In this section we will present things Bette Midler promotes on Twitter on in interviews, such as articles, books, and movies she is interested in. Kind of an antidote to the trivialities posted on social media. Yes, it’s artsy fartsy but we are going there. And here are the things Miss M is into right this very moment:
Hemingway in Love: His Own Story Hardcover ”“ October 20, 2015
In June of 1961,
A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary’s Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later,
Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade.
In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley,the real part of each literary woman he’d later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which he stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him: humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.
To protect the feelings of Ernest’s wife, Mary – also a close friend – Hotch kept the conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master as he remembers the definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and dogged him until the end of his days.
Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity
t was through control of the shattering of wild seeds that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world’s food supply, as loss of genetic diversity sets the stage for widespread hunger. Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in
food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in
American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies–with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970–this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity’s most basic foods are threatened. The consequences are more than culinary. Without the genetic diversity from which farmers traditionally breed for resistance to diseases, crops are more susceptible to the spread of pestilence. Tragedies like the
Irish Potato Famine may be thought of today as ancient history; yet the U.S. corn blight of 1970 shows that technologically based agribusiness is a breeding ground for disaster. Shattering reviews the development of genetic diversity over 10,000 years of human agriculture, then exposes its loss in our lifetime at the hands of political and economic forces. The possibility of crisis is real; this book shows that it may not be too late to avert it.
Wild Tales(film)
The film is divided into six segments. (1) “
Pasternak“: While being on a plane, a model and a music critic realise they have a common acquaintance called Pasternak. Soon they discover that every passenger and crew member on board know Pasternak. Is this coincidence? (2) “The Rats”: A waitress recognizes her client – it’s the loan shark who caused a tragedy in her family. The cook suggests mixing rat poison with his food, but the waitress refuses. The stubborn cook, however, decides to proceed with her plan. (3) “The Strongest”: Two drivers on a lone highway have an argument with tragic consequences. (4) “Little Bomb”: A demolition engineer has his car towed by a truck for parking in a wrong place and he has an argument with the employee of the towing company. This event destroys his private and professional life, and he plots revenge against the corrupt towing company and the city hall. (5) “The Proposal”: A reckless son of a wealthy family has an overnight hit-and-run accident, in which a pregnant woman gets killed. He wakes his parents up and his father calls the lawyer. The parents propose to pay the groundkeeper to take the blame for the boy. Soon the father discovers that he is a victim of extortion of his lawyer and the detective in charge of the investigation. What will be his decision? (6) “Until Death Do Us Apart”: During the wedding party, the bride discovers that her newlywed husband has been cheating on her with one of the guests, and she decides to pay him back.
