How Russia Must Weep

     The Russian Men's Volleyball team took home the gold in the 2012 London Olympics.  After my own US Men's team fell to Italy in the quarterfinals (they fought valiantly!), I shifted my allegiance to Russia.  I've been a big fan of volleyball on the international level for a while now, and countries like Russia, USA, Brazil, and Serbia have always produced powerhouse programs.  It's always been fun to watch these teams lunge for each others' imaginary jugulars.  
     BUT! Just a few days ago, I read that Maxim Mikhaylov,  arguably the world's best wing spiker, was TAKING A BREAK from the national team! Apparently he had a really long, really grueling season with his club team, Zenit Kazan.  Zenit Kazan, might I add, is really the house of volleyball giants, both literally and figuratively.  I mean, such names as Reid Priddy (USA), Clay Stanley (USA), and Matt Anderson (USA) have played there as well.  It is also coached by the best of the best, Vladimir Alekno.  
      Anyhow, I was pretty near heartbroken that Mikhaylov wouldn't be participating in the 2013 World League.  But I consoled myself with the fact that there would still be Alexander Butko and Sergei Grankin, two of the world's most prolific setters, as well as  Alexander Volkov, Dimitri Muserskiy, and Nicolay Apalikov, three of the scariest giants to ever dominate the net.  Out of all of those superstars, only Apalikov returned to the team.  I love the Russian team, and I know their entire starting lineup as well as most of their reserves.  Nearly all of the familiar faces are gone.  Obmachaev, Illinkh, Berezkho, Khtey, and Biryukov are all missing, in addition to Mr. Maxim Mikhaylov.  
     This got me to thinking.  Can this possibly be a coincidence?  They were all in their late twenties, early thirties...It simply isn't possible that ALL of them were injured.  I mean, Lady Luck isn't that capricious.  So I did some pretty stalkerish research on the internet, and found out that Vladimir Alekno resigned.  How sad, right? But then I also found out that the man replacing him is the very man HE replaced, years ago.  That change, as the volleyball community knows, lead to a monstrous run that cumulated with the Gold in London.  But now?  This smacks of conspiracy!
      What if Alekno was fired? What if all of these players left the team in PROTEST? A lot of them played for Zenit, beneath Mr. Alekno.  What if this new coach is a sketchy character? Did money change hands?  How can Russia compete at the level it had previously been dominating with such a crew of unknown variables?  What will I do without my heroes?


Woefully Yours,

Cynthia

P.S. sorry about the misleading title. 

“If More of us Valued Food and Cheer and Song above Hoarded Gold, it Would be a Merrier World” (J.R.R. Tolkien).

         Food sustains the body, but people need to realize that it also sustains the mind and soul.  Good food is important and should be considered art.  Chefs ought to be exalted as the highest order of artists using the ultimate medium and an accomplished chef should be able to achieve the same kind of recognition as a renowned painter.
       A meal should be a pleasure to eat, to smell, to see, and later to remember.  Drinks, too.  Those people that drink to get drunk are simply overindulging themselves and in doing so, miss the entire cultural experience.  In the US, the legal drinking age is 21, but I have tasted beer here, and wine in China.  Even someone as inexperienced as I can taste the brightness of rice wine sweetened with dried flowers, and the tartness of a peach brandy.  How rustic, how fragrant and how reminiscent of Hangzhou, a little province in China.  
        The self-proclaimed intellects always expend so much effort to rave and rant about the ballet, or the opera, or a gallery of paintings-rightly so, of course-but why do food critics get so much less attention?   
        Food and drink are also a splendid way to experience other cultures.  When I eat at Ashoka the Great I fancy I can see beautiful women draped in colorful silks, languishing over mirrored panniers or astride great, roaring elephants.  At Villa Capri, the crisp white tablecloths seem to flutter beneath a breeze carrying the scent of mimosa and vineyards.  When my mother cooks me a dish of dumplings it reminds me of the China of my ancestors, of old men playing checkers amidst dust and screaming children waving Hawthorne berry sweets in the air.
        It isn't very long until I go off the college, where the budget of a student surely means that such grand foods will not be within my meager means.  But does that mean that I must succumb to the pressures of a greasy burger joint?  Is the freshmen 15 simply an unavoidable ritual of adulthood?

      My father took me out to lunch today.  We went to a nice Italian place, and took our meal outside.  Regrettably, I don't remember the names of our orders exactly, but we started with something like the insalate pera anjou and then penne villa capri for him and fusilli di something-or-other for myself.  Then, I cajoled him into splitting a platter of cannoli with me because I've been quoting Peter Clemenza for years and I felt like a fraud for never having tried any.

Gorgeous!That isn't it, but the fusilli I had was simply magnificent. 


Happy Eating!

"Leave the gun.  Take the Cannoli" (Peter Clemenza, from the Godfather).

RIP Deanna Durbin

  
 Spring Parade (1940)
     Many people love Deanna Durbin, for different reasons.  Universal Studios loved her in the '40s, because not only was she one of the greatest box-office draws but she was also rumored to have saved them from financial ruin.  Your average joes loved her because she had the voice of an angel and the face of a madonna.  It certainly didn't hurt that her acting was simultaneously multi-layered, fresh, light, and girl-next door wholesome.  I love her for all of those reasons and also because miss Durbin was known to be diligent about answering fan letters and because of her adherence to her own principles.  
    She signed a contract with MGM in the mid '30s.  Later, producer Joe Pasternak said of her :  " Deanna's genius had to be unfolded, but it was hers and hers alone, always has been, always will be, and no one can take credit for discovering her. You can't hide that kind of light under a bushel. You just can't, no matter how hard you try!"

     Here are a few of Deanna Durbin's movies, and sorry about the hurried post.  I might return to this someday, and write a lengthier discourse worthy of her genius.   


  Christmas Holiday (1944): I really liked how Deanna tried herself in another genre.  She and Gene Kelly both experimented with film noir in this classic.  One of my all time favorites.

Something in the Wind (1947) contains some of my favorite tracks from her

Modern Complacency

       I mentioned my father a couple posts ago, and I mention him now because he helped bring about this one.  See, my father doesn't live with us because he works in China.  So naturally when he visits, the two of us have a lot of catching up to do.  We used to fight a lot-most everyday, actually-but I've grown up considerably in his absence ( I like to tell myself that, anyways), so now we have actual conversations instead of spats.  
       Earlier this evening we had a conversation about America vs China.  This is a pretty broken-in topic, as we two are of those two cultures.  I like to think that I have the better perspective, because I grew up an American, in a Chinese household.  My father believes that he knows better, because he's older and has seen more of the world.  It doesn't matter, really.  
       But anyways, I just wanted a written record of that conversation.  It's true that a lot of non-Americans don't think too highly of them-us.  Not just in China, either.  It's a popular misconception that all Americans are arrogant and lazy.   While it's certainly true that there are lazy Americans, laziness is not uniquely an American trait, although I know quite a few of us that must have majored in it.  As for arrogance, it's the same thing.  However, if one has to make a sweeping generalization, one may find it more accurate to say that Americans are ignorant, rather than arrogant.  Specifically, the younger generations.  My friends, not the friends of my parents;me, not my teachers.  
       The first part of this is isolation.  Think about it.  After the Civil War, how many wars of that magnitude were fought on American soil?  The World Wars never really reached our little haven, did they?  Sure, the Cold War spread the fear of nuclear annihilation here as much as it did everywhere else, but it was never about us.  It was a struggle for power between two nuclear giants: Russia and the USA.  It wasn't about the people as much as it was about the democratic US distrusting the Communist USSR, and vice versa.  So, how many actual battles directly disturbed American living?  This means that even if women and children sent their fathers, husbands, brothers, and lovers off to battle, those that stayed behind didn't feel the effects of war the way those in Germany or Japan did. 
       Back then, those wars were at the center of life.  Especially as radio and video footage from the front found its way in the living rooms of people all across the nation.  Although far from the fighting, both showed the reality of war, the so called glory of men killing other men.  The American youth these days don't seem to know much about war.  Perhaps this is our parents' and grandparents' way of protecting our fragile minds.  But that breeds complacency, which, dear friends, is the whole problem.  
     Imagine: the battle-weary soldier returns home to his wife and his home.  The war is over and he vows that his children will never have to witness what he did;they will never know such horrors.  They will grow up without food rations,and by george if they want cake for desert everyday of the week, they'll have it!  They will have what war took from him.  He buys his daughter lots of dolls, and then dresses and ribbons to hold back her pretty curls from her sweet, dimpled face.  His boy receives all sorts of action figures, and those dime westerns about cowboys and roping steers-you know, a proper  boyhood.  The soldier has a nice job at some plant or other, very stable.  He is proud of his wages, proud of his lovely wife, his beautiful children.  He is proud that they are unblemished from that which left him...somehow lacking.  The THING that wakes him in the middle of the night, sweating and trembling.  Eventually, his beautiful children  have beautiful children of their own, and the new parents shower them with gifts, with opportunity.  The soldier's grandchildren do not understand war.  How can they?  They grow up as the elite privileged.  The wars that rage even now...what do they care? The newest model of the iphone just came out.  And for heaven's sake, did you see what Sarah posted on Twitter!? And did you see what Jake said?? #craycray
     Are you starting to see the problem? The period of prosperity after the World Wars and after the fall of Russian Communism in 1989 in the US made people feel secure enough to neglect teaching this crucial bit of history to their children.  The collective memory of America is beginning the fail us, and will continue to decline if we, the youth, continue to  remain ignorant.  How many protests do you see today? We have no flower children, or hippies...just hipsters (who are all "different" in the same way, might I add).  Complacency is ruining us all.  
     Sometimes people tell me I'm rather smart.  After I get over being flattered, I realize that I'm not especially so.  It just happens that I'm pretty well read, compared to a lot of my peers. I used to read all the time, all sorts of things.  I did not discriminate between novels, poetry, histories, fiction, nonfiction... After all, it takes a genius to formulate an original thought without being exposed to the original thoughts of others first.  And how much geniuses walk amongst us these days? The thing is, not a lot of Americans are as well read as say, Europeans.  We aren't as cultured, as refined (again, a ridiculously exaggerated statement) as they are.  They know it, they all say so but it's not clear if they realize that the culprit is complacency.  What need have we, in a time of peace and the Kardashians, to know the world? 
     Ugh. I could go on and on, but I think I'll save it for later.  Hopefully organized into a more cohesive argument, anyhow.



Disclaimer: I might not know what I'm talking about.

"Someone told me there's a girl out there/with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair"
-Led Zeppelin



 

High Noon Thesis Paper

         So, my school offers this class called "Honors Humanities", which is a language arts course that includes more than just grammar and  spelling and whatnot-not that skills such as these two aren't very important, of course.  It is kind of linked to our high school's AP Euro class, but focuses less heavily on history and more on art and interpretation.  It is also the most challenging, back-breaking, illusion-shattering class I have ever taken.  There are no words to describe S. Tanaka's class, and there is no way anybody would understand without actually going through two semesters of it.  
      But naturally, as with all difficult things, it is and was a good experience and taught us all to develop original arguments, interpret based on various filters such as politics or the eternal feminine, and forced us to think analytically.  It's one of the most worthwhile courses I have ever taken.  
      Anywhoodles, although we had a lot of assignments, the greatest focus was on our thesis paper.  Now, as most of the general public knows, many college courses feature a thesis paper as the final display of personal excellence-or mediocrity-and mastery of the course.  Imagine my class, a group of unruly and unsophisticated second-year students.  What did we know of the world;what concern was it of ours what movie directors were trying to say?  We sure didn't care about the masters: Derain, Manet, Warhol, Morisot, David...they were then and we ARE the future.  But how can a group of idiots-for surely we were that-be the future if we pass into adulthood uncultured and ignorant to the greater field of the arts?  Therein lies S. Tanaka's greatest gift to us all.  True, many times I have hated her, and promised myself I would never visit.  But now that term is approaching its end, I now realize the disservice that would do her.  
      I don't think people understand the importance of history, and art, and literature.  I don't think they appreciate it.  Goodness knows I have only just begun.  
      I am including my thesis paper, on which I got a 98 percent, and my video presentation, for which I was given a perfect score.  Let it be known, that my paper's organization is off-the product of frantic work the night before. It isn't that I procrastinated (much), but that I changed the paper's structure, wording, commentary, Concrete details, commentary...plus the seemingly endless process of rereading and revision.  By five in the morning I was completely convinced I had failed.  My entire class was online, bonding and finding fellowship in our mutual screwedness.  Then, when that was all over, we had our video projects to worry about.  Mine was humiliating, not because it was awful, but because I impersonated various people in the interest of presenting analysis and pcms (professional commentary) in an entertaining way.  My teacher laughed the whole time, and my own face increasing had begun to resemble a tomato.  

       I did High Noon, which is said to be Gary Cooper's greatest film and was Grace Kelly's breakout role.  I personally am a huge (like, HUGE) fan of Gary Cooper and at the time, I was going through an Old American Frontier phase.  Literally, I devoured the works of Zane Gray and scoured the public domain for the big names like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry.  Just to name a few.  So here is my paper and video, if you care to see them. I apologize for my potentially politically incorrect accents. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0guLcfrSUhuyHzE13lKuOJRkVCe0mfETXh3EgQc-lk/pub


"Look for the woman in the dress.  If there is no woman, there is no dress"
~Coco Chanel

-Love,
Cynthia

My Views on today's film industry

     Anger is a beautiful thing.  It can be graceful and red as a ruby, the sort that propels forward the femme fatale.  It can be blacker and quieter than night, harboring an all-consuming grudge.  It can be as wild an violent as a tropical storm, but it is never the same.  No two people will ever feel the same anger.  
    So, that was kind of an unnecessarily dramatic intro for this entry, which, like my previous two, is basically my way of vomiting my thoughts and teenage angst all over the world wide web.  Sorry about the visual.  But I digress.
    Like pretty much every single human being-not just teenagers, but them especially-I get angry a lot.  I was angry when America lost to Poland in the 2012 Men's Volleyball FIVB World Championships.  I was furious when I stepped on my brooch ( the one-of-a-kind brooch I bought from the Escondido Renfaire) and snapped the clasp straight off.  But I get absolutely, positively out-of-my-mind, foaming-at-the-mouth rabid when Hollywood sinks its dirty little claws into certain classics and butchers them until they are near unrecognizable to us purists...más o menos. Now, don't get me wrong...old Hollywood up until the late 90s was great.  But now I personally feel that the movies now are so superficial, so pointless.  The Age of Louise Brooks up until the Age of Leonardo di Caprio featured films that made a statement (obviously there are exceptions).  They were art, not just bloody and/or sexual forms of entertainment.  It seems as if almost everything that comes out today only reflects the mindless consumerism of this generation.  Indeed, I shudder to think what the Founding Fathers of America would think if they could see the spawn of the great nation they created.
    Another thing that makes me bloody agitated is the BLATANT historical inaccuracies.  There are mistakes, and such thing as creative license, I suppose.  An example would be The Thirteenth Warrior, with Antonio Banderas and Vladimir Kulich. It's a viking epic modeled after Michael Crichton's novel, Eaters of the Dead (which was likewise modeled after Beowulf).  Anywhoodles, my point is that the vikings wear non-period specific armor, and the legend of Ahmed ibn Fadlan was a hoax.  Yet that was for the sake of the film.  In stark, STARK contrast is the 2013 film The Great Gatsby.  I loved the book and I adore F. Scott Fitzgerald.  So naturally I was PISSED when I saw the movie trailer.  Maybe I'm overreacting, but what the hell is up with the soundtrack? Was that Jay-Z? I'm planning on going to see this movie so that I can post a more accurate statement about this whole business, but for now...Where are the great voices of the 20s? Rudy Vallee? Nat Shilkret? George Olsen? Arden and Ohman?
    For heaven's sake, Hollywood, how about not letting my brain dead generation walk all over you with their over-priced Toms? How about making art for art's sake? Good Gracious, I'd like to see my Honors Humanities teacher kick your ass with her dainty little heels. Not that good movies haven't come out.  Um...hello? THE HOBBIT! 


All righty...I feel slightly less like my hormones are running a truck through my brain.  Peace and midnight rendezvous,

~Cynthia