First of all, I need to say that one of my favorite all time film moments is the moment in Before Sunrise when Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are in the listening booth of an old Austrian music shop and he wants to kiss her so bad–it’s actually difficult to look at his face without feeling that longing too. It’s just thrilling film making! And it’s so simple to understand why it works. It all boils down to chemistry between the actors and a director who is willing to let that lead the story at its own pace. But it would be virtually impossible to recreate that moment again. That’s a magical moment, plain and simple. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they shot it in the first take.
So then there’s Before Sunset, which takes all the promise of that first film and the magic between the actors, and tries to envision their cinematic future. Formally, this film seems much less free than the first one. There’s a lot that the actors need to say to each other and not so much time for them to seemingly discover what’s important about each other. And whenever a plot point gets touched upon, the writing seems heavy handed. We loved Before Sunrise because, not always, but at certain moments, there didn’t seem to be a writer. Before Sunset has fewer of those moments.
But to say that it doesn’t have something is plain crazy. I think the key to liking this movie is realizing that the annoying aspects of these characters is what’s most real about them. Ethan Hawke’s tacky, overtly sexual comments, for example, seem so honestly inevitable. His thin veil of machismo is so perfectly crafted over his intense self-consciousness and vulnerability. He’s not subtle. He’s not cool. He’s sort of horny and obnoxious.
And she is equally obnoxious. She’s tense and graceless. She doesn’t say anything funny on purpose and her references are a bit boring. In fact, it’s only when she talks about herself personally that she really seems appealing.
Sexual tension is a really important part of this film. Whether or not they will end up together is the central question and also the fantasy motivating the characters, pushing the plot along. Julie Delpy’s character, Celine, inserts sex into the conversation with what she hopes will seem like intellectual frankness but underneath, there’s something manipulative going on. She’s using it as a ploy to excite him and keep his mind trained on her. But when she does get that reaction she looks away from him; as if she’s angry with herself.
There have been plenty of female rom-com characters who try to be cute, or seem affected for the sake of men, but, it’s rare to see a woman acknowledge that performance with subtle facial expressions of remorse. At the same time, Ethan Hawke looks like he’s actively trying to recapture the connection they had the first time they met and even though those attempts looks awkward on film, it feels real because they are so clumsy and awkward.
If it’s possible, their characters seem more excruciatingly vulnerable in this film than they did in the first one.
Kelly Richardt made this film in 2006 and sort of challenged Gus van Sant’s take on Oregon as film muse.
The film is maddeningly atmospheric. It’s like the visual equivalent of “aural wallpaper” The viewer is literally staring out the window for 15 percent of the film. And Yo La Tengo keeps the soundtrack so understated that we aren’t really able to stray too far metaphorically from the literal view.
Maybe I’m thinking about vanSant because he is a gay filmmaker and Old Joy is, if not a homosexual film, then certainly homosocial. Will Oldham’s character is a little bit Buck from Chuck and Buck and a little bit like Sal Mineo’s character in Rebel Without a Cause.
It’s hard to understand a character like this one unless you’ve met someone like him before. His intensity is stark and raw, perhaps in a way we’d all like to feel sometimes. But it’s also on the edge of delusional.
In Old Joy, this character is named Kurt and he and his friend Mark go on a short camping trip to an isolated hot springs in the forest outside of Portland. The two men seem out of step with each other from their first interaction. When Mark drives to pick up Kurt from his house, Kurt is off somewhere collecting a cooler and some other junk for their trip and Mark sits on the porch wondering if his friend will show up at all. Mark also has a pregnant wife and in the brief glimmer we get of their relationship, the two seem stressed and sad.
When Kurt does show up, he seems shy and beholden to Mark. We learn later that the two were old roommates but that relationship seems far away now. When these two men meet again, they are rediscovering each other with very tentative probings. On their first night out camping, Kurt gets really drunk and the true nature of his feelings for Mark come out. To say that he loves Mark is accurate. But that love is not an easy categorical love. It seems explosive in every direction–will Kurt kiss Mark? Kill him? rape him? Is he crazy, or just lonely and lost? Will Oldham bring out Kurt’s character so fully with so little dialogue. It’s really incredible that he is able to pack such a short film (111 minutes!) with so much subtext.
But he also conveys a lot physically. There are these moments when Kurt looks at Mark with something slightly more evil than longing. In the culmination of the film, when the two have reached the hot springs, stripped down and entered there separate tubs, Kurt (after getting out to smoke a bowl) crouches behind Mark and begins massaging his shoulders. Mark tenses up and Kurt tells him to relax. The camera focuses on Mark’s hand, which starts out tightly gripped around the edge of the tub and slowly loosens and sinks into the water. His wedding ring eerily prominent. His hand limp like a dead man’s. He’s given in to Kurt and maybe it was the right thing to do. But his giving in also seems tainted because we can see that he thinks Kurt is off his rocker and when he lets Kurt take control of him, physically, it’s like he’s going against his better judgement.
At the center of Old Joy is the tension of life lived deliberately versus life lived passively as a witness. I would also add that the film uses the buddy (homosocial) relationship to reveal the difficulties of male bonding in our society. This film could never have been made about two women. Women are allowed to be physically close to one another to a much greater degree without things getting “weird”.
I called my American friend Sarrita from the lobby of the Hotel Palace: ”Sarrita, I’m at a wine tasting in Charlottenberg. It’s going on till five o’clock. There are at least 60 wines to taste from the Ahr, Nahe, Pfalz and Rheinhessen. This is like the Super Bowl of German wines.” I was so excited that I barely gave her a moment to answer. Finally she said, “Hmmm. I don’t know. I’m kind of tired. I was going to work on some stuff. Maybe next time, though.” Americans, I thought, and proceeded back into the ballroom for more sweet torture.
Mainly I wanted Sarrita there so there would be another American witness to the glory of German wines. And I refer to this tasting (by far the largest I’d ever attended) as sweet torture because after the thirtieth or so sample I tasted, I could no longer smell all that accurately and the taste may have been objectively good, even perfect, but my mouth could no longer enjoy what it was tasting. My stomach felt a bit raw as well. I spit and spit and spit throughout the whole tasting, I spit into a basin so full of spit-up wine that my little trickle caused an upsurge to shoot back in my face, but at some point my palette became slack and tasting another exquisite Riesling seemed like very hard work.
That being said, I did taste some extraordinary wines and I met some of the growers whose wines I have been enjoying since I arrived in Berlin. One of the perks of the wine business is that the people who make wine tend to be really enthusiastic and fun to talk with. I learned about ‘petrol-tone’ which is a term for the smell of gasoline that is often found in old-vine Rieslings. I learned about the different growing sites and their reputations and I developed some generalizations of my own. The Oelberg site, for example, developed wines that, for me, had a nose very much like freshly cleaned linens drying in sunshine. The St. Anthony 2006 Oelberg Riesling had the most strongly developed laundry nose out of all the wines I tasted. The Kuhling Gillot 2006 Pattenthal Riesling had a much more pungent nose in which I detected everything from nectarines to St. Marcellin cheese.
When German wine makers talk about their wines they tend to use words like elegant, developed, and balanced. German wines, from what I’ve gathered, do not go out of their way to be earthy, rustic, or singularly set on conveying one scent note, like the very out of fashion ‘oaky’ Chardonnay’s of California. This makes German wine tasting more difficult than wine tasting in Sonoma, for example, because if you were trained to notice the nose, mouth feel and acidity and grew up with wine growers who wanted you to be smacked over the head with their wines, then German Rieslings can be tough to distinguish between. There constructions are subtle, ethereal, even shy. That being said there were some wines I tasted at the beginning of my long journey into nacht that had exceptionally distinctive characteristics.
The Wittmann Aulerdere 2006 had a sharp and flowery nose, which gave way to a yeasty hay smell and then to something much greener that reminded me of photosynthesis and the fact that grapes and grape leaves are really just sunshine junkies. The Schaefer-Froehlich 2006 Halenberg Riesling at first smelled so clean I thought of this ridiculous ‘new car smell’ my Dad used to have sprayed in his car after a trip to the carwash. As it opened up though, the ‘new car smell’ gave way to overripe tropical fruits. The structure of the taste was slow to open as well, a bit tight and acidic at first but then it smoothed out and balanced itself and the finish was quite long.
I suppose what I’m learning from German Riesling is that it’s not enough to rely on scent cues and to revel in shocking, distinctive descriptions. What I seemed to have passed over in my years of drinking and studying wine is how taste the stuff. Tasting is a much more inexact, frustrating process for a writer. When wine is good, balanced, elegant, and smooth, there’s nothing to do but close your eyes and enjoy it. But how do you write about that?
The other night a friend came over to sleep-over in my airconditioned apartment and in exchange he brought a movie and some beer. I had never seen Talk to Her, the Almodovar film, and despite not being this director’s biggest fan I thought, well it might be time to give the old Spaniard another try.
About 10 minutes in, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. The pacing of the film was so mind-numbingly slow that even watching Tarkovsky’s Solaris would have seemed zippy in comparrison. And doubly annoying was the fact that my film watching partner was so reverent about the experience of watching this–his favorite film–that I didn’t even feel like I could make a comment. Although he apparently felt it was within the bounds of film watching religiosity to sing along to every song. (Dude, I get it, you’re real fuckin smart and you speak Spanish and shit. You don’t have to make a running point of it.) To be fair, he was equally annoyed when I paused the film during a dramatic moment to get a string cheese.
A film about two unconscious women being cared for by creepy men has the ring of something I might like, but all I could think about while watching was how extremely clean and cheerful the Spanish convalescent home seemed. I grew up visiting my grandmother in an extended care home in Encino, California that was so repugnant that I would spend the whole visit breathing into her lotion bottle to cut the stench. Also, unlike the women featured in Talk to Her, no one ever sensually massaged my grandmother’s midsection and inner thighs.
In retrospect, I probably should have chosen something animated and fantastical for such a ripe summer evening. It’s difficult enough to concentrate on watching films in the summer. There’s so much happening outside that being stuck on a couch, even in the middle of the night, makes me feel antsy. But it may also be true that Almodovar and I just weren’t meant to be. I’m just not romantic enough, I guess.
I have been thinking lately about how I look while I am working. Unless you are a personal trainer or an actress, you really can’t see yourself while you work but over time, I think, we come to recognize patterns in the faces we make. When I used to work at a computer all day, I made a lot of open mouthed, fly-catching faces. When the sun got strong in my window, I made squinty pursed mouth faces at the screen.
But in my new, more physical job as a cook, my faces have become more like a pro-basketball player’s. I do head rolls, I nod at teammates, I gasp at the heat. The extremity of the job really forces me to resort to comforting facial gestures and body movements. So here is a list of what I perceive to be the most common faces I make while working:
1) The Straw-suck Face–Cooks need to hydrate a lot and often can’t refill their water during a shift. To remedy this, we fill a water pitcher with ice and water, wrap it with saran wrap and stick a straw in it. This is what we suck on throughout the night. The Straw-suck face is a dead-eyed fish face. The eyes focus on nothing while the mouth purses down and takes in as much water as the moment allows. This face is repeated whenever there is a lull in the shift.
2) The Tongue-out Precision Face–This is the face I make when I am slicing a steak with concentration. I am thinking about the angle and trying to make it all fit nicely on a plate. Once and a while this face is accompanied by a “please let this be medium-rare” eye-plea. But the overall face is face down, tongue slightly out and held between teeth. Maybe this is the same face a Laker would make while setting up a free-throw shot.
3) The Eye-Roll Dick Waiter Face–This is the face we make when a waiter is a dick or fucks something up. It is a full eye roll to all kitchen members sometimes followed by a crude comment and a chuckle. This is how the kitchen builds a collective spirit amongst themselves. Without a bad or dick waiter, we cooks wouldn’t like each other as much. By fucking things up they are actually bringing the team closer together.
4) The Lifting Heavy Shit Face–We all know this face. It’s the face you make when you are straining to get something safely down or through a narrow passage. Somehow it feels like my nostrils flare more while I am engaged in these activities. My mouth is closed. My jaw is clenched and my eyes are so focused they feel like tiny beacons in my face. Imagine an angry horse.
5)The Fuck I Burned Myself Face–An indignant wince. Equal parts anger at oneself and brief fleeting pain.
6 ) The End of Shift Face–Actually, it’s not so much a face as it is a twinkle in the eye. If someone says anything remotely funny at this point, you will laugh. When your drink is finished, you will laugh at not funny things.
I have been working at Nostrana for a week now, manning the grill, discovering the fragile web that separates rare from medium rare, and inhaling more smoke than the Rat Pack.
You see, one of the attractive things about Nostrana is their adherence to very pure and ancient cooking practices. The pizzas are fired in a wood oven, and the meats are grilled over a wood fire. That fire adds a lot of flavor to the food, but it also requires a lot of man power to keep the system running smoothly.
On my second day of work, one of the cooks–lets call him No Smiles, took me to the wood shed across from the restaurant and gave me a basic lesson in humility. See, up until that moment, I had assumed that my duties stopped in the kitchen. I was finding it adequately rigorous to manage the various proteins, coordinate timing with other stations in the restaurant, and clean the enormous grill at the end of the evening. I felt proud and a little bad ass about being the only woman running the grill station. Having all that meat under my control and making sure the fire didn’t die down, seemed tough and sexy, and worth bragging about. Leaving work every night, I smelled like a camp fire. My clothes were dusted with wood shavings and my fingers were covered with soot.
Which is why I sort of froze when No Smiles informed me that in addition to the strenuous duties I had already undertaken, I would also be responsible for chopping the wood. He pointed to a stump in the middle of the shed with an ax buried deeply inside it. I don’t think I could even heave an ax forcefully enough to plant it into a stump, let alone chop multiple smaller pieces clear in half. I kept imagining the axe slipping and my leg being cleaved clear in half.
Losing face, it turns out, is more frightening than losing a leg. So with the stoic look of an expert chopper, I placed a log on the stump, raised my axe and lowered it so forcefully that a tiny chip came off the edge! I squealed with delight. No Smiles…not so much. “Try to hit the center next time.” he said, clearly masking his great excitement over my accomplishment.
Second swing and I’m all stump. Third swing and I get a slightly larger chip. No Smiles tells me to put down the axe. He gracefully chops 6 logs in what seems like 10 seconds. When he finishes. He says, ” I usually do this job so no one else has to.” I try to look disappointed and mumble something about wanting to share the load equally, but, honestly, THANK GOD!
Lets all raise our axes to No Smiles for keeping my legs intact.
Allow me to introduce you to my new and forever city, Portland–a place where wild artichokes grow in unkempt front yards, a place where grown men ride tiny little baby bicycles for some inexplicable reason, a place where you can drink beer and eat pizza in a second run movie theater.And not just any beer, but really good IPA’s from local breweries. Appetite is an essential part of life here and being a small weight or a tsk-er of carbs is tantamount to blasphemy. This was made clear to me when I opted for a pint of beer rather than my own personal pitcher. “But what if you run out of beer half way through the movie?” My kind and native companion asked. So I got me a pitcher and a couple of slices with local artichoke pesto and pickled red peppers and headed in to watch Greg Mottola’s Adventureland.Adventureland is one of those rare indie rom-com’s that didn’t make it big because it was a little too smart and understated for the general movie going public. The film is full of moments that take basic coming of age situations and subvert them just enough to make you laugh again at what has become the most tired of all film genres. And the dialogue is so good that I wanted everyone in the film to talk louder so I wouldn’t miss a single thing they said. They should issue mandatory closed-captioning for Mumblecore films. Or maybe I should not drink a whole pitcher of beer during an hour and a half film screening.By the time the lights went up, I had to pee so bad I thought I might have to go in the empty pitcher. My level of ebullient drunkenness was forcing me to say obvious things like, “This really is the ladies room,” as I waited for the next available stall, and to muse about my future pick-up lines for a Portland audience; “Who’s your optometrist?”, “Are the bars always this full on a Tuesday?”, “How’d you like to knock me up, so I can get on WIC?”Two bourbon-neat’s, and a Megavideo interrupted attempt to watch The Wizard of Oz later, I settled into bed almost looking forward to tomorrow and my first Portland hangover. Just as I’d expected, Portland was gentle to me the morning after. I woke to an overcast sky, walked less than a block and found really great coffee which I could drink slowly amidst the sound of languid conversation and lugubrious music. I took my sweet time eating my tuna sandwich and reading my mystery novel. When I finally felt clear headed enough to head back home, I checked the Craigslist food classifieds and found out Nostrana was interviewing. I sent in my resume and got an interview within the hour. In two days, I begin work at possibly the best restaurant for foodies in Portland. I thought about Dorothy, my childhood Idol, and her little line about not being in Kansas anymore. She wanted to go back, but I would just as soon stay here in Oz, thank you very much.
This is the salad:
- 1/2 cup of decent mixed greens, though by no means transporting
- 5 halved grape tomatoes, not especially flavorful
- a quarter cup of chopped red and golden beets
- 6 string beans
- a really blah vinaigrette
HOW COULD THIS SALAD COST 12 DOLLARS??? And why are people paying for it? I just assumed a salad like this would be 8$ tops and so I didn’t look at the price. When the bill came, I was flabbergasted. Last night, at a cute hole in the wall place called Weird Fish, my sister and I spent 60$ on a salad, two sides and a fish dish (and two glasses of wine). The kicker is, I was so hungry after dinner, I ended up grabbing a 4$ taco. I just want to state for the record that no salad is worth more than $10 dollars, and that salad must have some kind of wildly flavorful protein accent–house cured salmon, or grilled prawns, or skirt steak. I really need to get out of San Francisco.
In five days I will get on a plane and leave behind this place, the partner I had for 3 years and all the friends I made in the 2 years I lived here. The sky is threatening rain, which is nothing new for Berlin, and I can hear my compact washing machine spinning in the background. Chicken soup is on the stove-top and the apartment smells like an old Jewish lady, in the best possible way, of course.
Because I’ve never been much of a scenester, the memory of the places I’ve lived are always based on the apartments I lived in. But, as many agoraphobics I’m sure will agree, that apartment is a microcosm of the city at large. Take this apartment in Berlin. There are millions of weird details that would only be found in a prosperous European country. For example, the toilet has a shelf–or a German Stool Inspector–as my friend Lee fondly refers to it, and two flushing options. There’s also a special heating rack which you can hang towels on so the towels are nice and warm when you get out. This detail in particular held a lot of weight with me because when my parents went on vacation to Venice one rainy April in the mid 90’s, my mother came back raving about the hot towel rack. It became part of our conception of luxury, ditto with bidets. When I ended up in possession of one of these magic racks, it was a strange bittersweet reminder of how far away I was from my family and how different my life was from their’s.
Right now I’m imagining myself as an alcoholic old woman speaking mysteriously about her former life to near strangers in a bar; “I was in Berlin for two years between 2007 and 2009. The walls were gray and the church bells rang at 6pm every day and twice on Sundays. ” But I suppose part of this whole blogging business is a safeguard against forgetting all the details of your life at different stages. Maybe I’m afraid I won’t remember my gray walls when I’m drinking heavily in my 70’s. Maybe I’ll just wander around drunk telling people to google me. God how depressing!
And the irony is, Berlin embraces drunk 70 year olds. They still fit in at clubs and bars. The US is terrible in that respect. Women, especially, become invisible after 40. For some it happens even earlier.
And yet I am leaving this place and risking invisibility, suburban living, mass consumption, a population known for their irritating earnestness, dogmatic tunnel-vision, and overwhelming stupidity. Because at the end of the day, I can’t live with that towel-rack feeling. I can’t just reinvent myself in a foreign land and lose connection to my family and my homeland. For all my snobbery about the old world, I am an American and I want to wither and die there.
Auf Wiedersehn and Danke schön Berlin meine liebe! Thanks for the memories.
I need yoga. I need it right now and it makes me cringe to admit that. But why? In the 80’s I would have turned to aerobics, perhaps. In the 70’s I might have embraced modern dance. But the further down the historical line you go the less opportunities there were for women seeking health and recovery and that’s a scary prospect. What did women do in the 50’s do to clear their heads and center themselves? Bowling? Ballroom dance? And the 60’s? All I can think of is hula-hooping and swimming.
So here I am going through my little life crisis in the nascent years of the 21st century and I naturally turn to yoga. Or yoga presents itself as the natural choice. Yoga is like the anti-rave. It shares a fondness for trance like states and movement but where raves are about excess and abundance of feeling, yoga is about balance, about slowly heeling spiritual and bodily wounds, and yoga has adopted the language of religion. It is a ‘practice’ and a way to recover self discipline. The teachers are walking advertisements for their craft. They scissor and jump and hold themselves up by theirbig toe with cat like grace. They chant in a language that is usually not their own and they nimbly approach you as you writhe and pant, placing a strong steady hand on your shoulder and twisting you into a position that feels so much better and stronger than the one you were in, you wish you could take them with you always like a puppet-master. Just someone to pull the strings and remind me to stay straight, calm, centered.
I am bad at yoga. I never kept at it long enough to recognize the sequence of steps. I don’t know my right from my left. I always have to fart and then have to focus really hard on not farting for the length of the class. I have a weak leg from a broken knee and putting weight on that leg makes me fall down immediately like a stone figurine perched too far off a ledge. I spend most of the class berrating myself for how far I’ve let myself go. I worry about being a hunched osteoperosis granny. I get so frustrated I want to cry. And today I did everything in German, which was sort of like trying to follow a recipe while watching a foreign cooking show. There’s a woman standing in front of you, conscientiously going through a ritual and you can’t tell whether you’re making a stew or a cake.
When I finally paid my 9 euros for an hour of torture, got out onto the street and farted, I was very…depleted. Two days ago when I decided to do this yoga stuff I was feeling really empowered. I wanted to get it right this time. Stop drinking for a while, stop eating crap, cleanse myself with healthy exercise and massage. But the reality is so much more imperfect than I’d hoped it would be. My body, which looks fine in a dress and heels and even seems young at times, is revealed in yoga to be a rusty machine. Every deep breath makes creaky sounds escape from my shoulders. Each time I let the blood rush to my head, I get incredibly dizzy, and when I try to balance I realize that I have none, and a pot belly.
So why do people submit to yoga? Why has it become the antidote to all human ills? I find the chanting creepy and cult-like and yet at the same time, in my darkest hour, the idea that I would be able to Om with the best of them really made me feel hopeful again. I think it’s partly the promise that the body will fix the mind. For someone like me who can’t escape their thoughts, the idea that I could fixate on my muscles and my breathing, and that that would lead me to a more healthy balanced place seems as disingenuous and alluring as Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog.
On a more personal level, my cynicism toward anything that purports to bring health and wellness seems like a negative tendency, albeit rich material for dark humour. So I am turning over a new organic-rubber-recycled mat in order to test my strength of character and my weak leg.