Kittens

Jack

Stephen

looking out at the moths

Passione directed by John Turturro

This trailer of women dancing to the song How Mamma Made the Baby is worth watching.   The cinematography moves, the editor choses perfect shots for maximum movement. 

John Turturro, who directed,  is in love with the musical traditions of Naples.  His film demonstrates why.  Renditions of the emotionally stirring songs are given by singers who enact them much as vocalize them.  The music gets into your blood. 

Misia sings 'Indifferenemente'

Inside  

Out to get a breath of air

I heard buzzing within the siding.

Was it bees or wasps grinding to stay in

or to get out, and above, a tiny tap

of toes walking across the eaves, but then

a ping, like radar, or is it sonar that bats use?

Hidden from view in the wood and aluminum

a hive of bugs provides snacks for a pair of bats.

Little Brown Bats photo from Animal Diversity Web

Mud Dauber photo from Pest Control Canada website

Diana Nyad to try the Florida-Cuba swim again

Diana Nyad is waiting for the right weather in the Caribbean to begin her swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat she attempted over thirty years ago, but had to cut short because of weather problems.  Now she has assembled a team including kayakers with shark repellent and charted a plan to accomplish at 60 what she couldn't at 28.  I am hoping that she succeeds. 

August 8, 2011

Last night at 8:30 or so, Nyad jumped into the waters off of Havana, Cuba and began swimming to Key West.  According to the map posted by CNN this afternoon, she has swum more than 25% of the route.

What I don't understand is, and guess has to do with the sexist nature of athletics and media coverage of them, why this is not a bigger story.  To me, it wraps together a story of human endurance, athleticism, and female power.  People have asked why is she doing it.  I think the answer is simple.  Because she can.

Here is a poem I wrote when she first tried the swim, thirty three years ago.



The Legend of Diana Nyad


When I entered the sea at Florida,
my body covered with a layer of thick oil,
my limbs turned over the water like a motor.
But the waves sucked me in, spit me out,
jellyfish stung me until I puffed up,
and the shark cage rattled so I thought I'd go deaf.
I wanted to make it to Cuba,
but a voice, familiar and terse,
said Diana, Diana and fished me out.
Into the boat I flopped,
my eyes sunken into my head.
They slapped me back to life
and I began spouting like a fountain.
And I will go back until the strain has snapped
and the difficult becomes easy--
to let the part of me that isn't lost to shore
glides easily through the sea.

&&&&&&&&&***********&&&&&&&&&

It is now August 10.  Nyad made it halfway when she became ill and had to stop.
I still am deeply inspired by the effort.

"I am stunned, at age 61, at how fast it all flies by. My mom just died. We blink and another decade passes. I don't want to reach the end of my life and regret not having given my days everything in me to make them worthwhile. Now that also means relaxing with a friend, taking in a sunset. Not all type A personality activities. But I don't want to waste any precious time, as Bob Dylan put it!"

--Nyad in an interview from February 2011 (LA Times)

Hoarding images

July 13

Yesterday walking through the woods, I thought I always carry my camera eager to capture every beautiful thing that I see because I know how short lived these things are and by photographing them I get to keep them for later when I am no longer here in the location where I found these things or when someone has bulldozed over these precious lands and developed the property into a development.

rhododendron

 

 

 

 

 

Then I thought I should limit myself to just three shots, and become much more careful about what I capture. I am gone hogwild with digital imagery.  How easy it is to manipulate; I am cropping and enlarging all the time.   I need to be more discriminating, or more patient.  I am such a restless person, pacing back and forth, walking here and there, swimming up and down, instead of just sitting waiting for something to come to me. I am yearning to go out and find it.

Indian Pipe

Unknown lepidoptera

Hemlock Tree

Hemlock


Under its majesty, I shrink.
Its branches protect and
threaten in their gnarled darkness
to block sunlight that warms up
the wilderness.

Sky

I sit on the porch

and watch the moon rise as the

frogs begin their song

At Walmart in Monticello

Of all the Walmarts I have been to, this one seems sort of scruffy.  It is not unusual to run into a pile of things that in the process of being unloaded and put away, are abandoned and not put away.  Sometimes the aisles are empty --  new stock is coming but not there yet.

What  a diverse number of things are on my list-- starting with blossom fertilizer and ending with apple fritters -- can be found there, and on sale for a cheap price.  I couldn't believe the price of Schweppes tonic-- $.50 cheaper than what I was used to in my little local grocery.  Butter is shockingly cheap when compared to the price in NYC.

I had been wanting a new chef's apron since my old one got so stained and beat up I threw it away.  Looking on Amazon, chefs aprons sold for $15-20.  At Walmart a chefs apron costs $7.00!

I almost bought some beautiful clay pots in red, green and mustard, just because they were made in Portugal and it is so hard to find anything that is not made in China.  But I did not need clay pots.

Walking down the aisle that sold tuna fish, we came upon a giant can, it must have had enough tuna to feed 50 people.  R wanted to buy it just for the sight of it, so that he could look at the foot high giant can of tuna.

photo courtesy of Walmart

At one point as I was pushing my big cart down the aisle to meet R, I noticed a woman coming furiously at me.  She looked slightly tense, determined to get someplace, and not let anyone get in her way.  It was a mirror and I was aiming at my image.

Thornden Park Rose Garden

R and C and I visited the Rose Garden at Thornden Park.

When we first came in, R was interested in the most fragrant blooms.  We asked a volunteer who was pruning and she said sadly that she had lost her sense of smell 20 years ago, but there were always dead heads to take off.  She continued her pruning.  On this melancholy note, we explored what was left in early July of what comes into full glory in mid June, and were not disappointed.

First Fridays: Poetry Reading at Narrowsburg Public Library

Taylor Mali

Marie Elizabeth Mali

Taylor Mali and Marie Elizabeth Mali performed at the Narrowsburg Public Library July 1.  It was a packed house.

They presented a well prepared set of poems beginning with a bilingual recitation (she recited the Spanish, he the English translation) of a love poem by Neruda which set the tone for what was to come.  Two people not only perform together, they live together, and love each other.  I have never seen anything like it before.  It was almost too good to be true:  two attractive, accomplished, funny and charming people who both write well and perform well together.

Taylor Mali is the more practiced performer, with his big voice and persona. He could command a stage as big as Yankee Stadium, so the small reading room in the Narrowsburg library was very cozy and intimate a stage for a poet whose poem about how to write a political poem begins "However it begins, it's gotta be loud."  His poems about teaching have inspired over 700 people to become teachers, and when he hears from 1,000 (hopefully by the end of August of this year), he will cut his hair and donate it to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, a hair donation organization for women with cancer.  Even though he is best known for the poem, "What Teachers Make," he did not read it,  closing instead with "The The Impotence of Proofreading."  Marie Elizabeth Mali is no less accomplished a writer, but her subjects are more diverse and influenced by her background of Argentinian-Swedish family.

First there was the usual First Fridays open mike reading, with ten readers, closing with Vera Williams who recited her poem about how to make a peach sandwich.  Master of ceremonies was as always the charming Corinna, a teen, whose mother manages the programing at First Fridays.   Corinna recited one of her own poems, and then cheerleaded the rest of the readers.

Vera Williams

Mushrooms

INdian pipes

Went looking for mushrooms today, though find identifying them challenging. Indian pipes are not mushrooms, they just seem to belong in that family since they do not have chlorophyll, turn dark, and live off the decayed leaves in the forest.

The second mushroom has little specks on it as if it were decorated pastry.  This one is living in the moss, but is covered with pine needles and rooted in a decayed leaf.

The third one looks like a very nicely made poached egg, and learned it is called an American Caesar. 

Bad Teacher

 Cameron Diaz is very funny and sexy in this movie.  She plays a gold digger who slips under the radar of her principal even as she arrives at work each day in mini skirts only to show movies to her students.  The students seem thoroughly engaged by these movies, which nearly always have an educational theme.  Her rival, a truly dedicated, also funny character named Amy Squirrel, is the exact opposite.  She plans her lessons, tries to have fun with the students, and reports Halsey's (Diaz's character) bad behavior to the principal.

 

Diaz struts her stuff in amazing shoes and skintight dresses.  I read an article about her that said if she had lived in another era with better directors Diaz would have had a brilliant career.   The material in the movie is thin, but I am grateful for a movie that allows a gifted comic actress to make us laugh.

Indigo bunting, scarlet tanager, robins

Indigo Bunting, painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Even though there are lovelier birds than robins here, it can be dramatic to watch robins hunt and feed.    They are so very thorough.

A robin captured a fresh worm in her bill.  She hauled the wriggler across the hot pavement.  Two bitty steps pulling her cargo, then a rest.  Two more bitty steps.  Progress was slow but steady as she made her way from one side of the road to the other.  Halfway there, the worm broke in two.  This did not stop her from clipping the fragment in her bill and pulling it a quarter inch at a time until she got the worm to the other side then gently with the most delicate of manners she ate him tidbit by tidbit.  But before she tackled the eating of the worm she'd successfully carried to the grass, she returned to the hot pavement where the rest of the worm had begun to show signs of life.

Scarlet Tanager, photo by Terry Sohl

Again just as she did with the first half, the robin pulled the writher by her a bill a quarter inch at a time until he joined up with the other portion.

photo by Ryan Bushby

Did the two halves greet each other at their reunion?   Were they glad to see each other?  I know nothing of worm communication.  Now it was time for the feast.  She ate a dainty snatch at a time, did not gulp or grind.  She chewed slowly and swallowed silently as the best brought up of us do.  When the worm was a manageable size, she flew off with it in her bill to her nest to share with the rest of her family.

Sullivan County

We arrived at Ten Mile River yesterday morning when it was still spring.
After unpacking the car,  R noticed a scarlet tanager in a pine tree.

A red spotted purple butterfly basked in the bright noonday sun among the impatiens waiting to be planted.  At first, from underneath, with the orange
and white and black markings, I thought it was an admiral.  No, its first
cousin.  The butterfly looked brand new, no bird had taken a bite out of
him yet.  His wings shimmered as if still wet from birth.
 

Took a walk up the steep hill just to stretch my legs.  Ran into a large cluster of
mountain laurel, some pink, some white. 

laurel

rhododendron

Can't believe I ever confused rhododendron with laurel.
Must be the similarity of the leaves.  Laurel looks more
like ballooning petticoats in the shape of a ten
pointed star.  Each part of the flower petal has
a tiny vertical line almost like a border between
one part and the next.

Lest all of this sound like Eden, in order to get here, we drove
up the Palisades, then onto 6 and 17 west, and passed
at least five deer who had been struck and killed by speeding cars. 

The Trip

The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as themselves, has a foolproof structure.  The structure is  based on a BBC tv series in which the two characters take a restaurant tour of northern England.  Each episode features a new location.  Originally suggested by Steve's girlfriend, who has since backed off such a romantic journey, the trip takes the two men into and out of luxurious accommodations,  gorgeous scenery, and tantalizing versions of sauteed scallops.

We learn how close the men are by how well they accommodate each other through bouts of talkativeness, recitations of Wordsworth, singing, and imitations of actors, mostly British, which are hilarious.

It's a road movie, a buddy movie, a food movie, and  a story about family and loneliness.  I am so grateful not to have to see a Judd  Apatow movie in order to have a belly laugh!

Bad week for the neighborhood

It started with a hand drawn illustration of a horse posted in my building's elevator with a poignant message from its creator, who I would guess is eight years old.  My young neighbor wrote to inform us that even though  she had hoped that  the police department might be looking for an alternate site for the World Trade Center security command center, that hope was ill founded.  The police don't have an alternative site for the command center, and here it is, three months from the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took down not just the trade center, but the command center itself at 7 WTC.

So our beloved horses, and gentle mounted police, numbering in the single to double digits, with the open doors allowing us to see in to the stables where the dark chestnut animals eat and sleep, will be replaced with a command center manned with hundreds of police on the alert for terrorist attacks. 

Photo by Carol Glassman / Tribeca Trib

The other messsage our neighbor wrote was that the fire department -- ladder 8-- aka the Ghostbusters firehouse-- was on a list of fire houses that were considered low use, thus dispensable in this round of budget cuts.

Photo by Carl Glassman/ Tribeca Trib


Given the concerned neighbor's age, it is clear that both of these community cornerstones are favorites of children under 10 who are always welcome, and often invited in to either feed the horses (when my daughter was small, we used to bring carrots to the stables) or to have a seat in the firetruck if time allowed and some life saving event wasn't going on.

When I was recently hit by a car a few blocks from these places, it took only minutes for the fire department to respond, and I am very grateful for their gentle care throughout my transfer to the emergency room at the Downtown Hospital.

This reminds me of another loss to the neighborhood, even though it is farther uptown:  St. Vincent's Hospital.  Their critical care unit was excellent (almost said "is" because I can't adjust to life without that hospital to call on).

The crowning blow came in the New York Post headline:  Chez Perv.
Dominique  Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief accused of rape by a hotel maid, and arrested on the runway as he was making his escape, has moved into a Franklin St. address.  We may not have room for police on horseback, or firemen, but bring us your rich unsavory people under house arrest

 We need to hold on to the feeling of community these important institutions bring to us.

Bridesmaids

When a woman gets married, it can force a wedge between her and her friends.  She must sacrifice relationships that are not based on sacred rituals.  She has now pledged her troth to her husband and children, and his parents claim higher priority than her best friend  or even her sister.  It changes the whole social matrix of a woman's life.

Bridesmaids acknowledges this painful and poignant change.  Mostly it is just a very funny series of sketches about the perfect wedding run amok, which has become a genre of comedy since the wedding business has loomed large enough to become a huge industry.  (One of my favorite lines comes from the bride's father who says "I am not paying for this.")

Kristen Wiig plays Annie, the maid of honor to her best friend, Lily, (Maya Rudolph), who is now moving in higher class circles than Annie is used to.  A new best friend has emerged from this pricier circle, Helen (Rose Byrne) who is prettier, richer, and more ready to spend the manic energy needed for a perfect wedding.

The cast is very talented, and the love interest of Kristen Wiig, Chris O'Dowl, is so perfect she can't see it at first.  There are some funny scenes having to do with police cruisers and missing persons. 
It is a relief to find a comedy that is full of talented women and written by women.  The few times the comedy doesn't work that well I suspect were inserted by guys and sort of just gross you out.

MIdnight in Paris

Woody Allen's new movie gives the audience not only very attractive actors doing their work perfectly but also some philosophy to think about.  How many of us have wished we lived in a different time, or thought that we were born too late?  (We rarely think we were born too early.)  Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter whose visit to Paris with his fiance brings on a bit of magic, allowing him to visit his favorite artistic era just as he is in the throes of writing his first novel.  While we are chewing over the meditative bits about needing to accept the time you live in, there is some fine music being played by Sidney Bechet, beautiful costumes worn by the lovely Marion Cotillard, and  shots of the city's landmarks and rooftops.

Adrien Brody does a wonderful comic turn as Salvador Dali, Kathy Bates plays a humane Gertrude Stein.  All of the casting and makeup are marvelous.  It reminded me a little of my other favorite Allen movies, like Zelig, and Purple Rose of Cairo where the leap off the screen, the leap of imagination is gracefully done from scene to scene, and the audience has no trouble accepting this alternate reality.

The absurdity of life pops up and makes you laugh at regular intervals, but a movie that is both  intellectually accessible and challenging  is extremely rare.

Hazel Dickens

Hazel Dickens died yesterday.  Her obituary was in the New York Times today.  I always notice the women who rate an obit because there are not as many as for men.  Dickens sang about the hard lives of the coal miners.  Her voice was more mournful than Loretta Lynn, her songs had a harder edge than Dolly Parton.  She sang in the movies Harlan County and Matewan.  You can hear her sing here: Fire in the Hole.  Her voice goes right through me.

Source Code

Science fiction about time travel trips me up.  It depends on the belief that someone can be in two places at the same time.  Source Code would have us believe that the main character played by Jake Gyllenhaal is not traveling through time, he is just living in an alternate reality in order to discover  the criminal intending to wreak havoc on a major metropolis.  He can go back to the last eight minutes of an explosion when everyone on a train is about to be killed, an infinite number of times.  Each time our hero learns a little more about a crime about to take place, and Gyllenhaal's delivery of the lines he must repeat over and over again is one of the pleasures of this film.  He is the not the only one whose acting buoys up a rather baffling premise.  There is lovely Vera Fermiga as a sympathetic military official, and Jeffrey Wright chewing the scenery as an evil scientist, and Michelle Monaghan looking winsome as the love interest.

Even though it left me scratching my head, I enjoyed the movie's well edited suspense.

my mother's eye is scratched

This morning my eye feels itchy, as if there is a very fine hair that if I could just remove, all would be perfect. The little orb would go back to lying in its perfect solution of fluid.  But this is an illusion.  No matter how much I scratch at or poke at or try to tug the sleepers from the corner of my eye, it still feels as if something infinitesimally small is trying to work itself free and not succeeding.

Earlier this week my mother suffered a scratch on her eye.  She  is being treated for macular degeneration with laser therapy to reduce the errant blood vessels that are blocking her macula, that centerpiece of the eye that keeps things in focus.  When she went home, she was in pain, and the pain increased, and her eye was swollen.   She phoned the doctor who had her come back to his office, and learned that her eye had been scratched.  "This sometimes happens" was the doctor's explanation.  (Wouldn't you like to throttle him?)

Am I feeling sympathy pains, or worrying that I will soon suffer the same eye disorder as my mother since it is genetic.  Or maybe is it  just a case of itchy eyes.

Le Quattro Volte

You don't need to know how to speak Italian to watch this Italian movie, and it has no subtitles.  The movie is not purely visual though the photography is quite wonderful.  It has an important soundtrack which consists of the sounds of men tamping down charcoal beds with shovels, goats bleating before being milked, a woman sweeping the floor in a church, a sheep dog barking, the final block being put into place in a mausoleum to enclose a casket.  The action moves from a forest where a goatherd tends to his flock, then to the man's house where he tends to a nasty cough with a potion poured out in a folded up magazine page.

The potion is very important to the man whose cough does not improve.   A town performs a passion play complete with a christ figure carrying the cross up a hill to join two other crosses already in place.

The camera is never too close to people, with the exception of the goatherd.  Most of the shots are long shots.  The goats are shot close up and we get to know them pretty well.  The mountains, the trees, the dog, and especially one very tall pine tree, these are our familiars by the end of the picture.  The picture begins and ends with smoke.  We learn how charcoal is made in an ancient practice with an architectural form worthy of Stonehenge.

I remember in the preview the title was explained-- something about how man lives "four times" -- as mineral, vegetable, animal, and thinking being.  We watch the coal, the pine tree, the baby goat, and the old shepherd progress from beginning to inevitable end, as smoke. 

Heard a Mockingbird today

Heard a mockingbird today singing its heart out in the middle of a bush as we walked east on 23rd St in the middle of the day.  At first we thought it was an alarm, the sound was so exaggerated and loud.  Then I located the animal, his head thrown back like Edith Piaf, going through its extensive repertory of imitations, including a catbird, a starling, a robin, a catcall, an engine warming up, a towhee, a whistler, and on and on it went.  Another man paused to listen. He didn't need to look, just to listen as the concert continued for five minutes.  No amplifier needed, this thing was singing for the upper deck.   The bird's white-streaked tail was tipped way up to the moon as it gave its heady aria to all passersby for free.  It was full of joy.

Morgan Library: Diaries

R and I went to the Morgan to see the Diaries exhibit.  Thought of the difference between diary and journal.  Both keep records, but diary implies daily, more everyday events, keeping track of what you did, who you saw, what happened.  Journals keep for writers records of what they mean to do, experiments, drafts of things, even. 

Examining three centuries of diaries made us want to begin keeping a diary right away. You could tell how successful the exhibit was by the expressions on the faces of the visitors.  Many were smiling that blissed out smile of surprise that comes with unexpected pleasure.

Some highlights:

--an oversize notebook of John Steinbeck kept while writing the Grapes of Wrath. 
His goal was to write two pages a day, so simple. 

--diaries of Thoreau whose beautiful penmanship wrote each carefully chosen word

-- E/B White's typescript of writing about his childhood every day which  led to the opening of Trumpet of the Swan.

--Walt Whitman's tender record of the wounded soldiers in the Civil War

--Samuel Pepys' writing in shorthand about the London Fire

--Charlotte Bronte's griping about her job as a teacher in a boarding house

--American record of the Boston tea party

--Hawthorne family diaries

Whether writing down history, or recording what your family had for dinner, diaries bring to life what has passed.