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Hotchkiss girls cruise to 61-37 win
Jan 25, 2024
Riley Klein
LAKEVILLE — The Hotchkiss School girls varsity basketball team defeated Kingswood-Oxford School 61-37 on Wednesday, Jan. 24.
The Bearcats opened up a big lead early on and kept their foot on the gas through to the end. The dynamic duo of guard Kaila Richardson and center Morgan Jenkins terrorized Kingswood-Oxford with a seemingly unstoppable pick-and-roll. Combined with lights-out shooting from Grace Backus, Eleanor Hem and Angel Allen, Hotchkiss looked poised for a postseason run as the Founder’s League playoff tournament approaches.
The Jan. 24 game was well attended with a full student section. Bearcat fans were enthusiastic as their team built up steam. They also emitted exotic sounds, almost jungle-like, while Kingswood players were on the free throw line.
Kingswood-Oxford scored the first 4 points of the game, but after that, it was all Hotchkiss. Jenkins established herself as a dominant presence in the paint, to which the Wyverns had no answer. By the end of the first quarter, the Bearcats led 20-9.
Hotchkiss continued its run in the second fueled by disciplined rebounding on both ends of the court. The lead stayed steady at halftime with Hotchkiss ahead 32-21. Jenkins and Richardson linked up for 26 of the team’s first-half points.
The Bearcats’ guards took over in the second half with Backus, Helm and Allen combining for five 3-pointers. Drawing out the defenders opened up the paint even more and the lead continued to grow.
Hotchkiss won 61-37 over Kingswood-Oxford. The Bearcats’ season record advanced to 9-3 and the Wyverns moved to 5-6.
Jenkins led the Bearcats in scoring with 19 points. Richards and Backus each finished with 9 points.
Kingswood-Oxford was led in scoring by Samaria Gonzalez with 11 points.
Hotchkiss will host Kent School (11-3) Wednesday, Feb. 7, at 3 p.m. The last time these two rivals met, Kent won a nailbiter 58-53 on home court. Hotchkiss will look to even the score in the rematch in Lakeville.
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Beowulf Sheehan
Cornwall resident and author Roxana Robinson’s newest novel explores the unique challenges of finding love later in life.
“Leaving” is the story of two high school lovers, Warren and Sarah, who are reunited decades later. Their passion reignited, they must now grapple with the nuanced difficulties they bring to their new/old love story after two separate and full lives spent apart.
The intricate dynamics and emotional landscapes of the characters allow for an exploration of some difficult questions.
“Leaving, in terms of this novel, is about the way we part from things in our lives,” Robinson explained. “Sarah and Warren parted from the idea of their relationship originally for a reason that was completely false,” she continued. “I think that for many of us, those relationships that you have in your late teens and early 20s are based on so many complicated and possibly absurdly superficial things. There are all sorts of very flimsy reasons that we connect or leave a relationship, or even just a conversation. We just turn away. And in part, that’s necessary. We can’t stay open to everything our whole lives.”
Indeed, as the plot unfolds and the characters’ motivations are explored, the reader is left pondering the ways in which we often turn away from and abandon ourselves throughout the course of our lives.
Said Robinson: “What are the reasons that you stay fixed on your course? And what is that course? What does that mean to you? It’s exploring all those questions.”
Asked about her process, Robinson shared that “the characters write the book,” emphasizing her organic, exploratory process that shuns rigid outlines in favor of character-driven storytelling. “I write novels about things that really sort of trouble me and make me curious,” said Robinson.
Her second novel, “This Is My Daughter,” which came out in the ‘90s, explored the challenges of blended families and the inner lives of characters grappling with significant life choices.
“I was watching this [people embarking on second marriages] all around me and seeing people who were saying, ‘It’s great! We all are so happy, and the kids love us.’ I just didn’t think that was really what was happening. It was what Americans wanted to believe, but it wasn’t really what was true. So, I wrote about that issue, that problem of trying to reconnect families, because it was very prevalent at that time.”
Of “Leaving,” Robinson shared: “This is about people in the second half of their lives who are having a romance, and it’s much more complicated. You sort of think, ‘Oh, my kids are gone. I’m where I want to be in my in my career. And now I’m free to do what I want.’ And you are never free to do what you want. You are always bound by personal connections to place, to children, to commitments you’ve made. So, it was really interesting to me to sort of explore that issue.”
Robinson’s writing routine is as disciplined as it is exploratory. She writes first thing in the morning, every morning, guided by themes and characters that tug at her curiosity. This process has led her to explore diverse and challenging topics, from the aftermath of the Civil War to the return of a marine from Iraq to a character struggling with heroin addiction.
Her books have required meticulous research and empathy. She wrote “Leaving” in about three years, which is considerably less time than she usually spends on a novel; she said, “I didn’t have to do any research.”
Her teaching at Hunter College’s MFA program underscores her commitment to literature as she revisits literary classics with her students, finding new layers in each successive reading of “Madame Bovary,” “Anna Karenina,” “To the Lighthouse,” “House of Mirth” and “whoever else seizes our fancy that semester,” said Robinson.
“I’m probably the only person you know who has read Anna Karenina 15 times,” she remarked with a laugh, highlighting her dedication to both her craft and her role as an educator.
Robinson’s biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, praised by Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker as “without question the best book written about O’Keeffe,” offers a profound exploration of the artist’s life. It’s a work that not only showcases Robinson’s narrative prowess but also her deep understanding of the visual arts, a skill honed during her time in the American painting department at Sotheby’s. This expertise, coupled with a serendipitous suggestion to the book’s publisher by her husband, Tony Robinson, catapulted her into writing O’Keeffe’s biography, a task she initially doubted she’d be approached for, considering her pivot to fiction.
“It was a great project,” said Robinson. “She was a wonderful subject to write about.”
As art mimics life and inspiration for writers often comes from everywhere and everything, there is a hint of O’Keeffe in Sarah, one of the main characters in “Leaving.”
Robinson said of the comparison to Sarah’s self-sufficiency and independence: “It’s true. Sarah is very comfortable living alone. She has a beloved dog. She has a job. She has work that interests her. She has children that interest her. And you don’t see her as being needy because she’s alone, which is rare.”
In true O’Keeffe fashion, the characters in “Leaving” break with convention in order to really investigate what it means to love.
As for what is next for Robinson, she said, “I’m always at work on a book, so I have another book that I’m engaged by.” Her eyes then wandered to the corner of the book-lined room. “That’s it,” she laughed, “that’s what writers do.”
“Leaving” (W.W. Norton & Company), Robinson’s 11th published book, will release Tuesday, Feb. 13, with a book launch at The White Hart in Salisbury and a conversation with writer Dani Shapiro. Robinson will also discuss the book in conversation with Gillian Blake at The Cornwall Library Saturday, Feb. 17 at 4 p.m.
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A dish best served cold
Jan 24, 2024
MGM Studios
I was feeling surly recently, so I dialed up “revenge movies” on the streaming gizmo.
There are a lot of revenge movies.
I skipped obvious titles that I’ve seen multiple times, like the “Death Wish” flicks starring Charles Bronson.
But I didn’t skip John Boorman’s oddball entry from 1967, “Point Blank,” in which Walker (Lee Marvin, wearing a very sturdy pair of wingtips) wreaks all kinds of havoc in order to recover the $93,000 that was his share of a previous caper.
This was the 1960s, so the film’s story is “non-linear,” meaning the viewer wonders what the heck is going on.
But who cares when you’ve got Angie Dickinson wearing as little as the producers thought they could get away with, and bad guys like Carroll O’Connor and John Vernon.
William Lustig’s 1982 “Vigilante” is a coherent film that stars Robert Forster as Eddie, a regular guy pushed to extremes by indifferent policing and general societal breakdown.
Here we get into what is critical in a revenge movie: The hero has to pretty much kill everybody and break everything.
This one gets bonus points for giant land yachts and overall greasiness.
Brian Helgeland’s 1999 “Payback,”, based on a novel by Donald Westlake (as is “Point Blank”), has Mel Gibson rampaging around the nameless city that just happens to look a lot like New York in order to get back at the creep who double-crossed him on a heist and left him for dead.
This one has kinky sex, always a plus when you’re in a bad mood, and like “Point Blank,” the hero has a similar obsession with recovering the exact amount of money — no more, no less.
He also kills everybody and blows up what he doesn’t break.
Moving into a contemporary mode, there are three more or less current franchise films that explore the revenge angle.
The “Taken” series, starring Liam Neeson as retired CIA guy Bryan Mills, starts with Mills’ daughter getting kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex-trafficking thugs. Mills hops on a plane and kills everybody in creative ways and breaks everything. Oh, and gets his daughter back.
But one of the Albanian thugs has a grieving father who’s got the same general idea as Mills when it comes to killing everybody, etc.
This forms the basis for the imaginatively titled “Taken 2.”
In the third installment, Mills is framed for the death of his ex. There’s some unnecessary plot involved, but Mills gets to waterboard his deceased ex’s smarmy second husband and eventually wipes out the sinister Russian mobster.
What’s fun about these flicks is Mills’ ability to MacGyver, or to find simple solutions to knotty problems.
MacGyver used a Swiss Army knife a lot. Mills, when trying to prevent the private plane from taking off, simply crashes the stolen Porsche into the plane’s landing gear.
Would an ordinary Toyota or Subaru have done the trick? Sure, but viewers can crash their own regular cars. How often do you get the chance to destroy a Porsche?
John Wick is wet again.Lions Gate Entertainment
The soaking wet Keanu Reeves stars in the four “John Wick” movies, which are darn near interchangeable. John Wick is a retired assassin but this idiot son of a Russian gangster steals his restored Mustang and kills his puppy, which is good for about 12 hours total of mayhem and destruction in several parts of the world.
These locations have one thing in common — it is almost always night, and it has just rained.
And if there is any chance for John Wick to get drenched, he does.
The momentum lags by the time you get to the fourth flick, which spends at least 40 minutes in kung fu exercises in neon-lit rooms featuring lots of easily broken glass stuff.
Denzel Washington is the star of the “Equalizer” series, as another one of these retired CIA hitmen, Robert McCall.
He works in hardware stores and as a rideshare driver, but darn it all, he keeps running into injustice, which requires killing everybody and breaking everything.
This knight-errantry requires a more subtle touch from director Antoine Fuqua, who spends more time showing McCall drinking tea than seems absolutely necessary.
There are three of these movies, and darned if I didn’t feel just about revenged out by the time the credits rolled on the third.
The revenge movie exercise took about two weeks, and there were numerous flicks that did not make the cut. As a general rule, I avoided anything that has been mocked by the guys at Rifftrax, and I did not go back to the black and white era, when you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting someone en route to a showing of a revenge movie.
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‘When hatred gets out of hand’
Jan 24, 2024
Dividends
Felice Cohen, a journalist, writer and professional organizer, spoke about her 2010 book “What Papa Told Me” to an online audience via the David M. Hunt Library Thursday, Jan. 18.
The “papa” in question was her grandfather, Murray Schwartzbaum, from Szczekociny, Poland, who as a Jewish boy survived five years in eight different Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
Cohen said as a child “I had no idea” about the Holocaust until she read Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” in middle school. The book, published in 1960, is a memoir about the Holocaust.
The subject scared her. It wasn’t until she was in college that she became curious. One subject of her curiosity was the death of her grandmother, which she had been told was from cancer.
It turned out the grandmother died by suicide.
She asked her grandfather about it, and in order to explain, he had to go back to the Holocaust and the Lodz ghetto.
After Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the country was split up between the Germans and the Soviet Union, Polish Jews and Roma were forcibly moved into areas known as “ghettos,” where they were kept apart from the non-Jewish population.
Conditions in the ghettos were appalling, and nobody knew when they would be sent on to one of the labor or death camps.
Schwartzbaum told Cohen that her grandmother was staying in one room with her sister and her boys when the Germans came for the sister.
As she was dragged out, she asked Cohen’s grandmother to look after the children.
The next day the Germans returned and took the boys. The day after that, they sent the grandmother to Auschwitz.
Both sisters survived, but the boys did not. And years later, when the sisters were reunited, Cohen’s grandmother was asked by her sister why she hadn’t saved the boys.
Cohen’s grandmother sank into a deep depression. Treatment was ineffective, and she eventually hanged herself.
Cohen wrote about this unhappy history in college, and Schwartzbaum suggested he tell her his story as well.
Cohen said it took 18 years to put “What Papa Told Me” together. Her grandfather lived in Florida, and she was in New York, so she visited frequently, with tape recorder and notebook at the ready.
A sample:
At the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Schwartzbaum and others were ordered outside in winter and told to form a circle.
An officer in a Jeep-type vehicle drove into the circle. In the vehicle was a Jewish prisoner with an apple in his mouth.
The Nazi drove around the circle for everyone to get a good look.
He stopped and announced that the man had been caught stealing an apple.
As punishment, he was forced to hold the apple in his mouth, like a roast pig.
“But a Jew is no better than a pig,” yelled the Nazi before shooting the man in the head.
Cohen recalled being overwhelmed, not only by the savagery but by the realization that these and similar memories had been in her grandfather’s mind “for decades.”
The book came out in 2010, and Cohen did not expect massive sales. When 150 people bought it, she was thrilled.
But by a happy set of circumstances, the book took off.
Cohen was living in a miniscule apartment in New York, and agreed to participate in a video shoot about how to live in small settings. Visible in the video was her computer screen with the book cover showing.
The video took off, with views in the millions. Much of the response was on the subject or organizing, which is Cohen’s area of expertise.
But after that response tapered off, people began getting in touch about the book.
According to the Amazon.com listing, some 35,000 copies have been sold, and Cohen has spoken at libraries, schools, and other venues.
Schwartzbaum died eight years ago, Cohen said. But he was thrilled at the book’s success.
“This is one man’s story, for 6 million others,” she said. “It tells us what happens when hatred gets out of hand.”
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