Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

After Alfred

I just wanted to check in and report that I am still alive and kicking. And with power restored after two bouts of week-plus outages in Connecticut courtesy of Hurricane Irene in September and what they're calling Storm Alfred last week, I hope to be able to more regularly click on some pixels to make sure my blog is being fed and watered.

After all the to-do about this latest storm, what more can I add? Do I have to ream Connecticut Light and Power (CL&P / Crooks, Looters & Plunderers) over how they've failed to properly cut trees away from major transmission lines and roadside power lines... and how, with stronger storms and faster growing trees, we should be burying our power lines to avoid these major events? Do I have to lament how we had to make do with flushing the toilet with water bailed from the lake in the backyard? Must I again be thankful that we were able to make it through a lot better than others because of some better preparedness and home upkeep choices made over the years? Well, I'm definitely not going to tell you that we were able to provide some help to a few neighbors who were left in the 26-degree cold (spare generator and a couple of oil-filled radiators) and with tree damage --- some with 30-foot oak branches strewn in yards and in the road.

As you might have read, the problem with the early snow (we got about 7 to 8 inches in our little spot in northeast Connecticut) was that it accumulated on the leaves that hadn't fallen, increasing the snow load beyond what some trees could take. As the adage goes, the branch that does not bend must break. Many types of trees had already shed all their leaves, but this was a particular problem among weaker evergreens and oaks, which tend to hang on to their leaves and drop little by little, just enough to drive compulsive yard rakers crazy. A red oak in our yard sometimes keeps its leaves, brown, withered and sere, into March. Combine this with CL&P and homeowners not adequately trimming or cutting trees near power lines, and it's the recipe for the mess we were in. And so, when branches (and in some cases whole trees) fell, they did their damage. For sure, there will be a Lessons Learned approach after this latest storm. Or at least one hopes there will be; there doesn't seem to have been one after Irene.... Two weeks out of two months where large sections of the state have been without power isn't acceptable for a modern economy. This storm will be the death knell for some businesses and make it tough on people who had to spend money on hotels just to keep warm, generators and fuel, and have to replace food lost to spoilage. The power grid is not an area where we can continue to cut corners and bet that these so-called "once in a century" storms won't keep happening year after year.

The Romans said that pride goeth before the fall, and if you knew how I pride myself on keeping a clean home you'll know that last week was a little painful. We don't have the latest and greatest, nor do we need it or even want it much of the time, but what we do have is clean. Even with a dog that sheds like the Dickens and does a full-body shake-out probably 20 times a day. I was able to keep my head above water --- barely --- with regard to vacuuming and dishes with the generator power, but there are a lot of things left to catch up on, not least of which is the laundry. Since we got power back on Monday afternoon I've gotten three loads in and there's probably eight to go. Not looking forward to that, let me tell you.... 

But enough grumbling. We live in Connecticut and are used to having to put up with wacky weather and the destruction it can bring. You have to try to keep calm and survive this with grace.

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed." --- Ayn Rand, in "Atlas Shrugged"

Saucing Tomatoes

As a gardener, I enjoy growing tomatoes and I grow about a dozen plants a year. As an eater, though, I've only recently come around on them... as long as they're de-seeded and tucked away inside a sandwich or grinder/sub. It may sound a little weird, but there it is. Usually, I keep a stock of nice slicers for those in the family who do like tomatoes, but my real motive for growing them is for saucing. And so, here is my process:

Pick and wash the tomatoes, checking for freshness and firmness. Don't use any that show signs of widespread insect damage, over-ripeness or other problem. The one shown in my hand here is my garden's biggest this year.

Slice them up (halve the Romas, quarter the Celebrities, and make several cuts into Beefstakes or Big Boys) and remove the seeds into a container headed for the compost. I also cut away any unseemly sections. And while I used to use a corer to make a V cone cut to take out the white section where the stem leads into the fruit, it doesn't really matter for saucing.

Put the sliced, de-seeded tomatoes, along with just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan (the rest of the water shown comes out of the tomatoes) on the stove until boiling for about 5 minutes. Then I usually let them cool for upwards of a half-hour so milling them won't get too hot.

Drain as much water from the pot as possible. Get a sufficiently-sized bowl to catch the sauce and place the food mill on it, using the pronged feet to perch it securely. Then, using a sieved ladle, transfer a workable amount of the stewed, cooled tomatoes into the food mill. Work away turning the gear clockwise and counterclockwise (there's the saucing direction and the unclogging pulp direction) to produce sauce until there's only mostly dry pulp left. You shouldn't go overboard on getting every last drop of sauce or you'll be there a while and expend quite a bit of energy. Keep ladling in the stewed tomatoes until finished, getting rid of pulp in the same container as the seeds and cut-away parts as necessary to keep the food mill from spilling over.

You're left with a bowl of tomato sauce. It can tend to be a little watery, so it's a good idea to either boil it down a bit before using in recipes or add some tomato paste as a thickening agent. At this point, before covering the bowl with some plastic wrap and putting it in the refrigerator, I add about a tablespoon of a good kosher salt or sea salt as a preservative. The sauce will keep upwards of a week in my experience, but I can't speak to the longevity of freshness or when it starts to get fungus because it's never lasted long enough for me to discover how long that takes.

This process supplements my tomato sauce use during the summer months. At all other times of the year, I use Hunt's plain tomato sauce on pizza, pasta, etc. and season to taste with oregano, basil, parsley, garlic, black pepper and sea salt.

Irene

We came through Hurricane Irene pretty well. Never lost power besides several flickers, had water and phone throughout. The only real damage was some downed branches and twigs, a number of leaves all around, and my cucumber and pole bean trellis falling like a house of cards from the wind at about noon yesterday. Looking at the projected storm paths most of the week, I'd been expecting much worse.

Now, the same can't be said about the rest of the state, even just a dozen miles southwest where power is out, trees are down, people have lost their water....

This is to say nothing of sheer idiocy, where a once-in-a-lifetime canoeing opportunity turned into just that. A little piece of foam fastened to ones' chest was a bridge too far, apparently. It's a thin line between the human desire to "feel alive" and the wrath of Mother Nature screaming "DIE!" at all turns. A thin line, that is very poorly guarded under optimal circumstances. And even less guarded when naked machismo makes one believe he doesn't even need to wear a life jacket while navigating raging flood waters. There's still no Edit-Undo button for real life.

Anyway... it's time to clean up.

Explorers are we, intrepid and bold,
Out in the wild, amongst wonders untold.
Equipped with our wits, a map, and a snack,
We’re searching for fun and we’re on the right track!

--- Bill Watterson

"This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders." --- Sarah Orne Jewett

22 August 2011

It was a Canning Day here yesterday, as I finally amassed all the right ingredients in one place. Picked a bunch of Straight Eight cucumbers mostly from the garden of a close-by relative on Saturday evening and set to work Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure I've gone over the strawberry-rhubarb jam processing here before, as well as dill pickles. It started out with a literal bang while sterilizing the jars, as one of an older pair that I inherited did a clean break at the bottom, apparently from the heat. And then in the first jam session, I heard another sound from the canner and lifted the lid to see red water and loose bits of rhubarb in the roiling water. Not cool. Not cool at all. But, in total, I successfully processed 12.5 pints of jam. And then with the pickling (after changing the water, of course) I got 16 quarts done in three batches. The cukes were literally so large and seedy that for most of them, I sliced them in half lengthwise, and scooped out all the seeds before cutting them into wedges. Oh well, I never liked the seeds and mushy interior part anyway! (When we bought them at the store, I'd always get the little gerkin dill types that weren't big enough to have seeds.) I also did a few quarts of the "sandwich stacker" cut with some of the smaller cukes from my own garden, which worked out very well last year. I may do a small batch of relish in some of the left over pint jars if and when our cucumbers start to take off.

I just like the self-sufficiency aspect of canning. Not to mention that today's processing is equivalent to ~$100 (give or take) if we had to buy these things in the store through the year.

16 August 2011

So, in the last few weeks I celebrated my birthday, installed a new sidewalk, rebuilt some of the lake wall that had been caved in by the ice over the winter, split some firewood, did about 12 loads of laundry, mowed hell's half-acre twice, welcomed a good friend back from nearly a year in the land of OZ, and had the teevee on for maybe 6 hours.

The garden is doing all right, except for a serious lack of production from the cucumbers. By this time last year I'd done two batches of pickles and, so far, I've had about six Straight Eights to pick. Not very happy about that. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks. Pole beans are doing well, with three or four pickings so far. The tomatoes seemed to get done in by a run of upper-90 degree days (despite morning and dusk watering); the fruits that had already established have filled out, but many of the leaves went sere and there doesn't appear to be any more flowering for more fruit. I picked (in driving rain, no less) and sauced a bunch of the Roma and Celebrity tomatoes yesterday, actually. Zucchini is trudging along, which I'm a little surprised at because for the past few years it's been done in early by squash borers or blossom-end rot. Bell peppers are probably doing the best of the bunch... which actually might indicate the problem, as they produce peppers best in a low-nitrogen soil. I really need to work on getting the nutrients built back up in this soil, either through natural or other means. Last year, we got some so-called hairy vetch, an over-winter nitrogen-replenishing ground cover that greens up in early spring and you till in before planting your garden, but came to find out in my readings it was too late for it to establish. So, I'll be looking at putting some in late next month after production winds down. Also, I will likely be adding a bag of 10-10-10 fertilizer next spring before tilling. I had thought that adding our own compost and a nice load from the Franklin mushroom farm would be enough, but it clearly wasn't.

There's just so much to do in the summer. 'Course, this year's been more difficult and featured some inhibiting pain/soreness/serious loss of manual dexterity because of a certain event that I must not talk about at this time in a public forum. Mustn't grumble, though. It could definitely have been worse....

"Summer has set in with its usual severity." 

--- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tonight, for the second time this summer, I drove home during during a tornado watch and an accompanying downpour. There's nothing that quite excites the senses as the possibility of peril. I was in a rather unprotected spot when the call came from a family member that on the weather report, there were some Doppler super-cells of oranges, reds and purples headed right toward where I was. So, I grabbed a few things and took off toward home where I could stay in the basement. Well, it started pouring to beat anything just as I pulled into the driveway --- I could see a virtual river of surface water cascading down the boat launch next to our property. Staying in the car, I comforted Ruff with a few "It's OK!" phrases and a hand on his shoulder. I wanted to wait until the rain tapered a bit so we didn't get soaked to the bone. That ended up being about 15 minutes, during which I witnessed my garden trellis, holding my pole beans and cucumbers, list to the side. So, as the storm passed I got out and tried to reset it into the ground a bit (when I installed it, I had pounded the legs into the ground about 9 inches) and used a pry bar to keep it propped up. I'll take a look at it tomorrow morning, and see if the tomato cages need any reinforcing as well. That first severe summer storm, they pop out of the ground and it's a devil of a time trying to get them to get a secure bite of earth again. Happy to report that we made it through safe and sound.

Huntress Diana

This statute, called the Huntress Diana (or simply Diana) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens has been a favorite of mine for some time. It has such great contours, elegant form and is technically perfect. When I first saw this on a documentary about the artist, my attention was captivated.

There have been a lot of artists who created busts and statues to war heroes that exist as a physical reminder on their particular spot of remembrance. I am acquainted with the sculptor of the Husky statue outside of Gampel Pavillion at the UConn campus, and before every exam I had during my matriculation there, I rubbed its nose for luck. Indeed, that was a big part of the commission --- it's a congregating spot where people stride, touch and hold up their diplomas in front of it. It was a creation of college tradition. Nothing wrong with that.

But, when you look at his body of work, Saint-Gaudens had such a way with metal. I don't mean to blow smoke, but he could fill lifeless earth elements with reverent emotion. Whether it was the form of Diana; a tangible representation of the seclusion of depression in the Adams Memorial; or the glory, the diversity and a weird concomitant sense of anonymity in the Shaw Memorial as the eyes are first drawn to the long rifles being held over-shoulder as a dominant vertical, the massive horse as the dominant horizontal, the angel overhead... then the faces of the men. They demand the respect, but not the humbleness that many statues seek to impose. I think that's what makes such a difference for me, especially in these highlighted pieces.

It's so hot....

 With the temperature here in the mid-90°s for the past two days (including a so-called heat index of 115°F today) and another in store for tomorrow, I thought I'd share a collection of Johnny Carson's "It's so hot..." quips. Some are straight from him, some gleaned from the web and some originated from and/or reworked by yours truly:

It's so hot... Satan went home until it cools off.
It's so hot... Rosie O’Donnell is selling shade.
It's so hot... Burger King is saying, "If you want it your way... cook it yourself!"
It's so hot... I saw a funeral procession pull through a Dairy Queen!
It's so hot... I saw two fire hydrants fighting over a dog.
It's so hot... the ice cream man is now only selling milkshakes.
It's so hot... every gay person who's ever come out of the closet has gone back in.
It's so hot... L.A. Dodgers fans were seen removing the paper bags from over their heads.
It's so hot... you've been getting hot flashes --- and you're a man!
It's so hot... Paris Hilton has sworn off making sex tapes until we get a cool snap.
It's so hot... I saw a dog chasing a cat --- and they were both walking.
It's so hot... Al Sharpton came over to swim at Don Imus's pool party.
It's so hot... people driving their Mustangs with the top down and seat belts on have "FORD" branded into their hips.
It's so hot... cows are giving evaporated milk.
It's so hot... digital thermometers have a reading of “Are you friggin' kidding me!!?”
It's so hot... birds have to use potholders to pull worms out of the ground.
It's so hot... you've experienced condensation on your rear end from the hot water in the toilet bowl.
It’s so hot... when you wear wrinkled clothes outside, they get steam-pressed.
It's so hot... chickens are laying hard-boiled eggs.
It's so hot... straight construction workers are wolf-whistling at the Poland Springs delivery man as he walks by.
It’s so hot... even the sun is looking for some shade.
It’s so hot... not only can you fry an egg on a sidewalk --- you can cook hash browns to go with it.
It's so hot... the retirement center is having a wet T-shirt contest.
It's so hot... Jehovah's Witnesses started tele-marketing.
It's so hot... habanero peppers are looking for some buttermilk to bathe in.
It's so hot... fish are sweating.
It's so hot... hot water comes out of both taps.
It's so hot... I saw a turkey praying for Thanksgiving.
It's so hot... you need a spatula to remove your clothing.
It's so hot... your kids' braces are giving them third-degree burns on their lips.
It's so hot... the strawberries are ripe and the cab drivers are riper.
It's so hot... Dick Cheney asked to be water-boarded.
It's so hot... I saw a robin dipping his worm in a birdbath.
It's so hot... the ducks on the lake come in "original recipe" and "extra crispy."
It's so hot... your car overheats before you start to drive it.
It's so hot... I just saw a squirrel trying to cool off his nuts.

And it's so hot...

How hot is it?

It is *so* hot... Democrats are taking their hands out of your pockets to fan themselves.

(Photo illustration originated from screened.com and altered to B&W.)

Film Review: "The Other Woman (Love and Other Impossible Things)" (2009)

I watched “The Other Woman (or, Love and Other Impossible Things)” a couple of months ago after it had a re-release due to Natalie Portman’s Oscar buzz and eventual Best Actress win for “Black Swan.” There's a lot of people who mercilessly criticize Portman's acting outside of "Black Swan" but I walked away impressed.

“The Other Woman” did not receive critical praise. In fact, as an on-demand option on some cable networks, it darn near was a straight-to-video release. A story about a home-wrecker is simply not a film that’s going to get high praise from the viewing public. There are a lot of people who have visceral reactions to the generic "other woman" --- there is almost no way they will see this character as someone with whom they can identify or empathize. And for that reason, this concept was commercially doomed. Too many people's lives have been affected by infidelity for them to have much of a reaction but disgust or anger. In American literature and movies, the adulteress must get her just desserts for what she's done --- often with her life, or at the very least, any chance at happiness.

And that is essentially what happens to Emilia in “The Other Woman.” After having a seemingly targeted affair with Jack, one of the top lawyers at the firm where she works after graduating from Harvard Law School, Emilia finds herself pregnant. And at this point, the film makes a gracious leap forward in the timeline, bypassing matters of Jack and Carolyne’s divorce and picking up at the point where Jack and Emilia are getting married. But Emilia’s moral debt comes due when Isabel, the child conceived in sin, dies a few days after birth. As the story moves on, we see Emilia sinking into a mix of depression, guilt, and a profoundly awkward relationship with a profoundly awkward William, Jack’s son from the previous marriage. William comes out with some very inappropriate comments (and classroom drawings), even for a pre-adolescent --- one wonders whether there’s a medical or if it’s simply a parroting of Carolyne’s snarky and vindictive attitude. The upshot of it is that Emilia is shown regressing into kid-thought, at times becoming like a second child in the household. She graduated from Harvard Law and can’t seem to win a household argument against a little boy, and is somewhat desperate to justify herself and prove that she was in the right. For instance, when she takes lactose-intolerant William out for ice cream after school and the boy proceeds to soil his pants at a party, Emilia is relieved to find out that some other kids at that party later had that issue as well. She calls to have Jack tell Carolyne that the incident wasn’t her fault… as if it were a huge matter. But to Emilia, burdened with the weight of grave responsibility, it is. And it’s here that I’d like to point out Portman’s nuanced acting that reflects many undercurrents just beneath the surface, but with an exterior façade of appropriate coping. As much as she plays a naïve and neurotic ballerina in “Black Swan,” Portman had to show much more in “The Other Woman.”

After an emotional blowout at a remembrance event in Central Park, where she yells at her father for his infidelity (and seemingly, yelling at herself for her own), Emilia is at a crossroads. She confides a dark secret she’s been harboring --- she believes she smothered Isabel when she fell asleep in bed with her. And here’s where the film has one of its more intriguing moments. Carolyne (played by Lisa Kudrow in a complete cold, bitchy polarity to her “Friends” role of Phoebe) puts aside her loathing of this “Other Woman” and shows some true compassion as she explains to Emilia that there was no chance she accidentally suffocated Isabel. And then the glint of compassion is gone as quickly as it arrived. In many ways, Carolyne’s reaction in this scene tacks closely with the audiences’ view of Emilia. She’s not to blame in the scope of Isabel’s death, but in the larger picture, we won’t forget that she’s no saint.

And so it goes in relationship stories that boy must lose girl (or in this case, vice versa) and Jack decides that Emilia’s behavior is just too much for him. Until, several weeks (or months) later, boy and girl bump into each other, and the time and distance has made them each see the situation more clearly.

“The Other Woman” doesn’t get rave reviews among critics or on the discussion boards. I understand that. It doesn’t deal with popular subject matter. There are many who point and write “J’accuse!” at the screenplay's and novel's writers and intimate that they must be cheaters themselves in order to have this relatively kind treatment. There are many viewers who might want to see the “Other Woman” of the title pay more dearly for her sin. They might prefer that the character of Emilia got some form of cancer and died repeating how remorseful she was for her adultery. Make no mistake that we still live in that kind of world, and that as much as people preach forgiveness (and perhaps they feel forgiveness, too; albeit a guarded brand of it), they are less willing to wish for future happiness for the scarlet woman. And also, to posit the question here, what would our thoughts be if Isabel hadn’t died? Was Isabel's death necessary to redeem Emilia’s sin or sway some measure of audience sympathy? I rather think so… and what a sad circumstance that is necessary for sympathy and forgiveness. How much must be endured before this person is allowed to love again? Emilia is a flawed character in a film mostly full of flawed characters --- and indeed, in a world full of flawed people.

(Photo © "The Other Woman" (2009).  IMDB page.)

T.V. Review: "Single Father" (2010)

On Friday night, I finally got around to watching "Single Father," a 2010 U.K. series starring David Tennant. After his wife, Rita, is killed when her bicycle is hit by a speeding police car that runs a red light, Dave struggles to maintain his complex family structure --- he has a daughter from a previous marriage, Rita had a daughter before they met --- who now wants to meet her biological father --- and they had three children together. As the story unfolds and with some separation of time, Dave must figure out how to move on, and come to terms that his wife had kept secrets from him. An incidental kiss with Rita's best friend, Sarah (Suranne Jones) promises to further complicate his life.

I had only intended to watch the first of four hour-long parts on Friday, but it was really addictive. The screenplay at several junctures seemed a little too tightly woven, but there always has to be a suspension of disbelief mixed with just accepting the plot and watching the story as it plays out. Regardless, the tight weave does nothing to detract from the quality of the story-telling. As much as it begins with a tragedy, this series has a fair amount of humor joining the drama.

Owing to his time on "Doctor Who" and a great turn as Hamlet in 2009, I have become a big fan of David Tennant. (Well, of his acting. I agree not a whit with his overt political views. But hey, nobody's perfect.) He brings so much energy into his craft, he acts with his eyes in ways that few others do, and there's a kind of je ne sais quoi that's just beneath the surface that fine-tunes the precise amount of zaniness for his characters. "Single Father" is a bit of a departure for Tennant, playing a normal person in a normal --- though a bit convoluted --- circumstance apart from previous roles as a Time Lord and the gravitas of the Danish Prince (Tennant has the best performance of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy that I have ever seen). I think I ought to own up to the fact that as much as they may be looked down upon among machismo males, I've come to rather enjoy these kind of dramas. But I will mitigate this is by saying this series is by no means like the dreck dramas on the Lifetime network. In several ways, with obvious points of departure, it is like a Scottish take on Steve Carrell's enjoyable "Dan in Real Life." It ended in a self-contained manner, and at this point BBC has no plans for a second series. I'd really suggest it for someone looking for a short series.

"The clean sleek creature arose from its fleece --- how perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam, should have been seen to be realized --- looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which lay on the floor in one soft cloud, united throughout, the portion visible being the inner surface only, which, never before exposed, was white as snow and without flaw or blemish of minutest kind." 

--- Thomas Hardy, the sheep-shearing, in "Far from the Madding Crowd."

Edit-Undo

It's amazing the number of people who walk through their lives as if there's an Edit-Undo button that can magically remove their particular stupidity from existence.

Yes, people, you need to think before you speak or act.

What I'm Watching

I changed the category in the left-hand column today from "What I'm Reading" to "What I'm Watching."

I suppose that this is a much more honest representation of how I --- and the public at large --- get my fill of fiction these days. Most of the things I actually read are short non-fiction pieces --- the largest share is media articles, along with short opinion pieces, message boards (I seriously limit my use of these). There's just no time for longer novels anymore. It's been the natural progression of the American attention span for quite some time.

But it's also because some television and movies can do so much more now. They can turn a rather dull tome of black on white into great pieces of drama and show. Creating whole worlds that had been impossible is now done with CGI to a high degree of quality. And there's now enough sources that one can pretty much be assured of finding something that grasps the mind.

Take, for example, the comic book industry. Post 9/11, it was really a dying art form. And now, there are several superhero movies released each year that are making tons of cash, as Marvel and DC are trying to resurrect their brands via Hollywood. Why pay for paper when there is reality, or something close to it? What really turned superhero movies from throwaway flicks into something like real art was Chris Nolan's "Batman Begins." It showed a gritty brand of reality without so much campy dialogue and cheeseball fight scenes.

But, anyway, I've been watching several series over the past several months. Usually I play an episode or two on my laptop which is propped up on the counter while I'm handwashing dishes, which makes that chore seem to go by a lot faster than just staring out the window, often at my reflection against the black contrast of night. I've gone through the current run of the British series "Doctor Who" and as the picture indicates, I am now starting "Breaking Bad" after a long time of hearing people talk about how good it is, and Bryan Cranston winning three consecutive Best Actor in a Drama in the Emmy Awards.

So there it is. My dirty secret. I'm not a very dedicated reader of the long form. I can do it if I have to, and I am committed to finishing Shakespeare, but there are so many other forms of media that are so much more accessible now. I'd hate to see this progression kill the novel, and I don't think it will --- to wit, sales of e-Readers are through the roof, and novels are often the source of this new media landscape. But the days of sitting propped up in bed paging through a hardcover are mostly over. Vive le difference!

Daffodil

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I caught the tail end of a Michael Wood "In Search of Shakespeare, Part III: The Duty of Poets" rebroadcast on PBS last week that has stuck in my craw. In it, Wood says that Sonnet 18 was written almost a year after the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet at age 11. Shakespeare had, at best, a distant relationship with his family in Stratford as he made a living in London, and only heard the news after Hamnet was buried. I had never seen a date associated with the sonnets other than when they were first officially published in 1601, and the dates of the writing of the sonnets wasn't mentioned. But learning this detail of Shakespeare's personal history brings such new meaning to Sonnet 18, at least to my mind.

This sonnet has so often been used to describe romantic love that it's something of a meme. In my time at UConn, in Professor Manning's Shakespeare I course, he said that this sonnet was written for a patron and dedicated, most likely to a man named Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton. The first publication of the sonnets, by Thomas Thorpe, included a dedication to the "onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W.H." [sic] --- W.H. being an inverse of Wriothesley's initials. Adherents to this attribution say that the patron's identity was concealed because of the earl's subsequent part in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I, for which he was spared death for life imprisonment. Prof. Manning's lecture posited that some one of the Wriothesley family, perhaps even Henry himself, had paid a sum of money to host Shakespeare in 1597. And it was there that he wrote a series of sonnets about a "Fair Youth" --- ostensibly encouraging the earl-in-waiting, who was reportedly homosexual, to have children so his beauty would be passed down to future generations. Evidently, it worked and Southampton was married the next year and produced several children --- though it did not put an end to the earl's... how shall we say... extracurricular activities.

And indeed, this call to a living soul is a perfectly befitting reading of Sonnet 18 and that sonnet series. It is a wistful reminder that our lives are short and the lifespan follows a pattern much like the seasons. Like a flower must produce a seed in order for the original flower's beauty to continue, so must we have children to pass down our DNA. The sonnet reflects that as long as the sire's lineage continues, a part of his fairness --- in this case, specifically, the blond hair of the "Fair Youth" will always remain on the earth. And yet, Shakespeare acknowledges that sometimes features like blond hair are lost --- "every fair from fair sometime declines." Of course, we know now that the genes for blond hair are recessive and are masked in the presence of genes for darker hair in a recombination in offspring. In lieu of hard science, the poet's eye has a remarkable perception of nature given his time. Recombinant genetics combined with Darwin's theories really hit home the truth in "chance or nature's changing course."

But Shakespeare didn't just show up empty-handed at the Wriothesley estate. These lines were at least sketched beforehand. And in them, I can clearly see a father reminiscing about his departed son, his grasps at a deeper meaning, and a resolve to preserve his memory in the year since Hamnet's death. Some of the other sonnets in the series dwell on the word "sun" --- a homonym for "son" --- in a way that, to borrow a phrase from the Bard himself, "doth protest too much" for a man who was a master of double-meanings. While the sun is not directly worded here, it is described as "the eye of heaven" as a common descriptor.

Surely, the Elizabethan people were much more used to this situation of child mortality, but that doesn't mean it was easier to bear. Doubtless, even then, it caused degrees of depression, marital strain, questioning of religion and God, et cetera. Shakespeare was away in London during the illness, death and burial, and I suppose that may have both saved him some particular griefs in having to witness the details of passing, but also inspired others in the vein he wasn't there to see Hamnet or have a final word of parting with his son. With the line "... and often is his gold complexion dimmed," one can see a kind of struggle --- that, in an age where there were no photographs and portraiture was relatively rare, and with the passing of time, Hamnet's face and blond hair were becoming harder to accurately picture. The human brain is a kind of computer that does frequent massive memory dumps so we aren't overwhelmed by information, and it is true that the harder one tries to visualize the face of someone we know well, even, the details often escape us, leaving instead a dimmed impression.

Despite this struggle for visual recollection, Will is determined to remember and to have Hamnet be remembered. He is determined all the more by the dimming, I think. Having been in London and not seeing any stage of the death... in a strange way, the boy isn't terminally dead to Shakespeare. Will never actually saw him so. And so, the Fair Youth retains his fairness --- caught in a kind of mental limbo where he does not give back what he "ow'st," (in that time's sense that every person owes God a death in order to enter heaven), nor does he reside in the "shade" of the underworld. There is a poignant delivery in the last six lines, of the poet swearing that the memory of his son --- trapped forever in an "eternal summer" of age 11 --- will be alive on paper and on the lips of the reader, through the "eternal lines" (the lines of the sonnets) that his father has written. An eternal summer preserved by eternal lines.

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; 
remade all the time, made new." 

--- Ursula K. Le Gun

For a few months now, I've been trying to make a couple of loaves of bread when I happen to have the oven going. Most of the time this coincides with pizza night, when I'm making dough anyway and only have to clean the food processor once. In the photo, a garlic loaf is on the left, and an onion loaf is on the right. Both recipes are from a book titled "Electric Bread." Our bread machine is in the attic --- I moved on from it a few years ago, initially because the food processor is much quicker. I've come to really prefer loaves baked in a pair of old Pyrex loaf pans, because they're less dense, bake more evenly (and I can brush the top with some half & half for a finer crust), and slices actually fit in the toaster.

I've also tried a cinnamon-raisin loaf and an Irish soda bread.

NYT Pay Wall, Part II

Further to my previous post about the New York Times "pay wall" comes this article by Joshua Benton. The Times' plan --- in Canada; it goes live in the U.S. next week --- was hacked by four lines of Javascript.

And, as Benton writes, it is undone by what he calls the "Frank Rich discount" where one subscribes to the print-version Sunday Times and gets the complete digital subscription for free. This is an idea I've had for quite a while about the future of newspapering. It doesn't look like I mentioned it before, but rest assured, it was an original idea in my thoughts. I've always noted that people in our modern age do spend time with the physical Sunday paper. They do crosswords, they clip the coupons, they read about politics to go along with the Sunday morning political talk shows, they look for used furniture or jobs in the classifieds (well... there's slim pickings now on the latter score). Coming up with a pricing option centered around the Sunday paper and digital access the rest of the week would seem to be the best of both worlds. As Benton points out: it saves subscribers money, it saves the newspapers money, it allows for people to still have access to a physical paper; it gives people enough useful old paper for its sundry household uses (you really won't know how useful cheap paper is until it's gone), without being so much to have to haul to the recycle depot. The only real downside to this would be the maintenance and usage problems for web presses --- I'm not sure that a once-a-week printing schedule would be profitable. Weeklies do this now, but they're usually printed on presses that run dailies, among other ephemera printing jobs.

I just wish the Hartford Courant would do something like this, but as I wrote previously, print subscribers don't get access to the e-paper, and the Courant's current pricing schemes actually make it cheaper to get the print version, which is very expensive to produce and distribute. I really believe that people are ready to go digital, if they were given more choices and realistic prices that don't force them to subsidize other parties.

NYT Pay Walls

The New York Times recently unveiled their plans to introduce a so-called "pay wall" that will allow readers to access up to 20 Times stories per month for free. After this, the reader either will have to pay for a subscription plan or wait until the next month to read certain Times stories. Other features, such as classified listings, Times blogs, browser and smartphone apps, and Top News stories aren't counted among the 20 story limit.

And so, we step further into the breach of paid online newspaper content. It's been a long time coming, serving as the single biggest question mark / looming dread for the future of journalism. It is not likely to be the end of printed news, at least not in our lifetimes, and certainly not for smaller papers. Up until now, the Internet has been a vast compendium of news content --- one could find just about any story from major outlets and a lot of content from more localized papers --- all for free! It was manna from heaven! As is happening a lot lately, the harsh reality has finally hit.

The time has been overdue for a mainstream paper to set the bar for paid e-news. I don't think we can wait much longer to meander on the way to where we need to get. One outfit has to serve as a beacon in the long-indecisive online pay format and establish if the industry can sink or swim. Cutting paper and ink costs reduce a budget drastically (as our "Intro to Journalism" professor said at the time, it cost the Times $9 for the paper used for the Sunday edition. That's before anything else happened --- just the bulk paper). Papers have to pay their bills, they have to pay their staff a living wage --- and, in many cases, need to re-invest in staff after 10 years of layoffs, flat hiring and cutbacks on quality --- it would be extra special if they could turn some profits again. A broad switch to e-papers has obvious environmental benefits as well. Less demand for paper equates to fewer trees and less paper waste in landfills, as one example. One can get very involved when thinking about what a digital future would look like.

One thing that bothers me is the price on that price wall. I don't have inner knowledge on how they set the prices for the various tiers, but they're higher than I would have imagined --- especially when factoring in the savings inherent in not buying physical products, operating and renting space for the press-works, not having delivery costs, etc. As the above link states, the Times' monthly packages range from $15 to $35 based on the platform used to access it. For myself, I would probably be choosing the $20 option that would seem to cover laptop or netbook access. As a close corollary, our Hartford Courant subscription is $1.75/week ($7/month if my math is correct), with a standard subscriber discount. Sure, when the discount runs out, we have to vaguely threaten to cancel the paper, and then the deal is continued fairly seamlessly. A dirty little secret is that a paper is much more interested in keeping its subscriber base to attract advertisers than it is in collecting the relative pittance of a subscription price. A canceled account would mean that the Courant would have to start sending us packets in the mail once a week --- at their cost --- to satisfy their direct-marketing agreements. So the question stands: since production costs are less, why isn't the e-paper cheaper than a real print paper? (On a side note, as a print subscriber of the Courant, we don't get e-paper access. What's up with that?)

Especially as an introductory price, this just isn't appealing. Especially something as tenuous as charging for something everyone's gotten for free for the past 10 to 15 years, this is the most important number that the Times needed to decide on. When I think of a pay wall my mind is flashing on the scene in "Stargate" when David Spader puts his hands into the gelatinous material as an experimentation. Wouldn't it have made more sense to let people dip a foot into the pay wall, rather than being forced to dive into it? Couldn't they at least start out with a deal for early adopters?

(Comic photo © Wiley Miller "Non Sequitur")

Garden Planning

We ordered some garden products from Gurney's Seed & Nursery Co. web site yesterday, ahead of planting time. This is the time of year when ambitions are high, and the pictures in seed catalogs produce visions of grandeur. A day of rain, then two two days with temperatures in the 60s have knocked back a little more of the snow in the yard and ice on the lake. Indeed, the area I glided across last month now looks like the surface of the moon --- a dull gray with darker gradients of pockmarks where some foot had traveled, an ice-fisher drilled through or where the sun just seemed to have more effect. I've always enjoyed having the goal of walking out to the island in winter, where our dogs could run around off the leash through the massive rock outcrops, the pine needle-strewn floor under cedars, in and among the barren mountain laurel. This winter has been especially harsh, with record snowfalls and snowpacks that tested the mettle of man and machine. But there is some consolation that Punxsutawney Phil seems to have proved correct in predicting an early spring.

I wanted to try some Blue Lake pole beans this year, after having less than spectacular results with a bush bean variety last summer and in a desire to conserve some space to use for other plants. I'm planning to rip some 2'x4's in half to make something like an 8' tall arbor structure with fencing material between posts for the beans on one side and some Straight-8 cucumbers on the other. Another family member wants to try some Savoy cabbage, and I'm keen on doing some of our own romaine lettuce --- note: not a so-called spring mix --- in a side planter. Otherwise, I'm planning on putting in some of the usual Roma and Celebrity tomatoes. And as usual, I've got the large strawberry planters that I use for herbs, which this year is going to feature more dill, which I'll be using in canning some pickles. We've been steadily going through the pickles I packed last summer and they've turned out great. I'm never certain about squash and zucchini here because I haven't had great success with it after an initial couple of weeks of harvest. The borer insects and a smut-like substance (probably fungal) gets at the leaves and whatever legumes do develop from that time forward go soft and brown at the end tips. Even the butternut squash, which is supposed to be resistant to many of the problems that plaque other legumes, didn't produce very well. So, I may decide to forgo the zucchini and squash this year. Lastly, I do some rows of spinach and Swiss chard every year --- those are two favorites in this house.

It'll be something to keep from chomping at the bit and start too soon. It's usually early- to mid-May before it's safe to start planting seeds or starter plants directly in the garden soil. Until then, the soil can be amended with compost, wood stove ashes, and a load of soil from the mushroom farm down in North Franklin. There's a lot to look forward to.

The Death Penalty

As the Connecticut legislature is debating several versions of death penalty abolishment bills in committee this week --- to be fair, they are also considering death-penalty enforcement legislation to "sh-- or get off the pot" on the issue --- it may be a useful reminder to read about the failure of the legislative justice process in the neighboring state of Rhode Island. It's being reported in the Providence Journal that Michael Woodmansee, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1983 for murdering a 5-year-old boy (who allegedly wrote in journals that he had eaten the body and shellacked the bones) seven years before, is now in the process of being released.

With the death penalty virtually off the books in Rhode Island (the last legal execution was in 1845, and the only provision for capital punishment, established in 1872, was for murder committed while in prison for a lifetime sentence which was never prosecuted), Woodmansee was able to plea to a murder-2 charge, bargaining with prosecutors who could only leverage against murder-1 with a lifetime sentence. There is a vocal contingent of high-ground moralists who have little or no understanding of the real-world consequences of their positions. Taking capital punishment off of the books leaves one fewer tool to use in a world that is more and more being overridden with heinous crime.

In Connecticut, where the triple-murder of the Petit family in Cheshire shocked the state (and indeed the country), Governor Dannel Malloy campaigned last year on the premise that the death penalty would be justified in heinous cases such as this. Now, Malloy reportedly supports a death penalty abolishment bill should it pass in the legislature, ostensibly with "law doesn't go into effect until [insert date here]" caveat so current death row inmates and the Cheshire murderers would still possibly face death. [Stephen Hayes was sentenced to death last year, while accused accomplice Joshua Komisarjevsky's trial is slated to begin in the coming months]. Only a fool would expect that after legal wrangling, such a grandfather clause wouldn't surely be negated. The Malloy stance is discounting the idea that another such heinous crime will ever happen again in Connecticut. A cynic would say that he flat-out lied about his support for a rare death penalty option the during the campaign. And let's not kid ourselves --- the death penalty is rare in this state, as a death row inmate literally has to beg to be put to death, as in the case of serial killer Michael Ross.

Rhody's attorney general's office is in the process of keeping Woodmansee in a mental institution in an involuntary detention on dangerousness grounds. This is a poor supplement to have to resort to from poor legislative judgment that served only to reduce penalties bit by bit, thus emboldening criminals. Woodmansee was sentenced to 40 years in prison but has received "good time" measures of 12 days per month, that have accelerated his release. This is not an unexpected result from the most liberal state in the United States. Many people in Rhode Island are up in arms about this case. How can the justice system have failed so profoundly to at least make sure this man was in prison until his dying day?

When I saw the Poirot quote from "Murder on the Orient Express" before composing a new post, it gave me a little pause. That quote actually requires a little clarification. Because in the closing, Poirot, despite having learned the truth that his fellow 12 passengers in the coach had conspired together to murder the murderer of a small girl who had escaped justice via mafia connections, lead the local police in the wrong direction. In the book, Poirot had much less of a problem with letting go this band of self-appointed jury / executioners than was shown in this movie version.

Viewing Poirot in the Woodmansee case, though, the father of the slain boy called into a radio show and said point-blank that if his son's killer (and alleged cannibalizer) is released from custody, he will murder this murderer, consequences be damned. And if it happened and I were on his jury, I would probably take a cue from Poirot. The specter of Woodmansee's release is not justice.

"No! No! No, you behave like this and we become just... savages in the street! The juries and executioners, they elect themselves! No... it is medieval!

The rule of law, it must be held high and if it falls you pick it up and hold it even higher! 

For all of society, all civilized people will have nothing to shelter them if it is destroyed!" 

--- Hercule Poirot in "Murder on the Orient Express"

(Photo © ITV / PBS Masterpiece Mystery)

Movie Review: "Gnomeo and Juliet" & "The Illusionist" (2010)

As one can imagine, "Gnomeo and Juliet" borrows heavily from the Shakespeare tragedy. It's the Reds versus the Blues in a duplex backyard rivalry. The two owners don't like each other, their yard decor takes it a step beyond. In the "Toy Story" conceit, garden gnomes come to life when people aren't looking. And so, Gnomeo and Juliet meet and fall in love, amid their families' feud. The violence of the original story is replaced by some more benign ceramic damage, and a visit with the Bard himself leads to the question whether tragedy can be turned into happily-ever-after.

I'm not the foremost authority on animated movies (again, that may be my little niece) but "Gnomeo..." just doesn't work on several levels. I'm not saying that it's terrible, unenjoyable for its target audience, or that I'm expecting animation to be high art. British films have never been a detractor in my book --- I am a PBS Masterpiece Classic/Mystery acolyte --- but this was almost cloyingly so. The Elton John caricatures and songs were just plopped in to take up minutes. This is a movie that invites comparison and especially at the Shakespeare scene, requires a bit of extra-textual knowledge to make some of the jokes amusing (such as one red gnome wearing a pair of Speedos the Borat way). I'm not sure the people behind "Gnomeo..." are precisely aware of who they intend their audience to be. At times, I imagine that this story is difficult to follow for animation's usual target audience (to pull some numbers out of a hat, ages 2-12). If you're an adult, it's a bit pedantic. As ratings go, my thumb is dangling sideways, trending down.

If you're looking for a great animation that can actually count as higher art, I would definitely recommend this year's Oscar-nominated "The Illusionist" instead. While there's nothing untoward in it, this one really isn't for the kids. It may be unfair pitting these two movies against each other, but no one ever said life is fair.

The relationship between the magician and the char-girl is a bit complicated to figure out. That's one of the things that most stuck in my craw as I was watching and for a while afterward. The nature of their bond at times seems father-daughter and at other times, husband-wife. They sleep in separate rooms of the short-lease flats. She cooks some meals, but otherwise spends her days walking around trying to look pretty and staring at the newest items she wants. As performance artist acts lose favor to rockabillies, the lanky magician plays to smaller audiences then picks up odd jobs to buy her clothes. The viewer is left to wonder what exactly the magician is getting out of this relationship. It reminded me a great deal of the narrative of Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" with the way its female protaganist is mostly viewed as an object to possess and upkeep, where sex is implied, but never mentioned.

"The Illusionist" is artistically exceptional to anyone who grew up watching throwback animation, as opposed to the saccharine look of "Gnomeo..." or "Toy Story." There is not much dialogue, and much of what there is consists of grunts, French or English with heavy accents. A bit surprisingly, though, it works wonderfully.

Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part IV, and Oscar Predictions

● Yesterday I wrote that I wasn't expecting to like "The Kids Are All Right." I was wrong. Now, I'm not ecstatic about it and don't plan to buy it on Blu-ray or anything, but it was a nice little piece with a new take on the old romance and "other man/woman" themes.

At this point in Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules' (Julianne Moore) same-sex marriage, things have died down a bit. They almost inexplicably watch male-male pornography for arousal (well, it is explained that they don't like watching lesbian pornography because its stars' attachment is inauthentic. So, we're put off the notion that these women are together because they hate the phallus; they're together for love.

And then one day, one of the kids, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), decides that he wants to meet his --- and his sister Joni's (Mia Wasikowska, who played the title character in last year's "Alice in Wonderland") --- sperm donor biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). This precipitates a major transition in each person's life.

Nic, the clinical control-freak must learn that control isn't enough to sustain a family or relationship; Jules, a career-drifter, must find something to do now that the kids are getting older; Joni is a repressed (not just sexually) 18-year-old who's heading to college soon; Laser (seriously, who chose this name?) is struggling to find male role models as he comes of age.

After snorting drugs with his "Jackass"-type friend, Clay, then being asked to re-evaluate what he's getting out of the relationship with this friend, Laser asks newly-18-year-old Joni to find out whether they can meet their father. Paul is a fairly successful restaurateur / organic farmer, and before getting this call from the sperm bank, apparently is happy with a life of casual sex with women who work for him. After he meets Laser and Joni, and subsequently hires Jules to redesign his backyard to kick-start her new business, Paul undergoes a progression toward acceptance of this instant family being dropped into his life. When he starts having a sexual relationship with Jules and it is discovered, he seems to think he can slink right in. Is it just me or did it just seem wrong that I didn't feel too badly when Jules and Paul started with mutual kissing and then several quite graphic sex scenes? If Jules were cheating in a heterosexual marriage, it would not get the kind of audience reaction it did, and the ending as it stands would not sit well. Is cheating within a same-sex marriage somehow less morally wrong? With no substantial classic Hollywood-morality-tale repercussions for Jules besides an aching back from a few weeks sleeping on the couch, it would seem so. Like many heterosexual couples who "stay together for the kids" is it enough from this relationship that "the kids are all right"? Is it enough of a reason for them to stay married because they're "too old" as Laser's closing lines suggest?

We're not shown the resolutions to the transitions. Jules and Nic have to re-build their relationship; Mia had kissed an equally-repressed male friend and rode on Paul's motorcycle (breaking one of Nic's major rules); Laser parted ways with his jackass of a friend, who wanted to urinate on a stray dog (it seems he picked up a sense of "this isn't a good idea" from Paul), but he still doesn't really have a male role model.

Paul created a major obstacle for the moms. But for Laser and Joni, it seems like he planted a seed (this time, a figurative one) that will help them come through their transitions. Maybe it was enough. And in that sense, the kids are all right. The grown-ups, on the other hand....

Mark Ruffalo was enjoyable in his role as Paul. There's a wonderful play on the way he grows his vegetables organically, versus his role in the artificial creation of the kids. He realized that the casual sex lifestyle wasn't enough for him, but his attempt to be a family man by trying to cut into this situation was something that put them all in straits. As Nic delivers one of the more poignant lines of the film, Paul needs to start his own family, not invade one that he was an anonymous part of 18 and 15 years before.

-----

With the Academy Awards ceremony tonight, I'll posit my own list of who should win and who will win in the major categories. Many years, I didn't watch at all, or flipped to it between commercials of whatever other show I was watching. This exercise of watching the Best Picture nominees and writing reviews has made the anticipation to watch tonight somewhat increased, even with my general disdain for awards shows.

Best Picture
     Which should win: "True Grit"
     Which will win: "The King's Speech"

Best Actor
     Who should win: Jeff Bridges, "True Grit
     Who will win: Colin Firth, "The King's Speech"

Best Actress
     Who should win: Natalie Portman, "Black Swan"
     Who will win: Natalie Portman, "Black Swan"

Best Supporting Actor
     Who should win: John Hawkes, "Winter's Bone"
     Who will win: Christian Bale, "The Fighter"

Best Supporting Actress
     Who should win: Hailee Steinfeld, "True Grit"
     Who will win: Melissa Leo, "The Fighter"

Best Director
     Who should win: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, "True Grit"
     Who will win: David Fincher, "The Social Network"

Best Original Screenplay
     Who should win: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, "The Kids Are All Right"
     Who will win: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, "The Kids Are All Right"

Best Adapted Screenplay
     Who should win: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, "True Grit"
     Who will win: Aaron Sorkin, "The Social Network"

Best Animated Feature
     Which should win, "The Illusionist"
     Which will win, "Toy Story 3"

(Photo © TopNews.in)

Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part III

We're fast closing in on the deadline for Oscar reviews, so without further ado:

● It's been a while since I watched "Inception" but I am thankful to be blessed with a very good memory.*

Christopher Nolan wrote and directed this deeply psychological thriller that explores nuances of the dream world in a way only he would. Nolan is known for bold casting choices, but I won't spend much time discussing this aspect other than to mention that this film followed too close from "Shutter Island" for Leonardo DiCaprio. The actors are less important than the story of a team who can crack into people's dreams and influence their lives once they awake, and the goal of the haunted main character Cobb (DiCaprio) to be able to get back to the United States so he can see his kids after a years-long exile as a fugitive. We go through the process of how dreams are infiltrated and the rules the team has to follow to avoid being trapped in a dream, which has an exponential time element the further one goes into the subconscious. Then, the story converges --- Cobb is offered an end to his legal trouble if he will implant a thought into the head of a young heir whose father has died. The plan is to create a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream scenario, in order to implant the idea deeply enough. Gun-play and annoyingly slow slow-motion shots ensue. As with any psychological film worth its celluloid, the ending shot implants into our own minds the nagging thought that we just wasted over 2 hours of our lives question of whether anything we saw was itself a dream, or just another mind game that we need to backtrack to figure out.

Nolan certainly doesn't like making films in the linear fashion. As with "Memento," this is not a movie where one can sit back, turn off the gray matter and simply be entertained. It requires audience thought. I'm not knocking it for these qualities --- after all, I watched LOST religiously. And like LOST, one of the biggest themes is letting go of the things that hold one back. But whereas Jack and Hurley deal with their reality as it has been determined by an unknown something (God/The Island/Fate/Destiny/Time itself), Cobb's dreams about his wife's suicide (because, as a result of the dream-toying, she didn't think the real world was real, and thought it would wake her up. And she may have been right) and her rage, keep him from being able to move on. Nolan has said that he left his ending slightly ambiguous, but he prefers to believe that Cobb was reunited with his children and that's all that matters. Whether this reunion is real is secondary. Overall, "Inception" was an enjoyable film that inspires thought. And it was a blockbuster, raking in an estimated $160 million, according to an industry figure. Psychological thrillers, in my view, have a tougher row to hoe to be worthy of the Best Picture Oscar, and this didn't do enough.

● "The Fighter" is a story of boxer Micky Ware and his half-brother, Dicky Eklund, who acts as his trainer, in mid-'80s Lowell, Mass. While boxing is at the core of the film, the story focuses on their Irish-American family issues and the crack cocaine addiction of Dicky, the former "pride of Lowell" who knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard --- but lost the fight --- years before. Christian Bale, who has garnered a Best Supporting Actor nomination as Dicky, displays his usual physical commitment to the character, dropping a considerable amount of weight to show Dicky's cocaine-ravaged body. The main conflict is in the brothers' vie for attention from their family, mostly their mother, Alice, played by Melissa Leo, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role.

There are many times where anyone who hasn't lived in the northeast might wonder if people like Micky's sisters really existed. And the answer is, yes --- and there are quite a few of them still around. Same 'Big Hair,' same defensive cattiness, same purposelessness. They really didn't have to look very hard for location shots, as the tract apartment buildings of Lowell still provide that '80s sense of lower-class living conditions.

The prevailing thoughts I had while watching "The Fighter" was of slapping all of these people upside the head and screaming, "WHAT THE F--- ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?!!? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?!" In many ways, the family dynamic is commonplace as a rougher version of the "Beverly Hillbillies" meme, where testosterone and estrogen flow in the air, people seem to think that arguments are won by whomever is loudest, and the leader of the show is the most-organized, chain-smoking, control-freak buffoon of the bunch who appoints herself as manager of the books.

Micky, for a reason perhaps only those who live in the situation can explain, doesn't want to abandon his family even though doing so would bring him a greater chance at success. But there are many characters with this same almost inexplicable devotion to family --- mostly Alice, who refuses to face Dicky's addictions even after finding him twice 8jumping into garbage bins out of the back of a crack-house where he has holed up with his drug-addled friends. There's a poignant moment where she appears ready to burst, before Dicky starts singing a weak rendition of the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke" and pathetically emphasizing "but I couldn't see / that the joke was on me."

As the story progresses, Dicky's incarceration forces him to get clean and sober, but he also wants to do this because he finally realizes the effect of his drug use on his son when he sees it through the lens of an HBO documentary. There is a lot that the cocaine has taken from Dicky that he will never get back, but he still has a sense about boxing.

This had a lot more going for it than I expected at first blush. As a period piece, it captures the '80s brilliantly. "The Fighter" still doesn't beat out "True Grit" for me, but it's occupying a respectable place as No. 2 in my ratings of the 10, so far.

All that remains is "The Kids Are All Right." I've got until tomorrow night to sneak it in. I'm not generally a fan of Annette Bening or this type of neo-rom-com, but you never know....

* Except for roads, which is a little weird, considering that my father's nickname is "Rand McNally." You can literally call him and say "Hey, I'm totally lost in Hartford. There's a big red building with silver numbers 237 over the door and I need to get to the federal court for jury duty." Without a pause, he'll reply with something like, "OK, bang a left onto Columbus Boulevard and you should be coming up on a yellow newspaper box on the corner of Main...." It's no exaggeration. This was done about 10 years ago by my brother, with his friends in the car assuming that my dad somehow had a video feed. And he knows this for every town or city he's ever been to... and some he hasn't.

Beyond the Borders

Some people seemed genuinely surprised when retail bookstore Borders announced last week that they were filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closing about 200 stores nationwide.

In an article on NewsBreaks today, there is much ado over how the company has not reacted fast enough in the past 10+ years as the book market changed to an online dominion and more recently in the move toward e-books available on portable electronic devices. I'm sure that didn't help, but it was a business sense that shouldn't have been unexpected.

All one really needs to look at is Borders' pricing. I was recently looking at The LOST Encyclopedia, and decided to check in the store. The book's jacket price was $45. Border's price was $45. Even in their online store, Borders has this title listed as $45. Using the simplest of online searching, other online outlets have this title listed for as low as $15 (granted, from a site with a disputable reputation) and average between $25-$29, with no tax and no shipping cost. Using this example, Borders' bankruptcy should come as no surprise. Gouging potential customers when other outlets offer as big a selection of titles at deep discounts is a fantastic way to put oneself out of business.

This is what happens to a company when there is too much management and not enough people who have an interest in the long-term viability of a company. If I knew better, I'd hazard to say that management didn't care that their prices were from 20 percent to 25 percent higher than their competition --- that the income from people paying a higher price (either out of ignorance or loyalty) would make up for the business lost by customers who chose to purchase elsewhere at a lower cost. Eventually, especially in times like these, that merry-go-round stops.

Borders announced that they will continue business at their remaining stores, and this is an opportunity to make over their corporate structure. The NewsBreaks article quotes an Axis white paper that "a crisis situation like this allows a company to ‘unfreeze’ the organization’s traditional slow process of change to implement decisions more quickly and make the company more agile and responsive." Unless that plan includes slashing prices to become competitive, any reorganization will be, to excuse the trite expression, "like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic."

There is some speculation that the Barnes & Noble chain might be interested in some degree of takeover. They're no gems in the pricing arena either, at least in their 'brick and mortar' stores. As I found out when I went to get my nephew a fun pop-up book titled "Moon Landing: Apollo 11 40th Anniversary" two Christmases ago, there is a great disparity even within that company's entities --- it was full-price ($30) at the store and had a discount of about $8 at B&N.com. Amazon.com had it listed at about a $13 discount, again with no tax or shipping.

Care to guess where I ordered it?

"All good dogs are a little loopy. Otherwise, they'd just be like [mobile] furniture." 

--- G. Will Eggers, English 110W instructor at UConn

"That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up – look at the respective piles. There's nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man's condition, as Montaigne says."
--- Logan Mountstuart, in "Any Human Heart" by William Boyd

Oscar Best Picture Reviews, Part II

I promised to review all the 2011 Academy Awards Best Picture nominees, and I aim to make good on that over the course of this week.

● I wasn't expecting much from "127 Hours," as I've learned from many previous efforts that were "based on a true story." The real-world event was a much-publicized story a few years ago when Aron Ralston (James Franco, pictured at left), a backpack thrill-seeker, cut off his forearm after he was trapped by a falling boulder in a Utah canyon network. As such, we already know the ending, which puts a lot of onus on the narrative structure and acting to carry audience interest. In the first shots I was a little worried at the tri-split screen showing unrelated pictures and video news footage, thinking the cinematography was going to be of the "24" variety. That was a fleeting concern.

Having worked with stone a lot over the last 7 years, I knew right off when he was trying to chip away at the boulder from the bottom that anything he was doing there --- and with a dull multi-tool, it wasn't much --- would just make the boulder jam even tighter. But I guess we'll try anything when there is a possible alternative to what Aron eventually has to do to get free.

The camcorder messages that Aron records, knowing that he is probably going to die in the canyon is very touching and I wonder if they used the actual words from that tape, or whether it was written up to a great extent. I suspect that Hollywood put its touches in, but the fact that I'm asking this question means that the dialogue was very believable. Otherwise, the narrative spins around some of the relationship choices Aron has made, mostly regarding a nameless love interest and his family from which he keeps a certain distance. The poetic bits are not lost, then, that it took Aron cutting off his arm to stop cutting himself off from others and keeping his loved ones at arms' length.

This film invites a comparison to another based-on-real-life story, "Into the Wild," which features Emile Hirsh as a young man who rejects much of society and his family, going through a sort of breakdown after learning that his father had another family (or rather, that his own family was the "other" family). In isolation, the characters each come to realize the mistakes they've made in their approach to family relationships. I really thought Hirsh deserved more recognition than he got for hid acting range and the physical devotion he had to put into that role. There have been several basically one-actor movies in the past several years (which seemed to start with "Cast Away" exploring the theme of alienation even as our society becomes ever more electronically connected) and Franco holds his own with any of them. With a setting and storyline that could easily have started to drag on a viewer, Franco kept it moving. 

One question I had: when Aron was rewinding the camcorder to the part where he's canyon-diving with the two girls, and he paused on Kate Mara's chest.... What was that exactly? It was debatable to me whether he was shivering or engaging in some... shall we say, extracurricular activity.

All told, the most important thing to take from this film is the last line. Always leave a note or make sure someone knows where you're going, especially if you're doing something with the potential of danger.

● "Toy Story 3" is ostensibly a last goodbye in this series about a group of toys and their owner's path to maturity. Andy is headed to college, and the toys are facing an unknown future. Will they be relegated to the attic, the garbage or donation? As the previous animations showed, toys can be an obsessive lot --- always worrying about being damaged, misplaced, unloved or outgrown by their owners. Again, we're treated to the gang's adventures while figuring out their loyalties to Andy and to each other. My only gripe, and a small one at that, was in the furnace scene late in the movie. It lost a lot of its potential poignancy with the up-tempo music choice. It took a few moments before I got that they were all resigned to burning and after all the arguing, decided to go out holding their friends' hands. A slower Michael Giacchino-type score would have worked much better there. The ending was a great way to send out this franchise.

● I've been a fan of Arron Sorkin's script-writing since "The American President" and "The West Wing," even though I don't agree with very much of his political ideology. In "The Social Network" Sorkin and director David Fincher portray a fictionalized account of the beginnings of Facebook.com, the social networking Web site that has changed everything from retail marketing, to the course of human relationships, and across the Middle East in the past months, political revolutions.

The script borrowed heavily from details of the legal proceedings in lawsuits over the business side of the origins of Facebook. The film is necessarily bogged down with scenes of sworn testimony to flesh out the Winklevoss twins' portion for having the bud of the idea for the site, and how the buddy relationship between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) turned sour after they became business partners and outside elements started to exert their influence. I cannot say that "The Social Network" was very entertaining, so much as it simply tried to tell the story of a service that a lot of people use. Much of time, it was like reading a long, though well-written, Wall Street Journal column. As much as Zuckerberg facilitated virtual friendships around the globe, the film's basic intimation is that he is not at all good at facilitating his own friendships in the real world --- highlighting the closing shot where he is pathetically clicking the refresh button on his ex-girlfriend's Facebook page over and over. Eisenberg plays his part with a quiet, terse, social awkwardness that really invites a viewer to place Zuckerberg somewhere on the autism spectrum. A lot of people have him pegged as their favorite for Best Actor. I remain unconvinced that playing a pretentious, arguably back-stabbing prick is that hard of an acting job.

● "Winter's Bone" caught me very off guard with its brutal treatment of a girl forced to keep her family afloat amid the scourge of methamphetamine and its consequences in America's heartland. It was relatively shorter than most of the other films in contention, but nevertheless I'm still ruminating on it. The ending was left wide open as to who killed Ree's father --- her uncle, played by John Hawkes, says at the end that he knows who did it --- but as a simple vignette piece, it has the richness of a Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen Crane short story. Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for Best Actress and I can't disagree on that score. The downward spiral of meth is an all-too-real life for way too many people in this country.

● I went into "The King's Speech" wondering what it has that wasn't in Masterpiece Theatre's treatment of the same subject with "Bertie and Elizabeth" (2002). Besides all the therapy swearing, and the star power of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter and Geoffrey Rush.

It was a fairly good showing and I think Rush as the formally-untrained speech therapist will remain the most memorable part, especially that scene where he does the opening lines of "Richard III" for his children. I have an inclination to not like Ms. Carter --- I can't really explain it, but there it is. Colin Firth was very good, just as he's been in many roles (he is the best Mr. Darcy ever captured on celluloid in the 1995 version of "Pride & Prejudice"). Certainly two thumbs up, but it loses points with me over how reductive it was with the story, and how it put Rush's speech therapist at the heart of the political intrigue of the time. It conjoined those elements for the sake of time, but it did a great disservice to the reality of what happened. It also wrongly attributes the cause of and cure to stuttering as a purely psychological trauma.

As I wrote above, I'm not sure it broke much new ground from "Bertie and Elizabeth." And that film was able to go a little deeper into the succession crisis. "The King's Speech" placed a lot of the narrative on Rush's character to both egg on and shoot down the notion of any "vaulting ambition" on Bertie's part. And the politics of Edward VIII's abdication was much more complex than what they papered over in this new treatment, while also showing the progression through the war until George VI's death and Elizabeth II's coronation. James Wilby really personalized Bertie much more than I got the sense of from Firth. There is something to casting a lesser-known actor in a biographical film, as a viewer can stay behind a thicker veil of ignorance and isn't distracted by a well-known actor's face. All I saw here was Firth and Bonham-Carter. I'm sorry, I just don't need star power to be wowed.

All right, that's five of the Best Picture nominees reviewed right there. That's half of them! Add in the ones I wrote about in my last post... [carry the two, add four, divide by one]... and I only have "The Kids Are All Right," "Inception" and "The Fighter" left to recap. I'll try to get to them before Sunday's award broadcast.

(Images are © of their respective films. I have used official movie posters or publicity stills used elsewhere in the mass media)