2023, Week One: Wolfgang Petersen, Carrière Frères, Tchaikovsky, Leighton
Given my line of work, my days are thus split: 30% reading, 30% watching, 30% listening to music, 9% writing, 1% publishing. This is not an L posting, but the non-romanticized version of how a yarn is spun. I like to think that all the information I absorbed will come in handy at some point.
Watchlist: Fear and Shattered
During the 2020 pandemic, my now husband and I set out to watch as many movies that fell into the “cheesy and/or erotic” category as we could find. Despite our having watched perhaps 100s of them by now, the list goes as deep as you’d like to dig, and we keep unearthing gems that we had missed out on during our first pass.
This past week, it was Fear and Shattered
Fear became a cult film largely thanks to a love scene set to the song “Wild Horses” featuring a roller coaster ride where Marky Mark pleasures Reese Witherspoon as the cart is about to start its descent. What stuck with me was how he kept slipping into the thickest Boston accent while playing the part of this rough and sexy hypermasc man who is 23 but hangs around 15yos while living with his buddies in what now looks like the ultimate neckbeard’s nest. I also love the scenes where he punches himself in the chest to then blame it on the girl’s male bestie and the one where he engages in a battle of stares with her dad.
By contrast, Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered sees Tom Berenger play an amnesiac man who had been disfigured in a car accident trying to retrace his steps. Bob Hoskins gives the performance of a lifetime as a pet-store owner who moonlights as a PI. What initially seemed just like a cheesy 90s erotic-lite thriller is actually a homage to Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night.
Home: La Rose Aime Le Poivre
I had been wanting to try Carrière Frères’s home fragrances but I’ve always been wary of blind buys. The sister brand of Trudon, they specialize in single-note or otherwise fairly simple scents (pine+rose; rose+pepper; rose+mint). Their herb or spice-forward scents are particularly interesting, as they immediately make your surroundings smell like a a discreet, understated mediterranean garden or like the pantry of your favorite chef. 8/10 to rose+mint, 10/10 to Rose+Pepper and 11/10 to a fragrance that will officially release in February 2023. I hope I’ll be able to test out the rest of their lineup, as I am now researching how to turn one’s house into a scentscape
Music: The Nutcracker’s Grand Pas de Deux
Unless my spirits are extremely high, I refrain from listening to modern and contemporary music. Classical music and ballet scores do ground me, though. The Nutcracker with its pantomimes and its sweet-specific dances might sound childish and childlike—and let’s not forget the popular Fantasia segment feat. flowers, fairies, and trees. Yet, both acts end in sumptuous pas de deux in adagio. And while the one that closes act I conveys the feeling of the road ahead, the ending of act 2 with its descending scales is nothing short of a sensual, yet melancholic apotheosis that has very little bearing to the upbeat dances that precede it. In the original libretto, ALLEGEDLY, it was supposed to accompany the dance of a swarm of bees: I’d love to see this version portrayed onstage, as I feel like the gravitas and the sensuality of the pas de deux is a little inconsequential unless the version being danced has Masha/Clara become the Sugar Plum Fairy rather than encounter her.
Artwork: Flaming June
A new article in Graydon Carter’s Air Mail discusses the enduring popularity of Sir Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June. This prompted me to try to recreate it with Uni Posca markers, with subpar results but with the same feeling you experience after you complete a good workout, regardless of your actual performance and stats. In addition, Flaming June is an integral part of the Caroline Calloway Lore, and, together with Millais’s Ophelia, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Klimt’s Kiss, one of the few paintings that are constantly referenced in fashion editorials, ad campaigns, and even cinematography. And to those creatives I say: look into Franz Stuck and Sir Lawrence Alma Tadem