“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow … Continue reading Life with the Moomins: Lessons in Stability and Freedom From Moominvalley
When the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt spoke to a group of Hillsdale students about her time teaching poetic composition to the actor James Franco at the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program, she mentioned a poem they had studied, a cinematic oddity by American poet Robert Lowell titled “Skunk Hour.” In the poem, a speaker climbs a hill and views parked cars (“love cars” as … Continue reading A Backward Leap
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end. From: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm” I have lived in the same house in Southern Michigan since I was four years old. It’s an … Continue reading The Sledding Hill
My great-uncle’s full name was Verdon Ganger, but everyone called him Bud. By the time I knew him, Bud was a soft-spoken widower in his 80s, who kept an immaculate garden and took a keen interest in the birds that nested in his backyard. As a little girl, I never bothered to think of him in terms beyond that. Like all the others who … Continue reading These Worlds We Hold: Memory and the Role of Storytelling
In general, we are people who have cared little for beauty as spectacle. It takes a good deal of persuading to make us go look at a sunset…We like our beauty to be inherent in our way of life, not something we must make a special trip for…The beauty glimpsed between bursts of the labor that justified our joy in it was the beauty that … Continue reading Beauty As Spectacle
How does one make poetry in film? Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s most recent film, takes on this issue by taking on the poetic style of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, presenting, through the film form, reality breaking in through the prosaic rhythm of life. The film follows Paterson, a poetry-writing bus driver played by Adam Driver, and his loving relationship with his wife, Laura. Unlike … Continue reading Paterson
65,000 frames, 853 oil paintings, and 90 design paintings all come together into 1 hour and 35 minutes of exploration into the mind of Vincent van Gogh. Set approximately one year after the unexpected death of Van Gogh, Loving Vincent, directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, follows the path of Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), a model for several of Van Gogh’s portraits, as he … Continue reading Loving Vincent
Tom Cruise is known for doing his own stunts, but for American Made, he also learned to fly. Based off true events from the 1980’s, American Made tells the story of Barry Seal (Cruise), a commercial pilot, husband, father, and adrenaline junkie who simply cannot content himself with anything safe. After becoming bored with his job, Seal begins smuggling drugs in his airbus cockpit across … Continue reading American Made
Marvel continues to domineer the super-hero movie market with this year’s autumn release, “Thor: Ragnarok.” Since Anthony and Joe Russo’s treacherous “Captain America: Civil War,” Marvel fans have itched to learn the fate of that movie’s missing characters, Thor and the Hulk. This movie satisfies those super-cravings. “Ragnarok” kicks off humorously and, like most other Marvel movies, that humor reemerges throughout the plot (think Captain … Continue reading Thor: Ragnarok
Titanic disasters and perfect storms aside, it’s actually pretty hard to sink a boat. This was a pleasant surprise for my brother Sean and I when a strong gust of wind blew down our mast so violently that the metal beam punctured a hole through the bottom of our sailboat one afternoon in the summer of 2013. Although the cockpit filled with water, soaking our … Continue reading Sinking The Green Light
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