RIP John Crowley

I discovered the novels of John Crowley, starting with  Ægypt, probably 30 years ago. Once I read Little, Big, it became my all-time favorite novel. I have given copies to many people, friends and family, over the years. To my knowledge none have read it. The Crowley portal doesn't admit everyone. Those who enter find a space between the known and the imagined, where much more is possible. We don't want to leave, to return to a more limited more mundane world, after what we've seen, and sensed, and felt. 

John Drinkwater, builder of a model house in the country with five facades, five front doors, and familiar interiors along with places that didn't properly, or sometimes, connect, powered by an orrery (a brass model of our solar system) in the attic, made his living publishing animal stories marketed to children. He explained to a grandson that writing them was easy - he just copied conversations he overheard among the small creatures - the mice, the little birds, the fish.

His wife, Violet Bramble, was a scion of Theosophists. What she believed he didn't need to. She had an unusual ancient Tarot deck she consulted the way you might read a newspaper. Their daughter Daily Alice married a man who walked to the house: Stormy Barnable. Like his father-in-law he didn't have any interest in - nor hostility toward - the women's way of understanding the world.

One of their sons photographed fairies who were attracted by a pair of small granddaughters. His name was Auberon (Oberon: King of the Fairies, Titania his Queen).

Little, Big is full of joys and sorrows, wonderfully apt names and a multitude of small brilliant observations. One could read it a hundred times and find new connections, new notions, surprises and satisfactions. Like the greatest fictions of invented places, it has unerring internal consistency, integrity. We are the playthings of time and space, and other worlds interweave with the one we’re accustomed to, in ways we might glimpse or may never be capable of acknowledging. If you find “the world is too much with us,” as William Wordsworth’s poem says, take respite. Dig into this Tale, reimagine life.

The third volume of Crowley's trilogy (Ægypt; Love and Sleep; Dæmonomania), set in Blackbury Jambs in the Faraway Hills, begins with the arrival of Pierce Moffett: "The Houses of the Zodiac are not the Signs... Suppose, at your birth, a line were to be drawn across the eastern sky right at the horizon out beyond where you lie. Then up the sky were drawn eleven more lines, equally spaced, going up over your head, down around behind you, and into the nether sky below, coming back around to where you started, dividing the blue ball of the heavens around you (pretend it's really a ball) into twelve equal orange-slice sections, with your little self at the center. Then suppose the sections are numbered, starting with the one just at the eastern horizon. That section's the first House, Vita, the House of Life; the eighth House, Mars, House of Death, is over your head and to the west. Interesting? Now look out the windows of these houses - they are nothing but windows - and see what stars are caught in each just at the moment you appear bare and wailing on the earth. Say for instance Saturn, so heavy and cold, is out there in your first house, the House of Life; and say the sign Capricorn or part of it is just behind him, which is one of his favorite signs, and there you are, a lot of Saturn in your horoscope, in a House where it counts too. and though Val [the astrologer] would never say that this street of houses on which you find yourself will make you what you are, what you do make of yourself has got to be made here."

Thank you, John Crowley, for seeing far and recording it to share with us! I hope your next iteration is wonderful - you've surely earned it!

Buffalo for the Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien

This excellent 2001 memoir chronicles the author’s years as a rancher in South Dakota, restoring a badly-degraded grassland ecosystem into prairie more like the original – before the buffalo were slaughtered, land was fenced off by homesteaders, and cattle pushed out whatever other means of making a living there could have been. O’Brien’s understanding of biology leads him to rotate a small herd of cattle through his pastures, giving the native grasses a chance to grow. But the more he works the herd, the more convinced he becomes that cattle don’t belong on the Great Plains. 

A neighbor raises buffalo, and after assisting in a roundup he impulsively buys thirteen orphaned calves. They’re likely to die, and yet they thrive, teaching him how buffalo live where they have for millennia. They do not hide from the wind. They create seeps by wallowing and digging into low ground with their horns. They play. They belong on this land. 

Even as O’Brien fearfully calculates how much money he’ll have to make selling calves, and how much he’ll have to borrow to buy pregnant mothers, he loves these animals more deeply. Cattle are stupid. Buffalo are wily and wild. Cattle are destructive, trampling streams and denuding the land. Buffalo thrive on prairie they nourish, and in their presence a multitude of other species return – birds, deer, coyotes, cottonwood groves. 

Along with his love of this harsh landscape, O’Brien sketches his fellow inhabitants – ranchers on the edge of failure year after year, mechanics and fence contractors, veterinarians and real estate agents. We laugh along as this fifty-something bachelor hosts a pair of 14-year-old boys for a summer, clueless about how to get work out of them. And as we weep over the tragedies of his neighbors, we watch people pull together. 

He observes the value of a place where old-timers set in their ways clash with newcomers’ dreams and illusions that still manage to introduce enough new ideas to keep the culture alive. He admits how many years it took to cultivate a speaking relationship with a neighbor, and demonstrates that kind of patience in most of his dealings. 

They mostly think he’s crazy to ranch buffalo, and not to sell them to a feedlot their last few months to fatten them up like cattle. After bringing them so far, he can’t do it – it would violate their dignity. He finds a solution in keeping with his deep desire to restore this whole ecosystem to what it was. 

He gives us a taste of hard work in nasty weather, observing that a rancher or farmer spends much of his life acquiring skills he won’t need again for long enough to have forgotten them. It’s Sisyphean. You can buy this book, and bison meat, through Wild Idea Buffalo.

Il Cinema Ritrovato XL, Bologna June 2026

I was fortunate to attend this year’s 40th Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna – so many films (over 400!), screened in 6 theaters and 2 piazzas. A theme of celebrating strong women ran through the festival: one featured actor was Barbara Stanwyck, in Double Indemnity, Forty Guns, Clash by Night, and Ball of Fire. Films of Josephine Baker were also celebrated: Princesse Tam Tam, Fausse Alerte – in which she plays a sly amused match-maker between a man and woman who’ve been cultivating enmity for generations, and La Sirene de Tropique, along with numerous short clips of her performances. An extensive exhibit was devoted to the lifework of Agnes Varda, and her film Vagabond screened at Piazza Maggiore, introduced by her daughter Rosalie for a crowd of thousands as the evening sky darkened. 

Also on hand were Isabella Rossellini, Wim Wenders, Irene Jacob. A special video appearance by Mel Brooks helped us all to celebrate his 100th birthday – the crowd sang the Italian version of Happy Birthday, which he gladly acknowledged – prior to a screening of Young Frankenstein in the Piazza Maggiore. 

Given the centrality of film restoration, one of the festival highlights was Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, assembled by Bill Morrison in 2024 from fragments of nitrate stock from the US National Archives. These fleeting and damaged images show soldiers digging trenches, moving artillery piece by piece through snow, a horse corps, tanks, biplanes in combat, a zeppelin launched, and at the end a lone parachutist descending slowly to earth. The holes and discolorations in the film stock make the age of this footage more poignant – here is what remains of a record of war. In a time when we can no longer trust the images presented to us, these deteriorated clips are a testament to the importance of authenticity, of recording events. The Kronos Quartet contributed the score. 

Another treat was films of Daisuke Ito, a Japanese director who made samurai films, silent and sound, notably Five Men of Edo, and Osho, a gentle story about a chess-obsessed husband/ father who cannot stop himself from pawning household goods to pay admission to chess tournaments. I was also introduced to the work of Mitchell Leisen, a maker of light fare with matinee idols. We saw his 1941 film Hold Back the Dawn about immigrants cooling their heels in a Mexico border town while trying increasingly-desperate ways to enter the US. 

During Wim Wenders’ conversation with cinema savant Gianluca Farinelli about his career and the making of his first (student) film, Summer in the City, still unreleased, he reflected on the difference between scripted stories and his naturalistic camera work: it was hard to know when to “Cut!” As the actors continued, something surprising could arise at any time: “Who am I to interrupt this?” he asked. Having blown his full budget on filming, he had nothing left for post-production, where editing, soundtrack, and organization of footage take place. He used music from the Kinks, the Troggs, and Bob Dylan without securing the rights. His sound engineer, admonished to avoid the hiss of too-loud audio, turned conversation sound so low the actors are barely audible. 

Wenders also made the point that it was only after coming to Hollywood that he encountered his German predecessors: Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, and became aware of his lineage as a filmmaker. Wenders remarked that when he feels safe in a film – when he trusts the director to be honest – he often sleeps. He long felt apologetic about this, but finally came around to accept this as a valid response to the comfort of being in a safe place. 

Scorsese was featured with The Color of Money, 20-year-old Tom Cruise lighting up the screen with flamboyant pool-playing and the sheer joy of being so good at something. Paul Newman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio do their utmost to bring him around to the strategies of the hustler’s game, but they have a tough job – his exuberance just won’t cool off. A less-characteristic film was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which Ellen Burstyn plays the abruptly-widowed mother of an 11-year-old son, scrambling to make a living as a singer and finally a waitress. Mother and son’s free-wheeling banter gives the film buoyancy. Scorsese rounded out his part in the festival with a Piazza Maggiore screening of New York, New York, a flop at the time but an over-the-top evocation of lives and places dear to him. 

Many of these films were made in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, a useful reminder of the richness of cinematic history. Viewing Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous 1963 epic Il Gattopardo (starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale) was a treat, on the big screen it deserves. 

For me, the finest point in the festival was Krysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge, his final film, from 1994. A conversation with Irene Jacob preceded it, and her moving performance as a woman leading with love and kindness, matched against Jean-Louis Trintignant’s jaded cynic, proved yet again for this viewer Kieslowski’s insight into human emotion and connection, with his fearless use of parallel experiences, repeated images, and how the heart may challenge the mind and prevail. He is the filmmaker of our highest potential, his creative approach to human relationships opening our eyes and hearts.

The Christophers, a film by Stephen Soderbergh

This 2026 film starring Ian McKellan and Michaela Coel examines art, fame, legacy and greed in an insightful way. McKellan plays Julian Sklar, a top-tier artist in his waning years. He hasn’t painted in a decade or more, and keeps money coming in by doing a version of Cameo recordings (as a famous person, recording a scripted message). His pair of adjoining London townhouses are crammed with art and memorabilia from a long career in the limelight. One of his gigs was a TV show called Art Fight, where, led on by the host, he eviscerated some young artist’s work for laughs. 

Into his life come his estranged children, Barnaby and Sallie, out to make money on a set of 8 paintings he made decades earlier then refused to complete, show, or even discuss. These paintings, the Christophers, are portraits of a lover. They’re stored in a bathtub on his third floor. Barnaby and Sallie are desperate to get their hands on those paintings – at £3.5 - £5 million apiece they’ll compensate for failed careers. Julian, no fool, won’t even admit the pair to his home. So they hire Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), an artist with a reputation as a forger. Ostensibly Julian’s assistant, she’ll get her hands on the Christophers, finish them, and spirit them out of his house. “He never goes up there,” Sallie and Barnaby assure her. 

Lori and Julian have some history, that she has more cause to remember than he. She wants the money, a chance to humiliate him, and maybe convince him that she’s a real artist. In one wonderful scene, after she’s considered then copied the Christophers, she tells Julian what they reveal about the progress of that love affair. The self-regarding cynic tries to dismiss her analysis, but viewers know she’s right, and that he knows it too. 

Their battle of wits, complicated by Barnaby and Sallie’s underhanded ways, comes alive through crackling dialogue and sharp visuals. Ed Solomon, who scripted the film, and Soderbergh, who shot and edited it, have made a compelling statement about art and artists. 

I was reminded of La Verite, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s 2019 film starring Catherine Deneuve as an aging diva who brings her star power to even a bit part. She’s recently published a memoir, and her daughter Juliette Binoche, son-in-law Ethan Hawke, and granddaughter Clementine Grenier, have come to visit her in Paris. Binoche, who played second fiddle to her mother’s career, reads the memoir and finds no trace of herself. Deneuve without apology admits her vanity, touting its importance in her ascent. She, like McKellan’s character, used egotism to great effect. 

From their lofty perches at the top of their professions, they don’t want to hear about those they trampled. They’ve achieved greatness, as their adoring public affirms. Whether the pressure of age can knock a chink in their armor, or teach them something new, remains to be seen.

RIP TIM

 

Apocalypse Now - All the Versions

A brief intro: this film uses a story much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to examine what happens to people when they move beyond the morality they understand, adopting that of a culture they perceive as more powerful in certain ways, but whose moral center eludes them. A “civilized” man “goes native” and, becoming a savage, loses who he knew himself to be. It’s also a scathing indictment of military thinking, and the insanity of war. I’ve seen all 3 versions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now: the original cut (1979) twice, then Apocalypse Now Redux, his second cut (2001) also twice, and recently, the “Final Cut” version (2019), which film buffs will recognize as a misnomer. 

This film cost Coppola and his cast and crew more than its blown out budget, more than the notoriety of making it – it cost Coppola his sense of proportion. At some point, an artist has to let the work alone – it’s out, it’s done, move on. “Final” cut? Probably not – Coppola has long been obsessed with this film. The epic took so much out of its participants that maybe he feels he owes it to all that footage to include it. I disagree. If Werner Herzog can brilliantly winnow 200 hours of Timothy Treadwell ranting about the US Forest Service while he treats grizzly bears as humans in bear suits (and pays with his life for that illusion), down to the 2-hour Grizzly Man, I think Coppola could have let well enough alone. 

I appreciated aspects of the Redux version: giving Marlon Brando more time on screen, bringing the movie resolution. I didn’t need the Bill Graham/ Playboy Bunnies USO show – it was OK, but did the story need it? Debatable. The section in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) encounters a French plantation and its armed and determined family who declare Vietnam to be their home, for which they will fight and die and kill Vietnamese intruders, seems to be stretching a point. Is the purpose to teach us about Dien Bien Phu? To remind us that long before the US sent “advisers” to the country in the late 1950s, the French had established a colonial state there, which they were unwilling to cede to its natives? I found this section, first appearing in Redux, to be a distraction, even more so in the much longer Final Cut version where Willard shares an opium pipe with a Frenchwoman (Aurore Clement) and has an idyllic night – I thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and was disappointed by Coppola’s borrowing. 

Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Final Cut gets much more screentime for his surfing obsession, cocky sense of command, and the annihilation of villages. The point was well made in the original – I didn’t need more of his bluster and arrogance, nor even more footage of rows of palm trees going up in flames, Hueys swarming, nor the ridiculous pursuit of Willard on the patrol boat to retrieve Kilgore’s stolen surfboard. I really didn’t need that. 

The extended jungle scene of Final Cut in which Willard and Chef (Frederic Forrest) go looking for mangoes, was good – I really got a feel for these Americans in a totally alien environment, afraid all the time. The glimpse of an unexpected peril underscored the absurdity of the entire American misadventure in Southeast Asia. 

In the original, Brando’s screentime was brief – as the reason for Willard’s journey it needed more weight, and in Redux Brando received his due. But the Final Cut version beat a dead horse: I didn’t need Willard’s drawn-out imprisonment in a bamboo cage, being lectured by madman Dennis Hopper (in the role he was born to play) – in Redux we got all we needed of Kurtz’s camp, the ubiquitous dangling corpses and disembodied heads. I didn’t need more more more of that. The end was the same – Willard terminates Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Taking the hand of LB Johnson, the still-childlike surfer, to lead him back to the now crewless patrol boat, was enough. 

Here’s my compromise, Mr. Coppola: You can keep the USO show in the movie, but ditch the French plantation, and keep Kilgore and Brando to their Redux footage. That makes the film shorter than the Redux version (OK with me!!). Final Cut felt like piling on – the points had already been powerfully made. Shoving them at us repeatedly dulled their impact.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This 2025 novel is vividly told through the voices of its characters. The Salt family, Dominic (a widower) and his 3 children, son Raff (eighteen), daughter Fen (seventeen), and son Orly, (nine) are the last people on Shearwater Island, a dot in the southern ocean halfway between Australia and Antarctica. They’ve been here seven years – Orly remembers no other home. Though the weather is harsh, the island supports an abundance of plant and animal life. A seed bank repository has been built here, to save for replanting by survivors after climate apocalypse has devastated the planet. 

But sea level is rising rapidly, the seed vault built into permafrost is warming, and the family labor to save what seeds they can. A scientific group made lists prioritizing those to be salvaged, but by the time this novel opens, only the Salt family remain. A ship will come collect them and what seeds they’ve been able to remove from the drowning vault – but that arrival is weeks away and they have no communications. Their radio tower was sabotaged by someone on the island, so the ship crew have no notion of what has occurred. Down to their last rations – food, fresh water, fuel, dying batteries – the Salts live a spartan existence filled with hard work and awful secrets. 

Into their lives, then, comes a woman from the wreckage of a small boat whose pilot died. Fen, living in a boathouse at the beach surrounded by seals and penguins, sees the flotsam, swims out, and pulls in Rowan, who should be dead but insists on surviving. How her arrival catalyzes each family member’s griefs, and how their love changes her, drive the story. 

It’s well-told, unfolding a bit at a time, grounding readers then shifting deeper. Chapters are short, alternating voices; through them we mourn not only the humans but the planet they love. These seeds have been selected for human survival – but what about Earth's co-inhabitants, plants and animals? Do they have no right to a future we have jeopardized? Young Orly, a savant, feels deeply how that question must be answered. And Rowan brings creativity, skill and determination to this haunted place, where the first human population slaughtered colossal numbers of seals and penguins, rendering their carcasses for oil till there were none left, then abandoning the rusty barrels piled at the scene of their enterprise. 

Tragedies and secrets whisper to every character – so much of themselves is buried on this storm-whipped island, the reader wonders what leaving will do to them. McConaghy puts us into frigid water, fierce wind, constant hunger, and the human drive to finish what tasks we are set. Partner to their love of Shearwater is dread of what returning to society will mean – and in what threatened place it will make any sense to start over.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took my time reading the essays in this 2013 book by enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, PhD botanist, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY, founder and director of Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer. In addition to these credentials she is a mother, and student of traditional ways of living with Earth and its creatures. 

She writes beautifully, and she writes of the truths we ignore at our peril: that we are part of nature, that we thrive with our co-inhabitants and suffer when we do them harm. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.” 

She says, “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world… How do we consume that does justice to the lives that we take?” 

“Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest… I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.“ 

In a later essay, she observes, “The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Had we not worked waist-deep in the swamp, had we not followed muskrat trails and rubbed ourselves with soothing slime, had we never made a spruce root basket or eaten cattail pancakes, would [her students] even be debating what gifts they could offer in return? In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” 

This book is an avenue into a way of thinking whose time is urgently at hand. If we do not soon learn to live with earth and its creatures – plants, animals, rocks, streams and all – as partners, we will die alongside them. Earth itself will continue, but as a host for life, may go dormant for an age. We don’t have to do this, to our home and to ourselves. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise woman – read, listen, and heed her words.

LaRose, a novel by Louise Erdrich

This 2016 novel is a masterful landscape of the human heart, shattered by grief, rage, and jealousy, healed by generations of LaRoses. In brief, it’s the story of a tragedy – a man sees a big buck on his land and shoots it – except what he kills is his neighbor’s young son. Landreaux Iron is Ojibwe, his neighbor Peter Ravich is white. In this rural area they live closest. Their wives are half-sisters who are wickedly hateful to each other. 

Landreaux decides that the traditional way of repairing such damage is to give his youngest son, LaRose, to the Raviches. The repercussions of this decision are deep and wide. LaRose, however, handed over at the age of six, talks to the ancestors, and finds ways to move both families toward healing. In his lineage he is the fifth LaRose (so far), the first being a girl sold by her drunken mother to a trapper/ trader in exchange for booze, in the 1870s. 

Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now?... “You did right,” [Randall told Landreaux] at last, “the elders… knew the history. Who killed the mother of the first [LaRose], Mink, and what she could do. Then her daughter, her granddaughter, the next one, and Emmaline’s mom. Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew… People think that what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now. But not magic.” 

Erdrich has a genius for letting a sly adjective say everything: “Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was an unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.” 

and 

“Landreaux should not have imagined it was over… A man’s heart, shriveled raisin, prune of loneliness, burnt clam, understood what it was to lose out on love. And lose to a lying liar. Romeo bet his livid black heart could burst Landreaux’s baggy heart sack.” 

and 

“Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.” "Ah, god, please, Emmaline." 

"I can’t stand it anymore," she said. “It was never supposed to go on forever, was it?” 

Her characters, assaulted by a system that wants them all dead, persist. But amid the misery she gives us moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, as when the nurse’s aide/ addict who steals pills from the senior home, mixes them for an evening’s high and spends several days incapacitated with raging intestinal misery, complaining to his bathroom walls that those old ladies poisoned him.

David Ansen at 48th Denver Film Fest

Coffee and Conversation with David Ansen at the 48th Denver Film Fest  (Full disclosure – David Ansen is mi esposo’s cousin)

Longtime film critic (notably 30 years at Newsweek) and member of the board of film festivals (New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs), David Ansen conversed animatedly with mentee Matthew Campbell, Artistic Director of Denver Film Festival. Topics ranged from Ansen’s youth in movie-adjacent LA, where his father worked at MGM making two-reelers, to his two years in a Huerfano County, Colorado dome commune (along with Larry Laszlo, Denver celebrity photographer), to a stint in Boston at The Real Paper, a film critic incubator. 

He talked about how important magazines once were for reviews of new releases, and that early on he had the freedom to write about rising filmmakers like Werner Herzog, before the editorial staff grew stricter about focusing on big studio releases. Now, he observed, the focus of reviewers is speed – they can’t think for a few days (or even weeks) about their views of a film. Instead, the prize goes to whomever is first to post. Our fragmented media landscape has also created subcultures with vastly different tastes, from the Marvel-verse to quiet international films and documentaries that will never circulate beyond a small dedicated audience. 

He mentioned that snark is now taboo. Knowing his fellow critics, he said he can tell when they’re straining to make anodyne remarks in lieu of their true opinions. Also, he said the rise of social media and instantaneous exposure have changed how open interview subjects dare to be. He shared an anecdote about a well-known director in the early 1990s – they met in the director’s hotel room, where coke was spread on a table (none offered to Ansen). After he concluded the interview and left, the director followed him into the hall to request that he not mention the woman who’d been snorting coke with him. The coke, who cares? The woman, no, please say nothing. He said that would never happen today. 

He also distinguished between city-based film festivals and industry-based ones: the industry festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Toronto) are much bigger, and focus on getting distribution for new releases. City festivals like Denver’s are film-centric: organizers and attendees are interested in seeing and talking about movies, not selling them to someone else. Campbell noted that while many city festivals have been shrinking since Covid, Denver’s is thriving. Ansen speculated that people enjoy the openness of mid-sized festivals, where they can strike up conversations with those around them, and share the discovery and delight of seeing films that will never have mass distribution. Ansen spoke briefly about Cannes, saying the audiences are very feisty, readily booing, and sometimes destroying the prospects of movies they don’t like. 

Ansen estimated he’s seen around 14,000 movies (he's maintained a list!) which for many years didn’t include what he saw on TV. Now he does stream some, but prefers the big screen, particularly for older films which were made for movie houses. At 80, Ansen is sharp and funny – we could have listened for hours more as he and Campbell chatted.

"Listers" - a documentary by Owen and Quentin Reiser

Owen and Quentin Reiser, 20-something brothers, don't know much about birds - they can identify a few distinctive species, and beyond that "a lot of little brown birds" - but they decide on a whim to participate in what birders call a Big Year – a calendar year in which they identify & document sightings or songs of as many birds as possible. Big Years can be local, regional, continental – the one they get in on is the lower-48 of the US. Their Big Year is 2024. They made "Listers" about the experience.

Let’s start with some definitions: a “birdwatcher” is a person who enjoys observing birds – hearing them, noting their activities and preferred habitats. A “birder” is a person whose obsession with building their Life List of unique sightings sometimes comes to the exclusion of interest in the birds themselves. Anyone doing a Big Year is a birder. It’s highly competitive. The app: E-Bird, from the Audubon Society, has changed the way Big Years operate. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth or lucky sightings, birders use E-Bird to report & document their sightings and figure out where they can bag the rarer birds, all so they can get a higher count. This leads to crowds. I am reminded of watching 5-year-olds play soccer, running in a pack up and down the field as near the ball as they can get. 

Money is a factor. Some of the high-ranked birders the brothers interview can afford to fly from one region to another, stay in hotels, and hire guides, making it easier for them to get to those rarely-sighted birds. The Reisers don’t have money. They convert Owen’s 2010 Kia Sedona minivan to a vehicle they can live in, and drive 30,000 miles over the year. Cracker Barrel has a traveler-friendly parking lot policy, so they stay in plenty of those. They also pull off the road and spend nights in the middle of nowhere. In the absence of money, one must improvise – and they’re very creative, which is what makes this movie so much fun. Their only indulgence is the spotting scopes and quality cameras with huge lenses that birders must have – if you can’t prove you saw it, you can’t count it. 

For a raw-amateur film, it’s well done, with plenty of humorous visuals: a mock-up giant blister-pack of Dramamine before they board a boat (didn’t help); a little model of their Kia they drive across a US map (Minnesota again!); the birds Quentin draws. And we have tantalizing film clips of owls turning their heads, flamingos in flight, songbirds flitting through brush, Harlequin ducks. The Reisers discuss the details that positively ID this or that species. They claim no expertise, they’re just caught up in an obsession – like everyone else in this film. 

“Listers” has graphically crude moments, but if you’re old enough to read this, you’re old enough to watch it. Any fan of the work of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog will enjoy this film. It’s on You-Tube – go find it.

Match in a Haystack, a documentary by Joe Hill

This 2025 documentary serves as a companion-piece to Porcelain War, the 2024 documentary by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev about art in a time of war. Both examine the lives of Ukrainian artists whose work has been interrupted by the Russian invasion of 2022. Duty to one’s country and its culture would seem to dictate enlisting in the army and risking life and limb daily in acts of resistance – and yet, these films insist that this war is about defending Ukrainian culture against a foe who declares that Ukraine has always been part of Russia and therefore belongs in its sphere. 

And so, the long tradition of creating tiny porcelain animals and birds, painting them in exquisite detail, then firing them, is an act of cultural resistance. Likewise, Match in a Haystack shares the stories of a group of modern dancers, all women in their early 20s, who find purpose in creating and performing a work which, as choreographer Gala Pekha urges, means nothing without heart. She and Yuliia Lupita, the company's director, unite in their commitment to creating something that matters, that resonates in a war-torn country. 

When Director Joe Hill had spent about 6 months in-country, Vice, his sponsor, declared bankruptcy. He was fortunate to pull together alternate support to continue working, but finding himself in uncertainty set up an uncanny parallel with his subjects’ circumstances. 

One dancer makes a pilgrimage to the front lines to visit her sister involved in the fighting, and receives her blessing to continue what she’s doing. Another persuades her parents, whom she has scarcely seen since the war began, to attend the performance. Gala in particular drives the “girls” hard toward authenticity – the stakes are high, all of them have doubts but feel the significance of this work. A “match in a haystack” is what they intend to create - a spark that starts a larger fire.

For this dance to be worth the time and energy of rehearsing, costuming, finding a venue then hoping it will be intact when it’s time to perform, these young women must open their hearts to their country’s anguish, filter it through their movements, and mirror it back to the audience. And they do. If you believe cinema has value beyond escapist fare, you should see this film.

Round Midnight, a film by Bertrand Tavernier

This music-forward 1986 film by French director Bertrand Tavernier showcases the work of bebop musicians in New York and especially Paris, where in 1959 tenor sax maestro Dale Turner, played by Dexter Gordon but inspired by Lester Young and Bud Powell, went to live. But it is the score that takes center stage – as it should! Finally, a film where the music really matters, with the images and story woven as background through inspired edits. 

Clearly Tavernier loves jazz – he would not interrupt a song to show the daily life of an alcoholic or Francis, the young Frenchman who, obsessed with his playing, meets his idol, befriends him, and finally looks after him. The music carries the movie. Herbie Hancock, who won an Oscar for Best Score, did a wonderful job – from Round Midnight to Body and Soul, Fair Weather, Una Noche con Francis, and How Long Has This Been Going On, the songs are performed live, with the musicians alternately playing onscreen and going about their lives. 

Gordon, also nominated for an Oscar for his performance, plays as only a truly accomplished musician can – but he also spices his role with asides to young Francis – “Was I good?” he asks with a mischievous grin after cadging drinks, or escaping a hospital ward, or finally prevailing on the nightclub owner and his "minder" to pay him nightly like every other musician. And Francis grins back and agrees he was good. 

Gordon was near the end of his life when he took this role, and you can see his exhaustion and precarious health, but also his rich mastery born of a lifetime of improvising, performing, and exploring new depths in his musical expression. Tavernier reminds us – to our benefit – that the pitfalls of an artist’s life are not what’s important about them: it’s what they create.

Enough Said, a film by Nicole Holofcener

Enough Said, a 2013 film starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, offers an adults-eye view of misunderstandings, secrets, and how we muddle through after sabotaging our best prospects. Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a masseuse, 10 years post-divorce, with her daughter about to leave for college on the opposite coast. Gandolfini is Albert, a divorced dad in a similar situation; they meet at a party, and cautiously begin seeing each other. Both have been burned – they’re not looking for commitment, but they’re about to be home solo, which they’re dreading. 

Eva’s new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), is a poet, also divorced, with a college-bound daughter. Eva’s clients talk while she’s massaging them, and Marianne, facing loneliness with her daughter’s imminent departure, cultivates her as a friend and confidante. At some point Eva realizes Marianne is Albert’s ex – it’s so awkward she can’t bring herself to say anything – and yet, as she hears more from Marianne, Eva begins to needle him about the same issues that made Marianne divorce him. 

This is a Holofcener film, in which ugly secrets spill and the characters have to clean up their mess, in a humiliatingly-public way. She also highlights male vs female communication styles and expectations: one of Eva’s clients is a young man whose apartment is up a steep flight of stairs. He stands at his door watching her haul her massage table up, week after week. When she complains at dinner with friends, the woman agrees he should offer to help her. The husband says, “Have you asked?” and Eva and his wife both say she shouldn’t have to. This married couple, Toni Collette and Ben Falcone, have the same level of annoyance with each other’s foibles as Eva and her ex, and Albert and Marianne. It’s fair to ask why they’re still together while their friends are not – do they just have thicker skins? 

Should we be so ready to bail when we arrive at those “I can’t take it any more” moments? You are surely your own perfect roommate, and everyone else falls short – too neat, too sloppy, too driven, too laid-back – but if the price of not tolerating these differences is to live alone, do we really want that, for ourselves or for society? After Covid isolation, it’s become clear how many social skills we’ve lost – how to compromise, how to listen, how to empathize, how to have patience. How to be good partners, friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens. 

Holofcener shows situations where we have to work through these issues, even when it feels easier to just walk away. It’s hard to connect in deep and honest ways – should we be blowing off relationships because we’ve embarrassed ourselves or those we’re getting to know? Can we be forgiving, cut each other some slack, and set aside judgment? As Rodney King famously pleaded, after receiving a “wood shampoo” from 34 cops, “Can’t we all just get along?”

In Honor of Virginia Boucher

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

This 2021 novel is a beautifully told story about horrendous events. Set variously in Cyprus in 1974, England late 2010s, and Cyprus early 2000s, it relates the Cyprus division and coup in 1974, when an island inhabited by Greek and Turkish Cypriots split into warring factions resulting in murder, war, and dislocation. A Greek and a Turk, both islanders, fall in love. 

Kostas is a gentle thoughtful youth who loves the natural world; Dafne is a fiery freedom-loving girl drawn to his quiet kindness. In Cyprus at that time, they cannot be seen together. A tavern and restaurant in Nicosia, the capital, The Happy Fig, is run by two men, a Greek and a Turk, who welcome all. A fig tree lives inside the restaurant, and narrates chapters of this story. This non-human perspective embraces what we are learning about trees: their communication with each other and with other plant life and their shared earth, through mycorrhizal networks. 

The other major character is Kostas and Dafne’s teenage daughter Ada, born and raised in England. She is a child of the modern world, while Kostas has become a biologist specializing in trees, Dafne an archaeologist. Ada has grown up without an extended family – both her parents’ families shunned them for their choice of partner, so when her mother’s sister visits, she begins to learn her past. 

Kostas tells Ada: 

"I think it’s possible to deduce a person’s character based on what they first notice about a tree… some people stand in front of a tree and the first thing they notice is the trunk. These are the ones who prioritize order, safety, rules, continuity. Then there are those who pick out the branches before anything else. They yearn for change, a sense of freedom. And then there are those who are drawn to the roots, though concealed under the ground. They have a deep emotional attachment to their heritage, identity, relations…”  

This book is not a fantasy; it is firmly rooted in history and biology, including the rising effects of climate change: altered migration patterns, stressed plants and animals. The author also observes the impacts of traditional human behaviors on our world: in Europe, songbirds are considered a delicacy, with millions captured and killed yearly to become exotic meals in fancy restaurants. Kostas’s own mother stuffs and roasts songbirds, which the boy cannot bring himself to eat. She doesn’t think about the slaughter – eating them is a tradition. He can see only wanton devastation. 

Shafak is a fine writer and this novel is a beautiful portrayal of civilization on edge, humans out of synch with the rest of the world. The slow-rolling catastrophe of our dangerously-heating planet seems unable to get our attention to address it. But banishing the words “climate change” from US Government websites will not make it go away. Dismantling FEMA and knee-capping the National Weather Service and NOAA will only worsen the effects – while we whistle past the graveyard of the huge percentage of species facing extinction, too slow to adapt to unprecedented circumstances.

Islands, a documentary by Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin

I read an article by Michael Shulman in the New Yorker (Jan 20, 2025) about Charlotte Zwerin – now living in her former Greenwich Village apartment, he was inspired to learn more about her. She collaborated on numerous documentaries with Albert and David Maysles, though uncredited until very recently. One of those films is Islands, about the floating pink surrounds of half a dozen islands in the Bay of Biscay adjacent to Miami, Florida. 

A significant part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work/art was their efforts – calling meetings, talking one-on-one with the holdouts – to win over locals, government entities, and myriad bureaucrats who stymie activities they don’t understand. Finally, after the necessary concession to the Miami mayor, work could begin. Choreographing hundreds of volunteers was the heart of their projects. 

Seeing rolled-up sheets of hot-pink fabric maneuvered by many willing hands, then unfurled one section at a time, is a testament to the unifying power of creativity. Everyone who participates is inspired, taken out of their day-to-day by doing something remarkable together. We see the process then the finished pieces from water level, from the air, from underwater. In the unfurling, a woman frees a young turtle trapped in a roll of fabric, and later we see a needlefish emerge onto the surface from a seam, splash around, and find its way back into the water. 

The other beauty of these projects is their brief lifespan. While art museums go to great lengths to preserve works destined to decay, Christo and Jeanne-Claude left a piece up for a few weeks, then dismantled it. Their art was about time as much as material; people remember witnessing, and it conveys something magical about the location later. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed their projects themselves, as much to guarantee complete artistic freedom as to simplify the approval process. They accomplished this by creating hundreds or even thousands of images – postcards, framed drawings, maquettes, books – of each piece, and selling them. People literally bought into the ideas, supporting their creation. 

I’m delighted that Charlotte Zwerin is at last gaining the recognition she lacked in her lifetime – the New Yorker article discusses the documentary technique the Maysles and their contemporaries pioneered, eschewing lectures and talking heads for the thick of the action, shooting hundreds of hours to capture what they can, then shaping it in the editing room. Though Zwerin is not credited as Editor for Islands, the article indicates she was very involved in editing Maysles Brothers documentaries, and in that process bringing coherence to the footage: creating a film.

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon - Part 1

I’m in a book group these days with Heinz and Ernesto. The latter, a big fan of David Foster Wallace’s doorstop Infinite Jest, has been pressuring his brother to read that. I intervened – having already read it with Ernesto some years ago, I thought it was not worth a re-read even once, let alone Ernesto’s intended third time. So I suggested that instead we dive into a masterwork by the novelist Wallace wished he’d been: Thomas Pynchon. 

I’d lent my copy of Against the Day to Ernesto a couple years ago, and he didn’t get very far. Clearly, a cooperative enterprise was needed to get the guys through the book, which I wanted to re-read anyway. I gave a copy to Heinz and bought one for myself, and we agreed early this year on an amount to read per meeting. We’re reading approx. 110-page tranches, meeting every few weeks as time allows. 

Ernesto is captivated by the presence of dynamite in the lives of numerous characters: Webb Traverse, anarchist dynamiter who works the mines of late 19th century Colorado, private eye Lew Basnight who becomes addicted to cyclomite, a hallucinogenic chemical sweated off by sticks of dynamite. Basnight has been riding around the mountains of southwest Colorado trying not to get blown up by the Kieselguhr Kid, notorious dynamiter of the San Juans. Webb Traverse and his Finnish compadre Veikko blow up a railroad bridge, observing that “The railroad had always been the enemy… sooner or later you had some bad history with the railroad.” 

We have been introduced to Iceland spar, a form of doubly-refracting calcite which causes ordinary light, passing through, to divide into two separate rays, termed “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” “The Etienne-Louis Malus was named for the Napoleonic army engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking through a piece of Iceland spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered polarized light.” And under the lagoons of Venice lie the submerged islands still occupied by artisans who craft mirrors from Iceland spar. Either they go mad and are committed to institutions, or they go mad and continue their work. 

By page 317 of the 1085 page novel, we have seen some threads which will recur: malign influence of the railroads; capitalist Scarsdale Vibe with his long and corrupt reach; centrality of dynamite, introduction of Iceland Spar, hints of the adversarial time-travel groups the Quaternions and the Vectorists (of which much more is to come); places of significance: Telluride, Colorado; Venice, Italy; Chicago; London; the Chums of Chance (dime novel adolescent balloonists who travel through the earth as well as above it, for hire by various terrestrial entities); and dabbling in chemicals – not only dynamite and its components but photograph-developing, and alchemy. We've seen a vile murder and disposal of the corpse in an evil place where such acts are commonplace; we've watched an unholy love story rise out of what should be enmity. And we've watched the existential clash of capitalism with anarchism. 

It's a densely packed book - one dare not skim. Any slippery turn of phrase may take a character to another part of life or perception. My copy is studded with small sticky notes, and I have a notebook as well where I record significant characters and the page numbers where we meet them. So much to learn! One of the best things about this novel is how much of what seems made-up, is true.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

James McBride, who arrived on the literary scene with his unforgettable memoir The Color of Water, has since leaned on his heritage (Black father, hard-headed resourceful Orthodox Jewish mother) to produce some lively novels. His 2023 book, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, weaves the histories of Jewish immigrants, Black people, and Italians, and the WASP contingent that controls little Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s. 

The grocery store, owned by the small Jewish community’s rabbi, is largely run by his disabled daughter Chona. When recent arrival Moshe meets her, he falls in love and they marry. Her father dies, leaving Chona the store. Despite not making money, it serves as a community hub. Pottstown has a Negro/ Jewish area called Chicken Hill. The store serves its residents, and Chona, a kind soul, lets its denizens shop on credit, hires a couple Black women to help run the store, and writes a pointed letter to the local paper about Doc Roberts, the town doctor, readily identifiable in a KKK march photo by his shoes. She doesn’t care whose sensibilities she offends with her call-out. 

Her husband runs a theater which hosts many prominent jazz musicians, drawing audience from all over. Moshe’s right-hand man, Nate, is married to Chona’s employee Addie – the Black couple are fostering (after the death of his mother) a 12-year-old injured by the explosion of a faulty stove. The boy is called Dodo, but he’s no dummy. He quit school because he couldn’t hear, so the state keeps sending enforcers to place him in Pennhurst, a medieval fortress of an institution for the crippled, retarded, and insane. Chona helps hide him – Pennhurst has a deserved and dreadful reputation – and you’ll have to read the rest yourself. 

A stove blew up in his mother’s kitchen when he was nine. Killed his eyes and ears. His eyes came back. His ears did not. But he could read lips. Nate held the lamp next to his face so Dodo could see them. “What you doing?” The boy’s eyes danced away, then he said, “Making a garden.” For what?” “To grow sunflowers.” “CJ and them said you was on a train this morning.” Dodo looked away. It was his way of ignoring conversation. 

McBride visits the minds of these characters, and we spend time with individuals from Pottstown’s different communities, understanding their behavior, language differences, and gossip. He has an ear for it!

Dylan Considered: James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown"

Neither the first nor the best movie about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown is nonetheless a respectable addition to the canon. So, how does it stack up to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, or I’m Not There (Todd Haynes’s 2007 sketches, my personal fave)? 

I’m not counting Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s own 1978 film featuring his Rolling Thunder Revue (they toured in 1976, after which the concert album Hard Rain was released – I attended the Fort Collins, CO show, where it did indeed rain hard the whole time but was truly great anyway). R&C is semi-documentary, semi-fictional, Dylan making up versions of himself as he’s done lifelong. This 4-hour creation is in a class by itself. 

Timothee Chalamet as young good-looking earnest Bobby Dylan arrives in New York with a newspaper clipping about Woody Guthrie, only to learn his idol is at a hospital in New Jersey. He barely blinks at the big city, catching the next cab out. At the hospital he meets not only Guthrie but Pete Seeger, and sings them a song. Seeger, impressed, becomes an early ally. Edward Norton gives a nuanced performance as the banjo-frailing activist – if you think of the folk singer as a hard-line traditionalist, think again – even at Dylan’s notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Seeger wants to pull the plug on the young electrified musician, but doesn’t – he lets the moment play out. 

Is it intentional that Elle Fanning as Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, who insisted on her privacy and was not named in the film) and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez look so similar? I thought Baez was not given enough of her own fame to stand on – we see early performances where he doesn’t yet register with her audience, but soon he’s the one packing the shows. The script promotes a chemistry I didn’t sense, so I felt she put up with his hot/cold antics too long – in the absence of magnetism, I didn’t quite believe her. But Fanning does hit some of those gorgeous high notes Baez is famous for. 

Chalamet plays Dylan as a creature of whims, mercurial, contrarian, sliding out from under the crush of early fame and the demands of Albert Grossman (well played by Dan Fogler), his manager at Columbia Records. At first determined to guide this newbie and build a following by covering others' songs, two years later at Newport, Grossman can see his client is a true original and a star of his own making, and that a manager’s best move is to keep the tape rolling as the young dynamo takes off. Chalamet’s singing is no worse than Dylan’s, though he does sand some of the edges off that nasal delivery. 

Boyd Holbrook is a standout as Johnny Cash; before he married June Carter and (kind of) settled down, he was a wild man. He drank hard, took a lot of amphetamines (now we’d call that meth) and trashed hotel rooms, wrecked cars, chased women, got himself arrested. His friendship with Dylan in this movie was a touchstone – someone Dylan admired, who gave him all the approval he needed. “Track mud all over that carpet,” he said, and Dylan did. Though Holbrook – like everyone else – lacks Cash’s gravelly bass, he does his best, bringing that don’t-give-a-damn energy to the role. 

For a film approaching Dylan’s life as a series of Acts, I’m Not There has some fine sections: a Black teenager with a guitar, hitching freights and singing folk songs. Mid-sixties Dylan in a black-and-white sequence in which Cate Blanchett plays the insouciant subject of press curiosity who treats interviews as games – what’s the most baffling or outrageous thing she can say? What’s the most shocking thing she can do in this situation or that one? With those black sunglasses, black spiky hair, cigarettes, and amusement at the reporters who can’t tell when she’s bluffing, she’s a perfect Dylan. And in the early 70s era of the Basement Tapes with The Band, he goes all-in with costumes. He’s always been a shape-shifter taking on costumed personae – hippies wearing beads, colorful leather pants and cowboy hats, granny dresses and thin-soled leather boots – he could go hog-wild switching up his identity – Billy the Kid, a troubadour, a bandido, a joker – with The Band ready to play whatever roles he needed.

A Complete Unknown is a fine movie - lively, fun, capturing the spark of a prolific poet as he emerges into the light of public attention: startling, inspiring, resisting all attempts to pin him down - as he does today. Maybe early on he toyed with being a leader, but ever since he's been rebuffing admirers' efforts to elevate him, calculating ways to create offense, the whole time slipping off the microscope slide we're trying to squeeze him onto.