Shame on You North Carolina

Oh dear dear dear. Not again. Now now. Just when things seemed to be going so well. The Week reported last month that for the first time, those who support same sex marriage outnumber those who oppose it, and most importantly, those who strongly support it are as numerous as those who strongly oppose it (22% each). The very best news is that those who are under 30 overwhelmingly support it, so there are real glimmers of hope. Too bad that is not the same thing as doing the right thing. It is a simple matter of equal rights. Nothing less. You can thump your Bible all you want, and I will support your right to do so, but that has no place in a country that separates church and state. The Bible also advocates slavery, polygamy, and stoning your children when they disobey you--all of those have gone by the wayside. It is far past time for this one to be let go of too.

Sadly, the fight for equal rights is not behind us. The blue states are the ones where same sex marriage is legal and the maroon states are states are those that have a constitutional ban on it. North Carolina voters (60% of those voting) passed an amendment to their constitution banning same sex marriage, and became the 30th state to do so. They are not the leaders, but they strongly followed. On the other hand, the last time North Carolina amended it's constitution on a marriage issue was to ban inter-racial marriage. You can marry your cousin there, but not someone of the same gender. So that tells us something about the place. It is still a sad reminder of how we are prone to looking back rather than forward these days. As Amy Davidson noted in the New Yorker: "If there is a lesson in the North Carolina vote, it is that complacency on this issue is not a victimless stance." Happily, President Obama agrees, and has come out publically in favor of same sex marriege. Way to go, Mr. President.

Deviled Eggs

One of the things that I love about Passover, and the same applies to Easter, is that there are a lot of hard boiled eggs around. In Judiasm they serve to remind us that it is spring, and a time for renewal. Since Passover is a celebration of freedom from slavery and new beginnings, egss are a fitting part of that. Not to mention it is an ancient religion, and a little emphasis on fertility, while not appropriate in our over-crowded 21st century world, went a long way once upon a time. Here is a variation on deviled eggs: *12 large eggs *2 Tbs. mayonnaise *2 Tbs. ranch dressing *1 tablespoon Dijon mustard *1/4 tsp. garlic powder *Coarse salt and freshly ground white pepper *1 Tbs. finely chopped fresh tarragon, chives, parseley, or chervil, plus leaves for garnish an anchovy can be added to the mix, but be careful with the salt in that case Boil the eggs for about 10 minutes. Let cool and peel. Cut in half lengthwise and put all egg yolks in a food processor. If you accidentally break a white while doing this, that can go in the food processor bowl as well (I usally have a failure rate of 1/2 white per dozen eggs). Add the rest of the ingredients and pulse till a paste that is of a consistnecy that can be piped. If too stiff, add more mayonnaise or ranch dressing until it is right. Pipe eggs, filling them generously, and garnish with a leaf of the herb you used.

Seven Minutes in Heaven (2008)

This is a movie whose plot slowly unwinds. It is not a tense unwinding, but rather one where we know the basics to begin with--Galia is a survivor or a suicide bomber explosion on a bus. Her fiance, Oren, is killed and she doesn't remember much of what happened. When Galia visits Itzik (Benjamin Jagendorf), a first responder at the bombing scene at his Gates of Heaven seminary she learns she was unconscious for seven minutes and was considered clinically dead. He shares a mystical tale about souls that rise up to heaven but are incomplete, telling her, "Our creator gives these souls a chance to observe the life they'll live if they choose to return." Although Galia scoffs, Itzik notes that a soul choosing to return might be able to change its destiny at the moment it reunites with the body. With her extensive burns slowly healing , Galia's memories of what happened that day are also slowly coming back. She begins to search in earnest for answers--and what she can remember--when she receives a necklace in the mail. She doesn't realize who the necklace belongs to and she doesn't know where it came from. She meets a kind man on the street, and she initially resists the soothing attentions of this new acquaintance, Boaz (Eldad Fribas). None-the-less, he is patient and the relationship deepens. He reveals some things to her, and her memory slwoly returns, culminating in the film's final chapterm, which puts a poignant spin on all that has come before. Very thoughtful movie that skirts around the edges of a society that lived with terrorism on a daily basis.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

I am not a David Foster Wallace groupie. Maybe I should say that I wasn't before I read this novel. All that I really knew about him I knew from my son (who has a passion for writers and writing) and from Mary Karr's memoir 'Lit', where she has a brief relationship with him after they meet each other in reahab. So I knew nothing about his extraordinary gift. He is arguably the best writer for writings sake that I have ever read. He doesn't necessarily have a good plot, or the substance and structure of a good story. What he does have is an enchanting way of writing. To the point where I found myself not caring that I didn't know where the novel was going because it was remarkable to be on the journey with him. I can't compare him to anyone. It is breath taking to read. So do we miss anything from this being an unfinished novel? Not that I can tell, other than the fact that it doesn't really finish so much as it ends. But then again, maybe it would have been like this if he had lived to finish it. As unfinished works go, it is the Sagrada Familia of unfinished works. Magnificent, so much so that finishing it seems unnecessary. I had to gush a little about the book before I breathed a word about it's content. It is about random people who work for the government. The IRS, no less. And it is positively steeped in beaurocratic jargon. The theme which weaves it all together is boredom. It is lovely, funny and sad, brilliant and dull, a pastiche of contrasts that somehow becomes the great American novel about boredome. One review I read compared what 'The Pale King' does for boredom to what 'Moby Dick' did for whales. An epic novel. It is too bad the Pullizer committee couldn't see it is worth it's weight in gold.

Jews in Poland: A Krakow Reflection

Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world before WWII. Poland was the center of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. As the situation in other parts of Europe heated up, Poland became a unique shelter for persecuted and expelled European Jewish communities and a home to the world's largest Jewish community. The Catholic church wanted everyone either converted to catholicism or gone--either expelled or killed. No exceptions. Aa a result of Poland's long standing religious tolerance, about 1/2 to 3/4 of all Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century.

Why was Poland so tolerant? On the one hand, there was support at the top for these policies. The king wanted it, so it was so. Kings and landowners were supportive of Jewish communities because they were travelers and traders. they knew that business, and with Poland lying on the cusp between Asia and Europe, there was a lot of money to be made in trade, and Jews had that expertise. The other advantage that Jews had over Catholics was they could lend money--Catholics were religiously excluded from that business, while Jews were not, so they held a niche that was valued. Which is not to say there wasn't persecution. There was. It was medieval times, after all, but Poland afforded Jews a life that they could not find elsewhere in Europe for almost 1000 years. Hitler put an end to that thriving sector of Polish life.

Hugo (2011)

It takes gut to make a movie out of a book who's story is told almost entirely in pictures. I know, a silent film won best picture this year, but that was also a gutsy move. This one succeeds spectacularly, and every single character in it plays their role to perfection. So here is the story. It’s 1920s Paris. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a young boy who divides his time between manually winding all the main train stations’ clocks and trying to repair a strange clockwork. These tasks entail him running around and peering out at things from behind clock faces --which does an excellent job of setting up who’s who and what’s what at the station, most notably that Hugo has to stay out of the clutches of the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who seems to delight in throwing unattended children into a police van bound for the nearest orphanage. Hugo has a strained relationship with toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who has a stall at the station, and he is befriended by his granddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz. He teaches her about movies and she teaches him about books. Gradually she teases out Hugo’s backstory: his father (Jude Law) was a museum worker who died in a fire, then his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone) brought him to the station to help with his clock-winding job and promptly vanished. His father was trying to repair the clockwork figure before he died, and Hugo thinks (though he knows it’s crazy) that if he can repair the automation it will deliver a message from his dead father. In the end, the kids have adventures, the grown-ups fall in love, there are close shaves and narrow escapes and a movie studio that was made entirely of glass and a movie maker who lost his way. What’s not to like?

Remu Synagogue and Cemetery, Krakow

It was here, in the very well preserved Jewish Quarter in Krakow that I first first saw broken grave marker that were used to be something else. I had never thought about the purposeful destruction on grave stones before. Vandalism is a problem in graveyards in the United States--it is vandalism most of the time, not zenophobia or targeting a particular group of people. So why wouldn't it have been rampant during WWII, when the living were being murdered. Why woul dthe dead be spared?

Well, spared they were not. Grave stones were used to pave streets, whole graveyards were dismantled and the component parts used elsewhere. So in Krakow's Jewish neighborhood, which is relatively well intact today, there was destruction of grave stones. I really liked the idea of making them into something that is beautiful and useful. It is not exactly like fixing what is wrong in the world, but it is making what is wrong less powerful.

This is a humble synagogue with a beautiful cemetery. When we were visiting, there was a group of traditionally dressed orthodox men praying around the grave of a learned scholar. It is a tradition that is very old, and they could have been there a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, and the prayers (and to a certain extent,the dress) would be exactly the same. That is what is compelling about ancient traditions--they link you to mankind across the ages. It is just very hard to put the atrocities of WWII behind you.

Being Shakespeare

This is a very entertaining way to hear the argument that Shakespeare did indeed write all the plays ascribed to him. The play is by a Shakespearean scholar, Jonathan Bates, and the performance I saw at the Broadway Theater in Chicago was by Simon Callow (best known to me as the funeral in 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'). The play starts off with Shakespeare as a baby--his place in his family of origin, and the life he would have had in 16th century Stratford. It progresses through his life--in stages--and ends with his death. The template apparently comes from a speech in 'As You Like It', but it reminded me of Erik Erikson's Eight Stage of Man, where we have different developmental stages throughout our lives. The play links various works with the age that Shakespeare would have been when they were written, and then what we know about him at that time. The material is well written--very funny on the one hand, and craftily using Shakespeare's own soliliqies to bring home the main point on the other. The delivery that Callow brings to the play is quite good. The package is well wrapped in this case and well worth travelling to see.

Queen of Hearts (2009)

I was recently at a wonderful family gathering in Baltimore. En route to the East Coast, I got delayed for quite a few hours in Chicago (it turns out that the Windy City was aptly named that day, and airplanes do not appreciate wind as much as other things that fly, especially when it gusts unpredictably and close to the ground). To pass the time, I watched a couple of movies that I was reasonably certain my spouse would appreciate being excused from viewing. I am someone who lives very much in the moment, so I couldn't help talking some about said movies, and one of my very favorite people who I see reliably when my husband's family gathers together said about French movies "It isn't that I don't like foreign movies. Not at all. It is that I don't like movies that lack a plot." I laughed out loud at the time, and I am still laughing. It is a very reasonable gripe about the classic French romantic comedy. And he has a very reasonable expectation for films. It is just that while this genre very much appeals to me, when he said that, I couldn't for the life of me think why that is. Since then, I haven't made any progress on that front, but if you like that sort of movie, this one is very fun (and there is plenty of playful sex to keep someone who finds that to be adequate compensation for a lack of a plot to be kept happy). Here is the basic plot: Valerie Donzelli plays Adele, a young Parisian who flings herself wholeheartedly adn histrionically into self-pitying despair when dumped by boyfriend Mathieu. Relocating to the living-room floor of abrasive, mysteriously eye-impaired cousin Rachel (Beatrice de Stael), who encourages her to use sex with strangers to get 'back on the horse', so to speak. She throws herself enthusiastically into this task, all the while taking for granted Pierre, an obvious Mr. Right. (Jeremie Elkaim does amusing quadruple duty as all these male characters). The absurdist humor harkens back to early Woody Allen movies with a French signature.

Bobalicious, Iowa City

A restaurant with Vietnamese food in Iowa City! Pho! Bahn Mi! This is very exciting news. I know, I am late to discover it, and I beg forgiveness for that oversight. In my defense, it is nestled in what up until this year has been a relative restaurant wasteland of strip malls, gas stations, and big box stores that skirts the bottom of Iowa City proper. But discover it we have, and while the menu is modest, we liked everything we had on our first visit.

The Vietnamese spring rolls (fresh and wrapped in rice paper), which are available at other restaurants in town, are the best of the bunch. They are a bit smaller, and have more herbs rolled into them--excellent, and at $2.50 for two, they are a good deal as well. The Vietnamese egg rolls (what you might think of as spring rolls, with mung bean noodles as well as vegetables) are excellent, but again, not something we couldn't have someplace else in town. The bahn mi menu, with six options for fillings, does stand out. We have have one restaurant (Mekong) that on occasion has had one bahn mi option. This is a reason to celebrate! The sandwich we had (the traditional slow cooked pork version, with pickled vegetables and fresh herbs) was fantastic. I was serious when I said I could eat there the very next night, it was that good. On top of that, they also have bun thit nuong--hurray! This cold vermicelli noodles with fresh vegetables underneath, and highly spice meat on top is a favorite of mine (especially when they slice up an egg roll or two on top, and you can get that here). But wait, that is not all. The pho is very good, and they have several other Vietnamese dishes with rice. The restaurant started off as a boba tea shop and expanded from there--these do look very good, and I saw them scooping fresh avocado into the blender to make one, so they are not drinks coming directly out of a mix either. Once I get brave, I would love to try the durian boba In the meantime, I am going to exhaust the menu's options.