Last summer, we ate a meal in the Eiffel Tower and I was (privately) indignant when my "trout" came back looking just like the salmon I cook every week at home. I mean, c'mon, I want something other than home-cooking when I'm eating in Paris, people! My mind went right to "tourist trap" and I grumbled a bit about it to Irene and I allowed it to mar what was otherwise a lovely lunch.
Fast forward to last week when Irene did the Costco run and (for the first time) bought the weekly salmon. She told me she bought the slightly more expensive one because the cheapest one was labelled "steelhead" and not explicitly "salmon" so, in the doubt, she bought the one labelled salmon. I get on my righteous high horse and tell her I always buy the cheapest one and I suppose I had noticed the labels were different, but ,whatever, ... they are all types of salmon....
... or are they?
Steelhead Trout
Salmon (king/chinook)
What What? Turns out my trusty old "steelhead" IS a trout so the Eiffel Tower place was not misleading me - they were just calling it like it is ("truite saumonee") The steelhead is a subspecies of trout that goes out into the ocean and then lives & eats similarly to a salmon (and therefore looks and tastes similar).
Apparently there is much confusion on the subject of where the dividing line is between these critters so at least I am not alone in my confusion. Understandable confusion; people want things to stay within their well-defined lanes and boxes when nature really operates on a continuum.
In France, you can order a trout and get what looks like a salmon while in America you might buy a salmon that turns out to be a trout. Either way, identifying fish has made me a fool twice over and I don't need any help in that department!
It's not really a Stone Soup kind of thing, but I'm reminded of the folk tale every winter when I make a big pot of soup or stew on the wood stove:
Throughout the year, I freeze the bones after some meals (e.g. a chicken carcass, the bone from a leg of lamb) in order to have them on hand for just such an occasion. When I know we'll be home all day and heating the house with our little wood stove, I'll throw in whatever vegetables we have lying around at that time and, voila, a rustic little house on the prairie experience!
(Truth be told, the rest of the family is only with me in spirit on this one - I wind up eating most of the soup myself as they opt for less, ahem, rustic culinary choices)
As we prep for our first snow storm of 2019, I snapped a couple pictures of plants that are still alive in our greenhouse. Often we are mocked for under-utilizing our small greenhouse (I'm talking about you, SP!) and often we mock ourselves. But, the truth is, we have started tomatoes and a few other vegetable plants from seeds here in the early spring (only to then be transplanted outside where they get eaten by the non-human fauna).
A few years back I was given the tip that you can do late fall hearty greens (like the spinach pictured below) and harvest them in the winter. We've done this successful a couple winters in a row, but this year I didn't plant enough and now I guess I'll only get a single serving out of it! The dead stalk to the left is a basil-from-seed plant that produced a fair amount this fall but then died as soon as the weather got cold.
Since the greenhouse is not heated, we can't use it year-round but last year I threw in some cacti (from Costco, where else?) (one of them in the upper right in the pic below on the shelf) and I'm curious to see if they can make it through the winter!
In the foreground, on right, is a rosemary plant that originally went in the backyard this summer and I'm trying to see if it can make it through the winter by transplanting it into the greenhouse (so far so good!).
On the left, that big fella is an avocado tree that I rescued from our compost after a big guacamole spree this fall. I feel bad because he'll either die or get too big - but I feel obligated to support his underdog fight until the bitter end.
I just heard that the Hive is switching to the 24 clock. I applaud this whole-heartedly. I have long been a fan of 24 hour time (although I dislike that it is called 'military time' in the United States - c'mon people: the rest of the world is on 24 hour time!).
Time is originally based off of a 6 hour shadow clock that spans the ante meridiem (AM) which you then rotate 180 degrees to catch the 6 hours post meridiem (PM).
So I get the historic appeal of AM/PM for the daylight hours. However, the night-time never had such a distinction! Also, high noon is the meridiem and so is neither post nor ante! Anyone who thinks that noon and midnight have 'obvious' AM or PM associations are just wrong!
Just like the metric system updated all the quaint but fuzzy old measurement units, the 24 hour clock gets rid of the antiquated AM/PM distinctions. We have 24 hour days that end at midnight. Period. The countries that sadly still use the AM/PM are the same ones that held onto the imperial units for the longest: former British colonies.
Sigh, I guess we are doomed to use AM/PM for as long as we continue to buy milk in gallons...
As we were watching this (I think the video dates from 2012 - Sebastien was probably four years old as he narrates this), I remembered that I actually showed this to the faculty. We used to have technology share-outs at faculty meetings and so I used this one to show the utility of the "ShowMe" app on iPads because "It's so easy even a child can do it!".
(At the very end he says "These are first-borns" (Because Isabelle and I are both first borns whereas Seb and Irene are 'second borns'))
These movies made me a better person. Well, not better in the sense of kinder or becoming philanthropic or anything like that. More like in the Socrates-sense: "The unexamined life is not worth living"
This list is personal in the way my top three books post was personal: It's not about what I objectively think about all the movies I've seen, but rather the intersection of the movie and the time in my life when I saw them. Scenes from these movies rattle around in my head constantly and inform my interpretation of all other scenes that I might now encounter.
1. Cocteau (1946) La Belle et La Bete. Blogged about this one already.
2. Fellini (1956) La Strada. Anthony Quinn on his knees breaking chains he put on himself. 'nuff said but it turns out I have a really awkward blogpost inspired by this movie already as well!
3. Resnais (1980) Mon Oncle d'Amerique. A lecture on neuroscience embedded in a film about life. The juxtaposition of the scenes of Depardieu having his job threatened and two rats in a cage fighting over limited resources is one that flashes through my mind at least once a day.
4. Wenders (1988) Wings of Desire. Found another blog post inspired by the movie as well! Possibly the most life-affirming movie I've ever seen.
5. Kurosawa (1951) Roshomon. What is truth? Do events exist outside of our interpretation of them? I don't remember anything specific about this movie, but I can access the existential mind-funk inside of me that was inspired by this movie easily.
6. Bergman (1958) The Seventh Seal. Protagonist plays chess with Death incarnate? Drop the mic.
7. Linklater (1995) Before Sunrise. It's as if someone found a fantasy deep within me and made a film about it that I then saw before I even knew about it myself.
8. Malle (1981) My Dinner with Andre. I'll reference lines from this movie in the middle of a speech about the dangers of technology and I don't think this movie has anything to do with that. I think about this movie when I think about the power of storytelling. Basically, I think about this movie all the time.
9. Truffaut (1959) Les 400 Coups. Feels so personal and authentic - rarely have I felt another's existential pain so viscerally.
10. Clouzot (1953) The Wages of Fear. The first poem ever written is to literature as this movie is to cinema.
11. Cacoyannis (1963) Zorba the Greek. Engage! I wish I could ask Joseph Campbell if this is the film version of The Magic Mountain. I think that question would make me sound very smart...
12. Nolan (2001) Memento. The ending of this movie hit the resonance frequency of my darkest fears. Am I beholden only to my sense of self as defined by my memories?
13. Coen Brothers (1991) Barton Fink. "Oh, I could tell you some stories." Make assumptions, live in your own head, judge books by their covers - oh this movie hit me where it hurts!
14. Linklater (2001) Waking Life. Sometime I get up and switch the light switch to make sure I'm still real.
15. Lynch (1990) Wild at Heart. Maybe the only one on this list I am embarrassed by, but for me this is the road trip movie to end all road trips. I admit I think about the touchstone line about his jacket everyday:
In class we were talking about the classic momentum problem in which you throw your gold coins in one direction so you can slide off of the frozen lake in the other direction (seriously, it's a legit problem from Giancoli!) when a kid in the back row (JW) says "I'd just spit and save my money!" so I respond with "Oh, you're just like Gaston?"
After we shared a chuckle over this (Okay, maybe I was the only one who thought it was funny), I told the class the real deal was the 1946 Jean Cocteau version:
They looked at me blankly and we moved on.
This incident has me thinking about how, back in the day (at Swampscott High), a student (SD) and I started a short-lived "Foreign Film Club". It was fun and the memory inspired me to send out a proposal to show La Belle et La Bete one evening during winter week this year. Not sure if it will actually happen but now I have thoughts buzzing around in my head about this movie and about Art vs. Entertainment in general.....
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I've seen this French masterpiece by Jean Cocteau (1946) at least half a dozen times and as with all great works of art, I have a different experience each time I watch it. I think the transcendent nature of art is captured a bit in my increasingly layered appreciation of the film:
I first saw it as a child in France with my grandparents. I remember being struck by the fact that they stayed and watched the entire movie with me attentively although I thought it was a simple child's fable at the time. (in retrospect it could not have been the first viewing for either of them!). Although I was primarily merely entertained by the movie, I was struck and haunted by the imagery and the one-layer deep impression of the plot: Beauty is more than skin deep ("Don't judge books by the covers!").
Later I saw it as a teenager and realized the story was about the transformative power of love and I also began to appreciate the technical feats in the filming of the scenes themselves: These all "firsts" in the history of Cinema and these "tricks" then became part of the vocabulary of all subsequent film makers!
Then I saw it in my 20's and thought about why my feelings for the restoration of the prince at the end so mixed? Why was the obvious, happy ending unsatisfying in some hard-to-pin-down way? Is the elimination of the beast an elimination of the essential appeal of the Jean Marais' split character? Is our inner beast something to be denied or celebrated? How can this movie leave me feeling like I just went to an art museum and was reading poetry at the same time?
I saw it again in my 30's and took the perspective of the woman-who-is-attracted-to-bad-boys archetype. What happens to your love and interest once you've "fixed" him? I also began to realize that the titular relation is not just about the woman (beauty) and the man (beast) and the man and himself (he is both a beauty and a beast).
I watched it again in my 40's and for the first time looked at the lead actor (Jean Marais who plays the beast, the Gaston-like character, and the final prince: three different beasts for the price of one!) on film knowing he was the director's lover. There an early scene where the camera lingers admiringly on his sprawled out form, lounging casually on a chair. How could I have missed that?
Jean Cocteau (L) and Jean Marais (R)
Now, I'm gearing up to watch it again. How can we have beauty without beastliness? Are we defined by our flaws? Is perfection even interesting? I am sure I will leave this viewing with even more questions than I knew to ask before!
Someone asked me how many people read my blog. I hadn't checked in a while, but Blogger.com (now owned by google!) generates a nice graphic. I started this blog in 2009, but didn't put a counter on until 2010:
Of course, this count of "hits" does not mean that people actually read anything on the page!
I was poking around trying to find out if the traffic corresponds to the amount of content I post (sometimes I blog a lot and sometimes I don't blog at all), but I couldn't find that easily. I did find that the most popular entries are clearly redirects from random google searches:
All this data made me think, why do I have a blog in the first place? Turns out, the answer to that was my very first entry:
If you went back to the 20-year-old version of myself and told that young physics major that his destiny was to become a high school physics teacher and that he would absolutely love his job, he would have said, “You’re crazy – you don’t know anything about me!”
I always thought I would be doing some kind of science in a research setting. I quickly narrowed my interest to physics even while still in high school. Then, as an undergraduate at Purdue, I thought the big question of destiny was “theory or experiment?” At Carnegie Mellon, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant while earning my Masters degree so much more than my own classes, it should have been a clue! Somewhere after completing my qualifying exams (by the skin of my teeth!) and in the no-man’s-land of interdepartmental work in computation neuroscience, searching for a thesis topic, I finally looked around me and thought, “Wait a second, where am I headed again?”
I saw the revolving door of post-docs waiting for a spot in academia and my friends getting their PhD’s in physics only to go off and work in banking or in the computer industry and I had a young-life crisis. ABD, I took a leave of absence in 1995 and ran off to make wine with my uncle in France. I heard they kept my picture on the wall with the other grad students for a couple of years (“Who’s that guy?” “Oh, he’s making wine in France.” “You can do that here?”)
Although my mother will remind me occasionally that it would be handy to be Dr. Rideout, I have no regrets. After flailing around in various other jobs (lab rat, micro-plumber, architect’s flunky, wine importer), I found myself entering the world of high school teaching sideways at the age of 32. Almost immediately I fell in love with the job. I simultaneously rediscovered my own love of physics and discovered the unique pleasure that is guiding the occasional, willing teenager into the light. I know those particular students would probably fall in love with physics anyway, but to take undue credit as their guide is the teacher’s special pleasure. While I was a student myself, I was always scaling an ever higher summit in physics-land (or at least trying to!) and enjoying the challenge of the next peak, but not really savoring the view along the way. Now, that’s all I do: savor the view and attempt to get others to enjoy it as well.
A few years ago, on a bad day, I shared with my principal that I felt I hadn’t lived up to my potential and that younger me would be disappointed in older me. He gave me a startled look and said with simple sincerity, “What could you possibly be doing that is more important than what you are doing right now?”
Hey, young Ken, there’s plenty of science to go around outside of doing the research you are dreaming of!
Teaching high school physics and trying to teach astronomy.
Married with two kids.
Ex-microplumber.
Ex-wine importer.
Beer Brewer. Lived in 7 states. Spent time in 19 different countries. Have bald spot - getting old.
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