Top of the Lake- Season 2: A Few Thoughts

I just watched the second season of Top of the Lake and loved it.

One review I found online said that Jane Campion's 'signposting of feminist issues' was 'heavy-handed'. I found it to be no such thing. If one tv series is able to centre the bodies of women and their experiences it's but a drop in the ocean of paeans to the resilience and wonder of the male form.

Things I did find to be true about Top of the Lake.

1. Elizabeth Moss is spectacular. And her chemistry with Gwendolyn Christie is off the charts.  Christie's character was written with a great deal of care. I suppose it must ever be a subject of discussion how large her body is, and this show dealt with that extremely well.

2. On the subject of motherhood- in a show with several mothers talking about motherhood, and grappling with it, it is the fathers that do a stellar job, and keep the house together. Pyke seemed something of a fantasy to me. Look I didn't even look up the actor's name, because this character is a unicorn. We all want him. Or someone like him. The coroner, too, to a lesser degree: the safe dad figure, who offers comfort and snacks. In this show it is the men who always bring the food.

3. Puss. For anyone who has been with an older man, this relationship is the thing your mother agonized about. The lure of an older individual who wields authority is something I imagine many of us have felt, and Campion takes it to its brutal ugly extreme in the relationship between Mary and Puss.

4. This show has some great action scenes. There's one in the middle, with Moss fighting, where I found myself roaring alongside her. It is a violent show, but most of the physical violence remains off screen.

5. Talking about race and inequality appears to be the reserve of the villains, or the misguided on the show. I'm still thinking this through. The obviously horrendous power dynamic between S. Asian women, and their white male and female Australian exploiters wasn't picked apart with as much care as the relationships between parents and children, and male and female sexual partners. In a show with a lot of carefully treated women the brown women were still ciphers for white desire. Given that Campion was able to do so very much more with her women than most, it would have been nice to see her do as well by the brown folk in her writing as well.

Movies this week

The Martian
This was more fun than I expected. It was nearly a week ago but J and I are still wandering around the house singing Starman. Most excellent use of a song. The movie was completely predictable of course, but it didn't hit too many false notes for me. I enjoyed the smart aleck responses, I enjoyed the declaration that Mars was going to fear this man's botany powers, and I was happy to finally see something with Jessica Chastain in it. It isn't a life changing movie, but it wasn't filled with fools, in fact there wasn't even the one, and I was quite happy to spend $2.25 on it.

Spectre
J and I have been waiting to watch Spectre for months. Except for the joy of uninterrupted Daniel Craig for 2h 38 min there is little to recommend the movie. It turns up fantastically foolish dialogue- for example at one point Moneypenny tells Bond "You have a secret, something you can't tell anyone because you don't trust them". No shit. Any other really basic words that you'd like to explain to us in the middle of what's supposed to be a spy thriller? So boring. Once you've seen Daniel Craig in a swimsuit every movie without that is a wasted opportunity. There might have been one joke that worked, but in general the dialogue fell flat. Also there were too many flashbacks and throwbacks to previous movies, we heard about Vesper Lynd and Le Chiffre more than there was exposition about the villain of the piece. It seemed kind of a waste of Monica Belluci, to give her so little to do in the movie. Could no one come up with an independent story-line for this movie. Also this train hurtling into Morocco was most suspicious, seeming to carry only spies, and wealthy Europeans on vacation, the two being inter-changeable I suppose. So nice of them to take the movie to North Africa and throw in a black driver at least.

Tragic realisations

I might have to come to terms with the fact that I do not like Japanese food.

I have a very dear Japanese-Swiss friend. We used to go to a restaurant called Sushi-train, in Geneva, about once a month. There I ate rice, with fried bits of fish on top, and rice wrapped in seaweed with cucumber, and let myself think that sushi was something I could do. And Claudia, twice as polite as everyone else, on account of being both Japanese and Swiss, left me my illusions.

Now I am in the U.S, and living with another sushi enthusiast (C and I were joined at the hip for 4 years), but this one will call me out. We've tried a whole host of Japanese restaurants in the area. J has a dear friend whose father was born in Japan to an army-dad. J himself enjoys fishy foods of all descriptions. So we find ourselves eating sushi a lot. And it always leaves me with a very odd feeling.

Branching out to other kinds of restaurant-Japanese fare has not been successful either. I do not like cold soba noodles, which appear frequently on menus. I like warm soba noodles, when made spicy and with peanuts- so basically Thai style.  I do not like miso soup- it is so odd. I do not like tofu- though I know I must learn to love this, as a mostly vegetarian person trying to get by in the U.S without dying of boredom. I do not like soups with raw, or semi-cooked eggs in them. I thought I loved ramen but I do not like broths where I can smell the fish above all other things, and soy to me is not a flavour. I have not tried chawanmushi- an egg custard with bits of fish and scallions, but I hope to next time. I want to love edamame, but eating more than 2 (one edamame, two edamame?) leaves my head throbbing. Teriyaki chicken leaves me cold, as does hibachi- neither is interesting enough for me to use up calories over them.

I do like gyoza- but you have to be a monster to deny a pan-seared dumpling. Shumai, again a dumpling. All dumplings are amazing, and I don't know if loving these is enough.

I don't like Japanese food. And I am sorry to have to admit it.

Kaju katli is very hard to make.

Thai Villa

J and I like Thai food. Or rather J likes Thai food, I dream about it on a near daily basis and love it beyond all reason. One particular lemon fish that I ate as a 13 year old in Banglampoo before the mall burnt down and had to be rebuilt will forever be my most perfect fish.

I am in the process of moving to North Carolina and we have not discovered our go-to Thai restaurant yet. We have this kind of pan-Asian fusion restaurant around the corner, Tasu, and the food is a lot better than that shady description makes it sound. It is not identifiably Chinese, or Thai or Vietnamese, but their wonton soup is a thing of wonder, and everything they send out is delicious. I love it, but it is not where I would go if I wanted Thai food.

So we decided to try something new, and ventured into Thai Villa, in Cary. Only 3 tables were occupied, which is not the best sign, but it's kind of hidden away in one corner of a strip mall, so we shrugged that off. Big mistake. On entry the place looked promising. There wasn't a single tv, which has been my major grouse about most American restaurants- why must people always be watching sports? Even when out to dinner? And why do you need a 5 screens per room to watch them on? Anyhow. The lack of screens and the friendly service were a good start. But it was all boiled socks from there.

J ordered the Chicken Tom Yum Soup and Rainforest Curry with chicken. I ordered Glass Noodle Vegetable Rolls and Kapow Chicken (chicken with basil, red chilli paste and green peppers). The soup looked and tasted as if it came from a Knorr soup cube that hadn't even been brought to the boil. The chicken smelt bad. I would find that all the chicken they served that evening was really really smelly. The vegetable roll was a small limp thing with little to recommend it. Both the chicken main courses had the flavour of nothing so much as the boiled socks of a teenage boy.

The chicken was rank, but even worse was the criminal way in which they dealt with the curries. We decided not to stay, and that's never happened before. Neither of us has left a table at a restaurant after just a few bites convinced that the meal is beyond saving.

I've been to Thailand several times, and I don't expect the food to taste like on the streets of Bangkok. It is really painful though to encounter something so rank that calling it Thai would be insulting to the cuisine, and calling it food would be an unfortunate mistake.

Poetry week

has just been declared.
After all why not give in whole heartedly to the stereotype of what people do after having their heart broken. Cry, eat chips, drink heavily even on weekdays, turn your Twitter feed into a graveyard for songs about lost love and revenge, read poetry and force it on other people.


To the Welsh Critic who does not find me Identifiably Indian

You believe you know me,
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats - or is it yours -
while my country detonates
on your television screen.
You imagine you’ve cracked
my deepest fantasy -
oh, to be in an Edwardian vicarage,
living out my dharma
with every sip of dandelion tea
and dreams of the weekend jumble sale…
You may have a point.
I know nothing about silly mid-offs,
I stammer through my Tamil,
and I long for a nirvana
that is hermetic,
odour-free,
bottled in Switzerland,
money-back-guaranteed.

This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind,
how much from the gut,
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham -
it’s all yours to measure,
the pathology of my breath,
the halitosis of gender,
my homogenised plosives
about as rustic
as a mouth-freshened global village.
Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger,
a new patois to match
the Chola bronze of my skin.
Teach me how to come of age
in a literature you’ve bark-scratched
into scripture.
Smear my consonants
with cow-dung and turmeric and godhuli.
Pity me, sweating,
rancid, on the other side of the counter.
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
grant me a visa
to the country of my birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.

-Arundhathi Subramaniam

from http://cercopethicidae.tumblr.com/