Barbershop Big Bang Theory

I came upon an article in Scientific American recently suggesting that the universe began with a "bang" rather than a "bounce." That was the story we were told as kids, of course, and it even appears in a flashback in Annie Hall (!977) where the young Alvy Singer tells his psychiatrist, "Why do your homework? The universe is expanding, and someday it will explode." The kid's got a point.

More recently, theories have been floated suggesting that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion in an endless series of bounces. So, which is it?

I have often pondered this question while sitting in the barber shop waiting to get a haircut, though a second question often comes to mind first: "I made a reservation online half an hour ago, when there was a half-hour wait; so why do I have to wait an additional half-hour once I get here? Did I pass through a wormhole or what?"

Though I find the question of the origin of the universe intriguing, the first thing that caught my eye in the article was the last phrase of the headline—"New Studies Find."

This is wretched journalism, and not in the least bit scientific. The proper phrase would be "New Studies Suggest." Nothing in astrophysics is definitively "found," and the origins and dim past of the universe will probably remain murky 'til the end of time, and beyond. The "findings" referred to in the article are merely speculations, and shaky ones at that.

Astrophysicists have established with some degree of confidence that in the first few milliseconds during which our current universe expanded—a blindingly hot phase known colloquially as the "inflationary period"—the universe behaved very differently than it does now. The speculations under review here deal with conflicting explanations of irregularities that have been detected recently within the cosmic microwave background, which is commonly considered the "footprint" of that nascent universe. The authors of the current article describe and also critique theories such as bispectrum and loop quantum cosmology before concluding that before the Big Bang produced our universe from a "singularity," there was ... nothing. The mass required to reverse the expansion of a previous incarnation and keep the "accordion" pumping simply does not exist.

Personally, I have my doubts. Four fifths of the mass required to explain the rotation of the galaxies we can see and measure—the infamous Dark Matter—has never been detected at any wave-length. We presume it's there because without it our gravitational formulas don't work. Well, maybe there's even more Dark Matter out there than we think, that we also can't see, that would make a different gravitational formula more accurate while also supporting the theory of an accordion universe—the "bounce" theory mentioned in the title.

Yet such arguments overlook a more basic point. Even if current evidence supported the "accordion" theory of numerous expansions and contractions, it would leave the question unanswered. How did the universe—whether singular and unique or seesaw and musical—get going in the first place? Where did it come from?

Thinking about this issue at any great length will make you seasick. I would not recommend it. But such questions do have their amusing side, because language is incapable of even phrasing the question correctly. For example, a moment ago I asked the question, Where did the universe come from?  Such a question makes sense if it refers to something discrete, like a wood tick that suddenly appears on my forearm, crawling toward my hand, as I'm driving. Where did that come from? It wasn't there a split-second ago. The window's closed, and I doubt if it fell from the inside roof of the car. Weird!

One thing I know for certain is that wherever it came from was somewhere else.

But you can't ask where the universe came from unless you believe there's somewhere else it could have come from. But that place would also be a part of the universe, which includes everything. Right? The question makes no sense.  

Yet it must be asked.   

Another question that makes no sense to me is this: I've been waiting patiently, thumbing through Golf Digest or Minnesota Monthly, until my name rises to the top of the list on the computer screen. I sit down in the barber chair, and the stylist asks me a question like "Why are we here today?" or "What are we thinking of?" Oh, my God. These are profound questions. Why are we here today? Why is anything here today?  

But I think I know what she's driving at. And I have an answer ready.

I point to my hair and say, "A little shorter, please. And could you clean up that unruly fluff on the back of my neck."

   

Marvelous May: Forest-shaping

May is the gardening month par excellence, though it doesn't seem to get going until Mother's Day. The weather is cool, the vegetation is fresh, and we discover how well things did over the winter--or not-- which will determine what the new garden will require.

Variations on two common phrases have run through my mind more than once when scattering grass seed, assaying plants at a nursery, or lugging a tub of mulch or topsoil around the garage into the back yard.

— Gardening in the triumph of hope over experience.

— A garden is what springs up while you're making other plans.

Last summer was hot and dry; patches of our front yard became a desert, and several newly purchased plants didn't do well. I considered it a minor miracle to see that the blue beech (Carpinus caroliniana) that we planted last year, which did nothing but drop leaves for the rest of the summer, made it through the winter. It's still the same size as when we planted it, but its new leaves have a beautiful golden sheen. And I was equally pleased to see that two robust chokecherry trees have appeared nearby it in the midst of all the grape vines and Virginia creeper.

Two chokecherries amid the foliage

On the other hand, for several weeks I scrutinized the two witch hazel bushes we planted last year almost daily, looking for new buds, before concluding that I was staring at a couple of dead sticks.

If I had done my research before purchasing the plants I would have learned that—to quote the Chicago Botanic Garden—witch hazels "have preference for well-drained, loamy, acidic soil [which] means that they grow less than happily in clay soil." The soil out back, especially in the band of woods at the edge of our yard, is mostly clay.

I also read just now that the witch hazel is commercially grown and harvested "for the extract of its bark and roots, which is distilled into the common astringent that bears its name." I don't know anything about that, but last summer I watched the squirrels frolicking all over these plants, leaping onto them, bending them down to the ground, and basically going wild in every direction. Even this spring I saw a squirrel spinning around in the dirt at the base of the dead stump. Something in the bark appeals to them.

A few days ago we made a trip across town to the St. Croix River Valley to visit the Out Back Nursery, which specializes in Minnesota-grown native species but doesn't seem too concerned about the retail trade. As usual, our goal was to find a few shrubs to fill in the woods behind our house. After considerable hemming and hawing, we came home with another blue beech, a hazelnut shrub, and a gray dogwood similar to the ones that have lined our deck for the last thirty-five years.

A couple of nannyberry bushes had been doing quite well, but the rabbits girdled them during the winter and I cut them down, hoping they'd bounce back. One of the two is now, a month later,  a flourishing two-foot shrub. (It will take years to return to its former height, of course.) The other, larger, specimen still looks pretty dead. I tried to dig out the roots, but I couldn't lift them; they'd gone too deep. I gave up when the handle of the shovel sounded like it was starting to crack and simply repacked the soil and cut off the stump even closer to the ground. (You never know?)   

A blue beech (left) and a hazelnut

We planted the blue beech and the hazelnut within the deer-proof enclosure a few feet from the moribund nannyberry. (They say a black bear can smell a ripe hazelnut two miles away. That would be just our luck.)

Meanwhile, I'm thrilled by the new growth on the volunteer black locust. I'd say it's now at least four feet high and six feet across. (But maybe I'm exaggerating.) It seems to be suckering up from the roots of the two mature locusts nearby. I would have preferred to see it sprouting ten feet to the east, but it's a welcome addition to the woods just the same. 

Alongside this heavy-duty and perhaps Quixotic forest-shaping we also added a few annuals for color where the sun lingers for an hour or two—browallias, impatiens, astilbe, foxgloves. They don't look like much from a distance but add a little sparkle at close range. We also planted a few wishbone flowers, formally known as Torenia. They're named after my great-great-uncle Olaf (or so I'm told), the eighteenth-century Swedish bishop who "discovered" them in Viet Nam while serving as a ship chaplain for the East India Company.

We've planted them in the past: they never do well. 

Meanwhile, a columbine blew in last year that we hadn't seen in a decade. This year, it's back.

And the other day I transplanted a four-foot buckeye tree from near the woodpile alongside the garage back into the "woods," and I'm almost shocked to see that three weeks later it seems to be doing well. Dr. Seuss would have liked it. 

 

Gloria Mundi : Bad Latin

As Hilary and I were taking our usual walk around the block this morning the phrase that came to my mind was "Gloria Mundi." I heard it often during my church-going years, as I recall, and had a strong hunch that it referred to Jesus, describing him as the glory of the world. Wrong. Thomas à Kempis, in his 1418 work The Imitation of Christ, wrote: "O quam cito transit gloria mundi" ("How quickly the glory of the world passes away.") At that moment I was feeling the tremendous beauty of a cool spring morning before sunrise, not concerned about how soon it would pass, but rather, giddy with excitement and gratitude that it was present. A great-crested flycatcher whooped in an elm to our right. Three geese flew by, silhouetted high against the pale blue sky, and at one point I made a slight jog in my path to avoid walking directly under a fat robin sitting just overhead on a wire that crossed the road.

It's been a spring full of such moments, for me at any rate. Fresh plants returning, cool air, wonderful morning light day after day. I've long since resigned myself to the loss of a few shrubs to the starving winter rabbits (though I'm a bit disturbed that they're already nibbling on the hostas), and we've been consulting catalogs and gardening books for ideas about how to fill in gaps and liven things up.

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend in the wide-open garage door of a restaurant called A Side Publichouse, located in a converted fire station near West Seventh in St. Paul. It was a sparking morning, marred only by the man next door who spent a good half hour out in his front yard—and sidewalk—sending elm seeds and cottonwood cotton our way with a very loud leaf-blower. To me the neighborhood seemed remote and exotic, but my friend told me that he visits it often; three of his grand-kids go to a school nearby where Latin is part of the standard curriculum.

That reminded me of a phrase I'd come across the previous afternoon while dipping into Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Poststript. Of course I couldn't remember it, but I did make the effort when I originally came across it to consult the notes and find out what it meant.

I looked it up again this morning: quidquid cognoscitur, per modum cognoscentis cognioscitur. I admit, this doesn't have quite the ring of Veni. Vidi. Vici.  It means: Whatever is known is known in the mode of the knower. To me this notion takes us halfway toward the New Age nostrum that "we make our own reality." Which isn't exactly true. (If it were, we'd all be billionaires.) But it is certainly true that the way we process experience is colored by our temperament. This may be what Heraclitus was getting at when he remarked, "A man's character is his guardian divinity."

That is not, however, the point that Kierkegaard seems to be making. He argues that the understanding of the phrase "must be so expanded as to make room for a mode of knowing in which the knower fails to know any­thing at all, or has all his knowledge reduced to an illusion. In the case of a kind of observation where it is requisite that the observer should be in a specific condition, it naturally follows that if he is not in this condition, he will observe nothing."

Does this mean that in order to fully grasp the beauty of the morning, one must already be in a blissful condition? Kierkegaard, who's addressing a slightly different (but perhaps not so different) issue may be trying to say that those who smugly take their Christianity for granted will never arrive at the condition of doubt, anxiety, and dread required to recognize how fraught with uncertainty their ultimate fate remains.   

There is something wayward and perverse about Kierkegaard's approach to things, and I have come around to the conclusion that he should be read in the same way we read Tristram Shandy. Both authors are masters of irony, the difference being that Sterne's novel concerns itself with trivialities, whereas Kierkegaard's work concerns itself with exploring the prospects for eternal salvation.

I'm not concerned about anything much at all right now, just throwing out a few scraps of ephemera before breakfast, like elm seeds carried by the wind.    

Doors Opening

We drove downtown one Saturday afternoon recently to take advantage of the Doors Open event arranged by a variety of businesses and organizations who agreed to open their doors to curious visitors under the auspices of the city. It was a cool, drizzly day, which gave the urban scene a romantic luster.

Hilary and I drive down Washington Avenue, Second Street North, or River Road often, and have been surprised by the new restaurants, coffee shops, and other businesses that have sprung up, or closed down, not to mention the proliferation of condo towers. Seeing things on foot gave the streets a new and more manageable perspective.

Our first stop was the Star-Tribune production warehouse. But there was a line outside, we were told the wait would  be an hour, and the tour forty minutes. That would pretty much shoot the afternoon. No thanks.

Our next stop was a narrow brick warehouse called the Iron Building that some young entrepreneurs were gutting and converting into condos. Our tour guide was one of the owners.

"This building used to sell iron parts for repairing horse-drawn buggies," he said. "They didn't make anything here. But a long line of bays ran this way and people would bring in their buggies. We've had our eye on the building for ten years." He showed us where the timber beams had been replaced by concrete beams, and where the basement space jutted out under the sidewalk above, so heavy iron parts could be lowered easily into the building.

"This is a historic building," he said, "so we have to abide by lots of rules. And aesthetics has nothing to do with it. If a given feature dates to before 1930, we can't change it without permission, whatever it is."

He led the small group upstairs so we could see the apartment layouts. One woman inquired about buying one and he gave her his card. "This is a small building, and we focused on maximum living space for the dollar, which means no parking and no outdoor spaces."

Gutted buildings, like Greek ruins, are always interesting; the open space for the imagination. On the other hand, I worked in a building just like this one, the Bookmen,  for twenty years. I was also reminded of the genuine loft where an artist-friend who also worked at Bookmen, Ann Penaz, lived with her husband. She hosted a  party once where a film that Hilary and I had made with friend received its world premier. You reached the loft space via a freight elevator, and as I recall, Ann and John had an enormous black-and-white photo of Joseph Beuys on the wall behind the kitchen table. All the walls were white, or course. In those days there were several galleries nearby, and the chic New French Cafe was thriving, and there was talk of calling the North Loop neighborhood "Nolo" (you know, like Soho). Ann and John knew their days as illegal tenants were numbered. And also that the neighborhood would soon be gentrified beyond recognition.

Our next stop was Dayton's. Once the premier downtown retailer, It's mostly empty now, though there was talk of a food court before the pandemic hit, are enough businesses and offices have moved in on the upper floors to support a very nice gym and a stylish "library." The young woman at the desk started to explain to us what the building had once been used for, but I politely cut her short. "We know about Dayton's," I said. "In fact, I once saw the Butterfield Blues Band in the eighth-floor auditorium."

"Who?" She looked confused.

"The Paul Butterfield Blues Band," I added a first name to clarify.

"I like blues," she said cheerfully, "but I've never heard of them."

Hilary, hoping for better luck, said, "and I saw Jefferson Airplane here."

The woman shook her head. Negative. "I have heard of Prince, though," she said.

We took the elevator up to the eighth floor to see the swanky library and sitting room, and from there we wandered out onto the open-air deck overlooking the city. The buildings to the east looked sleek, glassy, and impressive—beautiful, even—though I didn't recognize any of them. To the northeast I spotted one flank of the Norwest Tower and a piece of the Grain Exchange, I think. The Crystal Court of the IDS Tower was directly below us.

We returned to our car and puttered a few blocks to the east side of town, where we found a spot right in front of a small walk-apartment building called the Oakland on 9th. Hewed in a vaguely  Richardsonian Romanesque style, it was the first building designed by Harry Wilde Jones, whose more famous works include the Butler Building, the Lindsey Brothers Agricultural Implements Warehouse, and the original Lake Harriet Bandshell. A sign in front describes the numerous challenges associated with preserving the relic here in the midst of parking lots and skyscrapers.

We were headed for a much larger building, the Hotel Ivy, which began its civic life in 1930 as the ten-story pebbled-concrete tower of a Christian Scientist church that was never completed. Over time it served other uses and was also scheduled for demolition at one point. It now functions as a luxury hotel. The lobby is on the third floor, with a spa on the second and a restaurant on the first. We were allowed to take the elevator to the penthouse, a one bedroom, two-story suite overlooking the city that rents for $5,000/night. As our tour guide explained, "This is not a room for visiting soloists with the Minnesota Orchestra. It's a room that Oprah or Cher might occupy.

I wasn't impressed. The spaces were cramped, the style was minimalist modern, and the views were only fair to middling. We won't be staying here any time soon.

Hilary convinced me to skip the free snack buffet on the third floor, and also the tour of the whisky cathedral in the basement, and we hurried a few blocks west to Orchestra Hall. We've heard many concerts here, but the backstage tour might have been interesting. Naturally, the greeter wanted to introduce us to the building. "We've been coming here since the seventies," I said.

"Oh, so you remember the colored pipes they used to have on the exterior?"

"Sure. Like the Pompidou Center in Paris. What? Did they take them off?" We skipped the forty-minute tour and walked out to Peavey Plaza, only to discover that the pool had been drained and replaced by stone tiles. Probably a good idea.

Our final stop was City Hall. We zigzagged north on foot past the Dakota Jazz Club and the old Young Quinlan Building—soon to be a bookstore! As we passed one old-fashioned café with tall glass windows I said, "Hey. That looks like Peter's Grill." Hilary was a waitress at Peter's back in the 60s, and she assured me that, indeed, it did look like Peter's. But it wasn't.

Our tour guide at City Hall was a man named Jerry, who identified himself as the supervisor of maintenance and building security. He walked us through the building while reading off of little 3 x 5 cards, and his halting yet informative delivery was perfectly suited to the ethos of the building. He took us to the city council chambers, where decisions regarding the city are made, and it struck me that politics does take place somewhere other than in the pages of a newspaper, and that real people, elected by other real people, make decisions that affect everyone in Minneapolis.

He took us to the mayor's office, which looked like a dentist office I used to visit on Lake Street thirty years ago.

We looked across the beehives in the building's leafy inner courtyard to the windows of the county jail beyond, where, Jerry told us, as many as 700 people could be incarcerated at any one time while awaiting trial. I had no idea.

Weary and inspired and sobered, we walked south toward our car past buildings I'd never heard of. Whatever happened to Lutheran Brotherhood? And the Dahlberg Drum Shop? And where was the Handicraft Building? Glancing down one street to the east we could see the old Normandy Inn.

 "I always hated that building," Hilary said, and I had to agree.

Twenty-four Hours in Forestville

The New York Times often runs articles with titles like "36 Hours in Rotterdam," or "36 Hours in Ashville." I occasionally take a look to see if any of the photos give me a better sense of the locale in question. Maybe it would be fun to go there?

I thought maybe I'd submit such a piece myself—"Twenty-four Hours in Forestville"—especially considering Hilary and I just got back yesterday from an overnight visit.

I realize there is scant likelihood that such a piece would be accepted for publication. No one has lived in Forestville for more than a century. But the fact remains, it's a nice place to visit. There's a state park there now, and a camp ground, and even a few camper cabins. We've been going there almost every May for thirty years at least.

The town itself lies at the head of an attractive rural valley, thirty-odd miles from the Iowa border. It consists of three or four historic buildings—a barn, a stables, a general store—that have been lovingly restored and maintained by the Minnesota Historical Society. The society used to give tours hosted by talented actors dressed in historic costumes, but then they decided that was too "nostalgic" and cancelled the program. I guess it's just as well, because the "town" lies on the other side of the Root River from the parking lot, and the bridge connecting the two, which was closed to vehicles quite a while ago, is now closed to pedestrians too. There's no easy way to get there!

That's too bad. But the most appealing things about Forestville—the birds, the wildflowers, the lay of the land—are still available to anyone who comes down to visit the park.

In mid-May you can expect to see quite a few warblers migrating north through the woods and along the river. One that especially interests us in the blue-winged warbler. Why? Because it's sometimes the only place we see it. Unlike many warblers that are just passing through to their nesting grounds much farther north, The blue-winged warbler nests here. We almost invariably see it in the tall trees near the turnoff for the group camp, but this year, we spotted one right outside our camper cabin.

The blue-winged warbler has an unusual but easily recognizable two-note call. (No one would call it a song.) The first note sounds like a faint sigh, with the breath drawn in. The second note, much louder, sounds like a slobbery exhale.

We soon spotted the bird darting from tree to tree just outside our camper cabin. That was a thrill. We also listened to a catbird chattering away, even nearer to our front door. After dark a barred owl began to take up the slack with his haunting and mysterious hoots.

It was raining the next morning. And I discovered, to my chagrin, that at some time during the winter I had raided the "kitchen pack" for matches and never got around to putting them back. We had no way to light the stove and make coffee!

We enjoyed our yogurt and granola as best we could and drove down to the picnic grounds along the river to look for birds in the drizzle. The conditions were terrible: the low light turned the birds, most of them high up in the naked trees against a dull white sky, into silhouettes, and drops of rainwater on the lens of the binoculars didn't help.

The park maintenance crew had been felling diseased ash trees the previous day, and we could see the smoke rising from  one of the smoldering debris fires. It occurred to me that we could light a piece of newspaper from the ashes and use the flames to light our little camp stove, but I had a hard time imagining what it would be like to run fifty yards from the heap of ashes to the nearest picnic table with a piece of flaming newsprint in my hands.

Then one of the crew arrived to check the embers, and we walked over to ask him if he could spare us a book of matches. "I don't have any," he said. "But if they don't have some at the office, come up to the maintenance shed and we'll get some for you."

Thus began a long conversation about the park, various options for the bridge, the diseased ash trees. "In Wisconsin they don't do anything with the diseased ash," he said. "They just let them die."

We'd visited three Wisconsin parks recently, with nary a park employee in sight, and I told him a story about my reluctance to buy an annual pass at a park kiosk.

"One day, out of the blue, we were instructed to remove all those kiosks immediately," he said. "People were breaking into the boxes, not only for the cash but also for the credit card numbers. The trouble with removing the boxes is that people still arrive expecting to buy a daily sticker and can't do so. They stick around anyway, and then we have to give them a ticket."

He seemed especially proud of the park's equestrian features. "Did you know that 48 percent of the revenue generated by horse campers in the state of Minnesota comes from Forestville?"

"I had no idea," I said. "I rarely see horses around here."

"That's because you come during the week." He recommended we drive up to the horse camp to take a look. And after we stopped at the park office to get a book of matches, we did. We had lunch up there, and the coffee was so good. But more important than that, we were inspired to take hike up one of the horse trails to a ridge overlooking the river. 

This was a perfect choice, because the woods were full of wildflowers, and they were much easier to see than the birds. The individual species are lovely, of course—hepatica, may apples, false meadow rue, buttercup, nodding bellwort—but I have also come to admire the way they intermingle haphazardly on the forest floor.

We took this same hike once twenty or thirty years ago. It was a hot, sunny day, and we didn't see a single bird on the way up to the bench overlooking the valley. But as we sat there a spectacular magnolia warbler landed on a branch of the white pine a few yards in front of us. A glorious sight, and a reward for our efforts.

On this occasion we didn't need a reward. The carpet of flowers was enough. But as we sat on that bench—the view now heavily obscured by underbrush—Hilary saw some movement in a thicket nearby. A black-billed cuckoo! 

There is No Word

There is no word in the English language to describe that narrow band of time during which the newly opened leaves on the trees are a lighter green, and very small and far apart, which creates an atmosphere of diaphanous, heart-rending beauty—an effect that's compounded by the swells of the early morning air. Yesterday might have been that day, but it was gray and wet and the air never really caught fire.

Today was that day.

In another day or two, the leaves will have matured, grown bigger and darker, still lovely but never again quite so tender, atmospheric, and sweet ... until next year.

Lucky for us, we had no commitments, and we took a walk along Tornado Alley, a semi-wooded bike path following the east bank of Bassett Creek between Theodore Wirth Golf Course and the railroad tracks that head northwest out of downtown through Golden Valley, Robbinsdale, and Brooklyn Park towards Elk River, Monticello, St. Cloud, and Winnipeg.

I don't really know where those tracks go. But the morning was cool and bright; we passed women and men walking their dogs, riding their bikes. We saw three green herons high up in one tree; a broad-winged hawk flew by overhead, and we spotted a solitary sandpiper feeding in a marshy piece of land alongside the creek.  This species migrates alone—hence the name—and breeds in northern Canada. It has a huge eye-ring, which makes it easy to identify. But you don't see them very often.

But what about this heavenly haze in the trees, for which we have no word? (If you can think of one, let me know.) Robert Frost took a crack at it, without much success, I'm afraid.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

 

Wallace Stevens was perhaps considering the same issue more rigorously in this poem:

 

The Motive for Metaphor

 

You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

             In the same way, you were happy in spring,

With the half colors of quarter-things,

The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,

The single bird, the obscure moon—

 

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were never quite yourself

And did not want nor have to be,

 

 Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being,

 

The ruddy temper, the hammer

Of red and blue, the hard sound—

Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

This poem had an effect on me in college, though I wasn't sure whether the "you" inline one referred to the poet himself, or to someone else, whom the poet was perhaps criticizing. Maybe he was criticizing himself?

In any case, neither poem quite captures the effect. They both refer to its character in abstract terms.

And what about this attempt by Mark Strand?

           The Night Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

I guess Strand is heading into unknown regions here, whereas the skein of delicate green leaves is right in front of our eyes. But also, I guess, in our chest. Our heart.

 Photographs can't capture the sensation, either. But I think you know what I'm talking about.

 

   

Film Fest Two

The low-key Japanese film Love Life begins in medias res, with Taiko and Jiri, a young middle-class couple, preparing for a surprise birthday party. In one early scene  Taiko shouts across the courtyard to an older woman; it turns out her in-laws live in the same apartment complex. Out in the street she consults with a group of people from the office where Jiri works about the festivities. One of them she's never met before, and she asks Jiri why he never mentions her in conversation. He brushes off the question with a shrug. 

Their young son, Kieta, has just won another Othello tournament, and they're using that as a cover for the birthday event, for which Jiri's father will be the focus of attention. Unfortunately, the old man arrives in a huff. There are hints and illusions as to the source of the tension underlying this ostensibly light-hearted gathering, but it takes us a while to put the pieces together. Kieta is Taiko's son from a previous marriage. Jiri was engaged to the woman in the street until he met Taiko; a newcomer to the office invited her to the party by mistake. And Jiri's parents are growing impatient to have a second grandchild--one of their own lineage.

I wouldn't be giving away so many pieces of the plot, except these are only a few of the complications Taiko and Juri face before the film gets rolling. It's riddled with politeness, disappointment, humor, and tragedy, unexpected turns and astute reflections about the past. It's a rich and satisfying  melange, which also includes some balloons, a stray cat, and two nuns singing karaoke.

The Eight Mountains takes us to the Alps north of Turin, Italy, where an urban couple and their son Pietro spend summers in a largely deserted village—the population has dropped to fourteen. Pietro forms a friendship with Bruno, the only child who lives there, though the two could hardly be more different. Bruno is robust; Pietro tends to get altitude sickness. Bruno has the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who knows his realm—the mountains—and has little interest in anything else. Pietro has no idea who he wants to become, though he comes to detest his father's driven way of life, exemplified by a tireless mountain-climbing enthusiasm. With the passage of time, while Bruno is laying bricks with his dad, Pietro cuts ties with his parents and carves out a bohemian path that seems to be going nowhere, though it leads him eventually to Nepal.

The film follows the lives of the two men, both heavily bearded now, as they revive their friendship in adulthood. Pietro struggles to come to grips with the fact that Bruno had spent a lot of time with his father during the years he was away. He helps Bruno restore a mountain chalet, brings his friends up from the city, and Bruno eventually marries one of them.

The mountain scenery is good, though the film was shot in a squarish format that restricts the views. But it's an odd and incomprehensible vibe at times, and the English-language folk songs on the soundtrack add to the disquieting effect. Which is another way of say that 8 Mountains doesn't fit a conventional story-telling mold. And I guess that's good. 

Max Roach: the Drum Also Waltzes follows the pattern of many jazz biopics, with black-and-white stills of Manhattan after dark (horns honking in the background or ice clinking in a glass), great music from the bebop era, detours into the world of heroin and other drugs, and interviews with the artist himself, the musicians he played with, and his wives and kids. It's always fun. Perhaps a film about an eminent drummer might not be quite as much fun, because drumming isn't all that interesting to most of us, in and of itself. On the other hand, Roach's story is enlivened by his efforts during the civil rights era to elevate that pressing issue in the public consciousness. The taped interview with the director that followed the film also added to the event.

 

One might suspect from the title that Greener Pastures is a film about agriculture. Not so. Although the focus here is on four Midwestern family farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota that are failing for one reason or another, during the course of the ninety-minute film we learn absolutely nothing about what the reasons are. The farmers themselves make a few offhand references to NAFTA, "factory farms," and tariffs making it difficult to sell powdered milk to China, but the filmmakers offer us no specific information about such things. The entire film is devoted to lackluster scenes in which the farmers stroll through the milking barn, drive their corn-harvesting machinery, or play military video-games in the basement to relax while complaining about tough market conditions and how much they love their cows. Bernie Sanders makes a brief appearance, of course.

Of the four farmers involved, one is leaving the farm to set up a business to counsel other farmers who, like him, have attempted or contemplated suicide. That's a worthy endeavor. Another is a practicing alcoholic who often finishes off a six-pack of beer before lunch. A third farmer seems to be hanging on largely due to his wife's cake-decorating business until he gives in and sells the mineral rights to his acreage, which will net him $150,000 per month. "I can tell, people in town sort of resent me now. They think I'm rich," he says. "But that don't bother me."

I like farm films, but we're far removed here from the world of Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, or the well-financed, thoughtfully managed California organic farm we see in The Biggest Little Farm. Farming can be a tough business, I know, and the little guy without a competitive edge is likely to lose out. But it's the same in every business. I read in the Star-Tribune a few weeks ago that the average net profit of a Minnesota farm last year was $179,000. That doesn't seem too bad to me. The income of dairy farmers dropped by 25 percent, however. 

Someone ought to make a movie helping us to understand why. 

Korean director Hong Sangsoo's filmography must number more than thirty works by now. His films tend to be fresh, rambling, and seemingly uncalculated, as if movie-making were a relaxed poetic endeavor rather than a leviathan corporate undertaking.

 His latest, Walk Up, is a black-and-white bagatelle involving a famous film director, Byung-soo,  who escorts his daughter Jeongsu to meet Byung's former friend Ms. Kim, a sometime interior designer, at the small apartment building she owns. Jeongsu is interested in interior design, and Byong thinks she might learn sometime and overcome her shyness by chatting with Ms. Kim. Ms. Kim gives her guests a tour of the building: a woman runs a restaurant on the second floor and a reclusive painter lives on the third.

A series of casual conversations ensue with plenty of drinking and an ever-changing cast of participants.  At one point Byung is called away to meet with a film producer and Jeongsu and Ms. Kim carry on a halting conversation not only about interior design, but at greater length about what it's like to be the daughter of a famous film director. Jeongsu goes outside to smoke a cigarette and strikes up a conversation with the boy who works in the building, and he fills her in on Ms. Kim's quirks of character. Hours pass, Byung hasn't returned, and Ms. Kim sends Jeongsu off to the corner store to buy another bottle of wine.

Things begin to get strange when we witness a repeat of the building tour, and Ms. Kim and Byung join Sunhee, the woman running the second-floor restaurant, for an afternoon of giggly wine-soaked conversation. Ms. Kim eventually heads down to her basement apartment to get some whisky and never returns, while Byung and Sunhee carry on a rambling conversation about his films, which she tells him she especially enjoys while drinking.

Time passes. The situation has changed, perhaps more than once; it's hard to tell. Another extended scene takes place on the terrace of the top-floor apartment. It seems Byung has moved into the artist's apartment with Sunhee. He's ill. She's going out to visit a friend who's getting married. He falls asleep on the bed. And so on.

The pieces of Walk Up don't really add up, though the ending is tidy. It were as if Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut had collaborated on an Asian remake of Run, Lola, Run. Some viewers will find the result self-indulgent. Others will be intrigued enough to see it again. An L.A. Times critic remarked, “Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward."