The Man Who Knew Too Much x2 (a movies review post)

There was this singer, once, I used to follow. His first album flew way under the radar, but he had a huge hit song off of a later album that blasted him to a niche fame. Around his sixth album or so, after he was popular, he pulled one of the songs from his first album and included it on the new one. Evidently, it was a song he really liked. When asked, once, in an interview about why he re-released that one song, he said, "I didn't think anyone was listening the first time."

I kind of wonder if this was one of those kinds of things for Hitchcock. The first The Man Who Knew Too Much came out in 1934, well into Hitchcock's career, actually, but he felt the need to re-make it 22 years later. Or maybe it was just a Star Wars kind of thing and he thought he could do better. He did say in an interview once that he was only a talented amateur when he made the first one but felt himself to be a professional at the point he remade it in 1956. The 1956 version was certainly better.

Of course, I watched the '34 version first. Even without having seen the second (well, I'm sure I saw the second one when I was a kid, but I didn't have any real memory of the movie), the first one felt... sparse. There's no real development of the story to give you any empathy for the characters. The mother, played by Edna Best, seems to not like her daughter very much, repeatedly calling her names and blaming her for her loss in a shooting competition, and taunts her husband about leaving him for other men. It makes it difficult to have sympathy for her once her daughter is kidnapped.

Then, once the daughter is kidnapped, the Lawrence's go back to England and try to act as if nothing has happened. It's kind of weird.

The best part of the '34 version is Peter Lorre. He's just the right amount of creepy for a bad guy. Plus, there's a cult and some hypnotism thrown in for good measure. I suppose the cadre of bad guys in the first movie is actually more interesting even if it is a little less believable. Cicely Oates is also decidedly creepy as the kidnapped girl's caretaker/cult leader.

But the remake is immediately better than the first movie. Maybe it's the charisma of Jimmy Stewart that does it, or maybe it's just a more believable scenario, a family on vacation rather than a family of, what, Olympic competitors? (It's never really clear if they're competing in the Olympics, but the father, Bob Lawrence, lost a skiing competition and the mother, Jill Lawrence, lost her sharp-shooting competition.) At any rate, the '56 version opens with some banter between the family as they ride a bus to Marrakesh, friendly banter and story-telling. They're likable. The McKenna's, though, have a son, not a daughter.

There's much more buildup to the kidnapping in this one, and you feel the loss with the family, the frantic-ness. There's love there, and you believe the lost-ness of the characters as they realize their son has been taken and they've been given no other instruction than to keep their mouths shut about what they know. It's, then, also believable when Ben McKenna tries to work out what to do and how to save his son on his own. Not that his wife, played by Doris Day, is to be left out of things, which is something else I like about the movie. The woman is no fainting flower (unlike Jill Lawrence who literally fainted when she found out her daughter was kidnapped).

There is an important scream in each movie -- I'm not going to tell you why because spoilers -- but the two screams are also significantly different in motivation. In the '34 version it's a woman screaming from fear much like the fainting episode: It's just what women do. Or some such. But in the '56 version, it's made very clear the scream was a deliberate attention-getting act. A brave move rather than a cowardly one. It's an interesting difference.

The two movies, despite the same basic premise and a few equivalent plot points, are surprisingly dissimilar. Actually, that's easy to see just at a casual glance considering the '56 version is about 45 minutes longer. Plus, there's Jimmy Stewart. If you had to choose between the two, the one with Jimmy Stewart is the easy choice, and it just so happens that it's the better movie. Oh, and the '56 one is also in color, so there's that, too. But I would really suggest watching both. The first one is worth it for Peter Lorre alone. Seriously.

What Johnny Rotten Got Wrong

Recently, Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols, came to the defense of Donald Trump, saying Trump is exactly the kind of anti-establishment person we need in office. Johnny Rotten has an incorrect view of what the establishment is. Trump in almost every way represents the establishment and everything he has done so far, and tried to do, has been to support and further ingrain that establishment.

See, the establishment isn't about politics; it's about money. It always has been.

Look, I'm not saying that politics aren't wrapped up in it, but it's not politics that the establishment is built on. From the beginning, the very beginning, it's all been about money. That's why there was a revolution. "Hey, you ugly king over in England, you're taking our money, and we don't like it!" There's a reason why virtually every one of the founding fathers were rich dudes. And some of those families are still in politics, so it can be confusing, but it's still all about the money. The politics just help control the flow of the money.

The Koch brothers are a perfect example of this. They are super rich and a huge part of the modern establishment. In order to keep themselves as much super rich as possible, they employ politics. They themselves are not politicians; they just buy them and keep them in their pockets (the super rich always have big pockets, deep enough to keep a politician or two stashed inside) and use them to shift policy the way they want it to go.

[I wonder if the Kochs spend more money on politics (including funding campaigns) than they would "lose" if they just left well enough alone, because they spend mega-money on politics (yes, mega-money is a "thing"). I have a hard time with the idea that it's actually profitable for them in a purely monetary sense.]

From that standpoint, the government, also, is not the establishment. The reason that Trump and the Republicans are anti-government has nothing to do with "standing up for the little guy" and everything to do with keeping the government out of corporations, because the government, prior to Trump, has been standing up for the little guy the most it has since, probably, the 60s. Corporations, then, are a big part of the establishment. After all, according to the Republicans, they're people, too. (And we don't want to huwrt the witty feewings of those super wich cowpowations.) The Republicans aren't about less government because they want to protect the freedoms of "the people;" they're about less government so that they can more fully take advantage of the people and suck them dry of all the money they have.

Here's an important distinction:
Hilary Clinton doesn't come from money. Sure, she has money now, but she doesn't come from money. Neither does Obama. It allows them to operate from the perspective of normal people. Trump, though, comes from money. Enough money so that the "small loan" of ONE MILLION DOLLARS (though it was actually more) that his father gave him when he was starting out was somewhat equivalent to the 20 bucks your grandmother used to send you on your birthday. That is to say there is no equivalence.

Trump is the establishment. He comes from money and has spent all of his life being around only people with money. He has gathered around him in the White House more money than has ever been there before. He has made the White House more establishment than it has ever been, full of people who want to get rid of government regulations (regulations that protect regular people from being taken advantage of or harmed by the establishment) so that they can make even more money than they already have. It's all a profit game for him.

Don't be distracted by the noise. Trump is not here to bring down the establishment. Not even Bannon wants to bring down the establishment. These are guys who believe in money, and getting rid of obstacles to making more money, and controlling your lives. They might want to bring down the government (Bannon certainly does), but they want the Establishment to stay right where it is.
On your backs.

This Is What Soul Tastes Like (a recipe post)

Research can take you to some interesting places at times, and it was research for... something (yeah, I don't have any idea, now, what I was actually researching at the time)... that led me to soul cakes. Soul cakes became the inspiration for a novelette which you can find in "What Time Is the Tea Kettle?" and has also become the inspiration for making some of our own every year. [I use the term "every" rather loosely as this is only the second time we have done this.]

I gave a brief history of the food item in last year's post, but I'd like to add to that by saying that soul cakes were made by the wealthy to hand out to the poor in no small part just to show off how wealthy they were. Many (many) of the ingredients were luxury items, and some of them (like saffron) were extreme luxury items. Also, this is, at least in part if not in full, where the tradition of trick-or-treating comes from.

I think this year's attempt, for which we went as authentic as we could, finding a recipe from 1604!, turned out even better than last year's. Yes, indeed, I did save some souls!

Now, here's my wife to explain the recipe:

Last year we made what is basically a modern cookie--because most of the recipes that call themselves "soul cakes" on the internet are modern cookies, by which I mean they are leavened with chemical agents (baking powder and baking soda). There is nothing wrong with cookies, but they aren't medieval food, and this year I wanted to do a more authentically medieval soul cake. That meant making one that was leavened with yeast, which led to the basic recipe that we used this year, which is from 1604: click here. Quoting, the recipe they used goes like this: "Take flower & sugar & nutmeg & cloves & mace & sweet butter & sack & a little ale barme, beat your spice, & put in your butter & your sack, cold, then work it well all together, & make it in little cakes, & so bake them, if you will you may put in some saffron into them and fruit."

So first off, whoa, it's like people in the late middle ages / early modern era didn't even know how to spell and punctuate or something. And second, what the heck are some of these ingredients??

Using the Gode Cookery translation of the recipe, here's what I came up with:

1/2 cup ale

1 tsp active dry yeast

2 cups flour (I use white whole wheat)

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 tsp. each nutmeg, clove, and mace

1/2 tsp. saffron

1/2 cup dried currants

2 tbsp butter

1/2 cup sweet sherry

When I looked at the recipe last year, some of the instructions made zero sense to me. But this year I was determined to figure it out, and it turns out that the ingredients in the recipe themselves lead to some pretty interesting history.

"Ale barme" is now just called "barm" and it is the foam that forms on top of fermented alcohol such as beer or wine: click here. The foam contains yeast, so, in medieval England it was routine practice to skim that off and use it to leaven breads. This barm bread was considered to be very good stuff: "The barm method appears to be an ancient method developed by Gaelic peoples in the mists of time, and was quite different to that used in Europe, which is to leaven bread with a sourdough or leaven (the French call it 'levain'). When the Romans first conquered Gaul, modern day France, they were astonished by the light sweet bread made by the Celtic inhabitants... In England noblemen's bread, manchet was always made with the barm method, whereas the commoners' bread maslin was a sourdough." link

And while I knew what the other ingredients were, I hadn't quite thought about what their meaning in the culture of the time was. Spices and sugar seem very common and easy to get and not all that expensive to us now, but that was not true in 1604 and earlier. Saffron was and still is quite expensive, and was usually an import to England (though there was some farming of it within England for a time). There was even a brief war over saffron. Saffron gave both bright color and interesting flavor to foods, AND, EVEN BETTER: Europeans thought it was a plague cure! So it was a culinary and medicinal luxury good.

The first step in this recipe is to get your saffron ready for use by extracting it in some alcohol. This helps bring out the color and flavor. Soaking the saffron in a couple of teaspoons of brandy or any other strong alcohol, it starts out looking like this:

And very quickly becomes this:

Then I prepped the "ale barm" substitute by mixing 1/2 cup of good local ale with 1 tsp of active dry yeast.

I combined the flour and sugar in a bowl, made a well in the middle, and poured in the ale barm to let it sit and proof. Were I to do this again, I would probably use instant yeast because it doesn't require proofing, and I think that might lend a slightly lighter character to the finished cake. Though it probably wouldn't be quite as authentic that way, either.

Sugar was also a luxury imported good in England, and sugarcane was being grown in Spain and Siciliy (link). In the decades after 1604, of course, the demand for sugar would drive colonization of the new world and the enslavement of many people. "Its price per pound in 14th and 15th century England was about equally as high as imported spices from tropical Asia such as mace (nutmeg), ginger, cloves, and pepper, which had to be transported across the Indian Ocean in that era." Sugar was also thought to have medicinal properties (sorry medieval people, lol, you were wrong).

Meantime, Andrew creamed together the butter and spices in a small bowl.

Look into the spoon...THERE IS A MAN IN THE SPOON! Oh, it's just Andrew.

Then I added the sherry to the creamed butter and spices. This seemed unnecessary to me, but the recipe said to do it, so I did. I ended up with lumps of spicy butter floating in sherry. Not a very effective technique, and even if you were to beat in the sherry slowly you'd still end up with this result. Since everything is going to get mixed into the dough anyway, why not just add the components separately? Anyway, sherry was an import from Spain to England, and spices came from far-away places such as the Middle East and Asia (link). I used a sweet sherry in the recipe because that's what sherry was then--sweet and probably not as high in alcohol as modern sherry. (I had a reference for that but don't know what I did with it!)

After steeping in the alcohol for a while, the saffron starts to look like a little sun in its glass.

The beginning of mixing everything together! I covered the ale barm well over with the flour and sugar, then poured in the sherry and spices and saffron. Then began to stir...

After my dough was holding together, I turned it out onto a wooden peel to knead.

Then added in the currants...

And kept kneading until they were all incorporated.

Then it was time to roll the dough out into a disk, about half an inch thick...

That's a closeup of one of the saffron threads in the rolled dough. I just think saffron is really cool.

After rolling the dough out, I used a cookie cutter to make rounds, then Andrew and I marked the shape of the cross on them. After letting them sit to rise for about 15 minutes, I baked them at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes--but they might need a bit more or less in someone else's oven.

Texture-wise, these soul cakes are interestingly different from modern cookies or breads. They are flatter and chewier and a bit harder. These were sweet enough, and the flavors were good, but next time I make them I will put some salt in them, because I think they needed a bit of balance, and salt would heighten their flavors. Andrew liked them and the kids liked them, so that seemed like a pretty good success rate.

As Andrew explained above, these would have been luxury goods, indicated by several of the ingredients--sugar, spices, saffron, and sherry. And they would have been perceived to be healthful, since the ingredients had "medicinal" purposes. So, in effect, rich people handing out soul cakes around Allhallowtide would be like rich people today handing out little goodie bags of Whole Foods protein bars full of acai berries and artisanal honey or something, I think. (I wonder if kids today would even eat Halloween candy they thought was meant to be healthy??)

Abandoned Places: Orphanages

Orphanages are not buildings I can say I'm sorry to see closed down. Despite any good intentions ever ascribed to having them or opening them or whatever, I don't think you will find one in existence that doesn't have horrible stories associated with it. Which is not to say that I think it's better to leave kids to live on the streets; I don't believe that all. I do believe that when an orphanage can be shut down because a better system has been put in place it is a good thing. So...
Mostly, this will just be a series of photos of abandoned orphanages. There are too many stories to try to recap them, and they are all too similar too choose between. Let's just say that none of the stories are good, and many of the buildings are supposed to be haunted. You can imagine the rest.

This is St. John's in Goulburn in Australia:

This is the Greek orphanage in Buyukada, Turkey. It is one of the world's largest wooden buildings:

The Philadelphia Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum (orphan asylum is such a curious and ominous word, don't you think?):

Photos courtesy of  Opacity.

A Kindersanitorium (another interesting term) in Germany:

Photos courtesy of  Opacity.

Newsham Park Hospital in England. Previously Liverpool Seaman's Orphan Institution. Now abandoned:

And I don't know what this one is. Evidently, I didn't save my links or didn't put them in the correct place.

Abandoned Places: Istvántelek Train Graveyard

Also called the Red Star Train Graveyard, Istvantelek is located in Budapest, Hungary. The trains are housed in buildings just off the active railway. Buildings that are falling apart as are the trains within. Many of the cars have been sitting in the same place for over 40 years, and several of them may have actually been used to transport Jews to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation.

Above photos credited to Jakob Christensen.

Here are some other abandoned trains and train graveyards.

In Bolivia:

In England:

In Germany:

In Australia: