Eggstraordinary:BLTC, Egg Mountains, Texas Rollup, Eggs Benedict, Eggs Quesadilla, Huevos Rancheros, Eggs a la Dagwood

Midway through Todd Haynes' weird mock '50s melodrama Far From Heaven Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) and Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert) find themselves staring at a Miro painting and contemplating its ineffable mysteries. Haysbert suggests that modern art picks up where religious art left off, offering us a glimpse of the divine source by stripping appearances down to pure shape and colour. It's a quasi-transcendent experience in which we're invited to look beyond surfaces. The real drama of the scene, however, lies in the fact that Moore plays an affluent white housewife, Haysbert is her black gardener and the two are fraternizing in public as if their skin were not an issue. Of course it is, as the entire gallery stares, aghast at the flouting of unspoken social codes.

Eventually their quasi-innocent (and quasi-transcendent?) relationship reaches a crisis, and Moore tearfully asks Haysbert if people can ever look beyond colour - beyond the surfaces of things. If I weren't such a lazy thinker I'd have some kind of insight into this questioning of surfaces in a movie so lushly dedicated to artifice, but I haven't got the time right now.

My wife, whose reputation I shall protect by calling her Fassbinder, is allergic to new money. I don't mean that she sneezes at Gatsby-type people (which, since she manages the gift shop at the poshest hotel within 500 miles, would pretty much reduce to her invalidism); I mean that her eyes water and her nose twitches and her trachea rebels whenever she has to handle freshly printed bills. To a certain extent, I know what she's talking about. There's a cloying smell that comes off of new bills that I dislike, but my eyes love the careful shades and weavings. For those of you used to American money, you're missing out. Canadian money is multicoloured but sober, extravagantly restrained. Come to Canada sometime and fondle our utterly worthless but pretty currency.

parode - exode