The Little Books of Perfumes – sneak peek
October 4, 2011 § 11 Comments
Penguin US edition
Oopsie on the blurb from India Knight on the UK edition, we know, please don’t write and tell us. Will be fixed on next printing, I am promised.
Material is mostly taken from our original Perfumes:
A good number of those reviews have re-smelling notes appended, since many many older fragrances have been recently adjusted with new materials, which have changed the balance in some and utterly changed the character in others. Some current bottlings we were unable to get in time, unfortunately.
The new material includes a foreword by TS and an essay on the Osmothèque by LT; there are four reviews of long-lost, beautiful Osmothèque perfumes we tested during a presentation on perfume by the brilliant Patricia de Nicolaï, curator of the Osmothèque, at the French Embassy in Washington, DC, organized by Smithsonian Associates.
I am sorry our publisher was so keen to have 100 fragrances; I would have liked to write about Poiret’s Fruit Défendu, about Fougère Royale and Ambre Antique and Parfum Idéal. At any rate, we give you L’Origan, described by me by LT’s request, and Chypre de Coty, Emeraude and Iris Gris, described by LT at my request. Personally, I think the book is worth peeking into just for LT’s take on those three fragrances. (My thoughts on L’Origan I think were tainted by despair for what had happened to L’Heure Bleue—all I could think while smelling them both was lost, lost, lost.)
There are also a glossary, a brief bit on sources for perfume samples and perfume education, and a Top Ten List section that includes Desert Island lists from both authors, so you can find out what we can’t live without. (Of course, if you asked me today I’m sure I might give you a different list. Hormones, you know.)
And that is it. Both editions are beautifully produced with the aim of making somebody you know a grand present at the end of the year. And the UK edition has a beautiful shocking pink ribbon, which you may slide slyly into place to your favorite perfume, and leave about the house prominently, as an indication as to what the next present ought to be.
The Questionable Usefulness of Pimsleur Modern Greek 1 for a Childless Non-Driver in Greece
June 24, 2011 § 5 Comments
I am enjoying learning Greek, of course, since it allows me to eavesdrop more efficiently on my neighbors.
However, because I won’t shell out for actual live lessons, I am using the remarkably effective Pimsleur method, which has no textbook and relies entirely on conversational learning.
It is marvelous, and I would not hesitate to use it to communicate with the natives in any barbaric non-Anglophone jungle I wandered into next.
Unfortunately, I have just spent the last few weeks patiently drilling conversations that force me to repeat such falsities and irrelevancies as the following:
I have a lot of dollars.
How much is it in dollars?
Do you have any dollars?
I live in America.
My family is in America.
I have five children, two boys and three girls.
The boys are big. The girls are small.
I have a car. I have a big car.
Is there gasoline in the car?
Put gasoline in the car, please.
It’s in my car.
My family is in the car.
I have one girl and two boys.
I have many children.
Do you have children?
Yes, that is my little girl.
My wife is in America.
And so on.
I have managed on my own to cobble together the sentence
Ένα αυτοκίνητο είναι πάρα πολύ ακριβό! (A car is too expensive!)
and
Δεν έχω παιδιά! (I don’t have children!)
But I really need more.
If you are a Greek speaker, please let me know how to say the following, which so far the Pimsleur method has not included in their lesson plans:
I have two stepchildren who live in England.
Me, I don’t have any children.
Sure, I’d like children.
You do go on about children.
Did my mother send you?
I have a scooter.
I’m not allowed legally to drive the scooter because it is one cc above the limit for driving without a scooter license, which no one told me until after I’d bought it.
No Greek, civilian or bureaucrat, can tell me how to get a scooter license.
I don’t have any dollars.
Who has dollars in Greece?
Come to think of it, who has euros in Greece?
My stepdaughter is small.
By which I mean she is taller than me.
I still weigh more. Much more.
None of your business.
Your lane is a meter farther right than you think it is, sir.
Do you still live with your mother?
Reading, watching, listening: Make Hortapita, Not War; Plus, Rufus Does Lenny
June 6, 2011 § Leave a comment
It was a drag of a week for an indolent wench like me who wants only to recline on a cushy sofa all day and read cookbooks, and instead is still unpacking and cleaning up everything that failed to be scoured by magical shipping container fairies during two months on the wide sea. Fire those fairies.
Let’s talk about Greek food.
Reading: The Foods of Greece, by Aglaia Kremezi (1999)
I love Greek food. By which I mean, I love the food at Molyvos and Elia in New York.
But when I first visited Greece as a student, back when drachmas were the currency and though everything was cheap it still didn’t seem worth buying, after three or four days of exotically grim breakfasts and identical stodgy meals at roadside tavern after roadside tavern, I swore by all that was dear to me that once I was home I would touch neither spanakopita nor moussaka ever again.
Do not make oaths.
A friend has let me borrow her much loved The Foods of Greece by Aglaia Kremezi, an expert on all foods from Corfu to Iconium, up to Macedonia and down to Crete. In the introduction to her recipes, she gives an excellent overview of Greek cookery, its evolution both good and bad. Eventually it emerges that this cookbook was written to exorcise a devil. His name is Tselementes, the French-trained author of “the most influential cookbook in Greece,” whose name is a synonym for “cookbook” and who is considered the inventor of that sad diminished repertoire we know as modern Greek food. Though Kremezi doesn’t name the nefarious volume itself, it looks likely that she means Odigos Mageirikes (1910), a self-loathing Greek’s guide to the kitchen. She writes,
Tselementes tried to refine Greek peasant cooking, making it more suitable for the tastes of Europeans and Americans. He believed that French cooking had its origins in ancient Greece, and that under Turkish rule, Greek cooking became more Eastern—something he was determined to correct.
If that wasn’t damning enough, she adds,
The popular version of moussaka is probably his creation.
I see with my soul’s eye that Tselementes, now in hell, swims forever, for sins against palate and patriotism, in a lake of béchamel with neither floor nor shore.
And Kremezi adds:
What most Greeks of my age and younger have known as “Greek” food is the “neither Eastern nor European” dishes that Tselementes promoted—food that cannot compete with French or Italian cooking.
True, one of the curiosities of the Greek food I encountered years ago was its limited variety. The hills are fragrant with thyme in abundance, from which a rightly famous honey is made, but thyme does not seem to scent the food. You can hardly stop the rosemary, basil, mint, parsley, cilantro, verbena from sprouting, but the only herbs that appear with regularity in dishes are oregano, garlic and members of the onion family. Olives and capers only seem allowed in the disjointed melange known as “Greek salad,” mostly composed of tomatoes, an American berry. In the countries to the north, east, west and south, pickles and relishes abound, but here I see only a salty mixed vegetable pickle, like what I’ve seen in jars that come from Poland.
You need only look next door to Sicily to find a varied, inventive, joyful cuisine, using much the same ingredients, but reveling in far more striking combinations, mounting all the glories of its mongrel history on its plate. For example there seems no practical reason that the Greeks should not cook a dish of sardines, fennel and saffron as the Sicilians do, especially as Greece produces a beautiful saffron of its own. Greek cuisine just suffers for not being Arab enough. As Kremezi points out, for reasons of politics and pride the Greeks have shaken off the best of the east as well as the worst—Turkish coffee is Turkish no matter how stubbornly it is called “Greek coffee” here. I think of it as the Freedom Fries fallacy.
Fortunately hints of the Eastern influence that Tselementes was so keen to repress appear throughout Kremezi’s recipes. In her introduction she explains that a rather bland dish of chicken with white sauce, a classic Tselementes creation, is probably his perversion of a far more interesting chicken in garlic-and-walnut sauce, which she includes. Her chicken with egg-and-lemon sauce (the famous avgolemono) lazes on a big bed of parsley salad that can only remind you of tabbouleh. Cinnamon scents her giouvetsi, or lamb stew; a hare is stifado with allspice, cinnamon and cloves. She provides a pilaf of rice, chickpeas and currants that any Persian could recognize. And the recipe I want to try next, melitzanopita, or eggplant pie, is seasoned generously with cumin.
Still, I spy another influence that could use some purging. There is no getting rid of New World ingredients, but must they be so prominent? Not only do tomatoes and peppers combine in the Greek salad (salata horiatiki) I find so boring, but the tiresome tomato is always off being stuffed or stuffing something, or lubricating other things in ubiquitous red slick. And the potato, that damnable tuber: do I come all the way here only to be greeted by potato stew?
Furthermore, food nostalgia can really go too far. Greeks, Kremezi writes with no apparent horror or regret, traditionally have gathered wild greens for their χορταπιτα (hortapita), which, reduced to spinach alone, has become the little slice of dull spanakopita to down with your ouzo, sold in a thousand tavernas from here to Macedonia, and which to me represents more than any other dish my memories of Greece.
She reports that the women of the countryside claim that seven different sorts of greens, balancing several fragrances and tastes, are required for a decent hortapita, and that these greens are not sold in stores and must be picked painstakingly by hand among the weedy hills.
It was pure delight, after reading such a passage, to head to the local supermarket and just pay money for food.
My hortapita was made with a very bitter green that looks like dandelion with a red rib, which they call χορτα ιταλικα (horta italica), plus spinach, fennel bulb, leek, scallion and dill. Kremezi’s recipe sweetens this mixture with raisins and salts it with a combination of feta and pecorino cheeses. Supermarket phyllo dough, which I’d never handled before, resembles wonton wrappers for giants, thin and fragile though flexible; Kremezi’s directions for making my own phyllo reinforced my impression that the traditional way of life involves greater expenditure of energy in making food than can be gained by consuming it, a thermodynamically unsustainable practice.
Even with the cornucopia available at the local A/B supermarket, preparation was a drag: the greens and leeks contained so much sand it was a surprise not to see parasols and Russian tourists come tumbling out. But in the end the pie was delicious, fresh and surprising, displaying an unusual range of tastes and textures. It put every other vegetable pie to shame (and utterly trumped that weird tart from Nice made with chard and raisins.) It lasted three days. I fear I am going to make it again. There’s one promise broken.
If you see me lingering on the moussaka page, however, someone come and restrain me until the doctor arrives.
Watching: The Warlords (2007)
After watching Ip Man 2, I got to thinking of that arty-farty, flighty-fighty movie Hero, which had both Donnie Yen and Jet Li in it. What’s Jet Li doing these days, anyway?
It turns out he’s getting an eight-figure paycheck, for which he consents to stand around in 19th-century military getup, keeping his expression blank while one glycerin tear streams down his cheek.
Apart from the appalling acting job that Jet Li turns in, the rest of the picture is a nearly two-hour-long orgy of battle scenes, complete with juicy slicing noises as spears and knives and arrows rip through soldiers whose useless armor must be made of dried fruit strips. As videogame cut scene this would be OK, but as film narrative it would all be much better if absolutely any wit had been deployed. Depressingly, there is also the regulation love interest, played by an actress who looks like the Chinese equivalent of Jennifer Aniston: whenever she arrives on screen, my eye keeps frantically searching for the person I’m supposed to be looking at. The only reason I can think of to watch The Warlords, if you’re not a connoisseur of gory battle scenes, is to gaze on the talented, super-handsome face of Andy Lau, who, with his flashing eyes and his bristly hair, has a healthy dose of that old Toshiro Mifune charisma as he out-acts everyone.
Listening: I’m Your Man (2006)
Leonard Cohen’s own performances are a minority taste, but some of his ditties that have been covered by others (try Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” or Madeleine Peyroux’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”) stand as some of the most gracious, intelligent songs ever recorded. So I imagined that I would love the cover album “I’m Your Man,” connected to the movie of the same name.
Unfortunately, several of the performances suffer from the singers seeming not to understand the songs, perhaps to have learned them phonetically. Worse, while Cohen’s twee folk impulses have always been well masked by his creepy bass drone and his prickly language, when the likes of Kate McGarrigle turns up with her high Celtic gargle and wavery flutes, the music hardly survives the revelation. Some of the covers turn Cohen into bad country-western; others turn him into bad gospel. The Handsome Family, Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker all suffer from the impression that they are competing in a Leonard Cohen soundalike contest, which Leonard Cohen is winning. But Rufus Wainwright, who has decided that Cohen is simply a music-hall piano man, makes up for it all with a tender “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” and a cheerfully sarcastic “Everybody Knows” tango, each well worth a 99-cent download.
Watching, reading, listening: Ip Man vs. GK Chesterton
May 27, 2011 § 2 Comments
Watching: Ip Man 2
When I was eleven, we spent a week in Hong Kong on our way to China to meet my mother’s relatives. As our taxi took us from the airport, it was more than raining; it was a typhoon. The little sky visible was a low, opaque smear; the windows clattered with the blows; and the sound of the tires across the wet road was like the peeling up of some great piece of tape. Between close, gray towers, I watched signs in Chinese flap like laundry on wires stretched over the middle of the avenue. I was repulsed. Everything and everyone was Chinese! I had thought Hong Kong was British. Why didn’t they speak English! I marched about speaking English as loudly as I could so no one would mistake me for Chinese. No one bothered to tell me why the Chinese had no particular fondness for English. I was left to piece it together from hints here and there
The psychic wound left by the foreign powers in China has been regularly and lucratively reopened in films, at least since Bruce Lee howled and let fly a kick at a park sign reading “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed” in Fist Of Fury
(Uh, nice “Sikh.”)
Ip Man 2 boils down to a (fictitious) grudge match between a large gorilla with an English accent—beetle-browed Darren Shahlavi playing a British boxer—and Wing Chun master Ip Man—played by Donnie Yen, with frustratingly Obama-esque serenity. Ip is fighting, naturally, for the honor of the insulted Chinese and their martial arts.
The scene is easy on the eyes: 1940s period set and costume design, with dingy tenements and alleys in a muted palette, are interrupted joyously by saturated turquoise and lemon yellow on doors or shutters, or bright saffron laundry drying against a grid of viridian windowframes. The camera spies on a conversation through slats in a wall, pans across city scenes from the rooftops to the street, but holds static precisely when less trusting filmmakers switch to obfuscating quick cuts and closeups: in fight scenes and conversations.
The plot has been purchased on clearance at the Hong Kong Action-Movie Bargain Plot Bin. There are rival schools, rival masters, the perennial problem of which style is most effective, to be settled with a match. The choreography contrasts fight styles to great effect, and a few good chaotic melees give you all the pleasures you desire from a kung fu movie. The characters even manage to be about as complex as you’d get in a graphic novel, instead of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Yet when the (terribly acted) English bark viciously at the ludicrously innocent Chinese collabos, I quailed. “They’re pouring it on a bit thick with the evil English,” I said. L raised an eyebrow and reminded me: “I’m pretty sure they were exactly like that. Probably worse.”
(For a less forgiving treatment of Chinese collabos, see Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution
Reading: The Ball and the Cross (1910); The Innocence of Father Brown (1911); The New Jerusalem (1920)
by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Coincidentally, the next night I opened up my Kindle app for Mac to read a bit of Chesterton, and I apologize to the makers of Ip Man 2: the English were abominable. Never stop kicking their asses in movies. I’ll never again complain.
I had to halt reading The Ball and the Cross
I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type. But he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy.
There was no sticking around in such a novel after that, so I moved on, with charity, hoping it was youthful folly and he would improve.
But The Innocence of Father Brown
Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche.
Jews are not the only ones who inspire narrative disgust, though they’re the most plentiful. A manservant Magnus, at first suspected of murdering his master (it transpires that he has only tried to secure the victim’s assets from being stolen by the real murderer) is described:
Then he stood back again, and his slits of eyes almost faded from his face in one fat Chinese sneer. Merton felt an almost bodily sickness at the sight of him.
Shortly afterward, the boyfriend of the girl whom Magnus has accused decides to attack her accuser.
His huge shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus’s bland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish.
This is followed by a mild warning from a police officer that if this continues, the attacker will be arrested for assault. The story giggles on, for want of an Ip Man to lay them all flat.
Perhaps the most startling and honest declaration of Chesterton’s phobia in these stories is in “The Wrong Shape,” in which an eccentric English poet of means is murdered.
The victim is one of those Englishmen possessed by a mania for the exotic, and Father Brown condemns him for it throughout the story, with an unforgiving, uncomprehending disgust, exceptional in a priest so otherwise mild with violent fratricides, adulterers, atheist assassins and burglars.
The murdered man “had turned his genius so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those bewildering carpets or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a fortunate chaos, having nothing to typify or to teach.” (Father Brown apparently nurses a hatred of Persian carpets for not being didactic.)
Examining a jeweled knife from the poet’s collection, Father Brown declares it’s the wrong shape. When asked by his sidekick to clarify, he says:
“It’s the wrong shape in the abstract. Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad– deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey carpet.”
Then:
“They are letters and symbols in a language I don’t know; but I know they stand for evil words,” went on the priest, his voice growing lower and lower. “The lines go wrong on purpose–like serpents doubling to escape.”
Father Brown’s idea of evil is simply the unfamiliar. Worse, he’s aware that this is what he hates, and yet he remains confident that fearful ignorance is a trustworthy guide. When a perfectly innocuous (so it turns out) Hindu friend of the poet is seen strolling around the grounds, the various characters spend some time watching him with disgust and suspicion, beyond tiresome to read.
Surprise: the fatly-Chinese-sneering Mongolian Magnus and this supposedly arrogant Hindu are red herrings. They are just loathsome characters there to soak up suspicion, before Father Brown’s eye can light on the correct murderer, inevitably a person who lies within the scope of priestly forgiveness. Murdering someone is human and understandable, after all, unlike being oriental—with the wrong sort of carpet, the wrong sort of knife, the wrong sort of face—which is devilry beyond Christian salvation.
Some apologies are always made for a writer like Chesterton: he was a man of his time, one could say, or instead, he couldn’t have known better. It is untrue, of course. Better persons knew better.
I condemn him for not knowing better because I am convinced he could have. He would be utterly harmless and not worth the breath it takes to condemn him for these lapses if he were not exceptionally gifted creatively and, when not immorally lazy, brilliant—if he did not sometimes put it just so. For how could I, a onetime resident of Kentish Town and rider of the 24 bus, not lurch with sympathy toward the page on reading this passage:
[T]he long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope. It was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell Park. London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels. It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each other.
Or help smiling at this:
[T]he chocolates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metallic colours which are almost better than chocolate itself; and the huge white wedding-cake in the window was somehow at once remote and satisfying, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat.
There are many more like that, delicious and thrilling. But then in The Ball and the Cross, which presumes to be a comic novel, an atheist and a devout Scotsman plan to duel over religion and demand the right to do so in a Jewish shopowner’s garden. The shopowner replies:
“Well, this is a funny game,” he said. “So you want to commit murder on behalf of religion. Well, well my religion is a little respect for humanity, and—-”
“Excuse me,” cut in Turnbull, suddenly and fiercely, pointing towards the pawnbroker’s next door. “Don’t you own that shop?”
“Why–er–yes,” said Gordon.
“And don’t you own that shop?” repeated the secularist, pointing backward to the pornographic bookseller.
“What if I do?”
“Why, then,” cried Turnbull, with grating contempt. “I will leave the religion of humanity confidently in your hands; but I am sorry I troubled you about such a thing as honour. Look here, my man. I do believe in humanity. I do believe in liberty. My father died for it under the swords of the Yeomanry. I am going to die for it, if need be, under that sword on your counter. But if there is one sight that makes me doubt it it is your foul fat face. It is hard to believe you were not meant to be ruled like a dog or killed like a cockroach. Don’t try your slave’s philosophy on me.”
Ah, that wholesome, old-fashioned English humor.
There is much more of this clumsy idiocy, but it is boring to collect it. If you’re curious anyway, download the Kindle file and simply search one by one for the terms “chinaman” or “jew” or “hindoo” and while you’re at it, download Ip Man 2 for a purifying ass-kicking afterward.
Note: Although the Wikipedia page on Chesterton surprisingly absolves him by citing the Wiener Library, which declared him not an anti-Semite, I don’t buy it. I have skimmed his later non-fiction statements on the subject and do see that he was both anti-Hitler and pro-Israel. It’s reasonable to ask why. Like many Englishmen around the time of the world wars, Chesterton thought the militant Prussian to be even more barbaric than the “sinister and unhuman Chinaman.” He also sensibly determined that unless the Jews had a home of their own, there would be no getting them out of England. To me, those don’t sound like the sentiments of a friend of the Jews. And since I’m sinister and unhuman and a Yank to boot, I say I qualify to make the call.
Listening
For dancing in the kitchen, remembering the tango guitarists of Buenos Aires.
Reading, listening, watching
May 11, 2011 § 4 Comments
Still no phone! They were due to turn it on today but the phone employees are on strike and we waited in vain.
You cannot have Internet till you have phone, and you cannot have phone until you have your AFM number, and even if you have that, you have to make an appointment and wait three weeks.
So for a month now at home I have been left to eat boiled vegetables and read. Which is not so bad.
Anyway, with a tip of my orange straw hat to Manolo I give you this list of what’s occupying my attention.
Kindle public-domain free books: enlarge your culture, indulge your stinginess.
I pretended to have read this in college. In fact, I’d read no Austen at all until this year, when I plowed through Pride & Prejudice and decided to go on. Finally I find I can wear pink without repugnance and read novels about marriages without going cuckoo with boredom. Girlhood came late but it came. And it turns out to be unromantic.
So with apologies to all you responsible literary types who did your assigned reading long ago in school, I find Austen to be, pleasantly, the opposite of a prose stylist; she is instead a shrewd portraitist and assessor of positions and strategies, analyzing through entertainingly revealing scenes all the iffy speculations and mistakes the heart makes in context of money and society. Not a purple flourish anywhere. Too bad the main character has the personality of a snail. Furthermore, since Austen’s romances seem always concerned with the problem of maximally valuing a lady’s maidenhead in the great one-time auction of her nubility, the name Fanny Price seems a bad joke.
Glee: The Music presents The Warblers
I am ashamed of my crush on Darren Criss.
Good dialogue, all actors in exceptional form (save for dull Derek Jacobi). That said, the plot unfolds without surprises, and the pacing goes a little soggy at the vital part (the king switch). Set and costume reek of big budget and small research. Accents sound surprisingly anachronistic. Ambitious camerawork sometimes distracts. But despite these quibbles, the film is enjoyable. Bonham-Carter’s queen mum is charmingly quick and acid. Colin Firth’s Bertie is perfectly sympathetic, with that hemorrhoidal, crumbling-from-the-inside expression that has served him so well. Geoffrey Rush is still a marvel of perfectly tuned choices, giving a subtle performance when an overweeningly hammy one would have been easy to turn in. Guy Pearce makes a convincingly abominably selfish, weak, abdicating Edward. The film is worth watching for these, though in truth there is little tension in the story at all.
Also, Churchill what?
As context for my bewilderment at the film’s portrayal of Britain’s attitudes on the coming war, I have had a good time recently reading, on the recommendation of a friend, the Cazalet
honeyandthunder 