Sasidhar (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} psasidhar) wrote,@ 2008-04-20 00:52:00 |
|
Brunch!!
Indulgence can take many faces. One of them: Seeking out the best brunch places along the Pacific Coast and have Eggs Benedict. I had a good start, after all, with Cottage in La Jolla.
Today, I headed to Geoffrey's in Malibu, with great views of the Pacific, one of the top 10 brunch places in LA, apparently. Once there, my position as the odd man out among the couples has been ascertained. And I ignored it with cups and cups of black coffee. Among the three benedicts on the menu, I chose the Crab Cake Benedict over the Scotch Benedict (Smoke Salmon) the Geoffrey's is known for, upon the suggestion of the cute waitress. Hey, I am not the first one to make a mistake by going with the cute waitress's suggestion. But, it didn't turn out to be a mistake. It was awesome.
Then I wandered off into the mountains for a hike. A must, especially after such a good breakfast.
Is there a proper word to describe hills like this? No big trees. Landscape smoothly flowing, rolling and rolling.. with yellow hues in Spring with wildflower bloom and golden hues in Summer with the dried grass (which makes these hills so prone to fires).
Rolling Hills?
But that's a city in SoCal.
===
UCLA Film Archive has been screening Manoel De Oliveira's movies for a while now. (If you don't know who he is, and if you are film buff, it's time to know now. :)) The series is aptly titled - The talking pictures of Manoel De Oliveira. That's what they do, they talk. And that's why I like them. I caught two of them today, after the hike.
The first one "O dia de desespero" introduced me to Camilo Castelo Branco, Portugal's most famous writer. It's difficult to explain this movie for somebody not familiar with Manoel's filmmaking. It's not a conventional biopic. And I leave it at that.
Or I could make a note of the program notes before it disappears from the site:
"Considered Portugal's greatest 19th century novelist, Camilo Castelo Branco led a life so tumultuous with scandal and passion that Oliveira fondly refers to him as the closest Portuguese equivalent not to Cervantes, but to the character of Don Quixote. O Dia do Desespero traces the last days of Branco's life before encroaching blindness led him to shoot himself in his rocking chair. No conventional biopic, the film's ghostly lighting and breathtaking attention to material objects draws us powerfully into the desperate love affair between the writer and death. One of the film's actors, Luís Miguel Cintra, has commented that in O Dia do Desespero, "the dead things are filmed to speak of the life that they hide. Living actors are filmed to speak of the dead." Ultimately, the state of uncertainty that Oliveira imposes—between actor and character, history and fiction—leads to a film of rare hallucinatory power, one that Randal Johnson calls "perhaps Oliveira's most spectral and phantasmagoric.""
The next one, "I'm going home," is again a typical Manoel movie, meaning inaccessible to general audience, but resonates with its core audience. :)
Indulgence can take many faces. One of them: Seeking out the best brunch places along the Pacific Coast and have Eggs Benedict. I had a good start, after all, with Cottage in La Jolla.
Today, I headed to Geoffrey's in Malibu, with great views of the Pacific, one of the top 10 brunch places in LA, apparently. Once there, my position as the odd man out among the couples has been ascertained. And I ignored it with cups and cups of black coffee. Among the three benedicts on the menu, I chose the Crab Cake Benedict over the Scotch Benedict (Smoke Salmon) the Geoffrey's is known for, upon the suggestion of the cute waitress. Hey, I am not the first one to make a mistake by going with the cute waitress's suggestion. But, it didn't turn out to be a mistake. It was awesome.
Then I wandered off into the mountains for a hike. A must, especially after such a good breakfast.
Is there a proper word to describe hills like this? No big trees. Landscape smoothly flowing, rolling and rolling.. with yellow hues in Spring with wildflower bloom and golden hues in Summer with the dried grass (which makes these hills so prone to fires).
Rolling Hills?
But that's a city in SoCal.
===
UCLA Film Archive has been screening Manoel De Oliveira's movies for a while now. (If you don't know who he is, and if you are film buff, it's time to know now. :)) The series is aptly titled - The talking pictures of Manoel De Oliveira. That's what they do, they talk. And that's why I like them. I caught two of them today, after the hike.
The first one "O dia de desespero" introduced me to Camilo Castelo Branco, Portugal's most famous writer. It's difficult to explain this movie for somebody not familiar with Manoel's filmmaking. It's not a conventional biopic. And I leave it at that.
Or I could make a note of the program notes before it disappears from the site:
"Considered Portugal's greatest 19th century novelist, Camilo Castelo Branco led a life so tumultuous with scandal and passion that Oliveira fondly refers to him as the closest Portuguese equivalent not to Cervantes, but to the character of Don Quixote. O Dia do Desespero traces the last days of Branco's life before encroaching blindness led him to shoot himself in his rocking chair. No conventional biopic, the film's ghostly lighting and breathtaking attention to material objects draws us powerfully into the desperate love affair between the writer and death. One of the film's actors, Luís Miguel Cintra, has commented that in O Dia do Desespero, "the dead things are filmed to speak of the life that they hide. Living actors are filmed to speak of the dead." Ultimately, the state of uncertainty that Oliveira imposes—between actor and character, history and fiction—leads to a film of rare hallucinatory power, one that Randal Johnson calls "perhaps Oliveira's most spectral and phantasmagoric.""
The next one, "I'm going home," is again a typical Manoel movie, meaning inaccessible to general audience, but resonates with its core audience. :)
