The newest Frankenstein: a review.

Sorry that I forgot to put up the usual and customary "on vacation" graphic for last week. But I assume y'all figured out that I was gone.

This week, I want to talk briefly about a movie I watched last night -- the newest remake of Mary Shelley's Gothic horror novel, Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus. 

Movie poster image stolen from Wikipedia

I'm not a huge fan of horror films these days -- too many of the new ones are slasher flicks -- but I have liked Guillermo del Toro's work in the past. I thought Pan's Labyrinth was very cool, and I liked The Shape of Water well enough to buy it (high praise for me!). So I knew I needed to watch his version of the Frankenstein story eventually, but I'd been putting it off. My favorite Frankenstein movie is Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, after all, and I knew this wasn't going to be anything like that. 

(We pause now to recite some of my favorite dialogue from Young Frankenstein: 

• "What hump?" 
• "Ovaltine?" "NOTHING! THANK YOU!"
• "Blucher!" neiggggghhhhh!

That's enough for now. Thank you for your indulgence.)

It has been lost on generations of students required to read the original novel that the Creature isn't the real monster in Shelley's story -- it's Victor Frankenstein, the Creature's creator. Del Toro gets it. And unlike many film directors of the past, he gives the Creature's version of the tale as much weight as he gives Victor's. Victor tells his side of the story to the Danish captain whose ship, stuck fast in ice in the frozen North, rescues him from the Creature's latest attack. But then the Creature -- who has suffered multiple attempts to end his life, discovering in the process that he cannot die -- climbs aboard the ship and tells the captain, and Victor, what happened to him after surviving the fire that Victor set to destroy him.

The Creature had holed up in an abandoned mill attached to a home, and through chinks in the walls, he watches the family who lives there care for each other. He develops an attachment to the blind grandfather, and poses as a traveler to spend the winter with the old man after the rest of the family departs for warmer quarters. This is not far afield from Shelley's story. The blind man cannot see the Creature, so he bases his interactions with him on his gentle nature and naivete. He teaches the Creature to read. He also teaches him the Christian tenet of forgiveness. But when the family returns, they try to kill the Creature, setting him on a path to find his father in the hope that Victor will make him a companion.

But after the fire, Victor renounced his life's work, and he is in no way interested in making another creature. So the Creature, enraged, chases him into the frozen North to kill him.

Unlike in Shelley's novel, however, del Toro's Creature has learned about Christian forgiveness. And Victor has realized he was wrong about his creation; he's not an it, but a human being. Victor apologizes to the Creature -- to his son. And the Creature in turn forgives Victor.

It's not all sweetness and light from there -- the ending is still tragic, as befits a horror movie -- but it's a lot more hopeful than Shelley's ending. In the book*, Victor is consumed by hatred of his creation, and that hatred kills him. There's no apology; by the time the Creature catches up to him, Victor is dead. The Creature creates a funeral pyre for his maker and then leaves to kill himself.

I'm not enamored of Shelley's Victorian morality, but I'm not sold on del Toro's relationships-turning-on-a-dime ending, either. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long, and I get that del Toro needed to wrap things up pretty fast. But a little foreshadowing of Victor's change of heart toward his son would have gone a long way for me.

So my favorite ending for the story is still the one in Young Frankenstein, in which Frederick, Victor's grandson, and the Monster swap brains. Frederick ends up with the Monster's giant "schwanstucker", delighting Inga, while the Monster gets Frederick's sophistication and his intended, Elizabeth, who fell for him in this immortal scene: 

Madeline Kahn was gone far too soon.

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*Don't @ me about spoilers from Shelley's book. It was published in 1818.

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I probably should mention the acting in del Toro's movie. Oscar Isaac is a force of nature as Victor; I loved him in Marvel's Moon Knight, too. And Jacob Elordi turns in a wondrous performance as the Creature.

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We are not going to talk about the fact that Young Frankenstein is 51 years old.

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These moments of monstrous blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Another New Mexico artist I'm a fan of.

I've gushed here on numerous occasions about Georgia O'Keeffe, but there's another artist with ties to New Mexico of whom I'm a fan. You may even have heard of him: Gustave Baumann. The New Mexico Museum of Art here in Santa Fe is running an expansive exhibit of his work through February, and I stopped by a few weeks ago to see it. If you're going to be in Santa Fe this winter, it's worth a visit.

Baumann was born in Germany in 1881 and moved to the United States with his family when he was about ten years old. According to Wikipedia, when he was 17, he worked for an engraving house in Chicago while taking night classes at the Art Institute. He returned to Germany for further studies, but by 1908, he was back in the US, earning a living as a graphic artist and producing color woodcuts. He spent some years in Nashville, IN, as a member of the Brown County Art Colony. While there, he was hired to illustrate a volume of poetry by James Whitcomb Riley, the celebrated (at least back in the day) Hoosier poet, which was published in 1912. The exhibit has a copy of the book on display. They didn't say I couldn't take a photo, so I did. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Lynne Cantwell 2025

In case you can't embiggen the second pic, here's what it says: 

James Whitcomb Riley, an Indiana native and the most revered poet of his day, and Baumann, then living in Nashville, was commissioned by the Bobbs-Merrill Company to illustrate his poem All the Year Round. The book featured color scenes of daily life in the rural county, one for each month.

Often overlooked but truly noteworthy, the bold lettering of each poem (skillfully carved backwards) suits Riley's folksy stanzas "to a T." The book was hailed as an innovative and artistic achievement, but even though it was priced at only $2.50, its sales were less than hoped for.

 I do hope you can embiggen the pic, if only to see that the museum staff waggishly printed the word "backwards" backwards.

In 1918, Baumann moved to New Mexico, arriving first in Taos and then in Santa Fe, where Paul Water, the then-curator of the New Mexico Museum of Art (which was new on the scene at the time), convinced Baumann to stay by giving him studio space in the museum's basement.

I was beginning to feel like I'd been following Baumann around. I grew up on the other side of Lake Michigan from Chicago and attended Indiana University, which isn't far from Brown County. And of course now I'm here.

The curators' whimsical nature shown in that label for the poetry book is well suited to Baumann. He created charming annual holiday cards and carved marionettes and painted backdrops for puppet shows, many of which are on display. He also helped another local artist, Will Shuster, create the very first Zozobra, the marionette that has been filled with "glooms" and burned every year since 1924. (The first one was only about six feet tall. They're a lot bigger now.)

None of this is to diminish the effort that Baumann put into his primary craft. One part of the exhibit is devoted to showing the layering technique for Baumann's print, Old Santa Fe. It required eight woodcuts, each with a different color of ink, to produce this result: 

From the New Mexico Museum of Art's website

For those of us, like me, who have made simplistic prints by carving a potato, the precision required for this kind of work boggles the mind. 

Anyhow, go see it if you're in town. The exhibit is on until February 22, 2026.

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Update on cooking Thanksgiving dinner on an induction stove: It was fine. Although the first thing I made, pumpkin pudding, took a little inventiveness. I've made this for years; basically it's pumpkin pie filling baked in ramekins instead of in a pie crust, which saves both calories (if you're counting those) and carbs (if you're counting those). It requires baking the ramekins in a water bath, which is a standard technique for baking custards. Anyway, the first step in the recipe is to heat a large kettle full of water to boiling.

Well. My kettle is ceramic. I bought it years ago, after I got tired of replacing metal kettles that always rusted inside. Ceramic can go right on an open flame, but it won't work on induction.

I ended up heating the water in a pot, then pouring it into the teapot to pour into the pan that the ramekins were placed in. I needed the spout to keep from splashing water into the filled ramekins. Anyhow, it all worked out fine -- although now I need to consider whether it's worth buying a steel teapot for the once per year that I make pumpkin pudding.

The rest of the meal went fine; I cooked the turkey loaf with the convection feature, and it turned out perfectly moist. The stove claims to automatically recalculate temperatures from regular recipes to induction. Now if somebody would make a stove that automatically calculates convection bake temps for 7,000 feet, I'd be all set.

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I'll be out of pocket next weekend, so no post from me. See you around here again on December 14th.

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These moments of waggish blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Anticipating an experimental Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is this week here in the US, and so we're all busy planning menus, pre-cooking parts of the feast, and inviting family, friends, and people we think may not have anyone to celebrate the holiday with us.

I'm not going to be with family (that's next week), and I'm turning down all well-meaning invitations for Thursday. Nor am I inviting anyone to my place, as I have sometimes done in the past. Why? Because I have a new toy to play with. I took delivery this past week on an induction stove. 

The new stove shows more of my fun backsplash tiles!
Lynne Cantwell 2025

When I bought this apartment, I didn't even think about the ages of the appliances that came with. At least, not until the 35-year-old dishwasher started coughing up things I'd never put into it. It was about that time that I decided to start replacing everything, even the stuff that still worked. I got a new microwave in 2024; somebody had stuck a finger or something through the plastic panel over the clock/timer display on the old one, and it bugged me that I couldn't easily read it. The new fridge I bought last year to replace a 2011 model. I got a new washer and dryer to replace the pair that were manufactured in 1997 when I redid the laundry closet last year.

That left the stove. I liked the old one. It had a 2011 manufacturing date, and it still worked fine, but I've been jonesing for an induction stove -- primarily because it's safer for older folks not to reach across hot burners for the knobs on the back of the stove. Also, induction burners won't get hot, even if the knob is on, unless there's an induction-ready pan on it.

"Induction-ready pan" needs an explanation. Induction works by creating electromagnetic energy. There's a coil of copper wire under the glass stovetop; electricity is sent through it, and when a pan that conducts magnetic energy is set atop the glass over the copper coil, the copper generates a current within the pan itself. Basically (if I've got this right), the pan itself is    ` the heat source. The burner on the stove gets warm, but the pan heats up a lot. So you can't use aluminum pots and pans on this stove -- you have to use something that a magnet will stick to. In other words, your pans need to be stainless steel, carbon steel, cast iron, or certain hybrid pans. Try sticking a magnet to the bottom of your pan -- if it sticks, it'll work on induction.

Induction cooking is fast. The installer had me put a little bit of water inside a pan and put in on the burner; the water inside started boiling within 30 seconds. Granted, it was only a little bit of water, but it seemed whiz-bang fast to me.

It's going to take some adjustment for me to get used to that speed. I've been cooking on an electric stove since the middle of 2018, and I've adapted my cooking style to the slow warmup of regular electric burners. The first time I made an omelet on this new stove, I waited too long to pour in the egg mixture. It didn't quite burn, but it came out extra brown. And induction heats up even faster than gas. 

This stove also has both a regular and convection oven. My microwave has a convection feature, which I've used a couple of times, partly for the novelty of putting an actual metal pan in the microwave -- although the microwave doesn't have a cleaning cycle in case you get grease spatters all over the inside, so it's not as useful as I first thought it would be. The new oven does have a steam-cleaning cycle. And purportedly it will do the regular-to-convection temperature conversion for you; given that I also have to recalculate for altitude, I'm not sure how useful that feature will be. But I'm willing to give it a whirl.

All of which is to explain why I'm not inviting anyone over this Thanksgiving. If I manage to ruin my Thanksgiving dinner, it will only be ruined for me. You're welcome.

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Oh, my pots and pans? Yeah, I did have to replace them. I had quit using the carbon steel frying pan I first bought because it annoyed me. Instead, I've gone with a couple of hybrid pieces and two nitrided carbon steel frying pans, all made by Anolon. (My favorite aluminum pots were all Anolon.) I am in love with these carbon steel frying pans. Still looking for a saucepan or two.

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In looking for links for this post, I ran across the saga of my washer and dryer: Best Buy had sold me a vaporware clothes dryer, and I ended up buying the unit from a regional appliance-store chain instead. 

I can laugh about it now. And you can bet I went to the regional chain first for my induction stove. Ordered on Saturday, delivered on Wednesday. Boom.

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These moments of cooking-with-induction blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Working toward a world in balance.

So here's the topic I skipped over last week. Might be a little stream-of-consciousness, since I've run across a couple of other points this week that are still gelling in my brain, but I think it hangs together pretty well. Here we go. 

yuliaglam | Deposit Photos

(I know it looks like a scales-of-justice, but it's not in this instance; it's just a plain old set of scales.)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm studying up on that time the Inquisition came to New Mexico and left, after blaming a Franciscan friar for all the commotion. I'm reading a book on the topic called The Witches of Abiquiu by Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks. I'm still working through the first few chapters, which describe the setting and the cast of characters. But in the introduction, on page 7, there's an initial discussion about fray Juan José Toledo, the Franciscan father who was eventually blamed for the trouble. Fray Toledo was conversant with the Malleus Maleficarum, which I've heard of but never read; it's described here as a witch-hunting handbook. But this is the part that struck me (emphasis mine):

Missionaries in Central Mexico and beyond learned to depict the Devil and his realm of Hell in vivid detail to convince the Indians to repent their sins. The Indians, however, held a different worldview in which creative and destructive forces existed side by side in their gods. They had no deity like the Devil and no word for evil. The Nahuas of Central Mexico and the Incas of the Andes believed in concepts of order and disorder rather than good and evil. In the Andes, for instance, the serpent did not embody evil as it did for Christians, but rather a destructive force attempting to re-create balance when relations of equilibrium had not been maintained." (page 7)

In other words, the missionaries had to teach the Indians what (in the church's view) Good and Evil were. Pre-contact, these Indians were interested in living in balance. I believe this is similar to the Navajo philosophy of hózhó, which you may have heard referred to as the Beauty Way; the idea is to live in balance and harmony.

Then there's the relationship between the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, which I know I've talked about here before. Perun is the thunder god; Veles is the god of the underworld and also of the forest. They have an epic battle every spring. But they're not enemies; they are not the embodiment of Good and Evil. Their battle is aimed at bringing the world into balance.

I dunno, man. Does it sound like Good and Evil are absolute concepts to you? Because it doesn't sound like it to me. Too many cultures around the world operated under a different philosophy for centuries -- probably millennia -- before Christianity became dominant. But there's danger in giving all your power to a single deity: the message of that deity can be misinterpreted at best and abused at worst. So we get things like the fear of the devil. And the patriarchy. And the concepts of Good and Evil, which are then used to categorize and stereotype people (men Good, women Evil; white folks Good, folks of every other color Evil or at best misguided and must be "civilized"; our political side Good, their side Evil; and so on).

Yesterday I shared a Facebook post about Rebecca Solnit, a feminist author and activist who identified the phenomenon of mansplaining (although someone else named it). The post calls this her most devastating line: "Men invented standards they could meet and called them universal." In other words, in our culture, the patriarchy assigned Good to men and Evil to women. Rationality is a male quality, emotion a female one (and guess which one is prized and which is dismissed?). There's no continuum in this worldview, no shades of gray -- everything is either one or the other.

That prompted me to comment: "I begin to think that men in ancient times invented every dichotomy that permeates Western thought because they were uncomfortable with ambiguity."

Men can be emotional and women can be rational. Other cultures' philosophical systems can also be legitimate.

As for politics in this country? I hope that someday we can have conversations with the other side again, to find areas of agreement and work toward a better nation. But we have a lot of work ahead of us. I hope we're not doomed to fail.

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Oh, here's an update on my whiny post of a couple of weeks ago: 

• Session proofer training ended on Friday, and we all survived; we're having a meeting this week amongst the trainers to talk about how it went. 
• As for the condo board, it looks like nobody else wants to be secretary, so I may keep the job for another few years. I'll know more after the annual meeting next Saturday. 
• And as for the Pagan group, I decided that I don't need to make a decision right now. Kicking that can down the road, baby!

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These moments of bloggy balance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!