November 10, 2024
# 1684

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Cover and Story
Fall days offer a treasure trove of simple pleasures from wrapping up in a favorite sweater to savoring the warmth of a hot drink between your hands. Leaves of red, orange, and gold crunch underfoot, making every walk a sensory delight. The world slows. A serene calm makes quiet reflection physically pleasurable. The glow of a crackling fire provides a perfect backdrop for reading a good book or engaging in enjoyable conversation. Enjoying a scenic foliage drive, pumpkin or apple picking, or simply lounging in a cozy nook, fall days remind us to cherish life's simple, comforting moments.

On the first leg of the trip to Savannah Ga, we had dinner at Elizabeth’s. The restaurant was terrific. Really special. Here is the tasting menu Tucker J and I enjoyed:

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Commentary II

The third day of my recent trip south was spent with my dear friends, Don and Tommie Toner. Their daughter is married to my son. We share two lovely granddaughters. Tommie is a very talented and active artist. She has retired from her career as a teacher. Don is a retired, successful businessman. They are a perfect couple.

You couldn’t wish for more giving hosts than this couple. They were over the top. Not only did they drive 100 miles to pick me up at my hotel in Florence S Carolina and take me back to their lovely home in Columbia, So Carolina, but, next day, they refused to permit me to Uber to the airport. Instead, at 5.30am, Don Toner drove me to the airport, thirty minutes away. Through traffic.

When we arrived from Florence to their home in Columbia, Tommie had a lovely lunch prepared, thoughtful as well as delicious.

Tommie’s lunch was thoughtfully composed and excellently executed

Tommie and I spent the afternoon walking about Columbia. We viewed the river. We couldn’t walk the Riverwalk. The hurricane’s debris made the area unsafe. We had a delightful coffee, after which we toured the “Horseshoe” of the University of South Carolina. A lovely campus. And large. And then the three of us shared dinner at the Motor Supply restaurant.
We returned home. The three of us played with Co-pilot, a first for Tommie and Don. They reacted to it with child-like glee, asking for recipes, directions, recommendations. They’re hooked.

The surprise of my visit was the meal at Motor Supply restaurant in Columbia. It always has been an excellent restaurant, but a new executive chef has raised it even higher. The food was universally excellent. The service was great. What particularly sticks out for me was my first fried okra. Delicious, as was the pasta: tagliatelle with a beef ragu. And the prices are so reasonable as to make one wonder how they can pay their bills.
Well done, Motor City.

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Commentary III
I had the honor of raising three wonderful sons and came across this pic. The boys were 3, 5, and 7 years old in this picture. {That was 50 years ago.]

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Kat’s Gen Z Corner

My friends and I at the ballet. $60 orchestra seats, Row F. The best.

Me leading a press conference with the future Mayor of NYC.
Ed: Kat is first figure-facing on left.
Brad is the figure behind the speaker.

Will as his dad from the 80s for Halloween. Truly iconic. My vision, his curation.

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Tucker’s Corner

Juror #2

Clint Eastwood always had one of the great faces of cinema, so it makes sense that somewhere along the way he became one of our great directors of faces. It feels ridiculous to talk of Eastwood’s “late style,” since the man has been on a late-style tear for the past 30-plus years. Unforgiven was the elegiac work of an aging icon looking back on a long and varied career; that was 1992. In recent years, though, as his films have become even more stripped down and settled into contemplative austerity, he’s seemed more content simply to let us look at the people he puts up onscreen.

The faces are important because that’s where real drama lies. In Juror No. 2, Eastwood, now 94, gives us a legal thriller that in its broad strokes could have come from an airport paperback. (As far as I can tell, it’s not based on anything, but an enterprising publisher could probably make a quick cool buck by novelizing Jonathan Abrams’s script.) While ideas of guilt and innocence have animated plenty of incident-packed stories over the years, here their value lies primarily in their emotional cost, in the way they tear people apart from the inside.

Chief among these people is Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a journalist and recovering alcoholic who’s just been chosen to serve on a Georgia jury that will hear the case of James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), an abusive lout being tried for murder. An ambitious assistant district attorney (Toni Collette) wants to convict Sythe for killing his girlfriend, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), by the side of a road one rainy night after a drunken squabble. As the case proceeds, Justin realizes that he was also at the bar that night, nursing an unsipped whisky and flirting with relapse. And on his way home, he hit something with his car that he initially thought was a deer but may well have been Kendall. It’s a great high-concept set-up: Can our hero, who is the real guilty party, save an innocent person’s life (and his own soul) by prevailing on his fellow jury members to acquit the man?

The troubled studio Warner Bros. has caught some deserved flak for its dismissive treatment of Juror No. 2. It’s given the film minimal marketing and is releasing it to a small handful of screens with no evident plans for expansion; bizarrely, it’s also not planning to report the film’s box office, which is either a preemptive admission of defeat, a thumbed nose at the media, or possibly both. Given that Eastwood has been for many years one of the company’s most treasured figures (once upon a time, it was rumored that he and Stanley Kubrick were the only two directors Warner deigned to give final cut), this seems particularly silly. But it also makes some sick kind of sense, given that Eastwood, for all his genre cred and iconic stature, is one of the few major filmmakers left making studio-financed adult dramas. To the modern studio executive, he must look like a glitch in the matrix — not an artist to be protected, but an error to be corrected.

Plus he’s working in a shopworn genre. Back when courtroom dramas ruled the land, they served as ideal canvases for reassuring suspense narratives. The legal thriller turned on someone gaming the system — corrupt politicians, murderous gangsters, sleazy lawyers, et al. — but the system usually prevailed. The powerful were the villains, and they could do a lot of damage, but these films evinced a quiet faith in American institutions. The truth would eventually come to light; justice would be served, even if it took a few extra tries and a couple of bodies. If we want to talk about why legal thrillers don’t quite hit the way they used to, we should look no further than our own growing cynicism about the effectiveness of such institutions, be that cynicism justified or merely fashionable. Juror No. 2 is the work of a man who hasn’t quite lost that faith; it features an entire scene in which the jurors are shown an instructional video, complete with American flags, about the justice system and the role they are playing in our democracy. But this is also a movie about how the system can fail even as everybody tries their best. It’s designed to deny us the satisfaction of seeing a villain get their comeuppance, simply because there is none.

This is not a film of rushing deadlines and dark investigations and narrow escapes and courtroom mayhem. It’s one of long close-ups, of internalized torments and doubts. As the slow agony of guilt chews its way through him, Justin’s world remains largely placid, if impatient. His wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth and wants him beside her during a high-risk pregnancy. The other jurors want to go back home to their families, and, besides, this Sythe character looks pretty guilty to them. The rival attorneys argue fiercely in court, but they’re also college chums who like to relax together with an after-work drink. Sythe’s lawyer (Chris Messina) is genuinely convinced his client is innocent, but we don’t sense that he’ll be too torn up if the guy gets sent away. Juror No. 2 suggests there is still purpose in institutions, but in some ways it’s the most damning of legal thrillers — one that suggests miscarriages of justice happen not from evil figures pulling strings behind the scenes, but from ordinary people making ordinary mistakes because life gets in the way. And yes, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that the man who was once Dirty Harry has now made a movie about the perils of rushing to judgment.

Eastwood gets excellent work from his cast because he gives them both space and time. His unhurried gaze allows the characters’ humanity to shine through. His style might be simpler, but his generosity as a filmmaker, his willingness to embrace the complex and the open-ended, has never been more evident. Juror No. 2 is a fine entry in a great director’s career. I for one am glad the man refuses to hang up his spurs.

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Chuckles and Thoughts

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Six Word Stories
Forgotten toy, child’s tears, mother’s hug.

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child (The Goodnight Hug), 1880, pastel on paper, 42 × 61 cm, private collection.
Mary Cassatt - http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/mary-cassatt/mother-and-child-1880

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Lentil Soup

Prepare Pot:
4oz of fat: olive oil or duck fat or porchetta in any combination to taste
Heat the pot

Aromatics, chopped: 2oz of each:
onions
carrots
celery
red bell pepper
and ½ oz each fresh garlic and serrano chili

Put all aromatics in food processor and
Season with ¼ t each of cumin, coriander, curry, ground bay leaf, salt, and paprika.
Grind and scrape into stock pot.
Soften the aromatics, about 10 minutes.

Complete the Pot
Add all of these:
2 cups of dried lentil beans
3 cups chicken broth
2 cups dry white wine
½ (14.5oz) can of cherry tomatoes
4 oz greens, chopped
Bring pot to a simmer and cook for an hour, or until the lentils are tender.

Change the texture of the soup
Scoop out half the cooked lentils and puree them with an additional cup of water.
Return the puree to the pot and simmer for 15 minutes, adding more broth if needed.
Serve
Garnish with chopped bacon and chives

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In the Mail

From Victor P for Tucker J:

Looking forward to seeing Conclave after your wonderful review!

Thanks,
Victor

And this from Tucker responding to an email from our friend Sally C:

Hi Sally,

Thank you for your kind words about my review!
You put it perfectly about how we’d all be so lucky to be blessed with the boldness to live fully as ourselves without fear.

I really loved the life experience you shared. Apologies for replying to your message so late!
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And this from my lovely niece Francette K:

Hi Uncle Dom!

Hope all is well. Just read your review of your recent visit to Chillingsworth. I can’t believe it is still open. I have such fond memories of having dinner there with my dad. When he still lived in New England, before moving permanently to Florida, I would frequently accompany him on weekends to the Cape to stay with my nana and papa during the offseason. Then, we would take the opportunity to visit some of the fancier restaurants on the Cape (I’m guessing because they were a little less expensive at the time). One of our favorites was Chillingsworth. That restaurant may have actually been my first fine dining experience, and it was definitely the site of many food and drink firsts.

I was only in middle school, but I had already developed a love of dining, fine and otherwise (no doubt influenced by your restaurant and all the great cooks in our family). But it wasn’t just the food that made those times so special. My sisters were older and very rarely made those weekend trips with me and Dad. Getting alone time with him and the ritual of those weekends—picking me up on a cold Friday night, stopping at Bickfords by the Braintree rotary for grilled cheese and chocolate ice cream (my dad always let me eat me ice cream before my dinner!), sharing the guest room at Nana and Papa’s while falling asleep to bad USA Network tv shows—was a sort of healing antidote to my chaotic childhood.

I miss my dad so much; this unexpected reminder of some of our best times together was a happy surprise. Thank you for that.

Xo,

Francette

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Last Comment
I write this on Tuesday, Election Day.
I voted for the candidate who will be good for the United States.
I have never, in my eighty-two years, felt more fearful for our country.
God bless America!
Please.

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Nov 6 11 10 2024

Juror #2