To ponder

My old friend from college sent me this poem.  I love it.

     The Way It Is

     There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
     things that change. But it doesn’t change.
     People wonder about what you are pursuing.
     You have to explain about the thread.
     But it is hard for others to see.
     While you hold it you can’t get lost.
     Tragedies happen; people get hurt
     or die; and you suffer and get old.
     Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
     You don’t ever let go of the thread.

       -  William Stafford

Away!

Bicycles for use by guests, Whistling Swan Inn, a photo by nickelshrink on Flickr.
(a little too big for the blogger frame, but clicking it will take you to the flickr original)
 --

We're just back from our first vacation since 2007. More to come, but here's a photo that I oddly love.

We stayed in a wonderful bed-and-breakfast where they've thought of everything, including bikes for the guests to use. I was standing inside, at the jar of homemade chocolate chip cookies, trying not to have another, and I looked out the window onto the side porch.

This sight called out to me - the bikes ready to fly off into the autumn sunlight and falling leaves. I wanted to capture it, and it was a rare case of my ipad's camera doing exactly that. This is what I saw, the light, the mood, everything! How often does that happen, especially with no cropping or enhancement?

We were away for 5 days, 2 for airports and only 3 to do anything with, but it was perfection and a break from cares that neither of us has had since 2008.

More pix coming.

Even I have some standards.

I'm am so crafts-challenged (poor digital dexterity and no patience) that my standards for my own work are pretty low.  But I do have standards.  Really.

I am never going to crochet like the experts.  Never never never, and that's because I have NO desire to.  Such intricate work makes me stark raving insane.

Hand made by my mom-in-law. This kind of skill floors me.

Larry's mom crocheted this gorgeous tablecloth for us.  It's enormous, covers a nice big farmhouse-sized table for a big gathering.  I've just folded out a corner to show the pattern.  How anyone can do something this big and this beautiful, stitch by tiny stitch, much less do it in a few months, boggles my mind.  I have enough trouble with simple mufflers.

And then, there's my lumpy work...

The all-blue one on the right is designed and being made (it's maybe half-done) for a friend for Christmas.  The blue and green one on the left (also incomplete, but about 2/3 done) wasn't made for anybody.  It's a test piece, to try out stitch ideas and see what makes the kind of final product I want to make.

My conundrum is that I don't want to do time-consuming stitches, but I get sick of the basic crochet stitch that makes all those little bow-tie-looking rows.  Bored with them.  Tired of that granny look.

So!  The question was, how could I make a piece that looked like I worked really hard, without actually working really hard?  I approach life this way whenever possible:  easier paths, shortcuts, magic formulas, etc etc.

On the blue/green one, I started doing rows of various stitches to see if I could make something that has a more interesting appearance, but was not too thick to wrap comfortably.   That job has taught me a lot.  It's too thick and stiff, some of the rows too uncomfortably ridge-like, and the variety of stitches looks as amateurish and randomized as it is, but as an experiment, it helped me figure out an easy stitch for a muffler that's decent-looking and feels good.  I'll finish it anyway, but only because I've started, and hated, and unraveled about 6 previous attempts and just don't want to throw out another one.

Maybe I'll give it to Goodwill, or use it myself, but it doesn't meet my standards for gift-giving.

This is where people say stuff like "The recipient won't care about the endearing goofiness!  You made it with your Very Own Loving Hands!"

Bullcrap.  Maybe she would find it all endearing, but it bugs me when women get told that, when it comes to the work of their hands, the lu-u-u-v is what matters.  Insipid, sexist swill.  Ever notice how, if a guy's woodwork or metalwork or whatever is lopsided, out of proportion, painted sloppily, or otherwise stupid-looking, nobody says, "Oh who cares, it's so cute, you made it with lu-u-uv!"?

At a glance, the blue one doesn't look that much nicer, but it does look a little nicer when you see it in person, and feels better, and meets my standards, which are mediocre.  This isn't about Being Too Hard On Myself.  It's competent, not Excellent.  My yarn tension is uneven, so there are some stitches you could drive a Humvee through, others so tight I can barely find the place to insert the hook for the next row.  It will look homemade, and I'm fine with that, but it has to be a certain level of well-made.

As for making anything with Love, it's sort of not in me to work serenely.  Even my simple project fouls up at moments, and the language I use ... let's just say that New Age people who think that your feelings and mental state infuse your products with good or bad vibes would be horrified by my attitude.

Maybe I should order some of those "made by" personalized labels for my goods:

Handmade For You - with Creative Profanity!

Try not to heave while I do a rare Gratitude post

I'm not much on doing nice humble gratitude posts.  I'd rather gripe.  But this week has brought too many things to love and to be grateful for, so bear with me.

1.  3 healthy cats.  Both sick guys are back to their usual selves, and Little Gray has not shown symptoms.

Downy rests up from the heavy demands of his life

2.  Fall!  The first nice cool overcast days of the season. I actually wore a sweater over the weekend. I'm also a fan of gentle gray days and cool weather, so the cool, cloudy weekend was like a gift. And today, we're getting rain!  Huzzah!

3.  Time with my dad, and the fact that he's still getting around and finding good in life.

4.  A husband who decides to spend the afternoon baking bread.  On his birthday.  That was Friday.

 

 

5.  And who walked all over the grocery store to find the chips I craved, on a special display, after I'd glumly given up on them when they weren't on the regular chip aisle.  I didn't make him do it, honest - I'm not that much of a High Maintenance Woman. Probably too much of one, but not that much of one. He disappeared and next thing I knew, he was guiding me to a chip rack.

6.  Books.  At every stage of my life, books have moved me, expanded my world, and kept me sane. This is only a few of the ones that have been the right book at the right time over the decades.

7. The invention of the slow cooker.  It's more than just an easy method of cooking for ADDs.  As luck would have it, the slow-cooker also makes the kind of food I like best, thick soups and stews, one-dish meals.  Slow cooking has existed for eons, but this little wonder of the world lets you do it without keeping watch over it, and without leaving your stove or oven on all day if you're out.

Back to my usual crabbiness without delay....

Bread and Peace

Universal Prayer
Alexander Pope, 1738

Father of All! In every Age,
In every Clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my Sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art Good,
And that myself am blind;

Yet gave me, in this dark Estate,
To see the Good from Ill;
And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will.

What Conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.

What Blessings thy free Bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when Man receives,
T'enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to Earth's contracted Span
Thy Goodness let me bound,
Or think Thee Lord alone of Man,
When thousand Worlds are round:

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy Foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish Pride,
Or impious Discontent,
At aught thy Wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy Goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's Woe,
To hide the Fault I see;
That Mercy I to others show,
That Mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholly so,
Since quickened by thy Breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe'er I go,
Through this day's Life or Death.

This day, be Bread and Peace my Lot;
All else beneath the Sun,
Thou knowst if best bestowed or not,
And let Thy Will be done.

To thee whose Temple is all Space,
Whose Altar Earth, Sea, Skies!
One Chorus let all Being raise!
All Nature's Incense rise!

I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

- Waldo Lydecker

You can say, and I'm not arguing, that Laura is sentimental melodrama.

Yes, it's full of 1940's social protocol and silly hats. Yes, as all my Twelve-Step Group friends have said many times, the love story is based on disaster bonding, the Lady and the Cop have little else in common, it isn't True Love.

But as filmmaking it's so well-crafted that it mends some of those plausibility seams, and if you don't buy that, it's still sumptuous to watch. The one Oscar it won, out of 5 nominations, was for cinematography, but the art direction was nominated too and the two work together. I don't think there's a single object, moment, or shadow in the movie that wasn't chosen to be there, and chosen well.

I find new things in it every time, which is why yall are being subjected to More Than You Wanna Know about why I love this movie. Complete with not-great screen shots in which I sometimes concealed the dvd-player controls and sometimes forgot.


Here in this flashback, Waldo Lydecker tells the detective how he used his newspaper column to mock the talent of Laura's painter boyfriend. Laura, still unaware that Waldo wasn't just her caring mentor but her stalker, found the column witty and insightful, and dumped the boyfriend.

The screenwriters could have written this scene various ways. Waldo is telling the story, but viewers could have seen Laura delighting in the nasty column all by herself - she'd certainly have told Waldo how great she found it. Or he could have come over to her place to observe her reaction, but sat with her at a breakfast table, with Laura fully dressed.

Instead they brilliantly, creepily, place Waldo there in her bedroom, while she, in negligee, is served breakfast in bed.

The camera pans away from Waldo quickly and focuses on a medium close-up of Laura giggling at the column. Possibly to make trimming out Waldo easy, to allow censoring if the Hays Office balked.

  But Waldo is definitely there and that adds an icky intimacy to their relationship. It's filmed to demonstrate both how un-platonic his feeling for her was, and how clueless she was about that fact. It's wonderful detail that adds dimension to the characters and a quiet clue to the murder motive that the viewers might or might not catch.

Everything in this movie is about detail. Starting with something little, look at Gene Tierney's outfit in the flashback scenes depicting the fateful day Laura Hunt introduced herself to famous critic Waldo Lydecker.


The costume designer has to outfit Laura for a major character development that takes place within a few hours.

This is a just-out-of-high-school Laura Hunt. Pre-success. Pre-sophistication. But smart, tasteful and ambitious, which is why she wants a celebrity to endorse a product and get her ad campaign noticed. In the restaurant scene, where she's vulnerable and naive, she wears a tasteful but unsophisticated suit with a boxy jacket. The jacket has a demure white collar and cuffs, country girl dressing professional.

 Shot down by the acid-tongued Lydecker, she returns to the steno pool at her ad agency.

But he has seen something exceptional in her - or sees a predatory opportunity. Take your pick. I choose both. Anyway, the repentant Lydecker comes to see her that same afternoon, to apologize and give her the product endorsement she wanted. But their roles have flipped. Now he's the uncomfortable one, on her turf, and wanting her approval. Laura has taken off the jacket and her outfit now looks, still unsophisticated and demure, but sleeker, showing innate good taste on a budget, and self-esteem.


More great costuming -- as the plot thickens, we need to suspect several people, including the weak, passive Shelby.  How to make this dork seem menacing...??

The coat. If he just stood there in his business suit with that gun, he'd look goofy, but with the coat over his shoulders like a villain's cape, he looks potentially evil.


The sets .... Oh my. There are three New York apartments shown, all belonging to well-off artsy folks. Each is unique, each reflects the owner. Waldo Lydecker, famous columnist and radio personality, has it all, including a leopard-skin chair in his bathroom, and a collection of masks on the wall that includes, as Detective Mark McPherson notices, one scary one given a central spot.


Laura's aunt is also well-off, but her taste is a little more classic and even staid. Hers is the home of an older woman with money, who wants acceptance by high society but can't entirely extinguish her showgirl origins (That, by the way is in the book - the movie doesn't bother to explain her) or lose her taste for superficial pretty boys who love her money.

Laura, now 5 years into being mentored by Lydecker, has been influenced by his tastes, but still likes sentimental music. And ruffles. The first few times I watched Laura, I thought those ruffled lampshades were just 1940's kitsch, but the sets are dressed with a lot more character insight than that. Laura Hunt is a self-made woman, with sophistication modifying her sentimental tastes, but not eradicating them.

My dvd of the movie has features including commentary by a film professor who mentions something I too noticed, but I think the professor misses the meaning in it. That's the importance of Bessie, the maid.


The film professor says that this, in which Detective Mark McPherson meets Bessie, is an unimportant little scene, but it's not. Bessie is a vital force in the movie and it's a key scene.

The movie is famous for its theme of the detective falling for the dead woman whose murder he's investigating. He doesn't fall for her portrait, whatever other observers say about it. The portrait that the people who loved her draw with words does it.  The painting itself is merely a tangible object he can focus on ,and possibly own.  Bessie loves her employer deeply and blisters Mark's ears with a tirade about Miss Hunt's virtues as a kind, giving, wonderful, true lady, and this is the testimony that tips the scales for McPherson.

Bessie is the method by which the script makes a case for these two possibly having a reality-based love story. Bessie is a hard-knocks Irish woman who hates cops: "I was raised to spit when I saw one." She destroyed evidence to help her beloved Laura keep a good reputation even in death, and she's proud of it.

And McPherson is smart enough to admire Bessie, to let the evidence problem slide, and to see the value of having her as an ally. In that one short scene she drops her cop-hating ways and becomes his biggest fan. Watch her through her few scenes in the rest of the movie. She looks at him as though he made Laura rise from the dead.

Bessie sees that both Mark and Laura are exceptional people, each transcending the world he or she comes from, and it's her devotion to both that symbolizes a solid and reliable bridge between Laura's and Mark's worlds.

The film professor also mentions that Bessie wears the same outfit two days in a row. "It's a one-outfit role" she laughs. I don't think that's it.

Same dress, different day

For a maid who's been presented as uneducated, rather superstitious, and as having a black-and-white view of people, that is a very classy, tasteful dress. Especially for her to come do housekeeping tasks in.

She has actually just come directly from the funeral, according to the book, and apparently they wrote a funeral scene for the film but ditched it. That could explain her nice dress in the first scene, but not the fact that she's wearing it the next day, too.

Nothing says this, but the attention to detail in this movie is so good that I'm pretty dern sure we're meant to see Laura's kind and close relationship with Bessie in that dress. I think Laura gave Bessie the dress, either new or as a cast-off, and that's why Bessie wants to keep wearing it.  Strictly my opinion.

Judith Anderson.  I LOVE Judith Anderson.  You just have to listen as she delivers lines nobody else could speak without sounding like they had a mouthful of graham crackers:


"He knows I know he is just what he is. He also knows that I don't care."

I love Vincent Price, too. Watch him clench his jaw when he's nervous. Watch him always try to make himself look good, so that when he really is telling the truth, and when he's not, he's hard to sort out.

Clifton Webb. Sarcasm at its finest. "Haven't you heard of science's newest triumph; the doorbell?"

This is one case in which the movie is an improvement over the book. The book has a point-of-view problem that filmmaking sort of renders moot. In the novel, several characters narrate, but in each one's segment, the author is forced to tell us things that the current narrator couldn't know, so it kind of shifts into a vague omniscient narrator. I've been told that this is called "author intrusion." They dropped the narrator idea in the film. The camera simply takes us through the investigation.

Just watch it, or watch it again, in a good print. It's a lot of fun.

A computer that works is a wonderful thing!

The smallest, and most eclectic, sampling of a YouTubePalooza!

IF you ONLY get ONE gadget - get this one!

I put the weather-dot-com gadget on my iGoogle page, thinking at the time that all I would get was the weather.

But they also run the child abduction alerts -- tailored for the zip code that you have put in to get your weather info.

This is a very very wonderful thing they can do to get the alert out there! It comes up, with any weather alerts, in red letters ....



.... and you click it to get the descriptive info you need to keep an eye out. All in plain, easy-load text.




I had this info within the hour it happened, and told the lady at our convenience store while I was getting my Diet Coke, so she could keep a watch too. If you only get one iGoogle gadget, I'd call this an important one -- and it does double duty!

I believe that (if this "share it" link works) you can get it here.

(By the way, the flood warning has come up since yesterday and appears to be a river surge coming in from the uplands after recent rains. It might cause problems directly along the river banks but shouldn't affect us much here.)

It's Helen Forrest's birthday

I looked up Helen Forrest's birth date (April 12, 1917 - July 11, 1999) quite awhile ago, so I could do a blog post for it, and didn't realize at the time that it coincides with Easter this year. Well, a happy and blessed Easter to all, and if you like the Big Band sound, consider this a holiday treat that has no sugar or calories. If you're not into Big Band then go listen to something else. 8~)

Helen sang with three of the greatest bands. She found Benny Goodman rather a pill to work for, as did quite a few others. She thought Artie Shaw was a terrific boss, and she was in love with Harry James, though she lost him to Betty Grable. Her bio is here.

In honor of her birthday, here's my Helen Forrest YouTube playlist of some of the best that they have. There's not much to see in most of these, just music to listen to. Several use the same slideshow for their visuals, or have no visuals at all, though a couple have nice footage.

These are old recordings. SOUND QUALITY VARIES from track to track, and I'm sorry for it, because it would be nice to be able to just "play all" without the volume variations, or the scratches and pops.

Because some of the rougher tracks have pops, scratches and hum that some listeners might find painful, I've made a second "short list" that leaves off the ones with the poorer sound quality.

I found that starting with the volume control at about 75% makes the rougher tracks listenable, and allows the low-volume "You Made Me Love You" to sound clear enough -- but that one is better if it's jacked up a bit. I couldn't resist putting it in.

Here's the full playlist, 11 tracks. The red asterisks indicate tracks with quality problems that have been left off the 7-item "short list."

Perfidia - with Benny Goodman

I've Heard that Song Before - with Harry James

All the Things You Are - with Artie Shaw

You Made Me Love You - with James

Then a two-fer, 2 songs in one Goodman/Forrest clip:
* Taking a Chance on Love (SCRATCHY, but I like it so much!) and
* Cabin in the Sky (equally scratchy)

I Don't Want to Walk Without You - with James.

*Deep Purple - a Shaw/Forrest standard. This choppy clip leaves something to be desired, but I thought it was the better choice. The only other complete version I could find on YouTube is a 78rpm that has such a jarring skip that I couldn't stand it. So I used this very good but truncated version from the film Symphony of Swing (with a silly bit of film drama. That lady would have to be 100 years old in 1939, to clothe her reminiscence in that antebellum dress, but Gone with the Wind imagery was the big thing that year.)

Comes Love - with Shaw. I love this song! "See your dentist right away."

Skylark - with James

*I Had the Craziest Dream - with James. Terribly scratchy, but with some great "G. I. Jive" broadcast material. I wanted to close with this one because Forrest used it as the title of her autobiography.

--

If you have time or desire to listen to only one, I'd say, make it Skylark. A less perceptive singer would have overdone that plaintive quality, but she uses a subtle hint of it, and I find it kind of haunting. And she makes it sound easy, which it ain't!

Help out teh animals!

Downyflake, Graymatter and Scooter -- who rarely agree about anything -- do agree that ....




freekibble.com is one cool site!

Answer the trivia question of the day, correctly or incorrectly, and you contribute to the donation of pet food to animal shelters.

The People magazine article about sooperhero kid Mimi Ausland, who started it, can be found here! (PDF)

There's a dog page and a cat page, and you can donate at either or both, once a day.

Every day~!

All I can say is ...

...I hope she won.

"Competent" and "efficient" are very very important.

Charles Lane has died at ...102!

So Larry and I have just finished dinner, a dvd and a discussion of the rare moments in TV that blew our minds, and I log on and see that Charles Lane has died.

Who?

Here he is in It's a Wonderful Life.

He played Homer Bedloe as a semi-regular on Petticoat Junction. He had regular roles in 5 TV series between 1954 and 1975, including the 1962-3 mutation of The Lucy Show. On Bewitched he guested 5 times as 5 different characters within about a 2-year period. Don't be impressed, I didn't recall all this. I checked imdb and Brooks & Martin's Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows. Librarians don't really store a lot of information, they just know where to find it.
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This is the resume of a good reliable portrayer of stock characters. But he was also talented as all get-out, and sometimes got to show what he could really do. I'm not the only one who noticed. Here's somebody else's homage to another of his performances, a small role that made a big impression.
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It was in an episode of St. Elsewhere, in 1987, that he gave a performance that took my breath away..

It's in the imdb. It's called "Weigh In, Way Out." What imdb doesn't tell you was that this was one of the show's unconventional artsy episodes, and one of the best.

In three subplots. the episode takes on three stages of life. There's a maternity ward story, a mid-life story and an old man's death. But the episode didn't use normal short scenes, constantly shifting among them. It gave each subplot long long stretches on camera. And, particularly effective in Lane's segment, it gave actors lengthy real-time scenes, all in one take.

Lane, age 82 at the time, played a man having a "good death" full of years and scrolling in his mind through his life. Lane had to memorize and speak a long passage, increasingly incoherent, moving out of this life and slipping into the next. Such a stream-of-consciousness is extremely hard to memorize, to me anyway, much less to perform with heartaching plausibility. I still remember sitting there as the credits rolled, feeling an excitement that came from having a not-so-common glimpse of true excellence. Lane wasn't all that was good about it. The writing, the direction, it all came together to say something beautiful about the human experience. Maybe I was unduly impressed with Lane's performance merely because of his age-- but no, it was that good.
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One of the commenters in a TV site (I think it was Jump the Shark) said she checked after she watched it, to see if Lane had really died.

Not even close! 8~)

That performance has stayed with me for 20 years, and goes into my "unforgettable" file. Great fictional TV doesn't change the world, but it gave me a glimpse of what's good about humanity. I need that sometimes.
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Bon voyage Mr. Lane.

Meanwhile - a beautiful song

During a YouTube binge I ran across this tribute to Barbara Stanwyck, set to a Cowboy Junkies song I never heard before. It amazed me. This describes exquisitely the kind of mountain sanctuary Larry and I dream to have someday.