Month: September 2018

Movie review: The Bookshop

My wife enjoyed the film as “an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community.”

My wife and I are probably the perfect demographic, a teacher and a librarian, for a movie such as The Bookshop. And note the protagonist’s surname. The story takes place in 1959 England, where a determined widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) decides to open a bookstore in a coastal town.

She does this with little help, save for a schoolgirl named Christine (Honor Kneafsey), and in spite of the keen opposition of Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), wife of a general (Reg Wilson). But she has a fan in Edmund Brundish, a reclusive book-loving widower (Bill Nighy), to whom she introduces the works of Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov.

There is also a slick, morally unmoored character Mr. Keble (Hunter Tremayne), who slithers in and out of scenes.

The Bookshop is based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel and directed by Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive). I think my wife enjoyed the film as “an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community.”

Alas, I found it rather bland and often lugubrious. Some critics believe it hewed too closely to the source material, which we had not read.

Moreover, the business librarian in me couldn’t understand why Florence was so determined to have a bookstore at all. “Is there a place for a bookshop in a town that may not want one?” Know your market, any business adviser would recommend. Nor could I really discern why Violet was so gung-ho for a community center in the venue instead.

That said, the film was a moderately interesting study of power dynamics, and how the system can be manipulated. And speaking of power, I always loved it when Nighy’s Edmund was on screen; he had a presence.

I can’t really recommend The Bookshop, but my wife would. As usual, we saw it at the Spectrum 8 in Albany.

Erastus Corning, Polly Noonan: Gillibrand connection

I remember Burt Reynolds first as the “half-breed” Quint on about four dozen episodes of the TV series Gunsmoke.

Falco as Noonan
Edie Falco as Polly Noonan in The True
These are a couple things that are Albany connected, the latter, very tangentially.

The new play “The True”, written by Sharr White, “examines — and hypothesizes about — the affections shared” between long-time Albany, NY mayor Erastus Corning 2nd (d. 1983) and his confidant Dorothea (Polly) Noonan (d. 2003).

There was an article in the local paper, the Times Union, with some relatives and/or friends of the pair complaining that no one had approached them about whether all the facts were correct. As with most movies about famous people and events, I’ve never felt it necessary for the story to be I-dotted, T-crossed factual.

BTW, I didn’t move to Albany in 1979, and Corning who was first elected in 1941, was STILL mayor. The Democratic machine, which still exists in a modified form to this day. Trivia fact: the tallest building between Montreal and New York City is the Corning Tower, the 43-story building on the Empire State Plaza.

“Edie Falco and Michael McKean star in The New Group production of “the True”, which opens September. 20 at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City. Falco, for one, didn’t know there really WAS a Polly Noonan.

Noonan’s granddaughter — Kirsten E. Gillibrand, “once a little-known congresswoman from the Capital District — was selected to fill the United States Senate seat held by Hillary Clinton, who had been named Secretary of State.”
***
I watched a LOT of Burt Reynolds. I remember him first as the “half-breed” Quint on about four dozen episodes of the TV series Gunsmoke (1962-1965), the detective show Dan August (1970-1972), then a whole bunch of movies when he was box-office champ, usually prompted by Susan, my first significant girlfriend after I first moved to the area in 1978.

We saw Smokey and the Bandit I and II, Rough Cut, Starting Over, Hooper, and the underrated The End. Later, I watched the series Evening Shade (1990-1994) and the movie Boogie Nights (1997), plus a variety of guest appearances. Sally Field, who was in at least four of those films, said that Burt “never leaves my mind.”

Here’s Jerry Reed performing “Eastbound and Down”, from Smokey and the Bandit.

Talk Like a Pirate Day triptych

‘Elitist’: angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website

Michael Scott MooreFor this year’s Talk Like a Pirate Day, I thought I’d look at the word three different ways.

The first one is about “The Desert and the Sea” author Michael Scott Moore talking to The Daily Show Host Trevor Noah about being “a captive of Somali pirates for nearly three years, as he describes the dangerous cycle of hope and despair.” I think some of you folks outside of the United States might not be able to see the official video, but I hope you can access this YouTube piece, because it is a compelling story.

Also check out these NPR reports, What It’s Like To Be Held Hostage By Somali Pirates For 2 1/2 Years and the followup, Journalist Held Captive By Pirates Says Focus And Forgiveness Were Crucial.

The second topic I actually purloined from Arthur, who linked to ‘Elitist’: angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website. This website was stealing writers’ works but it rightly got shut down. Some folks then were outraged, saying that it is “elitist” or worse, the very idea that authors expecting to be paid for their writings. What a load of…

The third topic, as is often the case, is about the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, who are going through another mediocre year. but this story’s a bit older.

From The Greatest Forgotten Home Run of All Time: “What Roberto Clemente accomplished in Pittsburgh on July 25, 1956, stupefied the tobacco-spitting baseball lifers all around him precisely because it transcended baseball, entering the realm of pure theater and then myth.” You don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate the subtext of this daring play.

I remember his early baseball cards referred to him as Bob Clemente, trying to Anglicize the Puerto Rican player. In 1972, my favorite player other than Willie Mays was 38. He had just hit his 3,000th major league hit, which surely qualified him for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Clemente did charity work in Latin American and Caribbean countries, hands-on stuff, during the off-seasons, often delivering baseball equipment and food to those in need. On the last day of 1972, he died in a plane crash while delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

He was inducted into Cooperstown in 1973, “in a special election that waived the mandatory five-year waiting period.”

K is for musing about the kitchen

Preheat the oven to 350F, and put some aluminum foil on the bottom shelf.

kitchen
NOT our kitchen

When my wife and I bought our current house in 2000, one of the things she was anxious to do was to remodel the kitchen. Space is laid out poorly with the stove, the silverware drawer, and the sink inconveniently close. The dishwasher pulls out into the room that is hazardous if there’s more than one person in there at a time.

Even I think a redesign is in order, with the dated cabinets. But it hasn’t happened. Everything else – a new roof, getting rid of the remnants of an aboveground pool, a new bathroom, among other things – has always trumped the kitchen redo. I recently came across an expert service in this regard, and you too can
check here to know more about them. I might even get in touch with them in a few days.

I was thinking about the kitchen I grew up in. It was much smaller, yet was laid out better. We had a gas stove; the trick in lighting the burners was using a matchstick. Once I mastered that, I loved that old gas stove.

When I was in college, living off campus, we had an electric stove. What I hated were those burners that remained hot even after you turned them off. I got mildly scorched a couple times. The other thing about that stove is that it wasn’t always clear which burner you were turning on; the labeling is much better now.

Our current stove is gas, but when the electricity goes out, the starter thingy doesn’t work. What?

My wife is a decent cook and a better baker. I was single for a lot of years so I won’t starve if left alone. But I’d rather wash the dishes, which is what I did a lot as a child.

Removing Rust from a Cast-iron Pan
(done for the first time recently)

Preheat the oven to 350F, and put some aluminum foil on the bottom shelf. Scrub the pan thoroughly with steel wool. Rinse and dry completely. Apply cooking oil, including on the handles. Place pan with the open side down in the oven on the top shelf; the aluminum is in there to catch the excess oil. Leave in the oven for one hour, then let it cool.

For more kitchen tips, you should probably go to someone else’s blog.

For ABC Wednesday

Earl Warren versus “people are corporations”

A leader of the Republican Party for more than a decade, Roscoe Conkling had even been nominated to the Supreme Court twice. He begged off both times, the second time after the Senate had confirmed him.

Earl WarrenSometime in 1973 or early 1974, I was in a class at the SUNY College of New Paltz. It was my only course, 15 credits, in political science, and, oddly, I don’t remember much about it except save for the fact that it was conducted by the late Ron Steinberg.

Except for one thing: we all got to meet retired US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in his office in Washington, DC. And not a meet-and-greet but him talking with us for at least a half hour, and then the dozen or so of us able to ask him questions.

Earl Warren is the guy whose court made many monumental decisions between 1953 and 1969 when he retired.
They included:
*attempting to end segregation policies in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education)
*ending anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia)
*ruling that the Constitution protects a general right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut)
*protecting the rights of the accused (Miranda v. Arizona)
*providing lawyers from https://www.denvercocriminaldefenselawyer.com/ to the indigent (Gideon v. Wainwright)
*codifying one person, one vote redistricting (Baker v. Carr)
*freedom of the press (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)

The question I had must have been stated ineloquently because he didn’t know what I was getting at. I was probably nervous. Finally, I asked him about the precedent of the Court considering corporation as people back in the late 19th century. He said that the Court got it wrong back then.

Earl Warren, who died in July 1974, would have appreciated this article, “‘Corporations Are People’ Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie: How a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent.” It involved the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, “owned by the robber baron Leland Stanford,” and the corporation’s lawyer, Roscoe Conkling.

Former President Harry S. Truman applauded the newly-retired Warren in this January 1970 California Law Review article. To the point of my question, Truman wrote:

“I would suggest that it is at least symptomatic of a conservative in today’s society that [Warren] is deeply concerned with the faceless, seemingly randomly and capriciously directed activities of the gigantic institutions which influence the direction of modem life. Under this definition, a conservative is one who worries that the balance of power in this nation has shifted in favor of oversized corporations, government agencies, labor unions, universities, foundations, and institutionalized groups which draw together shifting combinations of some or all of these.”

Happy Constitution Day.

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