All the Light in the Sky

Still not in OPAC. The name Swanberg suddenly popped out at me: I saw an interview with him an his wife, also an indie film maker, recently on TV. He does have other foms that are in the system.




Richard Brody New Yorker review, 23 & 30 December 2013 issue:

The director Joe Swanberg draws magic from a magical location—an oceanfront enclave of homes perched alluringly above the lapping waters of the Pacific and doomed by erosion. There, Marie (Jane Adams), a forty-five-year-old actress, serenely floats on the passing time as she does, in a wetsuit, on the shimmering sea below. Awaiting roles that have more or less stopped coming, dreaming of love that never clicks, she hosts her niece from New York, Faye (Sophia Takal), a young actress. In flowing days and evenings of lunches and parties with friends and neighbors, Marie and Faye talk through and play out shudderingly big questions—the prospect of marriage and children, the artistic calling, the weight of family history. Adams (one of the secret heroines of the recent cinema) and Takal—aided by nimble cohorts, including Larry Fessenden, Kent Osborne, Lindsay Burdge, and Ti West—bring a calm, focussed urgency to every chat and tussle. With his solar measurements and celestial allusions, the real-life environmental entrepreneur David Siskind gives the drama a cosmic context, and Swanberg, who is also the cinematographer, makes luminous images to match.—Richard Brody (In limited release and video on demand.)

/Nowhere to be found:/ 4/17/14.

California wine country

Sosnowski, Vivienne. (2009). When the rivers ran red. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kirkus: How the Napa and Sonoma Valley wineries survived Prohibition.California's wine country is an oft-romanticized region, and newspaper executive Sosnowski, a first-time author, seems to have fallen sway to its well-advertised charms in her attempt to showcase the region's fortitude during Prohibition. While it is true that many families suffered mightily during that period (1919–33), as the entire region's economy was centered around winemaking, the author's narrative lacks the cohesive direction necessary to give the wineries' plight sufficient dramatic tension. Copiously researched, but this particular vintage lacks complexity and depth.

Berkeley bohemia

Ed Herny; Shelley Rideout; Katie Wadell. (2008). Berkeley bohemia: artists and visionaries of the early 20th century. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith.