Everything I need to know about life, I've learned from Quentin Tarantino

Hello Fellow Travelers!

As you might have guessed from the title I am a big Quentin Tarantino fan.  Pulp Fiction changed my cinematic viewpoint forever, and when we still had Blockbusters, after I saw “Pulp Fiction” I immediately went into a Blockbuster and rented anything he had to do with.  Whether he directed it, wrote it,  acted in it or just stopped by for an impromptu soliloquy (Top Gun was a “gay” boys’ movie according to Mr. T.) I was down with it.  One of my very favorite QT efforts is 2003’s “Kill Bill, Volumes I & II”.  I always liked these movies for the usual reasons; snappy dialog with lots of humor, violence with-a-purpose, strong female characters and very little gunplay.  Guns are portrayed in a brutish light.  All the main characters use really special Samurai swords that most of them cherish, covet and at some point, use on each other in some balletic fashion until death.  It’s a decidedly adult adventure about a young woman who is left for dead after being badly beaten up and shot in the head.  Did I mention Beatrix Kiddo was really pregnant (yes, that’s really the character’s name) Now, I am a brain trauma survivor this film looks really different to me.  I think at first Kill Bill was just one long movie.  Now it’s two plenty long movies.  When Quentin wants to tell you a story, he’s all in and you’d better be too.  Anyone who whines or preens usually faces the business end of a big gun or a really sharp sword in Tarantino Land, he has no patience for anyone whining about the length of his movies. 

Of the two films Before Surgery I much preferred the second of the two parts.  So when I came across Vol I. this week, uncut and just beginning, I gave it a look and it played totally differently for me.  Post Surgery, the deadliest female on the planet now just looked like coma victim who awoke after four years and discovered her baby stolen and a plate in her head.  We know this because she spends exactly ten seconds feeling her flat stomach and knocking the plate in her her head.  While she's in a coma  an orderly assaults her and takes money from other men who want to assault her.  Beatrix wasn't just a talented hitwoman with a neat Samurai Sword, she was a brain trauma victim!  Uma Thurman looked amazing after four years in a coma which we all know doesn't happen.  First, Beatrix flies to Okinawa to get a neat Samurai sword for herself.  Then Uma/Beatrix gathers her multi-colored Sharpies and flies to Tokyo. On the plane she uses her colored pens to make a to do list of people that need to be killed.  As she kills she revises the list  She has a list of people that she views as putting her in a coma and she needs to kill them to get to the guy who shot her in the head and has stolen her baby!  In the real world she would have co-parented with Bill and been really grateful that her child was so well looked after by her father.  However, since she's the deadliest woman in the world (and she's Uma Thurman) when she wakes up she's really mad !  So when the disorderly orderly (appropriately named Buck, he likes to f___!) comes back into her room, he's very quickly dispatched so he's not in the film very long anyway he's lucky to have a name at all!

She's a head trauma victim who recovers really, really quickly.  Like the sushi/fancy sword making fellow Beatrix visits on Okinawa "I am sympathetic to your aim" and I am sympathetic!  She's reacting the only way she knows how!  Beatrix's reaction seems rather extreme I know but she's just working with the skill set she was given, like we all are.  At the end of the day we are all after the same goal.  How some us of get there might be more extreme  than others but we all have to start somewhere.  Even movie stars.

Before I couldn't watch Kill Bill Vol. 1 because I initially found it too violent for no apparent reason.  Now I totally get why Uma/Beatrix is repeatedly smashing Buck's head between the steel door and the metal door frame after cutting his Achilles Tendon.  (to make him fall, of course). After each slam she screams, "Where's Bill?" She was gathering intelligence to locate her child.  And Buck deserved it.  He had a vehicle that looked obnoxious but was thankfully handicapped accessible.  As I mentioned earlier coming out of a four year coma doesn't make the comatose patient look like they just returned from an extended spa visit.  However I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the story,  and it is, after all,, Uma Thurman.  Maybe she would wake from a four year coma looking like that.  I very much doubt it, but if anyone could look refreshed from a coma it would be Uma Thurman.

PS – re: More Crap My Mom Sent Me:  So my mom reads the blog about her sending me red fur in a baggie from her newest cat, Jed Clampett.  I get  this hysterically funny response where my mother attempts to assert that in some bygone era gentlefolk clipped and kept fur of their cherished pet.  She
cited '’historical evidence” as pet fur being saved like locks of hair in baby books.  Now I’ve seen lots of baby locks in baby books.  I’m familiar with a creepy Victorian fad of making odd object d’art from a departed person’s hair (Icky).  I’m even familiar with the mercifully short fad (also Victorian) of photographing the dead, especially children (even creepier).  Clipping cat fur?  Never heard of anyone collecting kitty fur.  Or doggy fur.  If people did collect pet fur they hopefully locked up those individuals and kept it a family secret (Also a fine Victorian tradition).  Nice try, Mom, but that dog won’t hunt.  It was hilarious that she thought this explanation would suffice.  It’s even funnier to learn she believed it!  My mother actually believed there was some “genteel old-timey” society where there was rampant fur collecting.  And she seriously thought members of this long ago as-yet-to-be-determined-exactly-where-and-when-era were furiously collecting pet fur and gently pressing it for future generations to discover (with horror? Disbelief?) in baby books (human babies?  pet babies? what?!  Do they make baby books for  pets?  They should.

The Awful Truth About - Offal

Hello Fellow Travelers!

A favorite Christmas gift is the I-Pad which offers many types of entertainment to each of us.  My son has an I-Pod so he already knew how to operate the I-Pad (Thank You, Rose!).  My patient spouse just treats it as a larger version of his phone.  A television program we watch together is, "Top Chef" we've watched it since it's beginning season.

Back in the Stone Age I was a serious foodie.  I trained under serious chefs, partnered in a catering company back when food was important.  I sampled all "important" restaurants that opened in San Francisco and restaurants that claimed to be "important" in the Bay Area (Hint: The greater the view, the more disappointing the food.  You can set your watch by it!).

 If you don't watch "Top Chef", it's the classic reality cooking competition.  Several young, visually compelling competitors cook their brains out for a chance to scoop up $250K and bragging rights to being deemed, Top Chef.  The show has been on seemingly forever and, to keep it interesting (and fairer) after the program you can watch the most recently ejected "cheftestant" cook head to head with the reigning champion in a culinary death match they call "Last Chance Kitchen".  The Head Judge, Tom Colicchio deals with the judging alone, it's very fast and if you want to see it immediately following the show you can see it online.

Last week in the "Last Chance Kitchen" Chef Tom, as he is known, challenged the two warring chefs to make the tastiest dish using Offal.  For anyone that needs clarification;  offal is culinary for guts. Tongue, kidneys, liver, heart, stomach, intestines and so on.  I've cooked my share of offal.  (Making pate was my job as an apprentice chef.  If you haven't sauteed chicken livers in shallots and cognac at 6:00AM you haven't cooked.)  Cooking garbage that hunters throw to their hounds when they field dress their kills is nothing I want to cook, smell cooking or, God forbid, taste.  It's all guts and all kinds of gross.  It smells disgusting as it cooks, no matter what you add.  It looks like it smells and tastes like it looks - nasty!  Menudo, pate, haggis all use some type of offal.

How are these seemingly disconnected circumstances connected?  And, more importantly, what do they have to do with me?  As soon as I saw the competitors and understood the competition I knew who would win and I didn't need to watch anyone cooking the guts or plating the guts or judging the guts.  Who could make that offal less awful?  Who cares?  You might be a Kitchen Stud for eating those sweetbreads and tripe but at the end of the day you still ate thymus glands and stomach.  EEEEWWW!  So, my patient spouse is insistent I watch this crap on the I-Pad.  I am repelled and explain why but my refusal to watch the "battle of the offal" resulted in much unhappiness disproportionate to a viewing situation.

One of the odder by-products of having the large tumor removed from my brain is I can't tolerate any kind of arguing and foul language is, well, foul. Discord of any sort is unbearable to me and I will do almost anything to avoid it.  Ordinarily, I happily watch any stupid thing put in front of me, anything to keep the peace and patient spouse knows what makes me laugh.  Guts are something people may or may not have not something you cook or eat.  So when my usually patient spouse kept shoving my son's I-Pad in my face and I wouldn't watch the chefs cook/eat/judge offal, he got all pouty and muttered something along the lines of, "You don't have to be like that!"

Oh no he didn't.  I took offense. Be like what?  I never get angry or lose my temper but those are fightin' words!  Because I feel as though I go through hell every day and having to watch anyone cook guts is less than boring; it's actively unpleasant!  No amount of culinary expertise is going to mask those vittles!   And the smell!  My Lord, the smell!  Why on earth would my beloved ever believe I would benefit from watching two chefs cook guts and a third chef judging/eating the guts.  I like to believe that as a society, we Americans have risen above eating offal or even considering how to cook it.  Maybe knowing how to cook guts is an easy way to separate the chefs from the boys.  I don't know.   I do know offal can be found in hard-to-completely-avoid foods (Although I do my best) like hot dogs and balogna.

I  know I don't need to see/witness or observe anyone doing anything with offal.  Ever.  Maybe it is a small thing but when I think of all the stuff I actually care about (what college my best friend's son selects, my sister-in-law, my sister-in-law's dog, Abbey, my brother-in-law's dog, Boomer, who dressed for the NFC championship, who will next send cookies and what kind will they be...cookies taste like love.  The same can't be said for offal.) watching people who can reach dizzying heights with food get reduced to who can cook guts the best, (and  believe me, there's no best here not even better just gross!)  my head hurts at the waste of talent and potential.  Like sewing a silk purse out of a sow's ear?  Or putting lipstick on a pig.  Actually, the makeup on the swine sounds kind of fun but then you'd have get close enough to the pig to put the lipstick on it and then you'd smell the pig and barf, so while the saying conjures up a compelling mental image the real application isn't practical or advised.