Pea Soup

A hedge fund manager made headlines the other day for paying 285 million—or was in 385?—for a half-finished apartment in Manhattan. But on a gray, slightly snowy day in January, it's hard to beat sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of the fire with a mug of split-pea soup in one hand and a copy of Montaigne's Essays  in the other.

The snow is so light, you can shovel it with one arm, which is what I did. And birds seem to be arriving at the feeder from all over the neighborhood: pileated, red-breasted, and downy woodpeckers, five or six cardinals at a time, shifting places or waiting their turn on the naked branches of the Amur maple trees near the fence. There's a frenzy in the air, and it's exciting to witness it.

I made the pea soup yesterday, and it taught me two lessons. The first is that green pea soup can be as good as yellow pea soup. I'd been hung up on the French-Canadian yellow pea variety, but they didn't have yellow peas at the grocery store. In boiling up the green split peas, I noticed for the first time that they actually smell like fresh green peas. It's a nice, summer-time smell.

(Minnesota is the nation's largest producer of peas. Farmers here plant 90 thousand acres a year, and the revenue they generate from this activity averages $38 million per year. This means that if all the pea farmers in Minnesota pooled their proceeds for ten years, they, too, could buy a penthouse in Manhattan, perhaps setting up a time-share?)

The second thing I learned is that it's a good idea to overload your pea soup with sautéed onions, celery, and carrots. Don't hold back. (What else are you going to do with that celery, anyway?) Summer savory is the preferred herb, but go easy on the salt, because that big chunk of salt pork is going to have a profound effect on the flavor.

At a certain point in the afternoon, it's a good idea to go out and get some air. Hilary and I drove down to the Lake Harriet Kite Festival, and we even brought along a kite I'd gotten recently as a birthday gift. In the end, we left the kite in the car, but enjoyed being out on the ice with several hundred other winter enthusiasts.

The kites were not overwhelming--little dots of color here and there. There wasn't enough wind, and it was difficult to run across the frozen lake, which was covered with a thin veneer of loose snow, at any great speed without taking a fall. But a few had gotten airborne. 

The ghost of Art Shanties Future

There was also an ice fishing contest for kids, food trucks, and a canvas tent dispensing free coffee to anyone who would make a contribution to the Art Shanty Villages, which lost out on their grant this year and will not be in operation.

Just being out on the open expanse of a frozen lake, with people passing this way and that, like a scene from Dr. Zhivago, is a thrill. At one booth they were renting fat-tire bikes, and we could see little squadrons pedaling off across the ice.  

All the way there and back on Wirth Parkway, we listened to a mysterious CD recorded in a Norwegian church by the Karl Ivar Refseth Trio called Praying. (We're talking here about a vibraphone, a double bass, and an alto saxophone, or occasionally a duduk--an ancient double reed woodwind instrument from Armenia made of apricot wood.)

Back home, I faced a challenge that no hedge fund manager will ever face. The fire had gone out while we were gone, but it was still smoldering. There were some golden pieces of split cedar kindling sitting in the wicker basket by the hearth. I'd split them myself from the butt end of a long cedar beam I'd been cherishing in the garage for years. If I'd tossed one in, it would have burst into flame and revived the fire. But I'm reluctant to use them because they're so precious and so beautiful. They smell heavenly, they burn perfectly, they crackle like nobody's business. Supplies are limited...

I think you can see the delicate position I was in.

The Green Book and other Fables

The Green Book is a winner, and it's hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. (Yet some people haven't, and perhaps there are good reasons why.)  It's well crafted, like the best comedies from Hollywood's golden age, and to describe it as cliché-ridden is like saying the Comedia del Arte is full of stock characters or that the sonata form repeats a lot. What else is new? The question is, what is being made of those patterns, those materials?

The basic formula is easy to describe: Tony, a brusque Italian-American bouncer (Viggo Mortenson) from the Bronx, temporarily unemployed, takes a job driving Doc (Mahershala Ali), a talented and effete black pianist who lives in an apartment in Carnegie Hall, on a concert tour through the South. 

Tony lives in a world of ethnic and cultural stereotypes, like most people of that era, but he's actually a fairly nice guy. He also has a reputation for being able to "handle" trouble, which is why he got the job. Doc knows there's going to be trouble during the tour. According to his band mates, that's one of the reasons he decided to undertake it.

The film largely consists of a series of conversations between this "odd couple" punctuated by incidents in which they encounter difficulties—some the result of deeply engrained attitudes of the Deep South, others largely self-generated.

The dialog is often funny, but it's also touching in many places. Doc tries to get Tony to improve his diction and helps him write love letters home to his wife; Frank introduces Doc to Little Richard and tries to get him to eat a piece of fried chicken. At one point he exclaims, "Doc, I'm more black than you!" No, Doc corrects him stiffly, you're not.

The film doesn't offer any sweeping vision or formula for the future of race relations. Then again, as far as I can recall, neither did Trading Places, Silver Streak, or Rush Hour II. But in describing it as a comedy, I don't mean to suggest it doesn't explore some very ugly corners of the American scene. The genius in the film lies in the success with which the main characters, who would be very unlikely to associate under normal circumstances, develop a grudging fondness for each other, working their way through the clichés to make contact with deeper veins of personal character.  

Shoplifters

We don't often get a good look at the underbelly of Japanese life, where men and women form unusual living arrangements and scam the government in order to get by. In Shoplifters we meet up with a disparate group of individuals living in a two-room apartment. Granny is a cagey old coot, though it's not clear who's grandma she is. The "man of the house," Osamu, has a job as a day-laborer but spends quite a bit of time shoplifting with a boy named Shota who lives with the family. The "mother," Nobuyo, works at an industrial laundry, and a younger woman named Aki also occupies some space.

Though their situation may be dire, especially after Osamu injures his foot at a construction site, the tone of the film tends to be light. Osama is a puckish character, they've got sources of revenue, food on the table, and a roof over their heads. Things get more complicated when Osamu and Shota come upon a little girl named Juri—not for the first time—who's being neglected and perhaps physically abused by her parents, and decide to bring her home. It's one more mouth to feed, but when it comes down to it, they find that they can't send her back to a life more miserable than their own. "It's not kidnapping if you don't ask for ransom. Right? And we're not holding her against her will."

Much of the film consists of a series of random episodes during which we develop a better picture of who's related to whom, and how. But that's not the important point. The big question is, how are these kids (both Juri and Shota) going to handle such issues as parental neglect and crime, once the public authorities get their hands on them. All of the characters linger in memory long after the movie is over, but the underlying themes are pretty obvious: giving birth to a child doesn't automatically make you a mother, and social workers often don't have a clue. It's a touching tale worthy of Yasijurō Ozu thematically, if not stylistically, which may explain why Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.

Happy as Lazzaro 

Several extended families of farm workers keep a tobacco farm going in a poverty-stricken region of southern Italy. Their landlords have somehow neglected to let them know that share-cropping has been illegal for a half-century. It's a tough life, the kids don't go to school, but it's all they've known.  

A bright spot is provided by  Lazzaro, a seemingly naive lad who enjoys helping out, doing more than his share of the work, brightening the mood. The other workers depend on him, and take advantage of him.

When the landowners arrive for a visit and to settle accounts, their son Tancredi takes a liking to Lazzaro, and the two develop a peculiar quasi-friendship. In a sequence of events too complicated to describe, the authorities are called to the scene and put an end to the peasants' virtual enslavement.

But that's only half the story. I'm not going to describe how these people's lives play themselves out in the city, but it reminded me more than once of John Berger's trilogy, Into Their Labors. And that's quite a compliment.

Zama

Set at a remote coastal trading outpost in eighteenth-century Argentina, Zama is rich in historical detail and local color, but also dolorous, claustrophobic, and slightly deranged. The narrative, such as it is, hangs by a thread on Corregidor Don Diego de Zama's eagerness for orders from Spain to arrive, transferring him to a new post. He's the local justice, but his rulings are few and far between. Zama has lingering respect, but not much authority.

Meanwhile, he longs for news from his wife and children and is disturbed by his growing interest in the native women. He seems to have few friends or even allies in the village—which  we never actually see with any degree of perspective. The first half of the film is a growing litany of frustrations, misunderstandings, and disappointments, all of which highlight the man's isolation and diminishing sense of self worth.

Why would we want to follow along on this trail of tears? Well, why read Becket? Or Bouvard et Pécuchet? Aren't you interested in the underside of colonial life? After all, this could be Grand Portage, or Fort Bent. The natives are here and there, servants, you see them looking at you, subservient ... for now.

The trouble is, in a hierarchical society, when everything trickles down from the top, it's hard to make a break and do things on your own initiative. Zama finally decides to sign up for a hare-brained expedition into the back country in search of a notorious bandit. Finally we get to see a bit of the countryside. We get to meet the natives. But in the end, this turns out not to have been a good idea.

“I wish it wasn’t so rough for the audience, but there are some ways that can be beneficial,” director Lucretia Martel says. “Anything that causes you to move out of predictability is not comfortable. It’s meant to be disturbing.”

Pancakes from Space

In October of 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted an object traveling through our solar system that was unlike anything anyone had seen before. They named it Oumuamua, which, in Hawaiian, means scout or messenger.

Studies of the object's speed (slow), trajectory (out of whack), and the gases surrounding it (the wrong kind) led them to the conclusion that it was neither a comet nor an asteroid. Variations in the light reflecting off of it as it spun through space led astronomers to conclude that it was at least ten times longer than it was wide. Speculative illustrations of this strange object have tended to represent it as a long thin cigar, but Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, has argued that it's more likely to be pancake-shaped and extremely thin.

He derives this theory from the fact that as it left our solar system it accelerated. Very strange. Loeb has speculated that the extra push Oumuamua was getting came from having sunlight at its back, as it were. In  order to generate sufficient umpff by that means, however, the object would need to be more than 20 meters in diameter and less than a millimeter thick. That is to say, it would have to be "man-made" rather than something hurled out into space by natural means.

Of course, if the object was "man-made," that would mean there are intelligent beings out there in other parts of the galaxy—a possibility so likely, according to Loeb, as to be a virtual certainty. There is no evidence, however, to support the supposition that the creatures who made the craft singled out our solar system for special attention. For an advanced civilization, the manufacture of such things might be commonplace, and as far as we know, there could be hundreds of thousands of them sailing through the near-darkness of deep space, hoping to be drawn into any gravitational field near at hand.

A very strange interview ran in the New Yorker recently in which the interviewer, one Isaac Chotiner, deflects Loebs efforts to underscore the empirical data upon which his conjecture is based while simultaneously trying to lure him into the most puerile forms of theological dispute. It's a bizarre display of bad journalism, and reading between the lines it's easy to see Loeb didn't much appreciate it.

The interview had been edited for length, and I suppose one of the things that was cut went like this.

In the article, Chotiner askes Loeb: My question is whether we tend to see things that we can’t know or understand through the prism of things we have heard about since we were kids. Aren’t we more likely to see something like an alien society as an explanation than something we maybe can’t even comprehend or put into words?

Perhaps this reply was cut. Loeb: "You obviously haven't listened to a word I said. I gave six empirical reasons to consider Oumuamua as the product of an advanced civilization, rather than a natural phenomenon. Ignoring these factors, you suggest that Oumuamua is entirely incomprehensible, and that my speculations are based on my childhood readings of science fiction magazines. You need to pay better attention, or get a new job."

What remains of Loeb's remarks makes perfect sense, by the way. He compares his simple conjecture to the mainstream idea of the multiverse—a theory that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. He finds that theory unscientific, because there is no evidence. "It cannot be tested." The same is true, he argues, of string theory, which also continues to be held in high regard. 

"Whereas the next time we see an object like this one," he goes on, "we can contemplate taking a photograph. My motivation, in part, is to motivate the scientific community to collect more data on the next object rather than argue a priori that they know the answer."

While pursuing his own agenda, Chotiner lets the opportunity slip by to question this Harvard expert about the possible significance of such a visit. Loeb was recently quoted in a German magazine as saying, "If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them."

It occurs to me that one thing we might learn from these aliens is how to make a thinner pancake. I'm sure you've noticed that many of the pancakes served in restaurants are thick and doughy. They soak up the syrup like there's no tomorrow. (For them, I guess there isn't.) To make a thin, crisp pancake you need a runnier batter, of course. We used to call such pancakes "fritters."

Meanwhile, the idea that an object manufactured by a far-flung civilization drifted slowly around our sun and then back out into the void is sort of thrilling. While we wait for their return, we've got to think of a better word for them than "aliens."

Song Slam at Ice House

A song slam is like a poetry slam with better voices and piano accompaniment. To this combination of features we ought to add the arching melody and carefully parsed rhythms that "art" songs often provide. But you're sitting in a bar. No one is dressed up. The composers and performers answer questions about their work before each number is performed, and hundreds of dollars in prize money are given out at the end to the contestants the audience liked best. That is to say, the friends they came to see.

Sound like fun? I thought so. I met a friend at the Ice House on Nicollet Avenue and Hilary arrived a little later from the opposite direction after an early dinner with a friend. The place was packed. It was almost too dark to read the program, which, in any case, was mostly devoted to ads for the Source Song organization and mini-bios of the performers. The bios didn't follow the order of the songs, anyway, and I found it easy to set it aside.

The important thing was the ballot inside, and I was determined to take notes on each song, or at least give each performance a numerical value, so as to be able to cast an educated vote at the end of the show. That didn't happen.

The performers were standing in the hallway leading off from the stage like bucking broncos at a rodeo, and everyone was having a good time. The master of ceremonies, Chris Koza, played the guitar and sang one of his own songs, and then the slam proper began.

I wish I could tell you more about the individual pieces but I had to turn in my ballot at the end of the show, and don't remember any names, though (checking the program later) the first singer, Rodolfo Nieto, had a vigorous baritone, and another of the early performers, David Walton, delivered his piece in a very sweet lyric tenor. I found Benjamin Emory Larson's song about Nicola Tesla a little heavy handed, and also Catherine Dalton's "You Have to Stand There," but found a lot to admire in Jake Endres's "The Fuge of Love," and not only because my friend Athena Kildegaard wrote the words to it.

A number of the compositions were chromatic and "conversational," a la Charles Ives, but several had formal stanzas and repeated melodies, a la Schubert and that crowd. The singers seemed relaxed and entirely uninhibited on stage. One woman wore a zany red hat with twelve fluffy prongs sticking out the top. In short, there was a touch of Dada to the proceedings. 

Throughout the set Hilary and I continued to pick at the ploughman's lunch we'd ordered, which looked a little like a portrait by Archimboldo. I was expecting a great big onion, some chutney, a pickle, and a crusty piece of bread, but the waitress brought us a thin slab of slate covered with mushrooms, sausages, smoked salmon, mango slices (all the Welsh farmers eat it), roasted cauliflower, several chunks of cheese, and some toast. There were also a few shredded globs of unidentified vegetable matter. Cucumber? Carrots? I have no idea.

The performance space at the Ice House is ideal for such events. You feel like you're at the Globe Theater or a bull fight. The audience was there to listen, but also to cheer. Everybody knew somebody; some people seemed to know everyone. And soaring over it all, the lyrical human voice, male or female, wrapping itself tenderly around a 16th century English ballad, a Portuguese love song by Camöes, or a poem by one of our great local talents.

Spoilers and Red Herrings: Four Recent Films

It pains me to report that several recent films highly praised by critics and audiences alike did not sit very well with me. I'm not sure much of a point is served by gunching, and I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from seeing these soon-to-be cultural landmarks. All I can say is that I didn't like them much ... and I'll tell you why.

It would be difficult to do this without revealing one or two of the plot twists involved, so readers who are planning to see them beware.  

First on the list is Roma, the most celebrated film of the year, to judge from the Metacritic scores. (Then again, Ratatouille, a cartoon about a rat that wanted to be a chef, scored a 99 a few years back.) It's a stunning black-and-white film about a middle-class family in Mexico City, though it would be useful to know going into the theater that the focus of director Alfonso Cuarón's attention is the maid, Cleo. This is because none of the family members have much character or definition, and Cleo herself is so quiet, dutiful, and subservient that she's not very interesting, either. Thus the lighting, mis en scene, and cinematography must take center stage. 

And it's true that individual scenes are so artfully designed and tonally balanced that any given frame could be printed, framed, and hung on a wall to good effect. This same quality limits the close-ups, which is too bad. We never get to know anyone well. It's just a bunch of bratty kids, a philandering husband (absent pretty much throughout), a neurotic wife, a maid, and a cook. The most lively and interesting character is the grandmother, who probably appears on screen for less than ten minutes.

Perhaps sensing this lack of emotional resonance, Cuarón's ends the film with the family taking a trip to the beach. And it got me wondering how many movies end this way. What came to mind first was Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows, where the protagonist escapes from reform school and goes to the beach, because he's never seen the sea before.

Then we have Wim Wenders' The American Friend, with a Volkswagen beetle racing to the beach to furious guitar strumming. And what about the big argument-at-the-beach scene from Big Night, which naturally calls to mind the even more famous ending to La Dolce Vita, where the jaded and decadent revelers end up on a beach at dawn watching a dead octopus wash up on shore. And for good measure, what about the dream sequence that serves as a climax of sorts to the recent Korean film At Night on the Beach Alone?

Nothing is more emotional, definitive, powerful, mysterious, and vague than the sea. And here I sit on the shore of Lake Superior, pen in hand, as the sky grows dark, listening  to the roar of the surf crashing against the beautiful slabs of rock--powerful, irregular, almost subliminal at times in its ceaseless rumblings. 

Events are the froth of things, but my true interest is the sea. - Paul Valéry

A second film I didn't much like, though it had potential, is First Reformed. Here a minister (Ethan Hawke) whose life was shattered when his son died in Iraq and his wife left him, is tending a colonial "museum" church under the patronage of the evangelical megachurch next door. Hawke drinks too much, and has only six parishioners, but the choir director of the megachurch has a crush on him (he should be grateful!) and one of his parishioners asks him to counsel her husband, an eco-radical who wants her to get an abortion rather than bring another innocent creature into this benighted world.

Meanwhile, Hawke has been entrusted with the responsibility of delivering the homily at the anniversary celebration for his church—an event that's being largely underwritten by one of the biggest polluters in the state. Complications ensue.

Director Paul Shrader, hitherto best known as the screenwriter for Taxi Driver, does a good job of keying up the existential angst, and Hawke holds the screen as the guilt-ridden minister, who in his idle hours is keeping a diary of his lonely days at the sparsely furnished rectory next to the church. In fact, the acting is uniformly first-rate. And scholarly articles have already been written placing the film within the context of George Bernanos's novel Diary of a Country Priest and the films of Dreyer and Resnais.

Trouble is, the ending simply doesn't work. It falls squarely within the "woman as savior" tradition which can be traced back to Goethe, Ibsen, and countless other artists. It may often be valid in life, and it often works in fiction, but it's too simplistic to serve as a resolution to the tortured emotional valences of the plot we've been following for ninety minutes.

Then we have Can You Ever Forgive Me? Here a biographer who has lost her audience—and her cash flow—takes to forging letters by famous writers to make ends meet. She also derives some bitter pleasure from the fact that her witty remarks are being accepted as one-liners by Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. Quite a bit of the film takes place in used bookshops, which is nice, and the characterizations of Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, who plays her partner in crime, are worthy of our applause. 

Trouble is, the characters they're portraying aren't likable people. We have no sympathy for them. Their irresponsible and anti-social behavior has none of the appeal of an "anti-hero" maintaining his integrity in a world gone mad (a la Jack Nicholson in his prime) and therefore, their foibles are only marginally interesting. It seems odd to me that anyone would consider this story worthy of the effort required to film it.  

And what about the Coen brothers' latest, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: six short films, all set in the West—bank robber, prospector, wagon master, guitar-strumming gunslinger, and so on. In True Grit, the Coens' showed they could spin a good story from beginning to end. But here they revert to their special brand of black humor, and that's too bad, because some of the narratives are pretty good as they unfold. I especially liked the wagon train segment and the one highlighting Tom Waits prospecting for gold in a gorgeous mountain valley, which is as beautiful as anything you'll see in Shane. 

My favorite film of the last six months is Crazy Rich Asians. A little too long, perhaps, but full of fun and froth. But in reviewing these various films, I'm reminded of the richness of imagery they carry and the novel corners of the world they expose, regardless of the shape of the plot. None was a total waste, and in the aggregate we'd have to describe them all as "above average" in one way or another.