Welcome to the Fresh Hell Newsletter, where this week we wax poetic about one of mankind’s greatest engineering marvels that might be soon rendered pointless in large chunks of the country. We also have some big, sad feels about the “Devil Wears Prada 2.”
I am a woman of many and diverse interests. Bicycles, orcas, the one-armed explorer and general badass John Wesley Powell, 6th century Romano-British burial rituals, tsunamis, World War I. The usual stuff.
The Boy Wonder and I are currently in Colorado taking an OPH vacation (the hot new travel trend as seen in this Fresh Hell newsletter). I spent some of my formative young adult years living in the mountains of Colorado and it is here that I developed another of my totally-not-weird-at-all interests: ditches.
Why ditches, my sweet Hellions?
Because they are the ancient relics of the people who settled this state and shaped the land to their needs. These massive ditch networks still ferry water from rivers and springs in the mountains to the farms and ranches built in wide open land that has almost no naturally occurring water.
Ditches are the physical manifestation of man’s instinct to make stupid decisions (Let’s put our farm here where there is no water!) and then figure out a solution later. The city of Denver itself relied in its founding years on what is now one of the oldest ditch systems in the state.
Ditches in the American Southwest are the modern and not-as-well constructed descendants of the great Roman aqueducts, which brought fresh water to the people of ancient Rome and its provinces, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles, around mountains, over valleys and canyons, from the water source to its final destination. It did so at a ridiculously well-engineered, precise and consistent gradient so the water was always moving, but not too fast or too slow, in enormous stone sluiceways. You can still visit the remnants of these gargantuan engineering miracles in France, Italy, Turkey and other former Roman provinces.
They are millennia-old chunks of living history that remind us that we, as humans, have seriously dropped the fucking ball when it comes to building on prior historical knowledge regarding public works projects. (e.g.: the Washington Bridge in Providence R.I.) But, as a technology, aqueducts and their descendants have enabled life in dry, lifeless places. Today, almost all major cities rely on some version of an aqueduct for drinking water.
The Colorado ditch networks, in comparison, are composed of miles-long dirt trenches, their water flow controlled with wood and rusty metal gates. They are still used for their original purpose—irrigating barren lands. The ditches are owned by local non-profit companies, which are in charge of administering and maintaining them. Like all things related to water out here, there are layers upon layers of bureaucracy and rules and laws, some dating back to the state’s founding documents.
Sadly, all the engineering prowess and human hubris and bureaucracy in the world can’t make snow and rain happen, and these are the primary sources of most of the water that flows not only through the ditches, but through nearly every tap in the state. A mega-drought has ravaged the American Southwest for the better part of 30 years and, aside from a catastrophically expensive electro-chemical process, there is no way to create more water.
Such a big fly in the “man triumphs over nature” ointment.
The Colorado River water flows have dropped 30% from historical flow rates in just the past six years. The river supplies water for seven western states (and around 40 million people), and water distribution is governed by a 100-year deal called the Colorado River Compact. Those states are all now fighting over who gets what’s left of the river’s water. State-level negotiations over the terms of the Compact have failed. The federal government has stepped in. The feds are due to issue mandatory water use rules this week.
Colorado ditch owners are waging a microcosm of this fight over the right to an increasingly non-existent resource. I spent an afternoon talking to my friend who owns a single share in her local ditch system, for which she and her husband paid tens of thousands of dollars. They own over a dozen acres of former ranch land that they use for agriculture. (They’re on the city water system for their potable water.) The other people who own shares of their ditch wage fights against the ditch company, each other and the state for the right to use what they paid for. They all worry about the precipitous drop in the number of days that water is actually released by the company into their ditch. But you can’t release what you ain’t got.
Aqueducts, ditches and reservoirs have been a reliable solution for thousands of years, bringing life to lifeless areas. But Mother Nature now seems to have other plans for the American Southwest and she gives not one single shit about your ditch share, your ranch or farm, your city, your nation’s reliance on the produce and protein raised in these states, or you.
But, by all means, build 4,000 more homes in the Arizona desert. There’s plenty of sand there to bury your head in.
As my Hellions know all too well, I’m not a movie critic. But I did do a couple of decades of hard time in the Word Mines of Moria (NYC’s magazine and newspaper industry), which I believe makes me uniquely qualified to weigh in on this film, a second romp through Andy Sach’s closet full of haute couture and inability to read the fucking room.
The film launches us directly into the Met Costume Gala, where our old friends from Runway Magazine, Nigel Kipling (Anthony Tucci), Miranda Priestly (La Streep) and her new assistant and whisperer, Amari Mari (played by the ridiculously beautiful Bridgerton star Simone Ashley), find out that the magazine is getting flamed online for a glowing profile it did of a fashion manufacturer that was violating child labor laws.
The first fly in the plot ointment comes when the owner of Runway Magazine decides that hiring a new high-powered features editor is JUST the thing the magazine needs to regain its credibility. Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway in her post-ingenue era yet still trying to ingenue the shit out of the role) is hired. This annoyed me. Everyone knows that editors are the people you FIRE when a publication runs into trouble of any kind. One editor can do the job just as well as six editors, amirite?
That’s why they lost me eight minutes in. Yet, I persevered for your sake, my chic-as-hell Hellions.
Anyhoo, the plot (plod, really) takes us to Andy’s embarrassing reunion with Miranda, during which Miranda claims not to remember Andy or the fact that she was, 20 years earlier, her personal assistant. Wait! Is the Devil Wears Prada 2 a tender examination of the effects of Alzheimer’s on the workplace? No. Just the victim of a truly unnecessary bit of scripting two-step that felt as inauthentic to the characters as that Birkin you bought on Canal Street last fall during your girls weekend.
Then, blah blah, Andy tries to write high-minded stories for Runway and they fail miserably to attract a readership (shocker) blah blah Andy decides after a week at her new job to buy a multi-million dollar condo (here the film drifts briefly into the fantasy genre) and blahbedy blah Andy meets a not-even-a-little-bit-hot Australian real-estate developer in a scene that had all the sexual chemistry of pouring salt on water.
Then, praise be to the movie gods, we finally get to see Miranda’s former assistant turned Dior exec Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) and her new beau, Benji Barnes, a billionaire asshole who used to be a total schlump but has undergone a divorce makeover that has transformed him into a “hottie,” but who still has the spectrumy personality and social skills of a damp donut. (A performance by Justin Theroux that was almost worth the price of the movie rental.)
Blah blah fashion blah blah Barnes tries to buy Runway blah Andy sets out to rescue it for Miranda blah… (at this point there was a short nap)…then fashion, fashion, fashion, music, Lady Gaga…. Blah blah last-minute rescue of Runway. The end.
VERDICT: Hard pass. The Devil Wears Prada 2 made me sad. It was like getting together with some old friends you haven’t seen for 20 years and they’re not as fun or interesting as they used to be, just richer.
DWP 1 is one of my favorite, most re-watched films. I had a brief nap during DWP 2 and didn’t miss anything. Instead of character evolution and plot, the movie phones in a bunch of “Hey, remember this funny thing we did in the first movie?” call-backs. The previously vibrant characters with backbone, humor, depth, complexity and actual character arcs are as gone as John Galliano, replaced by mannequins who can talk. The clothes are nice though.
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