1. I tried something a little different and very simple when I fixed dinner tonight. I browned some ground beef, seasoned with garlic powder, chili powder, and oregano. Before long, I added leftover brown rice. When the rice was heated up and the ground beef cooked through, I took out the leftover Israeli salad I made for family dinner on Sunday. I separated out the cucumbers, eating them while I did so, and poured the remaining tomatoes, red pepper, green onion, and some of the olive oil and lemon dressing over the ground beef and rice. Once these ingredients were warm, I enjoyed this bowl of food a lot -- it was kind of Mediterranean, sort of Tex-Mex (would have been more so with shredded cheese and a tortilla) and very delicious -- and a fun way to combine some of my leftovers in the icebox.
2. I'll jump ahead to the end of my night. I've been considering lengthening my days, going to bed a little later, as a way of watching more movies. After I watched a movie (see below) this evening while enjoying a cup of Yorkshire black tea, I was ready for some more viewing. I returned to Midnight Diner, the Japanese series available on Netflix, the one I started last week.
I watched episode 3. Similar to the other two episodes I watched, this one, in under twenty-five minutes, explored fragility, how tenuous, for example, friendship can be, and explored the question of whether, after a rupture, friends are able, if they so desire, to reconcile. This episode's featured dish was ocahzuke, a comforting bowl of hot tea over rice that is often served with an accompanying third ingredient in the bowl. The "Ocahzuke Sisters", the nickname Master gave the three women featured in this episode, always order the same ocahzuke. One orders pickled plum, another salmon, and the third, cod roe.
3. Tonight, I watched the movie, My Beautiful Laundrette. I watched this movie back in 1986 at the Bijou Arts Cinema in Eugene during what, for me, was a peak time in cinema for independent movies. Several released between about 1983-87 come to mind: Mona Lisa, Sid and Nancy, Sweet Lorraine, Paris, Texas, Choose Me, Streetwise, Shoah, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Official Story, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and others. I enjoyed movies directed by John Sayles during this time -- Liana, Baby It's You, The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, and, a little later, Eight Men Out.
It's fun to remember the night in August in 1983 when I went to a double feature at a theater in Berkeley and saw Baby It's You and The Grey Fox. I nearly came out of my seat during The Grey Fox when someone in the movie made a reference to mining in Kellogg, Idaho. Of course, that would stick with me!
Back to My Beautiful Laundrette. I had a great time watching this movie again, but one thing I had hoped would happen, didn't.
I had hoped I would be transported back to 1986 and the night I walked out of the Bijou Arts Cinema feeling on fire about My Beautiful Laundrette and that I would recall, maybe even relive, what jolted me so much about this movie, why I was so thrilled by it.
That memory is gone. Did I find its portrayal of Johnny and Omar's romance courageous? The way it crossed cultural and class divides? Was it its study of the angry, aggrieved, and violent underclass youth in South London who took out their grievances, often violently, on immigrant Pakistanis? Was it the portrayal of Omar's father, a Pakistani journalist who was so hollowed out by having left Pakistan and having moved to London that he spent his days in bed, drinking vodka? It might have been any or all of these things. I don't know. Throughout my viewing this evening, my thirty-two year old self remained hidden away, unwilling or unable to rise up and tell me why this movie mattered so much to him thirty-four years ago.
So, tonight, I experienced My Beautiful Laundrette as a sixty-six year old, closing in rapidly on sixty-seven.
Tonight I experienced this movie as a study of England during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as prime minister. The Pakistanis in the movie are portrayed as outsiders, certainly seen as a threat to jobs and money by the thuggish Paki-bashers, but (except for Omar's father) the Pakistanis are also portrayed as epitomizing material success in Thatcher's England: they are enterprising entrepreneurs, enjoying the pleasures of capital, pursuing money voraciously and not always within the law.
In case you see the movie, I won't go into detail about the laundrette. I'll just say that the laundrette comes to embody the Thatcher vision of economic development and becomes a flashpoint of white resentment in the South London area where Omar operates it.
While the socio-economic realities in My Beautiful Laundrette are always present, I experienced the movie as a complex portrayal of human relationships, yes, in the romance between Omar and Johnny, but also in the world of Omar's extended family. Even though the Pakistanis in this movie came to England on their own volition, they are displaced, outsiders, under suspicion, and never at home. I experienced a range of ways that these characters expressed and lived out their longings, dissatisfactions, desire for union, and frustrations.
I enjoyed how the movie was, at times, like watching a series of short films. The movie's detours added to the movie's depth. I enjoyed its stark realism and also its moments of magic realism. I also enjoyed how, by being a little bit incoherent, the movie explored not only the displacement and sense of dislocation in the Pakistani characters, but also in the British characters -- and not just the underclass, angry youth. I began to think this evening that the movie's central and most revealing relationship was between Omar's Uncle Nasser and his British mistress, Rachel; as I think about it, though, the Johnny/Omar relationship is also central and very revealing. Both relationships embody so much of what this movie explores emotionally, economically, sexually, and culturally. I don't think I'm wise in trying to rate one as more important than the other.
To conclude, yeah, I was a little disappointed tonight that my experience in 1986 didn't come rushing back to me. I really wanted to know what my younger self had enjoyed so much about this movie. But, that's gone. (No problem.) That I had such a scintillating experience watching this movie tonight, almost as if I'd never seen it before, more than compensated for my bit of disappointment.
I do remember, though, back in 1986, I recommended this movie to others. One of those people hated the movie and reported back to me with some anger and a lot of confusion that I had recommended it.
Her anger was instructive. Over time, I quit recommending movies and began to do what I've done in this blog post: describe what I experienced while watching the movie and leaving it at that.
I am way too easy to please to be making recommendations.
By the way, I'm the same way with food and restaurants.
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