Saturday, December 11, 2010

Betty and the Real World

The Edge of Winter:

Crispin quotes Tennyson at Araminta--"Thy fate and mine are sealed". But I like the whole stanza:
Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are sealed: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

It comes from a poem call The Princess with such a great plot!:
The poem tells the story of a heroic princess who forswears the world of men and founds a women's university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are discovered and flee, but eventually they fight a battle for the princess's hand. They lose and are wounded, but the women nurse the men back to health. Eventually the princess returns the prince's love.

'Let's dance the old-fashioned way...'
Crispin tells her right before he whisks her away for a quick proposal:

Dance in the Old Fashioned Way.
Won't you stay in my arms?

Just melt against my skin

And let me feel your heart,
Don't let the music win

By dancing far apart.

Come close where you belong.
Let's hear our secret song.
Dance in the Old Fashioned Way.

Won't you stay in my arms?

And we'll discover highs
We never knew before,

If we just close our eyes
And dance around the floor.

That gay old fashioned way

That makes me love you more.

Dance in the Old Fashioned Way.
Won't you stay in my arms?

And we'll discover highs

We never knew before,

If we just close our eyes

And dance around the floor.

That gay old fashioned way

That makes me love you more


Whew. Can I get some ice water here?

The Fifth Day of Christmas:

'The Chevoits, she knew, were close but shrouded in the still lingering mist into which the trees ahead of them marched'. The Chevoits are rolling hills straddling the England-Scotland border but to me the name sounds like a domestic car of, say, a mid-seventies vintage...(Shrug.)

Marcia prides herself on being an intellectual... she reads Goethe, Vondel, Homer and Virgil and pooh-poohs frivolous entertainment such as The Sound of Music. For Christmas Ivo gives her a beautifully bound volume of Mantaigne's Essays. And of all those choices, naturally I'm going to give you Sound of Music info...Marcia would hate me:
...noted film critic Pauline Kael blasted the film by calling it "the sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat," and "we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs."
In other news, I don't think I like Pauline Kael very much.


At the museum, they dawdled among the Rembrandts, Vermeers and Franz Hals...Julia was pretty knowledgeable.

Centuries later Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: 'What a joy it is to see a Frans Hals, how different it is from the paintings – so many of them – where everything is carefully smoothed out in the same manner.' Hals chose not to give a smooth finish to his painting, as most of his contemporaries did, but mimicked the vitality of his subject by using smears, lines, spots, large patches of color and hardly any details.
Can you get a better recommendation than that?

5 comments:

  1. Blogger mcckelly16 said...

    Je beaucoop Adore
    Which means I muchly love
    The gentleman youtubed above
    He many be French
    He's still a mench
    View muppets and Mr. Aznavour:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d605d29_HHo&feature=related

    From one who is living the sugar coated lie, almost literally, I share your antipathy for Mr. Kael's opining.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "The sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat."

    Evidently I have a sweet tooth.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Betty Barbara here--
    Re: Pauline Kael's review of Sound of Music--i wish I could get my hands on the whole thing, because she also slammed Christopher Plummer as something like a 'spider on a Valentine'.
    When George Lucas made 'Willow', he named the evil general Kael and yes, it was deliberate!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. She slammed "Ordinary People" (the one with Mary Tyler Moore as the nasty cold mother, and Timothy Hutton as the boy in therapy with Judd Hirsch). Her review which upset me as the time. So I thought, "Hmm, she only likes foreign films." I was wrong that she mostly reviewed foreign films -- she was pretty close to even-steven on domestic and foreign movie reviews, but she slammed 80% of the domestic movies she reviewed, and liked 80% of the foreign films.

    I don't think I'd have liked her either. Anthony Lane reviews for The New Yorker now and is much more fun. He went to a sing-along of The Sound of Music and wrote about it for the magazine -- he had a blast and made me what to go as well.

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  5. Pauline Kael sounds a bit like our local movie reviewer. It took me a while to figure it out, but what it basically boiled down to was that if he loved a movie, I'd probably hate it...and if he hated a film, I'd love it. I think he went to the Pauline Kael School for Film Critics.

    ReplyDelete