I've been meaning to post on this also--

Lady Grey is delightful, particularly the Twinings brand (I've only had the bagged sort). It's more than that: dear readers, it is true, blue-eyed love, and I don't mean to write this in a sense that is flippant or disingenuous.

Bergamotted teas have long been poo-pooh'ed by the tea literati--it is not infrequent that I'll hear Earl Grey mentioned with other miscreants such as Salada, or Lipton (red label, not yellow label--as a side note, Lipton Green Label too is very good).

I must admit, I agree to a certain extent. Earl Grey is like a creepy frat boy who comes on far too strong. And yes, I am shocked as many others are when he wins the hearts and bibations of his goals. It's obtrusive, often, often unwelcome, and I don't mind making this statement in public to the opinionated and highly intelligent readership of this blog (comments, you'll note, are open). But I should also admit (somewhat embarassedly) that I've been known to take Earl Grey with cream and sugar in the morning especially is marmalade and toast is involved.

But Lady Grey is different--demure, if you will. Subdued. The citrus is its main presentation, and the bergamot an afterthought--a pleasant post scripto, or sweet "by the bye--" Lady Grey is nothing like her masculine counterpart, and is certainly welcome in my book.

Also of note (and dear to my heart) is the Russian Afternoon blend I discovered this past semester (the Ruschka) from Mariage Freres--also a bergamoted tea. This one I like a lot better than the Lady Grey (if that's possible), but, sadly, all the Mariage Freres dealers that I know of in Boston seem to have run out of it, and I've been rationing it for myself this past month, in the hopes that a new shipment will soon arrive to Diptyque (the only good source around here that I know for Mariage Freres). The best part of the tea isn't the bergamot, although that certainly is high up on the list--it's the fact that the bergamot doesn't mask the tannins of the tea. I leave the leaves in when I brew it (it helps develop the flavor, I find), and take it, of course, neat.

I think I like the way the French think about the Russians (if their tea is any indication...).

But sadly, I'm nearly down to only the fannings of my dear Russian Afternoon, and no shipment appears nigh--I am, of course, more than willing to trade a batch of orange Madeleines for any advice...

While I am a true believer in the maxim that tea is claustrophobic and does not like to be kept in bags, I do drink a rather large quantity of commercially bagged tea. I simply haven't yet had the wherewithal to stuff a bunch of my own bags, and I like the wrapper that keeps the bag secure in my coat pocket.

So, the question is what bagged tea to drink-- in contrast to co-blogger Sudeep and his love of Lipton's, I prefer Twining's blue-label "Lady Grey", which seems to be an earl grey tea with a little less bergamot and some bits of citrus in it. The result is reminiscent of the first cup of tea I remember truly falling in love with-- a cup of Citron at Mariage Freres during a lovely trip to Paris in 2001.

It's true, of course, that lemon juice destroys the flavor of good hot tea, but the zest, or whatever it is Twinings uses, has no such effect, and I do think its freshness is welcome in an otherwise mediocre bag.

The meaning of my cryptic post here is at last made clear.

[Comments are open.]

Update: there has been a correction posted to this article.

Yet another delay for S.'s L vile wrap-up. Just had a wonderful dinner with Reihan Salam, of Stuyvesant SING! fame (rumor has it that Juelz Santana [a Hunter grad] has chimped all his rhymes, ever, ever, from that Winter '98 performance). Afterwards, because it was fucking cold, we went to see Brokeback Mountain. [Which, yes, my mother called something far filthier, totally unintentionally.]

Ross can rest assured. Heath Ledger only turns in a performance that ranks #13 on the scale of all-time movie performances. Take that, fairly tiresome anonymous haters on TAS; grow some stones and get a ranch already. Oh, wait. That's advice for the protagonists of this drawn out exercise in sighing.

The movie was phenomenally flat–almost Clement Greenberg flat–as the repeated shots of vast oversaturated vistas faded into the picture plane. The continual repetition of the landscape shots not only served to deflate the natural palette (has there ever been a less chromatic use of color?) but also to faux-defamiliarize the American West. I kept on hoping for the black-and-white of Terry Malick's far superior Badlands to assert itself. But that would make this a good film, and not just a profitable pretension. This is Ang Lee's trick - to invert Urban Cowboy, a cowboy movie which quietly fetishized gay culture, into a gay film which fetishizes cowboys.

There is nothing here about nature or ranching that a Boy Scout who has gone to Philmont will find novel, and the tolerated presence of so mundane a third participant in the protagonists' love speaks to the aesthetic and erotic limitations of the film's intended audience. (Admittedly, it speaks with more grace than the crowd of eager NYU fanbois and freshman lonelyhearts who giggled irritatingly at the incipient romance, and then quietly quickened breath during the Gyllenhaal / Ledger soft-core. Self-acquittal this was not). The sex is mediocre, only authentic in the initial encounter, and afterwards filmed as a great tear smearing of lightly scraggled chins against chests.

As Reihan notes, you can tell that they're going to fuck for the first time because the full moon is out: either that, or Lee is making an amazing gay = werewolf claim, to attempt to piss on those effeminizing gay = vampire tropes once and for all. This movie breaks little new ground in terms of gay rights; it might break some ground in terms of Hollywood's conception of gay sex as salable.

More importantly, the violence done to the two men's families in the course of their twenty-year affair is weirdly unresolved, which is to say that it seems very important, and then nothing is said about it. The movie hints as if it is going to address their treatment of their spouses by blaming the forces that conspire to keep Jack and Ennis' love nameless, but it settles for the vacuousness of unsaid words, empty canyons, and long tracking shots of steadily larger Ford pickups.

Kate Mara has a fine turn as Heath Ledger's eldest; she's the strongest part of the movie, and seems to draw out Lee's gift for turning small phrases into revelatory moments (whereas Jake and Heath play gay cowboy Days of Our Lives: "I wish I knew how to quit you," Jack says, as those who've seen the trailer well know. The answer probably isn't to go sleeping around with the husband of a Tri-Delt, although the inevitable end spares us the Midnight Cowboy meets Urban Cowboy agony of their affair surviving into the AIDS era.) From Ms. Mara's more than capable turn, we know that Alma Jr. knows about her father's sexuality very early, and it is to her credit as an actress that we know how carefully she manages this knowledge, how finely she loves this uneasy and increasingly broken man. Michelle Williams continues to redeem herself, and Anne Hathaway gratuitously shows her breasts for the second time in six months. I suppose her agent really didn't want Princess Diaries III.

See it, don't see it. But if South Park did it first, it isn't a cultural moment, it's a commercial aftershock.

Correction: Reihan actually said; "It would be awesome if, right now, they both became werewolves." I interpreted this as Reihan's correct analysis of the formal trope of imminent non-normative behavior. If I misrepresented his notation, it was only for narrative purposes.