November 29, 2024: Facing west at dusk on Wisconsin Highway 195 (the former Kenosha-Racine county line Highway KR) at Highway 31.
Another Week: Number 101
Sixteen years ago, in the thick of the Great Recession at the end of the George W. Bush administration, I watched a movie called Into Great Silence. It documented life in the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery high in the French Alps.
It was a very quiet movie. Icicles dripped. Monks sewed with needle and thread in dim light. I semi-seriously considered adopting their lifestyle in my own home.
Now, I’m partially there. The TV is off for much of the day, and I sit or lie typing or reading in silence in some family‘s 1940 home in southeastern Wisconsin as the days grow short and the snow flurries fly outside. I make coffee. I eat muesli soaked overnight in yogurt for breakfast. I feed the birds.
I did enjoy watching Michigan beat Ohio State yet again on Saturday, though.
Beyond my cloister, I had four dinners with my mom in Pleasant Prairie this week — the second of which was Thanksgiving. On her stovetop, I made Perfect Cranberry Sauce, Classic Candied Yams, and Steakhouse Creamed Spinach. Meanwhile, my sister Karen roasted the turkey and dressing in Mom’s oven and made gravy. It was a small gathering, but warm.
Driving at dusk and in the dark, I’m bewildered by the miscellaneous headlight choices deployed by my fellow motorists. Some have ultramodern, multilevel LED arrays resembling a mothership in blindingly bright tints of blue. Others, with one headlight out and aware of their padiddle status, have affixed a makeshift bulb to their grille or bumper in the vicinity of the missing light.
I remember driving through Germany once with an acquaintance who lives there, and she explained that vehicles must comply with a strict set of regulations in order to be legally operated on European roads. You can’t just patch your car with duct tape and plastic wrap and wire hangers.
My country has gone the other way.
I walked zero miles this week.
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Leonardo da Vinci (2024)
My mom likes to learn about the lives of great thinkers — so, over a couple of evenings, we watched Ken Burns’ new two-part biography, Leonardo da Vinci.
It was fine.
Leonardo was profoundly curious about a great many things in the arts and sciences. He studied them in astounding detail, sometimes centuries before other scholars. He had same-sex relationships. He painted the Mona Lisa.
You knew most of this stuff going in, but this documentary gives you a four-hour, concentrated dose of Leonardo’s life with rich visuals.
The main new nugget I took away was that the vast majority of his work was left unfinished.
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (2024)
My sister Karen and I have been big fans of Bruce Springsteen going back to before his gleeful Rosalita video (recorded on my 18th birthday while I was at Soldier Field watching the Rolling Stones) so, after our Thanksgiving dinner, we checked out this new film on Hulu about his latest tour.
A lot of music stars have put out this kind of officially-produced “documentary” in recent years — a combination of rehearsal clips, concert snippets, behind-the-scenes footage, and flattering commentary that serves as a promotional companion piece to the artist’s latest projects.
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band delivers an overview of the tour’s themes — specifically, mortality. Springsteen, 74 years old during his 2023 tour, has lost E Street Band members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons to natural causes. Of the members of his high school band The Castiles, Springsteen is the “Last Man Standing.” The film reveals that Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, has been contending with multiple myeloma since 2018.
This time out, his E Street Band is a mid-sized orchestra and choir. The performance clips look tight and strong, his carefully-crafted soliloquies are poignant, and his fans appear passionately moved.
What we don’t get, however, is any sort of outside perspective or critical appraisal. Every minute of the hour and 39 is strictly on-message.
Karen observed that Bruce doesn’t smile as much as he used to.
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Tender Mercies (1983)
I am currently reading a book about story and screenwriting that references Tender Mercies numerous times. I think I have probably seen it before — or at least parts of it — but on Thanksgiving evening, when my brother-in-law Kevin joined his wife, me, and our mom, I suggested watching it start-to-finish via Amazon Prime.
It’s an outstanding movie — my favorite sort of rural, muted, internal struggle amid mid-century artifacts.
Robert Duvall won his Oscar for his role here as Mac Sledge, a has-been singer-songwriter brought low by alcoholism. Duvall did months of research for the part, studying local dialects. He does his own singing, plays guitar, and even wrote a couple of the songs he performs.
Tess Harper plays the woman Mac marries. She’s sweetness personified — but might have been better with some added doubt or fear. Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, and Ellen Barkin round out the supporting cast.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a great way to spend 92 minutes.
The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)
As noted above, my mom loves biographies of great thinkers, and Turner Classic Movies recently ran a string of flicks about scientific pioneers, so on Friday evening we watched The Story of Louis Pasteur, from 1938, starring a bearded Paul Muni as the innovative chemist.
The movie is a stilted, 87-minute march through Pasteur‘s maverick accomplishments, namely developing vaccines for anthrax and rabies.
Mom was astonished to learn that the mouthwash she had supplied our household with for decades was named in honor of Pasteur’s British champion, Joseph Lister, a trailblazer in antiseptics.
The main thing that kept hitting me was that the vaccine scoffers of the 1880s are coming back to power today in the United States of the 2020s.
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