Chivalry in Central Park

I'm not Rappaport is the saga of a park bench octagenarian who lives true to his ideals, most of which have something to do with fighting entrenched injustices with predictable results. Unlike Don Quixote, Nat Moyer (Walter Mathau) derived his enthusiasms not from books but from distant yet vivid boyboyhood memories of Lower East Side worker meetings in the nascent heyday of the American labor movement.

Moyer's armour is a cantankerous blend of Jewish vaudeville, chutzpah, false impersonation and inflammed rhetoric, all of which he uses to sally against overcharging supermarkets, co-op associations, Puerto Rican muggers and a cowboy loan shark. His side-kick is a disbelieving, distrusting, down to earth Black boilerman, Midge Carter (Ossie Davis) who wants nothing but peace in old age, but who can't resist Moyer's stories and enticements.

Like his Estremaduran counterpart, Moyer's idealism is both heroic and harmful, fighting for people and callously using them at the same time. It also lands both him and Carter into some bruising righting of wrongs.

The movie is set almost entirely on a bench in Central Park and the play is carried along on the strength of Davis and Mathau's superb character performances which make one forget that the action has barely moved from a single spot.

When his concerned daughter seeks to check him into a senior residence home, will Moyers finally admit what he really is or will Carter entice him into ongoing flights of idealism and fantasy?

As the movie comes to a close, the camera slowly pans away from the park bench, revealing at first a cluster of autumn trees, then the growing expanse of the Park and finally the surrounding stone bastions of power, privilege and capitalism set against a swelling chorus of the Internationale

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Speaking of Petite Pois

Petite Pois are a staple favorite at the French table. They are usually served in a sweetened butter and/or cream sauce. Small sweet onions are usually added, although i’ve had them with diced ham or (especially delicious) lamb.

The trick of course is the sauce, which should be the consistency of a very thick soup. The sauce should never be runny, or spread away from the peas. The peas should “swim” in the sauce, rather than just be covered by it.

Basic Ingredients and Preparation.

peas ---- (fresh shelled, alternatively freeze dried but in any event hard)

small onions ---- (alternatively equivalent amoutns of diced white onion)
sprig (or infusion) of parsley ---- (OK, if sprigs are available)
lettuce core ---- (for purists, but unnecessary)
butter ---- (preferably European style)
cream ---- (prefereably creme fraiche or crema mexicana )
egg yolk ----(lightly pre-beaten)
sugar
salt
pepper
hot water

1. Melt butter (3 TBS per 1/2 lb) in a pot. Use enough butter to insure that all peas will be liberally coated. Do not brown the butter. Immediately upon melting.... >

2. Toss in the peas and swirl around with a spoon. Then add enough very hot or pre-boiled water to not quite cover the peas (or just enough to prevent the peas from scorching on the bottom of the pan...see below).

3. Add in, salt, pepper, onions, parsely, [lettuce core], (and ham or lamb)

4. Simmer overly low flame with a dish of cold water placed over the pot.

5. While peas are cooking, whisk blend egg yolk and creme fraiche,

6. When peas are cooked, take out spring & lettuce core, and stir in the yolk & cream, adding sugar to sweeten very mildly. Serve.

Some recipes call for adding flour to the sauce. I do not like this approach. The flour masks the natural taste and sweetness of the peas and onions. But a very light sprinkle is ok, if needed to thicken.

Don’t over sweeten. Remember that onions contribute their own sweetness.

Meats should be previously cooked and diced, needing only that amout of re-heating that comes with steaming the peas.

Tips & Tricks

1. Steaming

The main trick to this dish is the amount of water used. Some recipes say 1/2 a cup or 6 TBS. Others omit reference to water at all, but that seems to me to have been omitting the obvious.

You do NOT want to fry the peas. You want to steam them with just enough water to make a “heavy”steam. On the other hand you do not want to use so much water that you end just boiling the peas. This will result in too watery a soup/sauce. If you end up having to boil off the water content of the sauce, you can end up with soggy peas.

The amount of water used also depends on whether the pot is covered. The covering dish of cold water seems too haute fussy to me (unless the dish is going to be the main course). When being cooked with other things, open pot or regular lid is sufficient.

Remember: The recipes (being French) assume one is using fresh shelled peas; however, if one uses frozen peas, they will already contain “ice” which becomes water, so less water needs to be added.

2. Saucing

The second trick is heating the sauce. If the yolk/cream sauce is just poured over the peas, it can unduly cool the dish down.

Solution #1. Pre-warm the sauce. Pre-blend yolk and cream in a bowl before you steam the peas. Add sauce to pre-steamed peas just before serving, and reheat the entire thing if needed Be prepared to add a little milk (and/or a little flower). Add sugar to taste at this point.

Solution #2: Use more water (enough to cover the peas). Before adding the sauce, pour off a likely excess into a cup. (It will be “butter-water”). Stir in the sauce. The remaining water will warm up the sauce, as will the low flame which is still on. If the sauce is too thick, pour back in some of the saved excess excess. The risk here is that one ends up boiling the peas.

Preferences.

I usually make this with diced onions in lieu of the small onions. I prefer this, actually, as the diced onions bleed more of their taste into the mixture. They also conform bite-wise with the peas. The lettuce core and parsely can be dispensed with. I don’t see that they add all that much, given the sauce.

The egg yolk is critical to the sauce. Without it, the sauce is just creme. The yolk seems to me to give the dish its unique texture and taste.

And no you cannot do Organi-Cal Cuisine stuff like using honey instead of sugar, or chicken and chorizo instead of ham or lamb. The only meats that work with this are ham or lamb which ideally have been previously cooked and cut from a bake or a roast.

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Blame it On Fidel

Blame it on Fidel is the story of what happens to a family when some of its members become radicalized. The clever twist here is that it is the parents who abandon all to join the radical fringes of the early 70's -- to the bewilderment and chagrin of their arch-conservative nine year old, Anna.

The movie opens onto a scene of bourgeois bonheur at the estate home of a successful French lawyer. Here, and indeed throughout the movie, we are reminded in casual but unmistakable ways that the French perfected civilization.

They have been at it since the days of Ausonius, I thought, as the senses of memory revived the joys of le petite dejuner and a dish of peas.

But for reasons which are not entirely clear to us -- and certainly not to Anna -- her parents do a social volte face and (needless to say) everything gets turned upside down. Well cut and mannered gentil bourgeois are replaced with voluble, chain smoking "bearded reds" -- from Chile of all places -- as Anna's parents give up their home and lawns for crowded digs in an apartment. Haricot verts get replaced with strange foreign mushes, which Anna eyes suspiciously.

Most seriously yet, Anna's tenure at her Catholic school is threatened, although she is allowed to stay on condition she be excused from Catechism, in lieu of which she is dragged off to Sunday morning protest marches. "What is the difference," Anna asks incisively, "between "Solidarity" and "Following like Sheep"?

The brilliance of all this, is that we are made to see things from unconventional angles. We know that Pinochet is in the wings, and yet we are seeing the Reactionary Right from the perspective of a determined but helpless child, who has "political" issues of her own with her classmates.

Without the slightest hint of didacticism, Directory Julie Gavras whimsically lays out a series of symmetries -- "counterpoint" is too Germanic a word -- that in the end would have us consider politics as a question of character rather than "rational choice".

As Anna takes weekend refuge at her grand-parents' Bordeaux chateau winery where, with all decent kindness, certain things are never discussed, Anna's mother interviews unwed mothers and publishes a scandal-triggering book on the effects of France's abortion laws.

In two epigramatically perfect scenes, Gavras co-reflects the virtues and limitations of education at the hands of nuns and at the equal but -- is it really opposite? -- insistence of bearded communists. Perhaps they are just different affectations of morality?

Or perchance taste in heroes? On the announcement of DeGaulle's death, Anna's grandfather stares out the window and murmurs "It is all over". We don't need to hear what Anna's father feels as, several scenes later, he too stares silently into the unseen landscape beyond his window.

Or perhaps simply species of complacency and regret? In the end, Anna insists on going to Spain where she discovers some surprising things about her radical father and gets a sense of true and irredentist reaction unsoftened by French refinement.

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The War of the Seven Reductions

The Mission starring Jeremy Irons (as saintly Jesuit) and Robert de Niro (as penitent slaver) is less a movie than it is the illustration of an historical episode, in this case the reduction by force of the Jesuit reductions of the aboriginal tribes of Paraguay, Uruguay and Southern Brazil.

The difference between an historical illustration and a documentary is precisely that -- the former paints a picture, the latter (supposedly) documents causes and effects. As illustrations go, the Mission is well done. It tells the story of how avaricious and resentful Spanish and Portuguese settlors intrigue and connive with royal and ecclesiastical authorities to destroy the semi-autonmous and prosperous colonies the Jesuits had founded in the jungle among the indigenous tribes -- in this case the Guarani. Unfortunately, the illustration delivers the gist of the truth wrapped in false colors. Some documentary style background is required.

From the outset, the settlement of Las Indias was a four-cornered tug of war between Indians, Settlors, Church and Crown. Accepting de facto the inescapable presence of Europeans, the Indians sought to maintain as much autonomy and tradition as possible withing the new macro-political framework. Unfortunately that was pretty much what the Settlors wanted too. The Crown saw the hemisphere as the imperial foundation for the nascent unitary State and the Church saw the New World as a place were Old World Gregorian politics might get a second go around -- in other words, she saw the America's as a chance to hold on to medieval concepts of dual government in which the Chruch was the spiritual sun to the secular authority's moon.

As generalizations applicable to two continents and three centuries go, this is an astonishingly accurate encapsulation. But the "tilt" in the four cornered struggle was that three of the parties agreed that something had to be done with the Indian, whereas the native answer to this question was that preferably nothing needed to be done at all.

The Settlors, of course, saw the Indians as a hinderance to expansion if free and as source of free labor if not free. To this end, they were willing to accept "trusteeship" (encomienda) over the Indian for his supposed protection, edification and welfare. As advocated by the Settlors, the encomienda system treated the New World as a sort of vast geo-political orphanage. In contrast, visionary elements within the Church saw the Indian as Noble Clay out of whom a new breed of man, untainted by European sin, would emerge; and in the 16th century a few genuine utopias were tried. But even apart from such millenarian ideas the Church was opposed to slavery, forced conversions and the settlor's perversion of the econmienda system which she herself had originally proposed in 1516. The Crown was also opposed to encomienda and to the powerful feudal class such a system would necessarily create. It preferred to see the Indians incorporated into society as free, but loyal and productive subjects. The difficulty here, especially in places like Paraguay, was that the aboriginals were not particularly suited in their nobly savage state for participating in a proto-capitalist nation state. In fact they often savagely resisted cooption which only served as asserted justification for slaughter and slave raiding parties by the Settlors.

By the 18th century, the Church had pretty much given up on holding onto the Middle Ages in the New World. Good enough if it co-operated with the Crown. This policy certainly suited the Jesuits who had never particularly been grass-roots guys and who always aimed to rule through the top. The Jesuits convinced authorities in Madrid and Rome to allow them to "reduce" the Guarani and other tribes through pacific means. It was for this reason that the Jesuit missions were called "Reducciones" -- they were conceived less in terms of utopias per se and more in terms of co-opting the natives into the established colonial order.

But what a difference a little peace makes. The very fact that colonization was limited to pacific means -- and hence to show and tell -- tended of its own force to move the whole enterprise in the direction of "utopia". In fact, in another of the endless paradoxes that abound in the history of Spanish America, the reductions tended to revert to the original and idealistic notions behind the encomienda system.

The missions were not utopias of free men and women. They were guided democracies ruled by theocratic overseers working through select Indian caciques. But neither were they simply Jesuit run colonial entrprises geared for protean capitalist production. The agricultural economy of most missions rested on a system of communal property and inelienable land possessions. This was not (as the movie incorrectly implied) the transplanted result of European "communistic" ideas but represented rather a reversion to indigenous economic modes of production which are known in Spanish as ejidos

What the Reductions actually represented was a species of political, economic, relgio-cultural synchretism. This was not a process of "co-equality" but it was a process of mutual influencing and inter-twining. Only that kind of a process could have led to the Guarani Revolt in defense of "their" communities.



With minimal historical licenses, the Mission successfully conveys, if not the historical background, the true historical gist of the Guarani War (1757). The Jesuits did found utopian style missions; the Settlors resented them and manipulating European political issues to their benefit, got the Jesuits expelled and forcibly reduced the reductions....at least some of them.

What I found disappointing in the movie was its failure to capture the syncrhetic center of gravity of the Missions project. What made this more disappointing still was that, in too short a scene, the movie did capture the indo-iberian cultural melding as it manifested itself during an unmistakably "creole" religious festival in the colonial city. In a clever visual device, the scene depicted Europeanized Indians and New World Settlors interlocking in dancing circles to music that was already distinctly "Latino" (as we would say today).

Alas, the movie came up short when it came to illustrating the even deeper socio-cultural fusion taking place in the missions. The hints of indigenous input and authority were far too subtle for the average movie-goer and the overall impression ended up being a distinctly paternalistic, "Look at what the Indian can do." As a result, the movie did not proffer much of an answer to the brutal critique of a Settlor whose unmoved response to a Guarani-sung aria, was "Any animal can be taught tricks." The Missions involved something more than just teaching the natives tricks.

The movie's failure in this regard also spawned the false impression that the Jesuit missions were some kind of progressive political project of the Enlightenment. Jesuits doing Rousseau. In fact, it was the Enlightenment that destroyed the missions. The Settors would have gotten nowhere but for the fact that Portugal's minister, the Marquis de Pompal was a true Son of Voltaire who hated the Jesuits and who, in pursuit of the state supremacy, wanted to see the Church herself reduced to obedient, political prop. It was the Spirit of the Enlightenment (so called) that crushed the Guarani and ran the Jesuits out of Portugues, Spanish and French lands.

All in all, though, the Mission's illustration of an episode did manage to point to the underlying historical tragedy of the Ibero-American experience as an opportunity seen and missed.

The one thing I found impossible was the casting of Jeremy Irons as Fr. Altamarino. Irons is simply to indelibly and thickly English. He can't open his mouth without conjuring up "Tweed and Country". And the worst part of this is that it insinuates the subliminal notion that the English were the Good Guys, whereas in historical fact, of all the scoundrels in las Americas they were the most perfidious.

Marquis de Pompal - Destroyer of Missions

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