a yuletide treat for you

Have I got a Christmas treat for you!

Rewatching Kylie’s vlogs of Italy made me think of a favorite movie of mine: Ingrid Bergman in Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia), directed by Roberto Rossellini. It was also titled Voyage to Italy. Digitally restored, this 1954 classic tells the story of an unhappily married bourgeois couple driving down to Naples from England to sell an inherited villa.

2013 movie review by A.O. Scott at The New York Times – “Voyage” is not driven by the usual machinery of plot and exposition, but rather by a succession of moods, an emotional logic alternately reflected and obscured by the picturesque surroundings. The rich symbolism of the Italian landscape — the volcanic pools at Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the vistas that have stirred the imagination of artists at least since Virgil — makes the emptiness of the Joyces’ marriage all the more palpable and painful. Their emotional and spiritual sterility contrasts with the fertility signified by the baby carriages and pregnant women Katherine encounters every time she ventures into Naples, and also by the religious procession of the film’s devastating final scene.

“Voyage to Italy” takes place in a series of simultaneous aftermaths — of World War II, of a glorious ancient civilization, of Uncle Homer’s wild life, of whatever passion once united Katherine and Alex. And yet amid all this exhaustion it finds signs of vitality. In its time, this film represented the arrival of something new, and even now it can feel like a bulletin from the future.

During this Christmas Covid season, I can’t think of anything better to do than curl up at home and watch a really good movie. Here it is. Enjoy!

(141) Journey to Italy 1954 720p Drama, Romance – YouTube

have you met Kylie Flavell?

Kylie is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, journalist and cook, passionate about making cinematic content that spreads joy, beauty and renewed faith in humanity. Australian-born, but based in some sublime spot in Tuscany, she has embraced living as an expat.

She might not be everyone’s cup of tea – at times she comes across as winsome. She has a huge following of subscribers and patrons.

I stumbled across her vlogs while searching for something about Italy on YouTube. She really is a talented film-maker, her visuals of the Italian landscape (put to music) are stunning. My personal favorites are her vlogs of the Aeolian archipelago (Stromboli, Lipari and Panarea), a cluster of volcanic islands just north of Sicily, named after the demigod of the winds, Aeolus. I’ve been wanting to go there for decades, but have not yet been.

She’s a one-woman team and good for her. Oh, and her Italian? She speaks it fluently (I’m jealous because Italian is my favorite language, moreso than French.) She also offers up some darn good recipes.

Ready to be transported to Tuscany? This is Part 1 of her latest Christmas video below – great music in the background. There’s also a Part 2. But make sure to watch her other vids, especially the series entitled “SICILY: Part 1 Stromboli, Aeolian Islands (Isole Eolie, Sicilia)”.

(138) HOMEMADE VINTAGE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS IN TUSCANY, ITALY (Addobbi Natalizi Fai Da Te DIY) – YouTube

are our lives predetermined?

I consider myself a rationalist, believing that logic and circumstance (and one’s socio-economic-geographic environment) largely determines a person’s life. I mean, let’s face it: a woman born in Juba, South Sudan is not going to have the same life as one born in Toronto, Canada.

Chance also plays a part in our lives; luck, good and bad. Genetic traits as well.

This morning I awoke from a dream and a deep deep sleep with the following question in my head: What if my life had turned out differently? The dream was about the farm my parents bought way back in the 1970s, a beautiful rambling property with an old barn and a ramshackle hundred-year old house.

Why did my mother sell that farm? What if the farm had been kept in the family and I could still go there? Burrowed deep in the countryside, it was a peaceful refuge from the noise and chaos of the world.

Hence, the eternal existential question: Why am I here? I ask this question a lot. It’s this question that triggered the writing of my memoir. I wanted to trace the trajectory of my life to understand why I’m in Paris and not back home in Canada. I needed to make sense of it all.

How much control do we have over life circumstances/events that impinge on our reality? In terms of external causal factors, the answer is “none”. It is only how we respond to those circumstances/events that is the true test.

I think it’s good to examine our lives from time to time: how did we get here, what were the circumstantial reasons/factors that brought us here. And, most importantly, how can we live our lives to our full potential.

Here’s the farmhouse below. Dad had the exterior walls, originally brick, clad in the local fieldstone. An extension was added to the house (hidden behind the tree.)

When the tenant farmer accidentally burned down the barn, it was Dad’s idea to keep the remaining old stone walls and have a pool put in its place.

An hour and a half drive east of Toronto, the 100-acre farm is situated between the towns of Warkworth and Campbellford. I miss it.

By coming to Paris I believed that my world would expand, and in many ways it did, but it also shrank. I lost many things.

Here’s a brief excerpt from my book –

As for my father, he was on his way to fulfilling his next dream of buying a hobby farm. We had spent a year of Sundays cruising the back roads of rural Ontario and visiting farms for sale, all of them derelict and available for a song. The homestead that my parents eventually purchased sat on a hundred acres of woodland and fallow fields, set back from a gravel road. A long driveway led to a brick house dating from the late 1800s. Two sheds and a barn overlooked a pond.

“John is realizing his ambition to become a gentleman farmer,” said my mother to a friend.

“What’s a gentleman farmer?” I asked, picturing a man, suited and tied, sitting on a tractor.  “It’s someone who farms for pleasure rather than for money,” was the reply.

One day, at the height of summer when the crops and foliage were in full bloom and the trill of crickets filled the air, my mother and I stood knee-deep in a field of goldenrod, she clutching the bottom of a rickety ladder, me sneezing and rubbing my hayfever-inflamed eyes. From the ladder’s top rung my father stood, hammering a wooden name plate onto a tree at the foot of our driveway. The words engraved into the name plate were ‘Fern Hill Farm’.

“But there are no ferns around here…” I said between sneezes.

“It’s the name of a poem, dear,” said my mother, sighing. “Your father’s favourite poet is Dylan Thomas.”  Later, I read the poem entitled Fern Hill and agreed that it was fitting.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, 1914 – 1953

a holiday gift guide

I guess Christmas will be scaled back this year. Here are some of my favorite items that make great gifts for yourself or for friends and family:

Reebok DMX Thrill

In two words: supreme comfort. All my walking shoes are Reebok, but this model takes the cake.

LEXON FLIP

This award-winning alarm clock turns on and off by flipping it over. Featuring ON and OFF faces, LCD display and touch sensor snooze, it’s affordable and comes in a range of different colors. I love mine. There’s also a smaller travel version.

URBAN DECAY Born to Run eyeshadow palette

Since the beginning of COVID in March, I haven’t worn lipstick. Why bother when you wear a facemask? So I compensate by using lots of eyeshadow. Known for high-pigment, velvety color and blendability, UD eyeshadows have been a bestseller for years.

PURESSENTIEL ULTRASONIC HUMIDIFIER DIFFUSER

My new acquisition, purchased at my local pharmacy for just under 40 euros. You fill the reservoir with water and add drops of essential oil. It’s completely silent, and the fine mist that comes out fills the room with fragrance. See that blue color? It’s a soft ambient light that changes colors. The Puressentiel oils that I bought with it are Walk in the Forest (Atlas cedar, Cistus Rock Rose, Cypress and Siberian pine), Cocooning (Sweet orange, White grapefruit, Chinese cassia leaves, Bitter orange and Cinnamon bark) and Positive Energy.

UNIQLO – MARIMEKKO

I just bought this for myself at UNIQLO. It’s ultra-light and stylish because it’s MARIMEKKO. Of course you know who MARIMEKKO is: a Finnish design house celebrated for its original prints and colors since 1951. One of the first lifestyle brands in the world, Marimekko combines fashion, bags, and accessories as well as home décor into an expression of joyful living.

ANTIPODES – Protein-rich serum, avocado pear night cream, and this hand cream because we wash our hands ten times a day!

If you can find this brand, grab it because Antipodes is a plant-powered vegan beauty company from New Zealand. It uses pollution-free native New Zealand ingredients in its organic skincare range, and it’s great (award winning). Because I wash my hands ten times a day, I need to put on hand cream afterwards.

CHOCOLATE

 

How fortunate (for me) that I live in a city with the best chocolatiers in the world.

In closing, don’t forget to make a donation to your favorite charity this Christmas:

coming to Netflix – Room 2806 and the DSK sex scandal, 9 years later

They always said that one day a movie would be made on this hot topic. Well, it’s been done. Documentary film director Jalil Lespert returns to the scene of the crime that brought down not only one of the most powerful men in the western world, but a potential candidate for the next President of France.

Who is DSK? Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Professor of Economics. Minister of Economy and Finance from 1997 to 1999. Former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a controversial figure in the French Socialist Party due to his involvement in several financial and sexual scandals.

Where did the crime occur? In room 2806 of the Sofitel hotel in New York City.

Who was involved? Nafissatou Diallo, a refugee from Guinea (West Africa) who lived in the Bronx and worked as a maid at the hotel. 

What was the charge? Sexual assault. Diallo alleged that Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted her after she entered his suite.

Was there a settlement? Reportedly, DSK paid Diallo 1.5 million dollars. Today she divides her life between Dakar, Senegal and NYC where her daughter lives.

Here’s my blog post on the subject that I wrote way back in 2013 –

Two events brusquely jolted the French out of their reverie vis-a-vis their archaic attitudes towards women: the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York in May 2011 and the arrival onto French soil of the feminist Ukrainian group, FEMEN, at about the same time. On a Sunday morning, over croissants and steaming bowls of café au lait, the entire nation stared with collective incredulity at their TV screens. What were they looking at? Surreal images played over and over for all the world to see of their well-known countryman and respected economist – who was not only the head of the IMF in Washington, but candidate to be the next president of France! – handcuffed, unshaven and flanked on either side by burly New York policemen before being shoved into the back of a car and driven off to prison on charges of alleged criminal sexual assault. This was reality TV at its most horrific. It was, as the French press called it, an electroshock.  

There’s nothing like a pair of handcuffs and the clang of a Rikers Island prison gate to shrivel a sex offender’s dick.

Flash-forward two years: it took half a year for the French to come out of denial. During that time we had to endure endless TV talk shows (what, again?) and long, tortuous, psycho-babble written in weekly magazines dissecting what was so obvious to us outsiders (that DSK was guilty), and seemingly oblivious to them. Two-thirds of the country believed it was a Sarkozy-orchestrated plot. In collusion with the French-owned Sofitel hotel where the assault took place, they imagined that Sarkozy had planned the whole thing in an attempt to sabotage DSK’s presidency bid.

Had this calamity occurred in Paris it would’ve been swiftly silenced, just like Strauss-Kahn’s prior transgressions had been silenced by the practice of a mafia-like code of honour here called omerta. For decades (we later learned) DSK had been groping and harassing women. Either none of the victims had come forward to complain, or they had come forward but were jeered at and dismissed by the macho men’s club that runs the Gallic corridors of power. The wake-up call that France sorely needed to shake itself out of its dusty, last-century torpor were those TV images of DSK in handcuffs played over and over with the eyes of the outside world looking on: judging and criticizing unacceptable French behaviour that had carried on, unchallenged, for centuries; unchallenged by both men and women. Better late than never, I suppose.

See the trailer below. The one line that stands out is this – “He didn’t believe he did anything wrong, other than to get caught.”

(127) Chambre 2806 : L’Affaire DSK | Bande-annonce officielle VOSTFR | Netflix France – YouTube

Far from the Madding Crowd

I loved this movie. When I first saw it on French television, I didn’t know I was watching an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd because the title is different. At some point though I recognized the story. The title in French is “Loin de la foule déchaînée”.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel and his first major literary success. Set in rural southwest England, it deals in themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic but often harsh realities of a farming community in Victorian England. It describes the life and relationships of Bathsheba Everdene (played by a brilliant Carey Mulligan) with her lonely neighbour William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the thriftless soldier Sergeant Troy.

Have you seen this movie? It’s so so good.

(124) Far from the Madding Crowd Official Trailer #2 (2015) – Carey Mulligan Movie HD – YouTube