the nibbler

Joan Crawford

2011-11-14T20:59:00.001-08:00

Joan vs Joan: The Launch Party for Joan's Digest!

2011-11-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

Thursday, November 17
The party is from 8:30 to 11:30
at Anthology Film Archives
(w/ complimentary Joan-themed Bourbon drinks)

www.joansdigest.com

Coming Soon...

2011-09-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

Snapshots: A Flaherty NYC Series at 92YTribeca
October 5 - Nov 16

Celery Root

2011-09-06T03:03:00.000-07:00

Who knew something that ugly could be so delicious?

Celery Root Remoulade
Celery Root Leaves in Salad
Celery Root Gratin with Comté
Celery Root Sliced and Poached (served warm with vinaigrette)
Cubed Celery Root & Fresh Cranberry Bean Salad

Here is an interview I did with the great Georgeanne Brennan. She includes some terrific uses for the her recipe for the knobby root.

Still Away...

2011-08-16T01:06:00.000-07:00

Century Plants in Bloom

Highlights so far: sliced green grapes in a white wine vinegar dressed green salad w/ frittata and a bone dry white wine, plus the 2005 Bordeaux that was picked up on a barge and the unforgettable 1998 Bandol Domaine Tempier that tasted suave and elderly, Suzanne's celebration cumin carrot salad with the slooowest roasted pork + green beans w/ marjoram, a garden party with the next generation of cousins, reunions in the tree house, successful experiments w/ beef stuffed radicchio and celery root gratin, cooking with chamomile, flaked red salmon on sticky saffron rice with shiso, weeks of a slice of Pain d'épices (made with teff flour) every day, catching eyes with a buck who was fleeing a rendezvous at a house in the suburbs, plus all the hikes & figs & wild fennel.

The Genius of George Stevens

2011-07-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

George Stevens originally shot a scene in Alice Adams of Alice (Katharine Hepburn) flopping on her bed to cry after a party, but decided to shoot it this way instead.

Hepburn began an affair with the married Stevens on the set of Alice Adams that lasted until they shot Woman of the Year together (so, until she met Spencer Tracy). From this scene from Stevens' The More the Merrier, one of the sexiest yet still chaste scenes in cinema, you can see the appeal:

My favorite Stevens is the oddest, the sprawling and super-slow Giant that I once described as if Andy Warhol had shot Benjamin Button in reverse. The film ages Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson from this:

to this:

Have you seen her dressed in blue?

2011-07-09T13:37:00.001-07:00

(She comes in colors everywhere)

An epic post about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards,
and their taste in clothes and women and women in clothes.

Evidence One: Anita Pallenberg:

Evidence Two: Bianca Jagger:

Evidence Three: Marsha Hunt:

Evidence Four Patti Hansen:

And then there's Marianne Faithfull?

Jagger and Richards could do good bad better than anyone. But Faithfull just looks... bad.

Let's Go Native

2011-06-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

"You Jane"

Women Are Into...

2011-06-18T19:09:00.001-07:00

TOTAL FEMINISM * MALE NUDES * PUBIC HAIRSTYLES

(According to Viva magazine)

Other Viva article teasers:
"Lay Me: I'm a WASP"
"Sheer Chiffon"
"The Myth of Female Masochism: A symposium with Betty Friedan, Myrna Lamb, Alix Kates Shulman, Jill Robinson, Karen Durbin, and Barbara Seaman"
"Crotch Watching: The Only Female Spectator Sport"

All I Want Now

2011-06-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

"How could I be so lucky? For the first time in my life, I completely took, I didn't give anything."

Marin County 1978: "For four hours, they will bathe her, cradle her in a hot tub, massage her and stroke her with peacock feathers. It costs $180."

For the complete the complete 50 minute NBC news special on the shock of the self-indulgent click here.

Catalog of California Scents

2011-06-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

in the Land of Milk and Honey

-Smuggled chamomile flowers in a jar on the table with platter of cold artichokes and sweet & sour, marinated fried (blistered) squash with mint

-Dried Euclyptus leaves in a jar labeled "special breathe drink"

-Chamomile, peach and blueberry walnut-topped crumble (better the second day)

-Everything broth (leftover chicken bones, leek greens and mushroom stems) bubbling on stove to make a curried squash soup

-Outside smells like ripe, musty pollen in dry sun and fragrant leaves

L'Amour Fou

2011-06-18T13:22:00.001-07:00

The Nibbler's Top Ten Oddball Romantic Movies

2011-06-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

Asked recently what I considered the most romantic films, I realized that highly flawed love, awkward or resigned, ruled my list:

1. Shampoo (1975, Ashby)
Love by refrigerator light

2. Crash (1996, Cronenberg)
Or, scenes from a marriage

4. Heaven Can Wait (1943, Lubitsch)
Or, Loyalty trumps Fidelity

5. Max Mon Amour (1986, Oshima)
Some of the greatest double takes in cinema: "I just find out you're the mistress of a monkey and you want me to go to bed?"

6. Bell Book and Candle (1958, Quine)
"A witch?... Shep, you just never learned to spell."

7. Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993, Allen)
"Take away his elevator shoes and his fake suntan and his capped teeth... and what do you have?"
"You"

8. Trouble in Paradise (1932, Lubitsch)
Only the reunion under the table at a formal event in Shampoo can top the romantic dinner scene in which Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall return each other's stolen baubles--though he holds on to the garter--and discover that they're two of a kind.

9. Love with the Proper Stranger (1963, Mulligan)
"Scotch? Water, Soda or Tonic?"
"Zelda, Gin and Tonic, yes. Vodka and Tonic, yes. Scotch and Tonic, no."
"...uh."
"water."

10. You and Me (1938, Lang)

Tragic or Pure Romance:

The Clock (1945, Minnelli)
Brief Encounter (1945, Lean)
Cluny Brown (1946, Lubitsch)
To Die Like a Man (2009, Rodrigues)
The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954, Robson)

And on the flip side:

Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
Contempt (1963, Godard)
Duel in the Sun (1946, Vidor)
The Night Porter (1974, Cavani)
Remember My Name (1978, Rudolph)

nurturant kitchen

2011-06-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Mimi was particularly interested in the potential of consciousness-raising for reaching subject matter for artmaking. We had tried a few sessions early in the year, and they proved valuable. Three of the women were working together in the kitchen and not having too much success. Three of the women were working together in the kitchen and not having much success. Mimi suggested that we try a consciousness-raising session on kitchens. As we we went around the circle, women talked about their memories of the kitchens in their homes. It became clear that the kitchen was often the battlefield in the house. The giving and taking of food, what kind of food was fixed, who made food, and when it could and could not be eaten provided the means of a power struggle between mother and father, mother and children. The association of women with the kitchen and with the giving of food led to the idea of the nurturant kitchen, in which the walls, floors, and objects were covered with a flesh covered skin, and plastic eggs transmuting into breasts cascading down from the ceiling onto the walls. Room after room took shape until the house became a total environment, a repository of female experience and womanly dreams."

-Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: my struggle as a woman artist

top two images via hippy kitchens

Geoffrey O'Brien on Jimmy Stewart

2011-05-31T17:31:00.000-07:00

"His famous stammering pauses create an anxious space in which the scene’s progression is held at bay while he plays for time, defending himself against being rushed into anything."

All quotes from Geoffrey O’Brien, NYRB:

"In the body of his work after the war, at least up until 1962, we find his real biography. His biographers—or perhaps they should be called portraitists—were the directors who in different ways brought out previously hidden layers of his personality, revealing Stewart as an actor whose gifts had hardly been tapped."

"But as it progresses, following preliminary phases of youthful playfulness, shy romance, and idealistic determination, all echoing his earlier work, his performance moves into previously unsuspected levels of irritation, rage, despair, and fear that are like the revelation of a new actor."

"The peculiar emotional intensity of Stewart’s acting, his ability to expose raw feeling in a way that seems unmediated, takes on a different significance if seen as the performance of someone for whom acting will always be an act of rebellion against a powerful and demanding father who placed no value on it. The odd mixture of defiance and shame that comes through sometimes might well be the mark of someone torn in opposite ways."

Is there a better film than Vertigo? It screens for six days at Brooklyn Academy of Music, starting Friday.

“Vertigo wouldn’t feel so much like a tragedy if its first half, its fantasy half, weren’t put together with such evident love.” –O’Brien

The Bad and the Beautiful

2011-05-31T15:58:00.001-07:00

The Lady and the Lion

2011-05-23T22:52:00.001-07:00

polymorphous

2011-05-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

The Black Blonde Girl Rules the World

2011-05-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

Telling The Truth Can Be Dangerous Business

2011-05-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

"I didn’t want to frighten anyone, and people would leave me saying, she’s a nice girl. What is this big thing about? She’s a nice girl, and the thing is, of course, I wasn’t a nice girl. And when they found this out, they hated me all the more. And I think that’s what really happens. It’s not that they’re women. It’s that as women they think I want to show that I’m a nice person. I’m no one to be feared. I’m not one of those women who are not nice women. And in the end, when it comes down to it, you’re just as rotten as any guy. You’ll fight just as hard to get your way. So I think the real trick is for women is they should start out tough. They don’t start out tough. They start by saying, “Don’t be afraid of me. I’m only a woman.” And they’re not only women, they’re just as tough as guys. In that way I think I did have trouble. But only because I seemed so pleasant." -Elaine May on being a woman director

From this conversation with Elaine May from 2006.

Secret Wars

2011-05-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

"A lot of us who survived those fights, bloodied but relatively unscarred, are kind of like the old CIA and KGB agents that get together for reunions. Who else knows what we've been fighting over? Who else is interested in these issues that have really been consigned to a sort of historic scrap pile that people really don't seem that interested in anymore?" -B. Ruby Rich in !Women Art Revolution opening June 1 at IFC Center

Geraldine Chaplin

2011-05-09T18:54:00.001-07:00

REMEMBER MY NAME (Alan Rudolph, 1978) screens June 16 at 92YTribeca along with Rudolph's TROUBLE IN MIND as part of the ongoing series "Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs"

R. Kelly Feminism

2011-05-09T16:58:00.000-07:00

The is one of my films or videos, ever. I like the simplicity of the two R. Kellys (one a satisfyingly Cronenberg video blur) and the way the background transitions to the mountains when Kelly yodels.

MB: And I really feel like that R. Kelly song echo is the best song ever written about multiple orgasms. (Are there many others?)

Marisa: That is an interesting project. I wonder? I feel like Ani Difranco prob has but I can tell you I'll like the R Kelly one better.

"Never were Valley Girls so scary"

2011-05-09T05:55:00.000-07:00

--on Riot Grrrls, from Marisa Meltzer's GIRL POWER (Faber & Faber, 2010)

soft serve stardom

2011-04-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

Some gorgeous photos of Eva Mendes, who, with her old-fashioned movie star glamour and interesting film choices, seems like a front-runner for Liz Taylor's inheritance*:

*ok, that's a bold statement; nobody can take the place of Liz. But somebody's gotta aim there.

I'll be doing a Q&A with Ms. Mendes and the director Massy
Tadjedin at the Soho Apple Store this Thursday at 6pm where they'll discuss their new film Last Night, playing this week at the Tribeca Film Festival.

On Being Radical

2011-04-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

In a panel I participated in at Columbia last week, on what the prescient and indefatigable critic/programmer Scott Foundas calls a new New Wave of French critic/filmmakers, a few filmmakers in the group that Foundas calls the "Free Radicals" had a chance to speak together. In what felt like an exciting first attempt for this group to be described, in English, to an audience largely made up of people who hadn't seen the films (most of which were having their North American debuts later that weekend), my contribution to this group grasping for definitions was to read some quotes by Eric Rohmer from his 1953 essay on The Big Sky by Howard Hawks, a piece that this group's central figure, Serge Bozon, had cited as an influence. In the opening of that article, Rohmer describes his preference for the simple adventures of Robert Stevenson to the specious sentences of Conrad:

"One of cinema's assets is to have made us critical of words that sound nice but have little expression, more sensitive to a vigorous style than to a bombastic one, to the verb rather than to the adjective, to intention and movement more than to sensation and state, and to the moral rather than to some nebulous cosmogony."

I thought this description was appropriate for the intentions apparent in the films made by this group, and also the style of the films that they're reacting against, while also describing the prose style of the group's criticism (which at this early point has much more heft than the group's filmography).

"Yes," answered Bozon enthusiastically about the relevance of this quote. "We all make films that may be failures, but they are not pompous."

And as Bozon said stated earlier: "How does one maintain humor in film that is not necessarily a comedy? How does one break the tone and inject humor into the film itself, when it's not a comedy."

The Private Taste for Paula Prentiss

2011-04-20T06:42:00.001-07:00

"I think that Paula Prentiss is good. She ought to be a big comedy star. I don't know what's the matter." -Howard Hawks

" I rececently watched for the second time Howard Hawks' Man's Favorite Sport?, a film that was universally ridiculed when it appeared in 1964 and I myself hadn't much liked. This time I was delighted and deeply moved by the grace and humor with which the story is told, and moved by the reverberations of a whole substratum of meaning, of sexual antagonism, desire and despair." -Molly Haskell, 1971

Colder than...

2011-03-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

"Yes I'm a Witch" ~Yoko Ono

FleetwoodMac Buckingham Nicks McVIE

2011-03-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

Gypsy Dip

2011-03-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

Lady Sleuths

2011-02-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

And Manhattan as a Mystery

Films: THE PHANTOM LADY (Robert Siodmak, 1944) and THE SEVENTH VICTIM (Mark Robson, 1943) - among my favorite New York movies and made by two favorite underknown auteurs. These are also my two favorite noirs. Perhaps not unrelated, each of these films features a Nancy Drew-ish lady sleuth instead of a femme fatale.

Color images are from MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (Woody Allen, 1993), THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT (George Roy Hill, 1964) and a vintage map of a lost subway line. The last color image is from DUELLE (Jacques Rivette, 1976). [Rivette screened THE SEVENTH VICTIM for the cast and crew of DUELLE just before it was shot.]

To donate to restore
a nitrate print of
The Sound of Fury
please click HERE

Garlic Soup

2011-02-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

It usually takes me years of intimate friendship to reveal my secret pet peeves: The Beatles, David Bowie, and garlic. (But a blog obviously speeds along the process.) The latter is a complicated relationship. Fresh garlic is floral, and older garlic can add wonderful funk and flavor in small doses, but only when used with respect.

As Anthony Bourdain wrote: "Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please, treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don't burn it. Smash it with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic."

Or, as Elizabeth David wrote in her essay "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless":
"I regard garlic presses as both ridiculous and pathetic, their effect being precisely the reverse of what people who buy them believe will be the case. Squeezing the juice out of garlic doesn't reduce its potency, it concentrates it, and intensifies the smell. I have often wondered how it is that people who have once used one of these diabolical instruments don't notice this and forthwith throw the thing into the dustbin."

After the holidays, I discovered another use of garlic, a whole head for two servings, long simmered until mild:

Cure-All Garlic Soup

Water down chicken broth by adding one cup of water to three cups broth in a medium saucepan. Add a generous pinch of saffron, a scant pinch of paprika (the sweet and smoked kind is best), and one bay leaf. Add the peeled cloves from one head of garlic. Simmer for at least an hour.

Puree the whole mixture (minus the bay leaf, which you should throw away) and then put this thin, cloudy white broth back into the pot. Poach one or two eggs per serving in this mixture. Poach for about three minutes, so that the yolk is just set but mostly runny. Break the yolk in the bowl and stir around, thickening the soup.

This soup will cure you of any ailment or malaise, any heartbreak or sniffles, and at the last lick of the spoon may give you a momentary delusion of being super-powered.

*note: salt generously

bubbles

2011-02-05T18:09:00.000-08:00

Gloria Steinem

2011-02-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

On Sexism in Film
"If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck and you think it's a pig, it's a pig. Trust your judgment and speak up when something is wrong," Steinem encouraged the audience at a screening of Miss Representation, January 2011.

Ed Note: Is this a form of pin-up feminist calendar art? Focusing on Ms. Steinem's awesome sandals & shades, and including a photo of her in a favorite old school starlet pose, the bubble bath shot? The history of cheesecake imagery is a dialect of feminism. And fierce vintage looks are just as valid a form of communication as fuck off looks of Feminist Boredom. (As the genius Kara Jesella said better: "feminist boredom is so real. also, kind of hot.")

Fritz Lang: Moral Integrity and Bad Girls

2011-01-30T10:02:00.000-08:00

Fritz Lang at Home

In Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman, a film by Claire Denis, Rivette speaks of meeting Fritz Lang. "He spoke only of morals," he describes. Below are excerpts from a 1959 Cahiers du cinéma interview that Rivette and Jean Domarchi conducted with Lang:

Lang: M and Fury are, I believe, the films I prefer. There are others as well, which I made in America, Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window, While the City Sleeps. These are all films based on a social critique. Naturally I prefer that, because I believe that critique is something fundamental for a director.

Rivette and Domarchi: What exactly do you mean by social critique, that of the system or that of civilization?

Lang: One can't really differentiate. It is the critique of our "environment," of our laws or our conventions. I will admit to a project. I must make a film where I put all my heart. It is a film which shows modern man as he is: he has forgotten the true meaning of life, he works only for things, for money, not to enrich his soul, but to gain material advantages. And because he has forgotten the meaning of life, he is already dead. He is afraid of love, he simply wants to go to bed, make love, but he doesn't want any responsibilities. He only wants to satisfy his desire. I think it is important to make this film now. While the City Sleeps shows the hard competition of four men inside a newspaper office at the beginning. My personality refuses the personal satisfaction of being a man. Because each of us, these days, is looking for position, power, money, but never anything inside. You see, it is very difficult to say, “I like this or that.” When one begins a film, maybe one doesn't even know exactly what one is doing. There are always people to explain what I want to do, and I say to them, “You know more than I.” When I undertake a work, I try to translate emotion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rivette and Domarchi: You told us earlier that the director's goal was to critique. Couldn't that be the definition of mise-en-scene?

Lang: All art, I believe, should critique something. It isn't enough to say it's good, it's enticing, it's marvelous. In any case, what can one say of a woman who is good? She's a good mother, a good wife. But what can one recount about a bad woman? One can speak for hours about her, she is interesting [Laughs]. Yes or no? You say about one that she is good, but the other. ... The question is, “Why is she bad?”, “Is she really bad?”, “What right has she?”, “What were the circumstances?”, “Weren't men responsible?” One could talk all night. And we could talk all night with her. [Laughs]

• Lang's favorites Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window play today at Film Forum in New York as part of the FRITZ LANG IN HOLLYWOOD series.

The Future

2011-01-26T03:00:00.001-08:00

Along with Bringing Up Baby, Meet Me in St. Louis and The Muppet Movie, Woody Allen's Sleeper was one of my favorite films as a child, and probably the most formative. It brought up some key questions. How babies were made, that was a mystery easily solved by some books from the midwife's waiting room while my mother prepared for her second underwater birth. But the Orgasmatron? What was that all about? And health food, was it good or bad? Same deal with intellectual self-indulgence and minimalist modern design. Were these fun-seeming paths really the roads straight to hell? Only time would tell. But Sleeper piqued a lifelong curiosity about some of these issues.

Perhaps also this was a landscape I could identify with, since I was growing up surrounded by Frank Lloyd Wright's Civic Center and wooded patches where Ewok Villages were constructed:

SLEEPER House

Wright Civic Center, Marin

Wright Civic Center, Marin

To a wide-eyed, five-year-old Californian, it was the landscape and characters of Allen's New York City, with its mensches and their shiksas, that was absolutely alien.

On Thursday night I'll be moderating a panel on Woody Allen
at 92YTribeca in Manhattan, after a screening of
MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY

"Journal de la création"

2011-01-14T05:01:00.000-08:00

A Reminder: Feminism and Sexism are rooted in sex and procreation.

From Nancy Huston's "Journal de la création", written while she was pregnant:

"The famous 'Ivory Tower' that has for so long protected the peace and impunity of male artists--while their wives impeccably kept up the windows and the silent areas--is on course to crack and collapse on itself. From these ruins one will have to build, but more modestly, rooms of one's own [the requirement in order to write according to Virginia Woolf] for the women and for the men."

-Nancy Huston, 1988

[Caveat: translation by monolingual MB]

Best of 2010

2011-01-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

Films That Didn't Annoy Me Much

1. Everyone Else
2. Around a Small Mountain
3. Somewhere
4. Ne change rien
5. Shutter Island

Best Unreleased Film:
Film Socialisme

Best Script:
Tiny Furniture

Best Performance:
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

Everyone Else as Pre-Comedy of Remarriage

2011-01-09T07:38:00.001-08:00

I participated in
a very fun
end-of-the year
poll, the MUBI
Fantasy Double Feature
in which I compared
my favorite film
of the year,
Everyone Else,
to Stanley Cavell's
Comedies of
Remarriage

The following is an expansion on that thought, part of a defense written to another poll participant, David Phelps, who didn't think Everyone Else could be compared to a classic comedy like The Awful Truth. [I have since expanded on this expansion, and finally reached a conclusion here.]

[NOTE: some PLOT SPOILERS below]

So, I didn't like Everyone Else much when I first saw it, either. I thought this criticism from Richard Brody was hilariously correct:

"However, when the information comes, it fits into the schema like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle; the shagginess of the storytelling is actually quite soigné, a narrative bed-head achieved with a blow-dryer and gel."

The film was a little overwritten: the opening scene, the jumping out the window, and the whole section with the other couple all bothered me very much when I first saw it. Yet, of all the films I saw last year, this is the one that's turned around most in my mind and so seemed the most alive to me. I argued about it, then found myself thinking about it in relationship to other films and also to my life and the lives of my friends. There are some scenes and some lines that I've carried around with me:
• "You were the sexiest girl at the club"
• "Do I not seem masculine to you?"
• The grocery shopping scenes, hopping in and out of view in the aisles, in mock conspiracy
• The opening credits on the rug
• Shots of his back and of him walking around in little pink shorts
• Shots of her back, and of her ass in particular
• The timing of the love scenes
• In particular, the timing of the scene in which he straddles her over the stove when she's trying to play the good bourgie hostess. "You're crazy," she says.
• The way she's protective when the others make fun of his mother's hideous, bizarre collections
• The way he hits his head walking into sliding glass doors
• And the pop song moments that they share, too

These were interesting bits to me. As I stated in that write-up, something new. She had more power in the beginning of the relationship (the coolest girl in the club) and they were reaching exactly the point when the power was beginning to shift to his side. There was not much further she could go with her career and his was just beginning. She's paranoid that he'll leave her. He's still dependent on her for confidence, and yet she's also a reminder of his insecurity. This pivot point is interesting because it's a see-saw of exactly equal weight in power, ever shifting within each scene.

I also like the way that, even though I didn't find the characters attractive at first, I saw exactly what they found attractive about each other through the camera, as if it would switch between their point of views, specifically in how they looked at each other's bodies. As mentioned above: her ass, his long limbs, coloring, vulnerability, a slouched or sprightly gait... all this came across visually.

When I first saw this film, I wanted to write something about the American critical tradition of personal projection as opposed to politics; here it was loved, it seemed, because critics could project themselves onto those characters, and most reviews reflected that. (Except Richard Brody who couldn't relate to that couple's dynamics, and hated the film. "That isolated world that they create together isn't real!" he told me. I could only shake my head, in remembrance, "Oh it IS real, Richard.") But the only really interesting review I read was a quick report from the Berlin Film Festival, from a German I think, who talked about the unique contemporary class issues it brought up for a generation that tries to be "classless." And that was exactly right, I thought. It brings in a new commodity of "cool" to the status formula for this willfully classless (out of avoidance) set. Until the unformed Chris and Gitti suddenly have to grow up in their thirties.

But The Awful Truth is a tricky comparison. It works for the timing; Everyone Else ends when The Awful Truth begins. But the class issues in The Awful Truth are unusual compared to other screwballs. But they're there, of course—this role-playing and mocking and switching to see if their core values are in sync—as they are in all screwball comedies. But most often in classic screwball comedies, the class imbalance was a way of balancing out gender power. Runaway heiresses were on equal footing with their sparring partners. And it's the absolute equality that make this genre so unusual, and so fun to watch. And that dead even but precarious equality is why Everyone Else seems to belong in this genre, unlike any other film released for at least thirty years. (I wrote that Certified Copy, a film I saw after this one, was also like a Comedy of Remarriage, but I was wrong; I may have been just projecting.)

"In classical comedy people made for one another find one another; in remarriage comedy people who have found each other find they are made for each other," wrote Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness. Everyone Else is about two people who may or not be made for each other finding out that this tension just links them further.* So what comes next?

I was reading a DVD review in which the reviewer wrote that he liked the dark turn the film took at the end, but then, when they ended up in laughter, he didn't like it as much. He wrote that it then felt like it could go on forever. I like that.

"It is as though you know you are married when you come to see that you cannot divorce, that is, when you find your lives simply will not disentangle. If your love is lucky, this knowledge will be greeted with laughter." --Stanley Cavell

*on the tension linking them further, I can't help but think of this lovely phrase on the necessity of adding lemon juice when making jam, from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The addition of lemon juice "increases the acidity, which neutralizes the electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel." Maybe I'm projecting, but this seems like a nice comment on the balance of tension and attraction, perhaps even of fighting and laughing, necessary to make something gel.

NOTE: This has been further updated HERE

meow

2011-01-09T03:53:00.000-08:00

Nature has endowed me with a virile and decisive character... Yours out of lace and gossamer

2011-01-08T00:39:00.000-08:00

"Vous Yourself!"

Letter from Napoleon to Josephine:

I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk a single cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain separated from the moving spirit of my life.

In the midst of my duties, whether I am at the head of my army or inspecting the camps, my beloved Josephine stands alone in my heart, occupies my mind, fills my thoughts.

If I am moving away from you with the speed of the Rhone torrent, it is only that I may see you again more quickly.

If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love.

Yet in your letter of the 23rd, and 26th. Ventose, you call me vous. Vous yourself!

Ah! wretch, how could you have written this letter? How cold it is?

And then there are those four days between the 23rd, and the 26th.; what were you doing that you failed to write to your husband? ...

Ah, my love, that vous, those four days made me long for my former indifference. Woe to the person responsible!

May he as punishment and penalty, experience what my convictions and the evidence (which is in your friend's favor) would make me experience!

Hell has no torments great enough! Nor do the Furies have serpents enough! Vous! Vous!

Ah! how will things stand in two weeks? ... My spirit is heavy; my heart is fettered and I am terrified by my fantasies...

You love me less; but you will get over the loss. One day you will love me no longer; at least tell me; then I shall know how I have come to deserve this misfortune. ...Farewell, my wife: the torment, joy, hope and moving which draw me close to Nature, and with violent impulses as tumultuous as thunder. I ask of you neither eternal love, nor fidelity, but simply...truth, unlimited honesty.

The day when you say "I love you less", will mark the end of my love and the last day of my life.

If my heart were base enough to love without being loved in return I would tear it to pieces.

Josephine! Josephine! Remember what I have sometimes said to you: Nature has endowed me with a virile and decisive character. It has built yours out of lace and gossamer. Have you ceased to love me?

Forgive me, love of my life, my soul is racked by conflicting forces. My heart obsessed by you, is full of fears which prostrate me with misery...I am distressed not to be calling you by name. I shall wait for you to write it.

Farewell! Ah! if you love me less you can never have loved me. In that case I shall truly be pitiable.

Bonaparte

P.S. The war this year has changed beyond recognition. I have had meat, bread and fodder distributed; my armed cavalry will soon be on the march.

My soldiers are showing inexpressible confidence in me; you alone are a source of chagrin to me; you alone are the joy and torment of my life.

I send a kiss to your children, whom you do not mention. By God! If you did, your letters would be half as long again. Then visitors at ten o'clock in the morning would not have the pleasure of seeing you. Woman!!!

The Art of the Thank You Note

2011-01-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

via Letters of Note, a blog indispensable to Keeping It Real in the internet age.

Letter to the public relations department at Levis Strauss:

June 6, 1958

Dear Art Roth:

It's about time you were thanked for those four Western shirts that greeted my return from another recent trip to Europe: if they had not been buried under the usual mess of accumulated trivia that demanded immediate attention, your kindness would have been acknowledged days ago. Still, I am once again grateful to you, as you must know. The shirts are, for a conservative such as myself, rather, rather....if you dig me....and I'm not at all sure if I can swagger out in gold-threaded finery. I shall await a braver mood.

My temerity is at a low ebb today, but I venture to ask that you let me know if Levi Strauss ever evolve a line of absolutely plain un-checked, un-metal-threaded, absolutely solid-colored shirts...no matter what the colors: I will rush to the nearest shop.

You have my happy and grateful thought, Art Roth; when are you and I going to meet?

(Signed)

Cary Grant.

Heaven and Earth

2010-12-27T10:10:00.000-08:00

"A strange combination of the femme fatale, the German Hausfrau and Florence Nightingale."
-Billy Wilder on Marlene Dietrich

In honor of Marlene Dietrich's birthday, I'll pass along her smirkingly wise advice on life, from Marlene Dietrich's ABC:

MD on Envy:
I do not know envy. I do not know how this happened. I can only guess that I was taught to enjoy things regardless of ownership.

MD on Mink Coats:
An American symbol. A luxury item with a quality rare in luxury items--toughness.

MD on Scorpios:
The World, the flesh, and the devil.

And from the longest entry of all...
MD on Married Love (strategy of):
To make a man happy is full-time job. It leaves us very little time to take ourselves too seriously. And if you have children, you have no time at all. Or you should have no time at all. And when the work is directed towards the making and the keeping of a happy home, it makes you rich in contentment and puts occupational afflictions, like aching bones, into the only place where they belong, a hot bath.

This rich contentment will make you do a lot of things you had forgotten. You will remember your instinct's aerial, the tender, fine antennas you used to stretch his way in the beginning. Although neglected, they are still with you, dusty and bent, but you can straighten them. They'll help you know what he would like before he says it, as long ago when you were thrilled, and kissed, because he found another mystic link between your mind and his.

And a recipe, for Heaven and Earth:
A great meal for summer evenings, a peasant favorite because it is good and cheap: apples (for heaven) and potatoes (for earth). Cook tart, sliced apples with sugar or, better, honey, or make applesauce. Boil potatoes, peeled or with the skin. Put two bowls on the table. Everyone has his own way of mixing the fruits of heaven and earth.

American Confections

2010-12-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

This Christmas I made candy, a peanut butter toffee that is becoming a Nibbler kitchen favorite. It resembles butterfingers in texture, but with a much richer taste. It's elegant looking too: glassy little mahogany-colored squares covered in shiny dark chocolate. The best thing about them, though, is the dense and crumbly texture. Does anyone really like chewing on tacky-textured caramel or sticky-hard peanut brittles? I have my doubts.

The ingredients are so simple and the process so quick that one could whip these up for quick gifts within an hour.

Peanut Butter Toffee Squares
1 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
3 T water
1 large dark chocolate bar (at least 70%)

In a saucepan on medium-high, place the water and sugar. Stir until combined and then let boil until it goes through all the sugar phases: the thread phase, ball phase and crack phase. You'll see the boiling bubbles turn into foam on top of a viscous liquid that trails, and then the foam itself will become viscous. Soon after this the sugar would color (if it were white sugar) and then you would have reached your desired phase-- the soft crack. Since you can't go on color with brown sugar, you can and should use a candy thermometer, but I prefer to use the nose for a much quicker read on its state. As soon as the smell goes from molasses to slightly burnt, you're there. If you think it might have shifted, it probably has; it's time to act immediately. Stir in the peanut butter then turn the flame off. Keep stirring until the peanut butter starts to pale to a beige color and then begins to crumble. The whole thing will darken in color slightly as the peanut butter caramelizes and then will form a solid, chalky-textured liquid mass. Pour it immediately on to a foil covered cookie sheet.

Place several layers of foil on top and then press town with a cutting board or with a towel. Let cool, but not all the way. (This should only take about ten minutes or less.) The squares should cut easily and have a glassy surface and swirled pattern on top. Then cover these squares with a thin layer of tempered chocolate. (Which means heating the chocolate to 110 degrees, stirring vigorously till shiny and cooling down to about 90 degrees. After trying different methods I prefer to temper in the microwave.)

The kitchen experiments that led me to this recipe made me think of what a genius of engineering American candy can be. Because candy is all sugar (and if it's good, usually balanced with some salt) there is no real taste, only texture. This balance of sweet/salty, texture and presentation is the science and art of candy making.

Here are what I think are the most ingenious American candy bars:

Hershey's Kisses:

Launched in 1907 in the States, these Kisses have just become available in the UK this year to the puzzlement and vexation of some Brits. A recent Guardian article describes the disappointment of discovering that "a food which boasts an impressive amount of cultural glamour has all the flavour notes of regurgitated milk." They go on to quote chocolate scholar Paul Richardson's description of them as "a piquant background flavour of something faintly sour, cheesy, or overripe, what chocolate experts call a 'barnyard' taste," as if that was a bad thing... Milk chocolate is best when it's slightly cheese-like, and even like an aged goat cheese if it's great, like the best of the Sharffen Berger bars, their Rich Milk Chocolate. Kisses are the cheap American chocolate with the most interesting flavor, having some flavor yet none of that bitter dutched chocolate aftertaste of most Hershey's bars. And of course there's the packaging, and the size, and the shape--all of which make them the perfect candy to place in someone's palm.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

Round ruffled milk chocolate disks in black pleated paper cups, and sold in pairs, this 1923 candy bar is another form of perfect packaging. It also gets the sugar/salt balance just right. Gourmet or organic peanut butter cups taste of chocolate and peanut butter, but these little disks taste of neither, but are a too sweet and musky other taste, that seems to hit some just right spot. These are the second-best selling candy bars in America.

York Peppermint Patties

And my vote for the best candy in America is the one with the fewest ingredients: sugar, corn syrup, semi-sweet chocolate, invert sugar, egg whites, oil of peppermint. It's the simplicity that makes these delicious, and also the use of very dark chocolate (unusual in both 1940 when these were first sold and 1975, when they were launched nationally) contrasted with the white and light mint. But what makes this a genius invention is the use of egg whites, which give them that light taste and texture, smooth and firm, very unusual for this very old sweet. (Usually the mint filling is either gooey--and these days full of hydrogenated oils--or hard and crisp.)

I'm the press conference, you're a conversation

2010-12-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

THE BEST PERFORMANCE OF 2009
Mariah Carey in this video:

[Best of 2010 still to come...]

The Nibbler's Ideal Combinations

2010-12-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

1. A perfect hard-boiled egg with just picked lettuce and string beans

2. yakimochi and coffee

3. Walter Matthau in grey sweats making molasses yogurt shakes

New York Story

2010-12-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

From Darryl Pinckney's introduction to the NYRB The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

Hardwick met Robert Lowell in 1948, when she was summoned by a group of literary wives to a midtown hotel to be questioned as to whether she was having an affair with Allen Tate. (Many years later when Tate’s biographer informed her that Tate had claimed that they had had an affair, she said that Tate could have an affair with her for his biography if it meant that much to him.) She was given martinis at her interrogation, needed help when some of Tate’s friends, Lowell among them, broke up the meeting, and as Lowell handed her into a taxi, she turned and threw up at his feet. She once hid in a doorway along Second Avenue when she saw him coming, so great was her attraction to him.

They met again, at Yaddo, toward the end of 1948. He was just arriving; she was leaving. Lowell asked Hardwick to come back and she did.

Thirty years after his death in a taxi in 1977 at her door [coming directly from JFK, coming back to her after leaving her for another woman] she said she still wept for Lowell’s genius.

How to Be Attractive by Joan Bennett

2010-12-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

Whenever I hear Joan Bennett speak, I hear her throaty voice saying, as she supposedly did when her husband Walter Wanger shot the man he suspected to be her lover: "Oh for CHRIST'S sake Walter, he's ONLY an Agent!"

From HOW TO BE ATTRACTIVE by Joan Bennett (1951)

Some of our ancestors made a virtue of ugliness. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was a few hags who were neglected on the Mayflower boat trip. Today ministers to the spirit, body, and mind all agree that the woman who has stopped trying to be attractive is a sick woman.

Time for Headwork
A beautiful face, figure, and clothes do not necessarily add up to an attractive woman. Rather than delving into history or the world at large, suppose I just quote my own business. Look at the woman movie stars who have had great followings for the last ten or twenty years. Most of them have some claim to beauty--but frequently they have less beauty than other near stars have never made the grade. Now look around at your own friends. Oh, it's personality, is it?

Fastidiousness and vitality are parts of that "quality of the person." That's why much of this book has been devoted to sane and simple care.

How is Your Heart?
I don't remember how I got hold of the yardstick of kindness. Certainly it drops from my hands too frequently. My critics and friends will testify that I'm impatient, quick-tempered, and caustic. I have even been guilty of ugly generalizations. But cruel and unfair as I have been and probably will be, I have lost the knack of effective, damaging cruelty. It didn't disappear by any reasoning process or abstract philosophy. I won't even tell you the actual turning-point. But it was typically woman-fashion. You see, it is easy to love babies...

It is selfishness in the highest degree. I have children of my own. I want their world to be clean and free. If I help rob other children of that world, what possible assurance have I that my own won't live in the hopeless one of discrimination, poverty, sorrow?

I grow a little embarrassed, knowing I am not qualified to discuss these things glibly or as a personification of them. But it had to be mentioned--even in a none too serious book on beauty, by a far from great, gentle or wise woman.

Films: SUSPIRIA (Argento, 1977), SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (Lang, 1948), SCARLET STREET (Lang, 1945), THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH (Renoir, 1947), THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW (Sirk, 1956)

Saul Bellow on "Publicity Intellectuals" in NYC

2010-09-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

Bohemian life in the Village was, in the twenties, quite elegant--even patrician, for it attracted the rich as well as writers, painters, and radicals. The old Village was a grand success, and for a time New York really was the center of the country for certain rare and valuable qualities. Its free versers, free lovers, elegant boozers, its rich ninnies and eccentrics, its artists and revolutionists, charmed and heartened the younger generation, strengthening their resistance to the ugliness and philistinism of the hometown.

All that, of course, is over. New York is now the business center of American culture, the amusement of frivolity center, the excitement center, the anxiety center. But it has no independent and original intellectual life. It provides no equilibrium, it offers no mental space to artists. Ideas are no longer discussed here...

New York is the principal processor and distributor of the mental goods consumed by the American public. The present leaders of culture in New York are its publicity intellectuals. These are college-educated men and women who have never lived as poets, painters, composers, or thinkers but who have successfully organized writing, art, thought, and science in publishing houses, in museums, in foundations, in magazines, in newspapers (mainly the New York Times), in the fashion industry, in television, and in advertising. All of these things have been made to pay and pay handsomely.

I do not think anyone will fly in today from Boise, Idaho eagerly seeking in New York other writers whose love of poetry is pure or who are waiting on the steps of the public library like Athenians to discuss Existence or Justice. The publicity intellectuals have little interest in such matters. They read little, and they don't gather to talk about literature. Cultural New York founds its prosperity on the former presence of these great things and keeps up the illusion that they are still present. New York is a great marketer of echoes. The past is profitably translated into Village rentals and real estate values, into meal prices and hotel rates.

--Saul Bellow., "New York: World Famous Impossibility" (1970)

From Saul Bellow to Philip Roth

2010-09-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Philip,

If I had been interviewed by an angel from the Serpahim and Cherubim Weekly I'd have said, as I actually did say to that crooked little slut [from People magazine], that you're one of our best and most interesting writers... Still our diagrams are different, and the briefest description of our differences would be that you have taken the Freudian explanation: A writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives seriously. But this is an explanatory note, and I don't intend to make a Rabbinic occasion of it.

Cloud Cookies: Meringues Two Ways

2010-08-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

1. Forgotten Cookies

[My version of a traditional southern recipe. Usually left in the oven overnight, these cookies are more maternally known as "Forgotten Kisses" or more devoutly known as "Resurrection Cookies"]

Beat egg whites, add just enough sugar till "batter" doesn't taste eggy. When stiff peaks form, gently fold in bittersweet chocolate chips (Dark chocolate is essential here; the contrast between the light meringue and the intense chocolate is what makes them surprising and so easy to eat.) Dollop into kiss-capped disks on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Place in a 350 degree pre-heated oven, and turn the oven off. "Forget" about them till they're cool.
Serve with dulce de leche or coffee ice-cream.

photo: fuji mama

2. Walnut Meringues

Beat two egg whites with half a cup of sugar and a teaspoon and a half of vanilla. When stiff, gently fold in one cup of ground toasted walnuts (processed till powdery but not wet.) Dollop into kisses on to a parchment-lined cookie sheet, and place in a preheated 200 degree oven. Cook for about an hour and 15 minutes. (Till very lightly toasted beige-on-white.)
Very nice served with sliced strawberries macerated in red wine, a sprinkling of sugar and a touch of black pepper. This is a subtle way to end a rich meal, but if subtlety will go unnoticed or if the meal was light, add heaps of lightly sweetened whipped cream on top of the uber-red berries, to be scooped up and eaten with the meringues. (a walnut macaron deconstruction, messy and less precious, slightly bittersweet)

The Nibbler Roundup

2010-08-05T04:14:00.000-07:00

The Comedy of Creamy Overflow

Man's Favorite Sport?

via the fourth sex and Beyonce

Quiche Consciousness Raising

via hippy kitchens

The Furies on Film

A Cavell Parenthetical

2010-08-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

(When is it to speak something? When is it to bark something?)

"Movies magnify, so when pictures began talking they magnified words. Somehow, as in the case of opera’s magnification of words, this made them somehow ignorable, like the ground, as if the industrial human species had been looking for a good excuse to get away from words, or looking for an explanation that we do get away, even must.”

--Stanley Cavell, “Nothing Goes without Saying: Reading the Marx Brothers”

"Is it Possible to Make People Understand That Artists Are Not Interested in Art?"

2010-07-18T05:24:00.001-07:00

Robert Gober curated this excellent show (with most wall text in Burchfield's own words) on Charles Burchfield's movement from a state of Nostalgia (Mute Sorrow) to an expressive depiction of the "healthy glamour of everyday life."

Comic Geniuses & Hip Flippers

2010-07-17T04:38:00.000-07:00

"Mabel Normand was a proto-example of what food writer and film scholar Betty Fussell dubs the "sexy clowns": Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Mae West, Jean Aurthur, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday. And Fussell herself is like a lost member of this tribe. In her early eighties, she's dazzling beautiful, and speaks in crescendos and exclamatory noises that are difficult to duplicate in print..."

2010-07-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here I was born and here I died

2010-07-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

Kim Novak at home in Big Sur

Kim Novak:

I’ve always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees have witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil War, yet they still survive. I’ve always felt that part of why they survive is because they don’t try to intercede, to advise ‘No, that’s the wrong way,’ or to try and wipe out an army. They stood and observed.

When I read that part of the Hitchcock script where Madeleine and Scottie are among the redwoods, she touches the tree rings and says, “Here I was born and here I died. It was only a moment. You took no notice,’ I got goose-bumps. When it came to shoot that scene, I had goose-bumps.

That scene in Vertigo I felt more than any other, except the one in which Judy says to Jimmy’s character that if she lets him change her, will he love her? And she says she’ll do it, she doesn’t care any more about herself. That scene was so important to me. I was so naked there, so willing to be anything he wanted, just to be loved.

Bunny Yaeger

Dorothy Iannone

Menu for California

2010-07-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

1. Homemade yogurt w/ loquats and strawberries (at a vine-covered hobbit house in Berkeley, surrounded by Eucalyptus and Laurel leaves.)

2. Picnic at the bird sanctuary, on an Indian burial ground, in Bolinas (above):
-Tuscan melon, sopressata and chive savory salad
-cold artichoke w/ garlicky lemon mayonnaise or vinaigrette
-bread and funky, runny cheese
-ripe figs
-homemade champagne

3. Dinner while listening to gospel on KPFA:
-creamless creamy mushroom soup with just-harvested garlic and a splash of sherry (w/ homemade Pinot Noir)
-Leek, Chanterelle and Meyer Lemon Risotto (topped with a sprinkle of chives) w/ Chardonnay
-Two salads: julienned raw asparagus with mint & parmesan
+ shaved fennel & grapefruit salad

On Waves

2010-07-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

Zines are the new blogs? That’s the word, or the twitter, on the street. But when recently asked to contribute some writing on feminism to a zine, I realized my last zine activity was in a very different era, in the prime of Riot Grrrl, so totally back in the day, when I anonymously accused my sexist high school math teacher of subtle piggery. I was crouched in the back of Trig class, staring at my desk with a poker face, when a kid in class asked this teacher if he had noticed his cameo in our (dubiously named) revolutionary propaganda distributed in every other locker early that morning. He puffed up with pride and strutted like a peg-legged peacock to the blackboard; he had seen it indeed.

“Calling people out” was one of the basic tenets of Riot Grrrl. Usually, though, not so anonymously. These accusations of misogyny included finger-pointing in the pit of crowded punk rock shows or posting “wanted poster” flyers on record store message boards (or, more usually, through the more indie-style blacklisting of people who were no longer welcome in the “scene.”) Yet, these actions also unintentionally put the spotlight on the victim; by focusing on these specific incidents instead of addressing the underlying reasons for these institutionalized forms of sexism, the burden to bear was left on the victim’s shoulders. And Riot Grrrl got heavy, that way, for these teenage fighters, these screaming twee Joan of Arcs, and collapsed under some of that weight.

So when encouraged to again call out insidious sexism that I was experiencing, I resisted instinctively. It might feel terrific momentarily, but would it get me where I wanted to be as an adult who wants to be treated as a professional? “Let’s hope that being an adult doesn’t preclude you from being a Riot Grrrl,” was the wise advise I received about this quandary. My response was, Hell no! Once a Riot Grrrl always a Riot…Woman? Riot Womyn? Riot Lady?

After some consideration I realized the answer is, actually, yes, being an adult does preclude one from being a grrrl. Perhaps Riot Grrrl only lasted three years in part because the girls grew up. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna once declared that Riot Grrrl and its accruements of barrettes and babydoll dresses was all about reclaiming, with aggressive agency, trodden-upon lost little girl parts of ourselves. That was so complicated and necessary, to those involved and, perhaps, also encouraged a more general aesthetic and linguistic appreciation of what we deemed “girl-style.” (“Revolution girl style now” was our mantra.) But what’s next, style-wise and also philosophically and politically, in feminism?

The primary responsibility of feminism is to name, naming experiences that have gone unrecognized and so vaporously existed only in hunches and “feminine intuition.” What did Riot Grrrl name? (Those r’s are important! “Riot Grrl” is something that Spin or a Sunday supplement might write about. Those three r’s are the badge of recognition for anyone who was actually there.) "Riot Grrrl" named not only this loud growl of outing punk rock pigs, but the integrating of femininity, in the form of girl-style, into feminism. The sixties and seventies Second Wave of Feminism was about equivalence and equal opportunity in the world of men. The Riot Grrrl Third Wave aesthetic underpinnings, on the other hand, were about revalidating pure girliness with feminist force, not only about subversive ownership of a bit of Lolita sexiness, but about validating a whole mode of existence and syntax. It was a revolution totally conducted in the language of teenage gossip and fandom. As Marisa Meltzer quoted in her fundamental book published just last year, Girl Power: “Never were Valley Girls so scary.” And scariness, that punk rock rooted destruction, was of course where the “riot” came in. “Frivolity is subjective, so fuck you—this is my life, and on my terms,” said Riot Grrrl.

Again, the primary responsibility of feminism is to name. But once something has been named it’s time to move on and name new experiences. One must always be conscious of this history of naming, though, to remind ourselves that real things in women’s experience did not exist at one time because these experiences weren’t named.

The word “sexual harassment” first appeared legally in 1973. It didn’t exist before then (as Mad Men is currently reminding audiences.) But sexual harassment indicates a specific kind of experience, a boss-secretary dynamic of someone with more power demanding sexual favors from someone with less power. But as the work of the Second Wavers has cleared pathways into new and more equal opportunities in jobs for women, that doesn’t mean that sexism in the workplace has disappeared, but that it’s taken new insidious forms: less pay for the same work, the “martyr” tendency of women to take on extra hours of grunt work and organizing, the “martyr” tendency of women to take on not only this extra work but extra work at home as well. The Village Voice recently had a cover story of a woman who claims she was fired because she refused to dress frumpily; she dressed tastefully but womanly in tight knit skirts, turtlenecks, and heels—out of habit and personal/cultural pride—and the men she worked with claimed they were were distracted. Is their attraction her responsibility? Of course not. These men couldn't compartmentalize their physiological reactions from their professional behavior. Their behavior suggests that womanliness is not allowed in the work world. That sexist situation needs to be named.

Work that is conducted primarily in social settings outside of an office has its own set of problems. This particular scenario was identified in a terrific 2003 Salon article that attempted to answer the mysterious question of why there have been so few women directors. "Let's say you have a short at a film festival and it's doing well. Chances are high you'll be at a party and have an opportunity to pitch your idea over drinks. If your idea is good enough perhaps you'll get it financed," says filmmaker Tara Veneruso. She says that for women, though, chatting up an older man over drinks isn't construed as business -- it's seen as flirting. That, Veneruso says, is why women are "always on the outside of the casual networks where much of the film business gets done."

This sexist situation is not sexual harassment; it needs to be named. As B. Ruby Rich wrote in describing unnamed genres of films by or for women in her article "The Crisis in Naming in Feminist Film Criticism": "Here is the problem: not so much that the names just reviewed are being employed as that other names are not--and therefore the qualities which those names would describe are lost."

When it comes to identifying insidious forms of sexism found in professional settings, we need new names. This is out of the realm of the lexicon of girl’s bedroom and rock club domains of Riot Grrrl. This is also out of the realm of the experience of pre-9 to 5 era of feminist work world activism. The Second Wavers paved the way for more complicated social dynamics in the work world. We owe them so much. We must aknowledge this debt and also move on.

Independent curator and activist Matt Peterson is offering an amazing opportunity to remember those early struggles to identify and fight for the obvious tonight in his screening tonight at BAM of The Woman’s Film, a collection of firsthand accounts of the development of the Second Wave Women’s Movement in America. He rightly identifies this documentary and the shorts playing with it as important documents in the history of political consciousness.

The best way to remind ourselves of the work that still needs to be done in feminism is to revisit the work that has been done, rights won that we take for granted now because of the obviousness of those entitlements, rights so hard to win but that now seem inevitable. It’s important to remember that there was an era before these women when those obvious injustices hadn’t even been named.

girl style

2010-07-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

A repost from Kara's excellent feminist 90s Woman:

The early nineties– I was walking to the magazine shop where I bought my NME when I saw “revolution girl style now” grafittied on the five-story parking lot. In the shop, near Ray Gun, two older girls were singing “Goo likes to wear green underwear” to each other. I was intrigued.

So I learned to write in all lower case.

The leader of my Riot Grrrl chapter was called Sugar (her sister was Spice.)

There was one black babydoll dress I could wear most places: with band t-shirts and ripped tights and converse. (yikes.) Or with Mary Janes and little glasses to brown nose with recently elected women congress ladies. Democrats seemed exciting for a minute.

Indie rock taught me discrimination quick; 95% of the records we bought by mail order were crap.

Then I got into TLC.

Ambrosia

2010-07-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

From MFK Fisher’s Alphabet for Gourmets (1949):

In this country Ambrosia is a dessert as traditionally and irrefutably Southern as pecan pie… I always thought of it as old-fashioned, as something as probably unheard of by today’s bourbons. I discovered only lately that an easy way to raise an unladylike babble of protest is to say as much in a group of Confederate Daughters—and here is the proof, straight from one of their mouths, that their local gods still sup on

AMBROSIA
6 fine oranges
1 1/2 cups grated coconut, preferably fresh
1 1/2 cups sugar
good sherry

Divide peeled oranges carefully into sections, or slice thin, and
arrange in layers in a glass bowl, sprinkling each layer generously
with sugar and coconut. When the bowl is full, pour a wine glass or so
of sherry over the layers and chill well.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Here’s my very Californian version. It could be breakfast, a retro-eccentric side dish for picnics or a deceptively virtuous dessert:

GOLDEN COAST AMBROSIA
3 oranges (thin-skinned is best)
3/4 lb cherries
1 cup of shaved unsweetened coconut
3 cups of plain yogurt (preferably not nonfat, lowfat is fine)
1 lemon
agave syrup to taste

Pit and halve cherries. Skin oranges, then slice through center to make thin rings. Quarter these rings, en masse, so that you have little pentagons of naked orange segments. Add these to the cherry halves in a big bowl. (There should be almost equal amounts of each fruit, with cherries just dominating over orange.)

To the yogurt, squeeze lemon and add agave syrup to taste, until the sweetness just takes the edge off the urge to pucker. It should still be tart, just over the line towards sweet. (If you can only find sweetened coconut skip the sweetener altogether.)

Just before serving, add enough yogurt to coat the fruit, then add the coconut. (If you bring this to a picnic, travel with prepared fruit, yogurt and coconut in three separate containers.) While combining all ingredients, smash two cherries against the bowl until the ambrosia takes on a cherry-and-orange-stained perfect shade of pale pink. Like this:

In fact, the whole color scheme should look a little Vargasesque:

Everything is Gonna Change Forever

2010-06-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

On the turn of the century in 2003

Some highlights from my interview with Luca Guadagnino, the half-Algerian, raised in Ethiopia, Italian director of I Am Love:

MB: Do you see similarities between the cooking process and filmmaking?
LG: It's about collaborators, it's about tools, and it's about, most importantly, shaping a new form out of the natural ingredients.

LG: Oh, Jeanne Dielman, I love. I went to a film festival once and saw Jeanne Dielman at 9 o'clock in the morning. And I was hypnotized, mesmerized by this, for hours. Now that you are quoting it, I also used a lot of Jeanne Dielman for I Am Love. Of course, we don't have the gravitas and the austerity of Chantal Akerman. But the lesson, we tried to get the lesson of Chantal Akerman.

MB: The film starts as old-fashioned melodrama, and then transitions to something else, another kind of melodrama, maybe. It's the scene where she's driving to Sanremo, with her Vertigo hairdo, and it's very much from her point-of-view. And then suddenly, in this very short scene, the shape of her hair is echoed in the architecture and then the nature surrounding her. And then the film takes on this soft-focus style, with nature shots. What were your references for this part of the film?

This is what I saw: Vintage Playboy in Nature

LG: Many references. Mostly painterly references, photographic references. We looked a lot at the work of Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, great, great German photographers. Russian avant-gardists like Malevich or Pougny.

And this is what it came from: (Ruff, Ruff & Pougny)

Crabwise

2010-06-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

Loving Living Nothing Doting Partygoing Back

"And a wag said, 'I'd know that back anywhere'" -HG

The Paris Review, 1958

Terry Southern:
I've heard it remarked that your work is "too sophisticated" for American readers, in that it offers no scenes of violence--and "too subtle," in that the message is somewhat veiled. What do you say?

Henry Green:
Unlike the wilds of Texas there is little violence over here. A bit of child killing, of course, but no straight shootin'. After fifty, one ceases to digest: as someone once said, "I just ferment my food now." Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age. The unusual at this age is to get anywhere at all-- Goddamn!

Southern:
And how about subtle?

Green:
I don't follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide--now forbidden of a Hindu wife on her husband's flaming pyre. I don't want my wife to do that when the time comes, and with great respect, as I know her, she won't...

Southern:
I'm sorry, you misheard me; I said, "subtle"--that the message was too subtle.

Green:
Oh subtle. How dull!

Lady Lyndon

2010-06-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Marisa Berenson

The secret star of of the new film I Am Love

Marisa Berenson is also the real star of Barry Lyndon

Vincent Canby wrote in his 1975 New York Times review that "Marisa Berenson splendidly suits her costumes and wigs." As if that was a sly put-down instead of a specific cinematic style, and Kubrick's intention.

the effervescent life

2010-06-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

The Last Flight (1931)

Recipe for a Picon-Citron (or what I like to call a Picon Fizz) the drink of choice in William Dieterle's postwar Paris odd masterpiece, The Last Flight

Martin Amis on John Updike

2010-06-17T02:08:00.001-07:00

"I met with Updike at Mass General..."

[After Updike discovers he'll have to have a surgery postponed.]
"How frustrating. You must be..."
"Yes, I'm very sad," he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalized twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment--but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses.

I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.
"The ordeal of choice," I said. "Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?" I went on (The novel was MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK.)"He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the west one of choice."
"Yes, I keep meaning to get it. There's just something about forking out the twenty bucks. Why don't I carry that?" He said, and smoothly commandeered the trembling tray. The gesture was protective, courteous, very able, above all. "So the OBSERVER is paying for my tea. How nice."

In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascinations with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity.

West Coast WASPs

2010-06-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

California Casual in words, images, and recipes

"How to Be a San Franciscan" from Herb Caen's Guide to San Francisco, 1957

He dresses in dark, generally conservative clothes. He prefers streetcars to buses because he can run and jump onto the bottom step of a trolley, like the frustrated athlete he is. And when he drives to work, he'll park anywhere, being pretty haughty about traffic regulations.

New York impresses him, but he wouldn't dream of living there (or anywhere else but San Francisco). He is scornful of Los Angeles and Oakland, and generally insular about everything beyond the Peninsula. He eats long lunches and shakes dice for the check, and reports faithfully to the nearest bar at cocktail hour, for San Franciscans, per capita, are the heaviest drinkers in the land. And perversely proud of the distinction, which has its roots in the Gold Rush days.

Although generally he can take culture or leave it alone, he'll attend at least one opera during the season, as well as a symphony and even a ballet, because he was brought up to believe in those things. He likes dining in small, out-of-the-way restaurants (preferably in an alley) where he knows the waiters by their first names--and one of his greatest joys is "discovering" a good little restaurant his friends haven't heard of.

The Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite

From Joan Didion's Where I Was From:

The Bohemian Club of San Francisco was founded, in 1872, by members of the city's working press, who saw it both as a declaration of unconventional or "artistic" interests and as a place to get a beer and a sandwich after the bulldog closed... For a few years the members appear to have remained resolute in their determination not to admit the merely rich, but their over-ambitious spending, both on the club in town and on its periodic encampments, quite soon overwhelmed this intention.

The rituals of the summer encampment were fixed. There were, every day, at twelve-thirty, "Lakeside Talks," informal speeches and briefings, off the records. .. Local color was measured; the fight songs sung remained those of the traditional California schools Berkeley (or, in this venue, "Cal") and Stanford.

Sporty San Francisco-born socialite Nan Kempner, who canonized slacks and costume jewelry, described her own style best: "She said it was 'artificially relaxed,'" says Harold Koda, the Met's curator in charge of the Costume Institute.

From "Nan Kempner: American Chic"

When she arrived at La Cote Basque in a new-style pantsuit, she was told at the door, "no women in pants allowed." So, rather than hang her head, Kempner merely took off the pants she was wearing under her tunic and walked in the front door.

Kempner is the one who played in red-lined blazer over tennis whites

Click on image below to read an annotated page from Private Collection (from the Palo Alto Junior League) and a recipe for an eccentric salad perfect for luncheons with Avocado Crab Mornay

Marin County Sweet & Sour Pickled Figs
Recipe adapted from San Francisco a la Carte
The San Francisco Junior League Cookbook

Every fall my grandmother's refrigerator would always contain a glass jar of cold, pickled figs, incomparable and essential for everyday living. Equally good with ice-cream or with roast meat, they were especially good stolen straight from the jar first thing in the morning.

When I finally made them myself as an adult, I began to play with the recipe, cutting down the sugar and adding more spices. They were perfect with cheese this way. My grandmother was appalled. She didn't mind that I altered her recipe (she loved a little innovation.) "You bought figs?" she asked. She thought every real Californian should know someone with a fig tree.

4 lbs fresh figs
salt water
4 cups brown sugar
1/2 quart white vinegar
4 cinnamon sticks
1/2 tablespoon whole cloves.

Wash figs and bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes. Combine the sugar and vinegar and bring to a boil. Drain the figs and add to the boiling syrup along with the spices. Simmer for one hour. Pack figs into hot sterilized jars, making certain that the figs are covered with syrup and that there is a cinnamon stick in each jar. Seal at once.

For Heretic's Version (to be eaten within a week) halve the sugar and add cardamom and a few more cloves to taste, plus a very few red pepper flakes, and a minuscule pinch of cayenne. Make sure all the flavors—-sweet, spicy, and sour--are just hitting each other against each other without any one dominating. The traditional version is ambrosial and intense. The generic exotic heretic's version has a long line of surprises in flavor.

Meyer Lemon Tree

feathers fin de siècle

2010-06-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

Marisa Berenson as Luisa Casati

The feathers, chiffon and patchwork life

2010-06-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

All images YSL

The First Cut is the Deepest

2010-06-12T17:10:00.001-07:00

Tina Aumont

2010-06-04T13:05:00.001-07:00

Daughter of Maria Montez, Tina Aumont can be seen next week at Anthology Film Archives in two films during their tribute to Pierre Clémenti. She's in Bertolucci's Partner and Phillipe Garrel's Jesus movie, Le Lit de la vierge. Aumont, Garrel, Clémenti and Frédéric Pardo (who made most of the images of Aumont below) were all part of La bande de la Coupole (the Coupole set.)

Hippies with Dubious Accessories

2010-06-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

RIP William Lubtchansky

2010-05-06T05:18:00.000-07:00

Minnelli Minnelli Minnelli

2010-05-05T17:49:00.001-07:00

The Next Great Moment in History is Ours

2010-05-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Iannone

Duality in Gone with the Wind (Pt. I)

2010-03-11T04:17:00.001-08:00

A domestic war film.

Rivals in romance united after killing a Union soldier who invades their home:

"Scarlett, you killed him! I'm glad you killed him," says the ultimate Good Girl Melanie. Then she suggests, almost lustily, that they go through his haversack.
"I'm ashamed I didn't think of it myself," says Scarlett.

It's also about the before and after of war, long afterwards...

But most of all it's about a woman who marries in a split second,
three times, for survival.

"Marriage fun?"

And about surviving war trauma through equal parts delusional romance and scrappy common sense.

It makes an interesting companion piece to Shutter Island, another great war film, one that treats the trauma thread that's in all good war films as the subject, with no holds barred.

Hawks on Early Sound Cinema

2010-02-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

"I wrote all the story and all the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol… I didn’t tell them I had never made a talking picture. They didn’t find out till I was about a month into it. And I used to get notes saying that I had a chance to make a good scene and I blew it. Because the dialogue was very understated, very natural—it wasn’t stage dialogue. And I think I had forty letters from the front office saying I missed things. Picture came out, made more money than any that year. And made a couple of fellows who were head of studios very angry with me because they said, “Now people are going to try to do that kind of dialogue and they won’t know how to do it.” But they began to switch over and then they used the understated dialogue for many years until Kazan made that picture where people got really emotional and started acting. I’ve forgotten the name of it. And then people started getting melodramatic again."

-The Men Who Made the Movies, 1973

Faulkner, Hawks and Steve Fisher

For the Hatarians

2010-02-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

Dick Schickel on Howard Hawks, 1973:

"For if you have ever been a red-blooded American boy, the values of masculine comradeship and civility, practiced in isolated places, are bound to have seeped into your system—principally from the movies—and there is an inexplicable thrill in living by them, however briefly, under the eye of someone like Hawks who really represents an old-fashioned way of doing, a way that is not as readily available to us as it once was. You want to be as good as you can when he’s around. And somehow he does make you an edge better than usual—in my case, less angry, less anxious, less cynical than I customarily am on the sidewalks of New York. So it’s machismo. So what? Mostly I find it preferable to the neurotic whining that I hear around me most of the time."

Honey Hi

2010-02-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Magic seems to come up frequently on this blog of feminist goings on. I think I’ll have to add a new tag. And this inevitably leads to (slightly embarrassing) thoughts of Stevie Nicks.

Despite my hesitancy to full embrace this white witch, I love Fleetwood Mac. Who doesn't? Some of their albums, like Tusk, are generally accepted as unparalleled, brilliant pop songwriting. But I realize that I what I appreciate in albums by Mariah Carey (decidedly less generally accepted) and other R&B pop divas is similar to what I love about Fleetwood Mac.

Before Aaliyah and Timbaland, before Mariah Carey and all her brilliant producers on The Emancipation of Mimi, before Beyonce and her shrewd genius to hire whomever she needs to get the sounds she wants, there was the amazing combination of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. It takes some complex structure building to harness all that wild vocal energy well. [Which may or may not relate to the Dargis quote in the previous post about certain dazzling actresses overpowering, or sharing authorship of, some male-made movies that they're in.]

Buckingham’s solo albums are unbeatable; they’re unbelievably good productions. But, like Timbaland’s solo stuff, not quite as listenable as you'd like them to be. And Stevie Nicks on her own is hard to take. But combine the two, especially with a little time and upheaval and some Marin County views, and you have the best kind of album magic. As Nicks wails so hazily, “Thunder only happens when it’s raining.” Totally, whatever that means. Then add Christine McVie and it gets unreal. (Sorry, music's not my usual beat.)

SOME VIEWS OF MARIN COUNTY:

Headlining this Magic Mountain Fest on Mt. Tamalpais:
The Miracles and The Byrds

Mt Tam Woman by Suzanne Deveuve

Also on this same list?
Ronnie Ronette and Phil Spector.
Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux.

But it’s Fleetwood Mac especially—with shimmering, deep, complex, insane, sometimes tense layers of pop—that remind me most of what, I think, is the best music being made in the last ten or fifteen years: r&b pop.

On Actresses, Pt. III

2010-02-12T18:25:00.000-08:00

"Slick and overdetermined, this picture was so far out of control it got snatched by snatch. From reel one Stone owned Basic Instinct. She took it away from Douglas and made it hers, and in the process rewrote Joe Eszterhas’s misogynist tripe start to finish. It was, indeed, a performance worthy of all the great divas from Davis to Dietrich, who year in and year out turned man-made trash into gold, and yet another lesson in how complicated movies really are.” --Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice, 1992

Stellar phrasing (though I don't totally agree.) Some thoughts on the feminist prismatic perspective of Basic Instinct, and the unpopularity of certain forms of intelligence (as demonstrated by this comic genius who knows that some gentlemen prefer bleach-blondes:)

Monroe on the backlash:
"Let's take some actors or directors. Usually they don't say it to me, they say it to the newspapers because that's a bigger play. You know, if they're only insulting me to my face that doesn't make a big enough play because all I have to say is, "See you around, like never."

Dorothy Malone

2010-02-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

In one of the great feminist films of the last half century:

Whatever Lola Wants...

2010-02-08T02:06:00.000-08:00

"I am the reincarnation of Lola Montez!" --Tuesday Weld

Catherine Breillat

2010-02-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

On Getting the Job Done

Asked if she was born a provocateuse or if something happened in her life to make her a provocateuse, Breillat explained that what happened was that she was born a woman. "To do what I wanted to do, I had to be provocative."

Fu'ad Ait Aattou [lead actor in The Last Mistress who Breillat discovered in a cafe]—who was supposed to be a great lover—didn't know how to kiss well and so Breillat had to show him how. She took Asia Argento into her arms and kissed her, demonstrating to Fu'ad how it should be done. Fu'ad said an American director would never dream of doing that; but, he was humbled by the experience and did his best after that. "I'm a very physical director," Breillat commented, "and I like showing my actors exactly what I want them to do. In these scenes, I always play the boy of the couple and my male assistant—as you may have seen in Sex Is Comedy—plays the girl. Men and boys are much more modest than women. For them it's a bit of an affront to their masculine pride if they see a woman playing their role. Then they feel they have to do better."

Sex is Comedy

On Actresses, Pt. II

2010-01-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
"The first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of the cinema", Le Monde, 1976

A pet peeve: Some reviews of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman that I've read in the last year have misread Jeanne as oppressed by her domestic routine instead of this as the only outlet she has to save her from oppression. It is her medium.

"The important thing is the style, the form. It shows everyone has conditioning. The attention I show to this woman's gestures is very positive. To show that doing the dishes can also be used for art, that is positive," said Akerman in a 1977 interview with Film Quarterly.

Actress Delphine Seyrig said to the same magazine, "In this role I experienced things I've been trying to get away from my whole life. What was most difficult for me was not to express any revolt or aggression. As I became Jeanne Dielman, I realized how easy it is to be a woman like that. Women are very malleable, they all play roles, not just actresses; they adept more easily than men do. I felt this experience has never been shown before. No man could have made this film; it is a totally feminine film."

Released in 1974, just a year before Jeanne Dielman, Céline and Julie Go Boating (or one half of it) was written largely by actresses Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier:

"During the filming, we got up early in the morning and told each other our dreams, which the film depended on... We wrote our lines each morning and evening... [and we always] knew what stance we had and why. Everything is doubled in this film, which also talks about the acting profession in its relation to the spectators, whom we often act aggressively toward without real malice," said Berto.

Labourier explained, "We were interested in creating characters that would emerge from our essential vocation as actresses. Very often we tend to forget that the profession of an actress is, above all, based on games, like children's games. So in Céline and Julie we started off with the notion of amusing ourselves by creating interchangeable characters in many different forms in the style of a game."

Maximalist

2010-01-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

“I don’t think Jeanne Dielman is minimalist,” said Chantal Akerman. “I think it’s maximalist. It’s big!"

"And if I did the film now I don’t know that it would be called feminist."

“All those labels are a bit annoying,” she continued. “To name something is a way to possess it. I think it makes the film smaller. And O.K., maybe they are right, but they are never right enough.”

Julie Christie

2010-01-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

"She's crazy. She goes where she feels."

From Peter Biskind:

"If ever a movie star existed for whom stardom meant nothing, it was Julie," said Robert Towne. "She was genuinely a blithe spirit." Five-figure residual checks would flutter from her handbag onto the floor of the hotel lobby as she rummaged around for her keys. One day she appalled Beatty by losing a $1000 check in the street.

She, as Goldie Hawn once remarked, would have been more comfortable milking a cow than making small talk at a Hollywood party.

Sexy Mensches

2010-01-30T12:23:00.000-08:00

From Mia Farrow's memoir What Falls Away, about the tension between Roman Polanski and John Cassavetes on the set of Rosemary's Baby:

One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.

Interviewer: With History of Violence, did you want to address sexuality in a different way than you had in the past?

David Cronenberg: No, not really. Sexuality is of interest to me for all the obvious reasons — plus the body-specific reasons — but I have to forget about my other movies when I'm making a movie. The sexuality comes out of the characters and out of the plot. There are two sex scenes, which are interesting because they take place between a married couple that have children.
You don't see that anymore. It's either adolescent sex or forget it, whereas anybody who's married knows that sex gets more interesting and more complex and deeper as you get older. So I was interested in that.

In the original script, there were no sex scenes. I added them. I felt in some ways you could call this movie Scenes From a Marriage. I have to know about the sexuality involved in that marriage if I'm really going to understand it.

And Ernst Lubitsch:

Who had an astonishing imagination for innuendo, and also made a romantic, complicated and bittersweet depiction of marriage in this subtle film:

Of course the star of the Heaven Can Wait remake (script by Elaine May) deserves at least an honorable mention:

He's got at least one out of two.
From Peter Biskind's new biography of the conquistador, Beatty's phone technique:

Never identifying himself, speaking in a soft, insinuating voice rarely raised above a whisper, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, he asked them where they were, with whom, where they were going next and would they be sure to call him when they got there.

One morning he called Leslie Caron at 5am, waking her. According to her, he said: “You’re sleeping! You’re not thinking about me!”

Film and Feminism

2010-01-25T06:38:00.000-08:00

“Then came the awakening. That is, the moment arrived to repeat what had been said in images and derive consequences from it.” -Sexual Difference, 1987, by The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective

What are the connections between feminism and film? Endless.... One very basic tenet is that fantasy is the most essential tool available to feminists. The only way to step outside a patriarchal world that disguises itself as neutrality is imagination.

Here is a fantasy about fantasy: 9 to 5, written by the same woman who wrote 3 Women, a utopia versus Altman's dystopia. (Thanks to the genius team of Emily Ryan and Michael Goodstein for pointing out the essential connection between these films.)

Revenge Through Fantasy:

(Also, why didn't Jane Fonda make more comedies?)

More from Sexual Difference:
“The social status is assigned the female sex is such, wrote Carla Lonzi that, ‘…a man would prefer never to have been born if he had to contemplate it for himself.’ Women have borne it, bear it, helping themselves in part—a part difficult to measure—with fantasies. It is difficult to know at the moment to what extent fantasies help us to bear our difference when we find ourselves exposed to the exhibitions of the male sex. Usually one finds out when it is too late, when, that is, the power to fantasize diminishes. Then the female mind surrenders and falls into that state which psychologists call depression.”

On Actresses

2010-01-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

FILM MAGAZINE: It is curious to see men play subsidiary roles in Céline and Julie Go Boating. Does this have anything to do with what you term “individual expression?”

JULIET BERTO: I couldn’t really answer that. It is hard though to find actors who bring original ideas to film. They somehow aren’t interested in innovative research and challenge. Secure in their social position, they refrain from taking too many risks. Women have nothing to lose and it is from our socially deprived position that we emerge as powerful individuals in the film. It is a unique situation and one that is reflected by the fact that men are inevitably weaker in their profession as actors. Male actors posses an ambivalence, since acting for them implies the exposure of a narcissistic and feminine side of their personalities.

Clarification of the Concept

2010-01-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Linda Bengalis' "Female Sensibility"

The reason this blog is dedicated to femininity is not because we think it's in any way superior to masculinity. Masculinity is great. But we take the position that femininity is disgustingly underrated. (Undervalued and often unseen, and frequently not named.) What would a history of the world look like that took into account muses and wives? What would a history of the world look like that was not even about heroes, but about the everyday?
Femininity does not belong only to women, but to all who need it.

Should the Goal of Feminism be Equal Rights?

2010-01-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

The Italian feminist Carla Lonzi:

"The equality available to us today is not philosophical, but political: should we, after thousands of years, knowingly desire to become part of a world planned by others?

"Equality is what is offered to the victims of colonization on the level of laws and rights. And what is imposed on them on the level of culture. It is the principle by which those who exercise hegemony continue to condition those who do not."

Instead she advocated a feminism of differentiation:

"Equality is a juridical principle... Difference, however, is an existential principle concerning the modes of being human, the peculiarities of our experiences, our ends, our possibilities, our sense of existence in a variety of situations, whether given or desired."

Or, as the actress Jennifer Jones once said in an interview:

“It’s startling to read what men think of women, You build strange, high walls around us. And it’s so difficult for us to get over the walls.”

“Why get over them?” asked the reporter, “Why do women have to win?”

“We don’t. Because if we win, we lose. Once we win we’re all men.”

Phantom Forms

2010-01-19T05:56:00.000-08:00

Carolee Schneeman's
Fuses

“Why not posit here that the fact that everything that is analyzable is sexual does not mean that everything that is sexual is accessible to analysis.” –Jacques Lacan

I’m entering dangerous territory, with a blog cheekily called The Nibbler, in moving from innuendo to dealing direct. But I can’t ignore this news item that has me absolutely perplexed and irate:

This article claims that, "Researchers at King’s College London claim there is no evidence for the existence of the G-spot – supposedly a cluster of internal nerve endings – beyond a woman’s imagination."
Is this really where we are in the progression of feminism? Something that some, but not all, women physically feel is declared as officially not existing, as being in their imaginations, because some men can’t find it? And this is to protect the women! From not feeling bad.

This is insanity. You know what else is insanity? When Doris Lessing recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, some of the response to her literary career (my own included) was focused on one passage she had written, in her masterpiece The Golden Notebook, on vaginal orgasms:

"As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical — a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm"

She calls it a "real orgasm” and that’s problematic, but it’s the best description of the difference between these two types that I know of. In fact, this 1962 description is one of the only literary descriptions of this differentiation that I know of; this is part of the insanity. [Simone de Beauvoir also wrote well on this, what she called “a complete orgasm”, an experience she didn’t have until she was 39, and not with Sartre. Soon afterwards she transitioned from being know as an existentialist philosopher, who had independence by living as a man could but was called La Grande Sartreuse, and instead came into her own fame as a feminist philosopher with the publication of The Second Sex.] The deeper insanity was that while some women wrote about this passage of Lessing’s as being uniquely accurate, other women attacked it, not for undermining the clitoral orgasm, but for even declaring that a vaginal orgasm exists! How could she? How quaint and fifties and pre-feminist of her, wrote some commentators. Masters and Johnson had already proven that the only orgasm is the clitoral orgasm; how lucky that it’s our most phallic familiar spot, and the easiest to not lose sight of.

Women have three kinds of orgasms. At least! Three distinct tones that can be played in succession or in harmony.

Why is so much of men's sexuality so foundational to our value systems, to such an extent that we don't even notice, yet still so much of women's sexuality is debatable and susceptible to trends? Or just ignored.

This is important; the roots of sexism are in the fear of the power and the unknown, and the unknowability, of sex.

This is also important because by not being aware of our own sensations fully, we are also not aware of our forms. Standard narratives that are a linear buildup towards a climax are based, quite obviously, on the structure of sex. But what is less established, for the very reasons stated above, is that this is a male experience that women are also sympathetic to but not limited to. What would a narrative form that allowed for the competing, overlapping, choral voices of a woman’s experience look like? What would a "vague sensation of only emotion" look like in filmic images? Or how could one film the above mentioned de Beauvoir breakthrough of “profound self-abandonment” in which she describes her body as "a hymn, a flame.” Experimental film goes there often, but narrative features--which are, again, often structured on a male experience of action and climax and resolution--rarely do.

Two of the most interesting examples I know of authentic female narratives in feature films are both about women struggling to assert their own identities within, or outside of, or transcendent of, male sexual experiences. In Bette Gordon’s Variety, her heroine finds her own voice through a voyeuristic and playful ownership of the stories she overhears in the porno theater where she sells tickets. In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne’s “mysterious” and sudden shift occurs when, according to Akerman, she has an orgasm and it is intolerable to her.

The article that introduced this topic has me very concerned that what is complex about a woman's experience, and unfathomably but not unexplainably different from a man's, can be so easily invalidated. There are so few narrative feature film forms that are authentic to the experience of women. And when they are found, they might be declared, like the G-spot, as not existing officially.

Hidden Nature

2010-01-17T11:27:00.001-08:00

Animal tracks in the morning reveal all the
nighttime goings on.

Basic comforts, but not too much more, make room for intangible comforts.

Four inches of snow outside, stacks of firewood and homemade aquavit inside—winter perfection.

Spices for aquavit:
-coriander
-cumin
-a sprinkle of caraway
-a few seeds of cardamom
-a piece of star anise, for color and ceremony, for a few days only.

Let the rest seep for at least a week, and serve so chilled that it’s syrupy. Very good for inspirational sipping.

Being Mick: You Would if You Could

2010-01-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

"I fancied him, ol' rubber lips"

Two classic Mick moments from Performance:

"Do you think I should wash my hair today...?"

"That carpet is two hundred years old!"

Such a foppish femme. Anita Pallenberg describes his character in that film as "a man, a male and female male."

Marrianne Faithfull wrote in her autobiography that "…in May 1971, Mick had finally given in to his narcissism and married…himself!" -

NOTE: The title of this post is the actual title of a hilarious 2001 documentary, an essential part of the Jaggerlore on how Mick Jagger plays Mick Jagger.

Somewhere Between the Moon and New York City

2010-01-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Officially (or according to me) the first and the last screwball comedy:

From 1930, starring Miriam Hopkins and Carole Lombard, with dialogue by Preston Sturges:

And from 1981, Arthur, starring Liza Minnelli and "Cuddly Dudley":

"The plot begins and complicates itself in a city but gets resolved in a move to world of nature--In Shakespeare this is called the green world or the golden world; in four of the seven major Hollywood comedies of remarriage this world is called Connecticut."
-Philosopher/ Screwball Comedy Scholar Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness

On Anita

2010-01-11T19:40:00.000-08:00

"...And bang went the Ferrari."

In Susan McClary’s brilliant and groundbreaking work of feminist musicology, Feminine Endings, she suggests, among other theories, that music is essentially an expression of sex. If so, then supergroupies are some very essential muses. Anita Pallenberg probably was the Stones’ guitar sound.

Dress up your Lingerie

2010-01-10T19:20:00.000-08:00

"Let me see your underwear."

After a slap, rivals decide to swap positions in The Smiling Lieutenant

The Animal Photo Op

2010-01-01T14:20:00.000-08:00

But, of course, sometimes this can get out of hand...

Butterscotch is better with butter, and Scotch

2010-01-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

"I'll have a butterscotch sundae, I guess."

I've always been fascinated with the use of butterscotch chips in most recipes for butterscotch pudding, including this well-rated one from very trustworthy Food and Wine. Does authentic butterscotch flavor really only come from a plastic bag from Nestle? Is butterscotch--unlike deep, dark, dangerously close to burnt caramel-- a pure nostalgia trip? (As so many sweets are.) Butterscotch is a mellow, cloying comfort taste. And, apparently, impossible to reproduce. A pure memory taste.

But, like many things, it can't be recreated but can be vastly improved with time, technique and a little booze.

Butterscotch for Adults:
Make a caramel sauce. (David Lebovitz has the best instructions, though I like wet technique and he prefers dry; he gives intstructions for both.) Don't go quite as dark as you would with caramel; go to just when it seems ready as opposed to a little past and closer to the edge of burnt, as you should for a good caramel. After you add butter, add a combination of cream and milk, and add much more than you would for caramel sauce. Finish off with some spicy Scotch whiskey (J&B instead of Dewar's, but anything will do.) Then turn the heat back up for a few seconds, whisk the Scotch flavor in and mellow the alcohol shock, and then cool.