Lift Up Your Hearts!

I Am David (2003, PG)

Six years ago, my sister-in-law informed me that one of my favorite books, Anne Holm’s North to Freedom, had been made into a movie called I Am David.  Let this serve as an encouragement (?) to those who think I’ll never follow through on their recommendations:  Last week, we finally saw the movie.

Let me get the standard litany out of the way:  The movie isn’t nearly as good as the book.  It takes the plot, the setting, and the characters, but loses most of what makes the book sublime.  To be fair, translating David’s thoughts and transformations to film is probably impossible.  This may explain why I rarely find watching a movie to be an exalting experience.

That said, I Am David is very much a worthwhile movie to see.  It is the story of 12-year-old David’s escape from the only life he can remember:   the Communist prison camp in which he was raised, primarily by a man named Johannes.

(Johannes, incidentally, is from the Alsace region of France, and in consequence David’s journey takes him through Basel, a fact that escaped me on previous readings of the book, since at the time Basel had no particular significance for me.  That part is missing from the movie, however, so don’t be looking for shots of the Münster.  In fact, all of the movie—with scenes in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark—was filmed in Bulgaria.)

Ben Tibber, who plays David, does a better job than many adult actors I’ve seen; his face got him the job, and he makes great use of it for wordless expression.  Jim Caviezel plays Johannes so movingly that I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that he also played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

The PG rating is because of some violent prison camp scenes, but the movie does a great job of suggesting the horror without being unnecessarily graphic.  My primary complaint, other than the loss of the most important parts of the book, is that several of the movie’s characters are less pleasant than in the book—the Italian sailor demanding a bribe, rather than simply helping David, for example.

Naturally, I strongly suggest reading North to Freedom rather than watching the movie, but if you’re not going to read the book, I Am David would be a great addition to your video experience.

Daniel May: The Tall and the Small
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

Christopher Wilkins, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin

The first work on the program was a tribute to Jonathan May, onetime director of the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra, who died unexpectedly last year.  The Tall and the Small was composed by May's brother, and his wife, Maureen, played the solo cello parts.  I was impressed that she was able to perform this without breaking down.  The most exciting aspect of the piece, however, was that it was composed for double string orchestra, the "Tall" orchestra being the OPO, and the "Small" orchestra made up of student musicians.  I'm sure that performing with the OPO was quite a thrill for them—not to mention sharing the program with Joshua Bell.  At the risk of making some of my readers feel old, I'll mention that they had auditioned for the job via YouTube!

I like Sibelius, so perhaps if I were more familiar with his first symphony I would have enjoyed it more.  As it was, I confess I found both pre-intermission works rather soporific.  Looking around, it was apparent I was not the only one.

But only a terminal narcoleptic could have slept during the second half.

I've spoken before of my concern about the superstar phenomenon that destroys the "middle class" in music, sports, and many other fields.  Yet there is no doubt that Bell's superstardom is deserved.  As is that of the Stradivarius he plays.  Never have I heard so many textures come from a single instrument.  And what high notes!  What harmonics!  Years ago, when I asked one of Janet's violin teachers how he knew where to place his finger when leaping to the far reaches of the fingerboard, he replied, "You stab and hope."  Bell stabs and knows.  What's more, despite his appearing to have put in his 10,000 hours on this concerto alone, the performance conveyed an almost playful delight.

As an encore, he began with what sounded like a reprise of the magical cadenza from the first movement, but which quickly turned into a fiery cadenza for Yankee Doodle.

The full-house audience was appreciative and enthusiastic, with many unable to restrain themselves from a premature standing ovation after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky.  I confess:  I applauded, too.  You just had to; it was that transcendent.  Joshua Bell made the news four years ago for being decidedly under appreciated when he played the part of a street musician in a Washington, D.C. Metro station.  As unobservant as I can be when focussed on the goal at hand, I like to think I could not have passed such music by without standing, transfixed and open-mouthed.  Then again, I've always had a soft spot for street musicians.

Whatever it cost the OPO to bring Bell to Orlando, I'm glad they did.  His performance of the Tchaikovsky was like a meal at the Cheval Blanc in Basel.

How can you take a book without one single battle scene and turn it into an action movie?

"How" is actually quite well answered by the makers of the most recent attempt to bring Narnia to Hollywood, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  But what I really meant by the question was, "Why would you want to do so, and where do you get the audacity?  If you want to tell a different story, why take someone else's character names and setting?"

But I've sung this same song a lot recently, most notably for The Lord of the Rings and the first two Narnia films, and it's getting wearisome.  If I'm tired of movies that rip the heart and beauty out of a book and try to pass their new creation off as the real thing, then others are surely tired of me whining about it.  Perhaps the action film, bratty teen, and self-esteem genres are the "heart language" of today, and the filmmakers should be commended for speaking to people in a language they can hear.  Maybe the door will open a crack for what I see as the true beauty and wonder of the books. (More)

We slept well until 4:30 a.m.  That sounds early, but it’s not unusual for us to start the day ony an hour later.  Not bad at all, considering Hawaiian clocks—in the summertime—are six hours skewed from Florida’s.

(My current approach to combatting jet lag is to sleep as much as possible on the plane, but not to make an effort to sleep.  Once upon a time I acted as if I could get a full night’s sleep on an overnight flight:  brushing my teeth, wearing eye covers, and settling down as much as is possible in a coach-class set, with a pillow and a blanket.  After several flights with marginal success at best, I decided to ignore my watch altogether.  After boarding, I settle down to enjoy myself, usually with a book or my World of Puzzles magazine.  I’m at the stage of life where it’s easy to doze—actually, I’ve been at that stage for at least 40 years—so when I feel sleepy, I set the book down and allow myself to snooze.  I rarely even bother to take off my glasses; I just lean back and sleep.  When I wake, I pick up where I left off and begin the cycle again.  I find this much more satisfactory, because I’m no longer annoyed by announcements, food  carts, or neighbors who must get out of their seats.  If they wake me up, they’ve only disturbed a short nap, not my “night’s rest.”  I no longer worry that I’m “supposed” to be sleeping.   I enjoy the flight more, and adjustment to the new time schedule comes more easily.)

We would have liked to make a faster start to the day, but had a morning appointment with our “personal concierge,” who would help us plan our week, including the mandatory timeshare presentation.  She was actually very helpful, with useful suggestions for places to stop on our around-the-island tour.  She was also able to reschedule our presentation, which had originally been placed in the middle of the day, a most annoying and wasteful time.

The first meeting accomplished, we headed out of the Hilton property to the shopping/restaurant area at the entrance to the resort.  (The resort is more than the Hilton sites, although they constitute a large part of it.)  There we made a breakfast of “Japanese Tempura Style Fish and Chips” (and shrimp).  Delicious!

Unless you consider fish & chips for breakfast a bit odd, there was nothing about its onset to indicate how incredible this day would be. (More)

I'm still working on Hawaii, Day 2, so today you get to see the souvenir we brought home—for the worms.

It's billed as a compostable cup, and was of excellent quailty for drinking.  According the the manufacturer,

Please note that composting is required for biodegradation. These cups will biodegrade within 180 days in a commercial composting facility but can take up to a year or more to biodegrade in a home composting system.

We will see what the worms make of it.  I suspect it will take quite a while for them to have an impact on the cup:  they prefer their food in small pieces, preferably soft.  They will eat the mushier parts first, leaving harder pieces until bugs and microbes have degraded them somewhat—see the piece of corn cob to the right of the cup.

If a good neighbor is one who watches out for your home while you are gone, and a great neighbor takes care of your mail and pets (even if there are 10,000 of them), what can you say about a neighbor who will take you to the airport at 4:30 in the morning?  That was the first leg of our trip to Hawaii.  (Technically, “Hawai‘i,” with the left single quote, but I’m going with the simplified spelling.)

Hawaii?  What were we doing there?  That’s what I asked myself. (More)

Here's a quick story for you while I work on the Hawaii posts.  First the bad news.  The report is from Australia, but the practice is legal in America, though they are supposed to tell us about it in the fine print.

Yes, it's Frankenfood—but you can't deny it has a coolness factor, too.

As far as I can tell, there are two major problems:

1. Contamination.  Those of us who like our beef to be mooing know that a rare hamburger is much riskier than a rare steak.  With the steak, even brief cooking kills surface bacteria, but with the hamburger the "surface" has been mixed all through the patty.  Thanks to meat glue, your piece of meat may look like a steak yet have all the contamination risks of a burger.
2. Dishonesty.  It's like the carton of juice that proudly proclaims, "Unsweetened," but in the fine print admits it contains sucralose.  I wouldn't make using transglutaminase illegal, but I would require a clear, open acknowlegement that the food is not natural.

Don't ban the foods; be honest and let the consumer decide.

This is the best thing to do with a soda bottle since Diet Coke and Mentos.  The insructions are clear, and the cost of materials low.  I know some grandchildren who would love it.  (H/T Conversion Diary.)

Outliers:  The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2008)

Malcolm Gladwell’s books always turn my mind upside down.  He may not always be right, but he’s always exciting.

What makes a superstar?  What differentiates Bill Gates from the average computer geek, the Beatles from a garage band, the top athletes from the wannabes?  Talent, certainly, and hard work—but Outliers reveals that the most critical factors are often surprising, even random.

The 10,000 hour rule  Talent, we generally believe, is something we are born with.  Intelligence, musical ability, athletic skill:  you either have it, or you don’t.  There is more excuse than truth there, however.  There is a threshold of talent required in any field, but beyond that, experience is the all-important key.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing that makes you good.

Study after study has shown that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class expertise in any field.  That’s 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of a full-time job—for five years.  The opportunity to get those 10,000 hours, at the right place and time, makes superstars.  For Bill Gates it was a series of unusual circumstances, beginning in middle school, that gave him access to computers that even most college students did not have.  Before he dropped out of Harvard to make history, Gates had been programming for well over 10,000 hours.

Thanks to a chance encounter—and some illicit incentive—the Beatles found themselves in a set of gigs that required an extraordinarily long performance commitment:  up to eight hours per night, seven days a week.  It was the making of the group.  By the time they came to America in 1964, they had some 1200 live performances under their guitar straps.

Or, as Shinichi Suzuki said, “Skill equals knowledge plus 10,000 times.”  Another gem from the Suzuki world (though I’ve seen it attributed in several ways, most commonly to Vince Lombardi):  Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.  Clearly one must put more into those 10,000 hours than just time. (More)

Sabbath, by Dan B. Allender (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009)

Mystical poets who enjoy attempting to express the inexpressible may find working through Allender's Sabbath a productive exercise, but those looking for a practical, rational discourse on how to honor the Sabbath Day will find themselves banging their heads in frustration.  I know I did.

It's clear that Allender has experienced an otherworldly delight in his own celebration of the Sabbath; unfortunately, like many mystics of old, his attempts at sharing that experience fall flat.  First, there is a language barrier.  Poetical prose as a literary device can work, but like straight poetry it takes effort to make out the sense, and even then you're not sure you've got it right.  When you're expecting an informative book, the attempt at poetic language quickly becomes annoying. (More)

The Mother Tongue:  English and How It Got that Way (first published 1991, reissued by Perennial 2001) and Troublesome Words (first published 1984, revised 1997, reissued by Penguin Books 2009), both by Bill Bryson

My father and my sister-in-law became hooked on Bill Bryson as a writer; perhaps it is now my turn.

For the first twelve chapters, The Mother Tongue is an accessible, page-turning look at the English language:  where it came from, why it’s so popular, and how it came to be simultaneously one of the easiest and one of the hardest languages to learn. (More)

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh;
the Father on his sapphire throne
expects his own anointed Son.

I love Ride On!  Ride On in Majesty! for its profound overview of Holy Week.  We sang it this past Sunday, to the Winchester New tune, and as always I was especially moved by the verse above.  Last year I was inspired by those words to consider the effect of Good Friday on Jesus' parents.  Today I am struck by the realization that Easter was not a surprise, nor an afterthought, nor a Plan B.  In the drama of Holy Week, all scenes—from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday—point toward the finale:  Easter.  The Author includes some dark, excruciating (literally) moments, but the triumphant last scene is never out of His sight.

Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
Bow Thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, Thy power, and reign.

Music is such a personal, touchy subject—as is worship.  Put them together and you might as well be mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.  Nonetheless I will boldly go where too many have gone before, in order to draw attention to “Pop Goes the Worship,” an interview in Christianity Today (March 2011) with T. David Gordon, author of Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns:  How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal.

I wasn’t expecting much when I began the article (who writes these titles, anyway?), but was quickly drawn in.  A sure way to my heart is to say what I’ve been saying myself, or wanted to say, only much better and with authority.  The article is worthwhile in its entirety; here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite—or raise your blood pressure.  [Emphasis in the following is mine]

T. David Gordon argues that modern worship choruses have trumped hymns in many congregations because for decades, we have been inundated with pop music—to the point that many of us don't know better. If you eat nothing but Big Macs, Gordon says, you will never appreciate a filet mignon.

Regarding church music, Gordon says, media ecologists should ask how music, "once a participatory thing, became a passive thing. What happens when people who used to sing folk music around the house are now surrounded by Muzak? How does that alter our sensibilities of music?"

Many are promoting an "aesthetic" that it is our duty to patronize living artists and not artists who are dead. Should we also not read books that are more than 50 years old, or enter buildings that are more than 50 years old? Christians aren't abandoning their buildings, and they haven't stopped reading Spurgeon or Edwards or Luther or Calvin. We haven't rejected other art forms that are not new. We've done so only with music.

Unless an individual chooses to listen to different kinds of music, the only thing that individual will hear (most of the time) is pop. Sure, one's sensibilities can be shaped deliberately, and many of us have developed tastes that we once did not have. (I spent years cultivating a taste for Brahms, whom I now love, and I spent about two years cultivating my appreciation for jazz.) If I did not believe that sensibilities could be cultivated, I wouldn't have written the book; it is, in some senses, a plea to shape them differently from the way commercial pop culture shapes them. But for people who do not take ownership of the cultivation of their sensibilities, other cultural gatekeepers will shape them for them—and in this case, they will shape them to prefer pop.

 (More)

It's not the New York Times, or even the Hartfort Courant, but I'll thank the East Haddam-Haddam Patch for their article on the quilt show, and their mention of Phoebe's Quilt.  (H/T PJS)  As is true with most newspaper articles I've known the truth about, this one manages to tell gist of the story accurately while erring in the details.

One of the most interesting ... had to be Prudence Sloane’s quilt.

“I inherited a trunk from my mother, this was in the bottom of it,” Sloane said. The quilt contained the names of family ancestors stitched into it.

It turned out the quilt belonged to Phoebe (Burr) Scovil, Sloane’s first cousin four times removed. It was most likely a wedding present from friends and family around 1849. Sewn into each square section of the quilt was a different person’s name.

Sloane’s sister-in-law, Linda Wightman, who was very interested in the family’s genealogy, did research on all the names of the people on the quilt. Wightman even went to Boston to investigate the names in a genealogy library.

Wightman made a booklet and gave it to Sloane as a Christmas present with information on Phoebe and how each person sewn into the quilt was related to her.

The quilt actually belonged to Phoebe L. (Scovil) Bonfoey, who is, indeed, Prudence's first cousin four times removed (and my fourth cousin four times removed, for that matter).  Phoebe (Burr) Scovil was her mother.  The creation of the quilt was most likely around 1849, the year one of the signers died and one, who signed with her married name, got married.  Phoebe herself married Horace A. Bonfoey in 1852.

To say that I "even went to Boston to investigate the names in a genealogy library" sounds rather pathetic unless you realize that I, unlike the quilt, don't live in Connecticut.  In any case it's not something to be impressed about; whenever I make the (all too rare) visit to Boston, New York, Hartford, or other research hot spot, it's for a lot more than just the quilt.  Most of my research for this project was done using the amazing resources available online.  That's not to say I couldn't have walked to Boston in the time it took me to gather the information—not true, but at times it felt like it.

And, hey—they spelled my name right!  I'm sure I have Prudence to thank for that.

I created a Wordle picture of all the surnames I have associated with the people who made Phoebe's Quilt:  maiden and married names, names of parents, spouses, and spouses' parents.  (Click on the image for a larger view.)