OTB#91: L’Année dernière à Marienbad

L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Alain Resnais. 1961. ⚅

I’ve seen this at least a couple of times before. The last time was in 2015 according to Emacs… I regret not rebuying it on 2K. It’s such a beautiful film, and I’ve got it on a windowboxed DVD, so the resolution is like nil by nought. And the transfer isn’t particularly good either; there’s a lot of horizontal judder from seemingly worn-out sprockets. Or just bad machinery.

And the subtitles are YUUGE.

OK, for any subsequent movie I’ve seen before, I’m rebuying it on 2K. Gotta have more of dem pixels.

ANYWAY.

Rewatching it now, I do understand why it’s not #1 on this list. It’s hypnotical and dreamy and wonderful, but it’s so close to being risible. Just a slight tweak, and it’s a parody of French art cinema.

I still love it. The roving camera, the humourlessness, the theatricality, the literariness of it all.

Brilliant.

Here’s the cocktail for this movie.

It’s tasty! But then I always like cream/citrusey things.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#91: Le Samouraï

Le Samouraï. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1967. ⚃

I have apparently bought the Spanish version of this, but fortunately there’s also a French soundtrack. But no English subtitles! Subscene to the rescue! What would we do without pirates? Just watch Michael Bay movies?

Oh, wow. Alain Delon.

I don’t think I’ve seen any films by Melville? But I like his name.

This blu-ray version looks wonderful. Was Melville one of those “use ‘natural’ light only” guys? Well, not natural lights, but only lights that would be present otherwise? Because some of the scenes are really dark. But wonderfully moody. Noir.

I’m a bit confused as to why this is on the list of 100 best films of all time. I mean, it’s good, but… Is it one of those movies that’s interesting historically, so you have to have it on the list?

Or is it just that Alain Delon is so cool? Because he is. And the flat he lives in is picaresque perfection.

It’s a gorgeous movie; all blue and grey, and it’s Paris, and it’s Delon, but I’m not feeling it. Which is odd, because this is just my sort of movie.

The ending is beyond perfection, though.

I’m so out of practice in making real cocktails. I don’t have any citrus and my fruit press is broken… But I found this all-booze cocktail, that uses two of my boozes (and some wine).

It’s tasty!

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

Officially The Best

I’ve always wanted to watch all the movies on the Sight and Sound list of movies. First of all, it’s a poll taken of working directors, and that in itself makes it interesting. Secondly, the film that won was neither Citizen Kane nor Vertigo, which immediately makes it seem more relevant.

I’ve jokingly referred to the list as “the official list of best movies” in the past, but I’ve come to realise how apt that is, really: It’s a very staid list of movies. Directors do not seem to have very adventurous taste in canon.

There’s no Eraserhead, Tromeo and Juliet, You and Me and Everyone We Know or India Song on this list.

I’m not familiar with all the movies on the list, especially not in the latter half of the list, so I hope there are some surprises in store, and it’s not just Serious Worthy Cinema.

Uhm, writing that, it sounds like I’m going to hate-watch a bunch of awful movies, right? But that’s not what I mean at all. I’ll bet you that every single one of these 106 movies are going to turn out to be really good, and I love Serious Worthy Cinema. It’s just that I hope there are some surprises in here, too.

I have to call out the selection of Bergman movies on this list, though: They’ve chosen Persona (it’s magnificent), The Seventh Seal (sure), Hour of the Wolf (great) and Fanny & Alexander (of course). But no Cries and Whispers!? What?!?! That’s absurd! And again, perhaps, points towards the stodgy selection: It’s a movie with four female protagonists, and that’s what Bergman was interested in most of his career. Three of the four films selected here are more male centred, which is untypical of Bergman, but typical for lists like this.

And speaking of women: I haven’t counted how many films with female versus male directors there are, but I’m going to guess that there’s more than 90% male. Hm… is it possible that Beau Travail by Claire Denis is the only one with a female director?

*sigh*

There’s also the critics’ list, which looks like a straight permutation of the directors’ list (and it has Vertigo as #1), but there are some differences. For instance, it’s got the wonderful Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman, and it’s got Wild Strawberries by Bergman, and Imitation of Life by Douglas Sirk, so it is, objectively speaking, a better list than the directors’.

Whodathunk.

Here’s the number of films per decade on the list:

I think… we can probably guess what the mean age of the voting populace is based on this, eh? 70% of the films are from the 50s/60/70s, with an obligatory nod to the movies from the 20s and 30s that have to be included, and virtually shutting out all other decades.

And, I mean, I’m all for 50s/60s movies, but I’m rather sceptical of the 70s selection.

Anyway, let’s get started… And let’s do them in reverse order, starting with the movies that shared 91st place. And there’s sixteen of them, so we’re starting with the 106th movie.

Oh, and to increase the difficulty setting on this thing, I’m going to go through all the booze I still have from that project where I made one cocktail from each country in the world. I still have a closet full of the stuff, and some of it has probably gone off by now. So I’ll be testing the liqueurs and then using this page that lets you type in ingredient name, and it spits out recipes by the dozen. And I’ll be buying No New Booze. And I mean it this time!

(Well, except vodka and rum. All drinks have vodka or rum and I’m almost out.)

B&CB: Aïoli Monstre w/ Aïoli

New year, new decade, new food.

The previous salt cod dish from the Bistro Cooking book was delicious, so I’m all excited about this one: Lots of veggies, cod and aioli. The only thing that’s odd about this recipe is its name: Grand aioli. I mean, that’s just the sauce.

So this is a two-for-one dish, because I’m also making this:

And it’s the first time I’ve ever made aioli from scratch, so I wonder how that’s doing to go.

So it’s the normal setup: It’s salt cod, so it has to be desalinated for two days:

So, into the fridge… While that’s happening, I can read a book? Yes.

Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb.

Now she’s just fucking with us.

Two previous trilogies were named:

Assassin’s Apprentice / Royal Assassin / Assassin’s Quest

Fool’s Errand / The Golden Fool / Fool’s Fate

See the pattern? Now this:

Fool’s Assassin / Fool’s Quest / Assassin’s Fate

Hobb! Nobody can remember which books is which! Doing a combinatorial mix of words in titles is bad!

Anyway!

This is the sixteenth book in this series, and as you can see, it’s rather hefty. But I think this book is bigger than most of them? If we say that the books are, say, 600 pages on average, that’s (* 600 16) => 9600 pages in total. So my guess is that this is the longest series of books I’ve read.

I mean, counting pages. Reading-wise, it’s a breeze. Robin Hobb has a way of writing that makes these books hard to put down: Sometimes the plots are so exciting that it all becomes too much and I just plotz. She’s also really great at world-building; her different societies do not feel like Feudal Japan With Identifying Numbers Filed Off or whatever.

Let’s read the first three pages:

Excitement!

And this is the culmination of this series, apparently. I mean… OK, no spoilers? No spoilers. But it’s the end, so it has a lot to live up to, and it does. While some writers are rather thin on plot development and draw things out (I remember a mid-trilogy 400 page book by Cherryh that could be summed up “The ship took off.”, and was summed up that way in the next book.) But there’s a lot going on here, and everything that happens has repercussions, and there’s no deus ex machina that swoops in and makes all the tribulations of the characters irrelevant, and… It’s solid.

That said, Hobb has some annoying tics. OK, I hate all the torture scenes, but those can mostly be skipped over, but more annoying is that she has two plot gadgets she relies on way too much: Characters withholding information from each other (I seem to remember an earlier book that … just wouldn’t have happened if they’d talked on the first page; this one isn’t as bad), and the other is having Fitz (the titular Assassin) being stoopid.

Fitz always thinks he knows best, and goes off harebrained to sacrifice himself and then the other people go “hm, surely it’s not as dire as that” and then they have to go after him, unlocking doors he’s locked, and kinda sorta save him. Again, there’s not as much of that in this book as in previous books, but it’s a really sad way of solving plotting problems.

Oh, and another really annoying thing, come to think of it: In these books, nobody believes anything anybody says. “Could you pass me the salt?” “Do you really want salt?” These characters can mind-read and dream prophetic dreams and everything, but whenever somebody says something like “Fitz is alive; he just mindcalled me” everybody says “You’re just feverish. Go to bed.” It’s really, really annoying, and it wastes so many pages. One thing I really love about Star Trek: The Next Generation is that they had unconditional faith in nobody trying to bullshit anybody else, and that just makes things move faster. Somebody: “Captain, I think… something’s vaguely kinda perhaps wrong?” Picard: “Everybody assemble, drop out of warp, run a full diagnostic; could we be in an alternate timeline? Did somebody take over our bodies? Find out what’s wrong!”

ANYWAY.

And the next-to-final scene, with page upon page being spent on Fitz and how sad everything is, boo hoo (well it is sad), and then half a page spent on the Fool, as an afterthought. It’s eyeroll inducing.

But it does work…

The cod’s been de-salted enough now, so it’s time to start on the aioli.

So it’s garlic, salt and egg yolks…

Whisked a lot and then add oil and EEEEK! It separated! It’s horrible and gruesome!

*pout*

Well, while I think about what to do, I’ll do the rest of the dish.

It’s a lot of chopping.

And then everything into a pan to steam. The recipe said to cook everything separately, because everything has different timing (from 40 minutes for the beets, to 20 for the potatoes/carrots, to 7 for the cauliflower, to 4 for the beans). But I don’t have that many steamer thingies, so I just put everything into one casserole at different times. Lots of math!

Finally almost everything in…

It’s a very simple recipe.

And done! The recipe specifies one hard-boiled egg (in its shell), too, so I did that separately. I guess the shell is to make it more rustic? It’s got that rustic vibe.

I redid the aioli while the veggies were cooking, and added the oil at a much slower pace, and then everything went swimmingly. It turned out a bit thick, though. Perhaps I should have added some water?

Anyway, this was really good. I love salt cod, and it goes great with the aioli. What a good idea. And the beets are also a great component here. I should have added 2x the cauliflower, though.

Some of the recipes in the Bistro Cooking book have been kinda dodgy (or I’m not able to execute them), but this was perfect.

This blog post is part of the Bistro
Cooking & Books series.

news.gmane.org is now news.gmane.io

As previously discussed, the gmane.org domain was no longer viable, and the NNTP server has now moved to news.gmane.io.

Likewise, mailing list subscriptions have been moved from m.gmane.org to m.gmane-mx.org.

As of this writing, neither service is up, because I’m doing the final resync before restarting the services on a new server. I expect the services to be back up again about 21:00 GMT (January 15th 2020), so don’t panic before that time.

DNS changes may also take some time to propagate.

[Edit at 15:30 GMT: I had misremembered how long the rsync took, so we’re now live six hours ahead of schedule. This Shouldn’t Possibly Happen. I mean, a computer project not being late. Anyway, both Gmane and Gwene feeds are now processing, but the news-to-mail bits aren’t up yet.]

OK, service announcement done, so I thought I’d write a bit about what happened the last week:

First of all, thank you for all the nice comments and PVT EMAILs of support. I wasn’t quite sure whether to continue running the NNTP server, but getting some feedback helps.

So then I started moving 15K mailing lists from a subscription on gmane.org to the new domain, and that was… er… interesting? The process works like this:

The Gmane configuration is a file that has one of these entries per list:

gmane.test   gmane-test@quimby.gnus.org
  Testing the Gmane hierarchy
  mailman gt-gmane-test
  validated=2020-01-13
  transfer=done
  crosspost-posting=no

I’ve got an Emacs mode to do a the maintenance work (subscribing, unsubscribing and the like), so I utilised that to write a function that would send out two unsubscription messages (because lists may be subscribed as @gmane.org or @m.gmane.org for historical reasons and there’s no record of which one) and one subscription message for the new @m.gmane-mx address. This bit is fully automated, so I could just sit there watching Emacs send out messages at a somewhat speedy clip. (Well, sending out all the messages took 12 hours in total due to how it’s done: It’s actually doing RPC via NNTP so that the messages are sent directly from the MTA instead of from me, because that looks less spammy.)

(While looking at Emacs doing this bit, I watched Witcher, which was surprisingly entertaining… in parts, and really, really tedious for the rest of the time. And, since it was Netflix, it looked cheap and shoddy.)

I did this in 1K batches, because when I’ve triggered this bit, all messages for the group in question go to a special gmane.admin group, so that I can see all the error messages and stuff, but most importantly: The “reply to confirm subscription” messages, which I then have to respond to (from Gnus). That’s semi-scriptable, but when the “please reply” message is in Chinese, I have to kinda guess.

Then after that, the “Welcome to foo” messages start pouring in, and again, handling the ones in English is fine, but then there’s all the other languages. I know Willkommen, and I can guess at bem-vinda and bienvenu, but Japanese is not my forte, so more guessing is involved.

So this took two days, and for the second day I watched both seasons of Fleabag (the first one is really fun and original and weird, and in the second one they removed everything that was interesting about it and made it into a normal boring dramedy, which explains why it’s on all the “best of” lists of 2019, and even won the Golden Globe. Well played!).

Fun bits from this process: If you’re sending out mail to email addresses that may not longer exist, you’ll end up being branded a spammer, but that wasn’t really much of a surprise.

What did surprise me was that Sourceforge has made it impossible to sign up to mailing lists via email, so we either had to abandon the 2K Sourceforge lists (I know! So many! I had no idea) or do something… semimanually. So I wrote a little bit to open Firefox on each list URL, which put the unique gmane-mx.org into the X selection, so doing each list was “Super-s Right-Mouse TAB TAB SPACE TAB SPACE RET Super-TAB”, and I could do one in five seconds without moving my hands from the keyboard (it’s got build in mouse buttons).

But then it turns out that if you do that a lot, Sourceforge will sic the old-fashioned “click on the three palms” captcha on you. Which took the throughput way, way down.

So for the first half of the Sourceforge lists, I utilised the power of crowdsourcing, and sent off 100 lists each to people who volunteered to do this mindless and boring bit. (Some came back for seconds!) Thank you all again for volunteering.

For the second half, I discovered the wonderful world of captcha solvers, and after signing up with a free wit.ai API key, it worked pretty reliably. So I did most of the second day myself, since it just added a new “TAB RET” bit to each list. (I watched the Alan Bennett at the BBC box set for this part. It’s quite extraordinary. I particularly loved the one with Mrs Bucket in the hospital… and the one with the photographer in the churchyard… and the one with the guy who retires, is unhappy about the retirement, and then gets a stroke and dies.)

Uhm… Any other observations? Ah, right; the IETF MTAs rate-limited me to about one email per ten minutes, so it took four days for all the un/resubscription messages to get through, and some probably just timed out, so I should do another sweep of those bits.

OK… that’s it? Now I just have to wait for the rsync and the DNS changes, which is why I’m going on for this long.

Let’s hear it for TV and wine; two invaluable companions when doing boring semi-manual labour.