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We came together, then we took to the road
Well, I did not expect to wind up today walking home from Somerville after midnight, but it took me under two hours and there was a stunning haze-yellow half-moon following me all the way. It was actually pretty awesome.
Previous events had been more in the line of yardwork and going into Somerville to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks; we were planning to watch Pasolini's Edipo re (1967). Rather obviously, there were detours, starting when Rush found out that I had never seen Fantasia 2000. I was promptly sat down in front of the television (which still does not have a remote, but fortunately that's irrelevant to video cassettes) and shown "Rhapsody in Blue," "Carnival of the Animals," and the "Firebird Suite." The first of these was a lovely chaser to last week's trip, a clean-lined, looping, blue-toned day in Al Hirschfeld and George Gershwin's New York; it's funny and touching and follows the music at every turn. There are cameos by all the correct people. The second is just grin-making, a piece of classic cartooning with overtones of the Muppets—I have never heard James Earl Jones sound more like Sam the Eagle than when he finds himself reading the line ". . . that age-old question: what would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos? Who wrote this?" The third, however, is pure Miyazaki; I was amazed. Disney is not traditionally known for its numinous. If I had been told it was about the rebirth of spring after winter and disaster, I would have assumed some sort of awful sentimental flower fairies at worst, at best something inoffensive and vaguely classical. It is not any of those things. nineweaving would recognize its iconography. And now I know where one of gaudior's best icons comes from.
And then one of the cats threw up on the floor and had to be attended to and we realized it was substantially more freezing in the house than it was outside, so we put on our jackets and went out to seek kitfo in Central Square. Some form of space-time folding evidently applies at the borders of Cambridge and Somerville, because we walked from Union to Inman just fine and then we were lost and suddenly found ourselves facing Mu Lan in Kendall, which is apparently a lot closer to Toscanini's than heretofore believed. (It suits my increasing feeling that the world is imploding in on Somerville and/or D.C. Last night I went to hear Rush and others of the Boston chapter of Sassafrass open for Heather Dale in a house concert and it turned out I knew the person whose house and concert it was. Today I find out someone I met months ago in a third-party context is actually two degrees out from my romantic life. I think it's the Singularity. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice; I'm telling you it's going to be looking at other people's friendlists that does it.) Nonetheless, there was kitfo at Asmara, and lentils, and fruit juices, and a salad we could both eat around the onions in, and as we were walking home Rush was hit by a bolt of genius and suggested that we try to find Backbar.
It has a street address, but that really won't help you. You get there by trusting first that the alleyway that calls itself a private way is not merely the dumpsters-and-docking space between other restaurants' kitchens and then that you are meant to be on the other side of two fire doors and a hallway that looks like the tradesman's entrance or the fuse room. And then there is the kind of bar that looks like the liquor cabinets of everyone you know run together and rather stylishly arranged on several levels, also a pot of rosemary on the counter, also what really looked like an origami triceratops and we had no idea why the giant pair of forceps, but the horseshoe-sized π is strangely endearing. The ceilings are high and the walls primarily blackboard; the drinks of the week and day are drawn in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, the charcuterie looks like Mucha or Lalique, and I haven't a clue who the cheese list was derived from, but it's very pretty. The sound system was playing Benny Goodman when we walked in and the Psychedelic Furs when we left and the degrees by which this transition was achieved were seamless. It was not loud. We had two rounds of drinks, of which I think the second was the clear winner; I liked my Scofflaw well enough (Prohibition all the way, except for the pomegranate) and we discovered what the pot of rosemary was for when Rush's Back Word came with a little sprig stuck in a floating isle of lemon peel that actually contributed to the taste, but the seasonal milk punch is going to be a favorite whenever we return and I may have to negotiate some kind of open relationship with Saloon, because Backbar also made me a Bunny Hug. I think it's becoming my speakeasy litmus test. The one bartender looked it up in The Savoy Cocktail Book and made his partner taste it first. His partner turned out to be a self-described absinthe freak who came over to our table (in his Green Lantern belt) and offered to make us anything we felt like with absinthe in future, from classic preparations with spoon and sugar to setting the stuff on fire. Rush believes we should use him as an opportunity to test-drive Who Killed Hemingway; I have just realized my life is about to contain a lot of corpse-reviving. This place also makes the best caramel corn I can remember that wasn't from a fair or a midway: it's spicy. Chipotle, cumin, smoked paprika. The combination is sort of the platonic ideal of bar food.
And when we got home, we finally watched Pasolini's Edipo re and it was worth it. It's two years earlier than his astonishing Medea (1969) and it is not as historically careful, but it shares the same sense of raw myth raked straight from a past so distant, it is at once instantly recognizable and utterly alien in every detail—Jocasta in her turreted crown, Oedipus setting out from Corinth to Delphi like a vase painting in his broad-brimmed traveler's petasos, but there is also the impossible feel of casually documenting the ancient world, the dust and goats, knotted wreaths of flowers, the clay-faced walls of cities, even when the viewer knows for a fact that Delphi was never a single dry-branching tree in desert hills beneath which sits the Sibyl in her double-faced mask with blind cowrie eyes, laughing at Oedipus, slattern-voiced, pitiless, as she tells him which parent he'll kill and which he'll fuck, now go away. It begins a few decades before its present day, ends in the year of its making. In between is the Archaic period, because that is the time of oracles and fates and the harshness in all these stories that Pasolini does not polish off into something graceful; we change over when Laios—not yet in fear of prophecy, but in beautifully reversed jealousy of his wife's affections—decides to kill his child. The Messenger is nameless in the myth-time, but in contemporary Italy his name is Angelo. Things are edging into Oedipus at Colonus by the end. It's a very strange Sphinx, but I think it works.
The last bus did not hold up its end of the social contract. I still consider the day won.
Previous events had been more in the line of yardwork and going into Somerville to meet
rushthatspeaks; we were planning to watch Pasolini's Edipo re (1967). Rather obviously, there were detours, starting when Rush found out that I had never seen Fantasia 2000. I was promptly sat down in front of the television (which still does not have a remote, but fortunately that's irrelevant to video cassettes) and shown "Rhapsody in Blue," "Carnival of the Animals," and the "Firebird Suite." The first of these was a lovely chaser to last week's trip, a clean-lined, looping, blue-toned day in Al Hirschfeld and George Gershwin's New York; it's funny and touching and follows the music at every turn. There are cameos by all the correct people. The second is just grin-making, a piece of classic cartooning with overtones of the Muppets—I have never heard James Earl Jones sound more like Sam the Eagle than when he finds himself reading the line ". . . that age-old question: what would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos? Who wrote this?" The third, however, is pure Miyazaki; I was amazed. Disney is not traditionally known for its numinous. If I had been told it was about the rebirth of spring after winter and disaster, I would have assumed some sort of awful sentimental flower fairies at worst, at best something inoffensive and vaguely classical. It is not any of those things. nineweaving would recognize its iconography. And now I know where one of gaudior's best icons comes from.And then one of the cats threw up on the floor and had to be attended to and we realized it was substantially more freezing in the house than it was outside, so we put on our jackets and went out to seek kitfo in Central Square. Some form of space-time folding evidently applies at the borders of Cambridge and Somerville, because we walked from Union to Inman just fine and then we were lost and suddenly found ourselves facing Mu Lan in Kendall, which is apparently a lot closer to Toscanini's than heretofore believed. (It suits my increasing feeling that the world is imploding in on Somerville and/or D.C. Last night I went to hear Rush and others of the Boston chapter of Sassafrass open for Heather Dale in a house concert and it turned out I knew the person whose house and concert it was. Today I find out someone I met months ago in a third-party context is actually two degrees out from my romantic life. I think it's the Singularity. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice; I'm telling you it's going to be looking at other people's friendlists that does it.) Nonetheless, there was kitfo at Asmara, and lentils, and fruit juices, and a salad we could both eat around the onions in, and as we were walking home Rush was hit by a bolt of genius and suggested that we try to find Backbar.
It has a street address, but that really won't help you. You get there by trusting first that the alleyway that calls itself a private way is not merely the dumpsters-and-docking space between other restaurants' kitchens and then that you are meant to be on the other side of two fire doors and a hallway that looks like the tradesman's entrance or the fuse room. And then there is the kind of bar that looks like the liquor cabinets of everyone you know run together and rather stylishly arranged on several levels, also a pot of rosemary on the counter, also what really looked like an origami triceratops and we had no idea why the giant pair of forceps, but the horseshoe-sized π is strangely endearing. The ceilings are high and the walls primarily blackboard; the drinks of the week and day are drawn in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, the charcuterie looks like Mucha or Lalique, and I haven't a clue who the cheese list was derived from, but it's very pretty. The sound system was playing Benny Goodman when we walked in and the Psychedelic Furs when we left and the degrees by which this transition was achieved were seamless. It was not loud. We had two rounds of drinks, of which I think the second was the clear winner; I liked my Scofflaw well enough (Prohibition all the way, except for the pomegranate) and we discovered what the pot of rosemary was for when Rush's Back Word came with a little sprig stuck in a floating isle of lemon peel that actually contributed to the taste, but the seasonal milk punch is going to be a favorite whenever we return and I may have to negotiate some kind of open relationship with Saloon, because Backbar also made me a Bunny Hug. I think it's becoming my speakeasy litmus test. The one bartender looked it up in The Savoy Cocktail Book and made his partner taste it first. His partner turned out to be a self-described absinthe freak who came over to our table (in his Green Lantern belt) and offered to make us anything we felt like with absinthe in future, from classic preparations with spoon and sugar to setting the stuff on fire. Rush believes we should use him as an opportunity to test-drive Who Killed Hemingway; I have just realized my life is about to contain a lot of corpse-reviving. This place also makes the best caramel corn I can remember that wasn't from a fair or a midway: it's spicy. Chipotle, cumin, smoked paprika. The combination is sort of the platonic ideal of bar food.
And when we got home, we finally watched Pasolini's Edipo re and it was worth it. It's two years earlier than his astonishing Medea (1969) and it is not as historically careful, but it shares the same sense of raw myth raked straight from a past so distant, it is at once instantly recognizable and utterly alien in every detail—Jocasta in her turreted crown, Oedipus setting out from Corinth to Delphi like a vase painting in his broad-brimmed traveler's petasos, but there is also the impossible feel of casually documenting the ancient world, the dust and goats, knotted wreaths of flowers, the clay-faced walls of cities, even when the viewer knows for a fact that Delphi was never a single dry-branching tree in desert hills beneath which sits the Sibyl in her double-faced mask with blind cowrie eyes, laughing at Oedipus, slattern-voiced, pitiless, as she tells him which parent he'll kill and which he'll fuck, now go away. It begins a few decades before its present day, ends in the year of its making. In between is the Archaic period, because that is the time of oracles and fates and the harshness in all these stories that Pasolini does not polish off into something graceful; we change over when Laios—not yet in fear of prophecy, but in beautifully reversed jealousy of his wife's affections—decides to kill his child. The Messenger is nameless in the myth-time, but in contemporary Italy his name is Angelo. Things are edging into Oedipus at Colonus by the end. It's a very strange Sphinx, but I think it works.
The last bus did not hold up its end of the social contract. I still consider the day won.
no subject
I think Medea is the more accomplished myth-telling, but we kept staring and grinning throughout Edipo re, recognizing a twist here, a perfect translation there; it's worth your time.