There’s a riveting story in The New Yorker of 12/4/23 by Rebecca Mead on the actress Sandra Hüller. I was drawn to it by the photo of Hüller in it, because there is a little bit of our friend Susan in her looks. Amirite, Liz?
Mead starts by discussing Hüller’s portrayal of Hamlet in a German stage production. In it, the figure of Hamlet’s father’s ghost is not a separate character appearing to Hamlet. Instead, “[the director] Simons and Hüller agreed that it would be potent for the father to rise from within the son—speaking through him. As Simons recently described the conceit, “The father is so deep in your soul that you can’t get away from him—he is always in you.”
Here’s Mead’s description:
“When it came time for Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, an eerie chord resounded, and Hüller’s soft, breathy voice suddenly dropped an octave. She was no longer Hamlet, or not entirely. ‘Pity me not!’ Hüller said, her eyes hardening and her voice quickening as she channelled the Ghost: ‘I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.’ As Hüller played it, Hamlet wasn’t seeing a ghost; he was being possessed by it. Hüller’s previously gentle demeanor was displaced by lurching motion, and when the Ghost furiously commanded his son’s obedience—’List, list, O, list!’ in Shakespeare’s original—she practically vomited up the words: ‘Hör, hör, o, hör! ‘
“The scene was as scary to watch as any horror movie, but it also felt profound: the sins of the old were literally infecting the bodies of the young, emphasizing the generational rot at the heart of the play.”
Mead next addresses Hüller’s role in the movie “Anatomy of a Fall,” in which she plays a wife suspected of killing her husband. Both wife and husband are writers, but the wife is more successful and the husband resents the feeling that he sacrificed his work to support hers. At the trial, an audio recording is played in which the couple is fighting. Here’s Mead again:
“The fight between the spouses, which is presented in court as the key to whether Hüller’s character is responsible for her husband’s death, in fact addresses a more complex, and more widely applicable, question: whether she is responsible for her husband’s life.”
Get this – as she played the role, Hüller was never told by the filmmaker, Triet, whether her character was guilty or not. She was instructed to play her as if she were innocent. (The viewer is also left wondering where the truth lies.)
The photo, above, is from The New Yorker; our Phil captured her very nicely too.
This poem is by Jim Daniels. It was in The Writer’s Almanac yesterday and is called “Brushing Teeth with My Sister after the Wake.”
Brushing teeth with my sister after the wake
at my kitchen sink, the bathroom upstairs
clogged with family from out of town
spending the night after the wake
and the after-wake—cold beverages
have been consumed and comfort food,
leftovers bulging both the fridge
and the minifridge. In our fifties, both
half-asleep half-awake, we face each
other. My sister’s smile foams white
down her chin at the end of a day
on which no one has smiled. We laugh.
We may never brush our teeth together again.
No mirror down here to see our haggard faces.
We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.
The theme of yesterday’s puzzle was rhymes with colors, e.g., GRAY DAY, RED HEAD, GREEN SCREEN, and Donovan’s hit song from 1966 MELLOW YELLOW.
But it was 58A that caused all the ruckus: “Colorful (albeit rare!) rhyme for an item at a hardware store.” The answer was ORANGE DOOR HINGE. It is supposed to rhyme but many pointed out that it’s at best an imperfect rhyme (a “slant” rhyme). Miriam Webster says: “Of course, the two-word term door hinge does not form a true rhyme with orange, but half of it can be used to create a half rhyme with the name of the citrus fruit.”
When Tom Lehrer was challenged to come up with a rhyme for orange, he produced:
Using an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
Oyment thereof.
Some thought ORANGE DOOR HINGE was just horrendous, but others (like me) found it so awful they loved it. Then it turns out it’s a “thing.” First, apparently, it’s known that there is no true rhyme for orange. And when rapper Eminem was on Sixty Minutes he said: “If you’re taking the word at face value and you just say orange, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and you make it like more than one syllable, or-ange, you could say like, ‘I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.’”
Then, anonymous said: “I’m 67. I would have been single-digits-years old when one of the interstitial bits during the cartoon-forward show we all used to watch (Captain Penny) on our local channel pointed out that no word rhymes with ‘orange.’ Then somehow they worked in a punchline with ‘door hinge.’ I’ve never forgotten it, and all I’m sayin’ is that it’s been around a lot longer than Eminem.”
It was also noted that Kurt Vonnegut rhymed orange and door hinge in Welcome to the Monkey House, which was published in 1968.
Now, back to Donovan. BTW, Paul McCartney dropped by during the taping of “Mellow Yellow” and his voice is somewhere on it, among the revelers. And if you’ve been wondering what that “electrical banana” in it is, years later Donovan explained he was leafing through the paper with Lennon one day and found the phrase in a newspaper ad for a “marital aid.” [We’ll just tiptoe away from that one.] He liked the sound of the words; it has nothing to do with drugs.
Today’s puzzle returned to the old rocker’s theme with YAYAS from the Stones’ live album, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out! The title is taken from Blind Boy Fuller’s song “Get Your Yas Yas Out.” [Yup. I see the connection: it’s subtle but it’s there.] The lyric in Fuller’s song was “Now you got to leave my house this morning, don’t I’ll throw your yas yas out o’ door.” In the context of Fuller’s original song and its use in other blues music, “yas yas” appears as a folksy euphemism for tuchas.
The album’s cover photo by David Bailey, featuring drummer Charlie Watts with guitars and bass drums hanging from the neck of a donkey, was inspired by a line in Bob Dylan’s song “Visions of Johanna:” “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” (though, as mentioned, the animal in the photo is a donkey, not a mule). The band would later say “we originally wanted an elephant but settled for a donkey.” You can’t always get what you want, right fellas?
Here’s that cover, followed by a tune.
Hey, is Mick up there barefoot? Who does he think he is, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on an airplane?
It’s the last time the Stones toured as just the Stones, the five of them. They added backing musicians afterwards. It was also guitarist Mick Taylor’s first tour (he replaced Brian Jones shortly before his death).
Is it me? Or does U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb seem like a moron? She just sentenced a mother-son team who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped with the theft of Nancy Pelosi’s laptop to 18 months and 12 months of “home incarceration,” respectively. She described the sentence as “jail but at home.” That’s one hell of a “but.” That but is carrying one big shitload of weight on its back, if you ask me. The government sought sentences of 4 years for each of them in prison — you know, what you might describe as “home, but in jail.”
“They were acting very stupidly,” Cobb said. She said she was giving them a “significant break.” Ya think?
We don’t have photos for you. Phil was too disgusted to take on the assignment.
Let’s get back on safer ground: Travis and Tay. Turns out that’s what he calls her: Tay. We like it. You may have heard Joy Behar took a pretty big swipe at the fella. She found out about some of his tweets from a long time ago — they make him out to be sexist and pretty dumb, so she’s worried about what Tay may be getting into (Behar’s a Swiftie).
“Here’s one of his [tweets], ‘Damn, the Clippers girls gotta be the girls that don’t make the Lakers team ’cause they was all ugly,’” Behar read. She then read two more of his old tweets: “Why can’t girls hide they back fat?” and “I feel like if you want to be a cheerleader, you have to pass a beauty test. There’s too many ugly cheerleaders out here.”
I’m hoping he’s grown up. If he ain’t, that sh*t won’t fly with Swift, Behar’s right. Meanwhile, Owl Chatter is pulling for you, sweetheart. But you knew that.
Good night everybody. I have to go floss — appointment with Karen the dental hygienist at 8 am tomorrow, and she shows no mercy. Doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
The Wellington Files 