New Arrivals

 

The cold spring rain is refreshing, and the sun broke through the clouds just long enough for me to take a stroll through the back yard, where long lost friends are slowly reappearing.

These include the vinca minor, flowering here and there (see above) and the wind ginger, unfolding nearby.

The pachysandra has always looks slightly artificial among the native species, but still very nice when in bloom (or in a Japanese tea garden!)

A few trout lilies struggle to hang on way out in the woods. These were planted by the previous owners, maybe forty years ago.

And within the "garden" proper the brunnera have started to produce their tiny petals, while closer to the deck I see the jack-in-the-pulpit starting to emerge.

And then I hear a rapid, stuttering, melodious song I haven't heard for a year. It's the ruby-crowned kinglet! And I soon spot him flitting around from branch to branch on the Amur maples a few feet in front of me. Ah, now I see him.

This tiny butterball of a bird is easy to identify for that very reason; he flits around nervously like no other bird. You seldom see the ruby crown except during mating season, but he was flashing his crest wildly this morning, and, snapping a few frames with my little Canon Powershot, I got lucky.

After I lost sight of him, I could still hear his crisp, melodious chatter in the woods nearby. And several white-throated sparrows, as if to balance the mood, were singing their mournful, slightly-out-of-tune three-note descent. 

A brief but exhilarating expedition before breakfast. What will the rest of the day bring?    

Oscar Shorts

Perhaps no form of film is better suited to watching on a computer screen than a short subject. We spent three evenings engaged in that pursuit, independently ranking each entry from zero to five, and judged only a few to be less than a four. Now, two weeks later, some of them are a little hard to remember.

Among the animated shorts, both "Burrow" and "The Snail and the Whale" tell tales of animal adventure. The former probes cheerfully into the tunneling habits of several rodent and insect species by means of a colorful but blocky graphic style; the later, far longer and more sophisticated in technique, relates the adventures of a snail who, longing to see more of the world, hops a ride on—guess what?—a whale's tail. It's narrated by the late Diana Rigg, with Sally Hawkins voicing the snail. Both films are cute, both held my interest in a child-like way.

“If Anything Happens I Love You” is a mostly black-and-white piece about a couple whose daughter was involved in a school shooting, and it's highly effective, in so far as it makes you feel sad, sad, sad.

"Opera," from South Korea, was a misfire, I think. It depicts some sort of underground mining operation, but the triangular mountain that dominates the screen remains static and the characters moving back and forth are so small they lack individuality. There may have been a profound message here about tyranny or cooperation. If so, I missed it.

In my opinion, “Genius Loci” was the best of the bunch. I found the story incomprehensible and the tone sour, but the graphics were highly imaginative, almost as if they'd been made with construction paper cutouts and stop-action photography.

All of the live-action shorts were top-notch. The challenge here is to bring a little complexity to the story in a short span of time available.

 In Feeling Through a young homeless man, black, having failed to find a place to sleep among friends,  comes upon a middle-aged blind and deaf man, white, sitting on a bench in the middle of the night. The man needs some help getting on the right bus. He also needs some water. Adventures ensue, with irritation, self-interest, and compassion fighting for the upper hand at every step of the way. 

 In The Letter Room, a lowly prison guard (played by Oscar Isaac) aspires for something better and is happy to be put in charge of reading the letters that are exchanged between inmates and their contacts on the outside. Frustrated by the administration's lack of interest in his ideas for prison reform, and intrigued by the correspondence between one death-row inmate and his girlfriend,  the guard decides to do a little free lance counseling. Bad idea.  

 The Present offers a brief look at the daily challenges Palestinians face crossing back and forth from their territory into Israel proper. A simple tale involving a refrigerator, believable and well-acted.

In White Eye a young Israeli spots a bicycle parked in front of a fish warehouse that was stolen from him a few weeks earlier. He calls the cops and is told, "We can't do anything. You never filed a report." He asks a tradesman working nearby to help him cut off the lock. The man who now owns the bike, an African, arrives. He claims he bought it legally, and needs it to take his daughter to kindergarten every day. The cops show up, finally. And here comes the warehouse manager. It's getting messier all the time.   

But the best of the bunch, I think, was Two Distant Strangers, in which a sophisticated young black designer, leaving his girlfriend's New York apartment, encounters a feisty cop intent on hassling him. The encounter ends badly, like the ones we so often read about in the papers. But it was only a dream!

The man leaves the apartment again but does things differently, in the manner of Run Lola Run. Funny thing, the sequence of incidents is different but the end result is exactly the same, or worse. Ah, but it was only a dream! Once again, he leaves the apartment ...

It should come as no surprise to learn that the live action documentaries are mostly about bad things. Hunger Ward focuses on mass starvation in Yemen, though it offers not a shred of insight into the causes of the civil war or possible solutions to it. A Love Song for Latasha relates, from a mostly teenage and family perspective, the death in Los Angeles of a young black girl who was sent by her mother to but some orange juice at the local liquor store. Both are heartrending.

Collette offers a portrait of an elderly French woman who joined the resistance during WWII, and now, half a century and more later, has teamed up with a young German historian to seek out information about her brother's death in the death camps. A Concerto is a Conversation consists largely of a warm and gentle conversation between a young black Los Angeles composer and his Georgia-born grandfather about music and life, making great use of close-ups.   

But I found Do Not Split to be the most ambitious and enthralling of the five. It documents a few days of protest in Hong Kong against the encroachments of the Chinese government. Lots of chaos, tension, danger, excitement, courage, and youthful ardor.    

April Grays

 

Yes, April can be like this; here's proof.

White flecks of snow fell this morning, rectangular, widely spaced.

I began the day with a walking tour of a neighborhood in  Queens,

complete with pictures,

courtesy of a friend who sent me a link this morning.

Minor chores are done, though the jeans coming out of the dryer weren't really dry.

A few games of computer cribbage before turning to books.

Any books.

I ask myself, after studying a map in a book about Mencius,

why the Chinese named their kingdoms Chou, Chin, Ch'in, Ch'u, Ch'i, and Cheng.

They could have done better.

Then it's on to Gilbert White's Selborne County, where he describes

a remarkable spring that, during a drought, continued to produce

nine gallons of water per minute. He then calculates, for our benefit,

an output of two-hundred sixteen hogsheads per day. Well done.

Lunch consists of a sliver of onion pie—one of my specialties—

consumed cold, standing next to the fridge.

After bringing in the garbage can from the street,

I decide to make a fire, using a huge log that's been

sitting behind the yard-waste can all winter.

I know it won't burn, but by sliding kindling under it,

I create the illusion again and again.

Oscar Countdown: Four Films

Frances McDormand first showed up on my film radar in the year 2000, appearing as a character actress in two films that are still among my favorites, Wonder Boys and Almost Famous. It was not her presence that made those films great, but it didn't hurt. She had already cemented herself in the public eye three years earlier with an Oscar turn in Fargo. In time she began to take on the stature of a later-day Jack Nicholson, playing variations on her own idiosyncratic self in film after film, most of which I didn't see.

It was a major triumph for her to hold that over-the-top train wreck of a film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, together. I liked it quite a bit.

Film-goers who have been avoiding Nomadland for fear of similar excesses can rest assured: it's a lovely, elegiac film full of nice people, gorgeous desert landscapes, and sketches of a simple but atavistically attractive way of life, all of which are anchored in the contours of McDormand's craggy face.

A few days after seeing the film, I could hardly tell you what happened. The love interest was tepid, and the most dramatic "turn" had something to do with exorbitant repairs to the minivan. The seasonal employment at Amazon almost looked attractive to me, though that may be because I spent twenty years working in a book warehouse myself; and the director, Chloé Zhao, has made life in a van look fairly appealing. Here again, my personal predilection for desert camping may have come into play. In short, Nomadland works well, like a atmospheric European film, as a haunting portrait of decent but often damaged or grieving people who have chosen a variety of alternative healing paths. Less ambitious than the vaguely similar Into the Wild, for example, it presents itself on the screen as a tone poem rather than an opera. More movies like this, please!  (Best Actress, Director, Editor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography) 

One Night in Miami consists largely of an extended conversation in a motel room between Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) and three friends—NFL running back Jim Brown, popular singer and impresario Sam Cooke, and political activist Malcolm X. It bristles with wit while digging deep into the obstacles and options facing eminent black men in those days (and also today). It's also a hell of a lot of fun to watch. (Best Supporting Actor: Leslie Odom Jr.)

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, also based on a play, is "stagier" and less inspired, like drinking a mug of dark coffee that's simply too bitter. We soon adjust to the theatrical voicing of the characters, and the basement conversations between the musicians carry a lively spark, but Ma Rainey herself is difficult to like, the studio personnel hardly emerge from cardboard cut-out status, and the racial indictments, though well-founded, lack nuance. The silver lining is that the film is hardly more than an hour long. (Viola Davis: Best Actress; Chadwick Boseman: Best Actor)

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I have never seen a Will Ferrell film before, and might never see one again, but this mostly charming comedy/farce about an Icelandic duo who stumble into contention at the massive Eurovision contest is bolstered by the presence of Rachael McAdams, the silliness of its faux accents and folkloric Icelandic clichés, and lots of high-energy performances by various Euro-pop groups that I'd never heard of until I looked them up, including Lordi, Alexander Rybak, Conchita Wurst, and Netta. (Best Song)        

Oscar Countdown: Mank

Mank is a complex, busy,  peculiar, and largely unsatisfying work that once again underscores the fact that it's difficult to make a good film about a drunk. Why? Because a drunk tends to rely on the forbearance of everyone around him. They know him, perhaps they love him a little, they're willing to indulge him. But we don't know him, and we find him tiresome. "Get a grip on yourself," we say. "On what grounds do you deserve our sympathy and attention?"

One answer might be, "Because I'm in the process of writing the screenplay for the greatest film of all time." But the screenwriter himself wouldn't know that. He only knows that he's got to finish the script in sixty days, and considering his health, it might be the last one he ever writes, and it had better be good, because none of his earlier scripts were good.

 That is the basic premise of Mank. The central character, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, delivers bon mots that aren't witty, exudes a charm that isn't charming, and cultivates a "I could have been a contender" self-pity that means nothing to us, because we have no idea who or what he might have become, had he laid off the booze and done some real work. Howard Hawks would have done it differently.   

Meanwhile, the film abounds in technical issues. The black-and-white cinematography is meticulous and dazzling to a fault. The result is that everything looks a little too dark, or too bright, or too creamy, and all the wonderful period details distract our attention from both the characters and the story. We're being asked to look too many ways at once.

Compounding the problem, the voices seem to have been post-synched in an echo chamber. Why?

Herman Mankiewicz is best known today as the co-author, with Orson Welles, of the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Viewers who haven't seen that film—which I suspect are legion in this day and age—are likely to be even more confused than the rest of us. Citizen Kane is a thinly disguised and less than flattering biopic based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, though it also draws upon the somewhat larger-than-life braggadocio of Welles himself, who not only directed the film but also plays the lead.

Mankiewicz evidently knew Hearst well, and, to judge from flashbacks scattered throughout the film, he was invited to quite a few parties out at Hearst's palatial estate, San Simeon, on the central California coast. He also knew the ins and outs of the Hollywood studios, having written scripts for several of them. In one scene Mank introduces his brother (who later became a distinguished film director) to his brilliant writing buddies—a coterie that includes Ben Hecht and S. J. Perelman—and we're instantly wishing we could spend some time with them rather than with the boozy and existentially desperate Mank himself.

Because it lacks a sympathetic central character, Mark has a hard time getting us interested in its two central tropes. The first is that Mankiewicz, rather than Welles, ought to be given credit for the enduring appeal of Citizen Kane. Very few buy that theory today. The second is that Mank, no doubt a decent and lovable man underneath it all, inadvertently gave producer Irving Thalberg the idea for how to swing the California gubernatorial election in 1934, robbing socialist Upton Sinclair of the victory. The film even goes so far as to suggest that in his idealistic youth Hearst himself might have supported Sinclair.

Whether this is true or not, it's not the kind of thing that excites movie-goers today.

A single scene might serve to illustrate both the complexity and the vagueness of Mank. An old pal comes up to him at the studio and asks Mank for a dollar. Mank turns to the policeman standing behind him and asks him for a dollar. The policeman obliges. Mank gives the dollar to his old pal. I suppose this is supposed to suggest that people on the set are fond of Mank, and feel comfortable both asking him for things and giving him the things he asks for. But why didn't Mark give the guy a dollar from his own pocket? The scene isn't funny. What, precisely, are we supposed to make of it?

Some of the most touching scenes in the film involve conversations between Mank and Hearse's girlfriend Marion Davies. She looks glamorous but comes across as sweet and intelligent—far more appealing than the shrill character Mank wrote into Citizen Kane. Mank feels bad about this, and tries to convince his old friend, who has read the script, that her character as portrayed in the film isn't really how he thinks about her. Well then, why did he write it like that?

Even this cursory review ought to give you an idea how much thought went into the making of Mank. Too much of that thought, I'm afraid, has been devoted to incidentals--allusions to minutia of film history and California politics--and not enough about emotional ballast. In the end, the character of Mankiewicz himself hardly emerges from the realm of maudlin cliché. Long before the end of the film, some viewers may be gripped by the inexplicable desire to revisit that unparalleled cinema dynamo from three-quarters of a century ago, Citizen Kane.    

Here's That Rainy Day

Sometimes song titles present themselves to me. They float into consciousness, for no other reason but that I've heard the title, or read it on an album cover, and it seems to fit.

Like today. It was supposed to rain, and it's raining now, but I noticed that there was no rain in the forecast for midday, so I suggested to Hilary that we go on a field trip. I had discovered a new destination—the Grey Cloud Dunes Scientific and Natural Area, which lies on the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles downstream from St. Paul, beyond the Indian mounds, the railyards, the scrap metal company, and the oil refinery on Highway 61.

We parked in the gravel parking lot on the outskirts of Cottage Grove, read the informational sign for a minute or two, and then commenced our stroll south through the golden grasses high above the river. We couldn't see the river yet, but the skies were almost blue in some spots, and the dunes had a graceful roll. That shouldn't be surprising. They've been sitting here, shaped first by glacial rivers, then by wind and rain, for ten-thousand years at least.

Unlike state parks and recreation areas, "scientific and natural" areas do not have official trails or trail markings. Of course there are well-worn paths, but there's no way to tell which ones go where. At the first obvious fork, a quarter-mile in, we opted to stay on the ridge rather than descent to the lower level of the dunes. We wanted to get some perspective.

Fifteen minutes later we came to another fork. By this time the river had come into view to the southwest below us, and also the railroad tracks and two small ponds. Aided by the map I'd printed out before we left, we convinced ourselves that this would be a good place to head down to the strip of oak woods alongside the river. And so it proved to be.

There were hundreds of duck out on the water, but they were hugging the far shore (as usual) and we could only pick out a few common mergansers and ring-necked ducks with binoculars. It was more interesting watching the three eagles that were gamboling high above the river, soaring, then diving playfully at one another while making that strangely evocative clicking sound.

We sat on the bank in the dead leaves for a few minutes, and it occurred to me that this would have been a great place for any youth to head in search of adventure. I was reminded of the hikes I used to take with friends when I was in junior high, out beyond the confines of Mahtomedi on Maple Street or Hickory Street, to the woods, fields, and lakes to the east, sometimes with our .22s. (We shot at anything that moved, but rarely hit anything.)

On our way back, Hilary and I took a different path. It stayed in the lower dunes and crossed under the railroad tracks farther to the north. It was wetter down there and we had to take a few detours to avoid flooded sections, but we also heard, and then got a good look at, the first song sparrow of the season. At one point Hilary spotted some pussy willows in bloom—another first—and we also came across a flock of thirty-odd tree sparrows that were headed north for the summer, with a few juncos tagging along.

The lower trail wasn't nearly so majestic—no views of the valley or the river, and the dune grasses on the hillsides above us looked rattier than the ones up top—but it was different, and it gave us a new perspective on the area. A lone killdeer was peeping shrilly in the distance, again and again—they like to nest in rugged, barren spots—and at one point I spotted a northern shrike crossing the field in the distance ahead of us. That was the best sighting of the day.

The rain didn't start until an hour after we got home. I fried up some bacon and got a pot of pea soup going on the stove while we listened to a duo album by pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Charlie Haden.

Was "Here's That Rainy Day" on it? No.But the album does have quite a few standards along the same lines: "My Old Flame," "What'll I Do," "Long Ago and Far Away," and "Everything Happens to Me."

One reviewer remarked that the "casual intensity, and the willingness to commune with yearning lyricism one minute and dive into dark voids the next, make Mehldau and Haden's duo work here so compelling."

I would agree. And doesn't that look a little like Grey Cloud Island on the cover? 

Three Cheers for Thrifty White

While others were being inoculated, I was perfectly content to wait my turn. I'm not a teacher or a health care worker, and I have no underlying health concerns. I don't go out to bars much, and I'm perfectly happy to eat at home.

But after her Zoom book club the other night, Hilary mentioned that several of our friends had driven up to Grand Rapids to get the vaccine at a drug store chain called Thrifty White. That's more than a three hour drive, each way! It's true, they have a good pasty shop in Grand Rapids. But the crusts there are pretty thick, and that sweetens the pot only a little.

Yet I went on the Thrifty White website that very night, and there, lurking amid the hundreds of doses available in Manhomen, Red Lake Falls, Bagley, and Warroad—all of which are located in the remote northwestern corner of the state—I spotted a single dose available the next morning in Brainerd, hardly more than two hours away. But Hilary was volunteering at a local food shelf in the morning, and I didn't feel like making the trek all by myself. What if I passed out on the way home?

I continued to monitor the website every fifteen or twenty minutes, and it wasn't long before a slot appeared for the following Monday in Granite Falls, a mere two hours and fifteen minutes west of town. We hadn't been out that way in years. I nabbed it.

Monday morning was  cold and sunny, and it was fun heading west on Highway 7, past Excelsior and Carver Park, where we were skiing just a week ago, then continuing on through Hutchinson and a long string of farm towns with names like Cosmos  and Prinsberg and Clara City. It had snowed the night before, however, and parts of the highway were covered with packed ice—not slippery, but bumpy. It slowed us down considerably. I was glad I'd included an extra hour of drive time.

The water tower in Cosmos

Granite Falls lies mostly on the west bank of the Minnesota River, and to a casual traveler like me, it tends to share a hazy geographic blur with nearby river towns like Redwood Falls and Montevideo. I knew it was the home town of Andrew Volstead, the author of both the bill that introduced Prohibition back in 1920 and also the far more durable (but less well-known) legislation that made farm co-ops legal in the United States.

But on that sunny morning the looming issue was whether we should visit Carl's Bakery, in downtown Granite Falls, before or after the injection. Turns out we didn't get there in time to buy a donut or an apple fritter before we were due at the pharmacy. Little matter. As we drove by we noticed that Carl's is closed on Mondays.

The pharmacy is right down the street from the bakery. There was no one at the counter, but a woman restocking merchandise directed me to the back of the store, where another woman took my name, looked me up on the computer, and handed me some papers to sign. (No identification necessary.) She then wandered off, and I started chatting with the man who'd come up the aisle after me and was now standing seven or eight feet away, breathing into his mask. Gray hair, mustache, baggy jeans. He reminded me of Charlie Weaver.

"Are you here to get a shot?" I asked.

"I'm here to see about getting a shot," he replied. "I hate shots. Always have. I also hate heights. Worse than shots."

"I used to hate shots, but I got over it," I said in an encouraging tone of voice. Then I said, "Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?"

"No, but I'd like to go there."

"You'd love it. It's gorgeous. Lots of vistas. But if you go there, I would recommend not going to Toroweap. It's on the North Rim, fifty miles west of the lodge and fifty miles south down a gravel road. There's a campground out there, not far from the canyon. But unlike most of the canyon, which is full of lovely step terraces, at Toroweap the drop is 5,000 feet straight down. Fifteen feet from the edge, you're already on your hands and knees, shaking."

At that point another young woman--the pharmacist, I would guess--directed me to a makeshift room that had been erected near the side wall of the pharmacy. 

"The nurse will be with you in a minute," she said.

Seizing the opportunity, I said, "I've got a problem. My second dose is scheduled for a morning when I teach a class. I was so eager to get a vaccine, I didn't notice it at the time. Is there any way to work around that?"

The woman stared at me for a moment—not a friendly stare—then she said, "Not really. The doses are scheduled together. They have to be a precise distance apart. Your best bet would be to cancel this vaccine and start over. Or reschedule your class."

"That's what I'll do. I'll reschedule the class," I said.

Meanwhile, the nurse, a heavyset woman in a brown print dress, had emerged from the pharmacy and gone into her booth. I waited for a minute or two, then poked my head around the corner.

"Come in. Come in," she said in a jolly tone of voice. "So you're here for a vaccine. I'm going to fill out this little card for you. It's tells what vaccine you got and when. Hang on to it."

I liked her immediately. While she was fiddling with the vials and syringes,  I asked her the same question I'd asked the pharmacist.

"When is your class over? Noon? Well, just come in at two or three. It doesn't make much difference. I'll put a note on your card." Then she said, "What class do you teach?"

I told her it was a geography class, and I'd be mentioning Granite Falls, the nearby state park, the Yellow Medicine River, and a few other details of local interest.

"Don't forget the powwow," she said. "It's in early August, down at the reservation. And there's a new restaurant opening across the street, it's called Café and Canoes."

By this time she'd given me the shot. A real professional. And a warm human being.

After applying the Band-Aid, she advised me to sit outside the booth for a few minutes to make sure I didn't have an adverse reaction. While I was sitting there, idly scrutinizing the display of jigsaw puzzles on a nearby endcap, I could hear, through the thin wall of the booth,  her next patient describing  his engineering project, which was at risk of coming to a premature and inconclusive end due to the fast-melting ice.

After a mediocre take-out lunch from a local café called the Granite Grinder, which we ate in the car at a parking lot overlooking the small hydro dam in the center of town, we drove south along the river to the state park and took a walk through the unplowed snow to the reconstructed Indian agency building that played a prominent role in the Dakota War of 1862. 

On the return journey we passed so many trucks in the vicinity of the Renville sugar beet cooperative that I looked it up online when we got home. We also flushed some horned larks on the side of the highway, and a flock of snow buntings scattering as we approached. We drove through Sacred Heart, the childhood home of poet Phoebe Hanson, and took a spin around the "classic" town square in Hutchinson, stopping at the Dairy Queen on Main Street for a treat. 

We entered the building through a door marked Entrance Only, but as we were about to leave I noticed the other door carried the same sign. I felt, for an instant, like I was trapped in a Christopher Nolan movie.

"How are we supposed to get out?" I asked the teenager behind the counter.

"I don't know about these signs," she said. "Go out any way you please." 

On our second trip to Granite Falls, a month from now, maybe I'll bring along Phoebe's collection Why Still Dance, to read in the car. But it will also be on a Monday. And that means Carl's Bakery will once again be closed.

Though my second vaccine is now securely booked, I still find it interesting to look at the Thrifty White website from time to time. It's almost like taking a road trip. Last week the available doses dropped into the 300s statewide, but now the number is above 3,000, mostly in Bemidji, Thief River Falls, Red Lake Falls, and towns even farther north.

But I see a few available doses in Cold Spring, which would have been a good destination--maybe even too close to town. And how far from here, exactly, is Pierz?