Oops. This is a Netflix movie from 2017? Starring Brad Pitt? I’ve never heard of it, but apparently Tilda Swinton has a tiny role in this, so I’ve gotta see it for this blog series.
[ten minutes pass]
Oh deer. This is my least favourite movie genre ever? The satirical-military-movie-with-an-omniscient-voice-over film? I hate these movies so much.
And the director has told Brad Pitt to be a gruff general, so he tries to speak like Christian Bale as Batman, but he comes off as just being constipated.
[forty minutes pass]
IT”S JUST BEEN FIFTY MINUTES?!?!
I’m so bored I could plotz.
There’s nothing… nothing here. The cinematography is tedious; the acting is bad (Pitt is hamming it up to the max and the rest of the actors are playing it straight); the plot is without interest…
This is a typical Netflix Made for TV movie: It can be fun to watch cheaply made indie movies, but cheap Made for TV movies remove all the quirky stuff that cheap indie movies may occasionally have. It’s the worst of all worlds: None of the freedom of indie filmmaking, and none of the budget of studio movies.
[the end]
The last bit is… vaguely more interesting?
The paying-off-the-Afghan-guy thing reads more like “well, not all Americans are bad, right” than anything else, though. So the father’s suffering is more of an opportunity to show that most of them care.
Which is eye roll inducing.
It’s such a confused movie. You can almost see how this could be a good movie, if only not for… every single artistic choice by the director while making it? I mean, I can see how the pitch sounded like it was going to be good?
Hey! We’re back with our sorta-yearly “what has that Swinton woman been up to since last we checked?” This year, we have … about half a dozen movies? So she’s been busy.
First off a movie by Joanna Hogg? That name seems so familiar to me that I assumed that I had seen a bunch of her movies, but apparently not…
[an hour passes]
It’s very Rohmer in the way that it’s not clear what it’s going to be about… It’s not very Rohmer in the way that it’s all meta: It’s about a woman in film school, so we get to hear some bits from the teachers that also seem to apply to the movie I’m watching.
I love movies about making movies, but it’s not a genre that endears itself to a whole lot of people, so I’m not surprised at this tomatometer:
[the end]
Very meta. I just googled, and apparently Tilda Swinton performed in Joanna Hogg’s graduation movie in film school? And the woman playing the central character name is Honor Swinton Byrne, so I’m guessing that’s her daughter? And the in one of the scenes, the professor reiterates that she should make a movie about what she knows? So is this an autobiographical movie by Hogg?
Just four (?) posts to go! So that’s eight dishes and four books.
The first dish of the day is the mains, because it turns out that the starter takes four days! Who knew! Not me! I never read these recipes before I start to cook; I just get the ingredients and hope for the best.
“Oops.”
So they mains is… veal? VEAL?! Isn’t that supposed to be all evil and stuff? What is veal anyway? I’ve never actually looked that up… is it Bambi? Young Bambi before his/her mother was killed? Or is that… venison? Veal? Venison?
*duckduckgo*
Oh, it’s a young cow.
Possibly male. (Well, not the one in the GIF.)
I think I knew that, but I blanked.
So off to the butcher, because somehow the local grocery store doesn’t have any young cow meat, but the butcher was all like “YES WHAT CUT WE”VE GOT ALL THE PIECES OF THE ANIMAL” and I was like “it’s… sirloin? in English?” and then he googled it and I got this:
It’s all meat to me.
So I cut it in big chunks…
And then into a skillet with some hot olive oil.
Do you know that olive oil is quite violent? You heat it up and it goes BANG POW COMICS AREN”T FOR CHILDREN ANY MORE no that’s a different thing, but it sprays all over the kitchen when you’re cooking with it over high heat, which this is supposed to be.
But! Technology to the rescue! I got this like a year? ago:
It’s quite efficient.
It’s like a netting thing you put over the pan. It allows all the steam to escape (so you don’t end up boiling stuff you want to broil), but it catches like 87% of the grease that’s trying its best to sear your naked arms.
Or perhaps that’s just me, and that’s why chefs wear long-sleeved uniforms?
IT COULD BE
Anyway, less ouch.
So I sear the young cow (or ox; the butcher didn’t specify the identity) hard, in batches, to get it all Maillarded in the reactions. I mean, browned.
Then an onion into the pan for a few minutes…
… and then all the herbs and a tomato. Tomatoe? Was that what Dan Quayle used to write on blackboards to teach children? Potatoe or tomatoe? I forget. The 90s were a long time ago and god don’t we all wish we were back in the 90s?
*sigh*
OK, so that simmers for… TWO FUCKING HOURS.
I should really read these recipes before starting to cook, because now I’m famished.
So the next ingredient are carrots, which makes sense based on the name of the dish (“aux Carottes”). But man! These carrots! Is it the corona? Because I have never ever in my life bought carrots in a shop that’s as fresh as these. They smell and taste like they just came out of the earth!
While cutting these up I couldn’t stop snacking! They’re the best carrots ever! The aroma… man! I didn’t know that store-bought carrots could be this good!
Anyway, I stopped eating (the two hours waiting for the young cow (or ox) to finish simmering may have influenced my snacking here) before I there were no carrots left, and I dumped the rest into the skillet.
And then that cooks for 45 minutes.
*sigh*
Well, I have a couple more carrots to snack on…
“By this point, the carrots will have absorbed much of the sauce.”
I thought that sounded very weird, because carrots are very compact and mostly just water… there’s no structure there to absorb anything? And so it turned out: Nothing was absorbed.
I boiled a couple of potato… e? … s to go with the meat (and carrots).
Hm… well, all the meaty stews I’ve cooked from this book have been failures, I think?
The meat here (the dead calf) is really, really tender. You don’t need a knife to eat this; it just falls apart in the best way with just a fork. But… it’s dry. If you heap on a lot of sauce, it’s less dry, but, still, the meat is just dry.
But kinda tasty?
But there’s something offputting about the sauce… it’s got like a … wrongness to it. I mean, I finished that plate; it wasn’t horrible, but there’s something off. I have no idea what.
This is the same complaint I had about the previous thing I made. So perhaps my dried herbs just suck? It had a lot of dried herbs, too. OK, I’m dumping all my dried herbs and getting new, more fabulous dried herbs.
[ESTIMATED LIKELIHOOD OF THIS MAKING A DIFFERENCE: THE COMPUTER SAYS 0.2.]
But there’s a book, too:
Today’s book is a short story collection by Tove Jansson, Brev från Klara. (She was Finnish but wrote in Swedish.) She is, of course, famous for her Moomin books (and comics), but she also wrote a handful of books for adults. They have mostly remained out of print for decades, but somebody finally (in 2017) got their shit together and issued new editions of them all. Yay!
Let’s read the first three pages together:
OK, the first one epistolary, and sort of gives you a clue as to what the woman writing the letter’s like, but it’s a pretty vague sketch. It’s fascinating, though.
The rest of the book mostly consist of very short short stories: Between three and twelve pages long. This means that most of the stories are just a snippet from a single scene, but they’re all… very enjoyable.
Or perhaps that’s the wrong word: In every story, everything is at stake. The stories are gripping, mysterious, and yet straightforward and plain.
Wonderful storytelling, and I’m now definitely buying the rest of her books that I haven’t read yet.
And now on to the starter:
It’s… herring? It’s herring.
Now, I’ve got a … I’ve got an odd relationship to herring. As a child, it was something that was served a lot as a mains: Grilled (or braised) herring. It’s lovely! Delicious! But I never make it myself, because it’s kinda whiffy, and I’m guessing that’s why restaurants shy away from doing it, too. Or perhaps people just don’t like grilled herring: It’s got a lot of itsy bitsy bones you gotta be careful about, and if you don’t have the right technique, it takes a lot of time to deal with it.
But on the other hand: Pickled herring is a huge thing in Scandinavia — I think you can get like 20 different kinds in normal shops here. But I don’t like cold herring! It’s just something about the texture and the … cold fat? So I haven’t tried any for a few decades.
So here I’m picking some herring. As a basis I’m using a … pickled herring, but I tried to choose one that sounded like it had as few additives as possible. This one was just salted.
So there’s these things, all cut in rounds…
And then the herring fillets…
… which I cut into more manageable sizes.
And then it’s all layered into a box.
Finished off with lemons on top, and then peanut (!) oil to cover it all.
I’m kinda dreading how this all will turn out, but it’s then into the fridge for two to four days. I think I’ll have a taste after a couple of days.
I’m hoping I’m not ending up in one of these situations:
We’ll see!
[time passes]
So after three days I’m unpickling this… And there’s no horrible stench rising from the box, so that’s a positive.
So I’m serving this with some boiled small new potatoes.
Hm… It’s one of those flavours where I’m going “well, I’m not hating this”… But I’m not loving it, either. The onions go well with the herring, but perhaps the carrots should have been blanched a bit first? They’re extremely crunchy.
But the potatoes were awesome. Excellent tots.
I did finish the plate, but I wasn’t tempted to go back for more, so I say that’s a semi-win.
So I was unpacking a mega package from the US today (I’m using a forwarding service, because it’s just … more fun), and one of the packages inside contained this item.
“Queensryche? On tape?” I thought? “JUST HOW DRUNK HAVE I BEEN!!!1”
“Oh, OK, perhaps it’s something so avant garde that they sell it in a Queensryche cover! Yeah! Cool! Awesome!”
“Hm… still pretty much looks like a Queenryche tape…”
“THAT”S QUEENSRYCHE!!!!1! I must have been so drunk.”
So I went back to unpacking the mega package and found another little package from the same person, and in that was:
“Yes! A Xiu Xiu tape! I vaguely remember buying that! I wasn’t that drunk!”
So. Much. Drama.
Was that, like, a … bonus tape? In a separate package?
It’s been such a long time since I just sat down with a bunch of new comics… I’ve been reading (eww!) books all spring and summer (in addition to the Epic Comics thing), so my queue of incoming comics has grown to ridiculous lengths.
So! Newish blog concept! I get up in the morning, and do nothing else but read comics until I fall asleep, and I kinda er log them here on the blog?
I won’t be doing reviews, but I might… scribble something about what I read? Or not.
I’ve got candy to keep me company:
Let’s start!
11:51: Portrait of a Drunk by Ruppert, Mulot and O. Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)
Wow. What an asshole.
It’s very meta, all this trapped-in-purgatory-being-forced-to-watch-this-asshole stuff. Excellent.
12:23: The Social Discipline Reader by Jan Sundahl (Domino Books)
Unnerving and beautiful. Really talented storytelling; too bad the stories are a bit on the edge lord side; the ending of this one made me groan out loud.
12:42: Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyung-Ju and Ryan Estrada (Iron Circus)
Man, this starts out at So Much Drama Level 11, and it just increases from there. Even the size of the lettering contributes to the feeling that everybody shouts all the time.
It’s a pretty annoying read, and it’s difficult to keep the characters straight.
But it’s very edumacational, and almost despite myself I found myself drawn into this (apparently) true story about protest in South Korea in 1983. It’s interesting! And I teared up at the ending.
13:47: Space Basket by Jonathan Petersen (Domino Books)
Yes yes of course.
13:53: The House by Paco Roca (Fantagraphics)
This one tries really hard to be moving… and succeeds. I felt more than a bit manipulated while reading it, but it’s good. It does sometimes feel like the storyboards to a Spanish sentimental movie (and not in a good way), though. And it’s annoying the way Roca just can’t decide on a panel layout methodology, so you have to guess the reading order on every page.
14:39: Langosh & Peppi: Fugitive Days by Veronica Post (Conundrum)
This is a very oddly structured book… it starts as a down-and-out travelogue, and then there’s a manic pixie bit, and then there’s a people-in-the-country-side-sure-are-strange bit (i.e., Deliverance), and then there’s a bit about the refugee crisis. Any of those bits could have been a complete book, really, but all squished together like this, it’s an odd reading experience.
But there are some nice pastoral scenes. The character design on Langhosh feels like a mistake, though.
15:33: Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics)
I feel like this book has gotten less attention than Hanselmann’s previous books? Perhaps that’s not a reflection on the book itself, but rather that Hanselmann just isn’t the new hotness any more (I mean, nobody)…
By the way, that interview in The Comics Journal was hilarious? It read as if Hanselmann was a kid talking to his parent, and telling not-quite-true stories about the other nasty kids at school. I think a third of the interview was just about how nasty people are on Twitter, because they’re mean to Hanselmann, and by “people” I mean Kim O’Connor, who Hanselmann didn’t actually name…
Great comedy!
We’ll, let’s read the book.
OK, now I know why the book’s not getting much attention.
*sigh*
16:33: Becoming Horses by Disa Wallander (Drawn & Quarterly)
This reminded me of this:
Anyway — lovely.
16:48: Spider Monkey #1 by Jesse McManus with Austin English (Domino Books)
Very pretty and very puzzling.
17:05: Art Life by Catherine Ocelot (Conundrum)
Very witty, and a very challenging choice do depict all the figures like this. You have to express everything through dialogue and posture.
17:51: Face Man by Clara Bessijelle (Domino Books)
Very odd!
18:05: Nap.
18:55: A Gift for a Ghost by Borja González (Abrams)
Wow. This was something else. Such storytelling.
But no faces in this, either. Is that a current trend?
19:47: Psychodrama Illustrated by Beto Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
A real indie comic book! You don’t see many of them these days.
We’re in the Fritz/Killer storyline somewhere, and it’s all very meta, with Killer acting in a remake of a Fritz movie, and we get the DVD commentary on the movie by both of them, and then further explications on it all from Fritz as she hooks up with some guy.
It’s great! Reads like prime Beto.
20:24: Old Growth by Niv Bavarsky and Michael Olivo (Fantagraphics/F.U.)
I thought that this was going to be mostly non-narrative, but it’s a whole… epic… unfortunately, the final part is mostly just a big fight scene.
Aaargh! And the red glitter from the cover of the book has transferred to my pants! I”LL SEW YEWS FANTAGRAPHICS!
20:54: Pizza
Since I’m just reading comics (and napping, apparently) all day, I don’t have time to make food, so I got some pizza. It was pretty good, but there’s too much filling on it, so it was a bit on the soggy side. More isn’t always more.
20:54: Stig & Tilde: Vanisher’s Island by Max de Radiguès (Nobrow)
So I’m reading this while eating the pizza… not an ideal combination, because it’s awkward to hold in one hand. Anyway, it’s gorgeous, and it’s got a real old-timey kids adventure book kinda feel.
21:18: We Served the People: My Mother’s Stories by Emei Burell (Archaia)
So this is a book about the Cultural Revolution… I read the first few pages and I was all “well, OK, that’s interesting, but…”
But then it gets really entertaining, too. I don’t even know why they had the text pages at the start; the comic itself goes through many of the same points, but in a much better way.
I’m guessing… an editor that though some text pages would class it up?
In any case, it’s a very readable and interesting book.
22:20: Beirut Won’t Cry by Mazen Kerbaj (Fantagraphics/F.U.)
23:20: Inappropriate by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized)
I love Gabrielle Bell. This is a collection of shorter bits and pieces, so it’s very dense. Hilarious, moving and smart as always.
00:45: Go To Sleep (I Miss You) by Lucy Knisley (First Second)
Very cute.
01:18: It’s time for me to go to sleep, too.
Well, that was fun. I don’t think I’ve read comics that intensely and without much in the way of interruptions for … decades? My brain is all lethargic and buzzing at the same time… comics overload… coooomics…
