Independent Cinema: Movies that Make Us Think
The Academy Awards are upon us. “And the winner is . . .” For as long as I can remember, I have watched the Oscars, even though some years I’ve seen only one or two of the nominees. In 1966, I joined 50 of my freshmen dormitory classmates to watch host Bob Hope crown “The Sound of Music” with five wins. Fifty-five years later, I watched the stripped-down “Pandemic Oscars” (2021) by myself. There was no host, and “Nomadland” won three statues while “Judas and the Black Messiah” won two. I had seen neither. Until I moved to Ashland, my relationship with independent cinema was limited to the blockbusters that emerged from this creative brew: films like “Lost in Translation,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Moonlight,” or this year’s Oscar contender “Past Lives.”
Lamott: Straight Talk on Aging, Miracles, Humor and More
As many of you may know, Anne Lamott was my inspiration for starting this blog six years ago. Beginning when 69-year-old Lamott entered her early 60s, she began writing and speaking about the gifts and challenges of aging, along with life lessons she has learned. Her most recent column appeared just a few weeks ago in the Washington Post. If you, too, are a fan of Lamott’s straight talk and whimsy, you might enjoy this small collection of fresh commentaries. (Since some of these pieces have appeared behind a paywall, I’ve included the full text here.) Scroll down and at the end you’ll find, like frosting on a cake, a salute to Texan political commentator Molly Ivins, one of Lamott’s heroes (and mine). “The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion,” Ivins once quipped.
Democracy, One Signature at a Time
Canvassing is not for the faint of heart, especially if you are allergic to rejection like me. A few weeks ago, I signed up to gather the last round of signatures for a local petition called “Jackson County for All,” a citizen’s initiative to reconstitute Jackson County’s Board of Commissioners. This Saturday, I found myself going door-to-door in a medium-sized development west of downtown Medford, 17 miles north of Ashland. Maps in hand, my partner and I split our “beat” and set out. As we suspected, more often than not, no one came to the door. But those who did were more than polite. The first person to answer my knock, a gentleman in his 60’s, was dressed in a camouflage vest, dark khakis, and boots and enveloped in cigarette smoke. When he invited me in, I thought about deferring, but I didn’t. We sat at his kitchen table and he said, “tell me what you got.”
The Dams Are Coming Down and It’s about Damn Time”
When Copco Dam No. 1 , on the Klamath River as it crosses from Oregon to California, succumbed to dynamite last year, it unleashed a torrent of water into the abandoned stream bed below, overgrown with willows and weeds. For local whitewater enthusiasts, it offered the ride of a lifetime. (See video above!)“No turning back: The largest dam removal in US history begins,” Oregon Public Broadcasting proclaimed. In the 20th century, the US led the world in dam building. Dams were promoted as a way to harness unruly nature, bring water to deserts, and spin turbines to generate electricity for a rapidly growing population. To the builders, the flooding of canyons to create artificial lakes was seen as progress with little downside. But to communities of Native Americans who had fished, hunted, and otherwise used rivers for generations, the dams changed everything.
Still Becoming at 76
I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end. ― Michelle Obama, Becoming
Growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, I spent many Saturday’s skating at the university ice rink, dreaming of becoming a figure skater. When I was ten and learning “tourist” French at school, I imagined becoming a translator at the United Nations. When my parents divorced and, at age thirteen, I moved to Los Angeles with my mother, who had remarried a professor at UCLA, cross-country flights to visit my father and brothers back in Princeton got me thinking about becoming an airplane stewardess. When I fell in love with Big Sur on sightseeing trips up the California coast, I hoped to marry someone rich who could afford a house along this breathtaking stretch of highway. The career inventory test I took in tenth grade suggested a different path: becoming an orchestra conductor. (I played the violin and apparently showed leadership potential.) One thing was certain. I was growing up privileged.
Up a Tree and Meadow Life
“There’s a big orange cat stuck in a tree a few houses up,” a neighbor walking down our street told me as I carried geranium pots from my car. “Does it belong to you?” While not ours, I knew the cat she was referring to. His owners call him Lux but we call him Reds, the name of an old orange cat we fostered years ago. Reds entered our life through the cat door belonging to our formerly indoor Brooklyn cat. We had a second cat at the time who was killed this past summer by a cougar. (Tony and I had decided it was better to let our cats run free and suffer the consequences than watch the world through a window. It was a tough choice…not to mention the birds.) He moved right in without asking permission. Our cats, uncharacteristically unterritorial, paid no mind. So for the past two years, Reds has arrived like clockwork at 7 am, finishing whatever breakfast our cat(s) — Pesto is the name of the one who remains — left behind, then stretching out on our bed to catch more sleep.
Our Relationship with School Becomes Optional
On sunny school days, I often see the eight-year-old boy who lives near us running across the meadow we share, his long blond hair flowing as he aims his slingshot, sometimes at trees, sometimes at the deer or turkeys who graze in the meadow. I asked my neighbor if he knew anything about the boy with the flowing hair and he said, “I hear he’s unschooled, whatever that means.” I’m told that when it’s a “bluebird” day at nearby Mt. Ashland, students who ski head to the mountain instead of the classroom, with their parent’s blessing. In our post COVID world, I read that a sniff or cough often wins a kiddo a reprieve from school. The early morning stomach aches of yore rarely had such power. Whatever ground my educator colleagues and I gained over fifty years of trying to create school kids wanted to attend (and whose parents supported) seems to be shrinking like Alpine glaciers.
Tale of Two Cellos
My younger son, now 37, has played the cello since he was four. I fell in love with the instrument as much as he did. For years I’ve kept an eye out for “street” cellists, far from concert halls, who give themselves to what makes the cello unique: its perfect range, from warm low pitches to bright higher notes, which can touch our feelings in profound ways. My tips haven’t been generous enough. Ashland is blessed with two performing “street” cellists — more, in my mind, than “buskers.” They play at opposite ends of town. One performs in Ashland’s gracious Lithia Park, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other sets up his cello in front of the town’s funkiest grocery store, drawing a tapestry of listeners with shopping carts. Both gentlemen are composers as well as musicians. The first, always sporting a fedora and a tie, offers “easy listening.” The second, dressed for the weather, offers intricate compositions intended to unleash positive Reiki-like energy. Indeed, Ashland’s two public cellists could not be more different except in the way they hold their instruments close. At the end of each profile there is a video of them performing.
Reflections, Sixty Years Apart
In the summer of 1964, as I drove my family’s Rambler to the Santa Monica beach club where I’d snagged a job entertaining preschoolers, I’d blast the radio whenever Martha and the Vandellas showed up singing “Dancing in the Street.” Callin’ out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat/Summer’s here and the time is right/For dancing in the street. Two weeks ago — the first day of summer ’24 — Tony and I visited our Brooklyn family in Carroll Gardens, a tight-knit community made up of aging Italian immigrants, young families, and historic brownstones with pocket gardens sporting roses older than me. School was still in session when we arrived, and the parade of parents walking their kids to P.S. 058 was a 2024 version of dancing in the streets. When school let out, it seemed as if half of the 750 pre-kindergarten through fifth graders moved across the street to Carroll Park, originally a private community garden created in the late 1840’s and now two square blocks of swings, basketball courts, sprinklers, benches, and more. For the next two hours, seated on a bench under a centuries-old sycamore tree, I watched a universe of children — light and dark-skinned, English-speaking and not, privileged and less so, toddlers through pre-teens — chase each other, fill balloons with water and throw them on the pavement (it was 86 and humid), play tag, shoot hoops, soak in the sprinklers, talk in small groups, ride scooters.
Did the Frogs Go: All in a Summer’s Day
The persistent heat here in Southern Oregon this summer, combined with wildfire smoke, has created its own peculiar lockdown for local residents. Come early afternoon, it’s best to hibernate indoors as the heat and smoke reach their crescendo. Night offers little respite. The peak temperatures of late afternoon linger well into the evening. This past Sunday, the lockdown began early as smoke cloaked the landscape and an acrid smell hung in the air. I figured this was a good day to write, my ballast in this topsy-turvy world, and I ended up with this account of the day before: the sudden disappearance of the frogs in our pond, a morning walk in Lithia Park, a matinee and popcorn at Ashland’s Varsity Cinema, sending postcards to Montana voters while watching the Olympics.
Living with Wildfire
At a recent “fire preparedness” meeting at Grange Hall down the road from where I live, Kelly Burns, Ashland’s Emergency Management Coordinator, recounted the bright September day when a swath of drought-stricken brush and wind gusts up to 40 mph united to ignite an unimaginable firestorm a heartbeat away. “Thirty-years of firefighting hadn’t prepared me for what unfolded that day,” Burns said. Overwhelmed and outmatched, Burns and his team contended with burst water lines, fire hydrants that didn’t work, and a fire so hot that firefighters could not reach manual gas turn-off switches. Indeed, the fire soon spread through underground gas lines between houses sending structures up in flames from below when the danger from the fire spreading above ground seemed negligible. “Flames moved as fast as a bobcat could run,” he said. When the winds finally quieted the following afternoon, the Almeda Fire had consumed 2,500 structures and displaced nearly 6,000 residents, but miraculously killed only three. This night, four years later, Burns told us what no one wanted to hear: the city of Ashland was still grossly unprepared for an aggressive wildfire.
Old Growth Forests
Ancient — and not so ancient — trees are precious in ways we never knew, today’s forest scientists tell us. They communicate. They migrate. They protect. They heal. The novelist Richard Powers, in his award-winning The Overstory, shares some of this science. “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor,” he explains. “A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.” When I was thirteen, newly arrived in Southern California and uprooted from ivy-covered Princeton, New Jersey, my first trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, took my breath away. The march of waves hitting rocks 900 feet below against a blue horizon were the stars. When I was 71, newly arrived in Southern Oregon and visiting the Oregon coast for the first time, the abundance of “mature” and “old growth” trees drew me in as much as the rugged cliffs, sandy beaches, and unique rock formations. Here, towering spruce and redwoods guarded both sides of the Oregon Coast Highway’s 363-mile trek from the California border to Washington state.
Postcard from Portugal
As the 2024 Presidential election heated up this summer, along with hundred-degree days encasing Southern Oregon, I booked a mid-October trip for Tony and me to Portugal, a country we had never visited on our many trips to see his sisters in Italy but which seemed a perfect getaway in these disquieting times. Indeed, it had acquired a buzz, offering visitors culture, beaches, fresh seafood, architecture, wine, nightlife, surfing, Fado music, and so much more. Like most tourists, we began our Portugal “holiday” in Lisbon, staying at an upscale hotel in the city’s Alfama district, a maze of narrow cobbled streets and traditional houses all leading up a steep hill — the only neighborhood in Lisbon to survive a devastating earthquake in 1755. It’s a bull’s eye for tourists who clog its sidewalks and narrow streets on foot (in packs) or in three-wheel “tuk-tuks.” From the admittedly breathtaking terrace of our hotel, we overlooked a dock where cruise ships equipped for thousands disgorged their passengers, a fresh invasion every day. In the days to come, we moved on to Porto, Sintra, the Algarve, paradises where traffic jams, impossible lines, and “selfie” posing at every turn stole the glory. No wonder residents in Barcelona have pulled out their squirt guns.
Nope: The 2024 Presidential Election
Like some of you, perhaps, I turned down my media dial as the 2024 Presidential election reached its climax. I ignored the polls. I avoided the news beyond scanning headlines. I encouraged friends to count on the youth vote to carry Harris to victory. I quelled my fears with hope. Post-election, I continued to look the other way. I refrained from “doom scrolling.” I stashed the urgent emails from organizations I support. “My profuse thanks to the thousands of volunteers who fought tirelessly for democracy and freedom,” Substack’s Simon Rosenberg gratefully wrote. I don’t know if my 500 get-out-the vote postcards to citizens of Montana and Nevada counted as tireless. I sought distraction. Having discovered Grey’s Anatomy on my flight from Portugal back to the U.S. three weeks ago, I did something I’ve never done before: for the next ten days I binge-watched this legendary TV series, now in its 21st season. Yesterday, I plunged into the vortex of post-election, post-mortem discussions I’d been avoiding. I was reminded of the “M&M” (morbidity and mortality) conferences at the fictitious Seattle Grace Hospital I’d been watching on Netflix.
The Really Big One: Not If, But When
It is human nature — more or less — to pay attention to imminent risks and risks with which we have experience. On the natural disaster ledger this includes tornadoes in Kansas, hurricanes in Florida, flooding in Pennsylvania, Nor’easters in New England, and forest fires in California (or, gasp, New Jersey). This Thanksgiving, “Lake Effect” snow in five states joined the natural disaster list. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there’s a risk no one wants to think about: “The Really Big One,” a magnitude 9 earthquake along a 700-mile stretch of coast—from Mendocino in Northern California to Vancouver Island in Canada—followed by waves reaching 100 feet high. Seismologists call it the Cascadia subduction zone, where the oceanic Juan de Fuca Plate moves to the east and slides below the much larger, mostly continental North American Plate. “The Really Big One,” by all accounts, is unimaginable. In 2015, the FEMA director responsible for Oregon and Washington warned, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 [which runs north and south roughly 50 miles east of the Pacific] will be toast.”