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Category: Art

  • Perfect Days: A Wenders/Ozu Mash-up

    Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day.  Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many…

  • Kagoshima, Mon Amour

    My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is…

  • Wim Wenders’ Salt of the Earth

    I once wrote a book about Wim Wenders.  It covered the first 20 years of his career, his breakout years in Germany, where he became one of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, which sought to separate itself from the mostly mediocre studio films of Germany’s postwar economic-miracle era, and his foray into American…

  • Hong Kong University Book Talk on Ozu: A Closer Look

    If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94  

  • Dreams Deferred

    In his children’s book, A Home Run for Bunny, Western Mass author Robert Andersen tells the story of local heroes Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro and Tony King, high school athletes from Springfield, MA. Taliaferro, an immensely gifted African-American athlete, and King, captain of their American Legion summer baseball team, were set to compete in a regional championship.…

  • Over the River and Through the Woods

    Steven Sternbach, Holland Dell, Heath, MA*  One of our most memorable Thanksgiving dinners took place over a decade ago in New York’s Essex Hotel on Central Park South, where we were guests of our Manhattan relatives.  But through the decades “Over the River and Through the Woods” has conditioned most of us to think of a country…

  • The Ancestor

    Painting by Ammi Phillips, c. 1820 In 1956 my father drove our comparatively new Ford from Michigan to Phoenicia, New York, a town in the Catskills known today for skiing and tubing, to retrieve furnishings stored in the attic of Grace Longyear, my mother’s first cousin once removed. Among these were a delicately painted knock-off…

  • Josh Simpson, Glass Master

    Apart from Bill Cosby, whose reputation has suffered recently, our most famous local resident is probably glassmaker Josh Simpson. I first encountered Simpson’s work years ago at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, which owns one of his “megaplanets.” A Simpson “planet” is a spherical ball with shapes inside made with a variety of techniques and…

  • Woman in Gold

    We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening.  It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis.  Maria’s story, at least as…

  • Saving Mr. Banks and Philomena

    With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small…