55 Steps (2018)

This movie tells two stories. The first is a legal drama based on the true story of Eleanor Riese, a psychiatric patient who, in the late 1980s, sued a San Francisco hospital for the right to refuse medication whose side effects she believed were harming her. The second is the story of the friendship that eventually grew out of her relationship with her lawyer, the patient’s rights attorney Colette Hughes.

The second of these two narratives — as brought to vivid life by the pair of fine actresses portraying Eleanor and Colette, Helena Bonham Carter and Hilary Swank — is the more stirring.

The drama of informed consent, which was then not the law for California mental patients, opens in 1985 with a phone call from Eleanor, then a patient at St. Mary’s Hospital, to a legal-aid hotline.  I have some ambivalence about this, as there is plenty that is portrayed here that is a challenge for modern psychiatric care, but it is a well told story.

Little by Edward Carey

I forget where I read about this book which led me to put this on my library hold list, but I am grateful that I did.  I read this as I was flying into the eye of a storm last week.  The bomb cyclone blizzard that hit Colorado shook everything up for a lot of people, myself included, but it did allow me time to really relish this book.
It is the retelling of how a penniless Swiss orphan who later became known as Madame Truffaut, founded a London museum full of effigies that still welcomes 2.5 million visitors a year . Early on, she is apprenticed to Dr. Curtius, whose job in Berne is to render diseased body parts in wax and tout them around the city as graphic public health warnings. The subject is Curtius’s boss, a well-known surgeon. But the girl, Marie, notes how, after two straws have been placed up the man’s nose so that he can breathe; after his face has been smoothed with oil, then with plaster, to make a cast, and after the cast is taken away, underneath there is only another human face, “humbled and vulnerable” – and equal. The surgeon understands this; when he sees the success Curtius’s heads are achieving, he cancels his wages, forcing Curtius and Marie to flee to Paris.

Presenting everyone as equal doesn’t sell.  And so Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Robespierre and Louis XVI are added to the collection. Curtius himself is more interested in the people who are not fine – the murderers and castaways, the criminals and misfits – though, as the Revolution takes hold, it becomes increasingly unclear who’s who. Curtius and Marie cast them all.  And when it is all said and done, she leaves France, which is in ruins, and moves her show on the road to England.

Street Markets in Lanzhou

 It is hard to believe that the very first thing that I would post about my recent trip to China is photos from street markets.  I have my reasons for this.  The first is the overwhelming wealth of what is on display.  There are beautiful fruits and vegetables, some of them unfamiliar and many of them well known but beautifully displayed.
The other is that it is a window into a culture to see what they eat.  I could wander different markets, sampling street food, and absorbing the atmosphere as a part of every trip I take.

 This one has a love of noodles, that is for sure.  We saw bags of noodles for sale with a small packet of the sauce to mix with them once you got them home  We saw a vender who would chop the cooked noodles into your desired width and send you home with them.  You could buy the noodles to cook them yourself.  Every option, many sizes, and some variety of flavor.  The grains are much what we see here at home in a bulk section of a market, but somehow prettier.  There are tubs with fish that are still living, chickens that you can take home and butcher yourself, pet fish, tea, the list goes on.

Ladies in Black (2018)

I watched this on a transpacific flight of incredible length, and it was really fun to watch, in the sense that it was entertaining and while not action packed, it left you with plenty to think about.
The film is set in Sydney in 1959 in a department store.  We are all now more familiar with this setting since watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, who spends the first season of the show working in a very similar job in a Manhattan department store.
The heroine of the story, who takes her place as a lowly temp worker in the busy holiday season, is Lisa Miles, a 16-year-old high school graduate awaiting her university entrance exam results. The bookish girl dreams of being a poet and getting more out of life than the housewife role of her hard-working mother.  She finds that she has more in common with the European immigrants she meets through one of her co-workers than she does with other girls in the store, who dream of marriage rather than education.  The movie reminds us that it wasn't that long ago that women could not even go to college without their father's permission.  While there are miles to go in this arena, it is occasionally good to take stock of where we have come.

The Water Cure by Sophie Macintosh

This book was long listed for the Booker prize and is really quite thought provoking and also a very quick read.  Not that I am a big fan of that, but if you don't love the book at first sight, it is easier to get through to the end, and then you can reflect back on the overall result.  This is a book that benefits from that kind of after thought.
This book flits between The Handmaid's Tale and King Lear.  There is a house on an island, alone by the sea. Inside live three girls with their parents. Outside, beyond the sea and the horizon, there is a terrible world where everything can go wrong. To understand what toxins are, and indeed for their knowledge of everything else, the girls have always deferred to their father, aptly names King. Their world is complete. And then, one day, he is gone.
The title of the book refers to one of the 'cures' for what ails women.  They are sewn into “fainting sacks” and “drowning dresses”; they keep muslin pressed to their mouths like masks. Now, after  King is gone, the truth is that his legacy is the real toxin: a trauma that forces its victims to go on playing it out.
One day, three men wash up on their beach and the truth of that becomes clear.  Really great read.

Farewell, My Queen (2012)

This is a French movie, set early in the day of July 14, 1789, at the royal palace of Versailles. It was not yet a date fraught with destiny. In the rat-swarming servants' quarters, our heroine is a young woman named Sidonie Laborde , lady in waiting to the queen.  She slaps at mosquito bites, hurries through her toilet, and runs toward her appointment with Marie Antoinette. She is the official reader to the queen, and this position gives her a limited stature and some access to the royal life of luxurious decadence.
Over the next three days, we will witness life at Versailles exclusively through the eyes of Sidonie. Reports arrive at Versailles that the Bastille has been stormed, and although this is never publicly acknowledged, it spreads as circles of rumor through the ranks of the servants, some of whom perhaps only vaguely understand what it means — and what it will mean for them personally. The vast, all-powerful edifice of the French monarchy will be swept away in a matter of days, and Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI will inevitably be beheaded.  It is a lushly costumed movie with a slowly changing tone, from calm to urgency, that is very enjoyable to watch.

The Quiet Place (2018)

This collaboration between the husband and wife team of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt is pretty terrific (and I am not a fan of the horror genre).
The movie takes place in a near future post apocalypse where the aliens who invade are big, viscous, and  blind.  The bad news is that while they do not appear to smell all that well, they have a keen sense of hearing.  The survival of this family is tied to the fact that they have a deaf daughter, so they all know sign language. 
It is a tense ride.  It’s a movie designed to make you an active participant in a game of tension, not just a passive observer in an unfolding horror. Most of the great horror movies are so because we become actively invested in the fate of the characters and involved in the cinematic exercise playing out before us. It is the kind of movie that quickens the heart rate and plays with the expectations of the audience, while never treating them like idiots. In other words, it’s a really good horror movie.  Nominated in the sound category, it did not get the nod, but the Academy doesn't always get it right.

Effie Briest by Theodor Fontane (1894)

I read this after seeing it on a Facebook friend's list of seven books that influenced her.  I have never heard of it, and found that it has a circle of respect in German literature.  Thomas Mann said that the author was the best German author since Goethe, and since those are the two German authors that I have read a fair amount of, I tried this and liked it very much.  It is a strangely feminist book, in the same vain as Anne Bronte's The Widow of Wildfell Hall kind of feminism.
The book is considered to be the greatest work of Prussian realism and certainly one of the best tragic novels of the 19th century. The story is simple enough and hardly unique: Geert von Innstetten, an ambitious nobleman and civil servant on the brink of middle age, makes an uncontroversial marriage to Effi von Briest, the 17-year-old daughter of a former flame. Innstetten takes her back to the town in Pomerania from which he runs the local administration. A daughter, Annie, is born, but Innstetten is keen to get on, and leaves his young wife on her own where she falls prey to a womanizer, Major von Crampas.  The subsequent story is also in the end predictable, but plays out in an unusual manner.  Well worth reading.

Border (2018)

This is a movie that would be best seen rather than read the reviews, because I think it is hard to capture the underlying atmosphere of the movie in words.  Well, at least my words.  It was snubbed in the Best Foreign Language film shortlist (which is a list of ten), but captured a nomination for Make Up.  It did not win, but it was my choice in that category.
The story is about Tina, a border guard who literally has a nose for people who are misbehaving.  She is disfigured in a noticeable but not quite grotesque way.  She  lives an isolated life with a roommate who is really her friend until she meets another of her kind.  He is less attractive personally than she is, but he knows who he is and he travels around basically enjoying himself.  He reveals to Tina her previously unknown history and for a while she is quite taken with him.  It has been called a horror movie, and I can see why, but that really doesn't capture the underlying tensions about otherness that pervades the movie.  Very worth watching.

Cha Sui Kebab

We just got back from China and we were definitely not ready to stop eating Chinese food.  Here is one of the first attempts to capture the glorious food of our trip through Gansu Province.

• 3 tablespoons hoison sause
• 3 tablespoons oyster sauce
• 3 tablespoons Shaoxing wine
• 3 tablespoons honey (4 tablespoons for a sweeter taste)
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce (3 tablespoons light soy sauce for a saltier taste)
• 1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon five spice powder
• 1/8 teaspoon chili flakes
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1/2 thumb ginger, minced
• 8 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 kilogram (2 1/4 pounds) meat (options: pork shoulder, pork neck, chicken thigh, chicken breast, wings) (*see footnote 1)

---

Instructions

To marinate the meat

1. Combine all ingredients for the BBQ sauce except the vegetable oil, ginger, and garlic in a bowl and mix well.
2. Heat vegetable oil in a saucepan over medium heat until warm. Turn to low heat. Add ginger and garlic. Cook and stir a few times until fragrant. Add the BBQ sauce. Cook and stir until the texture becomes smooth, 1 to 2 minutes.
3. Transfer the sauce to a bowl to cool.
4. Add meat to a ziplock bag and 2/3 of the sauce (*see footnote 2). Press the air out of the bag and seal it. Give the bag a good massage, so that the sauce covers the meat evenly.
5. Save the rest of the sauce in an airtight container and place it in the fridge. You will use it for the glaze later.
6. Marinate meat in the fridge for 24 hours.

To prepare barbecue

1. (Optional) If using bamboo skewers, soak 8 skewers in water for 15 minutes.
2. Transfer the meat to a plate and discard the marinade.
3. If you are cooking pork or chicken skewers, transfer the meat to a cutting board and cut it into bite sized cubes (about 1 inches / 2.5 centimeters). (*see footnote 3)
4. Thread the meat onto the bamboo or metal skewers.
5. Add charcoal to one end of the grill and start a fire. When the coals are evenly lit, close the grill and allow it to warm up.

To cook skewers

Place meat skewers on the direct heat (i.e. above the coals) and close the lid to cook, until nicely charred on the bottom, 2 to 3 minutes. Brush glaze on the meat. Turn meat to cook the other side. Close the lid and let cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. If the meat is getting burned, move the skewers to the other side of the grill (the one with no coals under it) and close the lid. Keep cooking over indirect heat until cooked through.