Do you think you remember a movie in which a knight gallops toward a castle just as its drawbridge is going up, and his white horse jumps the moat in one glorious airborne leap? I could picture it too, but when I went looking for this image on the Internet, all I could find was a couple of cars sailing over rivers via lift bridges and the Pink Panther detective flailing around in the murky water, having missed.
Nonetheless, we’re that rider. Chasing us is the dreaded coronavirus. We’re in midair, hoping we make it to the other side, where life will have returned to what we think of as normal. So what should we do while we’re up there, between now and then?
Think of all the things you hope will still be there in that castle of the future when we get across. Then do what you can, now, to ensure the future existence of those things.
The urge to mythologize Blond Ambition, and Madonna’s career more broadly, is understandable. That’s how it goes, right? Our idols age, their albums sell fewer copies. Their personal lives might fall apart, but their nasty divorces and mid-life crises do less to inform their public personas than the memories of their younger selves. Should they wish to remain commercially relevant, they embark on live stadium tours, but the shows rarely resemble Blond Ambition. Male idols strum guitars and don leather jackets; female idols wear sequined cocktail dresses and lean against grand pianos.
In the 2010s, however, Madonna resisted the nostalgia narrative, even as her music became increasingly self-referential. The conventional trajectory of legacy acts, she claimed, was sexist and ageist. “To age is a sin,” she said in a 2016 speech at the Billboard Women in Music Awards. “You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio.”
“Amor De Mãe” (“Mother’s Love”) is a telenovela about three mothers from different social classes whose lives become entwined in Rio de Janeiro. Its run began in November on Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest free television channel, in an evening slot that can attract a quarter of the population. Then, on March 16th, Globo shut its studios to combat the spread of covid-19, sending home some 9,000 workers and, for the first time ever, replacing ongoing soap operas with reruns. Neither military dictatorship nor the Rio Olympics halted production of Brazil’s famous novelas, which are broadcast six days a week for single seasons of around 150 episodes apiece.
Manuela Dias, the writer of “Amor de Mãe”, and José Luiz Villamarim, its director, scrambled to re-edit existing footage to suspend the story on a cliffhanger. One of the mothers, Thelma, commits a murder to prevent another, Lurdes, finding out that Thelma’s adopted child and Lurdes’s long-lost son are one and the same. That was the easy part. Now Globo, a huge media empire that broadcasts news, sports and entertainment, must answer the question facing television executives from Hollywood to Bollywood: how to bridge the gap between the pre- and post-pandemic worlds—and what to produce on the other side.
I would have found the main central market, Varvakios, on my own — one of the best ways to know a city is through its markets. But I never would have sat in an all-but-empty diner within the market, Oinomageireio Epirus, to taste among other traditional dishes, patsas, a soup that came with a warning from Ms. Kolikopoulou that it wasn’t for everyone: The tripe-and-hoof soup was the essence of barnyard and animal guts, an acquired taste. It was unlike anything I’ve tasted, and it made the portrait of Anthony Bourdain, then dead just two months, proudly displayed on the wall of the restaurant, especially poignant. This was his kind of food — deep, nourishing, innardy, loaded with gelatin. Food that tastes of your own mortality.
Escape. It’s what many of us are searching for in our reading right now. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that a novel whose entire story line is about an attempt to escape would be especially appealing.
“Three Hours in Paris” isn’t just any old formulaic “Get out!” tale. It’s mystery master Cara Black’s first standalone novel, a spy story set during World War II in Occupied Paris. The premise is that an American female sharpshooter is parachuted into France to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Of course, she fails. Using wits alone, she must evade the Gestapo and make it back across the English Channel. Chances of success? Slim to none. Chances that you’ll be able to put Black’s thriller down once you’ve picked it up? Also slim to none.
You touch my lips more than my old wife,
but how could I love you? With a red-handle knife
from the shed my Honey painted teal,
She grazes in a meadow, sulfur blossoms spilling
from her jaw.
At this moment she seems so calm, she could be holy,
if what that means is something like being