History lives

It’s walked out of the books and onto the screen.

My grandfather collected books about Lincoln. Abraham, not Nebraska. I’ve read a few of them. Not all, by any means. So, I know a bit about our 16th president.

Most citizens of the United States do.

He’s one of the few that everybody remembers and everybody reveres.

Sometimes, we forget he was a masterful politician.

Go see Stephen Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln.

It’s going to sweep the awards. It deserves to do so.

What a gorgeous film on practically every level.

The acting—across the board—superb! Daniel Day-Lewis is the Lincoln I would have requisitioned if I could have imagined the perfect actor—and my imagination would have fallen short of this performance. The supporting cast: David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, Sally Field, Hal Holbrook and countless others disappear into the time and the story and the persons. After the first flash of recognition, all their star qualities, the tricks and trademarks, vanish as if they had never been. We are watching William Seward, Thaddeus Stephens, W. N. Bilbo, Mary Todd Lincoln, Preston Blair.

The script is fascinating. Based largely on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals, Tony Kushner has transcended the usual bio pic to give an in-depth study of the machinations surrounding the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The wheeling and dealing, the lofty ideals and the base political machinations are all laid out before us.

The cinematography is beautiful. The film is shot in a palette almost indescribable. Suffice it to say that the historical details of setting and costume are crisp and clean, and yet, the whole thing has a patina of age, a not-quite-sepia tone of old photographs.

The direction—okay, I have a few quibbles—but the overall achievement is of such high quality that I’m not going to pick nits.

The score—one of the few movie soundtracks I feel I ought to buy.

I am going to buy the DVD. The minute I can.

This movie is a FIND. With a capital F.I.N.D. Run—with a capital R—to see it.

Roses in December

“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
~J. M. Barrie

Today, I am wondering where my mind went.

I nearly forgot to do this blog post. How is that possible? I know I have to do a daily blog post. I’ve done one, day after day, for months. Nearly six months now. And, today, it is only by accident, it seems, that there will be something appearing.

I thought of it several times yesterday. I had a couple of topics in mind.

And then. . .I forgot.

This is a somewhat disturbing trend.

Definitely something to wonder about—where my mind went.

On the other hand, one could wonder about the equally amazing phenomenon that nearly the first thing I thought of when I awoke—far too early this morning—was OMG! I never did my blog post.

Memory is a strange thing.

An odd tightrope.

Sometimes, it seems like the more you put into it the more it can hold. When I am very, very busy with multiple projects and hundreds of details, I can often track them like a bloodhound. When I have less to do, it’s like the old brain goes on a slow boat to Bermuda.

Sometimes, though, when I am very, very busy with multiple projects and hundreds of details, the whole thing springs a leak. Multiple leaks. Things start slipping through the cracks, and the cracks—well, they start to resemble the proverbial sieve. Then, when I have less to do, a single-minded purpose, that one thing can become nearly an obsession.

An odd tightrope.

Some days, you over-balance in one direction; some days, it’s the other.

I’ve always had a really good memory. It’s a bit disconcerting when this kind of thing happens. As I get older, too, the occasional missed connection gets more worrying. Is this a trend? I wonder.

I think I’ll spend part of today learning a poem or something.

Memory is a muscle, too.

And I like roses. . .December or otherwise.

(But first, I’m going back to bed. Later, ‘gators.)

Why?

I’m just asking.

Why do men—and it must be said—men of a certain age begin to yell at the TV during news broadcasts?

I know no women who do this. (Not saying that there aren’t any—just that I don’t know them.)

Is it, perhaps, because their early spectator training is ball games? Where yelling at the ref is part of the experience?

It just seems a singularly futile thing to do. To say nothing of clearly being bad for one’s blood pressure.

Can’t we all agree that the pundits are going to talk over each other? That they are going to focus on domestic politics when you want to know about the Middle East? Or spend all their time on the Middle East when you want to know what happened with that hurricane? That the ones with whom you don’t agree are going to say utterly ridiculous and stupid things—while interrupting the ones with whom you do agree in a singularly crass and boorish manner?

And can’t we further agree that all those people in the little box? They can’t hear you.

I know when you were children—or, in some cases, when your children were children—that Miss Sally may have looked through her magic mirror and read off your name. And, yes, you could draw a bridge that helped Winky Dink cross the river. But, generally speaking, you really have no capacity to affect the behavior of those on the goggle box.

(The Kool-Aid Bunny Man did come to our house once. But that is another story, and nothing to do with yelling at the television set. In fact, I’m pretty sure the Bunny Man would have frowned on that. )

I’m sure the men I’ve heard yelling at the TV don’t think they’re really making a difference. I’m sure they are just blowing off steam. I just wonder where the dividing line comes between the point where you observe television quietly and the point where you launch into diatribes.

Hint: I think it’s around retirement age.

Maybe it comes with the gold watch?

Inside and Out

Mis-spending my life?

Emily Christensen (I’m sorry—I don’t know who she is) once said that a clean house is the sign of a misspent life.

This may be true. Certainly, there are more significant things one could be doing than sweeping floors.

But, I’ll tell you this. I’m sort of enjoying my currently—quite possibly temporarily—orderly house.

I was chatting over the last couple of days with various people who have been looking at the house next door. It’s recently gone on the market, and a lot of folks seem to be interested in it. It’s in a prime location, doesn’t need much work, and the price is pretty good. The realtors all seem to think it’s going to sell quickly.

The would-be purchasers have all had the usual questions. Do you like the neighborhood? How long has the house been empty? Is there anything wrong with it? And, because we live on the water, what about flooding?

What’s interesting to me is they almost all say very complimentary things about our house.

Mostly, I see the fogged window panes that need replacing and the parts of the lawn that are mostly weeds and the cracks in the driveway and the treehouse that needs drastic renovation.

Their enthusiasm has caused me to take a good look at it again.

And I’ve realized how far we’ve come since we moved into Casa Lagarto. Yes, there is still a long way to go. But. . .a new roof, the river rocks in all the flower beds, a front door instead of plywood, a roof on the dock, all the exterior trim painted, a new a/c system, new carpet in three rooms, furniture for the master bedroom, furniture for the guest room, the whole interior painted, a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, two termite-damaged walls replaced.

That’s a lot.

And. . .there are the results of my hour-a-day cleaning and hour-a-day yard work.

At the moment, however long it lasts, there’s no clutter and no dust. The driveway and sidewalks are edged, the flower beds weeded. There are some leaves—because the dang Wizard of Oz trees shed from October to March—but the bulk of them have been raked and mowed and handled. The ligustrum has been trimmed. And the pittosporum.

We’re looking pretty good.

Inside and out.

It’s a miracle.

I plan to enjoy it while it lasts. (Check back with me next week!)

You just never know…

What you may come to.

I spent part of the last two days vacuuming a ceiling.

Let me say that again.

I spent part of the last two days vacuuming a ceiling.

This is not a sentence I thought I would ever write in my life.

Certainly, with any vacuum I’ve ever had up until now, it would have been impossible to write it with any degree of truth. I have a central vacuum now, however, so there’s a long, LONG hose and many attachments. Hence, vacuuming a ceiling is a possibility.

In my laundry room—which is “unfinished” to a large extent—it just suddenly seemed like a good idea. The room has—I guess they call it a dropped ceiling or a suspended ceiling. So, it has these tiles—which surely need to be replaced as they have not stood up well to some leaks prior to our ownership. Trouble is, they don’t all need to be replaced—only I can’t find any matching tiles so the whole thing is just one of the million or so items on the To Do list.

In the meantime, I thought I would turn my attention to cleaning the laundry room in my one-hour-a-day plan. While I was at it, I vacuumed the tiles. I just stuck the brush attachment on the end of the wand and ran the whole thing over the tiles.

Darned if they don’t look better. (Not good, mind you. Just better.)

The whole time I was doing it, however, I was in a state of bemusement because I was vacuuming the ceiling!

And, you know? I expect I may be vacuuming other ceilings eventually. It’s an old house with a crow’s foot texture on the ceiling in all the other rooms. Looks like a dust catcher to me.

On the one hand, I feel nostalgic for the days when I kept the vacuum on the floor. On the other, well, it amused me quite a bit—and provided a blog post, so, hey!

You really just never know.

And now?

Here we are.

With any kind of luck at all, we have a clear winner in the U.S. Presidential election. I’m writing this as the returns are coming in (what? you think I get up at the crack of dawn to do this?)

At just about midnight, all the major networks have called the race for President Obama. However, the Romney campaign is not conceding, at the moment.

It doesn’t look like they have a path to victory where the math is possible, but they’re holding out. This seems to be part of a trend. Facts don’t count. We don’t believe data. We don’t believe science.

I wonder today, on this Wondering Wednesday, why anybody wonders why we have a problem with education.

However, it is fair to make sure that the votes have been counted. I’m okay with that, although I’d like to be able to go to bed knowing it’s settled.

And I wonder if this—once it is settled—means that we might get an actual working government where people realize not everybody can have exactly what they want and compromise is not always a bad thing.

Because there’s one thing I don’t wonder—and that is that we cannot go forward if people don’t get out of the way.

I’m going to bed thinking and hoping that this is a good day for the United States of America.

(UPDATE: It’s 1 am and Mr. Romney has conceded. It is over, and it is a good day for the United States of America. I still wonder if we can move forward, but I have higher hopes than I did yesterday.)

Do you know what time it is?

I’m not sure you do.

Too many clocks. Too many different settings.

In case you forgot, last night—Saturday—or, really, some time this morning—here in the U.S., we were supposed to set our clocks back to accommodate the switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard Time.

I went around and did it yesterday afternoon since I had nowhere I had to be later Saturday in a timely manner. In other words, other than any possible TV shows I might want to watch, it didn’t matter to me what time it was.

There are people who don’t bother. They use their computers and their cell phones—devices that are supposed to change automatically. My problem with that is that I have noticed that the phone companies don’t always change the time until Monday. The subways never did. And the computer. . .well, let’s just say my trust level is low. I was unduly influenced, perhaps, by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or by the Blue Screen of Death. It doesn’t bode well for any chance of me turning the driving over to a computerized car, does it? My PC may change back to Standard Time on time, but, you know, my Palm Pilot changed about two weeks ago. I guess it never got the message about the new, extended Daylight Savings Time.

Anyway, there are the clocks that changed automatically and the clocks that are going to change automatically but haven’t yet and the clocks you changed manually and the clocks way up high on a shelf that you forgot to change and the clocks you changed manually but accidentally mixed up the AM and PM and the clocks that are off anyway because the power went out for twenty minutes last Tuesday and the wristwatch in the back of the drawer and so on.

To say nothing of your body clock which is going to have you waking up at 4 or 5 am for the next few days no matter what the other clocks say.

Good luck with all that.

An unending supply of dirt

Actual dirt.

Not gossip or scandal or anything like that.

I’m talking about dirt. Erosion. Because I have been noticing for some time now that the yard is trying to take back the driveway. Little by little, the lawn has crept over the edge.

We’ll set aside the fact that I have plenty of bare spots on the lawn itself—where, you know, if the grass wanted to move somewhere, there would be little, if any, resistance. Or, wait. Let’s not. Set it aside, I mean. What possesses the grass to try to grow over and through the concrete driveway instead of turning around and nestling into the nice soft dirt?! I think the grass might be in cahoots with my Wizard of Oz trees. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but, seriously, what possible benign reason could there be for trying to grow on concrete?

Anyway, I’ve been noticing this encroachment, and yesterday, I decided I would have to do something about it. I started out using my weed whacker as an edger—a task at which it is surprisingly effective. However, there came a point on the driveway where I was going to have to trim back about a foot (a foot!) of dirt and grass.

Enter the grubbing hoe. The grubbing hoe is a very nice implement. I like it. Using it, I found the edge of the driveway again. And I dislodged most of the dirt and grass that had crept over it.

But I live in Florida, and the dirt is mostly sand, and pretty much as fast as you remove the side of a hill, the hill slides down.

An unending supply of dirt.

Next stop. The home improvement store.

I guess it’s time to get some of that plastic edging until one of two things happens. Either the remaining grass will put out tendrils and roots to anchor the sand, or we will have the time, energy, funds, and artistic sense to come up with something better. Meanwhile, I’m going to end that unending supply of dirt!

What becomes a legend most?

Sharing their stories!

Everybody loves behind-the-scenes info. Don’t they? I know I do. I love to hear how writers and actors and producers got started, what they remember most about their work experiences, what advice they have for others aspiring to similar achievements. It’s fascinating.

Of course, it’s best if it’s someone whose work you know, but an opportunity to hear from someone you’ve never happened to encounter is a gift, too. It can open your eyes to treasures you might not otherwise find.

Agnes de Mille came to speak at my college once. I’d heard of her. I knew she was, famously, the choreographer for the original Oklahoma. What I didn’t know and was delighted to discover was that she was a terrifically entertaining speaker and a wonderful writer. I went and found her books, learned a great deal and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Harold Clurman, John Houseman, Vincent Price—all became doors into new information once I had the opportunity to hear them talk.

So imagine my glee when I stumbled upon a website created by the Television Academy Foundation which hosts over 700 oral history interviews conducted in-depth with the legends of television.

EmmyTvLegends.org

There are over 3000 hours of interviews with actors, writers, directors, newscasters, tv executives, technical gurus and more. And they are not drive-by, promote-the-project-of-the-moment interviews. They are hours-long, thoughtful discussions. What I always thought talk shows should be and almost never are. (Dick Cavett’s show being a notable exception.)

It’s all fascinating. Sometimes funny, sometimes inspiring, sometimes eye-opening. The interviewers are good. They ask excellent questions, and they stay out of the way. Interesting facts come to light, and personalities are revealed.

You can spend a lot of time there. So, be warned. But spending your time in the company of some of our most creative people? Is there any better way?

Double trouble

Two for the price of one.

Today, I’m going to share with you two tips, from my frequent encounters with productivity gurus, that seem to be mutually exclusive. (Like those old adages that contradict each other. Great minds think alike. Fools minds run in the same channel, etc.)

These are To Do list tips. Productivity proposals.

Here’s the first tip:

Often, we are advised to do some of the simplest things on our task lists first. The theory is that it gives you a sense of progress. It’s encouraging. Crossing things off makes you want to cross more things off. You feel like you are actually accomplishing something.

For that very reason, one of my friends sometimes retroactively lists tasks she has completed just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. In this case, they aren’t necessarily simple tasks, but they’re already done! This is a variation I particularly like because you run no risk of the uncrossed item becoming an incomplete burden.

Remember, this works best if you actualize your list—by which I mean that you have to actually write it down. Or type it up. It’s got to exist in a somewhat tangible form—even if the form is the one-step-removed version on your monitor. It can’t just be in your head, or you can’t cross anything off. (It’s much less satisfying to just let something fade away out of your memory. Big red check marks. Big black lines. That’s the ticket.)

So, that’s one way to go. Do the easy stuff first. Build momentum. See results.

The second tip is the exact opposite:

Do the hard thing, the thing you’ve been avoiding, the thing that’s hanging over your head like that old sword of Damocles, that’s a lead weight in the pit of your stomach. Just get it over with—because the energy that comes from being released from that pressure will sweep you through the next several items on the list in no time flat.

Chances are, in fact, that the thing you’ve been avoiding is a thing that will make a much bigger difference than five or six of the easy things. That’s just one of those unfortunate realities of life. Most things worth doing are hard. Most difficult things, when accomplished, move us farther forward than the easy things. (Broccoli is better for us than potato chips, too—and isn’t that unfair?)

Tackle the hard stuff. Just do it. Get ‘er done, as they say.

Which of these methods is the best?

It kind of depends—on how much sleep you had the night before, on how easy the easy stuff is and how hard the hard stuff is, on a lot of things. I tend toward the first way—doing the easy stuff—because I’m lazy. And it works in a lot of ways a lot of the time. But I’ve also, on occasion, leap-frogged forward by forcing myself to deal with big, complicated, difficult tasks.

The most important advice, I guess, is—whether you go the easy route or take the harder path—do something. Keep moving forward.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
—Theodore Roosevelt

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

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