On looking ahead to this day—among leaders, and in the audience of "Once"

Today I'll give what I'm pretty sure will be my final talk emanating from LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair. I'll join Liz Dow, the extraordinary woman behind Leadership Philadelphia, and her leaderly contingent. We'll talk about this city we believe in.

The rest of the day will be a father-daughter day. Museums in the afternoon. Dinner. Then my father's early birthday present—tickets to "Once," which won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 2012.

I. Love. This. Story.

I. Sing. Those. Songs.

And while I gave my father many choices when we were planning out this day, I was secretly very glad when he said that "Once" was his first choice.

So off we will go.

Away, for a day, from here.

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Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, and The Swell Season

A few weeks ago, I watched "The Swell Season," the black-and-white documentary featuring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the musicians who brought us "Once."

("Once" remains one of my very favorite movies of all time.)

I can't get the documentary out of my head, and so I share the trailer with you today, on this cloudy Labor Day Weekend Sunday.

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Tears Fall Down

Yesterday the leaves here gave up for good, streaming down, hailing down; at times I thought that I was seeing snow. It was the end of the autumnal show. I felt deep melancholy.

Late in the day, Bill and I watched "Lars and the Real Girl," a story about a lonesome man who is pained by touch and who nonetheless longs for a woman. And so he brings a beautiful, contemplative-seeming sex doll into his life and (consequently) into his community—all of them treating this silent creature with such care and making room, always, for the man (Ryan Gosling) to step forward, out of delusion and sadness and into life.

I was so deeply moved by this movie—by its oddness, its kindness, its determined, quiet vision. Moved by the artists who would make such a film and the producers who would let them. It brought the film "Waitress" to mind, and also "Once," a movie about a busker and an immigrant who make music during one Dublin week. I can hardly think of "Once" without welling up with tears. Without knowing, for sure, that this is the sort of legacy I'd like to leave—one story, one single story that gets every note right.

Why is it so hard to capture human kindness—on the page, on the screen? To do it as well as Lars and Once and Waitress? These movies stand out because they are the rare exception, because they dare to be compassionate and odd at the same time, compassionate, perhaps, because they are odd.

As an artist, I know what I would like to achieve. As a person, I know how far I must travel still to get there.

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Moon Slide and Once

I've been watching the moon slide across my office window this morning—an imperfect, downward-tilted globe. Every time I look up it has escaped to somewhere new, so that just now it passes behind a fringe of trees, limbs incandescent with new buds.

Just now: trapped in the cradle of angled branches.

I remain off the page—hung up myself in some ambiguous writerly space. Ambivalent? My mind keeps returning to a movie I watched Friday evening—the movie "Once," which must be watched by anyone who cares at all about how stories get made, how love gets answered. It's a simple enough story about an Irish busker, the girl he meets, the time they spend making songs, but really: it goes much deeper than that. John Carney, who wrote and directed the movie, made the whole thing for less than $150,000, made it the way he wanted it made, hiring musicians who he thought might be able to act, as opposed to actors who might be taught to sing. He was guided, he has said, by tone as opposed to plot. He allowed scenes to develop at the distance of a long lens. He cleared a path for the authentic, and it shows, and I'm sitting with that, I'm trying to translate it toward anything I might choose to do—today, tomorrow, sooner or later.

The moon has gone pink on me, the color of the birthing sun.

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