Germanophobia

Tags

emigre, Germanophobia, Germany, history, islamophobia, WWI, xenophobia

Defined as an opposition to or fear of Germany, its inhabitants, its culture and the German language.

My family emigrated to the United States from Germany after WWI.

Germany was the main aggressor in that war, leading a coalition that eventually included the Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria against the UK, France, United States, and other western superpowers of the day. Even a casual student of history knows Germany was assessed reparations to pay for civilian damage inflicted during the war, and that those reparations were the major reason that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were able to take power in the 1930s.

During the war itself, the US Justice Department tried to prepare a list of all 480,000 German emigres in the country, and eventually jailed about 4,000 for fear that they were spies or saboteurs. Even the Red Cross forbade anyone with a German surname from joining the cause.

We’re almost a hundred years removed from the end of the so-called Great War, and nothing has changed except the group we’re trying to register, detain, and ban from our borders. We’re listening to a hate-spewing firebrand who has no business addressing an auditorium, let alone the world, on what American policy ought to be, and we’re forgetting that the United States of America is a nation of immigrants.

I wish everyone supporting the orange idiot would remember how their own families originally came to the United States, and what it meant to leave behind chaos and destruction for a chance at a good and peaceful life. What would have happened to my family if they’d been turned back at the US border, rounded up and detained during WW2?

My own grandmother and her siblings grew up speaking German at home, and Grandma had to repeat the first grade until she could speak English well enough to move on. She worked in a factory during the Second World War to help support her family, and nearly all of my great uncles served in the US armed forces. Maybe one generation removed from being “the huns” meant they were considered safe?

I work in a school and I live in a major US city. I’m aware of the risks of gun violence and attacks on civilians and infrastructure. I’ve tried to confront those risks in my mind and in my heart, and it isn’t easy, but sometimes that’s how it goes when you try to do the right thing. But I think of my ancestors leaving a war-torn country for the promise of hope, and I believe it would be hypocritical of me to deny that promise to another generation of naturalized Americans. We can’t be a shining beacon of hope to humanity if we try to hide the light from people who weren’t born here.

Paris, Je T’aime

Tags

Paris

I love Paris.

I LOVE Paris.

I studied French for seven years between high school and college to prepare for my inevitable trip there…which didn’t happen until I turned 30. C’est la vie. That trip meant so much, I still remember certain aspects of it as if they happened five minutes ago.

I feel like the city itself is hard on those who don’t prove themselves worthy. By worthy, I mean embracing the soul of a stretch of land that’s been inhabited continuously for 2,000 years. Understanding that a city as old as Paris has seen everything, expects to see everything, and will keep on keeping on in spite of what happens within its limits. To me, being worthy of Paris includes not only the external – the aged beauty, the art, the sophistication – but the underlying WHY that drives the city’s true denizens to live in a place where these are concrete values. To value art is to be open to your ideas being challenged, embracing aged beauty means sharing a legacy with the next generation (and newcomers) who will be the city’s future stewards.

The unhinged souls behind the recent attacks on Paris were never worthy stewards of her magnificent future. They were incapable of seeing a past that embraces bloodshed alongside beauty. They saw only the moments of their own lives, their perceived grievances, and they sought to destroy. Because they were unworthy, they could never understand that Paris has already moved beyond them, and inspired a fiercer kind of love and loyalty in those who are worthy.

Vive la France.

On the Big Screen: The Godfather

Tags

big event, Brando, cinema, cinephile, Cinerama, movies, SIFF, The Godfather

Check out one of my previous posts Shawshank vs. Titanic for some background on my thoughts about the prison movie with Morgan Freeman doing the awesome voiceover. In summation, it’s a good movie, but not great.

I still can’t move past the fact that the Internet Movie Database users ranked frigging Shawshank Redemption higher than The Godfather on the site’s Top 250 movies ever made. We might have to go to the mattresses if you agree with the IMDB users.

Because I don’t.

I REALLY don’t.

Living in Seattle affords so many opportunities to the obsessed moviegoer, I sometimes can’t decide what to do with myself. Cinerama keeps getting better now that I can have a beer with my chocolate popcorn, movies in the park during the summer are a growing concern, and the Seattle International Film Festival offers programming year-round. I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time at Cinerama (on my birthday no less!), drank a bottle of divine cab sauv with my friends as we watched Teen Witch at Cal Anderson Park, and have laughed along with the best at midnight shows at The Egyptian during SIFF’s annual film festival.

I love bad movies for their sheer gonzo level of entertainment, but I love great movies because they elevate an everyday occurrence for me (watching aforementioned movies) into an occasion. There are films that I absolutely love, but I make sure not to watch them too often so the experience won’t become mundane.

The Godfather is very definitely one of those films. I watched it on the big screen for the first time recently (God bless SIFF), and the experience thrilled me to my toes.

I’ve seen the film before, and like most well-versed cinephiles, I can rattle off famous quotes and tropes with the best, but this time, The Godfather was mesmerizing. In a dark theater, a movie becomes something special. I’m not on my computer, or folding laundry, or doing any of the other hundreds of little tasks that make up my daily life. Every iota of my attention was on that screen. The characters were literally larger than life, the scenes of life and death more immediate, and for the first time, I got the full force of Coppola’s visual composition alongside great dialog and superb acting.

It was only after the house lights went up that I realized no one else in the audience had made a sound during the show.

My people.

Why Amazon’s incredibly demanding workplace isn’t killing worker productivity

I think most people who live or work in Seattle know at least one person who works at Amazon, or has worked there. I’ve heard some of these stories firsthand from people I trust, although I don’t believe for a second that everyone at Amazon has had the same experience. I remember reading a story in the Puget Sound Business Journal a few years ago, and it discussed Jeff Bezos’s legendary frugality. He actually rewarded an employee who suggested unscrewing the lightbulbs in all of the vending machines in the company, because it would save something like $30K a year in electricity costs. On the one hand, it sounds reasonable to save that kind of money, but it does make you wonder where else a company that does billions in annual sales is looking to cut corners.

The Golden Wheel

Tags

Chinese, dining, Golden Wheel, Lotus Room, nostalgia, restaurant, Shirley Temple, sweet and sour sauce, Yakima

The Golden Wheel. When I was a kid, those three words were enough to elicit shouts of pure joy from me, my sister, my cousins, everyone. It’s the kind of place that hasn’t changed recipes or decor in about thirty years, because you know, it ain’t broke.

The Golden Wheel was that special restaurant that kids in our family always begged for on our birthdays. We’d get dressed up, parade through the front door, parents bemused in our wake, and we would be seated at one of the dozen or so booths. As kids, our drink of choice was the Shirley Temple. Yakima wasn’t known for its fine and varied cuisine at that time, so the Shirley Temple was one of those exotic treats that made The Golden Wheel such an experience. No other restaurants had that drink on the menu.

And even if they did, a Shirley Temple anywhere but The Golden Wheel just wasn’t as good.

The other big treat was the restaurant’s sweet and sour sauce. Over the years, it’s the sweet and sour sauce my family compares all other sweet and sour sauces with. If something is close to The Golden Wheel’s recipe, it’s sublime. The Golden Wheel, of course, is beyond sublime. Seriously, I have no idea what they put in the sauce, but it’s sweet, tangy, the perfect shade of orange, and so thick and gooey it could double as roofing material (this is meant to be a compliment). Not that I eat roofing material.

My immediate family has moved away from Yakima, but whenever we go back, we inevitably suggest a mini reunion at The Golden Wheel. Now I’m old enough to order cocktails from the restaurant’s infamous Lotus Room, the bar that makes its drinks so strong you can get a hangover just from the fumes. Nothing about the decor has changed, and I’m pretty sure the metal teapots have the same dents and dings they had when I was a kid, the menus as sticky as ever, but I still wouldn’t trade an evening at The Golden Wheel for anything. Nostalgia? Maybe. But why not?

HBO Exec Says Jon Snow Is Dead, Dead, Dead

The way these guys parse their words is almost funny. I believe them when they say that Jon Snow is dead. What they don’t say is that he’s dead forever and not coming back.

Rosalind in Chelan – Part 3

Tags

Chelan, chocolate martini, family, fiction, Lake Chelan, Rosalind, Rosalind Rees, wedding, writing

I’m really not sure how many installments this will take, but I hope you enjoy reading #3. Part 1 and Part 2 are still available to read, and if you’d like more info on me or any of my other work, please visit my website at www.francesca-rogers.com.

My dad set to work making the first of four chocolate martinis for my mom while James and I splashed around the pool for an hour. We headed into the hotel room just in time for Mom to hustle James into a quick shower. My dad took the opportunity to join me in a grown-up drink. The man mixes one hell of an old-fashioned.

“Is she okay?” I asked. We could hear Mom yelling at James not to run around the bathroom naked.

“You know how she gets around the family.”

I nodded in understanding. I strapped a four-year-old into the front seat of a car that goes from zero to sixty in less than four seconds, and I’m one of the normal ones in our family.

“You want something stronger than whiskey?”

“Sure do, but I don’t want to hallucinate purple clowns again.”

I grinned at the memory. “Coward.”

Mom made a dramatic entrance, silencing any sharp retort my dad might have come up with. She looked flustered, and I imagined that James had probably eluded her more than once between the moment she stripped off his swim trunks and tucked him into formal shorts.

“Rosalind, we’re heading over to the casino with James for the wedding rehearsal and dinner. I need you there no later than 8:00.” Mom bustled around the hotel room straightening up nonexistent messes while scrupulously not meeting me in the eye.

“Great. That gives me plenty of time for a shower.” She nodded and refolded James’s blanket. Nerves like that are visible from space. “Why do you need me there by 8:00?” I asked casually.

“Oh, the rest of the family will be joining in for some fun, and it would be nice to have you there to help with traffic flow, that sort of thing. Besides, you know how rowdy some of the family likes to get.”

Mom refusing to look me in the face while simultaneously mentioning the need to corale our batshit extended family led me to one nasty conclusion.

“You put me on pervy Uncle Lou detail, didn’t you? Are you kidding?” Surely a joyride with the four-year-old didn’t merit this sort of punishment.

Lou is my grandmother’s stepbrother, and he’s always been kind of off in the head. And gross. I’m sure he wasn’t invited to the weekend’s shindig, but like any rodent, he was good at sniffing out crumbs of information from the more gullible members of the family. No doubt he’d already inserted his awkward self into some of the day’s earlier festivities, and most people in our family were too kind to tell him how to get back home.

“Look at my face and ask me again if I’m kidding. You’re the only one who can keep him in line, Rosalind, and I need that for the next 24 hours. After that, you’re free.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head at her in disappointment. “If the rest of you had the guts to kick him in the face just once, he’d listen to you, too.”

Seattle Flunks Vaccine Science

Sorry to say I had this conversation with someone I had assumed was a reasonable, intelligent person. She actually worried that vaccinating her newborn daughter would somehow harm her. Gah.

Kir Royale at the Olive Garden

Tags

Bar, cocktail, drink, El Gaucho, Kir Royale, Lambrusco, Old Fashioned, Olive Garden, recipe, Seattle

I once ordered a kir royale at the Olive Garden. Part of me wanted to see what they would do, and part of me just wanted a kir royale.

I was not disappointed. The poor bartender, who looked like he was about thirty seconds past his 21st birthday, stared at me in total confusion as soon as I ordered. I realize I might have technically been speaking a foreign language, but he worked at a freaking Olive Garden. It’s not like spaghetti is English.

So, he looked up the recipe in a well-thumbed guide, and brought me (with no small amount of pride) a drink in a highball with ice and a paper-wrapped straw. There may also have been a club soda floater on it, I’m not sure about that part. I couldn’t help laughing….and switching my order to a glass of Lambrusco in case anything else was too exotic for him.

I rarely order kir royales in chain restaurants anymore.

Besides, my regular drink is an old fashioned.

The recipe has several variations, and depending on what sort of whisky is used, the drink can vary in sweetness and depth. I order them often, and find that the best ones usually come in a restaurant that specializes in steak. In case you don’t know me personally, I’ve been a vegetarian for eight years, and not the kind of “vegetarian” that still occasionally eats chicken. And if you are that kind of “vegetarian”, you’re not really a vegetarian. Just tell me you’re limiting your meat intake. I’ll respect you more. I’m the kind of vegetarian who goes to a steakhouse and orders mac and cheese.

All that aside, El Gaucho has so far made my favorite old fashioned in Seattle. Next time, I’ll dare try a kir royale, even if it is a chain restaurant.

Tomorrow’s Hollywood Icons (Part 1)

Tags

actress, Angelina Jolie, Audrey Hepburn, beauty, Charlize Theron, future icon, glamour, Hollywood, icon, Katharine Hepburn, Old Hollywood, talent

Ladies first.

Their names tell stories written by their bodies, their looks, and sometimes their personal lives. You know who they are: Audrey, Marilyn, Katharine, Rita, Lana, Grace. No last names needed.

The gamine, the tragedienne, the trailblazer, the love goddess, the sweater girl, the princess.

Whether they have one iconic role or several to their names, you still know who they are by virtue of the fact that they embody at least one ideal.

So, who are their contemporary equivalents? People who are famous now won’t necessarily be famous in thirty or forty years. Ever hear of Linda Darnell? A beautiful woman and a good actress, but not an icon.

Angelina? She’s one of the two closest we have to a future icon, to be honest. She’s carved out her own screen persona without the benefit of having a studio to do it for her. She’s an action star (and a believable one at that), beautiful (and super believable at that), a humanitarian, and unapologetically herself. I’ll call her the temptress for now, but I think a term with more depth will be needed for posterity’s sake.

Charlize? A fellow shoo-in. As beautiful as she is, Charlize has worked hard to take on interesting, challenging roles that totally set her apart from her contemporaries. If I had to label her, I’d call her the risk-taker.

Who’s next? One of the Jennifers? Frankly, there are too many to count, and I’ll have to let history sort them out. For my money, Jennifer Lawrence has the best shot at future icon status. She has a personality that extends beyond the reach of her looks, and for all of the burping, farting, etc., she’s very well-respected for her acting ability. What would I call Jennifer Lawrence? Maybe the paradox.

Natalie, Reese, Drew, Kiera, Lupita, and so many more possibilities. The future for all of these actresses will be interesting, and I have no doubt full of iconic performances. What I do hope is that women will someday be as powerful behind the scenes as they are beautiful in front of the cameras. Perhaps then we’ll have a whole new category of glamour to talk about.