Also, my Flickr account needs highlighting here, as there’s a lot more action over there than there is here.  It has lots of stuff from our last several trips (which should have gotten written up here and never did) and tons of animal photos.  It’s currently awaiting some photos from a trip to the Seattle Aquarium a couple of weeks ago, and will be getting our Norwescon photos after the event.

I will attempt to revive this to a much greater degree after NWC.  I’m being nagged to post a lot more about food, and there’s certainly no lack of nonsense in my head that I could be pontificating on.  But we’ll see how that goes.

(Also, a pre-emptive apology to folks on the LJ feed:  There’s a good chance this post will cause it to spit up the last eight posts again, despite their age.  I have no idea how to keep it from doing that, so if it does, you can just enjoy my old words all over again.  :P)

I’d been deliberately avoiding the trailer for this movie. Despite how often I ran across it posted on blogs and forums, despite how excited friends were getting about it, I refused to watch it. I hadn’t been to any movies at which the trailer was screened. I had not wanted to see this trailer, had not wanted to get a (very carefully shaped) preview of the film. But without warning, there it was on Sunday morning on the convention’s in-house channel, and despite my prior avoidance, I couldn’t help watching it.

As the first shadowed scenes played, one by one, with the hint of music from past films playing under them, I found a lump rising in my throat. As Indy’s hat landed on the ground, I found my eyes filling with tears. And by the time the entire thing had run its course, with music and motifs and characters that were intimately familiar to me and yet put in new settings, I was openly weeping.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and said to my husband, half-angrily and half-wistfully, “Dammit, I am supposed to be too old for this kind of fangirl nonsense.”

Gently, and with great understanding, he replied, “But you’re not.”

My entry into the world of fandom—of unabashed nerdiness and obsessive preoccupation with a made-up universe—started with Star Wars. And Star Wars led to Raiders of the Lost Ark, because of course a fan of that first universe would be thrilled about a movie that put Harrison Ford and George Lucas together again and matched them with the boy genius of Stephen Spielberg. I was all fired up about it from the moment I found out about it (in those quaint, long-ago days, from a story in the entertainment section in our local newspaper), and I followed all the scraps of news I could get over the year or so until its release, an impossibly long time for an obsessed adolescent nerd.

I saw Raiders at a preview, before it even opened wide; I still have the full-page newspaper ad advertising it. To go to it, I had to wheedle my parents into dropping me off at a mall a fair distance from our house, and allowing me to be there quite late on a school night. The preview itself was free, but to see it I had to buy a ticket to The Legend of the Lone Ranger, a terrible and massively failed attempt at reviving the Lone Ranger franchise, and that is notable here only for the fact that stuntman Terry Leonard did the same “under a moving vehicle” stunt in this as in Raiders, except he got badly injured doing it in this film. Anyway, I sat through the terrible Lone Ranger movie (which even at that young and relatively uncritical age I could tell was a terrible movie), and afterwards was rewarded by being one of the first to see this new adventure that I’d been waiting for so long.

I came out of it transformed. I was still a fangirl, nerdy and obsessive about this made-up universe (and I’ve still got tons of tie-in merchandise and a scrapbook of press clippings and ephemera to prove it); but I was also a fan of the movie itself, as a work and an experience. I can trace my profound love of the form of motion pictures directly to this movie. I would see it another 20 times that summer, in line with the whole nerdy obsessive fangirl thing; but each time I saw it, I also learned something new about how to make a great movie, and about how to appreciate films. It taught me about not only the technical aspects (oh yes, I learned all about how they made the bad guys’ faces melt off), but about the importance of the harder-to-quantify elements such as pacing and tone and how to use light and how film editing can be a kind of alchemy. It’s not a perfect movie—there’s no such thing—but there’s so much about it that works perfectly that my love for it only deepened with exposure and time. Raiders remains one of my all-time favorites, and incredibly important in my experiences as a fan and a film critic.

And part of the reason it is so high in my estimation is that its sequels didn’t measure up, and believe me, the fangirl was profoundly disappointed by that. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom gave me a headache the first time I saw it, a loud, cluttered, juvenile, screaming theme-park ride that battered at my senses for two hours and left me vaguely offended for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand for several years. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would be a pretty decent adventure movie if only it wasn’t a follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but since it is, its pale copy of the first one’s general plot and its over-reliance on bad comedy and Sean Connery’s charisma can’t help but be kind of disappointing (although I do still adore the opening sequence, which gave me a crush on River Phoenix that remains all too bittersweet). The sequels are excellent examples of how incredibly difficult it is to re-create the alchemy that makes truly great movies; whatever spirit had infused Raiders, it wasn’t something any of its makers could seem to capture again.

And so, all these many years later, I was skeptical, if not downright fearful, when I heard that they were, indeed, going to give it another shot, and that is why I avoided the trailers and kept the new movie out of my thoughts for as long as I could. It’s not just the impossibility of lightning in a bottle, either. It’s that I am not the same person who fell in love all those years ago. The new movie will be filtered through 27 years of experience, education, and cynicism, and the thought of it not only being disappointing but possibly being bad enough to taint the original is deeply upsetting. I’ve already lived through the crushing fannish nightmare of the Star Wars prequels, movies so bad and such betrayals of their progenitors that not even fangirl enthusiasm could overlook it, movies that have actually made me regret being a fan. I don’t want to go through anything like that with a new Indiana Jones film. With a new Indiana Jones film, the stakes are even higher, because it’s not just obsessive fangirlness, but also something that has become a core passion for me. I don’t want to have the foundation of one of the greatest loves of my life shaken. And thus I did my best to ignore the new film’s existence for as long as I could.

Yet when it was suddenly sprung on me after all that time studiously avoiding it, I reacted at a deep, near-primal level that I didn’t really even have control of. All of the right touchstones were there in that trailer, the familiar motifs and the music I know in my very bones and the images designed to whet my appetite and make me want more, and the knowledge—the cynical, decades-in-learning knowledge—that the entire trailer was very carefully crafted to evoke exactly that kind of response couldn’t stop me from reacting to it as if I were a breathless teenage fangirl all over again. And that’s why I wept: I wept in memory of all the joy the made-up world of Indiana Jones has brought me, and in gratitude for the great passion it introduced into my life. And I also wept for the intense fear I have that the new film might betray that joy and passion, and for the hope that it might, somehow, manage to reinforce them after all, and maybe even add to them. My husband was right: I’m not beyond being a fangirl, because being a fangirl has been the foundation of some very important things in my life. And it would just be foolish for me to deny that, as foolish as it was for me to deny for all those months that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull exists.

As I write this, it’s less than two hours until the movie opens. I am no longer the fangirl who had to be the first one there on opening day; opening days aren’t really my thing anymore, too much crowding and hassle and waiting in line, so I won’t be there tonight anyway, and I’ve honestly not entirely decided yet that I will be going to see it at all. Of course, I can say that with the almost-certain knowledge that my husband will manage to coax me into it, one way or another. If I don’t go, I’ll never know, for good or bad. But if I do go, I’ll definitely know, for good or bad. And I suppose, in the end, it’s better that I know.

It’s officially summer. Style Council is in the car tape deck, New Gold Dream is in the stereo in the house, and the evenings are full of burnished gold air and skies the color of iolite and the green of growth, so intense it hurts. And I’m filled with the distinctive mix of calm joy and aching nostalgia that only summer evenings cause.

Sitting under the elder tree at the spot where the yards met, perfectly shaded in a patch of cool thick grass, contemplating the quiet aliveness of a summer afternoon. Shouting, wordlessly, happily, and hearing the echo of my voice off the roof of the church across the street–and doing it again, just to hear it again.

The Oregon coast, wide soft stretches of sand gently polished by the surf, turning up stones and carrying them eagerly to my grandmother to see if they were the agates she so treasured. A green glass float, carried practically to my feet by a wave, as if the Pacific wished to give me a gift. Breakfast in the restaurant above the water, morning fog too thick to see the surfline, begging for a chance to run into it and see if it was as soft and caressing as it looked through the windows (it wasn’t, but nevermind).

Nevada desert thunderstorms, roaring out of the sky like dragons, cracking the air wide open with power and sound, followed by the soft caressing patter of rain and the smell of ozone, the most hopeful scent in the world.

Lake Tahoe, the smell of ponderosa pines in the sun as we trudged to the shore with our chairs and cooler, then bursting out of the treeline to the gleaming pearl and sapphire of the beach. Tiny fish in the water, trying over again and endlessly to capture them, just one, in my bucket, swirling in circles in the water. The taste of a sun-warmed sandwich, dusted with grit from my sand-coated fingers, and still-cool green grapes, crisp and snapping as I bit into them, like the sensation of cold captured in perfect tiny spheres.

Virginia City, the anticipation coming up the curve of the mountain in the shimmering heat, stepping out of the car to sun too bright to stand and too welcoming to avoid, the streets dusty and strangely quiet no matter how many tourists were there, and the sensation that the ghosts were simply waiting patiently for us all to go away so they could come out.

Riding my bike along the Burke-Gilman trail, even before it was a trail, pedaling over the gravel left from the railroad bed with little concern for the energy it took, sailing through clouds of gnats in the evening air and fruitlessly swatting them away. Picking morning glories to twine in my hair and around my bike basket, and watching them slowly close as I rode back home in the dusk.

Sunday afternoons at the Sand Point pool, the smell of chlorine and the sound of feet pattering on the concrete, swimming to exhaustion, Marco Polo and water tag and seeing how deep I could go, diving over and over and over again knowing that people would watch the perfect arc of my perfect form and loving the sensation of the board springing out from under my feet, the curve of my spine and the soft rush of the controlled fall to be enveloped by the water. Climbing out, reluctantly, only when the lifeguards forced it, and retreating to the snack bar, to have fat fluffy fries straight out of the fryer, too hot to touch, drizzled with ketchup the counterboys kept in the refrigerator for just that purpose.

Blackberry brambles, crowding and choking the paths on the hill, with goldenrod poking up in soft plumes to be picked and twisted into bracelets while strolling the paths, deciding where to start picking. Berries warm with the sun, crunchy from dirt and tiny insects, eaten straight off the vine with no care for the contamination, sweeter than any treat the ice-cream man could serve up except when they weren’t and the sourness bit at the tongue like tiny fangs, picking and eating till fingertips were stained purple with juice and dirt and the sweetness overwhelmed all else.

Camp on the Peninsula, a single-night campout away from our cabins on the top of a huge flat-topped rock jutting into the water. Waking just after sunrise, cold and yet strangely cozy in my sleeping bag, watching the early morning sea wind rustle the grasses and listening to the surf, and realizing that I was mere feet from the edge of the cliff and might have rolled off in my sleep, yet not disturbed by the thought.

Dusk in DC, the beginning of relief from the stifling soggy daytime heat, wandering among the brick buildings of our complex, stopping at the honeysuckle and gently plucking the tiny trumpet blossoms to suck the delicate nectar while watching the fireflies fade and shine and circle and swirl in the darkening air.

Lying in the hammock on the balcony, watching the Soviet tankers churn the perfect blue of the Bosporus and feeling the rumble of their engines, contemplating the people on those ships and what they were like and if they ever had fun, and whether I’d ever know anything about them. Rousing myself from the laziness to tramp down the cobblestones to the market and buy a melon, the greengrocer smiling indulgently at this little blond Western girl who knew only enough Turkish to say “please” and “thank you” but was big enough to carry a watermelon back up the hill by herself. Stopping on the way back by the wisteria arbor, to marvel at the perfect balance and perfect purple of the dangling blossoms, until the rumble of another tanker reminded me where I was.

Going to the Black Sea, the long drive through the fairytale prettiness and wildness of Belgrade Forest, with the reward at the end the glorious stretch of beach and water and the whole day to spend in it. Bodysurfing in the dark water, riding waves far too large for such a little wiry girl, learning how to skirt the edge of the undertow, making sandcastles and mud sculptures when the pounding waves overmatched my childhood energy, then returning to the water with ferocity when I’d recovered. Riding back home through the fairytale forest, dozing, skin glowing with sunburn, every muscle throbbing with the dull gentle buzz of complete and perfect exhaustion.

Another part of the Black Sea, sitting on the honey-polished wood of the vintage boat in the honey-colored sunshine, staring over the railing at the black water below, criss-crossed with countless small pulsing jellyfish, their transparent bodies marked on the inside with small X shapes that stretched and contracted as they swam, the pattern of their movement and endless numbers inducing a mindless, timeless state like some sort of midafternoon meditation.

Evening runs taken around the manmade lake in our condo complex, after the Georgia heat had cooled enough to make the humidity bearable, stopping on the far side where hardly anyone ever came to sit on the small flat rock and listen to the silence in the midst of a busy city, and hope fearfully for a glimpse of the water moccasin said to live under the very rock I sat on (it never appeared, if indeed it even existed).

Bicycle rides through the flat, quiet cul-de-sacs in the dusk, Kate and I going in soft lazy circles around and between each other in a teenage version of infinity loops for nothing besides the pleasure of the motion and the wind in our hair. Walking to the mini-mart through grass taller than we were, ears buzzing with the noise of grasshoppers and beetles all around us, shaking the stalks to watch the ‘hoppers fly away in brutal Texas sun and stop just far enough ahead of us for us to scare them up again.

Judy’s father’s ranch, playing in the shaded creek with the dogs while the sun was high, coming back to the house to dry off for barbecue and potato salad, then rides in the lengthening sun through the vineyards in the back of a pickup with the dogs and a boy a little older than I, trading shy grins and awkward touches of fingers as he showed me how to squeeze the pulp from muscat grapes without eating the skin, and the slight stinging bitterness of the skins on my lips nonetheless, a substitute for the kisses I was too bashful to ask him for.

A warm long night, dinner and a late movie not enough for us, so we drove to Lake Belton and sat on the dock in the darkness, listening to the water lap at the pilings, talking of things that I knew better than to talk with him about and never certain if he would take me seriously or not, until the tension became too much and he told me had to take me home before something wrong happened.

Long, long, long summer nights, alone with my depression and my thoughts and the stars and Roxy Music’s Avalon, writing and dreaming and fearing and hurting and hoping, until I greeted the first soft pinks and golds of dawn with Duran Duran’s “Like An Angel,” a song that might have been just for me, then taking to my bed before anyone else could come along and wrench me back into a reality that was worse than the darkness inside my own head.

Walking towards the glow of the ballfield in the dark, knowing we’d already missed the first two innings, and suddenly stopping where I was to spin in a circle, my face turned up to the stars that sparkled like crystal even against the blaze of the park lights, until I became too dizzy to stand and threw myself into the grass, breathing in the last of its daytime warmth and much too happy in the completeness of the moment to put it into words, while he just stood and smiled, bemused and uncertain and faintly embarassed by me.

Sitting on the screened-in porch at the back of the house, trying to read in the cooling late-afternoon air but constantly distracted by the burble of the creek and the jays and squirrels in the trees, catching a glimpse of movement in the grass out of the corner of my eye and looking up to see a small brown rabbit loping slowly and softly across the yard, utterly unconcerned at my presence even when I sat up and closed the book to watch it make its way across and into the trees and out of my sight.

Seagrass and sand and the weathered-soft shingles of the beach houses in Sandbridge, bobbing in the water in a soft afternoon rainstorm to watch a pod of Atlantic dolphins gambol by yards from the shore, walking in the surf just before the sun went down and returning to the house to sit on the deck and look up at the stars before tucking myself into bed with a candle and a book and the sound of the waves, away from home all on my own for the first time ever and incredibly happy.

An uncommonly sweltering Sunday afternoon, coming home after a morning of family obligation in silk dress and suit and tie, stripping to underwear to sit in bed with the fan and the paper and nothing else in the world to worry about.

Abruptly deciding to drive to Olympia, just because, stopping for comics and drinks and at the store where he’d once worked, talking about nothing special and everything important as we tried to get to know each other and figure out just what exactly we had gotten ourselves into.

A rooftop, a song I love, the full moon over Beacon Hill, my first time watching someone I was just starting to know make fire dance, and the feeling that at that moment I belonged, completely and absolutely and with perfect harmony, exactly where I was.

A blistering July day, a bluff overlooking the Columbia, the sweep and majesty of what the river had carved in time and force that would never be within my understanding, and the feeling of the sun burning away the self-pity I had encased myself in, till my mind and heart felt as broad and scoured clean as the rocks the river ran through.

And for six summers, just a turn away from my desk, the sight of a lake, water mirroring sky and dotted with sails in daytime, glass-smooth quiet and jeweled with lights at night, as surely home as anything has ever been.

…and that was where the first version ended in 2003. What do I have from the summers since then?

The still, small hours of a soft summer night, walking home to a brand-new solo apartment after seven years of shared housing, from a long stretch of dancing that I needed badly, and passing a cement corridor with a cellist sitting in it, his back to the street. A moment’s confusion for me, and then, as he started to play, understanding, as I heard the deep, mournful notes of the cello ring down the corridor and bounce off its end, to wash past me in waves and across the street and echo against the building there, and they seem to throb deep inside me and wrap around the complicated emotions I carried in a difficult year. And no one but me was there to hear it.

A riduclously warm summer evening, wearing crisp summertime whites and too overheated to rest or sleep, and a call from the other side of the world and a war, from someone who held my heart and I had not seen for months and would not see for months more, a call that went on as long as he could get away with it and when he couldn’t anymore became an IM session that somehow, through some kindness of circumstance, lasted for hours and hours, until it too could no longer be gotten away with and turned into one last, brief call, every second of all of it a treasure more precious than rubies. Reluctantly hanging up the phone and hearing the first notes of the birds, still in the dark wee hours, preparing to welcome the new day, and knowing we were one day closer to not being half a world and a war apart.

A walk through a neighborhood of vintage houses and eclectic gardens, picking sweet peas that matched my jacket to twine in my hair, and being hailed by strangers for the loveliness of it. A crow swooping past and dropping a pair of tweezers at my feet. The contrast of beauty and oddness resonating, all too strongly and yet in the best way, with the memory of a dear friend gone exactly one year that day, and wishing so much she could be there to share both qualities.

Summer in Florida, an unthinkable weirdness and trial for a Pacific NWer, the heat and the damp so heavy and thick they were almost tangible. Witnessing the effects of the hurricane we barely missed, sobering in its destruction even when it just glanced off the area at not even full strength. It would go on to destroy a uniquely American city, but we didn’t know that yet when we first looked at its effects there. Fat orange dragonflies everywhere in the water left behind by the hurricane’s rains, and the weird contrast of torn, uprooted plants and intense greenness everywhere.

A green slope of hill overlooking a small arm of Puget Sound, on a day so perfectly bright and warm that nothing in all the world could be any better. Sitting in a lounge chair in front of this view, as part of a weekend of heedless luxury in a hotel, alternating reading and dozing and watching everything going on down the green slope and on the blue water and across the bricks of the terrace I sat on, with moths and dragonflies and hawks and crows and eagles to fill in the gaps between people and boats, leaving me with a feeling that I had no cares, no worries, no desires and no needs of any kind, that for that day, my life was nothing more than that place and that feeling.

This summer has just started. I am curious and eager to see what memories I’ll have at the end of it.

It seemed at first that we were destined to not make it to the tasting. Although we’d thought we’d left ourselves plenty of transit time, we managed to get trapped between openings of two of the bridges over Seattle’s Ship Canal and the associated traffic, and then it turned out I’d gotten the location of the Theo factory wrong. When we finally got there, 10 minutes late, the tables were all full and they had no record of our reservation. Fortunately, the organizer took my word for it that we had, indeed, signed up, and told us that we could sit on one of the couches in the back and they would set us up with glasses. And thus we got to have a remarkable tasting experience.

We got to taste five ports, paired with five chocolates. The first was the Fine Selected White Port, paired with a thyme ganache chocolate. (The ganaches are what most people would call “truffles,” but the Theo representative explained that technically, truffles are rolled and enrobed by hand, and their filled chocolates are rectangular and machine-enrobed, so they prefer to call them “ganaches.”) I had never tried white port before; while it definitely has the almost-cloying sweetness of the muscat grape that is one of its ingredients, the other grapes modify that sweetness and make it refreshing and bright. Mr. Symington noted that white ports are generally drunk as aperitifs, and suggested using this one as a long drink (what Americans would call a “spritzer”) with tonic water or sparkling water. I felt that this port would be excellent with green things: crudites (perhaps with a light, tangy dip), or a light greens-based chilled soup, or melon (perhaps with prosciutto, though as a vegetarian I can’t actually state that). Because of this green harmony, the thyme ganache was a very nice complement; thyme is pleasantly green and just a bit sweet, and it harmonized with the brightness of the port and smoothed the bitter edge of the dark chocolate.

The second was the Otima 10-year tawny port, paired with Madagascar 65% cacao chocolate. The color of this port is extraordinary, like liquid amber. The aroma made me swoon even before I tasted it, rich with hints of wood and spice but a little sweet as well. The taste was a beautiful balance of dry and sweet, full in the mouth without being overpowering. It made me want to have it with an aged chevre–it would probably be good with fresh goat cheese as well, but I could really imagine how well it would go with the more mellow, woody flavors of an aged cheese. I found the chocolate a bit of a disappointment; it seemed harsh, slightly “dirty” and overly acidic to me. However, it did bring out peppery notes with the port, which was quite pleasant.

The third was Warre’s Warrior, their signature brand (it’s the oldest port brand in the world), with a 71% cacao chocolate from Cote d’Ivoire. The Warrior is really pretty much what port should be: rich, deep, with a balance of red and sweet flavors against a slightly spicy finish. Whole-grain crackers and a blue cheese (I don’t know what kind, unfortunately; the “blue” flavor was upfront, but mixed with a buttery, smooth texture) were also provided during the tasting, and I tried a little with this port–the combination was wonderful, though it made me crave some walnuts to go along with it. The chocolate, meanwhile, was extremely smooth despite the high cacao content, with a hint of cinnamon on the finish. With the port, it deepened the fruity notes, while the port brought out sweetness in the chocolate.

The fouth tasting was a late bottled vintage paired with a Ghana 84% dark chocolate. LBV port is cask-aged for four years, then bottled and allowed to age in the bottle for several more years. The result of this is a concentration of all the port flavors, with a strong emphasis on dark cherry and wood notes and a pleasant hint of tannins, much richer than the Warrior. We tried this one with the cheese as well, and found it even more perfect for cheese–I could happily sit down with a bottle of this and a selection of blues and make a meal. The chocolate, meanwhile, was intensely cocoa-y, but really nicely balanced between sweet and bitter, with a vague hint of vanilla. I typically don’t like this high a cacao content, but the balance of this one made it quite enjoyable. Combined with the port, it made for an experience of deep woodsy and dark flavors overlaid with the sweetness of dark fruits. We savored both for as long as we could.

The last tasting was a 1985 vintage port with a fig and fennel ganache. I had never expected to taste a vintage port, let alone from the hands of its maker (Mr. Symington decanted this one perosnally), and it was quite an experience. The color of this port is perfectly dark red, no brown or orange, like looking into a perfect ruby. The taste was incredibly complex and not something I can easily describe; there was plenty of fruit, but also a beautiful mix of tannins, and a certain floral quality. My husband and I both agreed that this was a port to drink on its own, not to clutter up with other foods. However, the chocolate did provide a nice complement; the fig gave it a dark depth that matched the depth of the port, and the herbal-liquorice note of the fennel contrasted the richness and gave it a little airiness.

All of the tastings were completely worth the price and the hassle, and we’d have been very happy with those on their own. But what truly made the evening outstanding was the presence of Mr. Symington. He is, of course, well-versed in the process of making port, and he spoke in great detail about the viticulture of port and the aspects of the region where their grapes are grown, and the technical aspects of casking and aging, and this was extremely informative and helped increase our appreciation for the port. I even learned why, in the historical novels I loved in my adolescence, there were references to a “pipe” of wine: It’s derived from the Portuguese word for “barrel.” He’s also very funny; he poked gentle fun at the puffery of many American winemakers who feel the need to justify their presence in the wine world by not acknowledging the existence of wine from other regions, and he had the room roaring when he described the “difficult” years of vintage ports (the stretch of time between the fruitiness of youth and the rich complexity of a proper aging) with a Portuguese expression usually used for adolscent girls and that translates roughly as “the locked-in-the-cupboard years.” (He also apologized for the paternalistic sexism of the expression, but I thought it was hilarious, having been an adolescent girl in my time and knowing the kind of mindset and behavior the expression refers to.) And he noted impishly that he would really like to take some of their 1870 vintage port and pour it over vanilla ice cream, but he fears his brother and cousins (his partners in the business) would disown him if he dared to do it.

In addition to these qualities, however, he has a strong sense of perspective about his responsibility to this business and to the wine. He said that he views himself as the “caretaker” of Warre’s and that it is his responsibility to look after it and make sure it is passed on to people (hopefully his children and nieces/nephews) who will have the same sense of responsibility to it. He can’t just sell it off and skip merrily away with the proceeds, because the weight of heritage that was passed on to him is important for him to maintain. In terms of his responsibility to the wine, he noted that his U.S. distributor has put their 1977 vintage port on the list for this tour he is doing, and he asked them to remove it; the 1977 is in its “difficult” stage, and he felt it would do a disservice to the customers and the port to serve something that would leave the drinker unenthused. This kind of respect for the quality is a lovely thing to see, and his views about his place in the world and the business quite touched us. We made a point at the end of the evening to thank him directly for his time and sharing his knowledge. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have gotten that.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, we were also treated to a brief tour of Theo’s factory at the very end of everything. How many of us had childhood dreams of visiting a chocolate factory? Well, I did, at any rate, and I finally got the chance. Since it was evening, things weren’t running, but we at least got to see all the equipment and hear an overview of their roasting and manufacturing process. This isn’t a big sleek soulless enterprise (yet, anyway); it’s still a small, specialized business that started with more determination than resources, and many of the machines in the factory were purchased second-hand and could even be considered antiques. It was fun to see the spirit they’re after in the color-coding of the process and the charming character of all the older equipment. I’m hoping to go back for an actual tour during operating hours, and perhaps take a group of friends and make an event of it.

As we left and headed home after this remarkable evening, I was profoundly struck by a sense of how wonderful my life is. To have the chance to taste port with its maker and share in his knowledge, to have quirky organic chocolate and see where it’s made–these are things that don’t come along every day, and I’m very, very glad that the chance came to us, and that we took it.

(What follows can be spoilery if you’re unfamiliar with the film.)

Many people I know were surprised to find out that this production is a ballet and not a typical West End/Broadway style musical with big sweeping treacly ballads and rousing group songs, and at least a few were turned off by that. Frankly, I’d have found that style much more off-putting. Edward, while not silent, doesn’t speak much; he doesn’t really know how to talk to others, and his expressions of his emotions and desires are largely physical. Thus, turning his story into ballet, where all the action and emotion is expressed through physical movement, seems ideal to me. I needed no dialogue or story-songs to understand what was going on; the dancing conveyed everything beautifully. And it is, for the most part, beautiful dancing.

The numbers involving Edward and Kim, the perfect blond daughter of the family that takes him in and who he falls hopelessly for, are all sparkling with tenderness and emotion, most particularly the sequence in which the photos of Kim in her cheerleader outfit (the first glimpse Edward gets of her) come to life and dance him to sleep. I’ve rarely seen the delighted joy of first infatuation conveyed with such giddy sweetness. And the fantasy topiary ballet is a thing of sheer genius, both in emotion and in technical achievement. The group numbers can be unwieldy and sometimes do rather go on, but they are great fun to watch; it’s particularly illustrative to pay attention what’s happening around the edges, where little pieces of character and motivation are subtly dropped in with bits of business involving one or two characters outside of the central group dancing. The Christmas party sequence particularly delighted me, both for the sheer fun of the dancing and for how many individual things of import were going on amidst the fun–just like a real party.

I think the highest praise I can give this production is that it manages to be both faithful in the most important ways to its source, and a standout creation of its own. It doesn’t feel like a Burton film transplanted to the stage; it’s more generous to the so-called “normal” characters than Burton was, yet maintains the sense of Edward’s isolation and yearning to be accepted and the sweet melancholy, along with just enough flavor of Burton’s signature visual style to honor him without being slavish. Something that really stood out to me here, and wasn’t conveyed as skilfully in the film, is the way that absolutely good and well-meaning people can nonetheless, and in all innocence, turn the “freaks” into benign circus attractions. The good people of Hope Springs do their best, for the most part, to accept Edward, even to finding a use for his strange disability, and yet they never quite get past being fascinated by what’s different about him, rather than by who he is. The generosity granted to the “normal” characters in this production is what helps play up this contrast so piquantly, and what makes Kim’s attraction to Edward so poignant–she’s the only one who does see him for who he is.There are some changes to the story, some of them certainly understandable for the restrictions of the stage and a story told all in dance, and some of them a little less so. The version here of Edward’s origins is less clear and somewhat less touching than it is in the film, and the opening sequence feels rushed. The event that causes the townspeople to turn against Edward is also kind of rushed and jumbled, and doesn’t carry quite the punch that it should. And due to the sheer number of characters, we often don’t get as much clarity in their motivations as would be nice, particularly the Bible-thumping Evercreeches; we see their objections (and their attractions) to Edward, but their reasons (aside from some rather lazy, knee-jerk Christian references) are muddled and a bit confusing.

Some of the changes, however, are brilliant, and exactly what make this production stand as its own creature and not a slavish reproduction. Making the setting definitively 1950s adds to the “long ago and far away” fable-like quality, along with really sharply outlining the contrast between “normal” and “freak” (and how narrow those definitions can be, when some of the kids are clearly telegraphed in 1950s “juvie” costume and attitudes). Edward’s adventures as a hairdresser are still important to the story, but less drawn-out and fetishized than in the film; this compactness helps emphasize how Edward’s place in the community is strictly tied to what he can offer them. And the general sense of kindness given to all the characters helps make all of the actions more keenly felt and not as simplistic as they can sometimes be in the film. It’s very, very easy to hate Jim in the film. It’s not quite as simple in this production, which deepened the melancholy for me.

And the things that were kept–including sections of Danny Elfman’s score for the places where their emotional impact matters most, and the ice angel, and the final scene between Edward and Kim even though it’s a pas de deux and not dialogue–are exactly the things that should have been kept. They’re Bourne and his collaborators acknowledging what in the film worked perfectly and honoring the inspiration that gave. Adapting something that already exists and is already beloved is a big challenge, and some adapters react to that by throwing away critical elements to put their own stamp on the work. Bourne realized he didn’t need to do that here, and it’s part of what makes the entire production so lovely.

Visually and technically, there’s not a thing about this that I could complain about. The stagecraft is ingenious, conveying scope and emotion and tone without relying heavily on massive set pieces; the scene changes are swift and compact, and the set contains just what it needs to get the point across. The use of scrims and lighting (and judicious placement of snow machines) is also ingenious, and I spent a fair amount of time marveling at how much wonder can still be achieved by such technically simple means even in this age of CGI. The costuming and craftsmanship is gorgeous; Edward, of course, is a marvel, as are the topiary dancers, but even the more “normal” costumes are not just pretty to look at but contain bits of character in them, such as the Grubbs all in matching, vaguely tacky prints, and the perfectly doll-like Cissy Monroe, and Mrs. Upchurch who has color-coordinated gloves for everything, even her bathing costume.

I have no fault with the performers, either. It’s somewhat difficult to give names for this performance, as the cast is comparatively small for the number of roles contained and nearly everyone doubles up and trades off on characters, so I’m not always certain who played which role in the performance we saw or if I’ve gotten the names right. I believe Sam Archer was Edward for this performance; while he lacks the heartbreaking sense of fragility that Johnny Depp gave Edward in the film, he beautifully communicates the confusion and yearning, as well as a sense of resolve that the film’s Edward didn’t always show. Kim in the film has always been its biggest weakness for me, underwritten and further straitened by Winona Ryder’s oddly flat, screechy performance; here, however, she is much more sympathetic and believable, particularly in her interactions with Jim. Michela Meazza as Joyce is brilliant, weirdly malevolent even within the context of being one of the story’s villains; there’s something insectlike about her movement and performance, the sense of a praying mantis searching for a mate (and of course we all know what female mantises do to their mates). And I found myself with a real soft spot for Shelby Williams as Marilyn-Ann Evercreech; she’s like a Wednesday Addams that nobody ever listened to, and her almost offhand yearnings for Edward, despite knowing how wrong they are, are both funny and a little pathetic. The rest of the cast was excellent, fine dancers and comedians all, but these were the standouts for me.

For both of us, the performance ended with a perfectly-placed fall of snow and honestly-earned tears. Everything that we valued in the story was there, and many things that added enormously to it were there as well. We couldn’t have asked for more.

Since I really hate ridiculous responses in myself, it’s time to get back on track.  This is as much a reminder to myself to get this going again as it is an apology.  So, worthwhile content within the week.  Really.

The first reason is that my husband is from Florida, and though he’s lived here for the better part of three years now, he hasn’t had much chance to really explore the area. And while I’m a Seattle native and have lived in the Puget Sound area for most of my life, I often get into that native mindset of taking where I live for granted. Having a non-native around who wants to explore the area is a great excuse to get me off my butt and out into things so I can show him around. The trip to Leavenworth is a beautiful one, and Leavenworth itself is an…experience, so it seemed a good option.

The other reason is that there are a whole lot of wineries in the region, and a number of them have chosen Leavenworth as a good location to showcase their wares, as it’s reasonably close to their location and a tourist cynosure. My husband might charitably be called a fanatic about wine (he skips the charity and calls himself a wino), and his enthusiasm has folded me into the interest. So here we had an opportunity to take a gorgeous road trip to an interesting spot and check out wines–it was pretty much a positive choice all around.

We chose to go over Stevens Pass, which took us north of Seattle and then east through the farming country at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and up into the powerful landscapes of the mountains themselves. The Cascades are a volcanic range, and comparatively young, so they are loaded with tall, sharp crags carpeted with huge conifers and abrupt shears of bare rock. This time of year, the clouds touch fairly low, so patches of mist snuggle into the forest like stray ghosts, reaching up towards the sky, and a rain shower might strike at any moment. There’s nothing gentle about driving through the Cascades; they’re a stark reminder that nature is bigger than you are, and it always will be, and it will never care about you. It’s both sobering and thrilling.

This particular year, there was an added sobering element, which was the bareness of even the highest crags and the weak, shallow trickles that should have been powerful alpine rivers. This has been a year of drought, possibly the worst ever recorded in the area; it hasn’t been much felt in the human-populated lowlands as last winter’s massive snowpack helped protect us from water shortages, but it’s starkly apparent in the bare, browned mountains. Visiting the Cascades helps remind us that we are dependent for our water on what happens with the weather in those sharp crags, and a good way to understand how what happens in nature affects how we live our lives.

The trip was about two and a half hours (not counting our stop in Monroe for lunch). We’d kind of made the decision to go at the last minute, even though we’d talked about it for a couple of weeks, and so we didn’t even get going until noon, meaning we pulled into Leavenworth shortly after 3 p.m. Our intent had been to visit some of the winery facilities nearby, and since it was so late in the day we figured we wouldn’t be able to stop at more than one or two. What we hadn’t realized, based on the brochure that was our sole source of information, was how many wineries had tasting rooms right there in town. We stopped in at the first one we saw, right on Hwy 2, and the staff there, upon finding out that we were there to do a “wine tour,” very helpfully gave us a flyer pointing out all the tasting rooms in town. There are seven of them on Front Street, the primary tourist drag, which is itself only a few blocks long. This solved the problem of us not having time to visit more than one or two wineries, and we essentially spent the next three hours drinking our way through downtown Leavenworth.

We did miss one of the tasting rooms on Front Street, but that still left us with six (plus our first stop). That was more than enough, really. The minimum number of wines we tried at any one place was three; at one, a joint room for two wineries, we tasted ten different wines in half an hour. The disadvantage of this, of course, is that after a time most of the wines blend together in the mind and it becomes difficult to remember what one had anywhere. A lot of the experience sits in my memory as a blur of fruity whites and oaky reds, sugars and tannins competing for space on my tastebuds. Nonetheless, we did come away from it with some useful general impressions and a few standouts.

I’m a newcomer to the world of wine. Before meeting my husband, I rarely drank wine; when I did, it might be a white zinfandel (the only type I could ever remember clearly enough to order by name), or perhaps a dry white, and I did like sparkling wines. I never drank reds–they tasted “funny” to me. My husband has done a great deal in educating me about wine and encouraging me to try different kinds, and as it happens, a lot of the arcana of wine fits well with my general critical/analytical mindset. I’m not a snob about wine–not at all–and while I understand what the terms “nose” and “terroir” mean, if I ever actually use them seriously, I will deserve the beatdown I get. But I do completely get the concept behind talking about notes in wine and how flavors that have nothing to do with grapes can be part of the overall experience of a wine. Drinking a whole bunch of different wines in a day was great for refining the way I can identify the individual flavors and determine what I like in a wine and how the combinations of flavors affect what I think about a wine.

Generally speaking, I seem to prefer sweeter wines over drier ones (which I know in some circles marks me as an “immature” or “unsophisticated” wine drinker, but really, screw that–as John Cleese said in Wine for the Confused, “A good wine is one you enjoy”). Rieslings are good to me, as are viogniers, due to the strong fruity notes, although even there I seem to better like the ones that are more floral-sweet than just fruit-sweet, and I like every gewurtztraminer I’ve ever tried. Chardonnays really depend on the particulars of the wine; while I like the general crispness of the type, the more oaky they are, the less enthusiastic I am about the crispness. Pinot grigios also seem to depend on the particulars of the individual wine. Blush wines seem to really agree with my palate; the sweetness is balanced by the depth of the red grapes in them. As for reds, cabernets and merlots are a challenge for me, as my palate tends to interpret the tannins as a kind of burned-rubber flavor, but it depends on how wet and smooth they ultimately are. However, I generally like syrahs, despite the bold character of the grape, because the spiciness offsets the tannins for me. And when it comes to dessert wines, I’ve yet to meet a late-harvest or ice wine I didn’t adore, though I do have a sweetness cap that sometimes get crossed. With sparkling wines, gently sweet is better than dry.

In our tastings yesterday, there were strandouts. At Gold Digger Cellars, we chose to pick up a bottle of their 2005 gewurztraminer, a sweet white wine that even my dry-red-loving husband enjoyed. Silver Lake Winery provided a few notables; we both really enjoyed their 2003 syrah, and I was impressed by their 2005 Roza riesling and Roza rose–the riesling had a lovely balance of fruit and floral, while the rose had rich notes of strawberry and spice. Another good blush wine for me was the Kestrel Vintners 2005 rose, which had a hint of effervescence to go with its fruit. And Icicle Ridge Winery floored me with a white merlot, which managed to combine the deep red flavors of merlot with a bright, light feeling. At Willow Crest, my husband was utterly seduced by their syrah port, which combined the traditional feeling of a port with some lovely floral notes. I actually preferred the Pasek Cellars port we tried at the same time, which is fruitier and yet has a peppery finish; both ports were heavenly with chocolate, however. And Pasek also managed to persuade us into a non-grape wine; their cranberry wine is cranberrry juice but a hundred times better, the fermentation reducing the acrid edge of the berries but leaving the distinctive tang; I got a bottle of that with the intent of sharing it with my extended family over the holidays, though it would also make a terrific late-summer wine with grilled foods. At one tasting room we tried an Italian dessert wine that was gently sparkling and the perfect blend of sweet and dry, a perfect pastry one; but foolishly, we didn’t write down the name of it.

The whole experience left us a bit wined-out and, at least in my case, not a little tipsy, but it was incredibly enjoyable to try all these different wines, experience the nuances of flavor and find out abouthow the wines are made and what the winemakers’ philosophies are. I love to learn how things are done and especially to see people who are passionate about what they do. We also had a really lovely experience at the Icicle Ridge tasting room, where one of the employees is a military wife with a husband in Iraq. Upon learning that my husband is active duty, they were very interested in hearing our impressions of life during wartime, and really warm and welcoming towards us, encouraging us to pay a visit to the winery proper when we get a chance.

As for Leavenworth itself, since we spent so much time on the wine, we didn’t really experience much of the town itself, though we did visit several of the shops. I still find the rigorously enforced faux-Bavarian style of the town vaguely absurd, and have to wonder how challenging it is to grow up there in the midst of such a stylized and tourist-focused environment; but it does have its own charm, absurd or not, and people in the shops were unceasingly friendly without being false or forced. It was a really nice way to spend an afternoon.

We came back over the pass in the deepening dusk, which was just as glorious in a different way as coming over earlier in the day. I can’t think of many better ways to spend a late-summer afternoon.

I loved the first PotC movie. I loved it enough to see it multiple times, something that’s become increasingly rare for me with mainstrem Hollywood releases. I loved it in part because it was so unexpected; who would have thought that a movie based on a theme park ride, of all things, and with Jerry Bruckheimer’s name on it, would have been such fun, loaded with such richness of character and place and a genuine sense that the people who made it had a really good time, rather than it just being an empty exercise in noise and branding?

And so, while I definitely looked forward to Dead Man’s Chest, I also came at it with trepidation, because it’s a sequel.

Dead Man’s Chest is very, very much a sequel. It suffers from the sequel motto of “bigger, louder, MORE” that most sequels do, and thereby sums up for me what is precisely the problem with the sequel model. I think the core appeal of a sequel is that there’s something about the story or the characters that people are attracted to; they want to see what else happens to those characters or what more goes on in the world that the first movie created, and if the story is well-written, it shouldn’t need anything else. But Hollywood, with its perpetual combination of greed, arrogance, and insecurity, rarely seems to trust the characters and story on their own. It has to lard sequels up with more action, more comedy, more noise, more toys, out of fear that the audience won’t come back without greater flash. And over the past couple of decades, we, the audience, have become complicit with that, accepting empty sequels that all too often cheat the characters and stories we loved in the first place for the sake of all that extra flash, and the cycle perpetuates.

DMC doesn’t cheat the characters and story, not exactly. But it does load up with action and comedy and noise and toys that aren’t really necessary. We get an extended sequence on an island of cannibals that is little more than an excuse for Jack and Will to meet cute, and for cheap, shallow laughs. We get a big, flashy swordfight that is a great set piece, but exists solely to be a set piece (and seriously shorts the actual swordfighting; I’m deeply disappointed at the poor quality of the fight scenes in this film). We get lots of bang and flash on board ships that rarely feels like it adds up to much. We get glaring, beat-you-over-the-head references to the ride that was the film’s inspiration, just in case our attention spans are so ludicrously short that we forgot. We get a Jack Sparrow who is too often (especially at the beginning of the film) a parody of himself; there are times when the dialogue put in Johnny Depp’s mouth doesn’t feel like part of the character but like someone making fun of what they think the character is. And, most seriously, we get villainy that is gorgeous to look at but not nearly as shiver-inducing as it should be.

I’ve got a serious problem with Davy Jones. For all the wondrousness of technology applied towards the character (and for all of Bill Nighy’s astounding expressiveness underneath the CGI tentacles), he never feels believable. He’s neither as horror-yarn frightening as the story wants him to be (there’s no moment equivalent to Barbossa’s “You’d best be believing in ghost stories…You’re in one” from the first movie), nor given a convincing sense of the bereft, lovelorn human he was that the main plot point hinges on. He’s a joy to watch, to be sure, an unmitigated triumph of the blending of actor and technology; but I just don’t really buy him as a threat so horrible that Jack would go to any lengths to escape him. I’m also bothered by the way the film slows to a tortuga’s lumbering in most of the Flying Dutchman scenes. Perhaps the intent is to give us plenty of opportunity to marvel at the creativity of the character design (which I will readily admit is damned impressive) and the skill of the makeup and CGI artists; but those scenes do as much as the extraneous set pieces to drag the film out longer than it needs to be, and not as much as they should in moving the story along.

I’ve also got a problem with the film’s other villain, the East India Company bureaucrat Beckett. Some have complained that this is a pointless character, but I disagree. He’s the perfect foil for Jack Sparrow, a man to whom freedom matters more than anything and whose very appeal lies in that uncompromising, unfettered activity. Beckett doesn’t just want to shut Jack down; he wants to bind Jack’s actions, bury them under layers of rules and bureaucracy, and thus remove the essence of what Jack is. His earliest scenes are some of the most efficient in the film, elegantly laying out the specificity of this threat. Unfortunately, the fact that he’s stuck back in Port Royal (rather than being out on the water chasing our heroes, as Norrington was in the first film) somewhat limits the effectiveness of his villainy, and he becomes less and less compelling as the movie goes on. I think this is a terrible shame, as his potential scariness is definitely equal to that of Davy Jones, just in a different way.

And then there is the Orlando Problem. It’s much more clear in this film than it was in the first one that Will is meant to be the hero; the amount of time devoted to his interactions with his father and the number of opportunities he gets to show off make that clear. But Orlando Bloom isn’t up to the demands of being the hero, particularly when he lacks anything close to the charisma of his co-stars (never mind that he’s way prettier than even Keira Knightly, a fact that becomes distracting at times). In the first movie this didn’t matter so much, because he was always paired up with someone else. This time, he’s expected to carry large swaths of the story all by himself, and too often he drops them. This is particularly noticeable in his scenes with Stellan Skarsgard, who strives mightily to hand Bloom the sense of epic fate a hero ought to have; instead, Bloom doesn’t seem to be able to pick it up, and comes off more as a rebellious adolescent fighting with Dad about a curfew. It’s unfortunate.

Now, all of that said…I enjoyed the movie. No, really, I did, more than I expected to, in fact. For all the things that are wrong, there are still plenty of things that are distinctly right. Despite the parodic elements, Johnny Depp remains a wonder; we’re no longer surprised by Jack (which was one of the delights of the first film), but he’s still a compelling character, nicely balancing the complicated and sometimes problematic elements of the rogue, and earning our affections and concern. I’m not particularly a fan of Keira Knightly, but the ferocity of her performance here is worthy of serious respect (save for one pointless and idiotic sequence where she abruptly reverts to a shameful girliness that is completely out of character). Elizabeth spent much of the first film being a victim of circumstance, and finding her way out of it. Here, she’s the one in charge nearly all of the time, and it makes for some complex and fascinating developments. While Will might (technically) be the hero of this one, Elizabeth is its conscience, and that’s really more interesting.

There’s also an absolute wealth of secondary characters. Mr. Gibbs was a figure of low comedy as much as anything else in the first film; while he has such moments this time, he also has a great deal of gravity and dignity. We understand better his loyalty to Jack and the way the two of them work together, and why, to some extent, “Captain” Jack Sparrow is as much a creation of his first mate as of himself. I found the comedy-relief duo of Pintel and Ragetti to be more annoying than anything in the first film; they were given way too much screen time and way too many gags (particularly involving Ragetti’s glass eye). While I think DMC could have gotten by just fine without them, their presence here is more enjoyable–they’re not overused, there’s only one gag with the eye, and their patented ridiculous arguments over things they can’t possibly understand have a little more bite (particularly when taken as background notes to the issue of Elizabeth being the film’s conscience). Jonathan Pryce, who I often felt exasperation with in the first film (indeed, I maintained for a long time that the character should have been played instead by Robert Lindsay, who is much better at that kind of helpless neurotic wittering), absolutely owns his few scenes as Governor Swann; he’s far more believable here as a father trading for his daughter’s life than he ever was the first time around. We get the return of Norrington, no longer a commodore, and his character arc is in many ways the most natural-feeling of anyone in the film; he was always a character poised between honor and malignity, and Jack Davenport gets the chance to demonstrate both sides of that. Before the first film, Davenport was best known for light comedy, and it’s a treat to get a real taste of what he can do beyond that. I already mentioned Stellan Skarsgaard; what is most notable about him (aside from his attempts to make Orlando Bloom a better actor than he is) is the profound, bone-deep sense of melancholy he gives Bootstrap Bill, and doing it with barnacles and starfish plastered to his face in the bargain. His performance communicates more of Davy Jones’s evil than Jones himself does–it’s not the fate itself that’s so horrible, it’s the hopelessness that comes with it.

And then there is Tia Dalma. For a character with only two scenes, she casts a long shadow over this story, because there is clearly much, much more going on with her than we are allowed to see in this particular movie. Naomie Harris gives her everything she should have and then some; no stereotyped cackling witch (a characterization that would have been all too easy to engender), she is instead a figure of enormous, unspoken power, both mystical and sensual. She commands the screen when she’s on it, a presence who can reduce even Jack Sparrow to submissive respect, yet without doing anything but cocking her head or her hip, or modulating her voice. We don’t need to be told what she’s capable of; we can see it, in the way she moves and the way she speaks, and we understand her importance–she might not be the one who can solve the conflict between Jack and Davy Jones, but she’s an integral part of whatever will happen, even from the obscurity of her house hidden in the swamp.

She is also perhaps the starkest representation of something that I haven’t really seen addressed much, which is that these films are, at their core, dark fantasy, a genre Hollywood has often found problematic. (I’m reluctant to call them “horror,” as there’s too much good-naturedness for them to be truly, deeply scary, but there’s no question of the darkness at the core of the stories.) It wasn’t necessary to make them that; pirate stories offer ample opportunity for rip-roaring adventure and belly-laugh comedy, and it would have been just fine to go with that paradigm. Instead, the decision was made to thread darkness and fantasticness through them, to set the films in a universe where the undead and human-crustacean hybrids are entirely plausible, where magic and mysticism and the presence of powers bigger than ourselves are taken as fact. Certainly that choice ups the entertainment factor, especially for those of us who like some cthonic leavening in our adventures (even as we recognize that the forces of the upperworld are almost certainly going to prevail). But it’s also a choice that honors the mythology and superstition that surrounds the sea and that has long been woven into the lives of those who work upon it; and it brings in elements of the region in which the films are set in ways that manage to communicate the gravity of the belifs and traditions that have hold in the area. The first film’s Aztec curse (cheesy as it was on its face) was presented as the despairing horror it would be; Tia Dalma’s presence speaks of the fearsome allure that Afro-Caribbean religions carry for many, in their sense of mystery and direct power, and again, it’s not done just as cheap thrills. Hollywood is very prone to turning such things to overbearing cheese, meant to be mocked to relieve the sense of unease. Undead monkey notwithstanding, that’s not the case here. It’s a tough line to walk and a difficult thing to carry off, and one of the things that pleases me about both Pirates of the Caribbean films is that they manage it as often as they do.

Will I see the third film? Oh yeah. I gotta see how Jack gets out of his predicament, and how Elizabeth deals with her conscience. I need to see Tia Dalma again. And I definitely have to see Chow Yun-Fat. Most of all, I have to see how they carry through those threads of darkness and bring them together with the world of the everyday.

Final menu: “Turkish” salad and roasted pepper and mushroom penne. We’d initially thought about going to the nearby farmer’s market for bread and fruit, but we were both kind of wiped out by the time she arrived, so we bypassed that and I just made the salad and pasta.

“Turkish” salad

This salad is based on the ones we had while living in Istanbul and traveling along the Mediterranean coast. It always brings up thoughts of balmy summer evenings and backyard dining.

1 English/hothouse cucumber or 2 regular cucumbers
1-1/2 to 2 cups small firm tomatoes (grape, pearl, or cherry)
2-3 ribs of celery (including leaves)
Seasoned salt or salad seasoning
Garlic powder
Fresh parsley
Olive oil and lemon juice or vinaigrette dressing

Slice the cucumber(s) in half lengthwise. If using regular cucumbers, peel and seed. Slice each half into three sections lengthwise, then chop into bite-size chunks. Place half of the chopped cucumber in a serving bowl. Season lightly with salt/salad seasoning and garlic powder. (You’ll be repeating this for each step, so don’t be too heavy-handed.)

Slice about half of the tomatoes into halves and place on top of the cucumber in the bowl. Repeat seasoning.

Roughly chop about half the celery, and place into the bowl. Repeated seasoning.

Repeat the first three steps until all ingredients are in the bowl.

Pull a small handful of parsley off the bunch and mince. Sprinkle over the salad.

Dress with about a couple of teaspoons or so of olive oil (a mister is ideal for this) and about the same amount of lemon juice. (If you don’t have these, you can use a vinaigrette dressing.*) Toss.

For a somewhat heartier salad, toss in a few tablespoons of crumbled feta cheese before adding the dressing.

Serves…oh, probably about 6 if they’re dainty eaters, more like 2 or 3 with hearty appetites.

*I was out of lemon juice, so I went ahead and used my own homemade balsamic vinaigrette. I don’t make it as a true vinaigrette, but the idea is the same:

Roughly equal amounts of olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Pinch of sea salt
A few grinds of fresh black pepper
Garlic powder to taste
Generous pinches of dried herbs; I used thyme and rosemary, and I sometimes use dill–others can be substituted as well

Put it all in a glass bowl in this order and whisk vigorously, or in a glass cruet or jar with a lid and shake vigourously, then pour over salad. Remember that you only need a small amount of dressing–toss the salad well to coat everything, so that you don’t have to drench it.

I use this basic recipe for most salads. It’s infinitely variable; other combinations of oils, vinegars, and herbs will give different but delicious results. A little honey can also be added to the basic recipe for a sweeter dressing.

Roasted Pepper and Mushroom Penne

This was completely made up out of what was on hand in the fridge and the cupboards.

1 garlic bulb
1-1/2 cups whole wheat penne
Olive oil
1/2 yellow onion
1 large or 2 small portobello mushroom caps
1 8-oz. jar roasted red peppers
Basil (dried or fresh)
Salt and fresh ground pepper
Fresh soft goat cheese

Cut off the top of the garlic bulb and drizzle or mist with olive oil. Wrap in foil (or use a garlic roaster) and bake in a 425-degree oven for about 15-20 minutes.

Bring a large pan of water to boil. When it’s at a full rolling boil, toss in some salt and the penne. Cook until al dente; drain.

Chop the onion roughly. Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a large saute pan over high heat and cook the onion for 1-2 minutes.

Slice the mushroom(s) into strips, then chop into chunks. Add to the pan with the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushroom is just browned. During this, add a dash of pepper and some dried basil (if using dried).

Add the entire contents of the jar of peppers, including the liquid. If necessary, chop the peppers into smaller pieces with your spatula, right in the pan. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the liquid is reduced by about half, maybe 5-7 minutes or so.

Remove the garlic from the oven and pop out from 4 to 8 cloves (depending on size and your garlic preferences). Chop roughly and add to the pan.

Add the pasta to the pan and toss. Crumble in the goat cheese to taste and stir until the cheese is mostly melted and coating the other ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste, and more dried basil if using dried; if using fresh, mince or chiffonade 2-3 leaves and stir in.

Serves 4-6 dainty eaters (or as a side dish) or 2-3 with hearty appetites (as a main dish).

This is a lovely, tender, and melancholy film, with sympathetic characters carved with precision and performances to match. The main problem with it, from my viewpoint, is that it’s too much like its predecessor; I found myself continually comparing its plot to the same notes in The Twilight Samurai, and generally finding them less effective. The sense of change and loss was much stronger in that film, the melancholy of its central character more pronounced, the issues of love and class keener and more heartbreaking. This isn’t a bad film by any means; it just comes up lacking in comparison to its forebear. If someone hadn’t seen the previous film, I think this one would seem outstanding, and it is definitely worth seeing for its glimpse at a world-changing time drawn at the miniature level and the warm it shows to its characters.

The most interesting thing for me in seeing this was seeing Masatoshi Nagase as a figure of gravity. Ever since he became my Japanese-movie boyfriend over a decade ago, in The Most Terrible Time in My Life, a jumpy, jangly take on film noir gilded with the neon of modern Japan, he’s represented for me defiant, uncageable energy with the hint of a refusal to grow up. To see him in this role, grave and composed, straitened by the strictures of culture and decorum, and carrying it so beautifully, was a bit of a shock. What happened to that energetic, vaguely disreputable young man? And then I realized: he grew up after all, just as I did. And while growing up might mean a tradeoff in energy, the result is usually that sense of wisdom and authority that I saw in his performance. Thinking that I’ve gained that, just as he did, is a pretty cool thing.