Straw Dogs*

Is there a purpose to remakes? Aside from maybe William Friedkin’s attempt in Sorcerer to re-imagine  Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear as something universal rather than Gallic, it’s usually just an exercise in regurgitation. This awful remake of Sam Peckinpah’s already deeply flawed but nobly imagined Straw Dogs(1971) is an typical  case in point.

In the original, Dustin Hoffman and the endearingly scrubber tartish Susan George are a mixed class and religion-type couple oppressed and besieged by small town English country boy thugs.  The slightly cross-eyed George is a dreadful actor, but her custard-dyed tresses and their black roots make for an endearing metaphor  for the kind of  deluded  love match only the actual couple involved can never get past their sexual compatibility to see holistically until its too late. Sure, Hoffman chews the scenery, as per usual, but as George can’t act her way out of a wet bag, we feel pity for her. It was nowhere near a great film, but Straw Dogs was a huge box-office boffo hit at the time because it helped  define the way rape and violence  could be rendered palatable for both intellectual and voyeuristic thrill-seeking audiences by being photographed on grainy  stock with lots of hand-held ‘chaotic’ shots. At a time when A Clockwork Orange left a lot of audiences feeling guiltily entertained but stupid, Peckinpah’s work could be written off by feminists as chauvinistic, and be used by the likes of me as great gender debate material that often got me laid!

In the new Straw Dogs,  the roughage of all kinds is more or less exorcised. It simply becomes  one more vengeance tale shot in the South, with good ol’ boy dialect  and the usual redneck clichés replacing England’s West Country. Interestingly, Dustin Hoffman’s academic  Jewboy mathematics nerd is replaced by a bookish but groovily in-shape goyish screenwriter David  played by the square-jawed James Marsden. And how do we know he’s a nerd? Well, umm, he doesn’t watch football, he openly talks the talk about being an atheist and because he believes that the podunk town his wife comes from, Blackwater, Mississippi, offers something he can’t find in the Sodom and Gomorra of Los Angeles while he’s working on his screenplay masterpiece. “I like quiet!” he says. “Quiet  is what I want!”

Meanwhile, his lovely blondie actress wife Amy(Kate Bosworth) is kinda/sorta ambivalent. Her tresses are tinted much nicer than George’s. After being written out of  a T.V. show in which she was a regular, returning to Blackwater is both comforting and a razor-keen reminder of  her roots. What to make of the local folk who dress like Larry the Cable Guy and all the women in old Burt Reynolds movies? Things go from bad to worse at the bar when David orders Lite beer and dares to pay for everybody’s libations with a --oh my God!-- a credit card! Well, all except Charlie (Alexander Skjarsgard) who ogles Ay-ma  like a hungry glutton regarding a roast. Turns out Charlie, who ingratiates himself enough with David to get himself and a crew of pals hired to fix David’s rickety old roof has wickedness on his mind. Of course, it turns out Charlie and Ay-ma have a history.

David immediately clashes with Charlie and the crew when he objects to their raiding his fridge and playing  Lynyrd Skynyrd and various other samplings of old school Southern rock at dawn. Not, however, enough to confront them. David seethes politely, while Ay-ma  obsesses on David’s inability  to confront  anybody belligerent. Charlie and his boys act  just like those mean ol’ big shots in Hollywood
 
Unfortunately, the neo Straw Dogs  cuts out the major subplot of the original which involved a ’Special’  local who rapes adolescents and a clever bit where the workers are served a saucer of milk  by an ambivalent Ay-ma after murdering the couple’s cat and hanging its corpse in a closet. Instead of  rural ruthlesness and culture at war with David’s citified Jewboy sensitivity and over education, the conflict  becomes moronically oversimplified and obfuscated between David’s liberal softy persona against redneck love of Jesus, football and guns. Indeed, one of Charlie’s crew’s obnoxious 4x4 truck has a bumper sticker that says: ‘Keep honking. I’m reloading!’ Ha! Ha!  I get it. Jesus loves guns! Even the usually solid character actor James Woods can’t do much with the role of a  jaded high school football coach who has turned all these twisted moronic redneck lumps of human clay into a team of rapists. This is  because the script by Rod Lurie is so crass. Is this the Rod Lurie who wrote the brilliant The Candidate? My God, what happened?
 
Sex-wise, you get your money’s-worth of the usual stereotypes that so puzzle us big city hypocrites when we go slumming it in trailer park  land. All these church going Protestant females seem to dress provocatively, but, you know, it’s the heat!!!  The locals stare at Amy as she jogs braless around the neighborhood and you realize that they don’t sell sports bras in Mississippi for that reason. At any rate, Charlie and the boys ogle Ay-ma just too damned overtly. She tells David and what does he do? Yes, he suggests she dresses more, umm, demurely. “Oh, I dress for you!!!” she insists, but is soon seen getting fresh with the local boys again and peeling off her clothes like a serpent in mating season for all the workers. Hmmmm!

The  rest of this yawn-inducing dross involves convincing the audience that the local males and females feel so hurt by David’s walking out of church in the midst of a sermon that they’d all passively participate or turn a blind eye to a gang rape. Thus when David--still supposedly uncomprehending of the fact that this redneck collective believes it owns the moral high ground--is confronted by Ay-ma, who would rather scream at him than call the authorities, he becomes the instrument of virtuous vengeance. The massacre which follows is neither cathartic nor even fast food for thought . He does, however, do more with the bear trap than Peckinpah! Good job with the bear trap, Rod!

Alexander Skjarsgard, who plays Ay-mas old high school boyfriend Charlie so well, actually brings so much gravitas to the part that Marsden  and Bosworth look lost. The subplot , involving high school football and religion, makes the movie’s fulcrum teeter on the edge of being a red-blue mini-war. Avoid this rubbish at all costs!

My Internist Prescribes

Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with.
All I see, floating around me, is detritus.
The detritus of denied intimacy.
The detritus of the glib.
Like beautiful Venezia, you float in your gondola
and ignore the surfing turds.
Peripherally, if you take the time to stuff cotton wool up your nose,
there is the rennaissence,
gargoyles in repose.
Pretty girls chinning crumbling window sills.
Perry Como crooning.
A strand of DNA showing off, curtsying,
vaguely remembering my ancestors days of slavery in Mitzrayim.
A goddamn melodrama in my arteries.
My internist prescribes,
I obey.
The pills are orange and yellow and a gruesome sort of flecked turquoise.
I wash them down with lukewarm water
and the eye at the back of my head winks.

During My Life

During my life.
Communism died, but  it  keeps making gurgling noises slightly out of earshot.
My mom split.
My dad died of lymph node cancer and toxic shock.
I flew back to Chicago and taught Frosh Comp
and my students wrote papers about why they owned guns.
This was the alternative to going into exile and looking for God.
God who runs away when you look for him.

In my dreams. In my dream life.
Hitler gets to be a painter. A shitty painter, but a painter nonetheless.
My mom stays and smells of hollyhocks and mothballs.
My dad dies again,
but this time I’m  in Maui drowning my sorrows in  big-titted  Calpurnia.
God stays.
He looks a bit like Victor Buono. It’s unnerving.
He sits at the hotel bar telling war stories: Sarajevo, Stalingrad. Tet.

During my life
the best alternatives come from mulling on my thesaurus.
That’s about  as good as  it gets outside a good curry.
During my dreams. During my dream life.
I resurrect the dead and, when I get bored,   I bury them again.

                                Ivor Irwin

Christmas Night in Chicago

I find you elbowed up to the bar,
bored, crunching ice cubes. Your English underwear tight.
Wiggling the backwash of your mortally wounded soldier.
Fidgeting, sucking your teeth,
dying for a cigarette,
staring at the bar tender’s artificial tits.

“Those are not real!” you complain.
You complain a lot.
Because it’s not L.A.
Because the snow is a dirty gray.
Because you had to shovel.
Because. Because. Because.

The bartenders’s bolt-on breasts not withstanding,
I thought you were having a good time.
Doing your little dance on my dime.
Instead, it keeps creeping back, this thing you cannot understand.
Why I don’t live somewhere in the sunbelt.
Live a less funky representational Yule Tide.

Ivor's Coconut Fish Curry

Nariyal Macchi (Coconut fish) Recipe
Some, indeed, like it hot. This fish curry is marvelous, and, although I own a personal preference  for Red Snapper or  salted cod(bacalao),  pretty much any kind works. The amount of heat you use can be altered to your taste.  An oily fish like like cod definitely demands something pungent to contrast with the  strong oil of its flesh. If mustard oil is unavailable, use mustard seed in safflower or canola oil, marinating for three or four days if possible.

Ingredients:
4 lbs White fish fillets, cut into cubes

For the marinade:

• 4 tsp (4 g) Turmeric (haldi) powder
• 2 tsp (8 g) Salt

For the curry:

• 1 cup Mustard (sarson) oil
• 6 tbsp Garlic (lasan), finely chopped
• 4 tsp Cumin (jeera) powder
• 4 tsp (4 g) Turmeric powder
• Salt to taste
• 4  tsp  Red chilli powder
• 40 Curry leaves (kadhi patta)
• 4  cups Coconut milk, thick, from 1 whole grated coconut
• 1/2 Cup Tamarind pulp, boiled in 2 cups of water and then strained
• 4 Green chillies, deseeded
• 4 Papaya
• Basmati rice
• 1 Lemon

Method:

1. Rub the turmeric powder and salt into the fish thoroughly. Place in the refrigerator for two hours.
2. Heat the mustard oil until it begins to smoke; fry the marinated fish cubes until they’re a golden color. Remove the fish cubes with a slotted spoon, draining the excess oil on paper towels.
3. Use the same oil to fry the garlic light brown.  Add the cumin powder, turmeric, salt, red chilli powder, curry leaves, coconut milk, tamarind extract, and green chillies.
4. Stir rapidly and bring to the boil before adding the fried fish cube, lower trhe light and simmer gently  for 5 minutes.
5. Cut each papaya in half. Skin and seed. Place the papaya in the freezer 30 minutes before dinner will be served. 
6. When all is ready, serve rice for eight and squeeze the juices of the lemon on the cold papaya.

This should serve eight people well.

R o g a n J o s h L a m b

Somebody took me to a real Curry dive in Cleveland that had the slowest service  since my old 2 a.m. hangover days  at the infamous Taco Bell in Rogers Park. When the food eventually did arrive it  all--and I mean every single dish-- had a half inch of Ghee floating at the top. This reminded me of my beloved Bubba Rachel who brought  me up in Manchester, England and found a way to use schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) in every dish she made, save, perhaps, the fruit compote. At any rate, this was a night of pure revelation for me. Not all of the people of India and its diaspora can cook! What a crushing shocker. This here is the real deal. Consider the fact that  my lovely lady wife, Elsie, hates the very smell of lamb. The brilliant spicing in this dish will transform  even the most pungent lamb.

         *   Cooking  t i m e    7 0   m i n u t e s
         *   S e r v e s   6

Ingredients:
A  2 inch knob of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
12 Cloves garlic
4 cups pink wine
2 cups vegetable oil
2 Ibs cubed lamb
10 cardamom pods
4 bay leaves
6 cloves
20 peppercorns
1 medium Cinnamon stick
4 medium onions, peeled and chopped fine
2 tsp ground coriander
3 tsp ground cumin
4 tbsp paprika
2 tbsp cayenne pepper (or, if you want to grow hair on your toes, boil, skin and mash 2 habanero/scotch bonnet peppers)
1 tsp kosher salt
2 cups natural yogurt
1 tbsp garam masala

Blend together the ginger, garlic, and two cups of ice cold water into a smooth paste. Brown the meat along with one of the onions, two cloves of garlic along with two cups of wine. Once it’s browned, set aside. Heat the oil in your  favorite heavy-duty skillet over a medium flame. Fry--all the while stirring gently--the cardamom pods, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns and Cinnamon in the oil. Add the rest of the onions, stir fry until the onions are golden brown. Then slowly add the garlic-ginger paste and stir in for a minute, then gently add the coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne and salt. Stir and mix for a couple of minutes. Add the meat and its juices, mix well so it’s all coated with the paste. Add the  tablespoon of yogurt, mixing well on low light before gradually adding the rest  of the yogurt, stir and fry for another three minutes. Add another two cups of water, bring it to a low, rolling boil, while scraping away the sticky bits from the bottom of the pan into the sauce.  If you would like it to taste a little sweeter use more pink wine.

Cover the pan and simmer on a low light for 80 minutes, checking and stirring the pot every ten minutes or so. The sauce should  slowly turn viscous and bubbly, but not too thick. If it is thick enough that the spoon sticks, you need more liquid  and should add wine or water. Finally, spoon off the excess fat, sprinkle the garam masala and black pepper and mix one last time before serving with basmati rice and nan.


 .        
   

For Elsie

Each night
before I get some kip
I think about
Ebola, Al-Qaida, starving Sudanese,
Barack Obama, pornography and war.

That way
I’m not thinking about You!