Ginger's Blog

I took my mother to Mt. Auburn Cemetery last week at her request to see the graves of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Isabella Stewart Gardner. She had a map from the Boston Globe that was–I guess I shouldn’t say that it was criminally inaccurate. Let me say rather that it wasn’t sufficient to actually find these graves. With a 91-year-old woman in tow on a hot summer’s day, the map was particularly insufficient.

The cemetery, however, was astonishingly beautiful. And interesting. I confess here that I’m not particularly interested in seeing the final resting places of notables of New England’s last century (or two). In many cases, the people we’d never heard of were more interesting (based on their memorials) than those we had. But the trees were more noteworthy than those of most arboretums. And the gravestone art–we could have wandered looking at interesting tombstones all day, if we’d had all day to do it in.

Which we didn’t.

Today we returned with a better map.

I became fascinated by those stones that showed a draped object. Mostly vases, but it began to seem that almost anything might be portrayed as draped and carved in stone. I didn’t have my camera with me that first day, but today I captured a few. Here are a small number of vases (the most popular), a sheaf of wheat, and a broken column.

And yes, we found Isabella Stewart Gardner (in a family crypt) and threw in Winslow Homer for good measure (tombstone not as art-noteworthy as his paintings, but then he wasn’t the one who designed or selected the tombstone).

I could make a coffee-table book of the trees, if no one has done that yet. Oh, the breathtaking trees! For now, I’ll show only an unexpected Dawn Redwood.

Dan and I are having trouble keeping our Netflix queue full. We just don’t hear of good movies to add to the queue as quickly as we watch the movies that are already in it. Most of the methods we’ve tried to find more movies we might like haven’t succeeded very well:

• Adding movies that look good in the trailers that come with other movies. This system works well for weeding out movies we *don’t* want to see, but there are some real duds out there whose only good moments are those incorporated into the trailer. Great trailer, lousy movie. Who was to know?
• Adding movies to the queue based on recommendations from friends. You’d think this would work really well, but we were surprised. Some of our extraordinary, smart, and delightful friends recommend the most ordinary and dull movies. In particular, we’ve learned never to trust the “hot” movies that everyone is seeing and talking about right now. By the time they make it to DVD they are no longer “hot” and often of little inherent worth.
• Using the Netflix recommendations (“Movies You’ll ‘Heart’”). The results of this, as nearly as I can tell, are totally random and useless.
• Adding movies directed by the same person as other movies we like. This isn’t a bad system if the director is consistently good. For example, Ridley Scott was, for the most part, a great success for us. However, any director’s oeuvre is limited, but our Netflix queue never ends.

But finally we have hit upon a system that works.

We ask my mother.

She is unerringly on the mark.

It’s gotten kind of scary. Dan always puts my mother’s recommendations at the top of the queue. And we always really like them. I think my mother is nervous now about recommending additional movies to us. The stakes keep getting higher.

Her most recent success was Vantage Point, a movie that tells the story of an attempted terrorist coup from a number of different but unexpectedly related perspectives, each layer adding depth and complexity to the story. It’s also a nonstop action movie that would do the TV series 24—the only ongoing TV show that I like—proud.

The movie that this reminds me of the most is Crash, which portrays the multifaceted interactions in the lives of a number of complete strangers in Los Angeles, some of whom meet by automobile crash or hijacking and some of whom never meet. We actually saw Crash twice, and enjoyed it both times. Frighteningly, this was another of my mother’s recommendations. Tonight I discovered that there is a name for this type of movie, and there are members of the genre Dan and I haven’t yet seen. Food for the queue monster.

Other movies that share this quality are Memento, Run Lola Run, and Babel. We liked all of these, too. I wish there were a Web site where you could enter the names of some particular movies, and it would tell you others that are in some way similar.

But meanwhile, Mom, you’ve scored again. Please keep those recommendations coming.

And, dear reader, I’m open to *your* recommendations, too!

“Who’s watching the Watchmen?” Dan and I are… finally… that’s who. What’s odd about this is that Dan is watching. Avidly.

Dan is not a fan of speculative fiction. He’s never picked up anything that might be called a “graphic novel”. He has little tolerance for the fantastical. Science fiction leaves him cold.

But he likes good design and he likes action. And Watchmen has these in abundance. Despite its bleak mood and noir atmosphere, it is an “up” movie. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether we are watching the plot, the effects, or the sheer beauty of the film.

Dan won’t say he likes this movie. In fact, he doesn’t have much to say about it at all. But he was on the edge of his seat. I was the one watching the watching man. He was glued to the screen for two and three quarters hours, about as long as I have ever seen him sit still.

That movie was good!

I have always had a weakness for the beauty of blown glass, but never, until this weekend, have I seen it actually being blown. So everything going on at the Icefire Glassworks in Cannon Beach, Oregon was new to me: how many layers of glass and color; how many times the work in process goes in and out of the fire; how many different fires are used; how many different ways the color can be applied; how many times the glass is blown and blown again before it is finished.

How like a dance the process is! The molten glass is always in motion, and the creators work together in choreographed teamwork.

The process is elemental; in days of fantasy and yore, glassblowers would have been mages and sorcerers, combining in their secret rhythms the glass and powders and grains of the earth, the air of their breath, the fire of three forges. And—yes—water, essential for shaping the glass and insulating the tools. Steam so hot that it is invisible and does not burn.

Well, you may just happen to be asking yourself, “How bad could a movie be, after all, that combines the classics with great special effects, that was written by Neil Gaiman, and whose cast includes John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, and a naked Angelina Jolie? Not to mention a villain that looks like Gollum on some very heavy-duty steroids, a villain even whose saliva is terrifying.” The answer is: Pretty darn bad.

The other thing you may be asking yourself is, “If summer daylight is so gloriously long in Scandinavia, how long are the nights there in the winter?” The answer is: Pretty darn long. At least 114 minutes too long.

So now you know. And you don’t even have to watch the movie to find out.

Although it seems a bit oxymoronic to speak of James Bond and intelligence in the same sentence, Casino Royale is James Bond with a lobotomy. I seem to remember the James Bond of forty years ago, as played by Sean Connery, as not only intelligent but also suave and elegant. Our twenty-first century Bond is, er… well muscled. So one has to wonder: Does the stupidity lie with the script writers, directors, producers — or with the audience of today that they’re producing for? Have we really gotten this dumb?

Dan and I just got back from seeing INLAND EMPIRE, a three-hour stream-of-consciousness dark David Lynch movie extravaganza which — oddity of oddities — just might possibly perhaps (if you look at it a certain way) have a Happy Ending. In a nightmarish David Lynch sort of way. This is not a spoiler. Some of the best, or, well, the paid critics see it differently. Your mileage may vary.

The way I see it is colored by the fact that I’m currently clinging mercilessly to the characters and plot and world of a novel that I’ve just completed and am still polishing. So I’m sensitive to how easily one’s characters take on a life of their own; how much the author/creator has vested in them; how deeply one loves them; and how strong a draw they have on the author’s life energy when one should be doing other things.

So I think I understand just what the inland empire of INLAND EMPIRE is. Laura Dern plays at least two nested characters (an actress and the character in the movie she’s playing) and possibly as many as four. And it’s just possible (I’ll try to do this without spoilers, which, in any case, might be wrong) that an even higher level of creation envelopes the whole enterprise. Maybe two.

This must be the Week of Memorable Dreams.

First Adam had a mystical Jewish spiritual mysterious revelational knockout and then I woke up with half a poem (alas, the last half) all finished in my mind. Here is an approximation of the poem. I had to reconstruct the first half, and it’s not as good as the ending, but I think it does okay in setting the ending up the right way.

The sun, the stars, the planets call, and still all of them fly.
While trees’ leaves drop to earth in fall, their branches reach toward sky.
To all things God allows no rest, and so do thou and I.
I see the love that moves thy breast, the darkness in thine eye.

Today, Dan and I went to see the movie “My Architect,” which is about the architect Louis Kahn. The film was made by his (illigitimate) son Nathaniel, who knew his father very little during his life, and twenty-five years after LK died, was trying to understand just who he really was. Despite some quibbles I have with it, the film is overall excellent and very moving. I recommend it.

But that’s not why I’m writing this journal entry.

As part of this project, Nathaniel visited every building that Kahn created. This includes the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been to the Kimbell twice. When the movie first showed sweeping shots of the museum’s beautifully lit, timelessly elegant interior, it all came flooding back to me.

The Kimbell is a gem of a museum, not only because of its architecture and light, but also because it has a small but completely first-rate collection. To quote its Web site: “The Kimbell Art Museum’s holdings range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including masterpieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, Caravaggio, El Greco, La Tour, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Houdon, Goya, David, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.” One or two of just about everything that any museum would give its eyeteeth to have. All displayed in perfect light, in uncrowded harmony.

The first time I visited the Kimbell, Adam was just two years old. Dan had gone off to live in Texas for several months to help in the start-up of his firm’s then-new Dallas office, returning home only on (most) weekends. But this particular week, I had a conference to go to in Dallas myself, so I took Adam and went to live with Dan at his apartment on Turtle Creek. On this particular day we didn’t have to work, so we went to the museum.

I remember carrying two-year-old Adam through the galleries, and stopping to look at the pictures and sculptures. At each one, Adam wanted me to tell him its story. Not who painted it and when, but who is that woman in the picture, and where is she, and why is she there, and why is that man looking at her in that funny way, and what’s going to happen, and…

And so we stopped at various pictures and sculptures, and at each one I invented a story for Adam that would be as long as it needed to be so that I could really look at the object and that would incorporate elements that might draw his attention too to some of the significant aspects of the object. And so we spent a pleasant afternoon at our own pace, my two-year-old son and I, going through the Kimbell Art Museum.

Today, twenty-one-year-old Adam is working on a capstone project at Brown University. It is a hypertext Web site in which a group of people meet and go through a museum. They stop and look at various objects. The reader can click on the highlighted objects if he wishes, and can then read a story associated with the object.

Now I have to ask you: Do you think this could possibly be a coincidence?