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Ah, sir, times is hard, times is hard
For his birthday tomorrow, my father requested meat pies. So I spent this morning and afternoon preparing the different kinds of filling, pulled pork with improvised barbecue sauce and curried beef with onions; rolling out the dough, crimping and brushing the pies with egg: I have just put the lot in the refrigerator to await the celebratory dinner. Yes, of course I listened to Sweeney Todd all the while. What do you take me for?
(Incidentally: edible anatomy lessons. I so need a copy of this book.)
And I love how the tale does not stop safely in the past. The last "Ballad of Sweneey Todd" is where melodrama turns into myth; the foolish barber and his wife are done with, but like a hungry ghost or a thoughtless promise, once called up, Sweeney will never disappear.
His needs are few, his room is bare
He hardly uses his fancy chair
The more he bleeds, the more he lives
He never forgets and he never forgives
Perhaps today you gave a nod
To Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sweeney wishes the world away, Sweeney's weeping for yesterday
Hugging the blade, waiting the years
Hearing the music that nobody hears
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall
No one can help, nothing can hide you
Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?
The elements that create him are quintessentially Victorian, but in the steam-whistle shriek that heralds his moments of manifestation and murder, the industrial design of the original production, the mechanized efficiency of his barber's chair, he's a creature of the modern age. Everywhere, anyone. He's out of time and he will never die. There is something in this characterization of the vampire: which is famously balanced between the old and the new worlds as well.
(And I get T.S. Eliot overtones, but I doubt this is an intentional intertext.)
(Incidentally: edible anatomy lessons. I so need a copy of this book.)
And I love how the tale does not stop safely in the past. The last "Ballad of Sweneey Todd" is where melodrama turns into myth; the foolish barber and his wife are done with, but like a hungry ghost or a thoughtless promise, once called up, Sweeney will never disappear.
His needs are few, his room is bare
He hardly uses his fancy chair
The more he bleeds, the more he lives
He never forgets and he never forgives
Perhaps today you gave a nod
To Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sweeney wishes the world away, Sweeney's weeping for yesterday
Hugging the blade, waiting the years
Hearing the music that nobody hears
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall
No one can help, nothing can hide you
Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?
The elements that create him are quintessentially Victorian, but in the steam-whistle shriek that heralds his moments of manifestation and murder, the industrial design of the original production, the mechanized efficiency of his barber's chair, he's a creature of the modern age. Everywhere, anyone. He's out of time and he will never die. There is something in this characterization of the vampire: which is famously balanced between the old and the new worlds as well.
(And I get T.S. Eliot overtones, but I doubt this is an intentional intertext.)
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I dunno so much. I'm damn sure Sondheim's read Eliot, at least...
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I don't doubt! But Sweeney Todd predates Sondheim.
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I thought you might be interested to know that when I was in culinary school, the meatcutting instructor always selected a "volunteer" from the class to demonstrate which parts of the cow produced given cuts of meat. Hilarious and instructive, to this day it is how I remember which parts come from where.
...it's also a great teaching tool. You'd be amazed how many people don't know the difference between a round and a loin. Show 'em by poking 'em, though, and they'll remember for life.
(comparative vertebrate anatomy is cool)
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Not at all. Pleased to meet you!
I thought you might be interested to know that when I was in culinary school, the meatcutting instructor always selected a "volunteer" from the class to demonstrate which parts of the cow produced given cuts of meat. Hilarious and instructive, to this day it is how I remember which parts come from where.
That's wonderful.
What is it you currently do?
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Butchers are a fun, macabre, weird sort of people. They tend to be large, squat, muscley people who think nothing of hauling around a half-side of beef and making puppets out of meat. Always get on the good side of your butcher. He/she probably won't actually carve you into bits, but since he/she will make no secret of the fact that he/she can, they're great persuaders when dealing with people who do not have butcher friends.
Do not piss off butchers. They wake up as early as bakers, and their practical jokes involve pig's blood.
Good times.
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Re: Sweeney: did you ever read Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris? Horrible clunky prose but a fascinating portrait of an old-world monster becoming absolutely irrelevant because of the onrush of the Paris Commune and modernity, but also making itself into an inextricable part of them.
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The latter sounds like particularly valuable knowledge.
did you ever read Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris? Horrible clunky prose but a fascinating portrait of an old-world monster becoming absolutely irrelevant because of the onrush of the Paris Commune and modernity, but also making itself into an inextricable part of them.
I never did. It's worth braving the clunky prose?
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Yeah, I'm with you on the old-skool Sweeney Todd. (You and I both liked ST before the movie came out, so we can laugh up our sleeves at all the teenyboppers who are just in it for Johnny Depp.) (Not that he's a bad reason to be into a movie.) The demonic quality was much stronger in the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn version. I was lucky enough to watch that on DVD recently, and it really shows the character going from an individual to something awful and universal. Hey, I know--it's like in the Dalemark books, where the heroes of prehistoric Dalemark turn into the Undying over the years. Only with cannibalism.
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I bet one could make a very good pie with curried onions, carrots, potatoes, etc. Parsnips. Pumpkin. Peas. Vegetables that begin with other letters of the alphabet. Cauliflower?
Hey, I know--it's like in the Dalemark books, where the heroes of prehistoric Dalemark turn into the Undying over the years. Only with cannibalism.
That comparison is made of yay.
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The best vegetarian "meat pie" I know is onions, potatoes, parsnips, "rutabaga" (swede) and a bit of apple.
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That sounds very good. And I'm not even a vegetarian.
I've never had a vegetarian pasty, but Golden Krust (NYC Jamaican bakery with a stand in Grand Central) used to have callaloo patties*, which were very good. Sort of like a cross between spinach and collard greens is the best way I can describe it, with a bit of spiciness; I can't say if that was the greens themselves or whatever spices they were cooked with.
*Pasty like savoury pies with a crispier crust; fillings are often curryish.
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Yes. And this is partly a function of the script, which elements were included and which for one reason or another cut; and partly of direction.1 (And with all due respect to Len Cariou, Patti LuPone, or Tim Burton, Lansbury and Hearn are still the best the roles ever got.) Depp's rendering of "Epiphany" does not give me the same cold awe and horror as Hearn's; he's a deathwish from the beginning, so coal-eyed and tightly held in on himself that we all deserve to die is not so much a snap as a logical conclusion. Hearn's Todd is no less damaged, rackingly bitter and too easily overtaken by the ghosts of his past ("The Barber and His Wife," "Poor Thing"—in moments of stress, he rubs at his wrists, unconsciously, as though his convict's shackles still chafe there), but he is human enough to thank Anthony for his friendship, it seems genuinely, and if he had come home to the loving wife and child whose memories shored up his sanity for fifteen years in Botany Bay, he might have had nothing worse than scars and bad dreams for the rest of his life. When he first swears revenge, indeed, Mrs. Lovett laughs in his face: "You're going to get them? You? A bleeding little nobody of a runaway convict? . . . Not in a million years." But when all that rage finally shreds itself into the savage keen of my Lucy lies in ashes and I'll never see my girl again, then she sees for the first time—as do we—how dangerous he might be. Burton seems to have made a similar tradeoff for the youth2 and sexiness of his stars in the musical's deliciously black humor, much of which has been excised from the film and which I think is essential. It's so much fun to watch these characters at their wicked work that we are decoyed from its tragic underpinnings, put off guard for the brutality of the finale. That raw edge in the last verse of "A Little Priest," the clanging brass and ferocity of its gleefully lunatic waltz, does not change the fact that it's hilarious; they flourish a butcher's knife and a rolling pin, at once absurd and rather alarming. But fortunately it's also clear / That everybody goes down well with beer! None of which means that I did not enjoy Burton's Sweeney Todd when I saw it for New Year's. The supporting cast were very fine; I was sorry so much of Anthony and Johanna's music was cut because Jamie Campbell Bower and Jayne Wisener impressed me,3 Alan Rickman was as lustful and loathly a Judge Turpin as I had hoped, and Ed Sanders is the best Toby I have ever heard, onstage or off; casting the role as an actual boy soprano was genius. But for the leads, give me the original cast recording or the DVD any day.
1. And set design, really. Burton's London is a Whitechapel fantasia, while Hal Prince sets his in the shadow of dark satanic mills: the sets are rusted catwalks, there is a production-line automatism to the routine of Sweeney's days. Wake up, Johanna! Another bright red day. He is the demonic present the newly industrialized world is grinding us toward.
2. I am aware that Johnny Depp is in his mid-forties, which is not an improbable age at which to have a sixteen-year-old daughter; I think George Hearn was not much older when he took on the role. But one of them is played older and more harrowed, the other more sociopathically smoldering; and while Helena Bonham Carter looks quite fine in her Gothic Lolita corsetry, it is not irrelevant to Mrs. Lovett's characterization that she is in her mid-fifties and still as daffy as a schoolgirl when it comes to Sweeney Todd.
3. And I say this as someone who unreasonably loves Victor Garber. The Anthony and Johanna in the Hearn/Lansbury DVD, alas, not so much. I feel strongly that the lovers need to be real: they may be refugees from an opera buffa, but that is not the same as comic characters.
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As an only passingly related aside, handsome 44 year olds are a treat.
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I don't mean that mid-forties is unsexy. Only that I think the characters work better when they are not played front and center pretty.
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Yes! And without that initial sense of humanity, the play of identities between Benjamin Barker and Sweeney Todd is meaningless. He cries out triumphantly as he cuts the Judge's throat—"Benjamin Barker!"—but there is no reclamation in it; he is shouting the name of a man who no longer exists, whose life he has forfeited for his revenge. Only Sweeney Todd holds the razor now.
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It's intriguing who ends up looming large in our cultural memory, and very very interesting how people see those figures over the years.
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Yes. I love seeing what legends stick.
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You're welcome! I look forward to seeing what you think.
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Cool anatomy weirdness!
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I can imagine worse fates.
Cool anatomy weirdness!
Yes! And you know it's only a matter of time until the human recipes start showing up . . .
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Well, I take you for Sonya. So, yes, I'm not surprised. ;-)
Happy birthday to your father! And I hope the pies are as delicious as they sound.
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His actual birthday is Monday; today is Birthday Observed, but I have conveyed your wishes to him. The pies came out spectacularly. We just have also a spectacular amount of leftovers . . .
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Ah. Thank you!
The pies came out spectacularly.
Splendid. I'm glad to hear.
We just have also a spectacular amount of leftovers . . .
Alas, if only I lived in Boston. ;-)
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That's awesome. I'm sorry I missed it.