Update on Joss Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing

To update my post of August 2, 2013, I saw in last Sunday's NY Times that Much Ado has been released on DVD.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

If you are young enough to have a seventy-year-old (or older) parent, or old enough to be getting close to that age yourself, you should run, not walk, to buy a copy of Katy Butler's Knocking on Heaven's Door:  The Path to a Better Way of Death (Scribner, 2013).

By turns a memoir about her parents Jeff and Valerie as first one and then the other declines and dies, an unsparing account of her own frustrations about never being able to cope with her mother, let alone live up to her expectations, and a clear-eyed analysis of the too-often-unspoken mores of the medical profession that value (and reward) the prolongation of life over any other concern, Knocking on Heaven's Door will leave you shaken.

More than that, however, you may well begin thinking about your own future.  What do you want out of life?  How do you want it to end?  For most of us, the choices may not be as simple as the bang or the whimper we used to believe were the two witty alternatives.  Jeff Butler had a pacemaker installed while he was in relatively good health.  But when his health began to fail, that pacemaker kept his heart beating long after almost everything else of him had ceased to function.  No doctor wanted to turn it off--and that was only one of the problems Valerie Butler faced.  Caring for her husband at home probably shortened her own life.  After his death, she began to fail.  The good news is that the negative experiences of caring for her husband had taught her enough that, with her daughter's help, she was able to make better choices for herself about the best way to die.

May we all have the courage Valerie Butler had, and may we all read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the path to a better way of death that Katy Butler has described in Knocking on Heaven's Door.  Lots of books have the potential to change your life; this one could change your death.

Highly recommended.

The CIA's Italian Cooking by Scappin, Vanoli, and Kolpan

Mention "CIA," and the response will invariably distinguish a black ops wanna-be from a foodie.  This post is for those who first think, "Culinary Institute of America." My wife Caroline and I have eaten in CIA's Ristorante Caterina de' Medici, and eaten very well indeed, so I was predisposed in favor of this cookbook.  Italian Cooking is in the atHome series of cookbooks published by the CIA; it came out in 2011.  Basically a survey of regional dishes illustrated with lush photographs, it has an introductory chapter on the foods and wines of Italy and then a sequence of chapters loosely resembling the sequence of a meal, except that it begins with  spuntini (snacks), takes a detour to conserve (preserves and pickles), and only then briskly proceeds through crudi, soups, pasta, gnocchi, rice dishes, fish, meats, and dolci (desserts).

Many recipes are illustrated, but not all.  Those that are, however, confirm Levi-Strauss's perception that food photography aimed at an affluent audience presents the food in close-up, easily within reach because they can afford it.  This volume's photographs are not only close up, they are enlarged more than life size, much like what you might glimpse just before you buried your head in the platter.  The magnification quickly becomes off-putting.

Another off-putting aspect of this book is its layout.  Every recipe is given in Italian, with a following translation in English.  Then come a few sentences of introduction.  The text for the number of servings is in bold typeface, but then, inexplicably, the steps to follow for the recipe are in light typeface.  Given that anyone following a recipe has to look at each step several times, making the type harder to see makes no sense at all.  This is bad design.

But wait, there are more problems.  It appears that nobody tried to follow these recipes.  Take the one for Minestra di fagioli e cozze, Bean and Mussel Soup.  After soaking the beans for a least eight hours, the recipe calls for adding the beans to the broth the mussels have been cooked in.  Fine.  How long should the beans cook?  "Until the beans are very tender"--that's no help at all for the cook trying to figure out a time schedule.  Saying the beans should take approximately 45-50 minutes would be far more useful.  And the quantities are questionable:  one pound of mussels for a soup that serves 10-12 people?  What, two mussels per bowl of bean and mussel soup?  I cut the recipe in half and used two pounds of mussels.

Another problem is organization.  The recipe for polenta gnocchi (p. 201) is based "on using leftover polenta"; fine and dandy, but how one makes the polenta in the first place is only accorded three sentences some 60 pages later. To find even that information, one has to go to the index and read through two more recipes, with only the second being helpful.

A similar problem can be found in some of the pasta recipes.  The introductory material on cooking pasta suggests keeping back a cup or so of the pasta water to finish the sauce.  Excellent advice.  Sometimes a given pasta recipe will tell the cook to hold some back.  Others, however, contain a kind of bizarre boilerplate, as in step 2 for Spaghetti cacio e pepe:  "Transfer a few ladlefuls of pasta water from of the pot (sic) to a bowl or cup to have ready for finishing the sauce if your recipe calls for that step" (my italics).  And what do we find in step 3?  "Add about 1/4 cup of the pasta cooking water to the spaghetti to moisten the pasta slightly."  Better copy editing would have eliminated these awkward spots.

Finally, if you do find what looks like an interesting recipe, you'd better make a note of its page number on the endpaper.  I tried for the first time Pasta alla Norma, Pasta with Tomatoes, Eggplant, and Ricotta Salata. It was delicious.  But, when I wanted to go back to the recipe and make some notes for another time, I couldn't find it in the Index.  It's not under "Pasta" or under "Norma."  I had to go page by page through the pasta section to find it. 

Bottom line: give it a miss.

Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods

Joe Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods:  A Season Living Among the Wild Turkey (Lyons Press, 1995) is one of those wonderful books that can only be written by someone who cares deeply about the subject and writes so well that you come away not only better informed but with the sense that you're a better person simply for having read the book. 

Illumination in the Flatwoods remained off my radar until I read about it in Steve Bodio's informative A Sportsman's Library.  What Hutto did was to incubate, hatch, and imprint two clutches of wild turkey eggs that otherwise would have been destroyed.  What he did not anticipate was the degree to which he would become devoted to these birds, devoted both in the sense of giving them most of his waking hours (and therefore never getting enough sleep) for two entire years, and in the sense of caring deeply about each one of them.

The La Brea tar pit of Disney-inspired sentimentality always lurks near writers of books like this, but Hutto never falls into it.  He knows the mortality percentages for wild turkey poults, but he also feels for each and every loss.  Even more important, his attentiveness to his flock enables him to shed his customary critical, analytical perspective and begin to enter another world of consciousness.  Richard Dawkins has remarked that we need to enlarge our scientific understanding by learning to see through non-human eyes.  Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods goes far towards accomplishing this goal.  Hutto lets us see through a wild turkey's eyes another world, one intricately woven of interactions and interconnections, another world of alertness and attentiveness we would do well to explore. 

Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine

What Gertrude Stein is reputed to have said about Oakland--"There is no there there"--unfortunately might also be applied to Allen's most recent film, Blue Jasmine.  Cate Blanchett gives a superb portrayal of Jasmine, a woman who has married up and lives a life of leisure, consuming only vodka and tranquilizers.  Completely self-centered, she goes to pieces when her charming husband (Alec Baldwin) gets nabbed for investor fraud and all their worldly goods are confiscated (which you would think would be bad enough, but  no:  Allen has to include scenes in which she finally learns of her husband's long-standing infidelities and his desire for a divorce).  Her solution is to leave the East and go to San Francisco to live with her sister, well played by Sally Hawkins, who has remained in the blue collar world Jasmine somehow managed to escape.  It's improbable on the face of it that this physically attractive but mindless Jasmine could have managed to reach the top 1% on her own, but never mind.

At its core, this purports to be a comedy based on class differences, with Jasmine struggling to survive in a working class environment.  Blanchett is wonderful, but her role is inadequately conceived.  There may well be a nod on Woody Allen's part to Streetcar Named Desire,  but the difference is that we care about Blanche DuBois. With one exception, which I'll return to in a moment, we don't care about Jasmine.  Allen puts Jasmine in unfamiliar situations, having to make conversation with her sister's complacently male friends, for example, or writhing away from a dentist's embraces after she finally lands a job as his receptionist, but Allen doesn't shape the scenes.  Any controlling point of view is noteworthy by its absence.  Jasmine can not learn how to use a computer, for example.  This is not amusing, it's inane.  She gratuitously lies about herself and her past to an attractive man (Peter Sarsgaard) she meets at a party.  He falls for it.  Inane again.  Window shopping for an engagement ring, the two of them are unexpectedely confronted by Jasmine's former brother-in-law (Andrew Dice Clay).  The engagement is off.  Quelle surprise! Do we care?  No.  The machinery of the plot all but creaks.  Are we amused?  No.  Do we gain any self-knowledge, seeing some portion of ourselves mirrored, if only darkly?  No.

I mentioned earlier that Jasmine is completely self-centered.  Throughout the film, she continually talks about herself.  By the end, hopeless, she goes to a park and begins muttering.  She's become the kind of person on a park bench the rest of us edge away from.  At this point, paradoxically, we care about her.  Yes, she's brought this upon herself, but now she's mentally ill.  What Allen apparently doesn't realize is that she deserves our compassion, not our contempt.  Puck might see her plight as an example of what fools we mortals are.  But Allen is no Puck, and this is no comedy, not even a satiric one.  There's no there there.  It's simply cruel.

A miss, an utter miss.

Melissa Milgrom's Still Life: Aventures in Taxidermy

Milgrom's Still Life:  Adventures in Taxidermy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) is a lively book on a subject few of us, I imagine, think about at all.  At once an informal history of taxidermy, an engaging profile of several taxidermists, English, American, and Canadian, and a candid account of her own attempt to mount a Brooklyn squirrel running along a wire, Still Life deftly engages the reader and keeps that reader turning pages.  As if all that weren't enough, Milgrom gives a wonderful account of how taxidermists compete with each other and how the judges, in turn, evaluate their work (I'll say only that the genitals turn out to be very important).  Is taxidermy a craft?  An art?  Or something that on occasion inhabits the vague boundary between the two?  Reading Still Life won't give you the answers, but Milgrom will get you thinking about the question. Highly recommended.

Whedon's Much Ado is Really Something!

Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing has never been a favorite comedy of mine--not, that is, until last night, when I had the pleasure of seeing Joss Whedon's recent film.  The verbal sparring of Beatrice and Benedick had always struck me as tiresome, while the malapropisms of the constable Dogberry had always seemed to me more contrived than amusing. 

But Whedon has forced me to change my mind.  He has directed and produced a film of Much Ado that is truly a festive comedy.  Not only does the film end with a dance, but it makes the audience want to get up and dance with the characters.  And somehow he managed to make this movie in a mere twelve days while keeping within a miniscule budget.

Is it a perfect film?  Well, no.  It's set in our time in what looks like Santa Monica.  For a duke to pull up to a house in a procession of limos doesn't quite equal the pageantry of an entrance on stage, while the discrepancy of men in suits and ties speaking Shakespeare to each other is initially off-putting.  And pulling back your suit jacket to point towards an automatic in a belt holster doesn't work as well as a hand on your sword when challenging somebody to a duel.  Having Beatrice slosh down so much wine seems rather too much of a good thing.

What bothered me the most is the enforced split in the characterization of Hero (Jillian Morgese) and Beatrice (Amy Acker).  Whedon motivated the putdowns between Beatrice and Benedick (Alexis Denisof) by opening with a scene of Benedick leaving Beatrice's bed:  she is feigning sleep, he is trying to decide whether to say anything before he leaves.  He remains silent.  In the narrow sense of motivating their professed distaste for each other, the scene works.  In terms of the film as a whole, however, it's questionable.  Hero, Beatrice's beloved cousin, is the model of chastity who is (falsely) accused of being a wanton.  Beatrice is staunch in her support.  But the polarizing language of Shakespeare's virgin/whore dichotomy to me cast a shadow over Beatrice's character--as it wouldn't have done if Whedon had not interpolated that scene.

Nevertheless, I'll still give Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing an A.  The casting is right on, every actor performs admirably, the slapstick farce is funny, and the movie joyful.  See it if you possibly can.  A hit, a palpable hit!