The Visitor

I really enjoyed this movie. It's a touching story that explores both the complex narratives people have and the experiences/forces that bring them together or pull them apart. Wonderful acting, great soundtrack, beautifully shot and edited.

I may have to purchase this one for my personal collection.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ 5/5

The Visitor (2008)
PG-13
Directed by: Thomas McCarthy
Starring: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira, Hiam Abbass

Enjoying Kooser

I was born in Nebraska and grew up there. The same goes for my wife. She grew up in the Republican River Valley in the southwest part of the state. I grew up in a little town along the Elkhorn River in northeast part of the state. I was a student at the University, and when we married, we made our home in a little apartment about a city block away from the state capitol building on J street in Lincoln. Our first son was born in that city.

We've now lived in Minnesota so long that it has become home for me. To be honest, it was home the first day I arrived. I immediately felt more at home there than I ever had in Nebraska. Something ancient and Norwegian in my DNA just felt like it belonged in Minnesota, and was glad to finally be back.

Though none of my three sons was born in Minnesota, they all grew up here. They are, without question, Minnesotans. I think of myself as a Minnesotan too, and I've come to believe that home is wherever your kids feel it is.

"Nebraska is a fine place to be from," I say, to my sweet Nebraska bride's dismay, if and when the fact of my Nebraska roots surfaces in a conversation. She likes Nebraska and thinks it sounds like I have something against it. I really don't. I just don't miss it at all. I think of family and friends and years spent there with some fondness, but never with anything remotely close to homesickness or longing.

These days, while enjoying my first cup of coffee in the mornings, I've been reading a little book by Nebraska author Ted Kooser entitled Local Wonders. Oddly enough, my wife bought the book in a small shop way up north in Grand Marais, MN on a recent trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior. Local Wonders is a collection of short pieces and essays, part memoir, part poetic reflection.

The writing is very good, but what's even better is Kooser's keen eye and big heart. That's what gives him something worth writing about. Whether he's trying to start a tractor, taking a walk in the Bohemian Alps, or daydreaming in the recliner chair he inherited from his Uncle Tubby, Ted Kooser sees quite a lot. And much to my surprise, he even manages to stir up fond thoughts and wistful memories in an old expatriate like me.

The book is arranged by seasons of the year, and after reading the Preface and Acknowledgments, I decided to start with the season I was in--autumn. One autumn essay includes a short poem I like so much I'm planning to have it inscribed on a wall in my house.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it new
you need never
leave home.

Today, after shoveling the snow from my sidewalks, I finished reading the section called "Winter." Now, I think I'll put the book aside until the crocuses start appearing. I’m always eager for the spring to arrive. This year I’ll be eager for more Local Wonders.

I Believe In Singing

I agree with what Brian Eno believes about music. Incidentally, it's one of the reasons I think that corporate music is so important to Christian community. Churches that allow music to become a spectator's sport are missing out on something very important.


Listen to Brian Eno's Essay on This I Believe.

This American Life

I'm a big fan of the This American Life radio show hosted by Ira Glass from WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. I listen to (and save) every podcast because I find them to be such a wonderful view into the lives and perspectives of so many different kinds of people and circumstances.

Thanks to Netflix, I just watched the entire first season of the new This American Life television program on Showtime. I found the production values to be extremely good and they succeeded in translating the personality of the radio program into the visual format of TV.

I enjoyed the series for the most part, but didn't find it to be as consistent or compelling as the radio show. In fact, I didn't care for a few of the stories at all--something that almost never happens when I listen to the radio show. I would expect TAL on TV to improve in future seasons, simply because I believe the TAL crew is brilliant.

I'm not sure, however, the TV show will have enough of a following to keep it going. Is the TV audience mostly made up of listeners? I'm all for TAL to have success on TV because I don't think the world can have too much TAL. On the other hand, I'm so satisfied with the radio show, I don't really need the TV program to be happy. But if you take away my radio show, I'll be blue!

The first season of TAL on Showtime is worth a watch, but it's not worth as much as listening to TAL every week on the radio.

◊ ◊ ◊ • • 3/5

Reading the Big Weather

Mornings we see our breath. Weeds
sturdy for winter are waiting down
by the tracks. Birds, high and silent,
pass almost invisible over town.

Time, always almost ready
to happen, leans over our shoulders reading
the headlines for something not there: "Republicans
Control Congress"--the year spins on unheeding.

The moon drops back toward the sun, a sickle
gone faint in the dawn: there is a weather
of things that happen too faint for headlines,
but tremendous, like willows touching the river.

This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us
something with its continuous scripture of leaves.

"Reading the Big Weather" by William Stafford, from Scripture of Leaves, ©1999, Brethren Press.

Literature: International Fiction

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
(1965 / Harcourt)

This strange and wildly inventive fantasy uses a first-person memoir style as a medium for relating complex concepts of cosmology to human experiences of the heart and mind. It is genius and surprisingly effective.

I heard about the book by listening to "You Must Read This" on National Public Radio. It was praised and highly recommended by the Salman Rushdie.

My favorite chapters were, "The Dinosaurs" and "The Light Years." The latter gave me insights to human relationships that I think will stick with me for life.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ • 4/5

Current Reading: Historical Fiction

Unto a Good Land (The Emigrants Novels, Book 2)
by Vilhelm Moberg

Published between 1951 and 1961, Moberg's four-volume "Emigrant" epic offers the saga of the Swedish immigrant's role in the settling of the American frontier. Book Two opens in the summer of 1850 as the emigrants disembark in New York City. Their journey to a new home in Minnesota Territory takes them by riverboat, steam wagon, Great Lakes steamship, and oxcart to Chisago County.

Current Reading: Pastoral

The Last Word and the Word after That
by Brian McLaren

Pastor Dan Poole returns with another personal and theological crisis in this final installment of McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian trilogy, which again features fictional characters engaged in nonfictionish theological dialogue. This time around, Poole has been granted an extended leave of absence from his conservative church as it investigates what it believes to be his liberal theological leanings, especially regarding the doctrine of hell and salvation.

Current Reading: Christian Worldview / Arts

Art and Soul: Signposts for Christians in the Arts
by Hilary Brand & Adrienne Chaplin

Hilary Brand and Adrienne Chaplin explore the full spectrum of issues and concerns that face a Christian who is interested in working within any of the creative arts.

Movie Experience: White Christmas

Last night, my wife and I went to The Heights Theater to watch White Christmas on the big screen. It was really a great time and a real blast from the past.

Kathryn Crosby (Bings wife) was there to introduce the movie. She showed old film footage and news reels, shared personal comments, and sang a medley of old songs from the Bing era. It seemed kind of strange at first, but turned out to be interesting and a lot of fun.

I've seen this movie dozens of times, but this was my first time to see it with a live audience in a theater. The big room stage scenes felt much different in the theater. Some of the corny gags and lines worked much better on the big screen too.

It was nice to see such a wide variety of people enjoying the same experience. I really enjoyed it when the crowd applauded song and dance numbers throughout the movie, and spontaneously began singing along with the song "White Christmas" in the final scene.

I will certainly be checking out other historic movies at The Heights in the future.

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Film: The Lives of Others

A very thought provoking story that shows the persuasive beauty and power of a life well-lived. A deeply moving and thoughtful exploration of personhood and the evil of dehumanization.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ •

Some sexuality/nudity.

Set in 1980s East Berlin, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature (which earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) provides an exquisitely nuanced portrait of life under the watchful eye of the state police as a high-profile couple is bugged. When a successful playwright and his actress companion become subjects of the Stasi's secret surveillance program, their friends, family and even those doing the watching find their lives changed too.

Film: Away from Her

I watched this movie with my wife. It's a real heartbreaker that examines one couple's tragic experience with Alzheimer's disease. The acting is good, the story is fairly engaging, but I found it to be dissatisfying in the end. While I tried to empathize with the characters, the dark guilts of their pasts and their fatalistic approach to the future didn't leave me with much more than pity.

◊ ◊ • • •

Language and Adult Situations

Award-winning director Atom Egoyan produced this film by actress Sarah Polley about a long-married but still very much in love couple whose lives are torn asunder when one of them must enter a rest home. Julie Christie plays the wife, and Gordon Pinsent plays the husband desperate to ensure her comfort in the new setting while burdened with guilt over past behavior. Olympia Dukakis co-stars in this film inspired by an Alice Munro story.

Historic Fiction: The Emigrants

I finished book one of the four volume "Emigrants Series" by Vilhelm Moberg, and found it to be very interesting. As a Minnesotan of Scandinavian descent, my interest might be a little higher than the average reader, but I think the 19th century emigrant experience would be interesting for most mid-western Americans. The writing is as "salt of the earth" as the simple people it describes. Short and well-defined chapters made for good bedtime reading.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ •

From Library Journal
Published between 1951 and 1961, Moberg's four-volume "Emigrant" epic offers the saga of the Swedish immigrant's role in the settling of the American frontier.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
Book One introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their 3 young children, and 11 others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Smland in 1850.

My Pentalogue of the Decalogue

I finished watching all ten of the Dekalog films by Krzysztof Kieslowski. There is a helpful synopsis and introduction of the films on the Facets Multimedia website.

Overall I found them to be really interesting and thought provoking. For a ten-film series, each with its own cinematographer, the collection of films is remarkably consistent. The stories are disturbingly interesting and the acting is very good.

My pick for the best five of the ten movies to be 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7.