October 20, 2024
# 1681

Sammy on the right, possessor of the devil’s great laugh
Dom is an angel

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World Food Day

World Food Day is an international day celebrated every year worldwide on October 16 to commemorate the date of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945. The day is celebrated widely by many other organizations concerned with hunger and food security, including the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. WFP received the Nobel Prize in Peace for 2020 for their efforts to combat hunger, contribute to peace in conflict areas, and for playing a leading role in stopping the use of hunger in the form of a weapon for war and conflict.

The World Food Day theme for 2014 was Family Farming: "Feeding the world, caring for the earth"; in 2015 it was "Social Protection and Agriculture: Breaking the Cycle of Rural Poverty"; in 2016 it is Climate Change: "Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too", which echoes the theme of 2008, and of 2002 and 1989 before that. The theme of 2020 was "Grow, nourish, sustain. Together. Our actions are our future."

Van-willem-vincent-gogh-die-kartoffelesser-03850
Vincent van Gogh - Zoom folder : Tiles folder (see "Notes" for assembly details)

It is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The original oil sketch is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and he made lithographs of the image, which are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The painting is considered to be one of Van Gogh's masterpieces

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Commentary
What should I think about hunger? Me, who from time to time indulges myself in pricey Guide Michelin starred dinners?

Should we hand money out to street people?
It is satisfying to give cash directly to those asking, under the assumption it is for their immediate purchase of food or other necessities. But if the ostensibly homeless person is addicted to drugs or alcohol, you may be simply feeding their destructive habits. How are we to know? We can’t. So, it is likely that such a handout does nothing to address their long-term needs; nothing to improve society.

Established organizations, with resources and programs to tackle the root causes of homelessness, like shelter, medical care, and job training, can often provide more sustainable support. For a couple of years, I gave daily cash to a woman whose hangout was near the café I patronized. I got to know her personally and felt that she used the money to eat. In fact, she often ate at Wagamama. I saw her there a few times. I haven’t seen her for years. But there is another woman, I call her Charlestown, she calls me North End, who hangs near my current café. I regularly give her cash, although not as much and not as frequently.

While individual acts of giving can provide immediate relief and personal connection, long-term solutions to poverty are best addressed through established organizations and government support programs that tackle the root causes with comprehensive resources.

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Kat’s Gen Z Corner

October has proven to be the most socially fulfilling month of the year.

Veggies from my latest CSA haul. Half of them went bad immediately, perhaps because I don’t know the proper storage techniques… any recommendations are welcome.

Adult field day in Central Park with my best work friend Maia’s birthday. It’s so fun having wonderful friends and meeting their wonderful friends. Also fall in the park is pure luxury.

Hiking Bear Mountain with the sweetest couple, Angela and John. The last time we double dated was to go mushroom foraging. I think I almost feel cool.

My two yoga aunties accidentally color coordinated. Yvette (left) and Jamie (right) are serious Ashtangis who inspire me on and off the mat.

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Tucker’s Corner

Ed Wood

The Ghost with the Most is back — and so is his creator, his handler, his bedfellow in crooked imagination, Tim Burton. Topping the box office for weeks on end, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has quickly become the director’s biggest hit in nearly 15 years. Whether it also qualifies as a return to form for Hollywood’s most gothically inclined fabulist is another matter. While any amount of macabre (and practically achieved) mischief appears to be cause for celebration in the minds of some loyal and lapsed Burton fans, this very belated legacy sequel still feels hollow in comparison to the artist’s richer works.

The last handful of his works suffer most by unflattering comparison to the entire magic run of Burton’s early years (the films against which nearly all of his 21st-century output has been inevitably, if perhaps unfairly, judged). In fact, this year marks the 30th anniversary of one of his best movies, a showbiz biopic whose luminous celluloid imagery and soulful sincerity puts it in a whole different universe than the one Beetlejuice Beetlejuice inhabits.

Ed Wood has always been an outlier in Burton’s body of baroquely stylized work, even as it’s poignantly aligned with his lifelong, career-spanning obsessions. The film certainly felt like a change of pace in 1994, and not just because it lacked the operatic strains of a Danny Elfman score: After a line of dazzling popcorn daydreams, Burton delved into the more adult (if still awfully unreal) world of 1950s Hollywood, where an indefatigable young go-getter chased his dreams and, for his trouble, earned himself the reputation of Worst Director of All Time.

As if to mirror the means of his subject, Burton worked in a slightly more stripped-down, guerilla style, with fewer elaborate sets and special effects (though the makeup work would win Rick Baker and his team an Oscar). Ed Wood was made for a fraction of the cost of his previous film, the budget-busting Batman Returns — a trade-off for creative control, including the privilege to shoot the movie entirely in black-and-white. On a smaller scale, Burton’s sensibilities deepened and matured; the humanity nipping at the edges of his extravagant fables suddenly took center stage. So, too, did his playful ease with actors.

The childlike wonder of Burton’s most beloved work is still there in Ed Wood. It’s a defining trait of Johnny Depp’s hilariously earnest, career-best performance as Wood. Having ushered Depp into movie stardom with their previous collaboration, the Frankenstein-in-the-burbs snow globe Edward Scissorhands, Burton once more cast the actor as an innocent navigating a cynical modern world. Wood, as Depp plays him, is unabashedly himself, down to his complete lack of shame or self-consciousness about cross-dressing (an element this 1990s movie handles rather matter-of-factly). Wood believed in himself against all sense and reason, and that — as the movie touchingly argues — is what made him a real artist.

Winking at Wood’s dark-and-stormy-night style without succumbing to his artlessness, Ed Wood has the look of sumptuous kitsch. But it’s more of a sly comedy about the difficulty of making movies under the best circumstances, never mind when your passionate drive to create is fully eclipsed by your dearth of qualifications. The film chronicles the assembly of the director’s troupe of has-beens and never-weres, the pro wrestlers and TV personalities and novelty acts that filled out his cast lists. Burton also takes us through the chaos-on-the-set foibles of the director’s most (in)famous pictures, like Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and the all-time heckle fest Plan 9 From Outer Space.

On the matter of authorship, the movie belongs plenty to its screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, then both angling to escape the Woodian indignity of a career exclusively spent writing kiddie crap like Problem Child. It worked: After Ed Wood, the two became go-to guys for so-called “anti-biopics,” giving dramatic shape to the life stories of Larry Flynt, Andy Kaufman, Margaret Keane, and Rudy Ray Moore. Their script is a symphony of first-rate zingers and priceless anecdotes, piecing together a satirical portrait of mid-century Tinseltown through the hustle of its most marginalized, disreputable auteur.

But Ed Wood is also quintessentially Burton: another celebration of beautiful, sympathetic misfits. It might be presumptuous to assume that a movie about moviemaking is the director’s most personal project; most of his films play in some respect like labors of love, telegraphing his taste in dark duds, twisting architecture, and slinky women. But the agony and ecstasy of filmmaking pulses through nearly every frame of Ed Wood. One need not be a hater nor an amateur psychologist to assume that he sees some of himself in Wood, regardless of the chasm separating their respective levels of opportunity and expertise.

Certainly, Burton found something personal in the movie’s most moving relationship, the friendship and creative bond that develops between Wood and the man who was once Dracula, the washed-up Golden Age star Bela Lugosi. Beautifully played by Martin Landau, who won an Oscar for this tender depiction of addiction and twilight-years desperation, Lugosi is at once a fading specter of the Hollywood magic that inspired Wood in the first place and a cautionary tale about how the industry might eat him alive, too. The dynamic between the two — a bittersweet buddy comedy for two castaways of movie land — brings to mind how Burton handed an ailing Vincent Price one of his final roles in Edward Scissorhands a few years earlier.

Burton is, by his own admission, a Wood fan. And judging from Ed Wood, he believes in the gumption of a guy who refused to let something as inconsequential as ineptitude get in the way of his silver-screen ambitions. At the same time, he never tries to reclaim Wood as a misunderstood genius, instead offering plenty of funny evidence to the contrary. Nor does he totally deny the tragic trajectory of the man’s life and career; the film-closing “what happened next” titles lay out the stark truth of his later years spent making pornography and his death of alcoholism at the young age of 54. Ed Wood walks a tricky tightrope. It looks at its subject with neither glib, mean-spirited condescension nor distorting, sentimentality.

The film’s best joke is that Wood had almost everything we value and look for in great directors: vision, determination, self-confidence, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, even a savvy commercial instinct. All he lacked was anything remotely resembling talent. There’s a great scene where one of his actors, the monosyllabic wrestler Tor, flubs his exit and staggers into a door frame, shaking the whole set. Rather than ask for another take, Ed moves on. “It’s real,” he insists. “You know, in actuality, Lobo would have to struggle with that problem every day.” Even when making a boneheaded decision, Wood had his idiosyncratic reasons. That, the movie says, is the soul of creation.

Gen Z: Alexis Brown’s Corner
I got a text from my college friend, Alexis, to the effect:

Dom, I need you to take part in my college assignment: create a 30-second commercial. Will you take the role?
Sure.
You will be an angel playing against the devil to help the boy choose (or not) an alcoholic drink.
When?
Tomorrow at 8.15pm.
In the event, the commercial was filmed in a convenience store with a crew of ten student-participants, the crew entirely orderly and creative, professional.
Other than myself, the actors and director were fantastic.
It took 90 minutes to film.
For an 82-year-old guy, an adventure with a dozen college-age students was an absolute blast.
They thanked me profusely when the reality was I the grateful one.

The space was tight which added to the fun of it.
This was prepping a close-up of the angel [me]: note the halo.

Sammy was a perfect devil.
He had a great devil's laugh.

Note the cameramen in the background.
I loved the communication between the cameramen and the director, Ariel, she not shown.

There we were.
The full cast.
Outside the store, preparing for Frank to do his chugging moment.

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Dining Out: Chillingsworth
Brewster, Ma

I got a notice from a Chillingsworth newsletter re: their fall menu. Chillingsworth is in Brewster, a 2-hour drive from Boston. When I proposed a trip there, my monthly dinner companion was enthusiastic. She has fond memories of many visits there in days long gone by.(I added ‘long’ because I know Kathy will smile and nod her head when she reads it.)

My own memories of Chillingsworth stem from fifty years ago (no, not a misprint) when that restaurant was cutting edge for fine dining in New England. While it is no longer head and shoulders above its competition, it is still, today, a darned good evening out.

We shared four courses, a Butternut Squash Soup with a drizzle of reduced apple cider, Pappardelle with Bolognese Sauce, Steak Frites, and a trio of variations on Crème Brulee, with a modified wine pairing.

Every course was well done and greatly appreciated. We enjoyed an exquisite private dining room. The wine selection was well chosen. The ambience was elegant. The service was warm, friendly, and spot on.

Chillingsworth is a reasonably-priced lovely dining experience.

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Chuckles and Thoughts

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Six Word Stories
”Forgotten promises. Unsent letters. Silent ache.”

Edgar Degas - In a Café - Google Art Project 2
Edgar Degas - Google Art Project: Home - pic Maximum resolution.

In the Mail

This from our in-house fisherman:

Hey everyone – got the chance to fish in Iceland for a week last month.

Here’s a 12-minute video recap you might enjoy: Iceland 2024 for Sea Run Brown Trout at Battle Hill Lodge

If 12 minutes is insanely long, here is the last three minutes which has some cool drone footage and photos: https://youtu.be/MdhkYJHdPZI?si=d58AuHcVyN4lTAc9&t=568

These videos look fantastic on a big screen at 4K but should also work on smartphones.

Hope you are doing well!

Chris

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Last Comment
Am writing this on the Amtrak from Savannah, Georgia to Florence, So Carolina, heading for a meetup with my beloved nephew, Stephen. We’ll spend the day touring the area with special emphasis on walking Stephen’s property. I am looking forward to view the results of his earnest efforts over the past year.
BTW: Stephen is the source of the chuckles with pictures that have been appearing in existentialautotrip these last several months.
TBC

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Oct 16 October 20. 2024

Ed Wood