The Hatfields and McCoys . . . and Hitchcock?

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

This week the History Channel is running a six-hour presentation of America’s most famous feud, the murderous, longstanding grudge match between the Hatfield and McCoy families living along border between Kentucky and West Virginia. 

 I am from a small town on the Ohio River not far from there, so I knew of this feud as part of the local lore decades after it ended.  I’m somewhat surprised that people from Hollywood also remember it and think viewers will want to watch, but I guess I shouldn’t be.  The Hatfields and McCoys didn’t merely kill each other.  Their feud was more like a Grimm Brothers fairytale of epic proportions, a morality play about disloyalty, perceived injustice, and revenge.   

 But here’s something that hardly anyone knows about the Hatfields and McCoys: Alfred Hitchcock (one of my favorite directors) made a silent movie that was almost certainly inspired by them.  How else can you explain a British movie studio in the 1920s coming up with a story about a “hillbilly” love scandal featuring multigenerational conflict between two Kentucky families?  Called The Mountain Eagle (Fear o’ God in its United States release), it was filmed during Hitchcock’s Berlin apprenticeship and shot in Austria’s Tyrol, with the Alps as a stand-in for the Appalachians of Kentucky.  

 The film has been lost for decades and is the only Hitchcock feature film of which no surviving print remains.

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Mother Nature as Muse

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

This week’s Saturday/Sunday edition of the The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in the “Review” section by regular columnist Jonah Lehrer, titled “Mom Was Right: Go Outside.” 

He cites the findings of several scientific studies that people who spend time outdoors – or even just looking out the window at a view of natural landscaping instead of concrete and blacktop – show significant gains in creativity.

How about that?  All the nature stuff that keeps finding its way into my creativity blog apparently is entirely appropriate!

So in honor of our muse, Mother Nature, here is a photo I snapped yesterday.  The branches of this mock-orange bush, spilling over the fence along our driveway, are in bloom with small, white flowers.  Their beauty is fleeting, just a few days, so it requires attention to notice and enjoy them each year.  “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may . . .”

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Hard times in The Big Easy

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I read the news today, oh boy . . .

 Actually, I read this particular news item two days ago.  The Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper, is moving to a three-day-per-week publication schedule.  The newspaper has an online presence at nola.com, but in no way does that mean citizens of New Orleans will be able to read it there. 

 An online model won’t work for New Orleans, according to Ann Milling, a long-time advisory board member to The Times-Picayune cited in yesterday’s USA Today article.  She and others are seeking new publishers committed to a daily print newspaper, either through purchase of The Times-Picayune or by starting over with a new, competing publication.

 What happens to a city without a daily newspaper available in a format that all citizens can conveniently access?  For one thing, it becomes less democratic, as PC magazine writer (and former newspaper reporter) Sascha Segan noted yesterday. 

 Is a city without a daily newspaper also less able to nurture innovation and creativity?

 World-class cities have daily newspapers.  London’s abundance of print has always intrigued me.  Emanating from its Fleet Street epicenter, London’s news biz supports dozens of “quality press” and tabloid publications, both daily and weekly.  Here in the U.S., New York has four large-circulation daily papers, plus many smaller daily and weeklies.  Chicago has two major dailies and several suburban dailies and weeklies.  Los Angeles has the Times and Daily News, along with quite a few other dailies published in the metro area.

 What is the cause and effect relationship here?  Does a city need a newspaper to create an “innovation” environment?  Or, does a city need an “innovation” environment to support a newspaper.

 I’ve never considered New Orleans an “innovation” center (in the Richard Florida creative-class sense).  Yet it is undeniably one of the most “creative” cities in the world.

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Woodpecker nest

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I never intended for this blog to become so nature focused, but I keep noticing nature-y things. 

Last weekend I saw a woodpecker angrily chasing a robin away from the upper branches of our silver maple.  The robin kept coming back to the tree, and the woodpecker kept going after it.  Yesterday when I was cleaning the yard (two large dogs), I realized that the squeaky noise I’ve been hearing for the last week is not branches rubbing together in the breeze but baby woodpeckers instead.  Their incessant tweeting sounds like a sticky piston on old machinery: squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak!

When I realized that the other incessant bird chirps I was hearing came from the parent woodpecker, I grabbed my camera.  Here are about two minutes of video I shot. 

That other noise you hear besides the chirping?  When I shared the video with my family last night, one of my daughters remarked, “It’s like watching a Planet Earth video, except for the garbage truck.”

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Queen Victoria’s journals

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role played by journals in creativity and innovation.  I’ll post more on this later when I have time to write.  This week I’m in the middle of final exams and closing out the academic year.

 But this morning my Twitter feed contained this intriguing news: to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth has made available online the journals kept by her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria, the only other British monarch to celebrate a similar anniversary.  The archive site is filled not only with photographed pages of the Queen’s actual diaries but also with commentary essays by various experts and a timeline containing notable events that occurred during her reign.

 Fascinating reading!

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“How to” . . . a snapshot of life in mid-May

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I was about look something up online just now – but couldn’t get past the list of top search terms that dropped down from the Google rectangle when I typed the words “how to”:

  • Tie a tie
  • Hard boil eggs
  • Boil eggs
  • Take a screen shot on a Mac
  • Write a cover letter
  • Make hard boiled eggs
  • Delete Facebook
  • Make French toast
  • Solve a rubix cube
  • Cook asparagus

 What do you think?  I’m guessing this is what May looks like for many of us:

1.  Someone who doesn’t usually wear a tie is dressing up for an out-of-the-ordinary occasion.  Prom?  Graduation?  One of my students, who works full-time as a cake decorator, says that between First Communion, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, and graduations, this is her busiest time of year.   

2.  Grilling season is here, so we’re eating lots of potato salad (made with hard boiled eggs).  Or, possibly, people are going on diets for swimsuit season and eating lots of hard boiled eggs.  Could these “egg” searches possibly be left over from Easter? 

3.  The kids made French toast for breakfast on Mother’s Day.

4.  The high school graduate just got (or is getting) a new computer (Mac) and someone (the graduate or the parents) is experimenting.

5.  The college graduate is job-hunting – cleaning up the online footprint (“Deleting Facebook”), sending out resumes, and possibly wearing a tie to interviews.

6.  Someone wants to solve the Rubik’s cube, which they a) apparently don’t know how to spell, and b) apparently see as a destination rather than a journey (hence the Google search for instructions).

 7.  Asparagus crops are rapidly overrunning backyard gardens.

Google’s top searches are like little “found poems.”  It’s fun to type a sentence or phrase into the search box and discover what the “crowd” is thinking about.

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Always chasing rainbows

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

 Last night it was raining as my film studies class ended, but while I was in my office putting away my gear, I suddenly became aware of the sky brightening.  Being a parent has conditioned me ALWAYS to look for a rainbow whenever sunshine follows the still wet, trailing edge of a cloudburst.  Habit propelled me to the window . . . and there it was!

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My little chickadees

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

A pair of chickadees has taken up residence in a knothole in the magnolia tree just outside our kitchen window. 

That hole in the tree didn’t always exist.  It was just a burled scar where a tree branch had been sawed off from the main limb.  Then one day a few years ago I noticed little pile of sawdust at the base of the tree.  I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  Carpenter ants?  Termites?  Looking out the kitchen window one day, I noticed a chickadee hard at work industriously digging out tiny bits of wood from inside the scarred ring and discarding them into the air with a sideways flick of its head.

Do chickadees return to the same nest year after year?

About a week ago I saw a one land on a branch outside the kitchen window, a piece of food in its beak.  It darted downward from branch to knothole, just as another chickadee inside the tree instantly popped into view.  In a millisecond food was exchanged from beak to beak; then the inside chickadee dropped down again, and the outside chickadee flew off.

The baby birds must be getting bigger, because I see both adults continually entering and leaving the knothole with food.

Here are a few minutes of video I was able to capture in the past week.  

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Light shadows

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Walking to my office early today (after a quick stop at Starbucks), I saw these shimmering squares of reflected sunlight cast down from a nearby office building.

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Room with an “itsy-bitsy” view

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

A spider began spinning its webs outside my office window a couple weeks ago.  Although the wind regularly rips the delicate spiral patterns to shreds, new orbs appear in their place within days.  (Click on the photo for a closer look at the web’s individual strands.)

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