Alma Sign
The little stone in the foreground was a silverware rest. I hadn’t seen anything like that before.
That’s a Farm Girl Saison from Lift Bridge Breweries in the foreground.
I’ve been thinking about the movie Tree of Life, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. A nice, attempted partial explication of the themes was written by Matt Zoller Seitz, but take a look at this quote:
Why is there a creation sequence? What does it mean?
It’s probably in there because Malick has been imagining the creation of the universe since he was a boy, and always wanted to see it depicted on a big screen.
This bothers me a little bit. Basically, Malick gets to produce this entire rambling piece that Seitz describes as a puzzle with no box art. Malick doesn’t do interviews. We don’t know what Malick truly intended. So, we have to place an enormous amount of trust in Malick, that he actually does have an overarching artistic vision.
What if he doesn’t?
If there’s no strict vision, then Malick gets to just toss in scenes of whatever he wants, whenever he wants to. The viewers and critics are forced to do intellectual backflips to connect dots that might not have even been meant to be connected.
I think I trust Malick, but I don’t really have any reason to do so. I’m not sure if all the dots are worth connecting.
“I’m not doing so well.”
My 84-year-old patient was nearing the end of another denture fitting appointment, and he had just accidentally spilled all of his water on the operatory floor. “No no,” I said, “you’re doing just fine.” Trying to reassure him, I couldn’t think of anything better to say.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I was not going to see my patient again. Shortly after that appointment, I was informed that he had to be transferred to hospice and would be unable to make any future appointments at the school. Still, a few months later, his words come to me every few days, reminding me of something important.
Biking along the Greenway today, my wife and I were happy: we will soon celebrate two years of marriage, we have years of happiness ahead, and are excited about the unpredictable nature of life. Like a path strewn with riches I don’t yet know of, my life winds away in front of me.
I’m just old enough to know I should enjoy what youth I still have.
I’m young enough to be able to execute.
But there’s still this poison that creeps in: as we biked along, I’m getting upset about something at school, or upset that there’s something in my eye, or angry that I didn’t pack sunscreen. The point is: loss of perspective is poison. It yanks you out of the experiential and into the narrative. And it happens to me with shameful frequency. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, my patient’s words crash through my shortsightedness: “I’m not doing so well.”
Alex, here you are, doing great. But you think there’s something wrong. You’ve got years ahead, but you’re stuck dwelling on short-term minutiae. You’ve got your health, but obsess over the jog you didn’t take. Inevitably, when I recall my patient’s words, I feel a sense of guilt. Somewhere, in a quiet room, my patient is sitting. He can’t do the things I can. His best years are behind him. He has family, but more often than not they’re elsewhere. He told me getting married was the best thing he ever did, but now his wife is gone.
Yet, I have the audacity to get upset over something in my eye.
We biked the Midtown Greenway today: headed over to Lake Calhoun and enjoyed the shops and biking. On the southwest side of the lake, there was a group of college kids that had set up a giant slip ‘n slide. We stopped and joined the spectators. One lady: “I couldn’t figure out why that girl was covered in soap!”
On our way back, we stopped at the connection between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, which turns 100 in two days. The plaque on the path there said that 100,000 people celebrated the joining of the two lakes, that celebrations last for a week, that the lakes were filled with whimsical floats, and that a symphony from New York came in to perform a march written expressly for the occasion.
This obituary for Huguette Clark, who recently died at the age of 104, may be one of the oddest I’ve ever read.
For the quarter-century that followed, Mrs. Clark lived in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches of crackers and sardines and watched television, most avidly “The Flintstones.” A housekeeper kept the dolls’ dresses impeccably ironed.
Odd, right? Take into further account that she had multiple estates around the country and lived most of her life on Fifth Avenue in New York.
Oh, and she was worth over 400 million dollars.
Her father was William A. Clark, a copper baron born in the 1800s. He built an absolutely astounding 121 bedroom mansion on Fifth Avenue. Here’s a picture, courtesy of the New York Times:
It was, in a stupendous act of stupidity and greed, knocked down in 1926 when restrictions on building height were lifted. Carter B. Horsley:
“No loss was viewed in retrospect to have been greater than that of Senator William Clark’s 121-room pile at Seventy-seventh Street, which was felled by the wrecker’s ball in 1926,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their book, “New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars,” (Rizzoli, 1988).
“Yet at the time only The New York Times appeared moved: ‘As for the Clark palace, it has been condemned unreasonably, indiscriminately. An echo of the architectural orgy of the Paris Exposition of 1900, its only fault is that it stops short of perfection in its kind. The inlaid gold leaf that decks its interior woodwork should have been spread upon its fantastic stonework without. Its astronomical tower should have been surmounted by an orrery with a sun of flame and planets of solid gold. It might thus have truly exemplified the senatorial mood of the eighteen-nineties, illumined by the ambitions of a doge.’
That was this woman’s home, for a time. With her, the last living memory of that house, that era, is gone. How small our scratches and turrets on the earth seem after time’s erosion.
Sighting: man smoking while rollerblading. I don’t think those activities cancel one another out.
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