Doctor Zhivago

Vogue December 2016

Russia has been in the news a lot of late. And I'm not so sure that we should be so surprised given the storied history of a place that is expansive, cold, and snowy in my imagination of it. One of the sources for the romantic idea that I have of Russia is from the film Doctor Zhivago. Every year, on a cold winter's night, I find this film to watch, for it's beauty, idealism, and romance. This cannot, of course, erase the hard truths of  Stalin, the Ukrainian Genocide, and now Putin to name just a few of the hard line problems of what has held Russia in a lock for centuries. And as it turns out, Boris Pasternak, the novel's author, and his beloved Olga fell into the bear's trap. And as Pussy Riot will tell you (the all-girl punk rock band who performed songs against Putin publicly and sentenced to 2 years of hard labor), for the crime, women carry the burden of the punishment.

Although twenty years older than Olga, it was an immediate attraction between she and Boris. Just having starting to write the novel that would become Doctor Zhivago, their love affair certainly influenced the expanse of the romance of Zhivago and Lara, the novel's lovers. The book isn't only about ill-fated love, it also addresses the sweep of political change during the turbulent early 20th Century in Russian history. And for that, the author was closely watched to determine how closely fiction was written as a mirror of the times (from the article): "In his writing life, the sense of pressure mounting on Boris was heightened by egregious  oppression and political forces. He was under constant surveillance due to the anti-Soviet nature of his work, while contemporaries who were not seen to serve the interests of the new Soviet system executed, exiled, or tortured."

And Olga? She met with the same sexist bias that Putin threw at Pussy Riot: "Little did Olga know that due to widespread knowledge of her affair with Boris, and her unflinching support of his book, it was not Boris who would be "hung, drawn, and quartered" but she herself who would shortly receive unwelcome visitors. On the the evening of October 6, 1949, the secret police arrived at Olg'a home with summons that held terrifying ramifications. The authorities had hatched a plan that would strike right to the heart of the "cloud-dweller." They would send his mistress and muse to a prison camp, and torture her instead."

Twin Peaks

Director David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Cooper)

The TV thing can be really frustrating, especially when a beloved program returns to a station for which one does not have access. I have been quietly excited for the return of "Twin Peaks," and when I saw that it was to air on Sunday, I was expressively excited. I was visiting my mother and was sure that she had the Showtime cable station. Settled into her sofa with glass of wine ... what? Mom doesn't have Showtime? Jeez. She has HBO? What good does that do me!

"Twin Peaks" is my show. Of course, others have come along since, but it was the first truly captivating network television show that I had ever seen, and I am not so sure that there has been anything like it since. Typically, I'm not a fan of horror, and I would categorize it as such because the underlying thread of pure evil that courses through it is undeniable, which is horrifying. Bob, the evil that is the show's murderer, is quite easily the scariest character ever created in my mind because he represents what lives, quite possibly, in each of us. He is Freud's Id- the part of our personalities that is instinctual and driven by sexual and aggressive drives that can only be tempered by the ego  and superego. Bob lives in an ordinary box, but when he gets out? Watch out.

In the town of Twin Peaks, David Lynch creates a bizarre world that supports strange. And if everyone is strange, or has a quirk, it is normal. He takes a happy collection of characters, like in the sitcom "Happy Days," for instance, and Picassos them. That's it. The show is a Freudian Picasso: complex, instinctive, exaggerated, and blue.

While I was watching the series every week back in 1990, I had a "Twin Peaks" friend in a very dear friend. We did not live in the same city, so we weren't able to see it together, but we always talked about it afterwards. And for Christmas one year, he traveled to me and surprised me with VHS tapes that he had used to record the entire series. Before there was even a word for binge watching, we spent an entire weekend locked in and binging on Agent Cooper. I baked a cherry pie (Cooper's favorite), we drank lots of wine, and at some point in the middle of the night, we decided that it was a good idea to give David Lynch a call. We were not happy with the idea that Bob had released himself from Agent Cooper psyche. How could good go bad? It makes sense, I suppose, but we didn't want anything to do with it because, ultimately, we didn't want to believe in instinctual evil. I dialed 411 and asked for the Los Angeles listing for Lynch. got We nowhere.

I am sure that there is some way around the Showtime conundrum. Sadly, my buddy has gone to the Blue Room. I wonder if I can buy VHS tapes anymore? If the series ends up on some type of platform that I can tape. , I want to be ready. Then I will somehow transport myself to the Blue Room with a bottle of wine and a cherry pie. Hopefully, behind the curtain, I'll find my friend. I'd like to watch it with him. And I'm sure that we would have something to call David Lynch about.

Betty Freydberg

Oprah Magazine August 2015

I found this in a stack of papers that was set aside to go through some day. Two years later, some day arrived, and I found this gem. The poet, Betty Freyberg, who began writing late in life, died in 2015 at the age of 107 years old. Just a few lines of her poetry is found in the article that originally appeared in "Oprah Magazine," which are: "I am bare now/ Cool to the fire of sunsets/ Gladly undressed of them." It's a rather stunning thought to consider that what was once enthralling has become pedestrian. I think of it in terms of my life and realize that some things just don't hold the same joy as was the times before when I had first experienced it or them or whatever. Strawberries come to mind. As a kid, we didn't see strawberries very often as we probably ate them in season. Later, when I began to set my own table, I always included them because they represented something that was special, but they have become unspecial, especially when I bought them in the supermarket in January. Those weren't the berries of my youth ... they were large, deeply pocked, rubber versions of them. Of course, I got smarter about these kinds of joys. I know now to buy strawberries in June when they are homegrown and sweetest. I get really excited when I see ruby red grapefruits in the market in January because that is when they are their best having been grown somewhere closer than half way around the world. 

But not everything can be figured out so tidily. Yesterday, I was chatting with a colleague who went to the same college as I. In our rambling about the bar and party scene, I remembered a band that I loved that played in a small, strip of a bar called the Club. It was so hipster. All of the Art and Design students hung out there in their new wave or punk gear, drinking cheap beer, and posing. The band was David and the Happenings, which was made up of students from the Art and Design department I am sure of. The band, from what I remembered, was a punky soul band. David loved to sing James Brown. He was skinny and blond, and could move across the stage like a blue-eyed soul man. Come to think of it, he was a hippier version of Darryl Hall of Hall and Oats. The band was just so damned cool. I would wear the old checkered jacket that I took out of my Father's closest, wear a tie, and line my lapels with all of my favorite band's pins. I loved to get it up! As I talked to the colleague, I found that someone had uploaded a video on YouTube of David and the Happenings from 1981. They weren't at our college, but it was surely them. What a prize to find! I sent the link to my brother who attended the same school as I and his response was: "David & the Happenings!  Those were in fact “the Days!" Yes, they were. And as much as I loved them, the band wasn't what I truly remembered them to be. I could see why I loved them ... for a bar band. But the one other person aside from my brother who I would like to share the memory with is no longer living. Sometimes fiery sunsets aren't there to find at the right time as they are gone forever. 

Another poem of Freydberg, "Chorus of Cells," is another that gives me pause. She writes about her making the bed every day. How the making and then getting into the bed is the constancy of her day. She wakes up, makes the bed and is alive. She pulls the covers back at night, for she is alive. My mother is a bed maker. And when I stay with her, I make my bed. When I'm not, all bets are off. But I see in her the rthym of her day and how the bed making marks the passage of another day with the "constancy" of her breathing. From what I have read of Freyberg's work, she portrays the quiet of what must be the end of one's life,particularly one that has been lived in good health and stability. In the quiet of that time, I imagine that one is reflective and though strawberries are sweet and a band makes one dance, it is life itself that one truly experiences the meaning of it all. I wake up; I make the bed. I pull back the blankets; I lie having lived another day. 

Chorus of Cells

By Betty Freydberg

Every morning,

even being very old,

(or perhaps because of it),

I like to made my bed

unhelplessly, 

is the biggest thing I ever do,

I smooth away the dreams disclosed by tangled sheets,

I smack the dented pillow's revelations to oblivion,

I finish with the pattern of the spread exactly centered.

The night is won.

And now the day can open.

All this I like to do,

mastering the  making of my bed

with hands that trust beginnings.

All this I need to do,

directed by the silent message

of the luxury of my breathing.

And every night,

I like to fold the covers back,

and get in bed,

and live the dark, wise poetry of the night's dreaming,

dreading the extent of its improbabilities,

but surrendering to the truth it knows and I do not:

even though its technicolor cruelties,

or the music of its myths, 

feels like someone else's experience,

not mine.

I know that I could no more cease

to want to make my bed each morning,

and fold the covers back at night,

than I could cease

to want to put one foot before the other.

Being very old and so because of it,

all this I am compelled to do,

day after day,

night after night,

directed by the silent message

of the constancy of my breathing,

that bears the news I am alive.

Justin Bieber

Super Bowl commercials aren't the tah-dah that they used to be because so many of them are released before the actual event. Most everything anymore is spoiled by our frantic need to know about everything before it happens. The element of surprise has been eliminated from our collective consciousness.

Ah, but then Justin Bieber showed up  on a T-Mobile commercial, and I was surprised by his adorableness. Actually, I was not that surprised by his being adorable because he is regularly. But I didn't know that he was going to be a Super Bowl commercial. That was my surprise for the game (come on, you didn't think that Tom Brady wasn't going to win? He's too practiced, too steely, and he knows how to win. It was inevitable).

I was talking to a guy at work who had asked what a particular student thought to talk to me about when I told him that he was asking me if I liked Justin Bieber. Now this student was more like a guy that would ask me if I liked Chief Keef, and he may have been trying to get my goat, but I always respond to silliness as if the query was for real. It always throws 'em off ... oh, it surprises them. My colleague told me that he didn't think much of Bieber until he saw him on Comedy Central being roasted. He said that he liked that Bieber was a good sport about all of the ribbing and actually was quite self-deprecating. I was not always a Belieber, and it took "Car Pool Karoake" for me to realize that he is endearing. He doesn't take himself  seriously, and he's fun. I did a turnaround. And this spot, if you haven't seen it check it out on YouTube, is all of the evidence that you need. It might just surprise you.

It's a Man's World

Lonely Planet  Winter 2016

The caption for the photo reads: "I stayed with Lkhagvaa and her family in Khatgal, a small village on the southern tip of Lake Khovsgol. Her husband and a friend knocked the goat unconscious with a rock, then, as is the tradition in Mongolia, made a cut in the the belly with a sharp knife before reading a hand inside to cut the aorta and kill the animal. The was pulled inside, then Lkhagvaa and her sister cleaned and prepped all the innards- throwing away nothing- while the men and her young son watched wrestling on the TV in the background."

While the men and young son watched TV ... sound familiar? I her beautiful silk robe, she stands in the kitchen ready to cut the guts out of dinner. We are more alike in this world than we are different. And this is evidence for it.

Queen Victoria

Vogue January 2017

This was the first January in six years when "Downton Abbey" was not on Sunday's menu on "Masterpiece Theater," and to be honest, I wasn't sad. I faithfully watched the program from its first airing through all of the exaggerated  hoopla that surrounded its final show. It was exhausting. And the show had lost some of its innocence and the organic feeling of a 'special' find. In the end, everyone watched it. And I don't mind being a part of everyone, but its huge popularity detracted from its original charm. One of the things that I like about a "Masterpiece Theater" program is in its quiet. The landscapes are peaceful. The costumes are intricate, not loud. And the passion that characters may, or may not, feel for each other smolders beneath the surface, never quite igniting into a blaze. Its a cozy, winter throw against the chill of a Sunday evening that is fine fare to accompany a Sunday roast and glass, or two, of Bordeaux.

Sunday evening's offering started off this year grandly with the final episodes of Sherlock Holmes. The three episodes were dizzying with complexity and the brilliance that is Benedict Cumberbatch. I am not nearly over them and vow to watch again so that I can capture all of the plot ... it runs fast. And I'm sorry that it will be the last of this incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. He's a character that I will never tire of seeing solve mysteries, and Cumberbatch was the finest who has played Holmes.

And now, we have "Victoria." Being an Anglophile, I watched Netflix's "The Crown" in a few sittings. With that over and waiting for its next installment, PBS brightening the dull winter sky with a beautifully produced story of Victoria. I hadn't realized that it was coming up, but I dutifully turned to a Sunday night view with this gift. Like "The Crown," "Victoria's" strength is in the actors who portray the characters. English actors are just better. And they morph into ancient souls flawlessly while creating a dimension all of their own. Jenna Coleman, who plays the young queen, is superb. She's a tiny girl, but like Victoria, she rises up out of size with strong conviction and a mighty force. Rufus Seawell plays her confidante, Lord M, who was Victoria's first Prime Minister. Seawell has changed since I last saw him on the screen, but the age that has come to him is wonderful. I don't remember him being so ... resonant. Their love for each other, which was established early on in the show, is believable and bittersweet. Much older, his wife has run off with Lord Byron ... oh, I love that! Byron the romantic. Byron the traveller. Byron the naughty boy. And Lord M. isn't naughty. He convinces Victoria that theirs is not a love to be had ... though he silently battles the rage he feels when other men come along. And the one man who does come along that captures Victoria's heart is Prince Albert, played by Tom Hughes. Hughes is more dreamy than any Downton lad by far. He holds himself away from Victoria to test that love, not duty, draw the two together.

Pour me another glass of wine. I am happy in the wrap of this to get me safely through winter.