Strange lights in the Orpheum while waiting for "Margaret." Photographer's mistake, or ghosts of the silver screen?

The Orpheum was packed last night for the Wisconsin Film Festival screening of the Kenneth Lonergan ("You Can Count on Me") film, "Margaret," A sprawling, messy meditation on life and death and adolescence. Some thought it was sprawling and messy and too long, and they couldn't stand it. I thought it was sprawling and messy the way life is messy, and that it was a poignant evocation of a young girl's awakening to the transience of life in the aftermath of a tragedy. There is no Margaret in the movie except the one in the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that's read in a key classroom scene that evokes the central theme of the movie. In case you missed it -- and because it's National Poetry Month -- here's the text of the poem.

Spring & Fall (To a Young Child)
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Note: The light streaks are because I moved the camera just as the camera was ending its 1-sec. exposure. Only the lights were bright enough to register as motion blur streaks in what must have been about 1/100 of a sec. I think that's what happened.

Or maybe the lights are spirits that haunt this grand old movie palace that has been showing movies on State Street for nearly 90 years, ghosts of the silver screen stirring from their long slumber to see what all the excitement is about.

"I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."

I've never been very good at memorizing poetry, which seems to be becoming a lost art anyhow. But for a long time this was the only poem I had committed entirely to memory and could recite at the drop of a hat. Not anymore. Now I have to read it on the Sequoya Library Poetree (rhymes with "sea.")

Watching an enchanting, slapstick pantomime fairy tale at the Orpheum Theater last night

It was rainy, windy and cold when we went to the Orpheum Theater for our Wisconsin Film Festival screening last night.

Among other things, "The Fairy" features this uniquely over-the-top chase sequence. The couple on a scooter -- Dom and Fiona -- are chasing a car driven by a virtually blind driver, trying to retrieve the unsecured baby on the trunk. The excitement comes from rear projection, the art comes from an almost balletic pantomime perfection. "The Fairy" is charming and whimsical, contains several inspired pantomime slapstick sequences -- as well as Dom and Fiona's magical underwater dance, with phosphorescent jellyfish dancing past them in a little chorus line and a giant clam also making an appearance. If you're lucky and there are some no-shows, you might still be able to catch "The Fairy" at its second screening tonight at Sundance.

Disclaimer: Like they used to say in the old TV ads, picture on screen is simulated (promotional still). The Orpheum is real.

It's Poetree Month, when poems grow on trees like leaves

At the Sequoya Library here in Madison, poems are growing on this tree by the entrance in celebration of National Poetry Month. This wonderful old chestnut by Joyce Kilmer seems especially apt:

Trees
by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The spring migration of the Red Admirals has arrived

These flighty little creatures migrate to Wisconsin from the southern states in the spring. There are many of them in June and July, the offspring of the spring migrators, their number depending on how many make it here in the spring. Judging from how many are flying around now, looks as if we'll have lots of them in the summer. (Note: Wisconsin Butterflies is a great online resource.)

Best read alone in a darkened room on a mobile device connected to a social network

That will help put you in the right alienated state of mind to properly savor the dramatic and macabre lede of Stephen Marche's article in The Atlantic with the provocative title, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

Marche's article is less dramatic than the opening paragraph. It says an epidemic of loneliness is sweeping today's America, due to a wide range of factors. Is Facebook one of them? The increase in Facebook usage correlates with the loneliness epidemic, but correlation doesn't prove causation. The research seems to suggest that people get out of Facebook what they bring to it -- lonely people often feel lonelier, while gregarious people who like to interact with many people enjoy the opportunities Facebook provides for networking.

I've got my black foamie thing on, thanks to Neil van Niekirk

I'm an available light shooter by nature, so when I need to use bounce flash I've always found it difficult to get good results, mostly because I pretty much followed the received wisdom of bouncing straight up or even slightly to my rear, resulting in flat, dead looking photos. After all, if the flash unit has a position that tilts back a bit, it must be there for a reason, right? Wrong.

Then I saw Neil van Niekirk's video about his black foamie thing for bounce flash. It changed everything. Neil's approach is to bounce the light off the place on a ceiling or a wall where you can imagine there being a softbox, usually off to one side or another , usually ahead of the camera. This concentrates your light and gives it a nice, diffuse directionality -- one that also creates pleasing catchlights in the eyes. Trouble is, if you aim an unshielded strobe this way, you'll throw some of the direct flash at your subjects, destroying the soft, diffused lighting you're trying to create. That's where the "black foamie thing" (which you can easily make yourself) comes in. Neil made a short video to explain the concept and how to make the black foamie thing.. Take a look. It really works. You may never look at bounce flash the same way.

That's what they all say, but sometimes it's all you've got

Whether in Watergate, Walkergate or any of our countless other "gates", politicians whose close associates are charged in political corruption cases steadfastly continue to maintain they know nothing and are not involved in any way. "I am not a crook" is not a great defense or PR move, but sometimes it's all you've got, even though it often seems to be a prelude to indictment. Or impeachment. Or recall. (Photographed at the outskirts of yesterday's Tea Party rally at the Capitol.)