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Film still from “Radical Wolfe” courtesy of Kino Lorber
If you’ve ever wondered how retrospective documentaries are made, with their dazzling compilation of still images and rare footage spliced between contemporary interviews, The Moviehouse in Millerton, New York, offered a behind-the-scenes peek into how “the sausage is made” with a screening of director Richard Dewey’s biographical film “Radical Wolfe” on Saturday, March 2.
Coinciding with the late Tom Wolfe’s birthday, “Radical Wolfe,” now available to view on Netflix, is the first feature-length documentary to explore the life and career of the enigmatic Southern satirist, city-dwelling sartorial icon and pioneer of New Journalism — a subjective, lyrical style of long-form nonfiction that made Wolfe a celebrity in the pages of Esquire and vaulted him to the top of the best-seller lists with his drug-culture chronicle “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and his first novel, “The Bonfire of The Vanities.”
The film is rife with local connections, featuring talking-head anecdotes by Wolfe’s former agent and Sharon resident Lynn Nesbit as well as Wolfe contemporary Gay Talese of Roxbury and Christopher Buckley, the son of the late Sharon resident William F. Buckley Jr., who interviewed Wolfe on PBS’ “Firing Line” in 1970.
Present at The Moviehouse was the film editor for “Radical Wolfe,” Brian Gersten, a Millerton resident who recently worked on “Enter The Slipstream,” documenting an American cycling team through the 2020 season of the Tour de France, and the film’s archival producer, Rich Remsberg of North Adams, Massachusetts, a two-time Emmy winner who recently produced “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” for HBO.
Remsberg admitted that in his archival search, there is a competitive sense of “trophy hunting” — the quest for a previously unseen piece of footage that will add an exclusive peek into the past of a film’s subject. “The trophy-hunting aspect of [archival producing] is the rarity of a clip,” he said at The Moviehouse. “I did a piece about George Lucas recently and found an interview with his high school art teacher. It was just mind-blowing. I found four interviews with Lucas before he became famous. But the director only used two minutes. And you can’t get hung up on, ‘But it’s rare!’ You have to consider how useful it is.”
Remsberg added: “One of my favorite sequences in this film is when Wolfe is being introduced onto all these talk shows, and we spliced ‘Ladies and gentlemen... Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe…’ And you see the rapid succession of him entering, shaking hands, doing his ‘hair thing’ three or four times, then crossing his legs three or four times. Beautiful rhythm to it, right? It’s really the musicality of filmmaking.”
“I think, as you could tell from how we structured the film, Tom Wolfe’s personal life was private. There wasn’t much there, to be perfectly honest. So the substance was all in the writing,” said Gersten on the documentary editing process. “If you open a book of his, it has so much style, so much is going on, and we did our best to replicate that in the editing style of the film. I think the quick cuts are effective at certain points. At other points, you want to let the story tell itself. When Tom Wolfe describes his interaction with [then-U.S. Sen. John F.] Kennedy, there’s no reason to stylize that. You want to hear Wolfe’s words.”
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Art on view this March
Mar 06, 2024
New Risen
While there are area galleries that have closed for the season, waiting to emerge with programming when the spring truly springs up, there are still plenty of art exhibitions worth seeking out this March.
At Geary Contemporary in Millerton, founded by Jack Geary and Dolly Bross Geary, Will Hutnick’s “Satellite” is a collection of medium- and large-scale acrylic on canvas abstracts that introduce mixtures of wax pastel, sand and colored pencil to create topographical-like changes in texture. Silhouettes of leaves float across seismic vibration lines in the sand while a craterous moon emerges on the horizon, all like a desert planet seen through a glitching kaleidoscope. Hutnick, a resident of Sharon and director of artistic programming at The Wassaic Project in Amenia, New York, will discuss his work at Geary with New York Times art writer Laura van Straaten Saturday, March 9, at 5 p.m.
In Falls Village, the vacant bank building at 105 Main St., with its white masonry exterior and revolving glass door, has recently been adopted by David Noonan and digital abstract artist Millree Hughes for the duo’s self-described “roving gallery” New Risen. The second show curated by Noonan and Hughes, “Faraway, So Close” is on display through Saturday, March 23. In addition to one of Hughes' own electrically lit disco "Matrix" landscapes, the group show features a pair of bedroom-eyed oil portraits by Maureen Dougherty, who recently exhibited at Cheim & Read before the 26-year-old New York City gallery closed its doors in December 2023, as well as an enigmatic and sensuously pouty graphite drawing of an astronaut by Judith Eisler, who lives in Warren and has exhibited work at Casey Kaplan in New York, with praise from The New Yorker’s Hilton Als.
“Spooky Action #2” by Will HutnickAlexander Wilburn
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Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
‘You don’t need to go to Africa or Yellowstone to see the real-life world of nature. There are life and death struggles in your wood lot and backyard,” said Michael Fargione, wildlife biologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, during his lecture “Caught on Camera: Our Wildlife Neighbors.”
He showed a video of two bucks recorded them displaying their antlers, then challenging each other with a clash of antlers, which ended with one buck running off. The victor stood and pawed the ground in victory.
In another video, a bear stood on its hind legs eating hickory nuts from a tree. “Bears are omnivores and will eat just about anything that becomes available,” said Fargione.
Bears first showed up on the property in 2004.
Fargione said, “Black bears have relatively poor eyesight but an excellent sense of smell.” In another video, a bear ran away from the camera after catching of whiff of human scent that had been left days before by researchers were setting up cameras.
“They are typically shy and retreat when they encounter humans. Despite their large size, they move across the landscape very quietly.”
Fargione added that black bears are very curious and have chewed the cameras, changed the viewing angles, and even broken a few.
The trail cameras are self-contained and waterproof; they run on batteries or are solar-powered.
Cary Institute first began to use camera traps or trail cameras 10 years ago to study animals, particularly deer, on Cary’s 2,000-acre property. Its researchers hoped to learn about the growth and declines of the deer population, but they got much more than they bargained for.
Fargione said that the videos captured allow researchers to study animal behaviors they are rarely privileged to see.
“Camera placement is crucial,” stressed Fargione. To get different animals recorded, the biologists at Cary had to “think outside the box,” which resulted in placing cameras near an old logging road by a stone wall and then by two log jams on Wappingers Creek, which runs through the Cary Institute property.
At the stone wall, they set up two cameras on either side of the old logging road. They found that “prey species use the wall to move silently through the forest without attracting predators,” while “predators use the wall to move silently along and sneak up on their prey.”
Wildlife using the top of the wall as a walkway and the logging road were deer, bobcats, cottontails, coyotes, turkeys, raccoons, bears and squirrels.
At the log jams on Wappingers Creek, the logs made convenient bridges for wildlife to cross the water. The logs were again used to tread quietly and quickly and evade predators or catch prey.
Those animals using the log jams were deer, bears, bobcats — notably a mother with three of her young — coyotes, turkeys and raccoons along with mallards, mergansers, a great blue heron, a mink, a fisher, a pair of wood ducks, a blue jay, a white-footed mouse and a grackle.
Rarer sightings of animals on the cameras are moose, river otters, barred owls and heron. A bull moose crossed through Cary land for a few days and a moose cow stayed for a few months. Some animals, such as the river otters and owls, aren’t seen because a camera may not be in the correct location to catch their images, which is why Fargione began to “think outside the box” for camera placements.
While they don’t often catch beavers on the cameras at Cary Institute, an opportunity arose when a beaver dam was causing flooding on a public road. The institute asked permission to dismantle the dam and set up cameras to record the rebuilding.
The video that was recorded showed at least two beavers carefully placing branches, jamming them in the bank for stability and “placing leaves collected from the bank and carried to the site along the edge of the dam,” said Fargione.
When leaving the building site, the beavers use their hind and front legs to kick up mud and pebbles from the creek bed into the dam.
Fargione noted that the “sound of running water attracts the beaver as it works back and forth along the edge of the dam.” In this way they add materials to plug places where water is getting through and make the dam more secure. The beavers began building around midnight and finished a little after 3 a.m.
Another rare opportunity came when a mother fox took up residence under one of the Cary outbuildings, which was also occupied by a groundhog. Fargione commented that the groundhog “had to be very fast.” While the cubs were too small to hunt it, the mother was a danger.
The cameras captured the mother fox returning from hunts with food for the cubs. One cub would grab all the food and “would not share.” It also recorded the cubs play fighting and hunting and napping in the sun.
Fargione concluded with cautions on setting up cameras and citizen science opportunities; he noted that no camera should be pointed at a neighbor’s property, to respect privacy, and not to trespass.
He said it is best not to give an exact address of animals’ locations to keep them safe and to “respect wildlife; don’t interfere with what they are trying to do: make a living.”
He mentioned that those who used trail cameras could be Citizen Helpers and contribute their photos to some projects such as iSeeMammals (iseemammals.org), which collects data on black bears in New York state, and Snap Shot (app.wildlifeinsights.org/initiatives/2000156/Snapshot-USA), which tracks animal populations and distribution.
On eMammal (emammal.si.edu/participate), citizen helpers can identify and upload and archive photos for the Smithsonian. Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org) does not require submitting photos. Helpers would identify wildlife from photos provided by Zooniverse. Both of these platforms allow regular people to contribute to real research.
Fargione commented, “Every time I check a camera, it’s like going downstairs on Christmas morning and opening a present, because you never know exactly what’s going to be under the tree.”
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The garden is dead, long live the garden
Mar 06, 2024
Dee Salomon
It is indisputable that we are moving toward a new garden aesthetic. I would even go one step further to propose that gardening’s "man over nature" ethos — which has a classic exemplar in the formal gardens of Versailles — is now over. Nature reminds us, with greater frequency and intensity, that she is in control, and we are beginning to come to terms with the reality that it is a fool’s game to try to tame her.
As you think about your spring planting plans, slide into a new mindset. Let’s call it "human abetting nature." This mindset finds beauty less in rigorous planting schemes and more in the creation of habitats. The aesthetic associated with this new mindset is, thankfully, more forgiving — not so much the baggy dress to the tailored suit, but a looser beauty that can still be shaped or contained in ways we find pleasing.
As with many of our choices these days, mindfulness is the first step. Where are you planting?
And what are you planting there? When planting at the edge of the woods and in her fields, writer and garden designer Page Dickey will only plant natives. Here she has incorporated American hornbeam, Carpinus caroliniana, redbud, Cercis canadensis and gray dogwood, Cornus racemosa. In her book "Uprooted," Dickey writes about her experience moving from a home where she crafted and tended an intricate garden to her current home in Falls Village with acres of woodland, fields and fen. Instead of working to transform the land into something else, she now listens to the land and responds to nurture it.
This new mindset does not mean that aesthetics are less important than before; rather, the aesthetic has shifted. In Dickey’s garden beds that surround her house, she mixes non-natives with native perennials, such as her favorite Bowman’s Root, Gillenia trifoliata (The Cornwall Garden Club native plant sale will offer Bowman’s Root plants among other native perennials Saturday, May 25, in West Cornwall. cornwallgardenclub.org)
Among Dickey’s favorite native shrubs are Fothergilla, Clethra alnifolia, gray dogwood, Cornus racemosa, and the American cranberrybush viburnum, Viburnum trilobum. She also used Viburnum lentago, called nannyberry, in place of adding more lilac, that had originally tempted her, for a hedgerow along a rough track on her property. From "Uprooted": “Surely I could plant something with more to offer, a plant that would enrich our wild habitat.” I can attest to the beauty of this native tree which grows at the edges of our marsh. It can get as tall as 15 feet and has a wide spread if given the space and light. Flowers in spring, nutritious berries for birds in fall.
Deborah Munson is one of our area’s top horticulturalists and landscape designers, who happily admits that her approach to garden design changed over the past decade: “In an ecologically driven garden/landscape I love a wilder and much freer style where there is little to no delineation between the wild and cultivated landscape and incorporating natives as often as possible; a landscape that over time can find its own way, being nudged occasionally by the human hand, often planted to allow the plants to drive the design, allowing self-sowing and covering ground.” One of her favorite native plant combinations is “shadblow, Amelanchier arborea underplanted with our native foam flower, Tiarella cordifolia and miterwort, Michella diphylla is a favorite combo. Add some snowdrops and white daffodils if you’re not a ‘native only’ purist.”
Out with precision edging. Out with yards of trucked-in mulch covered beds: “We can often create our own mulch on site by composting leaves and other garden debris as well as using plants as a living mulch. One should be aware that trucking in products can often bring new diseases and pests.”
Key to our new mindset, Munson reminds us, is "learning about a plant’s behavior… i.e. invasives (don’t plant) or colonizers (be careful what you ask for.) Is it a generalist, a plant that will grow almost any condition or specialist; for example, a plant that will only grow in wetlands or only in well drained acidic conditions?”
Many of Dickey's and Munson’s favorite native plants — from Redbud to Shadblow to Clethra, Sweet Fern, Viburnum Lentago and Anenome Canadensis — will be available from the Northwest Conservation District annual plant sale. You can preorder at nwcd.org and attend April 19-21 at Goshen fairground.
More on spring plant selection in next month’s column. If you have any questions regarding spring planting, please send them to dee@theungardener.com
Dee Salomon “ungardens” in Litchfield County.
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