Why I love my grandmother, reason #237a:

Evidently for many years she has taken quinine sulfate tablets as an anti-rheumatiod treatment, also to treat noctural leg cramping.  Unfortunately, the FDA recently made some ruling restricting the use of this medicine due to side effects or somesuch.

My grandmother’s solution to this unfortunate turn of events? 

To prescribe herself a nightly gin and tonic.

Ever the practical Midwesterner, my grandmother.

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Reason A why I like DC:

Because I can drive to Dupont Circle, find a parking space on a Saturday night (okay, so I circled the block a time or two, and then had to double-check my map to make sure I didn’t walk the wrong way down New Hampshire Ave.), and then have a perfectly decent dinner of steamed mussels with a glass of white wine for, oh, $25.  The entertainment for which was unwittingly provided by the couple next to which I was seated: a charming blind date consisting of a recently-divorced father of two and a never-married Quebecoise.  I add “recently-divorced” only because he was rather persistent at showing her pics of his daughters on his Iphone.   The ethnicity of the lady is a guess — she had only the faintest of accents.  

This is the essence of urbane life, I think, and I am eternally thankful I can partake of it regularly.  Good food,  decent wine, and amusing conversation.  Really, what more could one ask for?

Then there is reason B why I like Sacramento more than I like DC:

Because when I browsed the offerings at Kramerbooks after dinner, I was not able to find my current favorite author.  My hometown bookstore, on the other hand, has something close to his complete oeuvre on offer.  Who knew that Sacramento (Sacramento!) had more sophisticated literary offerings than the District?

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Because they play David Sedaris chanelling Billy Holiday singing the theme for the Oscar Meyer commercial.

Ira, Ira, Ira.  You have made a man who found himself commuting through deepest Maryland (don’t ask) supremely happy.

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So da partner explained credit-default swaps to me, in a way that I could understand. 

Frankly, I came away more disturbed than ever at the state of our economy.  I mean, I knew that high finance was really nothing more than craps with high stakes, but I had always thought that was a metaphor. 

Boy howdy, was that ever naive.

More to the point, what disturbed was not simply the magnitude of the problem — though that is bad enough.  As da partner pointed out, when regular companies lose assets, it’s nasty; when banks lose money, its 10X nasty because it means that money’s gone, plus the order-of-magnitude times that amount that is normally available for lending to others as credit.

No, what disturbed me is that we’ve lost, in this country, the very language with which to discuss and critique this.  It’s not just hat phrases like “bloodsucking financiers*” and “unproductive wealth” are laughable in present political discourse — Edwards barely hinted at this kind of thing in the most milquetoasty of terms, and he was laughed off the playing field — it’s that they don’t even make sense to most people. 

How are we to grapple with a problem we don’t have the language to describe?

*To be fair, the fact that some of this language has gone away is probably a good thing.  “Bloodsucking financiers,” for instance, is hard to hear without the echo of some of the worst variants of anti-semitism.

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For anyone who pays attention to such things, today’s lectionary text was, ahem, bizarrely relevant (Judges 4:1-7) to, well, recent events:

“And the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, when Ehud was dead.  and the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor; the captain of whose host was Sisera, which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles.  And the children of Israel cried unto the LORD; for he had nine hundred chariots of iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel.  And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, judged Israel at that time.  And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Beth-el in mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgement.”

This is where it gets good:

“And she sent and called Barak the son of Abinoam out of Kedesh-naphtali, and said untu him, Hath not the LORD GOD of Israel commanded, saying, Go and draw toward mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and Zebulon?  And I will draw unto thee to the River Kishon Sisera, the captain of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his multitude; and I will deliver him into thine hand.”

I can see why the evangelicals twist themselves into dizzying feats of textual explication.  Sometimes the perceived relevance of the words are, well, compelling. 

The rest of the chapter, by the by, is eye-archingly easy to read as a gloss on the election.   If, that is, you’re into that sort of thing.

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So, I should be grading.  Or phone-banking. 

But, it’s raining, and I prefer to relax.  So, some brief thoughts about Rachel Getting Married.

When I lived in Cambridge, my local neighborhood movie theatre was this place.  I liked it mainly because I knew that I didn’t even have to look in the paper before I went: I could just show up in good confidence that they would be playing at least one movie I wanted to see.  Often something that wasn’t necessarily playing elsewhere, or at least not for long.

This was precisely the kind of movie that I loved about that theatre.  Precisely the kind of movie that I could never kind in Texas — not even in Dallas.  Precisely the kind of movie that I appreciate when played at this place, and seen among friends.

There were three things, in particular, that I liked:

a.) It was smart.  I noticed this on one occasion in particular.  Towards the end, when hunky-best-man (Kieran?) says to our anti-heroine “you can call me anytime” — and then repeats it with emphasis after Kim cracks wise — this had a double meaning.  It was not spelled out (which I appreciated), but for anyone with even a passing knowledge of AAese, the contexual secondary meaning was clear. 

b.) It portrayed the contextual dynamics of family, over and above portraying the characters.  This is somewhat difficult to do, and not something that most movies attempt (hell, it’s hard enough just telling a straightforward plot, much less getting the characters right).  But where it became clear — and total props to Anne Hathaway, Jonathan Demme, and Jenny Lumet for acting, directing, and creating this artistic possibility — was when you saw how different Kim was in her AA meetings versus when she was around her family.  It was precisely this personality shift that made her character both sympathetic and believable and that, further, highlighted the long-term costs of tragedy. 

c.) It was urbane.  It treated its audience as not just intellectually capacious — smart enough to get references like “are you holding?” and “I am Shiva, the destroyer” — but also emotionally mature enough to “get” the kind of experience that (hopefully) few people ever experience.  This is risky, but well worth it.

Feckin’ excellent, I say.

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