While browsing a Sotheby’s catalogue a few weeks ago I came across an Expressionist painting that reminded me very much of a favorite film of mine called Gabrielle.
Ludwig Meidner - Crowd in the station:

Here are a couple of stills from the scene it reminded me of:

Richard Kanayan is incredibly charismatic!

Aristotle made a distinction between the use that a thing has in itself, and the use that it has for achieving an external goal. A glass of orange juice, for example, has a use in being drunk so as to assuage thirst. The thirst is not part of the orange juice - it’s an external goal. But orange juice also has an intrinsic use - or quality - which only a glass of orange juice can have, namely the very orangy-juicyness of it. That’s an intrinsic quality, a particular thing - while the external goal is much more general.

This distinction, for Aristotle, was not just an intellectual curiousity. It had, for him, a moral quality. I tend to agree. Put simply - it’s by focusing on the details of life that we come to enjoy it. If we take our time and savor a delicious meal, feeling all of it’s intrinsic qualities, we enjoy it much more than if we bolt it down simply to assuage our hunger. Or, to put it another way, if you want to avoid scepticism about living then go and do something you enjoy, and really enjoy it for what it is.

I don’t advocate the downfall of scepticism. It’s a healthy and vital thing - a thing with it’s own intrinsic quality and use, just like any other. Artists who try and avoid it wind up with work that feels hopelessely anaemic and naive. What I do advocate is balance. Aristotle recommended the same.

Nabokov’s short stories deal with subjects that might be categorised as sceptical: random death, chaos, unrequited love, delusion and so forth. But he balances this with a love of detail that is striking. Nothing is too small for Nabokov and every detail seems somehow both original and right. An example, from the short story, ‘Perfection’, which contains many details of action and environment:

The house was located at the rear of the little seaside town, a plain two-storied house with red-currant shrubs in the yard, which a fence separated from the dusty road. A tawny-bearded fisherman sat on a log, slitting his eyes in the low sun as he tarred his net. His wife led them upstairs. Terra-cotta floors, dwarf furniture. On the wall, a fair-sized fragment of an airplane propellor: “My husband used to work at the airport.” Ivanov unpacked his scanty linen, his razor, and a delapidated volume of Pushkin’s works in the Panafidin edition. David freed from its net a varicolored ball that went jumping about and from sheer exuberance only just missed knocking a horned shell off its shelf. The landlady brought tea and some flounder.

We went to see a play at the Odeon Theatre Bucharest. It’s been about three years since we last went. Because when we last went, it was so awful that we swore to never go again. Time and circumstance conspired against us, however. So we wound up jammed in a loggia without hope or expectation. And, unsurprisingly, that total lack of both was completely fulfilled.

The play was ‘Hotel Room’, a piece originally written for TV, for David Lynch, in fact. So one might expect dark, one might expect moody. At the very least, I imagine, a sense of intangible strangeness. But that’s not how they do things at the Odeon.

The Odeon has a set procedure for all plays. Rule number one is ‘Make it quirky!’ (the exclamation mark here, is essential). The rule dictates that, any chance you get, make a character do something odd. Have them fall over. Make them stand in a corner. Song and dance numbers are mandatory, even in Ibsen. I’ve even see them have every character on stage raise their right leg, all at once, for absolutely no reason other than a pause in the dialogue.

Rule 2 is ‘Distract the audience’. This can be done by having one character creep up on another, or by having a few totally unrelated characters talking and moving in the background, or (as I also saw once) have a thousand different colored ping pong balls roll onto the stage down a hill. As long as it distracts from the text or nuance, it goes in.

Rule 3 is ‘Always use the same characters.’ The Odeon has about four or five stock characters, drawn from the archaic world of television soap opera. There’s the ‘Cute Kid’ - a little girl, always smiling, always happy. There’s ‘Block Mom’, the older woman, resigned, in charge, wise but hard-working. There’s ‘Daft Old Guy’ - he shuffles about muttering to himself. There’s ‘Naive Guy’ - always played by the same actor, who specializes in innocence. And there’s ‘Guy In Charge’ - who speaks for himself, really.

These rules were assiduously applied to ‘Hotel Room’ just as they are to any other play, be it by Shakespeare, David Mamet, Chekhov or Sophocles.

Part one of ‘Hotel Room’ is about two men and a prostitute. Lots of potential for dark meandering there. But not with the Odeon. We got ‘Daft Old Guy’, ‘Man In Charge’ and, naturally, ‘Cute Kid’ as the most unlikely prostitute ever seen on stage. When one of the characters visits the toilet, we get the quirky distraction of the sound of them peeing, played for an age, while ‘Cute Kid’ giggles along, knowingly, with the audience. We also got an islamic bell-hop, dressed in tribal clothes, who does nothing other than wander about and be ‘hilariously’ islamic.

Part two concerns a husband and wife struggling with madness and the death of a child. We got ‘Naive Guy’ and ‘Cute Kid’ - along with lots of candles. They were so inept and inappropriate that the piece took on a strange new level of surrealism all its own - that of characters mouthing words which have nothing to do with them.

The Odeon saved the best for last. In part three, we got treated to ‘Block Mom’ and ‘Cute Kid’ doing an extended dance number to ‘Woolly Bully’ by the appropriately named ‘Sam the Sham and the Pharaos’.

It was an evening I won’t forget. Never before have my sensibilities been assaulted by ignorance on such a large scale. I was left drained and depressed, and I carried home an extended migraine that lasted all weekend. So stunned was I that I got hold of the original TV version, directed by Lynch and starring Harry Dean Stanton and Christian Slater. And there it all was - the darkness, the undercurrent of malevolance and despair. Pitch perfect performances and absolute realism of character. While the script is by no means perfect, the film managed, at times, to achieve a genuine sense of brilliance. I am sure that Lynch was sorely tempted to throw in a song and dance number at some point, but being the genius that he is, he resisted that particular path to easy money.

Every now and again I go to the hospital on Washington street to make appointments with various doctors for my grandmother. This dog has been completely adopted by the hospital. He is very serious, a real veteran who knows the tough life and has seen many sick people in his days. He usually minds his own business, but from time to time he barks at other dogs as they are walked past the hospital gates by their owners.

Here he is, waiting in front of the hospital kitchen window, barking slightly to point out his presence:

Our friends Angela and Mike made us a nice dinner a few evening ago. The soup was smashing, so we asked for the recipe. It’s one of Nigella Lawson’s:

“one whole garlic
2 tsps olive oil
200 g frozen peas
25g butter
2 tbsps freshly grated parmesan
200 ml warm stock
150 ml double cream (if you want to go crazy)”

Slice off the top of the garlic so that you can see the tops of the cloves revealed in a cross section.Cut out a square of foil large enough to make a parcel with room to spare around the garlic. Put the garlic in the middle and cover the lot with olive oil. Make a loose parcel around the garlic, sealing the edges. Bake in a preheated 200 C oven for 45 mins to an hour until soft. This makes all the difference to the soup. Roasting the garlic takes the edge off it and gives it a sweetness which makes a great and subtle base for the rest.

Cook the peas in boiling salted water. Drain and blend. Squeeze in the soft cooked cloves of garlic. Add the butter, parmesan and half of the stock. Process to a creamy puree. Pour into a saucepan and add the remaining stock. Add cream or extra stock to taste. Heat gently, season with salt and pepper and serve. Extra parmesan is recommended at this point, as is a spring of fresh parsley.

And here it is: