On The Waterfront on dvd

Waterfront has a very different connotation now from what it had when On The Waterfront came out in 1954. Now we think of restaurants and boutiques and gentrification. All is beautiful along the river. But not that long ago, towns looked away from their rivers. A friend of mine remembers a business that was built on the river front in our hometown having a toilet which emptied right into the river. Now that same 'waterfront' has a walking path, a farmer's market, more stores all the time. We have found the beauty of being by a river. It isn't just a utilitarian vessel for ships bringing goods or for carrying logs downstream.

Everything about On The Waterfront is perfect. The black and white photography, the story, the gritty feel to the place, which is Hoboken, New Jersey. If you visit Night Stranger's blog, you'll find that things are indeed very different in this city. In fact, her blog entry is what reminded me that I hadn't seen this movie in far too long, so I put it right in the Netflix queue.

Eva Marie Saint, who won the Oscar for best supporting actress, is wonderful. This was her first movie, and what a way to begin one's career. Her character, Edie, is the light on the waterfront, both figuratively and physically. Everyone and everything else is dark and dreary or scary.

The story is of the tough life of longshoremen whose daily existence is dependent on the mob bosses. They decide who will work and how much they will be paid. Cross them, and they'll kill you. The film actually begins with such a killing. Marlon Brando's character, Terry Malloy, lures a young man up to the roof by telling him he found one of his pigeons. The guy is then thrown off the roof. Malloy didn't realize that killing was part of the deal. He thought the bad guys would just rough him up a bit. The dead man is Edie's brother, and so the story proceeds. Will she find out that Brando is partly responsible for his death, and definitely knows who killed him? She has decided not to go back to the school where she has been studying to become a teacher. She tells her poor dad that she must find out who the murderer is. So this dad who has worked and saved to keep her away from the world of the waterfront must watch her get closer to Terry Malloy.

You've probably all seen the movie, or at least the 'contender' scene in the taxicab. But if not, I'm not going to write more and risk spoiling it. All I will say is watch it. And if you do, please check out the extras, especially the featurette and the interview with Elia Kazan. Both add a great deal to the film. Many think this is one of the very best films ever. See if you agree. I certainly do.

Piglet

It's been a while since I've posted pictures of sweet Piglet. She's now about ten months old and probably as big as she's going to get. This morning my daughter stopped by and the three of us went for a walk.

Today's picture/Recycled

This is what the farm animals drink from when they are in the north pasture. The house is just up the little hill, and we run a hose out to the tub from the outside faucet.

Tools of the trade/Sprouts

The equipment: Wheat berries, a jar, and a top with holes.



Soak the wheat berries in tepid water overnight.


Drain off the water, and rinse the berries twice daily with cold water. Three days later, I have sprouts which I'll add to bread to give a sweet flavor and chewy texture.

Why I love New England

Today I had to go grocery shopping at the only supermarket in town. There were free hotdogs and ice cream sandwiches, there was a television with the game on, and the music playing in the store was all Red Sox related: Sweet Caroline, Tessie, Dirty Water, We Are The Champions. I was happy, happy singing along as I strolled through the aisles.

Today's picture/Dead End

The signs seem so vivid this week. Signs of spring? :<)

After the snow melts

I took a five minute walk down on the main road, and here's what I saw.















PS: The next day I went down again and picked it all up! (and found some more)

Today's picture/Multilingual

Today's picture/Beetle

When the truck's on the blink, the Beetle works just fine as a farm vehicle!

Chocolate Cake

A young friend of ours, who goes to the same college as our son, requested that I make a chocolate cake today, and they'll both come up after classes to eat it! Since she turns 21 in a few days, how could I resist?! The candles are supposed to make a '21.' :<) I got this recipe online eleven (!) years ago, and it is one of the best. Put a little white vinegar or lemon juice in a measuring cup. Add 1/2 cup milk, and let sit a bit.

Addendum 2/11: just regular milk works fine

Addendum 2/11: buttermilk also works fine

Melt 1/2 cup butter. Stir in 1/4 cup cocoa and 1 cup water.

Stir together in mixer:

2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
1 t. baking soda

Pour butter mixture over this, and beat together well.
Add 1 t. vanilla, the milk, and 2 eggs, and continue beating till smooth.

Pour into greased 9 x 13 pan, and bake in preheated 325º F. oven (2/11 - 350º worked well) for about 30 minutes.

Addendum 2/11: two greased round cake pans worked great

Cool, and frost with confectioners' sugar frosting:

1/2 cup soft butter, t. vanilla, maybe two cups confectioners' sugar, and milk.

Addendum 2/11: add 1/4 cup cocoa for chocolate frosting

This is so, so delicious!

Today's cd/She & Him

She & Him
Volume One
2008

When it comes right down to it, what I love most is sweet love songs, whether jazz or pop. I listen to other kinds of music. I appreciate deep, dark, serious stuff, but at the end of the day, what lifts my heart is a cheery song with a good beat. She & Him Volume One is just the ticket for me. She is the actress, Zooey Deschanel, and Him is the musician M. Ward, and together they make some of the happiest music I've heard in a while. As it fills my house, there's a smile on my face and a little dancing in my feet. They do some originals, and some covers such as, You've Really Got A Hold On Me and I Should Have Known Better. Each song is special and wonderful. You may read more about them and hear some songs at their myspace.


I remember when I first saw the movie, Annie Hall, I was so impressed with Diane Keaton singing, and wished she would do an album. I bet now she would. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe she'll read this very blog, and say, why not? :<)

"You make me feel so young"

Who would think that a publication called The Oldie could make a reader feel young? I suspect it has this astonishing effect on the writers as well. It is a magazine which glorifies life, in all its facets. I had read about it for a while online, been to the website, and thought, nah, not quite old enough yet. Well, I think sixty is definitely the proper age, so I bought myself a subscription for my birthday, and shall be a subscriber until I drift off into the never-never. There are articles about books and gardens and travel and daily life. There are cartoons. It isn't always politically correct, depending where you are politically, but that only makes me love it more. This magazine brings together some of the best writers in Britain, and they write as they are. Some are light-hearted, some acerbic, some nostalgic. But every single one of them is good. How often do you find that in any publication? Maybe in the golden days of The New Yorker, but I don't think since. If this is being old, I welcome it. And I feel welcomed into their company.

I think I've always been an 'oldie' at heart. I've always loved the dead. When people talk sarcastically about 'dead white guys' - well those are my guys (and gals). It's the old books I love. And I've always loved the past. I would sit and listen to the grownups talk about the old days for hours. In my grammy's and then my aunt's little house there was a register in the floor next to the bed where I slept when we visited. Lying there in the dark, among her doilies and old sewing machine, in my bed on the linoleum floor, I was lulled to sleep by the downstairs voices, rising and falling as they left the living room and went into the kitchen for an evening snack. While others my age went out to a party on New Year's Eve, I'd sit at home, eating Christmas cookies, watching Guy Lombardo with my parents. Yes, I was a homebody even then. When Tom came into my life, he joined my mother and me. I've always liked 'elderly' pursuits like gardening and bird-watching. I love anti-macassars, though I don't have any. I love brocade-like furniture which you see every time I post a photo of a book for a book report. I love this old house. But existing side-by-side with the old stuff is my love for the new: new music, technology, home improvements, some new books. So, old and young, all in one, much like my now-favorite magazine in the world, The Oldie.

Today's picture/April Fool's Day

Here is what I found when I got up this morning from 'foolish' Tom!

Death of a soldier

The other morning I happened to hear a very moving piece on National Public Radio. Chaplain Thomas Phillips gets a notification on his computer whenever someone in the US armed forces is killed in Iraq. You may listen here.

It was even more meaningful because our area very recently lost a young man. He was much loved, and will be sorely missed. The funeral today was in the local church which holds the most people. There were two floors full, and a tent outside. There were buses of military people. The governor of the state spoke. It was broadcast to military bases in the US, and in Iraq. I'm told there were a thousand people.

The other day I posted Thomas Lux' poem, It's The Little Towns I Like. Where I live, it's the little area I like. There are several small towns all within a few miles of one another, and we are all connected, through friends or family or work or shopping. This young man's death affects each of us. We all have our memories of him. Tom was his eighth grade teacher; our daughter was a friend. Even our close friends who have moved to another town are connected: their nephew is in the same company in Iraq as the man who was killed, and when they lived here, he lived across the street from them. This is the way of it in a small town, or a small area. No one is spared the grief when one of us dies. The other day I drove by two very modest houses with their flags at half-mast for him. I don't know who lives there, but I know they are affected by his death.

There is an online book of remembrance, and reading it is enough to break one's heart.

There was a religious service, followed by a military tribute. As his mother and his father were presented with the solemnly folded flag which draped his casket, I sat with my daughter's sweater hugged to my chest, and that very daughter in the row behind me. And I knew the truth. It could be any of us. As parents, our joy is held by a kite string. It can fly out of our hands in a second's time. Then it is over. All these parents have left are memories.

Seeing all those kids, his high school friends, now men and women, was so poignant. The music was not hymns, but Sarah McLachlan, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World, and then saddest of all, sadness heaped upon sadness, Rusted Root's Send Me On My Way. There wasn't another sound. It played so clearly throughout the building, and probably outside. Rusted Root was a huge part of all those kids' teen years.

The words in my heart today come from Ray Davies' song, Some Mother's Son:

While all the parents stand and wait
To meet their children coming home from school
Some mother's son is lying dead

They put his picture on the wall
They put flowers in the picture frame
Some mother's memory remains.

Quote du jour/A.A. Milne

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.
A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Quote du jour/Helene Hanff

If you've read any of Helene Hanff's writing, you'll know that she is no shrinking violet. She has strong opinions and isn't afraid of voicing them.

After writing in 84, Charing Cross Road that she has only three bookshelves, she continues:

I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again like I throw out clothes I'm never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but you DON'T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

Book Report/Spring Snow

Spring Snow
by Castle Freeman, Jr.
nonfiction nature essays, 1995 (covering 1981-1995)
finished, 3/29/08

I love essays, and nature essays best of all. Spring Snow is such a book. Its subtitle is The Seasons of New England From The Old Farmer's Almanac. Castle Freeman, Jr. has written for this publication since 1981, and the book is a gleaning of those writings over fourteen years. If you don't have the annual magazine, you may still hear Freeman's monthly podcasts. Most of the essays are a page long, with the month and year at the end. I love that, too. He's a little more south of me, and over in the next state, but his writing is the very story of our lives here on this hill. I am going to buy a copy of this book for us, and for each of our children.

This book was suggested to me by my internet friend, Alison, who hopes to have her own blog next month. From the title, I thought it was to be a book of spring, but it covers all four seasons. Castle Freeman, Jr. may just be the very best of all the writers about the natural world whom I have read over the years. He writes in the preface that Thoreau didn't venture far from his home more than a few times in his life, and that this book is "in the same tradition." These are essays on "small, familiar matters and everyday occasions available to anybody - available to anybody, that is, who will hold still. I have read somewhere that most Americans move every five years. This book is not for them. Or, yes, it is: it's for them especially. It's for them more and more. Spring Snow is about staying put."

If a writing god were to offer me the talent and gift of writing, and asked, now, what type of writing would you like to do?, I would say, the kind of writing Castle Freeman, Jr. does in these essays. They are each one page of perfection, in subject matter and in execution. He doesn't waste words. He is clear. He draws the reader right in to what he is thinking.

The chickadee is the caretaker bird. Like his human counterpart who comes to houses in late fall after summer residents have left and sets things right for winter, the chickadee appears all alone one gray afternoon before snow and sets to work.... He's a caretaker of the spirit. He's here to help see you through the long winter that's ahead. If you give him seed - and sometimes even if you don't - the chickadee will keep you company from the first November day when he shows up, right along through the deepest cold and snow, and on into another spring. (November 1983)

The day lily must be an old-fashioned flower, I think. There is scarcely an old house without its lily bed, and they grow on banks beside the back roads where houses once stood. Lilies must have been a favorite garden flower of the farm wives long ago who had little time for cultivating what they didn't expect to eat. The lily was their flower because it needs little care. Just leave lilies alone and they will prosper. (July 1983)

Toward the end of February, as the season begins to commence to turn, every dooryard, every meadow, every wood is full of clocks. The winter buds are fat on the trees, and the brooks are running under the ice.... The tops of south-facing hills keep the sunlight longer and longer now against the night, and dusk lingers nearly until six o'clock. Every meadow is a sundial, the shadows of the trees along its edge reaching farther as each afternoon brings a little more sun. If you cared to keep such minute watch in your own backyard, you could tell the day without the aid of a calendar by measuring the angle of a tree's shadow at a certain hour or seeing how the sunlight lies in the open doorway of a shed. (February 1997)

And to end this very long blog entry, I shall quote an entire essay from April 1985. Simply said, it is just right.

Every spring there is one last all-out snowstorm, but this time people don't meet the weather with any of the varieties of resignation they have perfected over a long winter of successive snows. This time a big snowfall is, well, funny. Spring blizzards are a lark. Why? Snow is snow: if you're sick of it in February, you ought by rights to be even sicker of it in April. Besides, spring blizzards - at least around here - are often among the biggest storms of the year in terms of inches dumped. Last year we had two feet in one April storm. Oughtn't their volume alone to make them particularly oppressive, never mind their timing?

No. This argument starts from a false premise, that snow is all alike. It isn't. Every snow is different, and the big spring snow is the most different of all. That heavy accumulation doesn't weigh on your soul; on the contrary, the magnitude of a spring blizzard is one of the aspects of it that make it a joke. These storms are like an outrageous dessert that winds up a seven-course dinner: General Grant life-size in blue ice cream at the G.A.R. banquet.

And anyway, you can enjoy anything if you know it isn't real. Spring blizzards are like painted scenes of storefronts on a stage set. You enter the illusion knowing you could punch your fist right through the brick walls, knowing that very soon someone will come and pack the sets away. These are white storms. The sky is bright in spite of the snow, and the sun that will be out tomorrow is a spring sun that means business: in a day all this snow will be gone. You needn't take it seriously, then. The birds don't. The summer birds have already arrived, and you can hear the robins singing through the middle of the storm.

Today's picture/Bench

This is a picture of illusion. Doesn't it look like three people were sitting on the bench as the snow fell yesterday? And in the shadow, it looks like me taking a picture - my hair and the camera seem especially clear. But it isn't my shadow.


PS: A few hours later, no more illusion.

Mrs Bale reports on Spring around here

Wednesday, first red-winged blackbird under the bird feeders.
Thursday, first robins on the lawn.
Friday, snow all day, into the evening.

Whoopie Pies

This recipe was a real favorite when the kids were little, and Tom and I still love them. They are a bit different from some whoopie pies, in that the filling isn't marshmallow, but a confectioners' sugar frosting. Today I put in a little orange juice. You could also add lemon juice or some melted chocolate.

Whoopie Pies

Beat together:
1/2 cup soft butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 t. vanilla

Mix together:
2 cups flour (I used 1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry, and 1/2 cup white)
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
6 T. baking cocoa

In the mixer, at low speed, add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternately with 1 cup milk.
Blend well.

Drop by spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet, and bake at 350º F. for about ten minutes, but check sooner. Cool on cooling rack.

For the filling:
Beat together 3 T. soft butter and 2 cups confectioners' sugar. Add milk as needed.

When cakes are cool, spread the flat side with filling and top with a second cake, sandwich style.