November 26 2023 — Existential Autotrip

November 26, 2023
# 1632

***Last Thought: Feature Story***
I will remember this night forever as the full circle moment where I realized I am worthy of anyone’s love and attention, even the girl on the screen who I’ve idolized since forever. It showed me how easy it can be to drop deeply in with someone else and radically changed my understanding of meaningful relationships. She really lived up to every preconceived idea I formulated of her, which I hear is so rare for celebrities, and I will be forever grateful for this experience.

Story below in Gen Z section

Turkey still warm from slaughter house in Chinatown

Patience for the turkey run up to Thanksgiving

You’d look old and wrinkly too after 17 hours in a 200* oven

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Cover Story
Turkey is perhaps my favorite food. So when I discovered that Wings, the live poultry house where I buy my chickens (and they are the best in the world) was going to be selling live turkeys, I was ecstatic.

I generally buy my turkey from Savenor on Charles St. They come with every pedigree and honor you can name. And they always get one for me, no matter the season. In fact, they go a step beyond and sell me a half turkey. I live alone. A guest or two, frequently, to help me eat it, but even after three meals, the half turkey is always plenty for me and my guests. I have noticed that the turkeys have gotten pricey. I’m not one to complain about food prices (if you get what you want that’s worth something) but $10.00/lb. seems a bit of a reach, even for me who am disposed to pay top dollar.

But is wasn’t at all the price that was impelling me, it was imagining what the bird would taste like. If the chicken was so much better than anyone else’s, what if the turkey was that much better than Savenor’s delicious bird? The biggest problem was that there are no half-turkeys at Wings. We’re talking 20lb birds. I live alone. [But I do entertain a good deal.] In the event, the lure of the flavor, which my imagination was telling me will be unsurpassed, was my guiding principle.

Sunday morning, @ 8.00am, I set out for Chinatown to get my turkey. I arrived at 8.20am (they open at 8.00am) and the line was already formed. The birds are quiet in their cages. I was ninth in line (do you count your place number when you are in line?). It took 25 minutes to make my way to the head of the line because their Chinese clientele were ordering 8 to 20 chickens each. I noted that every one of them brought their own bags, perfectly suited for their order. I paid .30 for my bag.

But I finally got to the head of the line and ordered my turkey. The saleswoman/cashier was happy to see me (I’m there every week and I never see another white boy shopping there) and called in the order for my turkey. I paid, $98.00 for a twenty-pound turkey. The turkey turned out to be twenty pounds, or $5.00/lb. I strolled about Chinatown and returned in fifteen minutes. Two minutes after my arrival, she was helping me get the monster into my large backpack. The feet stuck out of the top of my pack.

I carried the monster home, it was heavy. I prepared it for the oven and @ 2.00pm I set it into my oven and set the temperature at 200*.

Seventeen hours later it was done.

Handling the cooked bird, carving it up, bagging it, making turkey stock to be reduced to an intense gravy, making turkey soup, and preparing dinner for three [can you guess the main course?] was a project.

Was it worth the effort and the cost?
What is the best turkey drumstick I have ever eaten worth? The juicy bird, texturally perfect, and intensely flavorful gave me maximum pleasure. Yes, worth it.
Any hedonist will tell you that such a meal is worth a lot of energy, money, and even pain.

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Commentary
Considering wine as a necessary complement to a meal can dramatically increase a food budget. A decent red wine costs $20.00 a bottle; a white, $15.00 a bottle, a bottle being a typical quantity for two adults.

Consider having bone-in pork chops for dinner, at a cost of $8.00 per pound. Consider buying a pound per person. Consider, then, that the food portion of dinner costs $11.00 [$3.00 for vegetables, fats, and pickings].

Consider this. We cannot on a nightly basis just sit down to a table carrying the necessary flatware in your hands, and scoff the food. Serve it in a trough, please. Save the plate. Why can we not? Because a hugely important part of each day of your life will be cancelled. How important is dining? Your mental health depends on it. Your entire well-being and the definition of who you are warped without a lovely meal.

Dinner requires, medically requires, a somewhat formal, social, leisurely experience. That means a well-set table, perhaps an extra course, and gentility, in this iteration, gentility includes the appreciation of the effort of the cook. What a lovely moment is dinner.

Unfortunately, to maximize the effort to create a dining moment, we need to add from $7.50 to $10.00 to our food budget. That’s $70.00 a week for a product that many people would not admit to being food. Is it worth it? Consider, damn right, it is. I drink that 1/2 bottle daily [sometimes choosing gin and tonic instead] and look forward to the slight buzz as background to my dining experience. Think of that glass of wine as an aid that help you and your dinner companions to unwind and relax. Look forward to slowing down the pace of the dinner to more greatly enjoy the food and the company. And look forward to the wine’s complement and enhancement of the food. Look forward to drinking carefully, enjoying the look, the smell, the taste, and the aftertaste of the wine itself. And look forward to choosing from a wide variety of wines and the resulting experimental pairing of the wine with the food creating exciting and diverse culinary experiences. And, carrying wine-drinking a bit further, consider taking five minutes to as the internet about the wine you are drinking. You might really enjoy the resulting wine-tasting.

Consider that wine greatly enhances your dining experience, and buy and enjoy the wine and your dinner.

To celebrate the completion of my novel, I considered opening up a bottle of Champagne. I asked AI what people liked about Champagne, and here is a summary of the response.

People often enjoy real Champagne for several reasons, which contribute to its reputation as a luxurious and celebratory beverage:
Elegant Bubbles: Champagne is known for its fine and persistent bubbles that create a delightful effervescence in the glass, adding a sense of festivity and luxury to any occasion.
Complex Flavors: Champagne offers a wide range of complex flavors, including citrus, apple, pear, and toasty, yeasty notes. These flavors develop over time as the wine ages, making each bottle unique.
Versatile Pairing: Champagne's acidity and effervescence make it a versatile pairing for a variety of foods, from seafood and poultry to cheese and desserts. It can enhance the dining experience and complement a wide range of dishes.
Celebratory Symbolism: Champagne is often associated with celebrations and special occasions, making it a popular choice for toasting and marking significant milestones in life.
Craftsmanship: Authentic Champagne is produced in the Champagne region of France, following strict regulations and traditional methods. People appreciate the craftsmanship and expertise that go into making each bottle.
Aging Potential: High-quality Champagnes can age gracefully for many years, allowing wine enthusiasts to enjoy the evolution of flavors and aromas over time.
Luxurious Image: Champagne has a luxurious image, associated with glamour, sophistication, and exclusivity, which appeals to those seeking a sense of indulgence.
Refreshing and Crisp: The natural acidity in Champagne gives it a refreshing and crisp quality, making it enjoyable on its own or as part of a cocktail, like the classic Champagne cocktail or mimosa.
Memorable Moments: Many people associate Champagne with memorable moments, such as weddings, New Year's Eve, and other joyous events, creating positive emotional connections.
Status and Prestige: Some individuals enjoy Champagne as a status symbol, appreciating the prestige associated with well-known Champagne brands and their limited production.
Overall, real Champagne offers a combination of sensory pleasures, cultural significance, and emotional resonance that contribute to its enduring popularity and appeal.

Once in a while I have the time to learn a little about the specific wine I am about to drink. I track other peoples’ tasting notes. Here are my notes after we drank that bottle.

Champagne, Laherte Freres, Brut Nature, Blanc de Blancs, $60.00

The producers, Laherte Freres, consider this the purest expression of the Chardonnay grapes coming from the Coteaux Sud d'Epernay and one of Laherte Freres' most iconic cuvees.

Appearance: Pale yellow; small bubbles, many of them. Very attractive in a champagne flute.

Smell: crisp green apple, fresh bread, lemon, minerals, cheese rind

Taste: Minerals, melon, intense citrus fruits with green apple lemon

Body: medium to full-bodied

Feel: acids give a slight bite; as do the crispy bubbles which I adore.

Aftertaste: a long, saline finish

Gestalt: vines growing in the chalky Côteaux Sud d’Épernay give the wine a chalky* quality.

*A chalky sensation in wine typically refers to a dry, gritty, or powdery feeling in the mouth when you sip the wine. It can be similar to the sensation of licking or biting into a piece of chalk. This characteristic is often associated with certain types of mineral-rich soils, such as chalk or limestone, where the grapes were grown. Chalky wines may also be described as having a mineral or stony quality. It's one of the many descriptors used by wine tasters to convey the tactile experience of the wine in addition to its flavor and aroma.

Monk Testing Wine by Antonio Casanova y Estorach (c. 1886)
Antonio Salvador Casanova y Estorach - Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 06.336.1.jpg

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Kat’s Gen Z Corner

False Gods

Never in a hundred years would I think someone as elegant and cool as she would entertain someone as sloppy and inarticulate as I. Like, really, the thought never crossed my mind.

I’ve watched Hitomi Mochizuki’s Youtube videos for years, looking up to her confident sense of self, groundedness in spirituality, and reverence for life. Yes, she’s an influencer — I’m Gen Z, try not to cringe; this is inevitable. She is essentially a professional frolicker, videotaping herself dancing in flower fields or crafting amateur pottery or reciting poetry in candle lit bedrooms. She gets paid millions to romanticize her life, and I love her because her brand feels like a hug to the soul. One million other people, her subscribers, feel similarly.

Never in a hundred years would I think someone as elegant and cool as she would entertain someone as sloppy and inarticulate as I. Like, really, the thought never crossed my mind.

Until a few weeks ago, when I walked into my Ashtanga Yoga class and saw her boyfriend in the studio. I gawked and he gawked back until the neurons fired in my brain and connected him to her. I smiled, introduced myself as a fellow fan, and asked him out for coffee.

Since, he and I have gotten half a dozen coffees in just under three weeks, becoming fast friends. He’s in NYC for a month, as is she, and we’ve enjoyed talking about Ashtanga, the meaning of life, our spiritual journeys, and whatever else you talk about with contemporary hippies. He spoke about Hitomi so casually, and I found it a challenge to maintain my cool as he did so. She was a celebrity I’ve admired for years! But pretending not to fangirl was part of the fun. Not permitting myself to ask about her. This was no big deal. Yea.

Last week, I invited him to a high level lecture on yoga philosophy in Soho. He happily agreed and, the day of, told me that Hitomi would be joining us. I still didn’t allow myself the sheer joy of this. This was the person whose every move on all social media platforms I’ve hyper-analyzed, hoping that some of her beauty, grace, and spiritual intellect would rub off on me. She was going to cancel. She wasn’t even a real person. I shouldn’t dwell on something that wasn’t really happening, right?

Until it did.

When Hitomi walked into the studio, I had to recalibrate her as a 3D live human — not a 2D figure on my iPad screen. I was shocked to realize she was my height, which immediately grounded her for me. (I guess all my idols are 6’2 in my head?) She behaved exactly as I imagined, and more. She embraced me as if we were longtime friends (which might be half true?) and floated around the studio with such ease in her body and spoke with incredible poise and humility. I still could not believe it. Here she was! And she was everything!

Hitomi sat next to me for the lecture, during which we all took notes, and the whole time I was trying not to sweat profusely and think about the fact I was sitting next to my spiritual idol. Highly ungrounded of me. After, we stayed back to share our learnings with each other and thank the lecturers (who were Deepak Chopra and Eddie Stern, two real legends in their own right).

It was 8 p.m., but Hitomi doesn’t drink alcohol (way too enlightened for that), so I thought the night was over. I was desperate to stay, to not let go, so I asked her if she had time to linger. She knew a late night cafe around the corner that served the best mushroom tea (of course she did), and the three of us journeyed there to geek out about our favorite Ram Dass teachings and share what’s “nourishing our soul” right now. Hitomi bought us the tea, which was hearty and fabulous, and we stayed talking until the cafe closed.

We were unapologetic in our young flowery language and romanticism of life. Celebrity aside, I realized we’re both just 20-something women trying to go deeper in our understanding of ourselves and our purpose. It was truly one of the most wholesome and heart-warming experiences of my life.

I will remember this night forever as the full circle moment where I realized I am worthy of anyone’s love and attention, even the girl on the screen who I’ve idolized since forever. It showed me how easy it can be to drop deeply in with someone else and radically changed my understanding of meaningful relationships. She really lived up to every preconceived idea I formulated of her, which I hear is so rare for celebrities, and I will be forever grateful for this experience.

It also turns out, however, that she, too, isn’t perfect, and later badly hurt and broke up with my new friend.

So this night will remain a perfect moment in time, and I bow to no false god.

I’ll still keep watching her videos, though.

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Tucker’s Corner

I did have a new film to write about this week but I also wanted to let everyone know that I finished my writing on the rest of David Fincher’s filmography. For those interested you can find those posts here.

Christmas came early for me in the form of a new Ridley Scott film in theaters. The gift has an extra shine on it because it’s a historical epic which is Ridley’s bread a butter. No one was large scale warfare on film like this man and I’ll show up for it every single time. I’m happy to report his newest is a wonderful addition to his filmography. This is Napoleon.

I like to imagine how Napoleon Bonaparte would feel if he could somehow learn the definition of “Napoleon complex.” The French commander who conquered half of Europe was subjected to plenty of cracks about his height in his own lifetime, but he didn’t live nearly long enough to see his name reduced to a pseudo-psychological SHORThand. The indignity continues unabated with Napoleon, a lavish, Hollywood tour of Bonaparte’s biggest military and political accomplishments that also happens to be a savagely funny character study of an insecure weirdo overcompensating for something. There are few short jokes, but almost all the humor is at the expense of a man small in much more than stature.

Make no mistake, Napoleon often does fit the profile of a standard historical epic, at least in the broad strokes. The film spans several decades, from Bonaparte’s rise to power straight through to his final days in exile, dramatizing many of the major Wikipedia bullet points in between. And with visual master Ridley Scott behind the camera, one can count on seeing the emperor’s most famous tactical victories recreated on a gigantic canvas, grand in scale and bloody in detail. But the fulcrum of this history lesson (and the idiosyncratic center of the movie) is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in the title role. He really takes the great man out of the Great Man biopic, inserting a perverted dweeb in his place.

The script by David Scarpa – who wrote Scott’s underrated All the Money in the World and his forthcoming Gladiator sequel – opens in 1793, with the French Revolution. Once fitted for a crown, Marie Antoinette (wordlessly played by Catherine Walker) is fitted for the guillotine. Into the void steps Phoenix’s Napoleon, a 24-year-old Corsican artillery commander whose keen intellect for strategy is eclipsed only by his career aspirations. On the battlefield and in the political arena, he is a creature of opportunity, always seeking advantage. Eventually, he will parlay his military conquests to a seat in the throne as emperor.

Ridley gallops through the career milestones, but slows to a trot whenever the man’s libido is inflamed. Much of Napoleon revolves around his romance with Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), the widowed beauty he eventually marries. Their courtship is its own kind of battle, a struggle for power fought through coaxed declarations of faith and need. (“You would be nothing without me,” he makes her declare, right before Scott cuts to Joséphine demanding the same words from him later.) The movie frames much of the action through Napoleon’s letters to Joséphine, read in voice-over, which has the effect of linking all his choices to his feelings of ardor and jealousy – a reductive but dramatically persuasive reading.

Phoenix, as ever, folds psychology into physicality. He looks initially like the personification of repression, clenched tighter than his uniform. I appreciated that this film doesn’t overemphasize the height thing. It feels as though Ridley and Phoenix thought those jokes were beneath their station. This Napoleon is more emotionally stunted, another boy-man on the spectrum of arrested development the star has continuously constructed. In him, you can see the immaturity of his performances in films like The Master, Joker, and Beau is Afraid. At times, he is like a child doing an impression of adult sternness. The movie gets big laughs out of his lapses in self-awareness – how he doth protest too much on matters of his own insecurity and ambition. The conniption fits are especially inspired, too: “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” he impotently bellows at the Brits, his naval superiors.

In between the comedy of manners, Ridley is right at home orchestrating panoramas of visceral mayhem, a greatest hits of Napoleonic warfare staged through slow-motion, CGI, and big crowds of extras. He gives us the cracking-ice misfortune of The Battle of Austerlitz and the vast, smoking-landscape enormity of Waterloo. We see the size of the armies; the damage cannonballs can do to bodies both human and equine. All of this is as technically impressive as one might expect from a Hollywood filmmaker fond of spending mountains of money on live-action games of Risk. The battles aren’t quite immersive (they put you in the balcony instead of the trenches), but I think that’s maybe appropriate for a portrait of a leader who saw the men under him as grist for the machine of war. It’s telling that the movie lavishes little attention upon strategy or tactical genius, and no rousing celebration on the aftermath of victory. It does keep a tally of the dead, however – a rising casualty list that puts the man’s legacy in daunting statistical terms.

French director Abel Gance needed more than five hours to tell only a portion of Napoleon’s story back in 1927. (Budgetary concerns sank his vision for sequels that would capture the whole saga.) Scott covers the entire scope of his career in under three. As historical theater, his Napoleon is streamlined to a fault, squashing some 30 years into a supercut of incident. All of which to say, it’s hardly surprising that the director has a longer version in the chamber, à la his similarly sweeping Kingdom of Heaven. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that a four-hour Napoleon might be richer and maybe, paradoxically lighter on its feet. It would probably breathe more than this all-highlights cut, which feels rather impersonal in its ticking off of dates, names, and places.

But in its more intimate moments, its peeks behind the curtain of textbook history, the movie flirts with something funnier and weirder: a veritable roast of royalty, taking special delight in the romantic and professional humiliations visited upon one of Europe’s, nay humanity’s, most famous figures. It’s as if Scott rewatched his own Gladiator, the film that put a love of old-world bloodshed into him and realized that the most interesting character wasn’t Russell Crowe’s Maximus but Phoenix’s vain, bitter Commodus. His Napoleon is what it looks like when you build a whole towering drama around the fragile ego of such a scoundrel. And in the disparity between Napoleon’s impact and his inherent smallness, the movie gets at the complexes shaping today’s halls of power. In the shadow of Bonaparte, little men continue to inflict their inadequacy on the world.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
All it takes is a beautiful fake smile to hide an injured soul.
Robin Williams

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Six Word Stories
"Broken heart, mended soul, stronger together."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nov 22 November 26 2023