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Thursday, January 22, 2015
from Wikipedia
I went to the liquor store to get some wine and they were out of the only screw top pinot grigio they sell. I went with some Moscato instead. Screw top is supposed to be easier to open and I wanted to try something new.
I've only been to the liquor store three times in the past year, but I know enough to know corkscrews and I don't get along. I keep reminding myself of my limited history of visits to that kind of store as I worry that I like wine when I always thought I didn't. Apparently, though, it's only pinot I like because I'm not liking what I'm drinking this evening.
To be completely honest, the only reason I ended up opening the bottle is because I'm stubborn. When I first got home I wanted a sip to unwind from what has turned out to be a very emotional week. I tried twisting one way, then the other.
I tried pulling and pummeling and knocking...nothing. The screw top was screwing me over big time. Now I only wanted the drink because I couldn't have it.
I hate giving up, especially on simple things, so I watched videos (yes, there are videos for opening screw top wines) and read online articles....still nothing. I couldn't budge it.
Then I found this guy* two hours later (while I was doing other things) and (yes!) it worked. The video, unlike the others I watched, offeres more than one option and clearly displays the handling of the bottle and each technique. Plus, the man is so pleasant.
I'm not happy because I got the wine open (at first I thought the bottle wasn't opening because God was trying to show me I am just not meant for alcohol) but because I didn't give up...I kept trying. It reminded me that the whole reason I wanted to have some wine in the first place was because I've been feeling a bit defeated lately.
And while looking up Moscato wine I discovered it comes from muscat, a family of grapes, with over 200 varieties. I'd rather learn something new than drink wine anyway.
Honesty...the woman can't carry a tune that well, but when Jessica Lange takes center stage and sings David Bowie you kind of can't help but want to watch. "Heroes" is definitely not her strong suit, but she's not half bad when she covers "Life on Mars."
This season of American Horror Story was off and on dreadful, but the last fifteen minutes of the finale almost redeemed the entire thirteen episode run and not just because my favorite living actress sang my favorite song ever, David Bowie's "Heroes."
Jessica Lange is never better than when she plays sad and very tormented divas. As Elsa Mars in Freak Show she oddly veers between being the queen of mean and being a very insecure woman, sometimes both at the same time.
There's one particular scene in "Curtain Call" that shows just how powerful the actress is when she embraces emotion. Having waited all day for the head of tv network only to find out he slipped out the back, Elsa loses it and slaps the receptionist when she offers a bit of unsought advice: "If you ask me, change your act. Marlene did it better."
Following that (and a tussle with a studio security guard) she falls onto the floor a crumpled mess of exhausted desperation. The look in her eyes, genuine and haunting (along with the way she says "My name is Elsa Mars" to the man who helps her), is one of the greatest moments in all of AHS's fourth incarnation.
Once Elsa's dreams come true after moving to Hollywood and getting "discovered," she realizes that dreams can quickly turn to nightmares. Soon, all she wants is for things to be the way they once were when she was happy with all her "monsters" and running her "freak show" in Juniper, Florida.
The last few minutes of "Curtain Call" are so easy to understand and just feel. The minute Elsa agrees to do her variety program live on Halloween (Elsa never performs on Halloween for interesting reasons made clear early on in the season) you know her life has gotten bad enough that she wants to die (or go to Hell)...either option is okay with her.
When she began singing "Heroes," I thought this is it, this is as good as my life gets. I wasn't being sarcastic, but for that moment felt the most bliss I'd experienced in weeks, as pathetic as that may sound. Freak Show might have mostly been bad this year but when it was good it was very good.
Elsa's performance is cut short because Edward Mordrake (it's a long back story, let's just say he knows his way around Hell) comes calling. Instead of punishing her, though, he sends Elsa back to when she was most herself, in Juniper, Florida, singing and being with her beloved "monsters."
It's kind of cheesy and might seem like way more than she should get, but considering Elsa's horrid past and few (but very sincere) attempts to be human (plus throw in this is probably Jessica Lange's last time on AHS), the lavish ending is kind of fitting.
"I just...I need to be with someone I love."-Elsa says to the man (Massimo Dolcefino, played by Danny Huston) she once hoped to be with before all her dreams crashed and burned.
Work closed early because of snow and so it makes a cozy night of reading at home. I pulled Helen MacInnes (so underrated, I think) off the shelf and am really liking While Still We Live.
Not too long ago, the New York Times ran an article largely about her and the times she was writing about in her novels:
This year’s news felt disarmingly retro. Israel bombing Gaza. Russia invading portions of Ukraine. A nuclear arsenal ramp-up by both America and Russia. Had we traveled back in time to the 1980s, albeit with a millisecond-long news cycle sped up by smartphones and social media?
My response was to time-travel too, after a fashion. If the present is explained by the past, might espionage fiction, especially the 20th-century variety, help us understand the cycles of history and perhaps even help us make better choices?
Choosing the right guide was critical: Eric Ambler seemed too distant. John le Carré, too in tune with the present. Robert Littell or Charles McCarry? Adam Hall or Len Deighton? All excellent in varying ways, but not quite right. Instead, I chose the only major female spy novelist, unsurprisingly the most ignored by her peers, the kind of woman writer Ken Follett derided as producing plots that were “just a channel through which a love story can flow.”
Helen MacInnes (1907-85) was born and raised in Glasgow but spent much of her 40-year career living and working in New York City. She drew on her extensive research and travel, and her marriage to Gilbert Highet, a classics scholar at Columbia University (and agent for British intelligence), to portray Cold War intrigue with a keen understanding of the machinations of power. Documents declassified in the late 1990s revealed just how acutely the couple understood the rise of Nazism and Fascism.
Photo
Credit Triangle Books
Highet first worked for the British Security Coordination (an umbrella organization encompassing MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 and others that operated out of Rockefeller Center) during World War II. He would maintain links to MI6, preparing influential psychological profiles of Nazi leaders including Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler, supposedly anticipating many of their decisions, and at the end of the war was tasked with drafting a key report that was rejected for being “too dry and academic” (it was revised in part by Roald Dahl).
It’s tempting to imagine Richard and Frances Myles, the adventurous married couple of MacInnes’s debut, “Above Suspicion,” as stand-ins for the Highets — and indeed MacInnes based the novel on diary entries she kept while on her honeymoon in Bavaria. Troubled by Nazi activity, she documented the instances of violence she witnessed and, years later, revisited her notes to create the story of a couple looking for an anti-Nazi agent while seemingly on holiday.
The flavor of much of MacInnes’s work — some 21 novels including “Decision at Delphi,” “The Salzburg Connection” and “Message From Málaga” — depended on a vibrant sense of place, suspense and Iron Curtain paranoia. The specter of Soviet influence as antagonist hovered over the volumes, be it in the form of disinformation techniques like mind control (“The Venetian Affair”), journalists naïvely swearing fervent oaths to the Communist cause (“Neither Five Nor Three”) or details from a propaganda conference (“Ride a Pale Horse”). No wonder MacInnes counted the C.I.A. chief Allen Dulles as a loyal fan.
But I found myself gravitating toward MacInnes’s heroines: “While Still We Live,” which chronicles the transformation of a young Englishwoman into a resistance fighter, or “I and My True Love,” in which the suspense derives as much from a woman’s love for a possible Communist spy as it does from her attempts to escape her smothering and much older diplomat husband. The most addicting quality of MacInnes’s novels is her utter lack of sentimentality. She was entirely without illusions about human nature. Her characters choose mates as much for love as for practicality; they are full of ambivalence and wary of ideology. To them, Communism, religion, nationalism are invitations to moral corruption and violence.
But her pragmatism was not without wit and optimism. “We have paid too much attention to political differences, just as we used to pay too much attention to religious differences,” she wrote in “While Still We Live.” “Nowadays the word Communist or Fascist rouses the same emotions as Protestant and Catholic once caused. If these religious factions can learn to live together by giving up all persecution and forms of torture, it is quite possible that a future world will see many forms of political ideology living and working side by side.”
Seventy years later, that hope remains, yet it seems we must learn these lessons anew. And if, in our ignorance of history, we are too overwhelmed to reckon with it outright, the novels of Helen MacInnes provide the grim lessons we need under the guise of suspenseful entertainments.
Les Yeux sans Visage is one of the best films I've seen in ages, yet it is also almost unbearable to watch, both for its horror and its heartbreak.
I can't say much about it without spoiling things since the fact that you don't quite know what is going on in the beginning is exactly what pulls you in and adds to the overall creepiness.
Actress Edith Scob wears a mask most of the time, but that only adds to the underlying sadness and beauty of the film and her presence (and those eyes of hers) is what gives the movie its only humanity. I have never ever seen anything like Les Yeux nor been so affected by a horror film.
I was so overwhelmed by the film's mood the other night I had to turn the lights back on in my living room and watch some "Golden Girls" episodes before I could go to sleep.
Just some FYI: Billy Idol based the title of his song "Eyes Without A Face" on this movie.
I don't think I truly realized how un-pretty I was until I hit middle school and I started hearing the word "ugly" tossed around. Insulated by the constant comfort that I just didn't really care about being popular or having boys like me I mostly ignored the taunts about my weird hair and the clothes I wore. I tried my best to just read during recess (when I was allowed to) and homeroom and just pretended the world around me did not exist.
I was lucky that my being teased was not 24/7 and only a matter of who was around at the wrong time. Art class was fun, for instance, because I had nice classmates there and at our table we would always talk about Duran Duran or Boy George before the last bell rang. Plus, our teacher was awesome. She encouraged us to be free spirits with our drawing. Of course the very fact that I liked my teachers and did well in school was also part of why I was such an easy target.
It was always the girls who were cruel, not the boys. Sure, some of the boys would say mean things and call me "weirdo" or "brillo pad" or "orphan Annie," but it was the girls who got violent or really knew how to hurt with their words. I remember one girl threatening me for not letting her copy off me during a test. I was afraid and started running down the hall when a small group of the kids who always tried to sneak cigarettes in during lunch stood in front of me and the girl to buzz off. To this day, I have an affinity for smokers.
I am very grateful that I was a teenager in the 80s and not now when social media can mean being bullied long after the school day is over. The worst part about not being pretty and the way people treat you because of that isn't the cruelness experienced in middle school for being different. That pain goes away in time and, in some ways, can make you stronger and more ready for what comes later.
Sometimes the girl who isn't asked out all school who becomes invisible later on in life. I think I grew into my non-looks so that instead of being picked on I just became a non-entity in the world of love and romance. And, in a way, I'm almost grateful to the teasers for helping me learn early in life that I may always be a wallflower...and that I'm okay with that.
Still, for those who are tormented much worse than I was, the damage is not always slight:
