Posted on 01/19/2019 4:45:04 PM PST by Twotone
Australia Day looms on January 26th, which is a week from today New Hampshire time. But a week from today New Hampshire time Australia Day will have come and gone. In fact, it may already have come and gone: as the years go by, the Pacific time zones seem to gape and open up even vaster temporal space. So I thought we'd go a little Australian ahead of the big day, and pick a movie with the most prominent Aussie actress of our time. In private life Cate Blanchett is a near parodic limousine liberal ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is wrong with the human race,' " etc.) who's lowered her own carbon footprint by drinking her own urine: for her home in Oz, she paid their architect thousands of dollars to design a system whereby the bodily fluids go down the toilet, get whisked by some Keystonesque pipeline through the walk-in closet, over the balcony, down the wall, back in through the rec room, and up into the wet bar directly into the soda siphon.
If that's the secret of her success, have one on me: What other actress has played both Katharine Hepburn and Bob Dylan? Nevertheless I must confess I have a preference for her earlier films, in which she is luminous, over the later work, in which she can be very severe of mien, as she was throughout The Monuments Men. And don't get me started on the ghastly Ocean's 8. So forget all that. She's wonderful as the hungry textile heiress Meredith Logue in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999).
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Frankly, I hope Mark doesn’t waste his talent on too many movie reviews.
Gotta make a buck, I know.
Actually, he’s written quite extensively on Hollywood & the music industry. Have to do Culture as well as Politics these days!
“believes that leaf blowers ‘sum up everything that is wrong with the human race”
Clearly racist.
Oh. Guess those subjects just didn’t interest me so I missed his contributions.
Great wit, reminds me of a Tom Wolfe.
“That” subject (Hollywood). Love his political stuff.
He writes a movie column and a music column each week. I rarely watch movies ... don’t even know what my husband is watching in the living room, but it has a pirate-y sound; might be “Captain Blood” again. However, Mark Steyn always has something interesting to say about movies I’ll never see.
It’s sort of like sports: I don’t care about sports, but a good sportswriter, like Jason Gay at the Wall Street Journal, writes interesting pieces on a subject I don’t care about.
(What the heck, always good to bump a Steyn thread...)
“Coffee and cigarettes” in the title drew me here.
Just as the spread of ‘civilization’ corresponded to the spread of beer, the spread of egalitarian and democratic governance spread with tobacco and coffee.
Like to remind people of that...
One more...
Know what you mean.
Hollywood is a lost issue with me though.
FReegards!
Civilization coincides with water-borne disease, so you’ve got to have alcohol as a standard beverage. Tea, coffee, and tobacco all required high-volume trans-oceanic trade. International trade over land routes was so expensive that merchants had to carry goods that were very high value for their weight/volume.
If you’re making a distinction I don’t see it.
“merchants had to carry goods that were very high value for their weight/volume.” was true of all goods.
It just may not be a merely a coincidence that tobacco and coffee use corresponded with these societal changes.
Of course back then the health effects of smoking wouldn’t be noticeable given the short life spans.
This is what happens up here in the NEK, deep into winter.
It’s called cabin fever.
Mark is a refreshing talent and I don’t fault him for wanting to make a buck.
Wood and oil up here are not cheap. Gotta stay alive.
It’s a matter of scale. Tea, coffee, and tobacco were high value/volume when your mode of transportation was a ship. When your mode of transportation was a camel or mule, rubies or silk was high value/volume.
European trade with India and the islands that are now Malaysia and Indonesia (sources of tea and coffee) predate the importation of tobacco from Virginia by a century or so. In a society that used wood or coal fires for heat and had no antibiotics, the negative health effects of tobacco probably weren’t noticed for quite a while.
She doesn’t like Mexican bagpipes?
I’ll be darned, she and I agree on something. Who’dathunk?
The only thing this article did was remind me of Otis Redding’s song Cigarettes and Coffee. Playing it on amazon now :)
Appreciate your points but still odon’t see a distinction (if you’re trying to make one).
The “coffehouse” where one drank caffein and smoked tobacco was a famous hotbed of egalitarianism and democracy.
Tbacco and/or caffein may have been like the Brave New World’s ‘soma’.
Once again, that old misinterpretation rears its ugly head.
Yes, average lifespans were shorter. That was more to do with the high rate of infant mortality and disease killing off the very young.
If you lived to be an adult, lifespans were comparable to ours.
Nah, “3 score and ten” was accurate until about the 1950’s.
I agree that coffee-house culture was a key feature in the development of both democracies and free trade. Stocks were originally traded in coffee-houses. Caffeine and nicotine are both stimulants, and the boiling water to steep coffee (or tea, also served in coffee-houses) killed germs, cutting down the need for general alcohol consumption.
“... boiling water to steep coffee (or tea, also served in coffee-houses) killed germs, cutting down the need for general alcohol consumption”
Well, that’s a very helpful point-
High on caffein and tobacco beats, intellectual facility-wise, a high on alcohol.
Of course.
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