【空中相會．昭和中期小物兩件】
早上和已返回東京的廣告分析公司老闆視訊進行兩小時的腦力激盪對話，這是老闆離開巴黎之後我們第一次在電腦螢幕上見面，我們都很興奮，視訊一開始就比賽看誰先向對方比出勝利的「V」手勢！
老闆結束了在旅館的三天隔離，回到家中繼續居家隔離，還要再八天才能回復自由。老闆說在旅館的三天很慘，三餐都是很難吃的便當，送達房門口時整個旅館會大聲廣播，請大家在三分鐘之後開門拿取，四十分鐘之後再將吃完的便當放回門口，旅館入口有一位身形健壯的警衛守著。老闆表示什麼都不能做，心情也不好，只好變成追劇人，看完了《后翼棄兵(The Queen's Gambit)》和《Unorthodox 》兩部劇，覺得非常好看。現在回到家裡，每天會有三通電話確認是否待在家裡或是離家2公里內的超市或是食品店裡，一通打到家中的座機，兩通是打到手機的影像電話。他和夫人昨天第一次下樓去超商買些水果時，剎那間覺得自由真好真可貴，哪怕只是10分鐘！因為老闆和夫人都只會做最簡單的料理，所以每天夫人的姊姊和媽媽會輪流做料理送來給他們吃，相較之下，法國實在太自由了！
今天老闆坐在陽台和我視訊，因為他想讓我感受他身處的環境，跟著鏡頭，我看到老闆住家所在的涉谷代官山，俯瞰街上的商店車輛和行人，看到前方不遠處目黑區老闆新公司所在的大樓，還有位於惠比壽的老闆岳母家公寓樓，老闆說天氣很好的時候還可以看到橫濱；讓我看著微微擺動的葉子和他臉上的光影來體會東京的風和陽光，又讓我聽街上傳來的救護車警笛聲；我則讓老闆看我最近完成的所有畫作。這樣的交流真的非常有意思！老闆一共收藏了五幅我的畫作，兩幅掛在法國鄕下的家、一幅掛在巴黎的家，這次帶著另外兩幅到日本，一幅放在家裡，一幅放在新公司，老闆說這樣無論他到哪裡都有我的畫陪著。
視訊結束後，帶著Billy Boy出門走走逛逛，在一家古董店買了兩件昭和中期(1950年代)的九谷風格小缽，是用來盛吃生魚片時沾的醬油，直徑只有6.5公分，小巧可愛的庶民風格。
queen's gambit意思 在 [閒聊] The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen's Gambi - 看板EAseries 的推薦與評價
去年12月時The New Yorker刊了一篇由一位住在美國北加州的作家所發表對后翼棄兵的評論，其中主要針對在這部影集中她認為女主角表現的「缺陷」，我覺得有些意思，貼上來與各位版友和后翼棄兵的影迷(我也是)分享。
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The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen’s Gambit”
By Sarah Miller
December 01, 2020
https://tinyurl.com/y3focf6d
I picked up Walter Tevis’s novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” from 1983, at Skylight Books, in Los Angeles, sometime around 2002. It was a staff pick, and the blurb on the blue index card taped underneath said something like “sleeper gem by dude who wrote ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ about an orphaned chess prodigy addicted to downers—read this now.” On the cover, Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said that he reread it “every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.”
I read it in two days, and over the years I have reread it probably a dozen times. From its first sentence (“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard”) to its last, it was my platonic ideal of a novel. I loved its respect for the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (“From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this”) and how this general efficiency made its richer emotional and physical details stand out, like
brightly wrapped Christmas gifts set under a sparse tree. “Do I have to care about chess?” people would ask when I recommended the novel. I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost, rejected, or underestimated while nurturing a fierce, mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book.
Following its début in October, “The Queen’s Gambit,” according to Netflix, became the streaming platform’s No. 1 show in sixty-three countries and its most-watched “limited scripted series” ever. (The show also appears to be responsible for compounding an ongoing, pandemic-induced chess boom, as measured in online chess activity as well as sales of chess sets and accessories.) I began watching the day it came out. I felt a twinge of familiarity in the austere rows of metal beds in the Methuen
Home—the orphanage where Beth lives after her mother’s sudden death—and in the matchy-matchy décor at the home of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Wheatley, in suburban Lexington. But I could not summon any similar spark of recognition for Beth herself. As Beth’s chess career took off, I was interested in where it took her—drab gymnasiums, then grand Midwest hotels, then grander international hotels—but I did not care much what happened when she got there. At the same time I was being given the gift of
seeing this imagined world come sumptuously to life, it was also being taken away, and the reason for the sense of loss was obvious: Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon.
A complaint such as this one, about the beautiful performers who take the place of our ordinary book characters, is common, even tedious. The Web site TV Tropes has an entry devoted to Adaptational Attractiveness, wherein “someone who was originally fat, plain, or even downright ugly is played by a much more conventionally attractive actor.” (One writer has helpfully mapped adaptational attractiveness onto a spectrum known as the Fassbender Scale.) Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal
People” confused some fans who thought that Marianne, a bullied outcast in the book, was perhaps not most effectively played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who probably spends her free time modelling. I agreed with this criticism a hundred per cent, but I also sobbed through the whole series, every second of Marianne’s pain piercing my heart like a dagger carved from the finest ebony, polished to match the shine of Edgar-Jones’s eyes and hair. I guess I’ve had enough really hot friends to believe that their
relationships are just as tragic and confusing as anyone else’s.
Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die, yet the acclaim for “The Queen’s Gambit” series, which stars an actual former model, has stranded me there, unable to descend until I have said my piece. Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty, and there is no story about her that can be told if she is.
We know that Beth is unattractive because it is written down. It is one of the first things we find out about her, right after she arrives at Methuen. “You are the ugliest white girl ever. Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper. You white trash cracker bitch,” her bully and future friend Jolene declares. Beth does not respond, “knowing that it was true.” Beth spends her girlhood in this lonely place, her only happiness learning chess in the basement and, when she
can’t, playing chess games in her mind. When she can’t sleep or concentrate, she lies awake, tense, her stomach contracted, tasting “vinegar in her mouth.” Her homeliness seems, for a while, like destiny: she watches pretty girls get adopted out of Methuen as she remains there to grow up. At twelve, she finally finds a home with Mrs. Wheatley, who is both an arguably bad parent and just what independent, chilly Beth needs. She takes the shame of feeling plain into her new life, however: “Sometimes
when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth.”
Tevis mentions Beth’s ugliness too often for readers to imagine that it is just some routine, awkward part of childhood that slips away with puberty, like a boy’s squeaky tones settling gradually into a mannish timbre, or because some nice girlfriend—she has none, after Jolene—takes her to Sephora. Instead, Beth becomes reasonably attractive by learning to play chess and then excelling at it. The first moment that Beth is able to regard her reflection without disgust comes right after she wins her
third tournament game. Some forty pages later, a chess player turned journalist named Townes tells Beth, “You’ve even gotten good-looking.” Toward the end of the book, Jolene herself, seeing Beth in magazines, declares, “You’ve lost your ugly.”
I’m not gathering these pieces of evidence to suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” is a book about looks—it’s not like in “Clueless” when Alicia Silverstone yelps, “Project!” and we soon see dorky Brittany Murphy sporting a choker, hitting on guys. Here is the book’s most explicit mention of Beth’s physical confidence as an adult: “Beth was wearing a dark-green dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.” Chess helps her to
inhabit her body comfortably, and this allows her to play better chess. It’s the playing-better-chess part of the deal that really matters to her.
Beth’s transformation—not into a swan, exactly, but a better-looking duckling—doesn’t need to be mimicked exactly for the adaptation to work. The problem has to do with the fundamentals of storytelling, in the tradition of Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or “Save the Cat!”—the character has to want something. Book Beth’s want is as thick as the cheap wool sweaters she wears as a child while yearning for cashmere, as thick as the “cold, pale butter” she spreads on restaurant rolls and eats as an
adopted teen, after a childhood of thin, institutional French dressing. Her addiction is a great, yawning want, at first for the warmth and safety that those green downers give her and, as an adult, for the freedom sobriety will give her if she can manage to ditch them. Of course, her greatest want, the one that thrums on almost every page, is to play chess—and then to be the best at chess. Early on, having been told that she is “phenomenal” at the game, she looks up the word. “The dictionary said:
‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ She repeated these words silently to herself now, ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ They became a tune in her mind.”
When this tune starts playing in Beth’s mind, she is still at the orphanage; the tune is aspirational. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is singing this tune from the moment we meet her—not as a secret wish that chess can save her from poverty, ugliness, and obscurity, but as a boast. Even as an orphan, in her sweet white nightgown, elbow-checking Jolene, smiling with sexy snideness, there’s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet. She walks into every room like she owns it. One signature move is
tucking her chin into her chest, looking up at people with widened eyes—a disdainful miming of submission.
The scene in Tevis’s novel in which Beth goes to her first chess championship, having no idea how to conduct herself or what is expected of her, is re-created almost line for line in the series. “Do you have a clock?” the boy checking in players asks, and Beth says no. He asks, “What’s your rating?” and Beth replies, “I don’t have a rating.” Tevis’s book is uninflected in some ways, inviting the reader’s projections, but we have enough information to make some good guesses as to how unpretty,
anxious Beth might deliver these lines. Taylor-Joy’s tone, though, is one of impatient self-regard, in this moment and most others. She doesn’t need chess to survive. She’s a confident girl who finds everyone annoying and wears great clothes and flies off to beautiful places to be weird around guys. If she didn’t play chess and weren’t such a bitch, it would be “Emily in Paris.”
The series actually begins in Paris, with Beth waking up drunk in a hotel room. If you novelized the series, rather than the other way around, it would begin something like this: “On awakening, Beth Harmon crawled out of a hundred-and-ten-gallon porcelain bathtub and, wet clothes clinging to her perfect form, slipped instantly on the Italian tile floor.” I might have kept reading, but I would have waited in vain for any indication that Beth needed someone to bear witness to her triumph. Drama happens,
she wins, she loses, she takes pills, she stops taking them, she sleeps with this guy and then that one, someone dies—but there are no stakes. Watching the show, I kept thinking, This might be an interesting, dicey, and potentially moving situation for an orphaned drug addict obsessed with chess—and then Taylor-Joy would pout a little or balance her face seductively on her hands, or employ those enormous eyes as lizards employ neck frills. There’s not a single moment when I thought, Please let this
work out; please let this go well; please let Beth thrive.
I don’t mean to suggest that Taylor-Joy is a bad actress. But she exudes mattering. The core of “The Queen’s Gambit”—a young woman struggling to matter at all becomes a great chess player—might be impossible for her to play. The series copies virtually everything from the book aside from its central tension. At the end, Beth sits down in a Moscow park across from an old Russian man and a chessboard. Instead of Tevis’s line, “Would you like to play chess?,” Beth issues a command: “Let’s
play.” Why ask when you already know the answer?
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