1. Teachers can't just flip a switch and, when facing a new group of students, just automatically do what they've always done in the past. Because this is true and because Debbie has started a new job in a school she's never taught full-time in before, she is, in many ways, starting from scratch as she gets started with this new school year. There's nothing wrong about the fact that Pinehurst Elementary School has next to nothing in common with Charlemagne, where Debbie taught in Eugene, or with Dora Kennedy, where Debbie taught in Greenbelt. Charlemagne and Dora Kennedy had little in common with each other. Because different schools in different parts of the USA are so different from one another, for Debbie it means all new work getting things going and she spent much of the day today -- and she'll do the same on Sunday -- working, figuring things out, performing administrative tasks required by the school administration, in short, making a transition from work she'd done over the past fourteen years to the work she will be doing in 2022-23. She's completely dedicated to her work and to these children.
2. This afternoon, Debbie took a break and suggested we order take out from the GarrenTeed BBQ food truck, located at 110 N. Hill on the east side of the street near the intersection of Hill and Bunker here in Kellogg.
GarrenTeed BBQ is set up to fill online orders, so Debbie jumped on the World Wide Web and ordered me a couple pieces of chicken with mild BBQ sauce and two sides, baked beans and GarrenTeed BBQ's own Fire Crack Mac and Cheese -- made with pepper jack cheese. Debbie ordered a brisket sandwich with Cole slaw.
I knew I'd enjoy the sides, especially the creamy, spicy Mac and Cheese. I'm not crazy about BBQ, normally, so I didn't know what I'd think of my chicken.
Thanks to the sweetness of the mild BBQ sauce and seasoning and moistness of the chicken, I liked the meat a lot and would gladly and eagerly order this meal again. I couldn't eat the entire meal in one sitting and enjoyed having some leftover chicken later in the evening.
Debbie also enjoyed her brisket sandwich and cole slaw and I'm thinking we'll be return customers, not only because we enjoyed this meal so much, but also because of the ease of ordering online and the fact that we live so close to the GarrenTeed BBQ Food Truck.
Want to take a peek at the menu? It's here.
3. Not knowing just what to expect, today I watched the earliest of the movies available in the James Wong Howe collection over on the Criterion Channel.
The movie is Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and features Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell.
To my delight, this movie developed into a thoughtful exploration of justice, of a moral dilemma that arose pitting the demands of the letter of the law against the feelings associated with love and longtime friendship.
It's not a remake of The Merchant of Venice, but the movie does explore questions of when must the law (and punishment) be strictly applied and when is it morally acceptable to set the law aside and act merciful, to relax the imposition of the law because of fellow feeling, of love for another.
I won't go into any more detail nor will I reveal what the characters involved in this dilemma decided to do.
I'll just say that as the movie drew to a close, I felt I was back to my younger days, discussing the plays of Shakespeare again, trying to sort out questions that ultimately have no absolute answers.
In addition to the movie's philosophical stimulation, James Wong Howe's work as the Director of Photography of Manhattan Melodrama delighted me.
The movie presented him with a wide range of challenges. Several scenes in the movie portrayed not only crowds of people, but some of these crowded scenes were chaotic and Howe filmed these masterfully, both on land and in water, alternating between pictures taken from a distance as the chaos boiled and pictures taken close up, inviting us into the emotion of these chaotic scenes.
In addition, I thought his work filming the scenes at Sing Sing late in the movie was exquisite, especially the way he cast shadows of the prison bars over the characters involved, augmenting the sense of the characters being themselves imprisoned in lifelong relationship they cannot escape. He also created some masterful shots from behind the prison bars looking outward as the prison scenes concluded.
In other words, I saw in this very early work of James Wong Howe's early evidence of the versatility that would come to mark his entire career and evidence of his sensitivity to the way his photographic images enhance the movie by integrating the visual images he creates with the emotional substance of the story the movie tells.
No comments:
Post a Comment