Show Me Love

I saw Blue is the Warmest Color recently. I recommend seeing it soon if you haven't already. It's unlikely to linger in theaters in most U.S. cities for long given it's a three hour long subtitled French film carrying an NC-17 label (since moving from L.A. to SF I've learned the hard way that not chasing down art house films soon after they're released often means waiting for them to come out on video much much later). 

I'm not the only one who found it worthwhile. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, and Criterion has already announced plans to issue a video edition in February (with a more fully featured version planned for a later date). Leads Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) are both stunning. Exarchopoulos, in particular, wears her emotions so close to the surface that she is always riveting, even as she plays a character constantly trying to calm her inner turmoil: her attraction to women, her insecurity over her relationship with Emma, her deep need to belong.

She can't help herself, though. In long moments of everyday life, and there are many of those in a three hour movie, when she's just chewing her food loudly, or walking around Lille, France, when we read these emotions on her face, they feel as if they've slipped through her face unbeknownst to her. So much of this movie she is unconsciously naked, and for long moments she's literally so; I felt a voyeur's guilt just sitting in my seat, and I would have felt it even notwithstanding the controversial feud between director Abdellatif Kechiche and his leads.

The movie is a bit too long, but Exarchopoulos' face transforms long scenes of Adele doing mundane things into vivid human observational studies. It's not surprising to hear that Kechiche cast her "after he saw her devour a piece of lemon cake." She is attractive, but so are many actresses we choose to promote to the big screen; what she has is the inner life which arcs off of the screen.

It's a good thing she has such an interesting face, because an unusually high percentage of this movie's shots are close-ups. This cinematography choice acts like an amplifier on the movie's emotional intensity. It's as if we're sitting a foot from the actor's faces for most of this movie, and there are very few cuts to wide shots to relieve the intimacy. Even those who don't usually notice the shot size selection in a movie will feel the impact of this style.

Would the movie have been stronger if Kechiche had stuck with the theme of the graphic novel from which this was adapted? In the book, the chief obstacle to Adele and Emma's romance is the homophobic society they live in, but in the movie, the primary threat is a class or cultural divide. Adele is an elementary school teacher, while Emma is a budding young painter. At first, it seems as if homophobia is going to be the theme of the movie. Adele's girlfriends at school are openly hostile to Adele when Emma appears on the scene, and Adele seems reluctant to explain her relationship to Emma to her parents. And then, just like that, the topic is dropped. My mind was still chasing that thread, and one of the reasons the movie feels long is that I felt I'd wasted mental energy chasing that red herring.

If you enjoy Blue is the Warmest Color and want to stay in the category of young lesbian romances (there are enough entries, meaning greater than two, to make this a genre, if a niche one), I recommend Show Me Love by Lukas Moodysson. It's gentler, but it's also about the strange highs and lows of first love. That both movies are about somewhat forbidden lesbian romances only amplifies that sensation of first love, when it feels like the world will never know or understand just how much another person matters to you.

Looking for face stand-in

On the 28th of October I’m giving a talk in Seoul, the home of uninhibited camera fiends*. I’m looking for a face stand-in, someone who can join the event who enjoys having their photo taken, and wouldn’t mind being tagged online as me. The audience will be in on it.

You can be aged 20 to 70, male or female, any ethnicity, frankly I don’t care how you look, as long as you’re comfortable with the process.

From Future Perfect.

Give the gift of Amazon Prime

You can now give Amazon Prime as a gift. I can think of few greater ways for you to help the global economy, and I already plan to give out many of these to people I know who haven't gotten on the bandwagon yet. Every time they order a package from Amazon, they'll think of you with a smile, it's truly a gift that keeps on giving.

If you're not sure if it's for you, learn more here and sign up for a 30-day trial. 

True run and gun

A long time ago, I wrote about Grinnell College's Division III basketball team which plays runs an innovative offense which coach Dave Arseneault calls The System:

94S + 47 3's + 33%OR + 25SD + 32 TO's = W

The ‘Formula for Success’ has withstood the test of time. Since 1996, whenever the Pioneers have attempted 94 shots, with half of those shots from behind the arc, offensive rebounded 33% of their missed shot attempts, taken 25 more shots than their opponent and forced the opposition into committing 32 turnovers, they have won at nearly a 95% clip. Grinnell accomplishes all five of these goals in slightly over one-third of their contests.

While the ‘formula’ has been consistent through the years, the strategies employed to achieve these goals have been altered. During the early years, a new group of five players usually stayed on the court for 2 ½ minutes at a time. The length of playing shifts has been reduced considerably during the last few years and it is now a regular practice to replace all five players on the first whistle after 35 seconds have elapsed off the game clock. Also, in those early years, it was customary practice to rotate three groups of five players. Currently, Coach Arseneault uses two playing groups- each incorporating a total of eight players.

Regardless of the length of shifts or number of groups used, there is still only one way to accomplish all five of the aforementioned goals: Your team must be committed to getting a shot off and getting the ball back every 12 seconds.

Grinnell is still at it, leading all of Division III basketball in scoring per game. Tonight, Grinnell player Jack Taylor scored 109 points in a 173-123 victory over Crossroads. Last year he scored 138 points in a game.

Foodism, the new cultural signifier

Food may well have replaced high art, as Deresieswicz argues, but it has also replaced popular culture. People talk about food now the way they used to talk about bands. Music has become too fractured and diverse to provide the necessary combination of accessibility and specificity for self-definition. If you liked Kiss or The Eagles in the 1970s, the fact established part of who you were: your class affiliations, where you came from, what drugs you liked to take, whether you were urban or rural. Today, if you like Grizzly Bear or Kanye West, it virtually means nothing. You could be a banker or a member of Occupy Wall Street. You could be eighty or eighteen. You could live in East Texas or the Upper East Side. I mean, Marco Rubio's favorite group is NWA.

 

Today, your attitude toward pork belly is a clearer statement of who you are and where you come from than any television show you watch or band you follow. Tell me what you know about pasta, and I'll tell you how much your parents made, how much education you managed, how much is in your savings account. Unlike other cultural phenomena, which are more or less generationally undefined now, food explicitly identifies youthfulness. The younger you are, the more you know about food, generally speaking.

 

I've had this tab open since last Thanksgiving (I'm not joking, I know I have a problem), but now that it's been a year it still applies: On Thanksgiving, the Foodies Should Shut Up. Anecdotally, it does seem as if books, music, and movies have receded as cultural touchstones in favor of food and television.

The rise of TV and food in the pop culture pantheon are related. Television turned chefs (and by association their restaurants) into celebrities. Both television and food have also benefitted from the internet. Television episodes recaps and reviews, food and restaurant blogs, everywhere is a boom in information about a small number of shows and restaurants that we only once read about in books like the local newspaper or books like the Zagat guides. 

The number of items in each category matters. Whereas the number of restaurants in a city has stayed largely fixed, and whereas the number of TV shows I watch has increased but perhaps only by 2X, the number of bands and musicians I can follow now has increased by 5 to 10X. Almost everyone I know can easily name 10 bands they love that I've never heard of, but it's rare for someone to mention a restaurant in SF or a TV show I don't already know. Having a small number of items of shared devotion creates a sense of communal power. Music still matters, but more people I know share a greater overlap with my TV and restaurant favorites than with my music universe. 

Not everyone is happy with the foodism bubble.  Writes William Deresiewicz:

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

 

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But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion. An apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it. A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one. Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things. Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols. Proust on the madeleine is art; the madeleine itself is not art.

 

A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul.

 

Yes, food centers life in France and Italy, too, but not to the disadvantage of art, which still occupies the supreme place in both cultures. Here in America, we are in danger of confusing our palates with our souls.

 

There's no doubt foodism has become a totem of class, and I would be happy to never see another photo of someone's dinner plate or lunch again on a social network–and that includes pictures of my own food, which I've been guilty of inflicting on others in the past (unless you're a chef or serious food journalist, then it's expected).

But the one aspect of foodism I do enjoy is the deep fetishism of the craft of cooking, as epitomized in documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi and Kings of Pastry or cookbooks like The French Laundry Cookbook or Modernist Cuisine. Reading about the conception of a dish and then the process of perfecting it until it becomes a recipe for maximizing the chances reproducing the best version of that dish is no more ridiculous, to me, than an article discussing the redesign of a website, a book about how the Mac was made, or a piece in American Cinematographer about how a movie like Gravity was shot. The more complex and audacious the better. Craftsmanship is sexy.