December 31 2023 — Existential Autotrip

December 31, 2023
# 1639

My spectacular gay niece and her equally splendid son

So I asked my niece, Marlo, what her high school years were like, romantically speaking. Normal, is how she described them. Normal, as in heterosexual. She had no inkling that she was gay. She dated, boys. She exchanged stories about her dates with her girlfriends. Marlo was athletic and girls in sports hit on her. But she brushed them off, not ascribing any patterns to them.

Things changed in college. That’s where she began to see women as attractive to her. She met her wife in 2008. It took some time for them to get to know each other, but, in the event, they became romantically involved. They married and had a son, Van, that Marlo carried. She was early forties.

Coming from a traditional family, it was predictable that the reactions among her family members varied: her sisters surprised and somewhat resistant, her mother more resistant, and her father even more so. Meeting her partner made their relationship more understandable to her family, and giving birth to Van eliminated all resistance.

She sees zero difference in the way Van, having two mothers, is being raised, than children brought up in more traditional families.

It does appear to me that Van is more comfortable talking about having two mothers than Marlo is. Van is ten and he is a perfect ten, as sexually immature/mature as one might expect any child to be. When it comes to talking about sexual diversity, Van’s attitude is mainstream. He is bright, handsome, and a delight. Surprisingly, to me, anyway, Van has encountered no issues at school regarding his two-mom household.

And, best of all, I think he likes my Marinara Sauce. He definitely likes my chocolate pudding.

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Commentary
My calendar for Christmas Week, through Christmas Eve, was active.
i didn’t feel lonely at all.

Christmas morning I woke at 5.00am, had my coffee watching “Wednesday,” and worked on my Query Letter for Literary Agents. At 10.00am, not lonely, I needed a break so I headed out to my favorite cafe. At 10.05 I stopped at the Concierge desk in my building to exchange greetings and best wishes. Not at all lonely.

At 10.07am I stepped out of my building and turned onto the Greenway which I will walk [a lovely walk] to get to the cafe.
The street parallel to the Greenway, normally busy, was covid-deserted. Then, with a 20 minute quiet walk ahead of me and no one else in the park or on the street, a cloud of loneliness descended. Dense.

Sparrows on the Greenway eating the holiday meal I remembered to take for them.

A year ago, another Christmas alone, at the same cafe I was heading to now, I met a lovely person. We became good friends, spending a lot of time together. It’s been six months since we’ve spoken. I know her to be on the West Coast now. She won’t be there at the cafe, but she might. It’s our anniversary. Kinda.

She wasn’t.

***Nighthawks is a 1942 oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist*** ***Edward Hopper*** ***that portrays four people in a downtown*** ***diner*** late at night as viewed through the diner's large glass window. The light coming from the diner illuminates a darkened and deserted urban streetscape.

This iconic painting shows a group of people sitting in a diner at night, but there is a sense of isolation and solitude among the patrons, emphasizing urban loneliness.

I enjoyed the cafe. Shared well wishes with several of the baristas i knew particularly well and answered emails, including a long and fast-firing thread of family-only addressees. Inexplicably, an email from a formerly excellent friend popped up in the middle of the thread wishing me a Merry Christmas. I couldn’t extricate her address from the thread and had to respond with addresses from a dozen years ago. But one of the two responses that I sent made it to her and we exchanged simple greetings. that was in the afternoon.

I use an app called Phone Link and it has, in the past, messed up several times, once the misstep creating a sadness in me for a lost opportunity.

I had a delicious Christmas dinner. Alone but not terribly lonely. Began with a glass of Champagne to toast in the holiday and to accompany Salmon Caviar and a sauteed chicken liver of exceptional taste and texture. For dinner I had a roast duck with mashed sweet potato and greens and a wonderful red burgundy. Then I had a plate of chicken soup which was supposed to be for Tuesday. But, I wanted it. It was a holiday. So I had it. It was delicious. For dessert I had a seven-layer chocolate cake with whipped cream. Yum.

At 4.30pm the Celtics pre-game was on, then a good game against the Lakers [Celtics victory]. I read some of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ [what a great book] and at 10.00pm I went to bed.

And to all a ‘Goodnight’.

I woke at 4.30am as usual. And there was another simple greeting from the same friend of a dozen years ago, saying Merry Christmas, with a heart emoji. It was clocked in at 11.52pm. Strange. That’s a late hour. But she might have sent it six hours earlier with the others. Or she might have sent it at 11.51pm to say ‘hello’. If it was a computer glitch a response to it might be an intrusion on her life, and yet… We were very good friends so I sent a brief response: “I finished my novel.” That was at 4.40am the day after Christmas. Will she respond?

When you’re alone, I suppose, you make a big thing out of nothing. Air Supply’s famous song, “Making love out of nothing at all.”

Merry Christmas from Jamaica

Will and I are visiting Port Antonio and Montego Bay for a week. It’s been a dream.
Morning workout in the jungle, fresh juices and clean food for lunch, beach, dinner, repeat. It’s hard to even believe I’m here! Not a bad way to end the year.

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Kat’s Gen Z Corner

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Tucker’s Corner

I’ve been a fan of Michael Mann’s work since the beginning. Though his output has slowed down in recent years the work he does release is always incredibly thoughtful and just as well made. Mann’s films feel like another father to me. They are studies on masculinity that teach me about the world that other men live in and face. They also help me chart my course through life as many of these men make horrific mistakes at the expense of their own chauvinism. His latest delivers another deep look at a legendary figure and another marrow deep look at the foolishness that often overtakes the male mind. This is Ferrari.

In Heat, Robert De Niro’s master thief Neil McCauley is reading a massive tome titled Stress Fractures in Titanium. For Neil, whose livelihood depends on drilling through stainless steel, such a book is surely required reading, and it does end up doubling as a nice icebreaker with the woman at the counter next to him—but the book also has a deeper meaning. No director is more interested in hairline fissures than Michael Mann, whose protagonists tend to be men defined by their iron will. The genre isn’t important; whether the protagonist in question is a safecracker, a blackhat hacker, a TV producer, or a mojito fiend, the drama lies in seeing how those hard, gleaming facades hold up in the face of constant and catastrophic damage.

Mann has been quoted as calling Ferrari a “labor of love” which is fitting as both are key themes in a movie that juxtaposes its subject’s professional and private lives and surveys the wreckage wherever they collide. In telling the story of Italian racecar magnate Enzo Ferrari, who did more to make people see the world of automobiles as beautiful, than any other person in the 20th century. Whether touring the assembly line, pontificating about his sleek designs, or sparring with the press, the man nicknamed “Commendatore” cut a grand figure. But Mann, one of our most granular filmmakers, is all about little details. There’s a telling moment early in the film when Enzo joins Ferrari’s latest racer, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), for a publicity shoot and notices that the driver’s girlfriend—a blond movie starlet (Sarah Gadon) with well-practiced red carpet moves—is standing directly in front of the company logo painted on the car. Irritated, he brushes her off like a bug.

“It is true that I have never met any man whom I thought altogether resembled me,” Ferrari once said, “but only because my faults are so enormous.” The contradictions of a self-deprecating egomaniac are fertile terrain for drama, and Ferrari—based largely on Brock Yates’s book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine—digs in. Set mostly over three harrowing months in 1957—a two-way hinge point in Enzo’s professional career and personal life—the film is an eventful pit stop rather than a glorifying biopic. It begins, strategically, in the 1920s, with Ferrari at his peak, having defeated all comers as a daredevil driver. Shot in a black-and-white that mimics the texture of the pre-sound era, the prologue is probably the closest Ferrari gets to the alpha-male hero worship that often defines Mann’s cinema; it also paints the rest of the film, set on the other side of his physical prime, with a stinging sadness. No longer able to pilot his own sleek, aerodynamic creations, Enzo lives vicariously through his drivers, but he can’t die with them: When a time-trial accident claims a casualty, he reacts dispassionately, as if such things are simply the cost of doing business.

What gradually becomes clear as Ferrari goes on is that Enzo isn’t so much cruel as armored: Things are in disrepair under the hood. He’s reeling from the recent death of his 24-year-old son, Dino, from muscular dystrophy, a disease that broke his household in increments and that explains his disgust for weakness. In the absence of anybody to blame, he’s simply hardened his heart. The question of whether grief justifies his lack of emotion—or his infidelities—is left open, which is where Mann likes it. Rather than imposing morality on his characters, he prefers to let them wrestle with their own demons. For Enzo, that means considering the request of his younger lover Lina (Shailene Woodley) to publicly acknowledge their 12-year-old son, Piero, who doesn’t question why his father drops in only for occasional visits (and who is oblivious to the fate of his late half-brother). Lina’s reluctance to accept her role as the other woman has left her bitter, but it’s nothing compared to the fury of Enzo’s wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), who stalks through their massive estate like a panther and is not above pointing—and firing—a loaded gun in her husband’s direction to get his increasingly divided attention.

“How do we reconcile this?” Lina asks during one argument with Enzo about their situation. But the wonder of Driver’s performance is that he makes you feel for both sides of the character’s plight without forgetting that he’s also lying in the bed(s) that he’s made for himself. Staring down two very different women with a claim on his heart, he’s simultaneously endearing, infuriating, and vulnerable. As for Cruz, she takes what could have—and in Mann’s films often has—been a thankless role as a jilted partner and imbues it with depths of feeling. When she and Enzo pass each other like ships in the night at Dino’s tomb, it’s as if they’ve made a tacit bond to forget their shared history—but when Laura discovers that her husband has Lina and Piero stashed in the country, her gaze turns to one of piercing, dry-eyed recognition. She sees Enzo for who he is.

Because Laura is the co-owner of Ferrari, she’s determined to have her say about the company, which is introduced in a state of flux. Instead of standing alone—and above—the competition, they must now reckon with the aftermath of their own influence. By the 1950s, Ferrari’s success had created a crew of high-end, custom-tooled challengers, and Mann, who is always interested in the rituals and realities of global capitalism—the politics of labor and exploitation—distills corporate rivalry into high-velocity blood sport. Where most racing movies are about personal glory, Ferrari is about brand extension. During a strategy session with his team about how to contend against their archrivals from Maserati during the prestigious 1,500-kilometer Mille Miglia—a twisty cross-country odyssey whose outcome will go a long way toward either shoring up Ferrari’s dwindling fortunes or exhausting them—Enzo explains that it’s impossible for two objects to occupy the same space. What he means, is that there’s only room for one in the winner’s circle. But the line could also apply to the neck-and-neck competition of his domestic life.

There’s also a third, more ominous implication, which is that if a racetrack gets too crowded, somebody’s going to be forced off it, and any viewers familiar with the history of Ferrari unfortunately already know just how right Enzo is. There are bright, vivid colors in Ferrari’s racing scenes and some exciting, suspenseful bits of staging, and yet the director isn’t chasing exhilaration in the Ford v Ferrari mode. Instead, Mann’s movie is death-tinged, cross-cutting between race footage and religious rites in anticipation of its grim final act. In sequence after sequence, we’re alerted to the microscopic differences between a vehicle operating at peak capacity and one that’s been compromised. At first, the consequences are relatively minor, but the pile-up of minor mishaps finally explodes in a set piece that splits the difference between tactile, flesh-and-blood realism and nightmarish stylization. Even in a non-genre film, Mann remains peerless in conveying the physics and metaphysics of extreme violence, with the added chill of knowing that Ferrari’s bloody spectacle is rooted in history. The sheer visceral impact of the imagery pushes things close to horror movie territory.

Mann has never really been a crowd-pleasing filmmaker. Even his most purely satisfying movie, Heat, builds to a climax of chill, existential ambiguity. But where earlier fact-based movies like The Insider and Ali are ultimately paeans to a sort of hard-edged heroism of individuals staring down gargantuan institutions, Ferrari inverts that dynamic to examine a man swallowed up inside his own machine. Enzo’s empire is built on a smoldering pile of collateral damage, and the bargain by which he ultimately reasserts his authority—and evades the consequences of yet another tragedy—is a Faustian one, while the final sequence melds tenderness with a melancholy sense of resignation. What we’re left with in the end is the knowledge of where all roads lead, no matter who’s driving, or who made the car.

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Mail

This from dear friend Sally C:
brasscastlearts@gmail.com

Dear Dom,

In reading your latest weekly missive (dated December 24), I was astonished to read the closing statement from your friend Sean Buzzard: “An opinion marks the end of thinking.”

How true is that!?!? This statement is a keeper. Could you check with him to see if he was quoting someone else or if this is his original thought. I want to attribute it properly and accurately.

Your comparison of “along on Christmas” was fun to read – it all depends on your attitude and point of view. My husband and I were alone, with each other, though, on Christmas Day. The Year 2019 was the last time my family got together, the last year my mother was with us, the last year of four generations engaged in the merriment. I had just brain cells enough to capture the silly, raucous joy on paper shortly afterward. I am so glad I did. My third brother, who always hosted the party because his house is big enough for a couple dozen of us, no longer welcomes my husband into his social fold (thanks to the stupid virus politics and political politics), even for the occasional family function. But I am wed – “as one” in the eyes of God – to my husband, so if he is rejected, so am I. I’d be happy to join with the family and never speak a word of politics, but some people can’t or won’t look past the politics to the loved ones beyond. I hope a pray that this will change some day, but the ball is in his court.

My husband’s family usually has celebrated Christmas together on the Sunday following Christmas Day (sometimes the next day, sometimes a week later), but there’s no sign of any such party so far this year. We did so two years ago, at his niece’s house. Last year we did not, for we lost two family members in early December, and the niece and her husband hosted the follow-up reception/parties, and they were too tired to do that again a few weeks later. I don’t blame them! But I think it discombobulated all of us at the time. Perhaps there is residue from that now, a year later.

Nevertheless, Phillip and I have each other – we are one, after all. We get stocking stuffers for each other, mostly food items like pickles and olives and such, various kinds and forms of chocolate, and favorite cookies. Perhaps unfortunately, the stockings do not come anywhere close to holding everything. (What happens to me is I buy a couple things this week, and a couple more next week, and so on, so by the time Christmas comes, I have a whole pile of stuff, including some duplicates – this year, it was garlic-stuffed queen olives.) So we have decorative boxes and holiday bags to use instead. This year, I did get a different item for Phillip – an Israeli flag to hang on our porch in a show of support. Phillip is big into flags.

I was in Boston on Christmas Eve, carrying a flag with some of my fellow fifers and drummers. We were at the Boston Sheraton to welcome bus-loads of college football players coming in for a Christmas Day game. Decent pay, extra for the last-minute, Christmas Eve program, and there’s be extra pay, too, because the gig went well overtime. I’ve earmarked that money to pay for a podcast I’ll be doing in February. The Good Lord provides!

I’m still having great fun working on my historical novel about Nicodemus. I’m about half-way through the second draft. It’ll take at least two more drafts before I will be satisfied with it. The research into those times – the last days of Jesus on Earth – is utterly fascinating, and seeing the characters take on a life of their own is great. Right now, I have the Roman centurion in charge of the detail that escorted Jesus to Mount Calvary visiting Nicodemus two days later, telling of his experience with Jesus emerging from the tomb in the wee hours of the morning. Nicodemus, a respected member of the Jewish ruling council (the Sanhedrin), finds himself fascinated with the Roman, never before having known a Roman soldier, and comparing the man’s physique, clothing, and body language with that of his Jewish culture. I’m really getting to like the centurion, too. There’s more to him than meets the eye.

Well, time to get on with other work today. Go well, my friend, and keep writing!

Sally

Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' is a poignant masterpiece that encapsulates the horrors of war and the human suffering it inflicts.
Created in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the painting is a stark and anguished portrayal of chaos, pain, and despair.
The distorted and fragmented forms of the people and animals in the painting symbolize the disintegration of humanity in the face of violence.
Through its monochromatic palette and powerful imagery, 'Guernica' serves as a timeless reminder of the devastating consequences of conflict and a powerful call for peace, empathy, and the preservation of human dignity.

Netanyahu’s Gaza

Food
Did I hear chocolate pudding?

Never made it before so i asked Chat for a recipe.
Here it is.
Chocolate Pudding from Chat
w minor tweaks from dom

Here’s the pitch. Use the no-name chocolate for a no name result. I used Burdick’s chocolate and the big bucks expense was well worth it in the result.

Ingredients:

2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 3/4 cups milk (whole milk is best, but you can use 2% or skim)
2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Instructions:

In a medium-sized saucepan, whisk together the sugar, cocoa powder, cornstarch, and salt. Make sure there are no lumps.

Gradually whisk in the unheated milk until the mixture is smooth and all the dry ingredients are fully incorporated.

Place the saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula. Make sure to scrape the sides and bottom of the pan to prevent sticking or burning.

Continue to cook and stir until the mixture thickens and comes to a gentle boil. This should take about 5-7 minutes. It's important to cook it until it thickens, as this will ensure a smooth and creamy pudding.

Once the pudding has thickened, remove the saucepan from the heat and immediately stir in the chocolate chips or chopped chocolate. Continue to stir until the chocolate is completely melted and the pudding is smooth and silky.

Stir in the vanilla extract.

Pour the hot chocolate pudding into serving dishes or ramekins. You can use small individual serving dishes or one large bowl.

Cover the pudding with plastic wrap, making sure the wrap is in direct contact with the surface of the pudding to prevent a skin from forming.

Chill the pudding in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, or until it's completely set and chilled.

Serve the chocolate pudding cold, garnished with whipped cream, chocolate shavings, or fresh berries if desired.

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Chuckles and Thoughts
Don’t associate yourself with toxic people. It’s better to be alone and love yourself than surrounded by people that make you hate yourself.
Robin Williams

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Six Word Stories
"Torn pages, new chapters, rewritten story."

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Last Thought
The text contact i made with a good friend from a dozen years past has quietly continued for the last several days. Nice.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dec 27 December 31 2023