Talk about price gouging: dumbbells are $315 on Amazon right now
It works out to $26.25 per pound, about the same as a dry-aged steak.
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It’s impossible to pretend that everything is normal. The City of New York is considering digging mass graves in public parks—10 caskets per trench—online sellers are price gouging for home gym equipment, and the weather turned freakishly nice overnight. How does all of that makes sense at once?! It’s a perfect spring day out there! Birds are chirping, the buds and flowers are out, and the church bells rung out a pretty little ditty today that sounded just lovely. In fact, the world is so alive that Le Le and Ying Ying, two pandas at the Ocean Park Zoo in Hong Kong, decided to “succeed in natural mating” today for the first time in a decade. Seriously. To say that I’m experiencing some cognitive dissonance at the moment would be an understatement.
It’s a big change from three weeks ago when COVID-19 was still a distant concern for many people, but the only panda getting any action was the one chasing down tourists in Times Square. While the health impact of the virus is tragic and the economic fallout from the lockdown will be unimaginably costly, for millions of people at this particular moment in time, the biggest daily struggle may be reconciling the presence of an invisible, malevolent threat with the fact that life does indeed go on. Spring continues to be a time of renewal and rebirth and even—it seems—panda procreation, despite the global pandemic facing our species.
When trying to put current events in context, I always try to take the long view and look at history. Most commentary, if it has sought to compare COVID-19 with anything, has singled out the Spanish Flu. This makes sense as it is the only modern equivalent to the current public health catastrophe. And indeed, just as in 1918, families all over the world are losing loved ones, doctors and nurses are on the front lines, and everyone touched by this disease deserves our collective sympathy and support. But if we extend our frame of reference beyond the last hundred years, our situation begins to look a bit rosier. COVID-19 isn’t smallpox, which was only eradicated in 1980, was highly virulent, and had a mortality rate of 20–30 percent. In 1666 and 1667, a full quarter of the population of London succumbed to the plague, and it was only stopped when most of the city burned to the ground. The Black Death, wiped-out an estimated 50 million people—60 percent of the population—in Europe during the 14th Century. And so far as I know, no one has advocated burning witches as a solution to our problems. If we compare our current plight—sad and scary and devastating as it is—to that of generations past, this hardly registers. This is not to say that many people are not suffering right now, but in the context of the history of human civilization, things could be far worse. We understand how viruses work, how they are spread, and how to treat them, even if we still struggle with leadership and the logistics of doing that at scale.
So when we hear things that strike fear into our hearts, let’s try and maintain a bit of a historical perspective. And on the bright side, the weather’s great, we’re all getting better at cooking, and zoos and aquariums everywhere are posting videos of our brothers and sisters from the animal kingdom enjoying the spring. I’ll let you find the pandas on your own if that’s your jam, but here’s a live cam of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s penguins living their best lives. (And if you like that, make sure you check out sea otter cam too.)
Today’s Recommendation: Harold and Maude (1971)
Today’s recommendation is written by Brooklyn-based director Robert Gregson. His short film “The Refrigerator” earned the Best New Director Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival and his feature film “Trivia Night” won the Best Feature Film Award at the Omaha Film Festival and is now available on Amazon Prime. As a director, Gregson has worked with a range of media organizations, corporations and non-profits and also wrote and directed “Envisioning a New Home for the Late Show,” a viral mini-doc on Stephen Colbert's transformation of the Ed Sullivan theater. His short psychological horror film “Shut Eye” is in the beginning of its festival run, and most recently he wrote and directed “A Good Couple,” a short psychological drama now in postproduction.
In addition to this, he is currently developing a feature screenplay with yours truly entitled “Influencers.” It’s a thriller about a misguided loner who forges his own kind of justice when he takes down a hated white collar criminal, only to find himself at the center of an ever-deepening web of conspiracies. You can reach Gregson at robert.gregson86@gmail.com.
Although its main character is a depressed, death-obsessed teenager who falls in love with a woman four times his age, few films are more life-affirming than Harold and Maude. Only the second film from director Hal Ashby, and the first produced feature from writer Colin Higgins, Harold and Maude invites us on a journey with its eponymous heroes as one discovers the meaning of life and the other gracefully accepts their fate. Ashby leaves no detail untouched. In one of the film’s best sequences, it suggests that without looking closely at details, you risk missing their meaning.
Ignoring his fake suicide attempts, Harold’s detached mother insists the cure to his malady is marriage and uses a nascent form of online dating to recruit a bride. When he’s not scaring off these dates, Harold hangs out at strangers’ funerals where he meets Maude, a kindred spirit 60 years his senior. Maude is a free thinker who lives in an abandoned train car and has little need for ownership, authority, or regret. A romance begins.
The magic of this film was forged in the white heat of rare cinematic forces. Ashby’s choices of music, casting, location production, and mis-en-scene have made this film transcend the era in which it was produced. Of the many special things about this film, I think Ruth Gordon’s embodiment of Maude is the place to start. Gordon, just off an Oscar winning performance in Rosemary’s Baby, has an energy and spontaneity that you absorb by osmosis. At times her gestures even seem to precede her thoughts. She teaches Harold much about life, and you believe she’s got wisdom to share. Much newer to the screen than Gordon, Bud Cort plays Harold, whose character is initially incapable of change and spontaneity. Ashby’s style of directing some of these scenes with Cort have had a lasting cultural impact. They are early and obvious touchstones for contemporary directors who have cultivated a similar deadpan humor. In fact, Wes Anderson put Bud Cort into The Life Aquatic on the basis of his love for Harold and Maude. The film’s score is made up almost entirely of Cat Stevens tracks, several of which were written for the film. These folk rock songs lend the film a fable-like edge that help lift it from the confines of realism into a place only the movies can inhabit.
One of the most iconic scenes in the film finds Harold and Maude in a field of flowers. Maude asks what kind of flower he would be and he responds gloomily that the flowers “are all alike”. Maude disagrees, pointing out that if you look closely, they’ve got “All kinds of observable differences. You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this,” pointing at a singular daisy, “yet allow themselves to be treated like this,” as the film cuts to a super wide of identical gravestones in a graveyard, revealing they were in a graveyard the whole time. It’s a beautiful scene that has all sorts of political implications, but the film transcends the particulars of its time and instead continues to speak to us through these kinds of existential, poetic images.
Tonight, if the big picture seems daunting, I suggest settling down with Harold and Maude and sweating the details.
— Robert Gregson
“Harold and Maude” is available to rent on YouTube, Amazon Prime Video and iTunes.
Reading List:
The Times published a must-read feature over the weekend about a lion tamer in Egypt. She’s got no fear and is showing the men how it’s done.
Also at The Times, Maureen Dowd penned a truly hilarious piece about how Curmudgeon-in-Chief Larry David is handling quarantine. (Spoiler, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much.)
And McSweeney’s has some tips on how to live among the mole people.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.