Coming soon, 6 March 2026

Seen before a screening of Train Dreams. I really enjoyed it and felt very sympathetic in the wake of Piper's death towards the central character, Robert Grainier, who struggles after losing his wife and child. The Malickian shots which placed him in natural, non-man-made environments were gorgeous. They gave context for the character - a man at home in the woods, away from his fellow men. But he also seeks the company of a woman and has a child with her so he is no misanthrope Unabomber type fellow.

I'd like to read the book upon which the movie was based now.

Oh no! Andrew Scott!

Another one for the playlist

Another one for the divorce playlist.

This beautiful piece is soothing on rides through the country. Or anytime, really. There's a section about 19 minutes in that feels like it was used in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life as I envision Mrs. O'Brien floating above the grass as the crescendo builds. It's as if Nature and Grace come together.

The final 5 minutes or so features a pakhavaj (drum) and I love the gentle urgency that the rhythm provides.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 92 - Postlude: Malick-Almendros

(Don't forget to read entry #92.)

The Corona Diaries Vol. 92: Tintype the Light Fantastic

(early-June 2023)

(Watch the prelude.)

For her birthday, my Frau decided that she wanted to have our portrait, as well as a solo one where she is sporting her fancy new tiara, done on tintype. Tintype is a kind of photography where the emulsion is on a piece of iron. Since the only place in anything resembling close proximity to us that does tintype photos is the H.H. Bennett Studio, that meant we'd be taking a trip to the local tourist trap, Wisconsin Dells. I’d been there many times when I worked for the Wisconsin Historical Society and so I knew of this old-timey photography method but this would be my first time actually having my photo taken with it.

Bennett moved to Wisconsin as a teenager, specifically to Kilbourn City, which is now known as Wisconsin Dells. He took up photography in 1865 and ten years later opened his studio that is now a historic site and where the Frau and I had our tintypes taken. The Dells area became famous, in large part, because of his photographs with the most well-known being one of a boy jumping between 2 tall rock formations.

I just looked this up and discovered that the boy was Bennett’s son, Ashley. Today, Bennett would have been locked up for standing by with a camera while his son casually made leaps where one small mistake, one teensy slip of the foot, would have meant certain death for the boy.

Bennett’s shop is well-preserved and visitors can imagine early Chicago area tourists stopping in to see his work or perhaps for a portrait after seeing his photographs of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Folks such as the Frau and myself who want a tintype taken are corralled into Bennett’s studio with its windowed roof and paucity of artificial lighting.

The camera is very basic – it’s a wooden box mounted on a tripod with a primitive lens.

All focusing and shot composition was accomplished by moving the camera. Talk of such luxuries as digital zoom and auto-focus would have been sheer madness in Bennett’s day. The photographer threw a black cloth over the apparatus and slid a carefully prepared sheet of iron into a slot in the back.

The Frau chose our background, we sat, and were very still for about 15 seconds. We were told that it was fine to breathe normally but I held my breath anyway. Can't be too careful, right?

With the exposure done, the plate was removed and placed in a tray where it received a bath of some magical developer elixir. Before our very eyes, the image of Madison’s premier power couple faded into being.

********

Since my Frau developed her mystery allergies/illness, she’s been spending much more time at home. Not only has her condition prevented her from working, but her social life has been severely interrupted. It has made me very sad to witness her go from being a social butterfly to a recluse. Well, not as bad as someone like Paul of Thebes, but she just spends much too much time at home these days.

One thing she’s done to occupy herself is to litter our deck with plants. Look at this coleus! Or is that two colei?

And that exhausts my knowledge of flowers here. But there are more photos.

Forgot. She grew a chili plant too, there on the left.

My contribution was a single coleus which I potted and put in our carport to add some color.

********

Driving down County M south of Madison, one sees some pretty scenery tucked in the rolling hills. I discovered that there is a fairly new bike path in the area, the Oregon Rotary Trail, that has a trailhead just west of the town of Oregon, population ~ 12,000. The paved path winds its way through the gentle hills and the Swan Pond Waterfowl Production Area and ends on the northwest side of Oregon.

And so one morning I threw my bicycle into my car and headed southwest out into the countryside. The small parking lot had one car that presumably was owned by the laughing young couple on the trail walking towards me.

Off I went.

There are signs at the base of the hills that tell you exactly how steep they are and I discovered that anything over an 11 degree incline gets me worried about cardiac arrest as I pedal upwards and onwards.

It was a lovely day and the grassy field near the trailhead presented me with an opportunity to go all Terrence Malick/Emmanuel Lubezki/Néstor Almendros with my photography.

All that was missing was a lovely young woman to run her hands across the top of the grass.

I wasn't too far from Swan Pond. It is unclear to me what makes it a waterfowl production site. Is there a swan factory there? A duck forge? Maybe it is kept in a state that is optimal for waterfowl to engage in some, er, amorous congress, shall we say. Perhaps certain plants are the waterfowl equivalent of mood lighting and a mirror on the ceiling. However waterfowl are produced, I was near water and so there were plenty of red-winged black birds about.

 

 

Coming out of a wooded area, I spied a deer out in the distance.

 

It didn’t run away immediately but instead slowly, cautiously put some distance between us, looking back to make sure I wasn’t showing any hostile intentions.

I made it to Oregon ere long. Oddly enough, I hadn't seen much in the way of waterfowl on the trip there. The northwest side is a weird mix of conservation park and industrial buildings. There is scrub dotted with small ponds next to a concrete factory, for instance. I also discovered that Trachte had facilities down here. It was all newer stuff on their lot, though. None of their vintage steel buildings with the barreled roofs.

 

While I had been to Oregon previously, it was always a bee line to a friend’s house in a slightly newer part of town (1970s vs 2000s) and I’d never wandered its streets before or seen the downtown. I biked east a little ways and found myself amongst some stores and banks, but it wasn't the old part of town. So I returned to the area where the trail begins.

As I rode down one street, I saw a pair of sandhill cranes on a patch of grass in front of the concrete factory. After taking a couple photos, I continued on. I rode around the area and through a section of the conservation park and then returned to the spot where I had seen the cranes lazing about.

There I found that they had crossed the street and were on the sidewalk beyond which was just a field of grass and small trees.

 

 

Unsurprisingly, they wanted nothing to do with the human so they ambled down a short hill into the scrub. They slowly walked through the grass, making sure the apeman didn’t come too close and everything just seemed calm and idyllic.

And then I saw a savage example of nature being red in tooth and claw unfold before me as the gentle birds were mercilessly attacked!

 

The cranes must have wandered into someone’s territory because a pair of red-winged black birds started diving at the them in a ferocious Blitzkrieg just like the Luftwaffe! OK, well maybe not. But they did seem to annoy the cranes a lot.

I felt a bit badly as the cranes didn’t mean any harm; they simply wanted to get away from me and then they found themselves running, well, strolling, a gauntlet of angry black birds. Having been attacked by territorial red-winged black birds myself, I could, as Bill Clinton once said, feel their pain.

I like this photo because you can see the full wingspan of the attacking black bird and the crane has this “Oh brother. Not again.” look on its face. Plus, there’s what I think is a female red-winged black bird down at the bottom presumably gushing over her mate’s bravery and derring-do.

“Oh, Harold! You’re so rugged!”

The cranes eventually got tired of being accosted and left. With the action over, I continued on to the trail.

At the very start of it I noticed a killdeer just standing there looking around.

 

 

I got back to my car just as it began to get really hot. It had been a very nice ride and it was now time to go home and do chores.

 

********

Bonus photo. Here’s a fine photo of Grabby relaxing in the sun.

 

(Take me to the postlude.)

Dear AMC...

For some unknown reason, I decided last week that I wanted to see Voyage of Time on an IMAX before I die. It's a passion project of Terrence Malick's made for the IMAX and is described as being "...a one-of-a-kind celebration of life and the grand history of the cosmos...a hymn to the glories of nature, life and scientific discovery".

I believe it's his only documentary. It's a Malick movie, what more need be said?

There was a time before AMC bought the IMAX screen here in Madison when it wasn't solely dedicated to tentpole productions, usually featuring CGI pretty people in skin tight outfits destroying some city or other. The previous owners actually screened documentaries on the big, big screen. But they went away.

So I have emailed AMC asking for them to return. They sure don't make it easy. I felt a bit like Arthur Dent at the display department. First, you dodge a series of FAQs. Then I submitted a comment on a form that doesn't really have a suggestions category and makes AMC seem wholly unprepared for any contact with customers that isn't a complaint. I then received an automated reply suggesting that I look through the FAQ's again to resolve my non-existent complaint/problem with some club I am not a member of. I replied that I simply wanted to submit a suggestion and was sent the following:

"Thank you for contacting AMC Theatres! I've noted your suggestions to include showings of IMAX documentaries at our Fitchburg 18 location for the appropriate departments to review. We consider guest feedback to be very important to our success and we appreciate the time and effort that you put forth to share your thoughts!"

I won't hold my breath that I'll be able to see documentaries on the IMAX here any time in the near future, but at least I made my thoughts known.

The Songs Remain the Same

I listened to Led Zeppelin quite a lot when I was a teenager and into my 20s. Nothing unusual here, nothing that countless other young men didn't indulge in as well. At some point, though, I moved on. It wasn't a falling out so much as me just finding lots of other musical rabbit holes to go down. As the years wore on Zeppelin would occasionally return to my musical diet after long periods of absence. A song of theirs might come on the radio or I would just get a hankering to hear one of their tunes.

One sad day I unceremoniously disposed of most of my tapes and records and found myself having to rebuild my music collection. I was in no hurry to buy any Led Zeppelin. At some point or other, I decided it was time to buy some of their albums but found that, in my 30s, I had become less enamored of Robert Plant's wailing and keener on listening to the blues artists that Zep had covered and been influenced by than their interpretations.

But I never lost sight of the fact that the guys were extremely talented and had a body of work that was much more eclectic than riffs and orgasmic moans. Some of their songs remain classics for me and have aged very well. Just like your humble narrator.

One Led Zeppelin song that I still love is "When the Levee Breaks". Yeah, it's a blues cover but it's really a re-working of a country blues song and not just a traditional blues tune put into overdrive with heavier guitars and a faster tempo. This is something altogether different.

I first heard this song when I was about 10 years old and loved it immediately, as I recall. I also remember thinking of it as being quite different from the rest of that album, Led Zeppelin's untitled 4th, a.k.a. - Led Zeppelin IV, a.k.a. - Zoso, a.k.a. - Four Symbols. "When the Levee Breaks" wasn't riff rock and it wasn't acoustic balladry. It was...just hypnotizing.

It opens with what is probably the most famous drum line in all of rock history. John Bonham's bass drum is drenched in reverb and right up front pounding away while his snare has a that great woody pop to it. The drums echo just enough to be readily noticeable and give the listener a sense that there's simply something different about them but not done with too heavy a hand to make them sound thoroughly unnatural.

Then harmonica, bass, and guitar come in. The guitar has a rather clean sound - no big fuzzy chords. It churns away in the background instead of being the main melodic component that your ears grasp onto immediately. The original version of the song by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy is a rather bouncy country blues. But Led Zeppelin transform it into a sludgy, raga-like epic.

There are no typical Jimmy Page guitar solos. In their stead we get breaks of distorted slide guitar that pay homage to the blues but don't really sound like it. The song just sounds dark and slightly surreal. If Jimi Hendrix took the blues into outer space and gave them a crazy, psychedelic sheen, then Zeppelin take them underground here, rolling them in the raw earth. That catchy drum beat and the jangly, churning guitar just don't stop and draw you in until you're lost in their rhythm.

Sometimes the guitar is clean, other times it has a wooshy effect - tape flanging, apparently. I've also heard that the tape was slowed down just a bit so the whole song steps down in key and, if you compare the released version to versions of the song that are more works-in-progress and not so adulturated, the instruments kind of meld into one another as in an alchemical blending of base elements.

No one element sticks out here with the others playing support roles like in other Zep songs where things seem to built around a guitar riff. This song feel orchestrated with everyone's contributions making a whole greater than its parts.

When I finally did buy a Led Zeppelin CD, it was Led Zeppelin III.

While the album has some classic riffing and more traditional takes on the blues, it's known for being the acoustic album in their catalog. They decamped from the big city (I think) and settled into a cottage in the Welsh countryside and returned to the city with several more acoustic, folky-flavored songs. That's the rock lore, anyway.

Of that bunch of softer songs, "That's the Way" stands out for me.

The gentle strum of an acoustic guitar opens the song but is quickly joined by mandolin to provide a sprightly rhythm that goes up and down with the first part ending on a high note followed by a decent into lower ones. Steel guitar adorns the acoustic instrumentation and adds a dreamy quality to the bucolic scene. Towards the end of the song as it meanders to a close, there's a little bit of a sound played backwards as you can hear delicate whooshes, as if the wind is gently lifting something up into the air. It's subtle, though and doesn't drag you off into some psychedelic landscape like the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather it's more like when Jessica Chastain's Mrs. O'Brien floats and glides around that big old tree in that scene from The Tree of Life.

Robert Plant eschews the wailing here, for the most part, as he takes a mellower approach to singing some rather impressionistic lyrics that only give glimpses of various scenes. The first verse begins with what appears to be the end of a childhood friendship before quickly zooming out and then in on a young man being ridiculed for having long hair, as one did in 1970. Later there are what seem to be more environmentally conscious lyrics where someone concerned with the state of environment has their concerns shrugged off - "all that lives is born to die".

The song feels like you're sitting by a window as the sun streams in and you look out at the tall grass bending in the wind as the leaves rustle and you let your mind wander, wander down the years to childhood and back up to the present with anxiety over the future. "That's the Way" is just a very pretty song with a hint of the wistful that floats along like a daydream.

Also check out the rough mix. The steel guitar is missing but it has some lovely dulcimer runs that the finished version lacks.

Grodziskie doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.: Grodziskie by Sketchbook Brewing Co.

 

 

My own view is that a dislike of smoke beer is a character flaw, an indication of a lack of virtue. Not lack of virtue as in smoke beer haters are just plain jerks, although they may be that too, but that they’ve forgotten what we all innately know deep down in our souls, i.e. – smoke beer is extremely tasty. For virtue is knowledge – knowledge acquired by education and praxis.

Back in the day, most malt was kilned in such a way as to expose it to smoke and so it was caressed by the spectral tendrils of burning wood, imparting the tastilicious flavors of guaiacol, syringol, phenol, et al. Then indirect kilning methods arose and the knowledge of the gustatory pleasure of smoke beer was lost to the intellects of most and with it, virtue.

And so now it is incumbent upon us all to drink smoke beers so that we may undergo anamnesis and recollect the knowledge that smoke beer is divine.

********

Back in August my Frau and I attended the Great Taste of the Midwest. As I noted in my post about it, I sought out the smoke beers which included a few Grodziskies, a Polish beer style which is traditionally brewed with 100% smoked wheat. One of those Grodziskies I sampled on that day was from Sketchbook Brewing in suburban Chicago. On a recent visit to the City of the Big Shoulders I acquired a 4-pack of the brew.

The genesis of this beer dates back to at least 2013 when a homebrewer named Cesar Marron brewed a Grodziskie that won Sam Adams’ Longshot homebrewer competition. Not long after his victory, Marron co-founded Sketchbook Brewing along with a trio of other craft beer lovers.

The Grodziskie apparently dates back to the 14th century and is named for the Polish city Grodzisk. It is thought that, back in the days of yore, it was brewed with 100% wheat that was smoked over oak but some modern recipes cut the smoked wheat with the unsmoked stuff. While it seems to have been a very popular style for a quite some time, the Grodziskie apparently fell out of favor in the 20th century and slowly disappeared. Finally, in the mid-1990s, it had gone extinct in its homeland. Since then, however, a Polish brewer here and and an American brewer there have brewed the style and so it has been resurrected. Beer historian Ron Pattinson once said that Grodziskie should be light, smoky, fizzy, and hoppy and I’ve gone with those expectations ever since.

Beer Advocate says that Sketchbook has brewed this beer a few times over the years – you’ve gotta dance with the one that brung ya - but I can find neither hide nor hair of it at their website. Maybe mention of this brew is buried at one of their social media accounts.

My pour produced a smallish but brilliant white crown of foam that wasn’t keen on sticking around for long. The piwo was a bright yellow that had a touch of haze. There were some bubbles to be seen in the beer. As expected, the aroma was dominated by luscious smoke but it wasn’t especially pungent. There was also a hint of grain and a very faint and indistinct fruity smell too. I think my nose was stuffy on tasting day.

Upon taking my first tip, my mouth was greeted by a generous dose of fizz. This is a very light-bodied brew and I was treated to a fair amount of smoke but it was rather mellow in contrast to, say, Schlenkerla’s Rauchbiers. I also tasted a little wheat and some spicy hops underneath – they were listed as being Saaz at the Great Taste – but those Czech hops didn’t come to the fore until the finish where they added a gentle black pepper taste & bitterness. The wheat taste came out more on the finish while that nebulous fruity aroma emerged as a lovely, delicate pear-like flavor.

Oh mama, this is tasty stuff! It’s got a great smoke smell and taste but it’s fairly mellow. A little wheat, a dash of fruitiness, and some spicy hops tie it all together. With its very light body, this makes for perfect summer drinking, as proven at the Great Taste back in August. But I am slow on the draw and didn’t get my hands on the stuff until the autumn. Better that than never.

Junk food pairing: A bag of Jay’s Hot Stuff potato chips is a must for this Grodziskie. The piwo will cut through the fat and heat of the chips and let the smoke and paprika mingle on your tongue in gustatory grace.

To the Wonder Delayed

A few weeks ago Terrence Malick's latest movie, To the Wonder was scheduled to open here in Madison at Sundance this month. The film's website now lists a 22 August date at the UW Cinematheque. What happened?

Not to demean Cinematheque, because they are a great organization, but a week-long run would be really nice. Contra Rob Thomas, not everyone who wants to see it will be able to make it. Plus it's a Malick film. The bigger the screen, the better.