Bean Film Quotes

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.

I grew up poor among poor people in a poor town, but I never knew how poor I'd been until I moved to New York. These women with their fresh produce and diamonds and manicures. Even their skin was expensive. What got to me about them wasn't just the way they made me suddenly self-conscious about the ink under my fingernails or the haircut I gave myself in my own bathroom. It wasn't just that they'd spend more in one evening on chocolate, escarole, and jam than I did on the rice and beans and film and photo paper I needed for a week. What enraged me is that they didn't, couldn't, see me. I was less than a machine to them, less than a body. I did not even appear in their line of sight. I was nothing more than a couple of chanted phrases: Cash or charge? Paper or plastic? Thank you, have a nice night.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

The girl in the Four Seasons coat check was eating handfuls of colored jelly beans and reading a thin yellow paperback. I’d read in the witness report in Ashley’s police file that the coat-check girl’s name was Nora Halliday and she was nineteen. Every time a party of diners arrived—midwestern tourists, finance dudes, a couple so elderly they moved like they were doing a form of tai chi—she whisked off her black-rimmed eyeglasses, hid the book, and with a cheerful “Good evening!” took their coats. After they moved upstairs to the restaurant, she put her glasses back on, brought out the paperback, and started reading again, hunched over the counter of the stall.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

I turned on the television screen and computer and fast-forwarded Casablanca for one last try. I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could never be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.

This culture gave rise to review sites and media watchdog groups (part of evangelicalism’s aforementioned cultural critique) who became moral bean counters, neatly cataloging infractions for concerned parents or easily offended saints. For example, one media watchdog group noted that the popular film The Blind Side (2009), despite a positive portrayal of evangelicals and a redemptive message, contained 10 sexual references, 3 scatological terms, 8 anatomical terms, and 7 mild obscenities — offenses that eventually resulted in Lifeway, one of the largest Christian bookstore chains in the world, removing the movie from its shelves.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

OYAKI Vegetable bun Serves 4–6 (makes about 20 buns) Preparation time: 2½ hrs Cooking time: 15 mins For the dough 300g (10½ oz) wholemeal flour 50g (1¾ oz) cake/self-raising flour 250ml (8½ fl oz) water For the filling 2kg (4 lb 6 oz) mixed shredded cabbage, finely cut daikon (white radish) and carrot 160g (5½ oz) yellow miso 40g (1½ oz) sugar 4 tbsp vegetable oil 1 tbsp basic dashi or water Vegetable and sweet miso 1 aubergine or daikon, finely sliced For the sweet miso sauce 300g (10½ oz) yellow miso 100g (3½ oz) sugar 50ml (1½ fl oz) vegetable oil 1 tbsp basic dashi or water Sweet potato with sweet red bean paste 2 sweet potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced into rounds 225g (8 oz) red bean paste, sweetened to taste salt, for seasoning 1 Working the dough correctly is key. Combine the two flours in a large bowl and then add the water slowly, mixing with chopsticks, just until combined. Cover with cling film and allow the dough to stand for 2 hours. 2 Meanwhile, prepare the filling. Steam the vegetables in a steamer until just tender but still retaining a bit of bite. Remove, allow to cool, then squeeze out excess liquid. Put the steamed vegetables in a large bowl. 3 In a bowl, combine the miso, sugar, vegetable oil and dashi. Pour the mixture into the bowl with the steamed vegetables and mix well. 4 Divide the vegetable filling into 20 portions and form into balls. Do the same with the dough. 5 To make the buns, take one ball of dough and place on a lightly floured surface. Use the palm of one hand to flatten (or use a rolling pin) into a small circle about 10cm (4 in) in diameter and about 2mm (1/12 in) thick. Try to make the centre of the dough slightly thicker than the edges. 6 Place a ball of filling in the centre. Fold over the dough and shape into a ball, pressing the edges firmly to seal. 7 Steam the oyaki in a metal steamer lined with a damp cloth for 13 minutes, until the dough looks opaque and the centre is cooked through. 8 Once steamed, serve at once. Alternatively you can fry them in a non-stick pan over medium heat for 1–2 minutes, or until each side is lightly golden. For the vegetable and sweet miso 1 Bring a saucepan of water to the boil and blanch the aubergine for a few minutes, until softened. Remove and drain. 2 To make the sweet miso sauce, combine the miso, sugar, vegetable oil, and dashi in a bowl. Spread the miso sauce between two slices of the thinly sliced vegetables like a miso sandwich. For the sweet potato with sweet red bean paste 1 Season the sweet potatoes with salt. 2 Spread red bean paste between two slices of sweet potato, like a miso sandwich.

(Describing a stop at a village cafe in Italy while filming Taming of the Shrew) It was a perfect choice, the kind of place where chickens brood under the table, though there were none here There was the usual arbour of vines. Two men there intrigued Elizabeth. One was a distinguished oldish man, well dressed, who sat alone at a terraced table and neither ate nor drank nor moved. The other looked like a mendicant monk of some obscure order. He read from a parchment and ate bread. He didn't look up at all. He had a large beard. At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love. The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream. we stopped eating our fave (raw kidney beans) and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen. It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they're over. The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where. we drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I've ever seen her and with a wisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E's image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.