January 21, 2024
# 1643
Clara Peeters - Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels
www.mauritshuis.nl : Home : Info : Pic
I am thrilled with the way cheeses look, starting with their shapes. Wheels, blocks, wedges, rounds for softer cheeses, logs, and other cylinder-shapes, (those favorites of makers of goat cheeses) braids for mozzarella, pyramids and cone, squares and rectangles and other unique shapes used for specialty cheeses or as a signature style or even in more whimsical forms. These shapes can be influenced by tradition, the cheese-making process, or simply aesthetic and marketing considerations. Each shape can also affect the aging and flavor development of the cheese.
And that’s just the shapes. Don’t you love its colors. Creamy white, rich yellow, orange, boldly green and blue-veined?
And the rinds, absent, soft and edible, or hard and crusty, add to the visual appeal. Some cheeses present a smooth, glossy surface, while others are crumbly, pocked, or even have small holes known as 'eyes'.
Tasting cheese is a delightful sensory experience, akin to tasting fine wine: enjoy the range of scents from earthy and musty to fruity and nutty. And comes the texture: soft and creamy, semi-hard, or crumbly and hard.
Eat small pieces. Let the morsel linger on your tongue, enjoy the complexity. Initially, there may be a sharp, tangy, or mild taste, followed by secondary flavors like nuttiness, sweetness, or grassy notes. The taste lingers, developing on your palate.
BTW: Appreciate that each cheese is unique, reflecting its milk origin, aging process, and craftsmanship. Tasting different varieties, from a creamy Brie to a pungent Roquefort or a sharp-aged Cheddar. Explore the diverse textures and flavor profiles. Cheese is a unique, hedonistic, elegant experience.
Still life w Cheese
Floris Claesz van Dijck 1615
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Commentary
Health is on my mind.
Another bout of skin cancer frozen off.
Another biopsy: this on my head.
Two for one visit.
Blessed are we who have health insurance,
for we will live longer than those who do not.
Which brings up the thought: why is health care hit or miss?
Shouldn’t we all have clean water to drink?
Challenging schools to attend?
Food to eat?
Band-aids for cuts?
Aspirin for headaches?
Dermatologists for skin cancer?
No insurance?
Suck it up
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Kat’s Gen Z Corner
I’ve arrived at the Ayur Yoga Eco Ashram.
It’s a beautiful Ayurveda and yoga sanctuary right by a river outside of Mysore, India.
For a month I won’t hear the sound of a car. I won’t feel the January cold. I won’t be victim to the chaos of the city. I can feel my body relaxing. I’m so excited.
Ashram Update 1/10
I’m meeting a lot of cool people here! Everyone is coming for a different reason, from a different place, with a different yoga background. Many people are wildly interesting and interested in sharing passion for yoga/spirituality/living with intention.
Many are here bc they are at a crossroads: quit a job, ended a relationship, etc. One guy is here because his wife said if he doesn’t live more fully / less on the surface she’s leaving him 😂 (By the way he’s been behaving, he’s going to be left 😆
Others are just world travelers. Met a couple today that has been traveling cheaply together for two years … bouncing from retreat to retreat and working in farms across the world… One day maybe 😚
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Tucker’s Corner
My review this week is about a film that traffics in nostalgia. It manages this by accurately and warmly depicting America, mostly Seattle, in 1936. The sights and sounds of the Great Depression ring true and the tense nature of the world in the years that lead into World War Two is on full display. None of this though is what I’m talking about when I talk about nostalgia. I was born in 1988. I spent my summers on Cape Cod with my grandparents and their tiny but essential (to me) shelf of VHS tapes. They didn’t have the classics. Far from it. In fact I’m positive every movie they owned was loaned to them by friends who recommended they watch it. If I think back to that small collection it was mostly made up of films like The Boys in the Boat. Moderately ambitious period pieces that had perfectly acceptable theatrical runs before disappearing to shelves like my grandparent’s. I was raised on films like these. I miss them now. This is The Boys in the Boat.
The Boys in the Boat - directed by George Clooney
Speaking of these films as good but not making a huge impact maybe sounds like a back-handed compliment. It’s not. In adapting The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown’s 2013 history of the 1936 University of Washington men’s rowing team, Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith (Overlord, The Revenant) fully embrace certain period-picture conventions without trepidation or eager-to please undercutting. This was an unlikely group of working-class novices who made it all the way to the Berlin Olympics. The film is an unshowy but slick underdog sports picture, fluidly told and elegantly mounted. It’s about rowing, for crying out loud; it doesn’t have a post-modern or irreverent bone in its body, and for that, we can be at least a little grateful.
The narrative is framed by images of an elderly man in the present day watching young rowers and thinking back to his youth. Lilting orchestral music (by Alexandre Desplat, outdoing himself) accompanies these recollections of the days when, as an impoverished engineering student, Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) joined his college’s rowing program because he was promised a job if he made the team. The film highlights the contrast between Rantz’s grim, gray circumstances — he lives by himself in a burned-out car and stuffs his hole-filled shoes with paper — and the rolling hills and wood-paneled halls of his university, not to mention the placid, sun-dappled waters of the rivers where he will eventually row.
When he’s approached by Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), a pretty co-ed whom he knew back when they were kids, Rantz clams up and barely makes eye contact, even though we know they’ll soon get together. He’s a man of few words, too proud to mention his impoverished circumstances to anybody. Many of the others around him, including his friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike), are in the same boat. When Rantz and Morris show up for the school’s rowing trials, the crowd around them is huge. Every kid there is also hoping to get a job, even though only a handful will make the eight-man crew team. Again, no one says a word, but you can see the desperation on their faces.
All the men of The Boys in the Boat guard their emotions— even Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), the head coach who thinks of nothing but getting his rowers to perform, to whom the aforementioned promise of jobs for these kids is just an afterthought. Dead serious about his own job, Ulbrickson is willing to let his inexperienced Junior Varsity team compete at the famed Poughkeepsie Regatta, despite the others’ seniority. He thinks his JV rowers’ working class backgrounds might provide the necessary edge for them to prevail against boats from traditional powerhouses in California and back East. (“Old money versus no money at all,” as a radio announcer puts it at one point.)
He won’t get much praise for it, but the terse, focused Ulbrickson is a perfect role for Edgerton (who also gave one of 2023’s best performances in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener). At the start of his career, the actor seemed to be somewhat lost. His downcast energy didn’t always translate to the intensity some of his early roles called for. As he’s entered middle age, however, that submerged quality has ripened into a world-weary melancholy; his haunted visage has real character now. He won’t give you big speeches or other scene-stealing moments, but simply watching this man furrow his way through a challenge can be exciting in its own right.
The Boys in the Boat does feel true to its era, not just to the economic desperation in the air but also to the notion that these people are living in the ruins of a more prosperous age. When young Don Hume (Jack Mulhern), one of the rowers, sits at a piano and halts out a rendition of the Jazz Age standby “Ain’t We Got Fun,” the melody sounds like it’s echoing from a distant room; we understand that to these kids, the Roaring Twenties would barely be a memory. The movie doesn’t come right out and say it, but this economic devastation will, in a few quick years, give way to war in Europe and the Pacific. When Hitler shows up in the film’s final act (this is not a spoiler — the whole point of the movie is that these kids rowed at the 1936 Berlin Olympics), he’s there not just as the Chancellor of Germany, but as a menacing vision of things to come.
As a sports movie, The Boys in the Boat does provide a lot of the sturdy, conventional pleasures one expects from the genre and Clooney does a nice job handling something that is not a naturally dramatic sport that can be easily depicted onscreen. The boats glide elegantly, sure, but the difference between winning and losing has to do with barely perceptible details, with questions of rhythm and timing, with wind resistance and waves and chemistry among the rowers themselves.
The Boys in the Boat probably could have done more on the characterization front — we feel just enough for the other rowers besides Joe Rantz that we wish we knew a bit more about them – but in showing how a crew team must function to succeed, it’s genuinely engrossing. And as a throwback to the kind of unfussy medium-budget prestige pictures Hollywood once specialized in, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
We love mail.
This from our own Ralph I:
Dear Jimmy and Dom,
I wrote this e mail to my poetry teacher for over twenty years. He has just survived a great illnesses. We have been also been in communication for over twenty five years. I feel this might make a contribution to others especially in these tumultuous political times.
It is sublime to be on the court with you.
Again
Love
Raphael
Tom,
I remember we were doing Hamlet for the third time I think. You said that Horatio saids to Hamlet’s request yes before Hamlet tells him what it is. You have this way of making comments that open worlds for me.
What was it about Hamlet and Horatio’s relationship that Horatio accepted Hamlet’s request without knowing what it was? Did he have a dysfunctional relationship with Hamlet? Just the trust, communication and expression of love between these two men rules this out I would say. Was it obedience to Hamlet as his prince that Horatio did this? Horatio had too much integrate to submit to authority because of title. We can just look at the fact that Horatio was so openly loyal to Hamlet that he was risking his life. Horatio was no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Was it the love for Hamlet that Horatio would accept a request without knowing it? For me maybe? , but there has to be something greater to allow for an absolute trust that Horatio has for Hamlet.
I struggled with this for years and gave it up and something came to me. Saint Francis of Assisi when asked how does it feel to be a Saint said, “I am just a madman.” I would assert that it was Saint Francis madness that gave him his connection to his God or to his higher power or to be more pragmatic to Love itself.
I assert the same thing with Lear and Hamlet. “O let me not be mad sweet heaven./ I would not be mad/. Keep me in temper/ I would not be mad.” Does Hamlet share the same madness as Lear? “ I am but mad north-north west the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.” “ Was it Hamlet wronged Laertes Never Hamlet/ I Hamlet himself be taken away,/ And when he is not himself does wring Laertes/ Then, Hamlet does it not Hamlet denies it/. Who does it them? His madness.” Does Hamlet and Lear share the same madness that Saint Francis of Assisi has with the Devine or Providence?
King Lear: “Lear, Who’s woulds’t serve?”
Lear, “Does thou know me fellow?”
Kent, “ You.”
Lear, “Does thou know me fellow?”
Kent “ No Sir but you have that in your countenance that I will fain serve.”
Lear, “What’s that?”
Kent, “Authority.”
Kent follows and serves Lear even when he striped of all earthly authority with great danger to his own survival . What authority does Lear have that Kent serves? Does Horatio have the same relationship to Hamlet as Kent has to Lear?
Horatio: “If your madness dislike anything , obey it.
I will forestal all their
repair higher and say you are not fit.”
Hamlet:
“Not a whit, we defy aurgury There is a special Providence in
The fall of a sparrow. If it be now, Tis not to come, if be not to come yet it will come The readiness is all Since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t
to leave bedtimes Let be.”
Why does Hamlet defy rationality reason and even his will to survive? Is he loyal and serve Providence?
Why does Hamlet defy rationality reason and even his will to survive?
We know with great madness is great suffering. Leo Tolstoy said that , “Only people who are capable of loving strongly also suffer great sorrow, but the same necessity of loving serve to counteract their grief and heals them.” Do Hamlet and Lear in dealing with their madness achieve the same connection? Do people who serve people who serve Love or Providence are also healed of their madness?
My Dear Thomas you have in your countenance that I will fain serve. Authority. This has been my great joy and source of strength and nurturance for over twenty years.
I Love You
Your Dear Dear Brother
Ralph
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Time is the best teacher, unfortunately, it kills all of its students.
Robin Williams
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Six Word Stories
"Sunrise's promise, tomorrow's hope, endless horizons."
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Travel
So I came across an ad touting a 4-day trip. I didn’t like the advertised trip but the ad helped me form the idea of taking a break from our weather in Boston. Cancun jumped into my head.
Warm and easily accessible. An easy, non-stop, four-hour flight.
I decided to book one.
I called my cousin Lauren, a seasoned travel, to help me find and order the trip. I wanted insurance against making a rookie mistake.
The upshot of her visit?
I booked a round-trip flight to Cancun for four days during the second week of February.
Leave Monday from Boston. 4/5 hours in the air, non-stop to Cancun.
Destination: a Hyatt all-inclusive.
My goals include a four day break from routine. Enjoy great weather. Eat decently. Walk the beach. Walk downtown Cancun. Look at the couples. And work on my projects.
I’m looking forward to it.
Lauren helped me book the trip.
Above, from left to right: Aerial view of the tourist area, Kukulcán Boulevard, beach, Alacrán Temple in the Yamil Lu'um Archaeological Zone, El Rey Archaeological Site, View of the hotel zone, Caracol Beach and Puerto Juárez.
Microstar - File:Cancun Strand Luftbild (22143397586).jpg, por Dronepicr (CC-BY-2.0) File:Boulevard Kukulcan, Zona Hotelera, Cancún, Mexico - panoramio (34).jpg, por Panoramio upload bot (CC-BY-3.0) File:Gone to Lunch. - panoramio.jpg, por Panoramio upload bot (CC-BY-3.0) File:Yamiluum1.JPG, por Feliks~commonswiki (CC-BY-SA-3.0-migrated) File:El Rey Zona Arqueologica, Cancun, Mexico RFDZ1265.jpg, por Xe3osc (CC-BY-SA-3.0) File:Cancun Luftbild (22143391876).jpg, por Dronepicr (CC-BY-2.0) File:Cancún, Playa Caracol - panoramio.jpg, por Panoramio upload bot (CC-BY-3.0) File:Ferry Port in Cancun.jpg, por Nv8200pa (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
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Last Thought
I’ll let daughter Katherine have the last thought, a quick text that she found time for.
”How are you?
”Life is incredible here. I’m so happy. But fulfilled.”
I am dying to hear more.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!