good!

Good Dogs

2009-11-11T05:31:00.000-08:00

Until we got our dog Britt, I had a harsh Darwinian theory about how to tell a good dog from a bad one. As I saw it, the best canine achievement took place in 1925 in Alaska when relays of noble dog teams brought diptheria serum over a thousand miles to Nome, to save the children from an epidemic. Could YOUR dog brave blizzards, shattered ice floes, fight off polar bears? Could he save the children, or not? He couldn't?

Tough, pal. My Skipper could have gotten the serum to Nome on his head, smiling all the way.

I grew up with Skipper. He was a large, stunningly handsome border collie, with the wisdom of a Yoda. I didn't have to bother with kindergarten. Everything I needed to know, I learned from Skipper. In many family photos, guests are standing around looking at him admiringly. As I recall, they were saying things like, "What a great dog!" "Where can I get a dog like that?" and even "Why do you get the best dog? Why not me?"

Many years passed. Skipper went up to Good Dog Valhalla. And one summer afternoon, we bought a tiny shetland sheepdog puppy. She could easily fit in my hand. She would have been outweighed by a dinner roll. Yet she already had a massively well-developed vision of herself as Crown Princess Britt.

Her reign began a few minutes after we bought her. For the ride home, I'd brought a frayed old towel for her to rest on (and pee on, if need be). She looked at it in horror. "This crummy rag?" she was plainly thinking. "Why, I wouldn't touch it with BORROWED puke. Is this any way for my subjects, I mean owners, to treat the darling little sheepdog?"

She quickly noticed, however, that I was wearing a beautiful Scottish wool shawl. In fact, the shawl cost so much that it was accompanied by literature to persuade chumps to buy it. A brochure on slick paper informed me that the wool was "harvested from happy sheep, bathed in the silken, sparkling waters of Loch Lomond, woven by cottagers dedicated to their ancient craft."

When Britt nudged the shawl with her cheek, she began jumping up and down, yipping ecstatically. "Oh, thank God, they got it right after all. Happy wool that cost an arm and a leg,what could be more appropriate for adorable me?" Firmly overcoming my feeble struggles to keep my prize, she nestled in its folds, sighing with relief.

So I gave up the shawl. When we got home, she indicated with certain averted glances and delicate hesitations that she considered the puppy kibble inferior. By that time, it seemed completely natural to rush off to buy this graceful little creature the finest shaved deli beef and tender niblets of peachfed ham, luxuries which the humans in the household had never ventured to buy for themselves.

Things went on like that. And in the years that followed, unkind friends would sometimes ask me where Britt would fall in the mushing-the-serum-to-Nome scale. I'd answer that it was only Britt's body that was small; in spirit, she was an unstoppable Amazonian Goddess Queen. I would tell these doubters that I could easily see her standing on top of the rushing dog sled like a tiny lion, keeping the serum warm with her royal shawl. Her ears would be up and her dark eyes outshining the whiteout storms, and throughout the long days and nights she would never rest as she kept everybodies' spirits up by yapping lustily all the way to Nome.

Life's A Feast, and Sometimes You Have to Eat Big!

2009-11-05T05:38:00.000-08:00

I don't know why it is that setting your teeth into a well-browned hunk of hog makes you feel good, but it works for me. For Thanksgiving and Christmas I want meat, and I don't mean a measly, puny, stunted portion, either. I want big, maddeningly fragrant mounds of steer, hog or bird, or maybe all three, drenched with gravy.

Holiday meats should be baked until all you have to do is gently nudge some critical joint, and the whole thing sweetly falls apart into neat little sheaves. This meat is not burned, it is charmed, and you can eat right through its coral bones.

I wonder what spiritual eunuch first banned "cooking odors" from the home? I want to smell that heavy hunters-and-gatherers food baking. Morning of the banquet day you put the standing rib roast or the big boss bird in the oven. If it's a turkey, I will have dipped a length of cheesecloth into a pound of melted butter and snugly wrapped up that tom; he's now our big gilded turkey baby. In the next hours, ragingly delicious smells expand in golden waves from the kitchen.

Then the best time of all comes: you sit down to eat the food you love the best, with those you love the best. A glass or two of crystal white wine, or potent red goes well with this--wines that are the soul of grape, so that they seem to kiss you back when you smack them. At the end, there are berry pies nestled in buttery crusts. In our family, there's also a hundred-year tradition of serving candied nuts in the same gorgeous china bowl. I'm sure you know there are saints' bones that are handled with less reverence than we lavish on that bowl.

Then everyone alternates sipping his or her dark, fine coffee and nibbling the brown-sugar-crusted nuts of the field. We look around the table at these faces that we love, and every one of us (even the agnostics) thinks, "Thank you, God!"

VAMPIRE MEETS MAIDEN: Halloween Poem

2009-10-20T05:39:00.001-07:00

(I wrote this poem, and it STILL scares me!)

Vampire Meets Maiden

Old cruncher stalks the midnight prize. He knows
she's out there, a juicy warmblood
whose neck is his perfect small world:
white earth of flesh, rock of bone,
and luscious vein tributaries
sleek with red. He turns a corner

and there she is, a lone lamb-girl
strolling home with dreaming gait.
"Look at the darling stranger," he thinks,
"so adorably helpless,
and her tender meat, soon to be mine.
God bless the meek, who die so young.
Will she beg, cry? Her terrified eyes implore?"
His claws unsheathe with switchblade clicks.
His sideburns swell, his pulses cry NOW.

She looks up
and there at last he is, the dark real thing.
Slowly, voluptuously, he bends his lip
to her nectar neck, drives his nails
through the lace at her breast, and feels---

"SWEET JESUS!" he screams in his head.
"PLEASE TELL ME THAT'S NOT FUR!"
But already he dangles from her iron wrist
like a dolly. He's eaten alive
by her eyes, steel brilliants
in a hairy angel face. She licks his cheek slowly
like the sweetest plum, breathes
"Marry me, bloodsucker-boy?" Her wolf-teeth gleam.
He thinks, "I'm dead." She bounds away for home.

He's lashed across her body like a dead rabbit
as the werewolf bride
springs to her den
over the dark earth, through wind and storm.
Mashed to his ear is a terrible nuptial drum:
her heart's
boom. Boom. BOOM!!!

Queen of Sheba Chocolate Cake: Search No Further

2009-10-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, cake was supposed to be dry. If your morsel of devil's food left a smear on the plate, it was considered a disgusting sight. In fact, there was a white angel's food recipe that was so parched, so arid, my sisters and I called it Choke Cake. You had to gasp down a big tumbler of water with each cupcake, just to stay even.

There's a whole generation of recovering Choke Cake victims who've made it a life quest to find the perfect moist chocolate cake. It seems to them that the right sweet dark balm, sheathed in buttercream, would definitely evaporate all nightmares of the desert, and maybe sort out their problems in general. How depressed can you be when you've got paradisal ambrosia melting in your mouth? So they obsessively test recipes.

I'm always baffled by the instruction to add, say, a grand total of two tablespoons of cocoa to the batter. "What was that?" the eater might ask. "It flew by so fast and light, like a dream. Could it have been a whisper, a thread, a tiny seed of--of chocolate? Could the baker spare it?"

I am more the type of eater who wants her chocolate to suggest a herd of chocolate buffalo thundering toward her, who at the last minute magically condense into the delicious bite-sized niblet sitting on her fork. I want my chocolate cake to make me think of whole fields of cocoa, complete with brilliantly colored tropical birds and maybe workers glugging streams of Kahlua out of gleaming jugs. I like my chocolate intense.

I won't claim to have found the best recipe in all eternity. The Amish have it right, and only God can make a perfect chocolate cake. But the following recipe is a very good one indeed, every bit as fine as we earthlings need or deserve. Besides, I've gone through some grief for it.

I have a foodie friend who takes her baking very, very seriously. She says this cake is an imposter. Her nanny-like reproaches include the claim that a true Reine de Saba gateau (note her French) contains NO FLOUR, but it DOES include currants, cognac and ground nuts.

My response is that I've heard no complaint from the Queen of Sheba. She passed thousands of years ago, and is unlikely to be heard from now. Besides, I said, a cake SHOULD have flour in it. I like that glint of grain, a hint of earth. It reassures us that we aren't eating moon food.
So, this is:

PLENTY GOOD ENOUGH QUEEN OF SHEBA CAKE

1 egg
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 softened stick butter
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup strong coffee

Put these ingredients in a big bowl in the order given. If you want to be fancy, substitute a couple tablespoons of Kahlua or Godiva liqueur for part of the coffee. Run your mixer on High for two minutes. Bake at 350 in a greased 9" by 9" pan. Begin checking carefully after twenty or twenty five minutes. DON'T LET THAT CAKE GET DRY!!
Frost with your favorite chocolate buttercream frosting. Again, you may choose to add a little Godiva or Kahlua for part of the liquid.

I like to serve the slices on thinnest rosebud china, with the pink cloth napkins...

Red Jacket: A Poem For My Mother

2009-09-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Edmund Savides: September 23, 1915 - January 26, 2004
(Happy Birthday, Mom)

RED JACKET

She was borne away by an engine ornate, fiery and black
on a rescue mission: to oversee an uncle's burial.
Huge Uncle Bill had been the King Kong
in our family fairy tale, bolting rows of sweet corn
and inhaling ingots of butter at Reunions,
beer bubbling out of his ears, Snickers bars up his nose,
his roaring beefy tongue popping with hotdogs
and Scottish curses, a new wife
sitting on his hand every few years.
Suddenly he'd exploded, his football-sized pigskin heart
split at every seam,

and our mother's calmness was frantically summoned
by the hysterical fourth wife.
Mom rode to the rescue on a dragon-black train,
bolt upright and pushing it all the way. Once there
she ordered the special, jumbo casket,
she blessed the giant's exploded corpuscles
with a gentle veil of white flowers,
dignified his furry pagan paunch in a kingly suit of black.
She directed when cables would lower his bulk,
heavy as a crusader in full mail, to the inner earth
where seethed gobs of minerals, and his ancestors' lacy bones.
Old wives' and young wives' cupid's-bow kisses
colored his big ornery face
ravishing shades of rose.
At the funeral lunch, the peach-fed oils of Mother's baked ham
soothed mourners' torn nerve endings.
The precise rectangles of her bar cookies
made them feel they could go on.

At home we shivered in coldest eclipse,
for she was the queen
of our tribe of dwarves.
At five years old
I fought my baby instinct to stroke her red jacket
in the closet where it glowed.

Finally one midnight the dragon brought her back.
Finally we could breathe her warm air again.
But I'd heard that corpses were green,
and rotten-bellied with fear
still had to ask.
Yes, she said, Uncle Bill had been a little green,
but he was now shining in Heaven,
silvery with Grandma and Father Abraham.
She believed it, too.
When she looked up, all of her beloved dead
were sparkling in the constellations.

My hard little coconut head
processed her words. I looked up
suspiciously at those stars, privately had my doubts:
then looked into her gentle face and decided
then and lifelong,
never to tell her.

My Favorite Movie Dance, Bar None

2009-09-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

In general, I detest movie musicals. When actors begin to dance and sing in a mob, I just wish they'd sit down and shut up. It's probably a genetic thing. My grandfather deeply loved classical music, but if male ballet dancers in tights began doing scissors kicks to Stravinsky across the TV screen, he'd turn it off. My aunt rose and stalked out of the theater during SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS. She claimed she'd been offended by the broad Morning After grins of the Brides. Later, she admitted that the sight of all those actors caroling and prancing around "was enough to make me throw up twice." An uncle has said he can endure THE WIZARD OF OZ, but is waiting for the non-singing, non-dancing version. As for me, over the years I've sighed loudly, gossiped, shredded Kleenexes, devoured Milk Duds, and griped my way through other musicals which friends insisted I see.

But every once in awhile, a song or dance arises so spontaneously in a NONmusical that it's lodged like a sweet ember beneath my ribcage before I even know what hit me. Take Rudolph Valentino's smoking hot tango toward the beginning of the great old silent FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE. He awes the murderous drinkers in a cutthroat cantina with his coldly sexy moves, hurling his little monkey-woman partner all over the floor. Ninety years after that scene was shot, it still reduces a female audience to infatuated silence...and a good portion of the male. Or there's that moment in GODFATHER II when the little Vito Corleone, child of a murdered father and murdered mother, completely alone, friendless and quarantined in a foreign country, sits up in his pauper's nightshirt and sings his Italian folk song--in an unwavering voice.

And then there's this movie dance, my all-time favorite....

The film is Jim Jarmusch's DOWN BY LAW, and involves the escape of three prisoners who rush into a swamp for concealment. The most eccentric fugitive is played by Roberto Benigni (of course), and when the trio happen upon a young woman (Nicoletta Braschi), she and Roberto instantly fall in love. One minute they're strangers, and a few heartbeats later you sense they'll never willingly be parted. It's a wonderment, something like watching a car go from zero mph to 1000.

At the breakfast table next day, the fugitives are eating their bacon and eggs. Roberto says casually, "Let's have some music." He turns on the radio and we hear Irma Thomas's slow, lovely, funky version of the blues song "It's Raining." Roberto and Nicoletta begin to dance. Gradually it turns into the sweetest, most intimate and sensual dance you ever saw. There's no showy choreography, nothing especially graphic, just chemistry and true love. And it doesn't hurt that you know Roberto and Nicoletta are married in real life.

You can see it on YouTube, and if you haven't, don't wait another minute:

Down By Law - It's Raining

I'd write it in gems if I could.

Moving Actor: "Whoa, Look At You Go!"

2009-09-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

Actors fight, dance, leap from great heights and even walk better than you or I do. They may be privately shining with sweat from the effort of making these moves, but up on the screen they're dusted with stars. We've spent many a happy hour admiring them in the dark. Here I'm going to concentrate on several of my favorite actor-walks (although, just to break it up, I'll include one demented little jig.)

l. John Travolta owns the best walk in the business, and he shows it all in his street-strut through the credits in SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. He steps out strong in his pointy-toed red shoes which match his flare-collared red silk shirt. The infatuated camera admires him from the ground up, lingering on the billowing cuffs of his black polyester slacks. He's also carrying a paint can, but is way too cool to care. That whole white-suit/dancy-dance nonsense he gets up to later is pallid by comparison.

Travolta also delivers a hugely satisfying moment when he climbs stairs in a busy restaurant to vent justice. In GET SHORTY he's been insulted by a wannabe-tough henchman standing on a landing. Wrong move, goon! Travolta heads up the stairs with that brisk can-do set of his shoulders. He's unhurried, with a confidence so staggeringly complete he doesn't even look cross. He collects the nasty guy like a bad debt and heaves him down the stair rungs like manure off a pitchfork, all without missing stride. Travolta is the Walk King of his generation.

2. In my opinion, Richard Gere is never convincing in good-guy roles. Maybe it's too much of a stretch, who knows? But he did surprisingly well in INTERNAL AFFAIRS as a cheating, lying, betraying, fornicating, murdering bad guy. He was also very effective as a shameless sleazebag of a celebrity lawyer in PRIMAL FEAR (although outgunned, I'd say, by Ed Norton's jaw-dropping debut performance). And years ago he was also good in AMERICAN GIGOLO--avaricious, social-climbing, amoral and sexy. All of which brings us to his walk.

Maybe it's not his fault. After all, human babies learn to walk around a year of age. But Richard Gere walks like a tart. He walks as if he's thinking about his hips more than men usually do. There's a crisp little hitch in his get-along, to put it mildly. This fits in with his dark and ambiguous roles, but is one of the reasons we can't believe him in the saintly ones.

3. John Wayne walks with his whole bulky body, something like a sasquatch would, as if he were holding the sky up on his big shoulders and the earth down with his feet, and plowing ahead no matter what the plague or disaster. In THE SEARCHERS, for five long years he never ceases to search for his kidnapped niece, by sunlight, moonlight, firelight, through storms and floods, under attack and threat of death. He searches mostly by horseback, but also in large part by the almost demented concentration and unstoppable forward impetus of that walk. We never doubt he'll find her, and he does.

4. Now for a dance: Donald Pleasence is an English actor known for his extreme style, which reached its height when he played Mike Myers' unfortunate doctor in the HALLOWEEN series. In the Western WILL PENNY he's a wicked psycho/preacher who's trying to force a virtuous widow (Joan Hackett) to marry one of his heart-stoppingly hideous, homicidal sons. There's a moment when he seems to have won, and in sudden celebration he does an evil little jig with such vile delight that he almost puts his foot through a chair. We hate him, but the moment still has a satanic glow.

5. For me, the most endearing walk is that provided by Roberto Benigni in IL MOSTRE (THE MONSTER). Through his usual series of disastrous misunderstandings, Roberto's character Loris is under suspicion of being a mass murderer. Nicoletta Braschi is the tough-minded undercover detective assigned to his case. She shadows Loris constantly, and gradually becomes fascinated by the wildly eccentric little man.

Now, the walk: in an early scene, with typical Benigni reasoning, Loris has decided he'll avoid the notice of his landlord, to whom he owes money, if he crouches down and walks like a duck below the man's line of vision. He does this more or less successfully, but rather sadly. There is something very lonely about a man who is walking like a duck all by himself. But Nicoletta sees this ruse of his. By this time she's realized that, evidence to the contrary, he's an innocent at heart. She gently crouches down beside him, and as they duck-walk away together, his face lights up with a shy man's happiness. It's a fine moment.

"In Praise of Aging". Photographs by Sandy Wojtal-Weber. Poem by Gerda Lerner.

2009-09-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

This beautiful little book might just as well be called "In Praise of Living" because to use Lerner's words it is about "celebrating what is/ what still is..."

Sandy Wojtal-Weber is an accomplished photographer with an instinctive skill in seizing images from the natural world, with tenderness and grace, at just the right moment. It is no surprise to learn that she particularly admires the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In this book, her pictures illustrate the lines of Gerda Lerner's poem "In Praise of Aging." Many of the photographs were taken at Parfrey's Glen, in Wisconsin, as well as other far-ranging locations. The two sunflowers were taken from her garden.

Essentially, Lerner's poem is about living life mindfully, with both gravity and joy, in a way that moves us naturally to an acceptance of the end of life. For example, on an early page Lerner writes "On that path, step by step,/we must give up something forever..." Wojtal-Weber's accompanying picture is of a rocky, steep, and difficult climb through heavy woods. At first glance, it might almost signify Gethsemane. Yet the texture of the stones and mossy boulders, the green beauty of the woods, show the indestructable loveliness that accompanies us through hardship.

Wojtal-Weber's pictures are fully true to the object or scene in her lens, and sometimes something more: an homage. The two pages of glorious sunflower budheads--"discovering the pleasure of the modest particular/Growing awareness of purposeful seeing"-- for the first time made me think the words "Powerful! All-seeing!" about a bud. Her color photographs are often sumptuous, her black and white winter scenes impeccable. Although her work is the furthest thing possible from sentimental, the viewer's sense is that she has captured these images with respect and love.

There is a great deal to admire and enjoy here, not least the last picture. It shows a curling green frond, with behind it a huge, veined green leaf and the words "and grace." But perhaps my favorite image of all is of the bird--with fragile limbs and delicate beak, but mighty wings--flying straight up into a storm so threatening it looks like the bottom of the sea:

"Courage."

"Nasty Frickin' Peeping Tom"

2009-08-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Cee-Cee, the retired policewoman, had just thrown a bomb right in the midst of our peaceful little group, enjoying tea and scones at the Borders West cafe.

She said that a Peeping Tom had been plaguing the area, spying on people in their baths and their beds. One lady had been sitting in the tub shaving her legs when she heard a car engine, CB-like chatter, and a male voice saying, "I wonder if it hurts her when she shaves her leg like that?" A few days later, a long-wed couple had been indulging in a married moment in what they innocently thought of as the privacy of their own home. They heard a male voice say, loudly and clearly, "Did you get that?" Then scrambling outside their window, and running footsteps. There had been several other incidents.

Shelley almost upchucked her Earl Grey tea. "Can you imagine something like that happening? It would be so embarrassing. I'd feel like shooting myself!"
"I'd tell the guy to wait six months until I got in shape!" Emma chortled.
"I heard about the lady in the tub," Judy said. "She thought the man's voice sounded like this creepy guy who used to live next door years ago."

"Shelley," Cee-Cee said, "why would you feel embarrassed? After all, YOU'RE not the nasty frickin' Peeping Tom."

"Maybe this has happened and we didn't even know it!" Shelley wrung her hands. "Maybe there's some dirty old man in South America drooling over my picture right now."
"Well," Emma said, "I'm deep into middle age. I know what I look like. If somebody is drooling over my fifteen extra pounds, the birthmarks and Caesarian scars, let him go to it. I pity the fool. That's all."
"It's not really about youth and beauty with these creeps," Cee-Cee said. "Often they'll target someone who's rejected them. They're like this--this savage tribe. A Peeping Tom thinks he gains power over someone if he's stolen a picture of them--the more unflattering, the better. It's as if they don't really get it about human beings. They can't understand that somebody is more than her skin."

"Cee-Cee," Judy said slyly, "you said that about 1% of cops are what you'd call Naughty. Does an off-duty cop ever do something like this? I mean, they'd have the surveillance knowledge--"
"Not one of the smart ones. Not in broad daylight," Cee-Cee added with a smile. "A cop would know that Peeping Toms are always caught. They can't seem to give it up. It's sort of what they have instead of a life."

"Well, I would mind, big-time!" Shelley said. She set her tea down so hard it slopped into the saucer. She continued, blushing rosily. "Sometimes Freddy and I have done a little...a little role-playing. When we were alone. When we THOUGHT we were alone," she added dolefully. "It would make me feel really bad to know somebody was seeing us and laughing."

"Hubba hubba!" "Oooo la la!" "I always knew there was more to Frederick than met the eye. Let me at him, the sexy beast!"

"It's not funny," Shelley snapped.
"That would be creepy," Emma admitted. "But there's something I'd mind even worse, because it would be more...more invasive." She continued in a very quiet voice. "Sometimes I have sad moments, which I try to conceal. It would be terrible to know that somebody was at the window watching me, when I'm alone, with sadness on my face--just watching me, with no more understanding than a monkey or a parrot would have."

The little group was silent for a moment. Everybody knew about Emma's health problems, and her difficult marriage. Then Shelley cleared her throat and gently squeezed Emma's hand.
"There is something that would be much, much worse than any of this. It would be...to be the poor sick frickin' Peeping Tom."

They looked at each other. They thought it over. Then, one after the other, they solemnly nodded.

French Movies Break My Heart...And Gladden It

2009-08-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

I saw my first French movie at the age of ten. It was a bitterly cold winter's day, and I sat with classmates in the odd but glorious little bijou theater in Baraboo, the exuberantly gilded Al Ringling. The Al Ringling is supposed to be a tiny replica of a theater in Versailles. What Versailles is doing in cow country, I don't know; but I've always enjoyed the place.

The double bill that Saturday matinee was WHITE MANE and THE RED BALLOON, both directed by Albert Lamorisse. It should have been called the Killer Bill. At first the other kids and I were just having a typical afternoon at the movies. There was a lot of boisterous climbing over seats in the dark, hissed arguments, fighting over arm rests, and a strong smell of funky winter coats and barn boots, as well as a constant hail of flying goobers. But then we started to actually watch the film. I've never really recovered.

WHITE MANE takes place in the Camargue, which is a harshly beautiful region of France, on the sea. A brave little boy, Folco, befriends a gorgeous wild stallion. White Mane is the glittering silver of moon and stars and sea foam. Folco defends the horse against greedy, brutal cowboys who would break the animal's proud spirit, use and destroy him. The cowboys start a fire to trap White Mane. He barely escapes. He's forced into a savage fight with another stallion for dominance, loses and almost dies. This horse goes through more suffering than the whole cast of Les Miserables. Throughout, the boy Folco (always dressed in white) does his best to defend him. In the end, after a terrifying chase Folco and his beloved horse are backed against the wild sea by the cowboys who want to trap them. Because we in the audience were Americans, we fully expected some version of the cavalry to thunder up and save them. In our movies, it always did. But instead, the French boy on his French horse wheels his magnificent stallion away from their tormentors and rides straight into the sea. Not only is there no land in sight, but we slowly realized they would have to swim across the Atlantic to find any. The camera follows the struggling pair until the stallion's snowy mane disappears--inevitably, beautifully, agonizingly--into the sea foam...

Soft little voices could be heard throughout the theater. "Where--where are they going?" "Are they...DEAD?" There were sobs, many of them, and the loudest was mine.

We perked up a little when the next film appeared: THE RED BALLOON. Oh, this was more like it! We'd swoop and soar on a jolly red orb, and forget all about Folco, who was our age, glugging the icy grey waters at the bottom of the sea.

The French boy in THE RED BALLOON wore a tragic little grey sweatsuit throughout. Young though we were, we noticed that he was the only one of the children who was dressed this way. His home life with his cranky grandmother sucked. And he was heartbreakingly isolated. He had no friends, not one. The other children were really mean to him, even for the French. Then one day he finally found a friend, a big red balloon which followed him, and which was so sensitive to his moods that they ran and danced and sang together. They were soulmates. We sighed with relief. Thank God he wasn't alone. Now he had this superbly bouncy and upbeat red friend. But the mean children hunted them down. They punched the fragile little boy, and pricked--killed--the beautiful balloon. It deflated before our eyes, and lay dead on harsh stones. And the "happy ending" consisted of the little child in his grey sweatsuit being lifted up to heaven by a cluster of balloons.

Once again soft little voices arose in the theater: "Where--where are they going?" "Is he--DEAD?" And more sobs. I staggered outside, glazed-eyed, having undergone my first aggravated battery and sophisticated sucker punch at the hands of European cinema. Worse, somehow I knew I would never be able to forget White Mane, or the all-too-human red balloon. And I never have.

Eight years passed. I went to a college which had a very, very serious Film Society. Film critic Mike Wilmington went to the same college, and has written about movie discussions which ended with members throwing hot coffee in each other's faces, or rolling on the floor searching for strangle holds. My sophomore boyfriend, whom I'll call Wally, cultivated his cinematic tastes like fine orchids. For example, he thoughtfully described an ex-girlfriend by saying, "She has this wild mane of black hair, like Stefania Sandrelli in SEDUCED AND ABANDONED." He also mocked Ingmar Bergman as "Swedish chicken fat," but not very loud.

Wally told me that my ignorance of fine European film was barbaric. We would go see JULES AND JIM that very night. And we did. For the first time I saw Jeanne Moreau in the role of Catherine. Catherine is a born muse. She has a subtle, fascinating smile which ensnares the friends Jules and Jim with its mystery. "Where does that smile come from," these European men wonder, in their sumptuous ponderings, "what does it mean?" ("Who the fuck cares?" one American girl in the audience thought, but didn't say.) Catherine breaks the hearts of both Jules and Jim, not once, but many times. She marries Jules on a whim, is the worst mother since Medea, flares through the movie like a psychotic comet. In the end, when Jim tries to escape her, she murders him and herself by driving off a bridge--still with the same mysterious smile.

As we left the theater Wally raved about her: "Oh man alive, Catherine is the queen of everything, her smile, those eyes, that little song she sings--"
"She's an evil bitch!" I protested. "She ruined their lives. She's a murderess--"
"She's a REAL WOMAN," Wally sighed adoringly. "American girls just don't have that subtle femininity."

I dumped Wally. And that evening I wanted to dump Catherine and Jules and Jim, and White Mane and the Red Balloon too. But I never did, because in their arbitrary, violent, and often exquisite ways, they'd already invaded my bloodstream.

Cee-Cee Chews Me Out

2009-08-16T09:25:00.001-07:00

The background to this post is that I write letters to the editor, early and often, usually about justice issues. I'd like to think of these letters as bold and illuminating, but friends keep me from vanity with remarks like, "I see where you were gassing away in the paper again," or simply "Blah, blah, blah."

My friend Cee-Cee (not her real name) is a retired policewoman. I met her, if that's the right word, when she called me up very late and out of the blue, to chew me over, grind me up and spit me out for a letter of mine she'd just read. The letter concerned what I saw as a poor judgment call on the part of a police officer.

Keep in mind that this was around midnight. I'd been asleep. Cee-Cee, a stranger to me then, has a voice of mighty thunder when upset, sort of like God and Thor combined. She said, or shouted, that although the facts in my letter were "technically correct," I had written it in a spirit of smug fault-finding and from a place of ignorance. Like most civilians, I had no idea of the thousands of judgment calls which every officer is required to make, often under severe stress. Neither I nor any other civilian would hear about the great majority which turned out to be right. Cee-Cee said I'd been wrong to zero in on this officer's rare mistake, when what mattered was an honorable career as a whole.

I was speechless for once. You would be too, if the side of a mountain suddenly split off and fell on your head, or if an avenging angel suddenly swooped down out of heaven and began flogging you like a racehorse. But I come from an ancestry of bossy teachers and ministers confident in their salvation, and those genes kicked in. I told Cee-Cee the truth. I said that I admired the police, because they have such a tough job. I said that I would never say or even think a single harsh word about an officer, as long as he seemed to keep alive and active in the front of his mind the fact that he'd promised to protect and serve the innocent public. He had not vowed to protect and serve himself.

"This cop you wrote about is a good one," Cee-Cee said bluntly. "You were wrong." Then, still angry but in a lower voice, she said, "I bet that if you ever needed help, you'd be the very first to be yelling for the police to come and save your puny butt!"

I said, "You got that right, I'd be the first, and if there were some number before 'first' I'd be that. I would stand there screaming like a toddler for them to come and rescue me, to come charging up in their shiny cars and obliterate criminals threatening me and sweep me to a place of safety, because in crisis that's their duty. That's what 'Protect and Serve' means!"

Unexpectedly, I heard Cee-Cee's deep, jolly, and striking laugh for the first time. She said, "You don't expect much, do you? You certainly are a STUBBORN little shit." I wasn't crazy about being called a stubborn little shit, but her tone had warmed up. After that the conversation was much more amicable. She even generously allowed that my letter had been "an honest, though stupid, mistake."

And a few minutes later, after a thoughtful pause, she said slowly, "Not that every single cop who ever existed was an altar boy or altar girl. There's a story or two I could tell you--no names, though--"

"Over a glass of good red," I said. "My treat."

"Deal," she said, and laughed.

And I think that Cee-Cee is a woman who keeps her word.

Mad Movie Love: Milk Duds and Lava Kisses

2009-08-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

I was about twelve when I first learned that movies could be about something other than Lassie making it home. My sister Helen and I were sitting in the little Prairie du Sac theater watching a movie called The Naked Jungle, with the young Charlton (my father called him Charlatan) Heston and gorgeous Eleanor Parker. My innocent parents thought it was a nature film about fauna in South America. However, Helen and I couldn't help but notice that Charlatan was very hot, barging around the plantation in his ass-kicking boots, bossing the natives and flailing whips. He and Eleanor slept in separate bedrooms and he was very mad at her, we didn't know why. She showed up for dinner every night in magnificent ballgowns which had huge bustles but no top, while he ground his teeth and cracked walnuts in his bare hands. Finally there was a scene where Charlatan kicked down Eleanor's bedroom door and fell on her like a thunderbolt, flinging bottles of perfume over her cleavage and giving her lock-and-load kisses. Little Helen and I looked at each other, big-eyed: WHOA!

Thousands of romantic movie scenes later, I still think The Naked Jungle might win for sheer door-busting energy. But here are some other favorites, most of them described at the moment when the hero discovers or shouts his feelings--or, in the case of silent movie The Sheik, uses title cards to declare his intent to ravish.

In THE SHEIK, Ahmed (Rudolph Valentino) is a powerful Arab lord of the desert who kidnaps the sexy but cold English aristocrat, Lady Diane (Agnes Ayres). She's arrogant, icy, and according to the title cards, asking for trouble. Ahmed snatches her, and charges across the desert sands with her flung across his saddle like a bag of feed. His opulent tent is hung with voluptuous oriental fabrics, suggestively tasseled and bobbled. He strides back and forth with a pantherlike tread, gloating over Diane through slitted eyes as she cowers before him. Finally she asks what may be the most stupid question in all cinema: "Why--why have you brought me here?" At this he flares the whites of his eyes at her and makes the famous reply: "Are you not woman enough--to know?" This scene still sizzles, although the alert viewer will notice that both Ahmed and Diane are wearing many layers of clothes. Diane is sweltering in a full white linen riding suit with hat, ascot scarf, gloves and boots. Ahmed struts around in turban, cummerbund, jeweled dagger, embroidered waistcoat, huge pantaloons and more boots. Rationally it would take Ahmed at least half an hour to fight his way through to skin. However, even to this day Valentino packs such a punch that we have no doubt he can do it.

TWILIGHT is about a pair of young lovers who face more than the usual problems. In the most intense scene, Edward is crouched on a tree branch glowering over Bella as he bares his soul to her: "It's you, your scent. It's like a drug to me. You're like my own personal brand of heroin." He isn't kidding. Edward is a vampire, and his feelings toward human Bella are complex. On the one hand he wants to be a courtly gallant lover, protect her tenderly and bring her pink corsages for prom. On the other, there are those moments when he wants to tear her throat out and drink from her jugular. Also, there's conflict with parents. Bella's grumpy old Dad doesn't approve of Edward.

A TAXING WOMAN is a Japanese comedy which also has some poignant moments. Upright, obsessive Ryoko is a lady tax collector, baying on the spoor of the genius tax evader Mr. Gondo. He's a mogul who's gotten fabulously wealthy from dozens of dubious enterprises, but hardly a penny goes to the tax man. Ryoko gets her teeth in his leg and never lets go. They have huge contests of will, during which the viewer senses Gondo's growing attraction to Ryoko--not only because she's adorable (although she is), but because she's his equal in battle. No one else ever has been. He never expresses his feelings for her in words. He's cool, hardened and macho--until the moment at the end when he asks her to live with him. She refuses in shock. He says nothing. Instead, he draws from inside his shirt a handkerchief she'd lost earlier, and in that silent gesture we (and Ryoko) realize he's worn it over his heart. Then he takes his penknife, opens the blade and cuts a deep gash in his palm. With his blood he writes his phone number on the handkerchief. "Call me," he says quietly, as he hands it to her.

In THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS we know the moment we see Hawkeye and Cora together that they're meant for each other. Yes, he's illiterate, half-naked and charges through the forest in bucksin leggings, jumping on deer and cutting out their gizzards. She's a pampered English maiden in corsets, numerous petticoats and blossomy hats. However, they have the same tumultuous heads of hair, great waves of tumbling black curls. More important, in any crowd the two of them are always the most energetic, the most active and gutsy in finding solutions to threats--like getting scalped. So we see that beneath the satin and lace on one hand, and stinky deerskin on the other, they're the same sort of person: tough, smart, and passionate soulmates.
Toward the end, Hawkeye and Cora are facing torture, slavery, death by burning, and complete annihilation. Most men and women would give up. But by this time we know this pair so well that we're not surprised when Hawkeye shouts at Cora, "Stay alive no matter what occurs! I will find you!"

Because we know that she will definitely stay alive. And he will find her.

Dr. Sabra Explains Autistic Thinking

2009-07-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

My friend Dr. Sabra (not her real name) is a psychiatrist of fame and powerful flair. I thank God every day that I'm her friend and not her patient, since paying her consulting fees would definitely make me more depressed than before. She's famous for cracking her patients like whips, for being plain-spoken to the point of eye-popping rudeness. Who needs it? If I want somebody to tell me off, there are many friends and relatives who are eager for the task, and they won't charge five hundred dollars an hour.

According to rumor, when in full psychotherapeutic rant Dr. Sabra might accuse one patient of "wallowing in the mire of your Mickey Mouse obsessions," or another of "returning to your evil Ex like a dog to its vomit." Not everybody enjoys being accused of having inferior obsessions. Not everyone wants an impossible but beloved former partner to be compared to barf. Dr. Sabra will also sometimes casually mention, during a session, that she hates the patient's haircut.

But, whether you love her or hate her, she knows her psychiatric onions. So she was the person I asked to explain a term which has been cropping up lately, online, in newspapers and journals: "Autistic Thinking." Politicians, poets, conspiracy theorists, celebrity couples, suddenly everybody is accusing everybody else of this. What does it mean?

As Dr. Sabra considered the phrase, her eyes gleamed like a mighty tigress spotting a juicy gazelle. "That's one of my favorite subjects. It's simple. There are two ways of responding to events in this world. There are people like me, who know that reality is their friend. They don't want to wander in fantasyland. Their home is planet earth. They want their feet on the ground and their eye on the prize, whatever that might be for them. They want to listen, learn, think, and then move in response to reality. I love people like that. They really have a chance in this world.

"Then there are the autistic thinkers. They think that reality is whatever they prefer to believe. 'No, it's not,' I tell them. A lot of my patients are like that, but also many everyday people who would never think of themselves as disturbed. I've conducted thousands of hours of sessions, and believe me, they don't always sound so different from conversations with friends. A patient tells me that the earth is 6,742 years old, or that the drunken husband who shoved her head in the toilet last Saturday night is really a good guy at heart. Events have no roots for her, she believes what she wants. 'No, he's not good,' I say. Or a friend tells me at a bar mitzvah that his adult children, who haven't visited him for eleven years and call once a year at Christmas, really love him. 'No, they don't,' I tell him. Is that cruel? How cruel would it be to let him keep waiting for those children?

"We all know many people like this. One of my acquaintances is a nasty gossip. He makes up stories about people he's jealous of. He's thrown many a dead animal into clean wells, caused problems in innocent lives. What would you call somebody like that? What would the right words be?"

"Lying cow?" I suggested.

"Yes, exactly. But he prefers to call himself a Quaker. Now, as everybody knows, Quakers are all about peace and justice and doing the right thing. The Society of Friends has no Lying Cow branch. But he's sitting in Meetinghouse with his holy face on, praying for the end of war, and also stirring up the shit for people he bitterly suspects have a happier life. Maybe there's some person or power who could make him see what's wrong with this. I can't. It's beyond me.

"An autistic thinker denies the plain evidence of his senses, and is an enemy to his own brain. Some of them are rich and sucessful, but I always think of them as orphans of the storm. I picture them driven across the sky by violent winds, with their heads upside down and their hair spiraling out in electric shocks, like in a Marc Chagall painting. When they're my patients, I try to convince them to climb down, or jump, or cannonball, or do whatever they need to do so that they're no longer stuck in the sky of delusion. Why are they so afraid? Truth, facts, reality, all of these can cause pain. But nothing, nothing could ever be more painful than to be a stranger to their own minds."

"Just Another Shade of Blue" and "Casualty Crossing" , by Kevin Hughes

2009-07-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

Kevin Hughes has a Superman job and a Clark Kent job, although there may be disagreement as to which is which. He's a Dane County Sheriff's detective with a 30+-year career, and he also writes mystery novels.

"Just Another Shade of Blue" was Hughes' debut novel. It was based on the real-life homicide case of Doris Ann McLeod, which he investigated. The novel achieved the almost impossible task of finding justice for the murder victim by setting forth the circumstances of her tragic life. From childhood onward she had been so isolated and exploited, so uniformly betrayed, that when she disappeared nobody reported her missing. A mutilated corpse was found, but its identity remained a mystery for many months. The actual McLeod case was solved, in the end, by the strangest of flukes: a toddler happened to lisp a few words, chilling ones, that a detective realized were a description of the victim's terrible last moments. In Hughes' book, Detective Toby Jenkins finds a solution every bit as harrowing and odd.

Hughes' second novel, "Casualty Crossing," begins by describing the abusive home life of 14-year-old Billy: "He was the kid who ate lunch alone, who chose to sit in the back of the room. In the locker room, eyes were blind to the bruises on his back as he quickly changed outfits. Those bruises weren't small; it was just that nobody noticed the wallflower of a kid or had any reason to care." Billy has a confrontation with his violent, repulsive slob of a stepfather, Virgil--and it has to be said that Virgil is so evil, most readers will want to somehow jump into the book and knock his head off. Billy flees in terror, the book follows him on a desperate odyssey without ever pausing for breath, and so do we.

Hughes gets so many things right in these books. He has the storytelling instinct which drives action ahead--not always gracefully or smoothly, but then, these are mystery novels, not ballroom dances. The dialogue, especially between T.J. Jenkins and his colleagues, is the tough real deal: it jumps back at you with raw candor. And it's a pleasure to make the acquaintance of T.J., although he isn't one of your glamorous pretty-boy detectives, consulting wine lists, and combing society nymphets out of his hair. He's defiantly rough around the edges. He has an alcohol problem, is on terms of mutual contempt with a boss, his divorce left him with little more than the shirt on his back, and he's often rude, crude, and unkempt. (The grimly hilarious first scene of "Casualty Crossing", which has a hungover T.J. frantically smelling garments in his scruffy wardrobe to find the least gamey for a court appearance, demonstrates the last.)

In one scene, T.J. describes his world as "shitty," and himself as a buffoon. But the reader sees much more. T.J. is honest to the bitter end. He's loyal to friends, and he has a tremendously cranky but real dedication to his job. He has skills: in the crunch and at his absolute best, he can see like a deaf man and hear like the blind. He's committed to hunting bad guys, and he protects and serves the innocent. He gets the important things right.

Defanging The Vampire Bully

2009-07-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

"Never allow yourself to be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life. Define yourself.
Harvey Firestone

"A bully is a big a--hole with a little bit of man attached."
Mickey Rourke, actor

"I was the kid who used to get shoved into lockers by school bullies. Because of that, I have never felt like a star in my life."
Winona Rourke, actor

"I paid a worker at New York's zoo to open it just for me and Robin (Tyson's then-wife). When we got to the gorilla cage there was a big silverback gorilla there just bullying the other gorillas. They were so powerful but their eyes were like an innocent infant. I offered the attendant $10,000 to open the cage and let me smash that silverback right on the snotbox. He declined."
(As a young child, Mike Tyson had been savagely abused.)

"A bully is an emotionally retarded vampire. He is not entitled to your blood."
Marlena de Blasi, writer

"Stalking is bullying. One of the hardest jobs a cop will ever face is getting it through the head of a true sleazebag that he can't dog, stalk, threaten, and otherwise torment a woman he wants, who won't have anything to do with him. He thinks it's in his Slimeball's Bill of Rights somewhere."
Officer Billy Leo

"All bullying should be met by steel."
Gypsy saying

Crunchy Glory Fried Chicken

2009-07-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

"It's not any good unless it's got some grease in it."
Tina Turner

This was my family's favorite chicken recipe. The dish first became popular in the 50's, when people became fascinated by the culinary possibilities of the potato chip. Maybe it should be called Tina Turner Fried Chicken. It's sumptuously greasy, but if you MUST pump up the health factor, substitute extra virgin olive oil for the peanut oil.

Pour most of a bag of Lay's potato chips, the ridged kind, into a sturdy plastic bag. The chips should be fresh, not the kind that have been mellowing on top of your refrigerator in a gaping bag for three months. Take your rolling pin and whale away at the chips until they're ground small. Put them into a bowl.

Dry your cut-up chicken pieces on paper towels. Next, roll them in vegetable oil (peanut oil is best, but corn will do) and then in the ground chips. Make sure they're very well coated all over. Place them skin side up, in a shallow pan big enough so that the pieces aren't crowded. Bake at 375 degrees for somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on the doneness you prefer. I like to bake chicken until I KNOW that hen won't scratch no more. There's nothing more disgusting than seeing blood and raw tendons on a nasty, undercooked bird. At 90 minutes the pieces will have reached a deep, crusty, delicious mahogany brown. Let them cool slightly, then have at it.

This is so good it's ridiculous. Even if you've eaten half the bird, you'll still want to scrape the crispy bits out of the pan. Sweetened iced tea is nice with this; or you might try a favorite picnic drink of the 50's: a tall glass filled with half grape juice, half 7 Up, and ice. And to round out the 50's theme, and make your heart and eyes glad, you might serve the meal on one of those lovely vintage tablecloths: crisp cotton that you've ironed, with a design of berries and green vines and rosy flowers...

Karma, The Great Boomerang

2009-06-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated by the concept of karma: what goes around comes around. Here are a few favorite quotations, and if you have more, I'd appreciate hearing them in the Comments.

"You should tremble with fear when you disrespect man, woman, chick or child. The universe has all the time in the world to grind your bitter grain, to force upon you a hateful bread..."

"My karma runs over your dogma."

"If you want to see the boomerang of karma in action, be cold, be cruel, be unjust--you can live perfectly well without half of your head, can't you?"

"I love my dogs, and my dogs love me."
Mickey Rourke, actor

"The filthy-minded man shouts out in triumph that he sees filth in a pure stream--not realizing it is his own reflection."

"The highest stupidity is for one human being to try to withhold blessings from another. Who does he think will lose in the end, who will be scoring his cheeks with his own nails and screaming with loneliness?"

"Karma is sort of like cause-and-effect, but on a diet of blood and honey."

There Are No Small Pleasures

2009-06-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

During our student days, my friends and I were death-defying young women and proud of it. Rising nineteen and with energy to burn--and far too stupid to spot the Grim Reaper even when he was sitting on our handlebars--we'd soar and drop on bikes without brakes down and around Bascom Drive's unforgiving, cement tumble of curves to the Union. We'd fly between furiously cursing bus drivers and stone walls as the large capes we obnoxiously affected whipped in the wind. We may have been hotdogs, but we were hotdogs with capes.

I wonder what my friends would have thought if they'd known of the real pleasure I get, these days, just from rising early, making coffee and reading the newspaper?

Soon after dawn I'm up and looking out the window to see what the birds are up to. There's always a crow, on the highest branch of the tallest pine, looking over his world and seeing what's in it for him. I've never seen a crow, in this position, who didn't look as though he'd do just fine.
If there's a red sky behind him, it foretells an interesting but possibly stormy day.
For humans, this first hour should have a nursery peacefulness. There's plenty of time later to toil, sing, battle and laugh. Soft, warm clothes are nice. My favorite dawn shirt is a red plaid flannel, washed to the tender softness of red milkweed floss.

Next, coffee. I don't know if the java-jive loves me, but I love it. The French Roast brew should be bear-black in color, and a lion in action: strong enough to turn your eyes from back to front. You want that coffee to come roaring out of the mug shaking its mane. You want the jukebox of the sleeping brain to be slapped awake, light up in all its reds and yellows, and begin spinning its songs.

In regard to the newspaper, I know that world disasters are not my fault. Still, I'm neurotically compelled to read about them carefully, once a day. After that, it's all right to have some fun and study the behavior and remarks of embezzling or randy evangelists, close relatives of felons, and all political candidates. Scanning our dailies, I see that co-pastors of a Pentecostal church are on the outs. "He said he would punch my jawbone up my nose and pull the weave right out of my hair!" complains one. "That man's behavior would make Jesus puke!" storms the other.

Next, I learn that it's Barbie Doll's 50th Anniversary. According to the tabloid fashionistas, Barbie is innocently responsible for tens of millions of egg-yolk-yellow, fairy-gilt and hoochie-gold dye jobs "sitting strangely," as they put it, on 50-to-60-year-old grey American heads: mature women who'd adored her as little girls and whose personal ideal remains the stardust princess.

Next, the relatives of a serial murderer puzzle over his behavior. "He must have only become a monster recently," the stepfather says tolerantly. "He has always sent me very nice Father's Day cards. Hallmark."

Reluctantly, I fold up the newspaper and for the first time that day, look directly at the computer sitting on the oak table. The English language has at least a million sinewy words in it, most of them capable of root-binding and branch-whipping any fool who handles them carelessly. I walk to the table, but take one last look out the window at the strange sky: red, with high storm clouds, and a spellbindingly defiant sun.

Good Girl, Bad Boy

2009-06-12T09:32:00.001-07:00

Three high school teachers were chatting in the Borders cafe over their blueberry scones and cappuccinos. Shelley said, "I really love my job...except when I hate it." Emma and Judy sighed, and nodded in agreement. "My biggest challenge this year was the same as always: keeping the good girls away from the bad boys. It seems that just as soon one of those 110% pure, nun's-pet kind of girls hits high school, she pauses just long enough to decide who is the most surly, foul-mouthed, dirty-minded, useless punk with the worst possible future, and then hurls herself at him with cries of rapture. I just don't get it."

"Romeo and Juliet," Emma said wisely, "Bonnie and Clyde...and GUARANTEED to drive her parents crazy."

Judy watched the cream belly its spirals through her dark coffee. After a moment she said softly, "I had a crush on a bad boy in high school."

"EEEEKKKKK!" "You didn't! Get out!"

"I did. Oh, don't worry, I didn't have the guts to speak to him. But he enthralled me. Shane was dangerous and wild, and dressed all in black.He was a dark boy--black-haired and black-eyed. He wore some kind of savage musky cologne. He had big cleats on his motorcycle boots, so you could hear him before you saw him. He raced trains on his motorcycle, cutting through the crossings a hair before the train barreled through. The teachers were AFRAID to give him detention slips. He would swagger into class late, in a fog of cigarette smoke and beer fumes. He had a big jackknife, which the teachers pretended not to see. He'd flick open the big blade and casually clean flesh tissue out from under his fingernails. His father was a butcher, and Shane helped him in the cutting-room.

"As for me, I was a maiden nerd who wore goofy spectacles, read a lot, and my aching heart bled for him under my Honor Society pin. This was the beginning of the Madonna era, and many girls in my class aspired to copy her Early Strumpet look, with ripped stockings, tight skirts and desperate hoochie hair. This horrified my mother. She dressed me in pink sweatshirts with kitties on the front, and cut my hair in a sensible bob. I died from mortification.

"I secretly watched Shane, and he watched the blond prom queen who sat across the aisle from him. He got her attention in bold ways. He'd let loose with thunderous belches, and when people looked at him, he'd solemnly point to Her Highness. I guess he found a painful pleasure in the shades of horror and revulsion passing across her fair features. Or he'd blow his nose, honking tremendously into a dripping snot-rag, and then stare into its folds with cries of incredulous wonder and delight, as though discovering rubies and emeralds. She would literally turn pale with disgust. He must have figured that, if he couldn't get her, at least he could make her sick.

"Did he graduate?" asked Emma, always the teacher.

"Of course not. He got expelled. He did two bad things in the same week. First, he got caught making out with his slutty girlfriend behind the school incinerator. Then, he and his goon friends got drunk one night and vandalized the library. He was only allowed to come back once, to clean out his locker. And that's when we had our one and only high school conversation. Somehow I got up the nerve to talk to him. I stuttered out a few words, something about how Home Room would seem boring without him. He smiled at me, really looked at me with those dark eyes. Then he said something I've never forgotten. He said, "I'm sorry about the library. It made my mom feel bad."

"What happened to him after that? Did he go to prison? Did he get shot?"

"Shane inherited his dad's butcher shop," Judy said. "He still reeks of smoke and beer, but he's a good butcher. My husband and I go there to get our steaks for cookout, and our Thanksgiving turkeys. And to this day, Shane teases me about school days. He says, 'I suppose you're still readin' up a storm?' as though he were talking about some wildly impractical, exotic activity peculiar to me. And he asks where he can find one of those cool pink sweatshirts with the kitties on the front, for his daughter Theresa. He calls it a Chastity Sweatshirt, and says it would go huge on eBay. Theresa is a good girl. She'll be entering high school this fall.

"Shane has a beer gut now, and that curly hair isn't as black as it used to be. But..." Judy looked down into her coffee, sighed and smiled, and said in a very quiet voice, "he's still pretty cute."

Doris And Rock And Me

2009-06-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

An editor recently asked me for "your first literary memory." After a lot of pondering I realized it would have to be this incident.

It was a sweet-smelling, balmy summer evening in a little country town, many years ago. My sister and I, sixteen and seventeen (we were "Irish twins") were sitting in the tiny Prairie du Sac movie theater. We were watching the romantic comedy Lover Come Back, with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

Because we were innocent to the point of mental disability, we saw nothing bizarre in the fortyish Doris's frantic attempts to preserve her virginity against the lecherous assaults of leering playboy Hudson. She fled his slobbering pursuit in her high heels, both flirting with him and flouncing away from him with such manic energy she almost bounced off the screen. She scolded sex-crazed Hudson for his base desires, shaking her finger at him and telling him off, a high-minded ash-blond angel in tight-fitting suits.

My sister and I were fascinated, rooting for Doris and filing away her strategies for taming bestial, drooling, skirt-chasing Hudson--who, as became obvious later, was a far better actor than anyone gave him credit for.

The movie was well-started when a huge bulbous man entered and began fumbling his way down the dark aisle, looking for seats. He was holding the hands of two small fair-haired children. Everyone in the theater recognized the father, who in terms of mass alone was the most gigantic man in Sauk County; and they knew his children, April and Wally. On the screen, at that very moment, Doris Day was vigorously shaking her blond French twist at Hudson and showering him with maidenly reproaches; and in the aisle, the brilliant regional writer August Derleth looked at the screen, listened for a minute, snorted, and then laid down the most tremendous, roof-lifting fart.

Enemies

2009-05-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

"Rise early, and sharpen your knife."
Czech saying

""I hated the vain turd on sight."
character Billy Leo about con man Geoffrey
in short story "Geoff In Disgrace"

"If you sit beside the river bank long enough,
the bodies of all your enemies will float by."
(All countries have some variation of this)

"You can smell him before you see him."
Lyndon Baines Johnson about his enemy,
conservative journalist Robert Novak

"You should always enter a room in such a way
that your enemy feels the day is not as sweet as before..."
Ernest Hemingway

Above all, "Illegitimi non carborundum" (Latin)
Don't let the bastards wear you down!

Mother's Day Haiku--Late But Sweet

2009-05-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

prodigal's sunbrowned hand
wraps mother in flowers--silk
scarf, from Africa

"Eat Me: The Food And Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin"

2009-05-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

If you like good food and aren't afraid of hot pepper and sizzling spice, you'll enjoy Kenny Shopsin's book. Shopsin is the most ornery, foul-mouthed, and talented diner cook in New York, and his cookbook/memoir/rant will bust your sinuses open like his Brazilian Chicken Garlic Rice Soup.

As you read, you gradually become aware that, although Shopsin doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, he's got one. It comes through in the fierce love and care he shows for his family. His book has a huge-lettered dedication to his late wife, the saintly Eve. His children have chosen to work side by side with their often-raging Dad. It's evident in the decades-long devotion he feels, in his own way, for certain customers. (For example, although Shopsin has an ironclad rule that he will absolutely not do takeout, a sick bed-bound customer and friend found that food "came around.") Shopsin treats his good suppliers like precious jewels, and remembers the sins of his bad suppliers with elephant-like clarity forty years after the event.
His attitude toward food critics can probably be guessed.
He can write, he can think, he's genuinely fearless, and judging by his recipes (which are excellent) he can cook like a madman. Toward the end of the book he says this:
"I have a lot of character defects, but reaching above myself in terms of my desires is not one of them. I don't pretend to like things or try to like them because someone told me to or because I think I should like them. I have no problem with my lack of sophistication when it comes to anything and certainly not when it comes to food. It is not necessary to tickle my palate with subtle nuances and exotic hidden ingredients. With food, I don't like subtlety. I like gusto. I think that is why I like Mexican food so much. You take a bite of good Mexican food, and it just explodes..."

Dahlias of the Storm

2009-05-11T05:08:00.001-07:00

By early May, when my garden has the promise of green, I've almost recovered from a traumatic scene that takes place during every November's first big storm.
Typically I'll be in the livingroom, peacefully watching a favorite Marx Brothers movie. I'm eating Fritos Scoopers with tahini, and thinking it's almost time to put the three-cheese ravioli on the table. The windows are lashed by icy rain or some variation of huge record-breaking dumpings of snow driven by gale-force winds. I think how cosy it is to be inside, all warm and comfortable.
But as I stare hypnotized at the sleet flowers on the window, very slowly I realize that the storm is sure to bring about the season's first hard freeze. And at these words, the hair on the back of my neck slowly rises. Surely I didn't forget, once again, to dig up the dahlia roots and bring them safely in?
Five minutes later a puny figure can be seen in the garden, through the blizzard, frantically digging. She is alone, since she tried to persuade the family dogs to come out with her, but they were too smart. She spades furiously, trying to separate the dahlia roots from clumps of ice forming around them.
Swags of snow cover this figure and turn her into a shoveling snowwoman, or perhaps there's no snow but only sleety rain under a thunderously swollen black sky torn by zigzags of lightning, striking close. No matter; she digs on, cursing. She has to. Finally the roots are chipped and gouged out, and rushed to the house in a bucket as the snowwoman loudly screams "Shit!" It's painful to recall that only a week before, on a honey-scented, Indian summer afternoon, she had sentimentally admired a late rose.
Six months pass. Spring comes. I put it off, but the day comes, as it always will, when I have to go to the basement and open the bags of dahlia roots I'd sealed shut on that storm-driven night in November. I take a hard look at them. They look dead as nails: dried, shriveled, unpromising. They haven't made it, and it's all my fault. While I was lounging in front of Marx Brothers movies eating Fritos Scoopers heaped with tahini, the fragile dahlia orphans were perishing in the storm.
But then I take another good look. In the cold, dark basement air, it almost seems as though there is a minute red ember on one of the roots. When I keep looking, very close, I gradually see that each root has one or two tiny red fronds. They are sturdy, alive, and seeking the light. And that is all it takes.

Visiting A Smart and Kind Mighty Huntress Up North

2009-05-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last Fall, during hunting season, we visited my sister Anne who lives close to Iron Mountain. This
is serious deer country. If you drive along the roads at dusk, you'll see deer coming down out of the hills and feeding in the fields like Biblical cattle. You will also see coyotes and black bears whether you want to or not. The wild world is very close up north, and humans live beside all those teeth and claws and bloodlusts without fear.
We went for a walk through the late Fall woods. Anne, who is a mighty huntress with her own deer stand, kindly pretended not to hear my squeaks of terror as a black bear crossed our path."You never have to be afraid of a bear," Anne told me, "unless it's a sow who has cubs. Then, back up fast!"
We walked through a light, pearly fog which turned the snowy woods into an ethereal dreamscape. Anne's beagle Babe added some horror movie elements as she bounded up behind us and proudly showed us the deer foreleg complete with stringy ligaments dangling out of her mouth. Finally she dropped the leg, and I thought to myself, "Thank God we won't have to look at THAT anymore."
But a minute later the fog parted to reveal Babe now running TOWARD us, grinning hugely, the deer leg snugly reinserted in her mouth. She repeated this manuever 70 or 80 times, dropping the leg, snatching it up, worrying loose a delicious morsel of the knee, or crunching up a bit of hoof, weaving and reweaving figure eights to show off her prize. Dogs never quit. This is one of the things I like about them, but not always.
Now, Anne knows perfectly well that I'm a yellow-bellied weinie who can't so much as think of words like Vein or Incision without growing faint and queasy. But she never loses hope that she can toughen me up. Her kind intention is that I'll grow to share her fascination with the natural world, no matter how raw and real. So she showed me where she'd field-dressed her buck, leaving a big pile of guts. Barely a grease spot remained. The coyotes, the black bears, the crows, hawks, raccoons, eagles, and Babe had all had their banquet at the Guts Buffet. But there was a tiny, mysterious, furry little animal chunk of some part or other. Anne pondered over it for several minutes, intrigued, tried to identity it, and finally tucked it snugly in her pocket to take home. She thought it was part of the liver or maybe the spleen, and was going to check it out on the internet when she got home. (My sister has won Best Science Teacher in Wisconsin awards, and I'm never surprised.)
Then we went back to her log home, and in front of a crackling wood fire we had savory, tender venison stew, chunks of delicious meat breathing garlic and caramelized onions and mushrooms. With this we had a swashbuckling red wine from Anne's own grapes, "a bossy wine with shoulders," she said. After this came berry pie with thick cream.
Then Anne went to the computer, intent on checking deer anatomy charts so she could identify the furry animal chunk she'd collected in the woods; while I grabbed my notebook, sat in front of the fire, and recorded impressions. And we were both very happy.

A Sly Dog Meets His Match

2009-04-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

The first dog my husband and I bought was a beagle puppy. Our then-teenage son insisted on naming him, and so the puppy's name, properly registered with the Kennel Club, was Eddie Van Halen II.
Eddie's faults grew huge and fluorescent as he matured. He was sly, greedy and power-hungry almost beyond belief. He would watch us carefully until our attention was elsewhere, and then fight our toddler tooth and nail for her bottle, trying to be alpha baby. Eddie would then drag the bottle off by its nipple and we'd discover him later, reclining voluptuously behind the piano, ravening over the soy milk, eyes crossed in a swoon of ecstasy.
Eddie was incapable of seeing anything in the yard that was smelly or dead without doing a belly-buster in it. He was also a bully; our children would have to rush out and rescue kittens, or baby birds with bits of the shell clinging to them.
I compulsively watched Barbara Woodhouse's dog-training show on TV. She would stalk the turf of the training ring like a dominatrix, barking orders at the humble, cowering dog owners. In fact, she always treated humans like crap: a bunch of sniveling, chuckle-headed dead-asses and drooling screwups who were sure to muff her simplest commands.
However, she believed all dogs were sensational darlings. She wooed them with musical, brightly joyous and extravagantly approving praise and treats. I noticed that everybody, man or beast, obeyed Barbara instantly.
During one session she casually mentioned that she liked to arm herself with a stout cudgel when she walked her dog in case she ran into anything that needed bashing. This nugget of information made the humans noticeably pick up their heels as they galloped haplessly around the ring at her command.
I brooded over the fact that I lacked Barbara's natural authority. I was at my wits' end about Eddie, and that is why I took him to the Blessing of the Animals ceremony at the town's Episcopal Church.
Devout farmers brought their livestock to be protected by angels from hoof rot, spontaneous abortion, death by lightning strike and the whole ocean of disaster toward which farm animals rush with gleeful neighs, quacks, gobbles and moos. I hoped that in the general swells and backwashes of grace, some of it might slop over onto one bad dog.
People beamed at the cute little beagle. They didn't know he was the notorious Nasty Eddie. He made an appealing picture as he stared with wonder at mighty draft horses, and trotted admiringly after a couple of goats, yellow-eyed reeking sons of diablo whose ferocious smell and horrible attitude problems impressed him greatly.
The rector was tall, dignified and nobly spiritual. In the golden light of a paradisal afternoon he made holy gestures over the animals and told them to be good horses, goats, cats, ducks and (graciously patting Eddie) beagles.
Eddie slobbered fawningly over the rector's boots and, with a smarmy look on his face, cuddled close to the lace hem of his robe. Eddie preened, smirking, as photo were taken. People talked about the peaceable kingdom.
It couldn't last. Fatally, refreshments were served. Eddie never met a deadly sin he didn't like, but gluttony was his favorite. Shedding his fresh blessings like lint, he frantically attacked a 90-year-old church organist for her handful of popcorn. He thought she would be easy pickings, but he was wrong. This ancient gentlewoman seized her walker and brandished it at him. Eddie bolted off as though shot from a cannon and could be heard baying with terror up and down faraway hills. And I remembered, as clearly as though it were written above me in the beautiful blue sky, his breeder's cheerful comment that beagles were very long-lived. With luck, We might enjoy Eddie's companionship for twenty years or more!

I Like Reality

2009-04-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

Speak the truth, but ride a fast horse.
Cowboy saying

The carriages of the past will take you nowhere.
Nikolai Gogol

He who limps is still walking.
Stanislas Lee

I like reality. It tastes of bread.
Jean Anouilh

Samson and Delilah and Me

2009-04-09T09:45:00.001-07:00

On a recent icy Sunday I could be found in my old Morris chair, snugly wrapped in a favorite red plaid afghan, watching Bible movies on TV. Close at hand was a big plate of buttery garlic bread, heavy on the garlic. On the screen over the course of the day were Moses, Samson and Ben-Hur. I first saw these movies in the great old Al Ringling theater in Baraboo, Wisconsin with a few hundred other innocent tots like myself. We may have been a little vague about political or religious conflicts in the movies, but we alertly followed orgies, dismemberment, mass execution, torture and assassination with fascinated attention.

It was easy to tell who was good and who was bad. The good were raggedy, but virtuous. They wore burlap bags and worked to exhaustion on the pharaoh's hellish construction sites. Bad people wore glamorous, shiny fabrics and were studded with gems as big as duck eggs. They showed their moral corruption by lying sideways while eating, lounging on marble daises. In The Ten Commandments, Yul Brynner has Psycho Pharaoh written all over him. His oiled chest is garnished with weaponry and fabulous jewels. He glares at his slaves with brutal command, and eyes his fiancee (Anne Baxter) with a carnal leer. He also thinks he is divine--a delusion guaranteed to set off the hair-trigger temper of Cecil B. DeMille's God.
No wonder Moses and his followers flee hotfoot into the desert to get away from him. However, they aren't home free yet. The moment Moses goes up into the mountain to get God's word, the freaky-deaky element among his followers take over. They're fermenting manna, gilding a heifer, exchanging somber robes for rhinestone bustiers and chiffon dancing pants. Where did these clothes come from? These people are in the middle of a desert. They must have packed them earlier in case they felt inclined to bust out later.

At the Al Ringling, we kids knew that wherever you had dancing girls doing high kicks in shiny fabrics, God's wrath was not far behind. It looked like Southern California. We all waited with real anxiety for Moses to come back down. When he did, he was as disgusted as we were and nipped the frenzy in the bud.

These epics specialized in brutal truths. In "Samson and Delilah," one minute Samson is riding high, sweltering in the embraces of the darkly adorable Delilah/Hedy Lamarr. But when he lets her hack his hair off, he's blinded by his enemies in an instant. He finds himself in a show ring being tortured by dwarfs. You may recognize several ex-Munchkins among them. Ten years before this movie was produced, these little people were dancing in tiny lederhosen and singing to Dorothy, "We represent the lollypop guild, lollypop guild, lollypop guild..." but now here they are, tormenting Samson with whip and spur. In the climactic scene, there are dancing girls, graven images, a 4-story pagan god with a nasty sneer on his face and flames coming out of his mouth, the whole can of worms. And a huge mass of evil people are conveniently gathered together, being mean to Samson. For some reason none of them have noticed that Samson's hair has been growing out and his Old Testament 'Fro is quite huge and fluffy again. However, we kids had noticed. And we weren't really surprised at what happened next.

A Feast With Friends, In Honeycomb Walls

2009-04-01T14:19:00.000-07:00

Years ago, there was a certain day when I traveled by bus, for ten hours, through a dark gray, sleeting, hopeless winter landscape, over roads that varied between frozen mud and black ice. I had a lot of time to brood over unhappy recent events.

It was a long trip. However, the kind hands of my friends Nancy and Al were there to help as I climbed stiffly off the bus. Minutes later, I was sitting in their kitchen. Nancy is an artist. Two of the walls were parakeet yellow, and in fact exuberant wings were drawn flying to the ceiling. The other walls were painted a warm apricot, with cross-hatching in dark gold to represent a honeycomb's cells.

They had cooked all day. Correctly gauging my mental state--"Your blood sugar must be in your boots," she said--we started with dessert. This was my favorite: French vanilla ice cream with eggy golden pound cake. You tear off chunks of the cake and use them to scoop up smooth, soft, vanilla-fragrant gobs of the ice cream. Eat them together.

A crisply browned pork loin followed, with rich gravy. Let's admit it: succulent grease is good for what ails you. It gilds and heals the nerve endings. There was Seven Jewel Rice, there were brandied peaches in a blue canning jar. There was comforting Grandma food in the form of creamed corn in a blue willow dish, with poached eggs on top and three tiny circles of spice--cumin, pepper and paprika--on each egg. They had done all this for me.

Hunger is said to be the best sauce. I think that a better one is when you realize that affectionate eyes have studied your tastes, quietly and without fanfare, and acted on them. There are people on earth who think you should have what you like. And within their walls of apricot, honey and sun, the most stubborn ice crystals can thaw.

Pablo

2009-03-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

"He must have an angel in his head."
(Picasso said this after looking at one of Marc Chagall's paintings of heavenly swooping figures)

"I know--it's terrible--but I love her so much!"
(Picasso's reaction when a friend told him that Gertrude Stein was ungratefully selling the portrait he'd made of her to buy, as she put it, "a better picture.")

"It looks like a hair in my soup."
(Picasso, frowning, when he saw a line drawing by Matisse, his lifelong rival.)

"He steals my blue."
(Picasso, lying, about Matisse. Actually he tried to steal Matisse's blue.)

"Forgiveness, the first sign of senility."
(Picasso, known for his stamina in holding grudges.)

"The main thing is to outlive the bastards."
(Picasso, who lived into his nineties.)

A Mildly Blue Story On A Beautiful Green Earth Day

2009-03-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

(Original Earth Day was March 20, 1969)

My good friends Sue and Charlie both grew up in Colorado, and they insist this story is true:

Wolves were multiplying like rabbits and growing fierce as tigers in the remote Colorado hill country. Ranchers were infuriated as their sheep flocks were attacked and gobbled up. They often shot the wolves on sight, which put them at odds with shiny-faced young environmentalist students in the state university. Finally the students persuaded the ranchers to meet with them, promising that they would come up with a solution to the problem.

The meeting took place in a village town hall. The ranchers in the audience were a tough, hardened, weatherbeaten crew, dressed in frayed ranch clothes which had seen many storms. They were also angry, and they were not in the mood to take any crap from The Greenie Babies, as they called the students. However, a crisply tailored student, smelling of men's cologne and with a freshly styled hairdo, strode with huge confidence to the lectern.
"My colleagues and I have discussed your situation," he said importantly. "And we have come up with the one and only solution that can save both the wolves and the sheep." He paused impressively, then announced his plan: "We will castrate the wolves!"
The ranchers were stunned into silence. Then, slowly, they began to mutter between themselves. Finally they chose a spokesman, Vern, the most weathered of all. He stood up, nervously twirling his hat in his hands, tried to speak, and fell silent. "Tell 'em, Vern! Tell 'em!" the other ranchers urged.
Vern finally got it out. "Perfessor," he said, "we don't care if the wolves f--k our sheep. We just don't want them to EAT them."

And I Won't

2009-03-14T09:25:00.001-07:00

"Don't let anyone prophecy over you who doesn't like you."
David Gonzales, evangelist minister

Duffy and His Harry Houdoggy Moment

2009-03-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

As everybody knows, Harry Houdini was a master escape artist who could compress himself into, and then work his way free from, the tiniest spaces. Our dog Duffy has perfected only one feat of this type, but it's dazzling to watch.

First, a little background to the Harry Houdoggy moment. We supposedly bought a purebred shetland sheepdog, but Duffy has grown fabulously huge for the breed. Can you picture a 50-pound sheltie? Friends, relatives, and even total strangers walking their dogs have taken it upon themselves to kindly let us know we were total chumps if we thought we were getting a purebred. But we don't regret it, because Duffy is one of life's sweethearts. For one thing, in his heart he's still a tiny guy. He will crawl confidingly into our laps, crushing us. And he's passionately attached to the little crate which he used as a puppy, and insists on taking his naps there. It looks impossible, but in his mind the sun shines on all his endeavors, so he never hesitates. First he crouches and creeps through the tiny door. I worry that the day will come when he can only do this if he's covered with grease. He eases forward until his nose touches the back of the crate. Then comes the Harry Houdoggy moment: slowly, but with fabulous confidence, he twines his loo-oong, flexible spine around on itself like the unfurling of a rosette, and ends up facing out, in a compact bundle. His big, dark, furry head and shoulders loll out the door, and his face has a look of ecstatic stupor, as with half-closed eyes he gently mumbles a shred of the battered red flannel shirt that's been his blankey--also since puppyhood.
And we smile, because we know we're looking at perfect happiness.

The Scents Of Memory

2009-03-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

The five friends were sitting around Marta's kitchen table, toward the end of dinner on a cold Sunday night in March. They were well into the third bottle of the Polish Bullsblood wine that Sam had brought. The topic of conversation was memorable smells.
"The most comforting smell on earth was my grandma's hot pastry, baking," Marta sighed. "Her strudel had such integrity. And if I asked Gram, she'd cut out pastry leaves and flowers to bake on top, and a M for my name--"
"How precious," Josh said bitingly. "Well, my favorite scent is the way my first girlfriend smelled. She was an arty bohemian girl with hair in her armpits."
"Why are we talking about your love life when I'm trying to eat?" Anne said, looking at her scone.
"Well, I love the smell of wet dog,"said Carol, who always hated to be outdone. "I grew up with a Lab/shepherd mix named Sluggo. Sluggo was one of those big, goofy, slobbery, happy dogs that make you feel good just looking at them.
"He did smell truly awful when he got wet, but I never minded. He lived with us for years and years. His favorite thing was to go out in the rain and roll in the rotting mulch in the garden. He would stink terribly. Then my mother would scold him, and he'd be ashamed and try to force his way behind the leather armchair to hide. But he was way too big. So my Sluggo would sit close BESIDE the armchair, and hope for the best.
"Anyhow, it rained the day after he died, and there was no reek of wet fur. I looked at the armchair and started to cry. I said to my mother, 'Would it have killed us to move that chair out a couple inches, so he could hide there when he wanted to?' She thought I was crazy."
Jennie, who still missed and often spoke of her noble Skipper many years after his death, had tears in her eyes.
"I'm the only person in the world who can't stand the smell of popcorn," Sam said hastily. He detested sentiment, and thought Sluggo had brought them dangerously close. "This began when my parents and I moved here from Poland.
"Friday nights my mom would make up a big vat of popcorn for our cozy American evening at home, as she'd seen on television. But my Dad's idea of entertainment was to insert his butt into the La-Z-Boy and tell me about the 10 thousand years back in Poland during which our serf ancestors had been treated like crap in their godforsaken hovel on the landlord's estate. There had been a long line of vodka-crazed psycho landlords, but my father called them all by the same name: an unpronounceable Polish word that means Butthole in the Big House."
"What a coincidence," Marta said. "My Lithuanian ancestors also had a landlord called Butthole in the Big House."
"In Poland," Sam continued, "the males in my family, the Dudeks, were traditionally horse grooms. The landlord's idea of fun was to kick a Dudek to death with his jackboots if the horse wasn't looking properly twinkly-eyed. You would think it would have occurred to somebody to leave. I said this to my mother, and she said, 'We must respect their struggles.' I understood this. I knew my ancestors had modest expectations. They thought things were going good if nobody had recently been flayed alive by the bullwhip.
"But every Friday night in America, as my dad ate popcorn and told me about our sacred dead, I silently raged," Sam said. "I was a merciless little American, and I wanted to enjoy my life. Doing this around my dad was like trying to learn to dance while having to edge very carefully around a huge bucket of blood which stood dead center in the livingroom. It was like we left Poland but never really got away.
"So that's why I dislike the smell of popcorn," he said.
Sam's friends stared at him in silence. Then Carol leaned forward and very gently poured the last bullsblood wine from the last bottle into his glass. He swirled it, breathed in the harsh, bitterly sweet bouquet, and drank it down.

Message to All Artists

2009-03-05T04:44:00.000-08:00

When the gulls are flying off with your pancreas, just tell yourself, "This will all be very useful someday."

Jim Carrey

MAY AND THE MISDIAGNOSIS: FIGHTING BACK

2009-03-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

(A tribute to my friend May, who received a death sentence from her doctor. He was off by about twenty years. She wore her pink survivor's ribbon with honor and joy.)

One day the doctor told May
"Your turn for a wasting disease"
but she refused to let him
prop her ribcage up a tree just yet.
Instead, she began eating her head off.
She lived on lard, all her nerve endings
sheathed in rosy fat.
She dunked her rosette curls
into butter tubs of gluttony.
She spit on her bad gut, her bad heart,
and all but the most sumptuous
deadly sins.
The doomy wag of the doctor's tongue
had twisted her to the roots, but
closer to the earth
she prized up gobs of tubers, anklets of peanuts,
and embraced whole racks of lamb.
She saw the doctor chop bits most cherished
from other patients. Savagely physicked,
they crawled to the cooling board.
May ate steadily forward,
never putting a foot wrong,
gilding every jiggle, dimple and crease.
On appointment days the doctor would look at her,
sitting on two chairs, her big smile
smelling of pie and ham fat,
and the old skull would fall silent.

(originally published in The Georgia Review)

A Navajo Grandfather Once Told His Grandson.....

2009-02-28T06:16:00.000-08:00

There is a story about a Navajo grandfather who once told his grandson, "Two wolves live inside me. One is the bad wolf, full of greed and laziness, full of anger and jealousy and regret. The other is the good wolf, full of joy and compassion and willingness and a great love for the world. All the time, these wolves are fighting inside me.

The boy said, "Which wolf will win?"

The grandfather answered, "The one I feed."

Elizabeth Berg

How Mark Bittner Became A Writer

2009-02-25T06:05:00.000-08:00

Mark Bittner is now the well-known and well-respected author of a best-selling memoir, *The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill*. It's a fascinating account of his interactions with a flock of wild parrots that lives in the North Beach area of San Francisco. For many years Bittner studied, fed and protected these birds even when he was struggling with homelessness and poverty. He kept a detailed journal on the flock, but resisted the idea of becoming a professional writer. Bittner was a devoted student of Eastern religions, and wanted to cultivate peace and serenity in himself. All the famous writers he'd heard of seemed to have become drunkards, drug addicts, brawlers, wife-beaters. Bittner was afraid that if he wrote, he would become some kind of psychopath, develop a host of exotic problems and die years before his time.

Eventually, however, Bittner noticed that his journal on the parrot flock had become 1000 pages long. In other words, he was already writing. Also, he loved reading and studying books, and slowly he accepted the idea that maybe it would not be too bad an endeavor to write one. This is his description of his change of heart:

"As for my old fears about the fate of writers, I was ALREADY destitute, and having survived the streets, I was no longer afraid of going insane or becoming an alcoholic. I found some milk crates and an old door and improvised a desk. I'd written short stories and I'd written songs, but I had no idea how one went about writing an entire book. My usual method would have been to buy some books on how to write a book, but I didn't see myself as having the time for that. I didn't delay even a single day; I just sat down and started writing."

*The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill* is one of the most delightful, as well as tough-minded and informative, books you could read, this year or any other year. It continues to sell very well. Bittner can now afford a real desk and computer, but he still often likes to write by hand. He's now reached the second-draft stage of his new book, *Street Song.*

His fears about turning into a degenerate never materialized. Bittner and his wife Judy live a remarkably healthy life. They can often be seen biking up and down the San Francisco hills, or swimming in the icy, rambunctious waves of the Bay in close proximity to waterbirds, sea lions, and harbor seals.

AND ANOTHER THING, GEORGE.....

2009-02-23T12:18:00.000-08:00

Attention, all you joyous Dems and everybody else who enjoys having his country back: I think you'd like, as much as I do, a cover story in Kotori Magazine which is titled "666 Reasons Sentient Citizens Are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush." Political writer Dan Benbow did an incredible job of research on what is a virtually complete record of the abuses of the Bush presidency--specifically, large and small disasters which occurred during those eight lost, dark years. It may seem odd to describe an article with 666 power points as "concise," but Benbow's focus is lazer-like. The link is:

http://kotorimagazine.com/74/236.html

Throughout, the article is compelling. And personally, I think it would be a good idea to print it out and re-read it at least once a year. Lest we forget.

THE EMPEROR EXPLAINS HIMSELF

2009-02-20T06:05:00.001-08:00

The great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa had an onset nickname: cast and crew called him Tenno, The Emperor. One close friend described Kurosawa as "a demon of strength" when directing his magnificent films, which included The Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Yojimbo. His personality was so imposing that actors would endure the most incredible hardships to please him. This might vary from painless but disgusting tasks like wearing the same stinking rags for months, both onset and off, since he believed that actors should stay in character; to being nearly drowned, since he liked torrential rain in his films, and plenty of it. In the final scene of Throne of Blood, actor Toshiro Mifune was nearly skewered by the hundreds of real arrows that were shot at him by expert archers. In The Seven Samurai actors attacked each other with real swords, knives, pikes, and cudgels in hip-high mud while being deluged by The Emperor's favorite Biblical-strength rain.
Apparently actors seldom so much as said "Boo" to Kurosawa about his methods. He was just too big, too powerful for them to question.

Because of incidents like these, Kurosawa's scriptwriter friend Uekusa told him that obviously he had never known regret, desperation or defeat, the weaknesses that most people struggle with. Uekusa said that "Tenno" had been born strong and born lucky, and that his achievements had come easily to him. This is the way Kurosawa responded:

"I only wear the mask of a strong person...I am not trying to defend myself. But I feel this is an opportunity to make myself understood. I am not a special person. I am not especially strong. I am not especially gifted. But I hate to show weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That is all there is to it."

THE PHILOSOPHY MAJOR'S HAIR

2009-02-16T05:43:00.001-08:00

(This is a Valentine's Day poem, a little late...the tumultuous crush took place during school daze...)

THE PHILOSOPHY MAJOR'S HAIR

Young men in that class grew fierce traditional snake-braids
spearing the debate, others blackened the room
with enormous, spittle-shimmering Bolshevik
storm-beards of sedition.
While you called Nietzsche sentimental
and others roared you down,
I studied the earth-orb of your sumptuous 'fro
and wished it were made for me.
Let it be mine,
your hard and stubborn head
with its yew-dense, mustang-brown fur of knots
tempting my hand. In it
I could have clipped topiary shapes of Adam and Eve,
their fast-breeding menagerie and garden of delight.
Then I would have said to you
Screw Nietzsche. Here's a mirror. See
how we could be.

One Who Is Good At Preserving Life In Battle.....

2009-02-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

One who is good at preserving life
does not avoid tigers and rhinoceroses
when he walks in the hills;
nor does he put on armor and take up weapons
when he enters battle.
The rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn,
the tiger has no place to fasten its claws.
Weapons have no place to admit their blades.
Now,
What is the reason for this?
Because on him there are no mortal spots.

Tao Te Ching, quoted in the book Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

COMFORT FOOD

2009-01-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

The summer I was 6 years old, I had a galloping case of scarlet fever. My parents despaired of my life. We had a neighbor called Mrs. Jessie who was fond of me, and often took care of me. She was very religious, and almost set the Catholic church ablaze with candles for all of her sickly and disaster-prone friends and relatives. She was sitting beside me when I awoke from the fever.

"Mrs. Jessie," I croaked, "would you fry me up a mess of sinkers?"

"Oh, my God," my mother said, "the poor child is delirious."

Still, Mrs. Jessie rushed to the kitchen, whipped on a print apron, fired up a large kettle of grease, and I was on the mend.

A sinker is a doughnut, of course, but has nothing in common with the wimpy product you see in modern bakeries. Mrs. Jessie's sinkers were cut from rich dough, flung into boiling lard and plucked out with tongs when they were a golden-hearted brown. They were then dredged in powdered sugar and eaten hot. There was no diddling around with paper towels after they were friend, either. Those suckers flowed with grease, and that is the way Mrs. Jessie and I liked it.

My friend Cindy once told me about her grandmother's magical Yorkshire pudding. It was not anything, she said, like the degenerate, fluffy Charmin-type Yorkshire pudding you get in restaurants these days. It was a crisply browned, warm little boulder which kept your innards company. It stayed by you. When you felt bad, when the world's boot was on your neck, you could get on the outside of a large portion of this pudding and plan your comeback.

If Cindy's grandmother sensed that she was sad, she let her eat the pudding straight off the platter, which was thick white ironstone with a lion's head on the back. This helped, too.

Your personal comfort foods are the ones that keep your boiler warm. Judith Kranz will never win a National Book Award, but she understands comfort just fine. In her novel Scruples the heroine Valentine suffers a disastrous reverse in love. She crouches in her apartment, wailing. She doesn't eat, she doesn't wash her hair. Things are rapidly going from bad to worse when she's rescued by her photographer friend Spider.

Spider holds Valentine tright--but best of all, he feeds her Campbell's tomato soup with Ritz crackers. When I got to that part, I said "Bango!", which is what the sportscaster Eddie Doucette used to say when somebody made a basket. Tomato soup (made with milk, of course) and Ritz crackers are good for what ails you. Something about round crackers makes me feel better right away, while the bristly right angles of Triscuits seem harsh and sad.

Ice cream, too, has been close to my heart ever since the Christmas when I was 8. I had large juicy chickenpox all over me, and fury in my heart. I'd miss everything. I hated everybody. It was so unfair.

Then my father came home from work and showed me what he'd bought. It was especially for me, mint ice cream made with a colored Christmas tree design in the middle. He made me a sundae with sprinkles on top. He treated me with a beautiful gentleness all evening. And I healed.

The last memory is bittersweet. On a winter morning long ago I stood in a snowbank, in a blizzard, breathless with pain. I was incapacitated by grief, unable to step from the drift to the sidewalk. I'd just had the kind of conversation, with an ex-fiance, that shouldn't happen to a dog. You would think that the realization that your lost man is not only a selfish rotter but an utter fool would make you stop wanting him. You would think that. But for a 20-year-old, it's not so.

Anyhow, my hands were in my pockets because I'd rushed romantically into the blizzard without gloves. I was freezing, but after awhile I became aware of an object in one of the pockets. I pulled it out and stared at it. It was a chocolate bar in a brown wrapper. Nothing fancy, but the chocolate bar of my childhood, the kind my mother always bought.

With stiff fingers I fumbled the wrapping off and put the chocolate in my mouth. There followed one of the lodestar sensory experiences of my life. The dark, sweet, velvety stuff melted on my tongue, while a fine mist of snow blew against my face. Tears, snow and chocolate blended. After a few minutes I felt, not exactly better, but stronger. I was able to step out of the snowbank, and go home.