An intimate picnic in The Blind Assassin is a lover’s picnic on the grass that might fleetingly Genesis but more directly alludes to Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát “XI.” Iris Chase has returned from her wedding trip with Richard and is unhappy. By...
Laura Cunningham’s memoir A Place in the Country (2000) is suffused with romantic memories of a New York City park where she picnicked with her mother Rosie and eating lunch packed in a paper bag. The sandwiches were made with Wonder Bread, soft bread with no...
After much tribulation, Elfirida Phipps Oscar Blundell and friends gathered at a Christmas Eve picnic for the start of a happy future. The timing purposefully combines the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ and the winter solstice that is the beginning of the...
Simic’s “Night Picnic” defies picnic expectations. Instead of daylight, there is a very dark vast starless sky. Instead of romancing or jollity, a man and woman sit on the grass without communicating. The narrator finds it slightly ironic that they...
Pantell’s painting Backyards is an urban scene behind the street façade. He finds a family sitting at a picnic table among the things he sees. The trees are bare in either early spring or late fall. But the hearty picnickers are taking in the city air in their meager...
Marsh’s Dead Babies, Mood Swingers in the U.S., is a satire of a picnic disaster. If this satire is meant to be crude, it succeeds admirably. If satire aims to amuse, Dead Babies fails miserably. Ditto Martin Amis’s novel on which the film is based. The...
When Food & Wine magazine asked Alice Waters, “What would you eat for a summer picnic?” she suggested a take-out picnic because she did not want to cook, especially on a day off. Her picnic prepared by her favorite Japanese restaurant would be grilled...
Harper’s archery picnic is faithful (more or less) to George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda. It’s a picnic archery meeting for women only. Elliot uses the sport as a metaphor for gender relationships. Archery is a variation of the goddess Diana hunting, except here, the...
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the hold on “official” artistic imagination produced many satires. Among them, Dubosarsky and Vinogradov’s Luncheon on the Grass reverses rigidity and social realism and embraces sexuality and lascivious behavior for the fun of it....
Altman’s fall shooting party and lunch in Gosford Park is a metaphor for social rot in English aristocracy and their servants circa 1932. The pheasant hunt takes place on a cold rainy day in October at which the lord of the manner, Sir William McCordle, brutally...
Von Hellermann’s When he came. . . is a feminist complaint about male attitudes and a woman’s compliance? The concept is an allusion to Méret Oppenheim’s Le Festin (1959), a Surrealist banquet set on a nude woman’s body. Oppenheim originally...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
Dworzak’s picnic in Grozny, Chechnya, is disconcerting. Chechen men having a picnic in a bombed-out neighborhood near Minutka Square. See Thomas Dworzak’s Ruins of Chechnya (2002). Magnum Photos. Compare this George Allen Warner’s picnic in The Rubbish Dump (1955)...
Ali’s family picnic is outwardly happy but inwardly troubled. After twenty years, Nazneen’s marriage to Chanu Ahmed has gone wobbly. She’s never loved Chanu, but at the time of the picnic, she’s conflicted by guilt and lust-fueled by Karim, a Muslim political activist...
Some aficionados of Ulysses remember the picnic at which Molly, then Marian Tweedy, seduced Leopold Bloom at a picnic at Howth Head around 1888. The lovers traveled to the outskirts of Dublin, where they made love among the wild rhododendrons and ferns. It is a...
Payne’s film Sideways has three picnic episodes, none of which are in Rex Pickett’s novel Sideways. The picnic first is Miles Raymond’s memory of a vineyard, wine, and food. He recalls that he and his ex-wife used to like this view. “Once,...
Slater’s picnic in the family backyard is a metaphor for his homosexuality and his conflicted relationship with his father, who wants him to be masculine. Tinned Ham” is humorous up to a point, but the picnic menu can make you gag. Slater describes a...
Question: What does an obsessive gunsmith take to a picnic on the grass? Answer: cold bottles of Frascati and Asprinio, five grams of pecorino, 100 grams of prosciutto, a jar of small black olives, two oranges, a thermos of sweet black coffee, a loaf of coarse bread,...
Hesser’s “Fine Dining in the Sky,” from Cooking for Mr. Latte, A Food is a fussy gourmet’s admission that she packs a bulky in-flight bag as if it was a flying coach a picnic cooler. She wants us to believe that she for a flight to Spain, she...
