Weekend Words: Garlic
Weekend Words was saddened this week by the news of the death of filmmaker Les Blank. While his best-known movie is probably Burden of Dreams (1982), a behind-the-scenes look at the epic struggles undertaken by visionary German director Werner Herzog in the making of Fitzcarraldo, for the most part
Weekend Words was saddened this week by the news of the death of filmmaker Les Blank. While his best-known movie is probably Burden of Dreams (1982), a behind-the-scenes look at the epic struggles undertaken by visionary German director Werner Herzog in the making of Fitzcarraldo, for the most part Blank’s work celebrated the music and food of America’s vanishing subcultures.
No movie does this better than Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, which was described by Vincent Canby of The New York Times as “‘so good – and funny – that it doesn’t even offend someone who takes a dim view of baked whole garlic and who doesn’t exactly long to munch chocolate-covered garlic cloves.”
“Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke.”
—Thomas Nash
“What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.”
—Augustus Saint-Gaudens
“Do not eat garlic or onions; for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant.”
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.”
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slingin’, spaghetti-bendin’, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsingin’ motherfucker.”
—Mookie (Spike Lee) insults Pino (John Turturro) in Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.”
—Cyril Connolly
“There’s no doubt that after you eat a lot of garlic, you just kind of feel like you are floating, you feel ultra-confident, you feel capable of going out and whipping your weight in wildcats.”
— Off-screen voice heard in Les Blank’s Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers
