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The tiny sewing machine push-in light bulb that all sewing machines and sergers seem to have as default lighting is barely adequate to illuminate even the intended sewing area. Today's lighting options can mimic natural daylight and keep any sewer from enduring an inadequately lit sewing area.

Sewing and Daylight Illumination

Just returned from a Viking cruise on the Mississippi. My daughter-in-law and I had a great time. We flew to Memphis and cruised south to New Orleans. Stops along the way included Greenville, Vicksburg, Natchez, St. Francisville, and Darrow.

Among a sewer's collection of sewing tools, notions, fabric, threads and needles none is more important, save the sewing machine itself, than an iron. It may be hard to think of the humble iron as a sewing tool yet its heat and steam capabilities are key to producing exceptional sewing results.

Importance of Pressing

Om Puri - Inflexible Patriarch

The link above is to my latest article on my Selective Focus film blog. I review two British films that explore father-son relationships in the context of immigration and religious pressures. The films star Indian actor and icon Om Puri as the family patriarch - "East is East" and "My Son the Fanatic" are the movies discussed. Here's the first paragraph.

Following the birth of his second child, musician Don Henley penned the reflective ballad “Annabel” in her honor. He warns his daughter of life’s hazards but sagely acknowledges, “I know, in the end, you’ll be who you will be.” The two patriarchs portrayed by Om Puri in “My Son the Fanatic” (1997) and “East is East” (1999) lack the wisdom, and flexibility, to accept who their children have become. Although approaching fatherhood from widely divergent perspectives, both characters turn violent when their sons attempt to forge their own paths in life.

I'm unable to publish my latest review on the Drama Movies site due to technical issues, so I'm posting it here.

What transpires when there are no consequences for criminal behavior? Tribal nations have been grappling with this issue for decades, especially since the 1978 US Supreme Court ruling that tribes do not have jurisdiction over non-natives on tribal land. FBI Special Agent Richard Collodi, while acknowledging he has no evidence to support the statement, thinks the ruling has had no effect. Interviewed for this film, he confidently states, “Native women are not being targeted.”

“Missing From Fire Trail Road”, written and directed by Sabrina Van Tassel, provides a scathing rebuttal to Agent Collodi’s assertion. Since the FBI does not collect data on the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), Van Tassel provides statistics from the National Criminal Justice Training Center. Indigenous women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than any other ethnicity and homicide is the third leading cause of death for Native women. Four out of five Native women experience violence.

Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a Tulalip woman who disappeared from the tribe’s Washington State reservation in 2020, is the main subject of “Missing from Fire Trail Road”. Using the fly-on-the-wall technique, filmmaker Van Tassel stays off-camera and off-mic as she interviews family members and shadows their investigation of Johnson-Davis’s disappearance.

Like many Indigenous children, Johnson-Davis and her sister were placed in foster care; the sequel to the government’s boarding school policy. Both girls were sexually abused by their foster families. A monetary settlement that should have made life easier for Johnson-Davis, ironically, made her more vulnerable to predators. According to her sister, Mary Ellen’s husband (non-native) stole her money before absconding to California. A pair of known drug dealers on the reservation (again, non-natives) also seem to have targeted the missing woman for abuse.

The family’s legal counsel, Gabriel Galanda, describes the situation as a game of “hot potato”. The tribal police cannot prosecute non-natives so they hand off the investigation to the state which sends it to the federal authorities. The FBI is offering a cash reward for information leading to the recovery of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, but that seems the extent of their involvement.

The verdant beauty and the incongruous poverty of the Pacific Northwest reservations are captured by the cinematography of Christophe Astruc. Ominous shots of Douglas fir trees shrouded in mist hint at the illicit activity occurring that takes advantage of nature’s camouflage. What criminals aim to hide, documentaries like “Missing from Fire Trail Road” make visible. While MMIW organizations pressure the authorities to act, the case of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis shows Indigenous families are often compelled to pursue justice on their own.

“Missing from Fire Trail Road” was released in 2024. It is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The documentary is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, which is how I watched the film at my own expense.

Danish film "The Last Viking" (previously titled "Back to Reality") is in post-production. The dark comedy is another entry in the long-running collaboration between actor Mads Mikkelsen and writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen. In "The Last Viking", Mikkelsen plays a mentally ill thief who cannot remember where the loot from his last robbery is stashed. His brother, played by Nikolaj Lie Kass, is newly released from prison and has to try to retrieve the information. The film is slated for release in the fall of 2025.

Here's a quote from Jensen on his working method - "I don't see myself as a provocateur. When I talk to academics or journalists that issue comes up, but my audience doesn't think about the issue of political correctness or how my films may or may not challenge it. I've no deliberate intention of challenging niceties. It's not about challenging what's politically correct, but about working with what's really funny." (Taken from the book "The Danish Directors, Vol. 2")

Gene Hackman retired from acting two decades before his death last month. He was known as a stubborn and private man who did not have much patience for the celebrity game.

Since his name has been in the news, I went back to Al Pacino's memoir "Sonny Boy", published in 2024, to see what Pacino had to say about working with Hackman in their 1973 film "Scarecrow".

"He was ten years older than me, very funny, a great actor, and a good guy. But that doesn't always mean that you can make harmony together. We weren't fighting at all. There just was an awkwardness between us...Gene was a bit taciturn, and there was no real communion between us except in the roles we had. We worked. I think Gene might have thought I was immature because I was so crazy wild. And I think he might have been right, really."

Pacino had a better relationship with Hackman's younger brother, who was willing to walk on the wild side with Al.