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Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Ambling Of The Bulls

The endless loop playing through my head was asking the question: "What would Hemingway think?" The answer for a sceptic like me is "Not much!"

Let's face it, before we go any further, the 32nd Annual Hemingway Days in Key West celebrating the late writer's 113th birthday yesterday is about nothing quite so much as having a good time.

In Key West the innocuous phrase "having a good time" generally devolves to a party, quite likely an outdoor event or a street party accompanied by alcohol, costumes and buffoonery.

On those terms Hemingway Days could I suppose once again be termed a rip roaring success this weekend.

Ostensibly the struggle is to find a white man with a white beard who most closely resembles the elderly "Papa" before his suicide in 1961 in Idaho. That he was a strapping man in his prime when he lived for most of a decade in Key West has nothing to do with the image portrayed here.

This is the old man Hemingway that drove the former big game hunter and deep sea angler to his premature death, apparently in fear of the loss of his faculties.


Nothing daunted the candidates are required simply to resemble the Old Man, there is no general knowledge quiz about the man his lifestyle or his books.

It is, naturally for Key West, an event that raises money for various good causes chief among them scholarships of the Florida Keys Community College, and on Friday they had an elimination round of lookalike judging at the headquarters of the event. Then they had some kind of inaudible charity raffle in the crowded bar, the one that carries the namesake of Hemingway's fishing companion and erstwhile good friend, Sloppy Joe Russell.

Another way to raise money is to induce women to sit astride the bull holding a sign "I survived Hemingway Days Key West 2012" and cough over some cash for the privilege.

The uniforms of the participants harken back to the original and actual bull running event in Pamplona. It is a true running that sees a few participants killed every decade and several injured each year in Spain.

The red scarfed costume is in honor of the Patron Saint of Navarre, San Fermín who was martyred in France in AD 303.

It Is said he was beheaded, hence the red scarf, and dragged through the streets by bulls hence the bull running theme. It's all a bit vague as early Christian martyrs' biographies tend to be, but it all makes for a jolly good time in Pamplona July 6th and equally in Key West.

And so, after the fundraising and the drinking and the gathering of Hemingways on Greene Street in front of Sloppy Joe's Bar, the racing begins.

The crowd cheers the runners on as they get organized into teams around their bulls, because unlike Pamplona, here the bulls are propelled by the participants.

There are apparently cliques working to get candidates elected and not just at the political level:


But the center of attention are the bull runners.

It was a hot afternoon Saturday and let's be honest, expecting these elderly paunchy out of shape old codgers to do anything more than amble gently around one small city block would be expecting far too much.

It was a good show of cigars, beer and boxing gloves...


...all taken at a gentle stroll in the hundred degree heat.


They stumped along reminding me of nothing quite so much as my elderly Labrador (far from the madding crowd yesterday afternoon) stumping along and sweating profusely.


It's a way for old graybeards to get some youthful admiration, I guess.


There was plenty of that as they cruised up Ann Street to Caroline and started back toward Duval.

Hemingway made the original bull running popular among English speakers through his novel The Sun Also Rises which I read years ago, through a sense of obligation more than admiration. Hemingway's style using short sentences leaves me breathless and while I honor his Nobel Prize I prefer other authors.

Hemingway's great love was his farm in Cuba, which loosely translated means Overlook Farm, set in the hills behind Havana. It's an unhappy truth in a time of embargo against the island by the US, in a town that makes hay from piracy and Hemingway to draw tourists. Pirates in Key West are a myth and Hemingway's time in Key West was but an interlude in a long life lived mostly elsewhere. For pictures of his Cuban home check this out:

Finca Vigía

But facts are irritating things to paraphrase John Adams, especially when all you are trying to do is throw a party.

At that, Key West excels.

Key West Bight

In an effort to put lipstick on a pig the city has paid a sum of money for a study and decided to rename the Bight as the Historic Seaport and bugger me if it doesn't have it's own webpage! Historic Seaport. And look what I found on their website, a depiction of Key West as a working port, a place where rough people gathered and some people made money.

Not all boats in the Bight are sleek or home to the wealthy. Western Union, the former cable laying ship is now floating after a massive refit in 2011, Key West Diary 2011 operated by a local non profit after Historic Tours abruptly decided to get rid of the boat and unceremoniously had the crew walk the plank, as it were.

I am quite surprised how much the boat has deteriorated since 2011 and now it needs more work and thus more money and is currently out of service. This may be a losing proposition.

The Bight these days looks less historic but it bustles with tourist traffic nonetheless. Hemingway wrote about the Bight and the more or less unhappy people living on boats there in 1937 but those passages from To Have or To Have Not are a bit long to excerpt here. His description of a nighttime bicycle ride home is quite evocative from that period. And all one sentence too:

 HE DID NOT take the bicycle but walked down the street. The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, interbreeding and the comforts of religion; the open doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses, shacks whose only romance was their names; The Red House, Chicha’s; the pressed stone church; its steeples sharp, ugly triangles against the moonlight; the big grounds and the long, black-domed bulk of the convent, handsome in the moonlight; a filling station and a sandwich place, bright-lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew stores, three poolrooms, two barbershops, five beer joints, three ice cream parlors, the five poor and the one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, four second-hand joints (one of which made keys), a photographer’s, an office building with four dentists’ offices upstairs, the big dime store, a hotel on the corner with taxis opposite; and across, behind the hotel, to the street that led to jungle town, the big unpainted frame house with lights and the girls in the doorway, the mechanical piano going, and a sailor sitting in the street; and then on back,past the back of the brick courthouse with its clock luminous at half-past ten, past the whitewashed jail building shining in the moonlight, to the embowered entrance of the Lilac Time where motor cars filled the alley. 

Nowadays its  a cruise ship towering over this little town, the smoke stack visible right across town if you have a tall enough vantage point. The romance isn't quite the same, mass tourism versus Depression era poverty.

The Wild West Burger by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway and Pauline Kael caught in a happy moment in Key West, a suitable image to celebrate the day, forced upon us by the good people at Hallmark. Yes, it's Valentine's day today and I shall spare you the story of St Valentine of Terni (my fair city) whose holiday was never noticed when I was a kid until people everywhere realized there was money to be made from a minor religious holiday and in 1996 my homies started celebrating the Christian Bishop of a Terni who married a Roman soldier and a Christian woman. So now we are all out buying flowers etc etc.. Anyway I saw the BBC story BBC News - Hemingway's favourite burger recipe and I thought that thanks to the fact the man is inextricably linked to the Southernmost City we should probably not let this historic (really? Pardon my skepticism) recipe get away from us. Here's the story with added pictures pulled from the Web. Happy Valentine's Day !

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other" wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. Could it have been a wholesome burger that made them sleep so well, asks Tanvi Misra, of the BBC?

According to Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, Papa's favourite hamburger recipe - made available in digital form by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library on Tuesday - reveals quite a bit about the author and his fourth wife, Mary. It's no surprise that he liked his burger "pink and juicy in the middle" but what about the soy sauce, and the half-teaspoon of Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder? "One of Hemingway's favourite restaurants was in Havana's Chinatown," says Spanier. He loved Chinese food.

Also notable is the sheer range of items thrown into the mix - India relish, capers, wine, parsley... This captures a "gusto that's very characteristic" of Hemingway, Spanier says. "It's indicative of his enjoyment of the pleasures of life," and also the range of his tastes, from low-brow to high-brow. He was as comfortable on a boat with Cuban fisherman, Spanier says, as he was dining at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

As burgers go, this is quite ritzy.Hemingway's passion for food and drink is often reflected in his writing. Whole paragraphs describe the frothy bubbling of pancake batter in a skillet, and the sip from a tin of apricots in one of his earliest short stories, Big Two-Hearted River, Spanier notes. A Moveable feast, published after his death, contains a loving description of eating oysters with cold white wine. Mary wrote that they ate the hamburgers to fortify them for "tramping through the sagebrush after pheasant, partridge or ducks" in Idaho or Wyoming, which they visited every autumn. She typed the recipe out for the Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery while Hemingway was still alive, Spanier says.

This recently published version with the added "Wild West" tag, was for a later edition. After Hemingway's death in 1961, as relations between the US and Cuba deteriorated, Mary needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim documents and memorabilia. President Kennedy and Fidel Castro intervened to make it possible - which explains the JFK library's interest in Hemingway's papers.

This recipe, above reproduced below, was among those left behind at Finca Vigia outside Havana, shown with Hemingway's own notations.

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves minced garlic

2 little green onions, finely chopped

1 heaped teaspoon India relish

2 tablespoons capers

1 heaped teaspoon of Spice Islands sage,

Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning – ½ teaspoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder – ½ teaspoon

1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork

About one third of a cup dry red or white wine.

1 tablespoon of cooking oil

Spice Islands discontinued Mei Yen Powder three years ago, but you can recreate it with 9 parts salt, 9 parts sugar, 2 parts MSG. If a recipe calls for 1 tsp Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 tsp of this recipe mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.

What to do:

Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.

Key West on Dwellable

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Gun Running In Key West

Happy Christmas! I prefer Festivus myself with the airing of grievances but anyway, now we are past the holly and the ivy thing lets get on to today's essay. I think a movie is the thing for the cold dark midwinter that hovers outside your door. Hemingway, gun running and Audie Murphy, perfect company on Netflix streaming for Christmas/Festivus.

Howsoever that may be this is light entertainment not high art, so you can afford to not be completely attentive during the show. Better in fact you do not always pay close attention, as we shall see.

Hemingway's 1937 story has inspired lots of movie spin offs. Bogart met Bacall on the set of To Have And To Have Not, a movie made in 1944 patriotically set in Martinique a French island run by Nazi collaborators. Nowadays the star power of the movie makes it the most popular version of the original story. This one stars Audie Murphy the World War Two hero turned actor.

It most emphatically does not star Key West. The movie is mostly interiors and scenes at sea, which is your first clue the producers cheaped out. California is a versatile movie background, the Mojave desert for Afghanistan, Long Beach for Miami, Carmel for Cornwall and so on, but unfortunately because I know the state well I tend to get annoyed by movie makers' short cuts. This is not, nor ever was Key West:

Photographing the TV screen is not easy or effective so bear with me, but anyone who has been to Key West knows there are no hills anywhere. Certainly not as an inadvertent background to the harbor. I think you can see the slope in this grainy close up, between the boat in the foreground and the white forms in the middle ground:

I suppose this could double as a Key West street, but it's a shame when they short change us.

Don Siegel directs a solid cast of unknowns these days. Patricia Owens is Murphy's loving much younger wife and they sparkle together on the screen.

Everett Sloan plays Murphy's drunken deck hand, to much less comedic effect than Walter Brennan did in the Humphrey Bogart film ("Was you ever stung by a dead bee..?").

The happy couple, broke as one should be in Key West. After all eighty percent of the people were in the (first) Great Depression which was when the story was set by Hemingway.

It's a cute movie, plenty of humor and in atmosphere close enough to the original story.

Oops, excuse me, there they go again.

Until Gita Hall steps in and wants to tempt baby face Audie off the straight and narrow.

No one is what they seem...and strange blondes who offer you lunch, or something, are trouble.

But our hero is a man of steel...

...lacking authenticity a billboard will do. Am I a spoil sport?

On the other hand this set doesn't do a bad job of recreating depression era Key West.

And slowly the plot unravels.

A movie of which you have never heard. My gift to you. Cancel your cable and save a bundle by subscribing to Netflix. Oh, and it's advertising free.

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