Site Title

recent posts

about

Category: MBH Essays

  • 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…

  • Maple Sugaring Along the Mohawk Trail

    When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England. Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants. Colonists first learned about…

  • Cell Phone Distractions

    I was heartened to learn that author Ann Patchett does not use a cell phone.  I do, but rarely.  People watching is so much more interesting.  One Sunday in September I was breakfasting in a self-serve restaurant in Freeport, Maine, sitting across from a father and young daughter, most likely a divorced dad who had…

  • 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…

  • Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

    In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and…

  • Pyrex vs. Depression Glass

                                                    Green Depression Glass (photograph: Steven Sternbach) I first encountered the fashion for “vintage Pyrex” a decade ago when I discovered that the mother of a Japanese student I was tutoring shopped for it regularly in antique and second hand stores,…

  • 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.…

  • From Thanksgiving to Christmas

     We spent our first Halloween at Mill Brook several years ago, and to mark the occasion, we purchased three pumpkins, one large and two small, and placed them by the front porch.  It poured rain, so no tricker-or-treaters came; they weren’t used to having us there for that holiday anyway, but the pumpkins remained until…

  • 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…