I have had a bitch and a half of a week. It seems
like each day brings its own particular brand of crap. And I’m not even going
to go through it here.
In my NaNoWriMo novel, if faced with a week like
this, one of my main characters would anesthetize herself with massive spreadsheets and crunch data until her ears were bleeding. The other main character would crank
up the volume on a couple of Bach cantatas and then cycle through the
Brandenburg concerti. My victim would have swallowed a bottleful of rum.
Me? I’m hunkered down with DVDs of the entire Due South series.
The SF-based NPR station KQED is running a series by
The Kitchen Sisters called “The Making of…” about, well, pretty much anything
you’d care to make—from a pot of tea to something that is uniquely SF:
Homobiles.
Homobiles
is a donation-based dispatch-only transport service for the LGBT community. If
you’re in that demographic, your chances of getting a ride from a taxi at
club-closing time are low. Homobiles fills that gap.
It’s an interesting story, and I love the way the
Kitchen Sisters let the participants tell it. The audio
runs more than seven minutes, but it’s worth it.
I especially like the one rider who understands why
regular taxi drivers might not want customers who leave behind body paint,
glitter and sequins. “You can’t get that stuff out.”
So this commercial for Smirnoff came to my attention
by…well, you don’t really need to know that. I don’t believe it’s running in
the US; if so I’ve not actually seen it on TV.
However, I find it…interesting. Because I don’t
exactly know what it’s telling me. I mean, you’d think that if they wanted me
to ingest their product—which is, after all, an alcoholic drink—they would, you know, say so.
Instead, I’m apparently being urged to…paint my body
multiple colors, fill a grand piano with ice and throw fruit at fans? And evidently, only at night.
Hmm, it seems that nothing is immune to a rise in
the cost of living here in the Silicon Valley. You’ll recall the cosmic
confluence on El Camino Real of businesses involved with freshening up your
inner and outer personas.
It was 70 years ago today that one of the all-time
classics of romance, wartime intrigue and just sheer verve premiered. Casablanca opened at the Hollywood
Theater in NYC on 26 November 1942. Since it was a film about the fragile
encrustation of normalcy plastered over the underlying desperation and fear in
Vichy North Africa, its premiere was moved up from Spring of 1943 to coincide
with the Allied invasion of that territory in November.
Casablanca
did well both critically and at the box office, right from the beginning. It’s
consistently ranked amongst the greatest films of all time on any number of
such lists. I myself watch it at least a couple of times a year—sadly, no
longer with a bottle of Cordon Rouge (which is what Rick & Ilsa drank at La
Belle Aurore to keep the invading Germans from getting it in 1940), but maybe
with a glass of Mumm Cuvée Napa. & I find new aspects to enjoy every time.
When you think you’ve memorized every possible
interaction between Rick, Ilsa & Renault, there’s still plenty to explore. I
especially get a kick out of the minor characters—many of whom were played by
European actors who fled the Nazis in their respective countries. Carl the
waiter (S.K. Sakall), Sascha the bartender (Leonid Kinskey), the Leuchtags
(Ludwig Stössel & Ilka Grüning) on their way to America. (Perhaps most ironic: Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser.) Watching them in
little vignettes gives me something new to discover every time. The expression
on Sascha’s face when Rick tells him to take the drunken Yvonne home—and come
right back; Carl pulling an extra cordial glass out of his pocket—along with
the best brandy—having anticipated that he’d be invited to share; the Leuchtags
practicing their conversational English.
I also really love the music war—“Die Wacht am Rhein”
vs “La Marseillaise”. It’s symbolically heavy-handed, but, damn, does it have
style. That’s worth the price of admission right there.
If you want to revisit Casablanca, TCM will be showing it on 6 December. Set your DVR, put
a bottle of bubbly on ice & settle back to enjoy.
