Last Day of the year

Word of the day:  gelid : extremely cold

Man, Gabriel sure doesn't want to nap!  Tonight, Julia and I will finish watching Honeymoon in Vegas and maybe Midnight in Paris.  What a beautiful day - high sixties and sunny.  It's been a nice afternoon so far - pizza, the UK-Louisville game, a nice walk with Daisy.  It's just so relaxing, having the home to ourselves!  Julia and I are looking forward to having this therapeutic, easy weekend unrolling at a leisurely pace.  Monday, we go back to gorgeous Beaufort. 
 
To continue Polish weekend, let's take a quick look at one of the most acclaimed battle scene paintings of the 19th century, Polish artist Jan Matejko's The Battle of Grunwald (1878), which depicts the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ruthenian (Slavs from southern Russia, Galicia, and northeastern Hungary) rout of the invading pests that were the Teutonic Knights.  The Knights were a religious-military order set about to convert heathen Poles and Lithuanians.  By the time of the battle, the Knights were based in Prussia, with large possessions in Germany and Italy; they were at the peak of their power.  The battle, sometimes known as the Battle of Tannenberg to the Germanic Teutons, was technically lopsided - the Teutons were outnumbered - but the Teutons were better trained.  The winner would control most of eastern Europe - at least, that was the projection.  But mainly the battle signaled the eventual dismantling of the Teutons, which incurred heavy financial loss because of the battle.  They couldn't defend their other territories and were forced to rely on costly mercenary forces.   (If anyone is interested, here is a link to more info about the battle: http://www.imperialteutonicorder.com/id41.html) with technical summaries of the strategies and maneuvers.  

 
Anyway, Matejko's large, three-years-in-the-making work features a barrage of horses and knights struggling greatly.  There is a lot of detail, and amidst this storm of movement and bloodshed, two figures emerge - the doomed, about-to-be-slayed Grand Master of the Teutonic Order (in white) and the Grand Duke of Lithuania (in red).  When the painting was first exhibited in Krakow, thousands came to see it.  Matejko was influenced by northern Renaissance painters, particularly Titian, and his works have a comparative theatrical feel to some of the grand, big-canvassed Renaissance works, a patriotic bigness.  
 
Poland features the largest population of wood storks anywhere in the world, did you know that?  I didn't.  Looking at my handy, insanely informative The Sibley Guide to Birds (courtesy of Julanta - aka, my Santa Wife), I find the following bits of info about the wood stork:
- large, slow-moving, heavy-billed
- a shallow water forager
- a white-bodied, excellent soarer
I also find that they migrate through this area in winter.  Maybe I'll see one in Savannah sometime! 

(Well, the day was going fine.  Daisy nipped at Gabriel's face.  Rotten!) 
One more bit about Poland.  Try this quiz: http://www.sporcle.com/games/Rooneyfan1/countries-that-border-poland

Last day of the year = last day for 2011 movies.  Only two January 2012 releases look remotely interesting - The Grey (Liam Neeson fighting wolves) and One For the Money (Katherine Heigl bringing Janet Evanovich's bounty hunter to life), so it'll be fun to track the Oscar race this month, if nothing else.  I'm sticking to my early predictions - and even rooting for Woody Allen to win a screenplay Oscar for Midnight in Paris.  Speaking of Allen, he has directed 42 movies.  I have seen 29 of them.  My eight favorites are: Match Point (2005), Annie Hall (1977), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Midnight in Paris (2011), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), followed closely by the much-maligned Whatever Works (2009).  He has been nominated for 21 Academy Awards, winning three of them.  6 actors have won Oscars for their performances in Allen's movies.  His next movie, filmed and set in Rome, is titled Nero Fiddled and features what is bound to be one of 2012's most fascinating, intriguing casts: Allen himself, Ellen Page, Jesse Eisenberg, Roberto Benigni (yes, Roberto Benigni), Penelope Cruz, Alison Pill, Alec Baldwin, Greta Gerwig, and Judy Davis.   

Back tomorrow - or next year. 

Back Again

Word of the day:  inspissate : to make thick; thicken

Okay, the guests are all gone, and I'm free to blog again.  And free to spend all my time with Jules and Gabe and the wonderful Daisy. 

Two book reviews: 

- A Drop of the Hard Stuff, by Lawrence Block.  Block has a gritty elegance, with cleanly authentic dialogue and a knowledge of the seedy.  He writes pungently, vividly.  The plot - about one of Block's most famous creations, PI Matthew Scudder, investigating the death of a recovering alcoholic shot after making amends to all those he had wronged during his drinking days - crackles for a while, but then loses some steam, with the discovery of the killer kind of random. 


- Radioactive, Lauren Redniss.  A compelling biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, most likely to be cherished and remembered for the audacity of its form.  Done in the format of a graphic novel, the biography features arresting artwork on every page, which Redniss (who teaches at the Parsons School of Design in New York, all you Project Runway aficionados) has constructed using cyanotpe.  The Prussian blue created by the ultraviolet rays hitting the negative and solution (ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide) give the pages a spectral, glowing look, apt for the subject matter.  I flew right through it.

Okay, so we'll make today and tomorrow Poland Day, in honor of Marie Curie (heck, maybe next week, too).  I knew a little about Solidarity, but the following article taught me more about this crucial period in Polish history, especially in regards to the country's relations with the Soviet Union:  
http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1980solidarity&Year=1980

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) was one of Poland's most famous, most glamorous Art Deco figures.  A painter of luxurious, lush women, sexually satisfied and decadent, her art providing a good, reflective impression of the woman herself, a high society aristocrat who was perhaps a symbol of the new Polish woman - independent, chic, sexually unfettered.  It was in Paris during the tail-end of the first World War and throughout the twenties and thirties that the born-to-wealth Lempicka made a name for herself, painting nobility, writers, entertainers, scientists, industrialists.  Her life in Paris between the wars was marked by debauchery and bisexualism.  She had a simple style, was very prolific, and was much in demand as a portrait artist, in Paris and during her time in the U.S.  (Above: L'Echarpe Bleue, 1930)

So long, Showtime.  You were good for two shows, the sixth season of Dexter, which gained its footing after a shaky start and was undeniably gripping by the end, and the wonderful Homeland, which featured three outstanding central performances: Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin.  

 

    

Checking In

With the holidays still in full force and with my parents in town, I'm going on a brief blog hiatus.  I'll be back this coming weekend.  Happy holidays to all! 

Happy Holidays!

I'll be back on Tuesday! 

Straw Dogs!

Word of the day : disputatious :  inclined to dispute; provoking debate

I've still got to post a picture of our new dog Daisy.  She's a sweet treat!  Funny and happy, playful, a good listener, house-trained, not a mean bone in her!  We're all just waiting for surly Clive and hissing Kit to warm up to her.  I'll post pictures soon!

We all watched Straw Dogs last night.  I know it was supposed to be an ugly and provocative film (the original 1971 Sam Peckinpah version wasn't particularly easy to watch), but it was too silly, too unrealistic.  The deck was stacked - the villain (True Blood's Alexander Skarsgard and an overdoing-it James Woods among them) and his cronies were too Hollywood-redneck: 38. Special-loving, football-and-beer crazed, hunting good 'ol boys; so any queasy ambiguity about the inevitable denouement is pretty much nil - and the question about whether the raped wife was "asking for it" pretty much irrelevant.  James Marsden is an adequate fill-in for Dustin Hoffman, and Kate Bosworth is fine enough, but there are too many nagging questions, and only the final scene ignites.  

David and I went and saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol yesterday, and it was fantastic, the best of the series so far.  The director this time around is animation virtuoso Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) and he does a remarkable job keeping the film moving tautly along, and some of the set pieces display a how'd-they-do-that wizardry, including a sequence outside the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, that will leave you amazed.  The team (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner) is appealing, but it's Tom Cruise's show and he's all sublime, beautiful movement (the actor is still in remarkable shape).  This is now a series I don't want to end. 

Larry McMurtry's Sin Killer, the 77th book I've read this year, is an amiable opening act in his tetralogy of the Berrybenders, an English family traveling through the American west in 1832 for sport.  As usual, there are a wide array of colorful characters (McMurtry can do 'colorful' as effortlessly as anyone), an absence of pokiness, a well-researched portrayal of various Indian tribes and beliefs, romance, humor.  The only flaw is that there is no real ending, no wrapping-up (inevitable, I guess, since it's part if a series), and that, maybe, this all comes too easy for McMurtry; really, how can you top Lonesome Dove? 

Check out this article from NPR's website on Diego Rivera:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/21/144028225/unusual-diego-rivera-work-restored-in-mexico-city

This week's American masterpiece: Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, 1948.

On display at the MOMA, this famous work of loneliness and isolation, unreachability and physical and emotional distance, was one of Wyeth's most personal works, composed during a time when the American art scene was dominated, defined, by abstraction.  Here are two excellent summaries about the painting and the house within the work:
http://www.andrew-wyeth-prints.com/article-christinas-world.html
http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_paintings/ss/andrew_wyeth_christinas_world.htm

Quick mention.  In the Lawrence Block book I'm reading right now, the author references Lincoln Steffens' 1904 work Shame of the Cities.  Having no idea what it was, I went digging (well, one doesn't 'dig' so much on the internet, but, rather, lightly prod) and found that Steffens was one of America's early muckrakers, those writers and journalists who exposed the issues of the day: political corruption, prison conditions, exploitation of natural resources, pension fraud, etc.  Shame of the Cities wasn't so much a book as it was a collection of articles Steffens wrote for McClure's magazine.  The collection was a series of portraits of various U.S. cities - St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, mong others.  It was meant to inspire reform, for Steffens saw the widespread corruption as ruining the very ideals of democracy the country was founded on; Steffens' U.S. was marked, dominated by, powerful, all-prevailing special interests.  For Steffens, the whole country was a business - and that was a problem.  (Another, more famous work of muckraking?  Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.)
 
Today's bird?  The brilliantly blue indigo bunting (the male that is, the female being dull brown), a small, thick-billed songbird found in the abandoned lands throughout most of the U.S, its preference being for oil fields and roadsides.   This bird migrates at night, using the stars as its compass, wintering in weedy and neglected fields and beneath power-line right-of-ways south of the border, the Caribbean, and South America.  Its population is dwindling slightly in the southeast but nowhere else. Solitary, socially monogamous birds.

Take care!      

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Word of the day :  ectype  : a reproduction, copy

Katrina is 54 today. 

What a blissful weekend!  A Saturday spent in Beaufort, good shopping at Tanger Outlet malls in Hilton Head Island, Obsessed, a lazy Sunday of football watching (plus a Bengals win and a Jets loss), and, today, a Monday morning playing Stratego with David, and now an afternoon working on my blog and watching a salute to Cary Grant on TCM.  Julia and David are in Savannah right now, getting tattoos.  Tomorrow morning, we might be getting a new dog.  More details to come on that tomorrow.  

David and I went and saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows on Friday.  It was more of the same, not as fresh as the first one, but not much of a slacking-off either.  While the relationship, the back-and-forth- affectionate bite between Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock and Jude Law's Watson, might lack the humor and sizzle this time around, it's such an appealing, ingratiating twosome that we don't really care.  Downey, in particular, hasn't worn out his welcome as Sherlock yet.  It's not a logy movie, though Guy Ritchie's staging (or should I say CGI-ing) of the action scenes tends to be a messy jumble, badly blocked, largely incomprehensible.  Jared Harris gives good villianry as Moriarty; Noomi Rapace is here too, as is Stephen Fry, both of them adding some color. 

Fright Night is a real treat.  As remake of the 1985 film, this updating by director Craig Gillespie has Anton Yelchin filling in for William Ragsdale as the teenaged kid suspecting that his neighbor next door (Chris Sarandon then, Colin Farrell now) is a bloodsucker responsible for most of the disappearances in his Las Vegas neighborhood.  The film is fabulous, funny and tense, with a particularly memorable, vise-tight sequence when Yelchin's character tries to smuggle a kidnapped girl out of Farrell's apartment.  The special effects are fun and the movie is gory without washing the audience's face in it.  Toni Collette is underutilized as Yelchin's mother, but it doesn't matter too much with Farrell around.  He's a slithery, purring thrill as the sexy, ominous Jerry; the way he greets Yelchin with a "hi, guy" is scarier and more enjoyable than any special effect. 

David and I watched A&E's four-hour miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's Bag of Bones, not bad as its type goes.  It actually gets more involving as it goes along, as opposed to most of King's novels.  Pierce Brosnan isn't exactly who I envision when I think of Mike Noonan, and Brosnan isn't able to bask in his crisp, languid raffishness but, rather, overact - but what else can one do when forced to talk to a moose head and a refrigerator?  The film is well-paced, with adequate effects, but King, as ever, is too schematic, the mystery eventually too diagrammed out, with everything falling right into place; there's ultimately less than meets the eye. 
Why does Hollywood keep adapting King?  There have been about sixty feature-length adaptations, give or take, of King's work.  I have seen, believe it or not, twenty-nine of them.  The best?  The Mist and Misery. 

I'm reading Larry McMurtry's Sin Killer and was surprised to find that one of the characters in the novel, a painter named George Catlin, was, in fact, a real-life artist.  He was the first painter to portray Plains Indians in their own territories.  He journeyed out west five times to do so, creating more than 600 paintings of the American West.  Catlin was convinced that the Indian way of life would be wiped out soon, so he wanted to set down their customs and lifestyles on canvas for eternity.  Catlin sympathized with the Indians, forced west after the Indian Removal Act, and their struggles to adjust to the hardships of the corrupt frontier.  He displayed his paintings along the east coast and Europe, and Catlin himself came to be well-known as an activist for the Indian way of life.  He didn't just paint Plains Indians - he also portrayed Cheyenne, Omaha, Mandan, and Blackfeet Indians, among others.  Catlin had tried to sell his Indian Gallery (his collection of Indian paintings) to the U.S. government, but couldn't and, heavily in debt, was forced to sell off the Gallery to wealthy industrialist; they are now in the Smithsonian.  Catlin was a writer too, although some of his "accounts" of the frontier are believed to be wildly exaggerated.  

According to the Georgia Ecological Services Fields Office website, there are four birds with habitats in the state of Georgia right now that are either threatened or endangered:

The piping plover.  This threatened small shorebird winters along the coast in expansive mudflats or sandy beaches. 

Kirtland's warbler.  This bird migrates through Georgia on its way to wintering in the Bahamas.  Primarily found in Michigan jack pine forests, it's a small blue-and-yellow bird with black stripes that constantly pumps its tail. 

The wood stork.  Endangered like the Kirtland's, the wood stork is found in southeast wetlands, nesting in cypress and wooded swamps.  Large, white, baled-headed, this is the only stork breeding in the U.S.  It breeds in late winter in Florida, when its prey fish is easy to catch because the pools have shrunken. 

A red-cockaded woodpecker.  Also endangered, the 'pecker is found in mature pine forests. This woodpecker is endemic to the U.S. (a trait rare in itself).  A black and white bird, it has a very particular, very specific habitat and this has caused its population decline, as their pine forests have been decimated.  A cockade is a ribbon or ornament worn on the head; the male woodpecker has a hard-to-see red one on the side of his head. 

Wish us luck on the dog! 

Word of the day : glom :  to take or steal; to seize

I finally finished Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, a lush, pungent, detailed, all-night, euphoric novel, written in a sinuous, tipsy style.  It is about two Cuban-born musician brothers who move to New York City in the late 1940s and start a mambo band.  The brothers are a contrast in temperament and personality; Cesar, the oldest, the vocalist, is a ladies man, a warm-hearted sensualist, a hard-working hedonist; younger brother Nestor is sad-souled, eternally longing, equally talented, the composer of "Beautiful Maria of My Soul," a modest hit that catches the attention of Desi Arnaz, a lifelong friend, and gets the brothers a guest appearance on I Love Lucy.  The book spans about thirty years in the life of Cesar, and there is lot of sex in it; Cesar's life is saturated with it, and such an emphasis on the physical, at times graphic, wantonness of Cesar might turn some female readers off - and, in truth, gets a bit monotonous.  But Hijuelos doesn't throw away any of the characters; they're all detailed and multi-dimensional.  As a look at particular time in America, as a sympathetic, even-handed account of an immigrant's experience, as a loving, heavily-researched tribute to mid-century Cuban popular music in America, the book hits its marks.  A rich, rewarding novel, one that arouses your interest in the subject. 

I was glad that Zooey Deschanel was rewarded with a Golden Globe nomination for her flaky, post-ironic loopiness in The New Girl because she is the whole show, despite the other cast members all being pretty funny - and equitable, well-matched guest work from Justin Long and others.  Although, I guess it's fair to say that if you don't like Descahnel, there's no reason that you would like the show.

The American art work of the week is The Scout: Friends or Foes? (1902-1905) by the western artist Frederic Remington.  A painter, sculptor, author, and illustrator, Remington studied at Yale and the Art Students League of New York, before heading west to try his hand at technically reproducing the beauty of the American West, dynamically representing the frontier, the cowboys, the cavalrymen, the Indians.  He did a lot of illustration for magazines such as Harper's Weekly, and was probably most famous for these western-themed illustrations, though he did hundreds of paintings, and was a fine  reporter and sculptor as well.  In the above landscape painting, we see how Remington's early twentieth works tended to pose, rather than answer, questions.  The Indian is watching the distant dwellings on the horizon, unsure whether the dwellings house allies or enemies - if indeed, they're even dwellings, for the distant mass is hard to make out, and could be even an oncoming force.  Remington expresses sympathy for the lone Indian, and the viewer can't help but notice the sheer whiteness of the snow, and what must be a characteristically brutal winter. 

Today's bird?  No bird today.   Just a kinda-interesting article:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/12/the-city-bird-and-the-country-bird/

It is me and Julia's 5th anniversary tomorrow!  Can you believe it?  I love my wife, love her, love her, love her, love her, love her, love her! 

Beaufort!  Beaufort! 

Word of the day: conversazione : a meeting for conversation, especially about art, literature, or science

Considering these - http://www.imdb.com/oscars/nominations/screen-actors-guild -
And these - http://www.imdb.com/oscars/nominations/golden-globes
Here are my picks for the Oscar nominations:

Actor:  (LOCKS) George Clooney, The Descendants; Jean Jujardin, The Artist; Brad Pitt, Moneyball; Michael Fassbender, Shame.  Those are all near-guarantees.  That fifth one?  Hmmm... I'm thinking Gary Oldman gets muscled out by Ryan Gosling in The Ides of March.  This will make up for Gosling's lack of nomination last year for Blue Valentine and as a reward for what was a terrific year for him. 

Actress: (LOCKS) Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady; Viola Davis, The Help; Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin; Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn.   That's four.   This is where we get tricky.  Will it be Rooney Mara?  Glenn Close as a woman playing a man?  Charlize Theron for the well-received, Diablo Cody-scripted Young Adult?  I'm thinking Theron will get left out; same for Mara, as the girl with the dragon tattoo; Close, who hasn't been nominated in twenty-three years, will fill that last slot for Albert Nobbs. 

Supporting Actor: (LOCKS) Christopher Plummer, Beginners; Albert Brooks, Drive; Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn.   That's it on the shoe-ins. I'm not quite fully convinced that Moneyball's Jonah Hill will be included with these other stalwarts, but he's got a shot.  Nick Nolte will get his third nomination for his grizzled father in Warrior.  So is it Hill?  Armie Hammer for the widely-panned J.Edgar?  Viggo Mortensen?  Kevin Spacey?  Nah, Hill gets it. 

Supporting Actress:  (LOCKS) Octavia Spencer, The Help; Berenice Bejo, The Artist; Jessica Chastain, not for Tree of Life, not Take Shelter, not The Debt, but The Help.  Here it gets dicey.  Already it's a largely star-lacking category, with all first-time nominees, relative unknowns.  The big question is, can Melissa McCarthy get in?  I say, why not?  But the answer is no.  I think the great Vanessa Redgrave gets in for Coriolanus, leaving one final spot.  If Janet McTeer gets it for Albert Nobbs, she will surely be the least-known actor with two Oscar nominations within the last twelve years (she was nominated for 1999's earthy, enjoyable Tumbleweeds).  I don't think it will happen.  Pencil in The Descendants' Shailene Woodley. 

Director:  (LOCKS)  Martin Scorsese, Hugo; Michael Hazanavicius, The Artist; Alexander Payne, The Descendants.  I haven't heard enough early reviews for Steven Spielberg's War Horse, but it certainly has a lot going for it, so I'll give him the fourth spot.  Fifth?  Let's go with the Woodman, with his best-reviewed movie in years, Midnight in Paris. 

Picture:  (LOCKS) The Artist; The Descendants; War Horse; The Help; Midnight in Paris; Hugo; Moneyball.   Now I don't know, but what the hell?  Tree of Life, Bridesmaids, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. 

Bird of the day:  Look no further than the black-capped chickadee.  Tiny, with an oversized round head, a black cap and bib, it's truly a curious bird, investigative and bold.  Bouncy and acrobatic, too.  These birds can be found throughout the north of this continent year round, from, say, Kansas to Alaska in woody shrubs, woodlots, marshes, residential neighborhoods and parks.  This chickadee has an amazing memory, hiding bits of food and seeds in thousands of different places for later on, and it is able to retrieve them all (well, most of 'em) at later points. 

I watched Inglorious Basterds with David today.  This was the third time I've seen the film, and I am convinced more than ever that Christop Waltz's sly, rollicking, frightening turn as Colonel Hans Landa is undoubtedly among the finest of the last decade.  Of all Quentin Tarantino's discoveries and junkheap-retrievals (Travolta, Robert Forster, Pam Grier, David Carradine), I think Waltz is the real treasure, although Forster (recently seen, poignantly curmudgeonly, a bitter blast, in The Descendants) is great underseen and should have never faded out to begin with. 

Saw a dolphin yesterday!  Three of them!  Made my year!  Happy holidays! 

History Lesson Wednesday

Word of the day : non sequitir : a statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it; an inference or conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence; an unwarranted conclusion

Off to Savannah today with David!  Some stops along the way include the Oatland Wildlife Center, maybe Fort Pulaski, Tybee Island, the historic district, and shopping.

The Oscar Hijuelos book I've been reading has been full of information - not just on mambo music, but mid-20th century Cuban history as well.  Which is a nice segue into today's history lesson...
Do we all remember what the Bay of Pigs was?   Here's a nice link:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pigs.aspx

As a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba.  The U.S. followed suit by removing theirs from Turkey and agreeing to never attempt an overthrow of Castro's government again.  

Other interesting facts about Castro?  He was educated in Roman Catholic schools.  His presidency spanned the terms of nine U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush.  He claimed to survive 634 assassination attempts.  There are no streets in Cuba named after him, no statues of him, no currency featuring him.  (Incidentally, in a UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2011 finding, Cuba has the world's second highest literacy rate, 99.9%, trailing only Georgia; the U.S., with its 99.0% rate, ranks #45). 

A close friend of Castro's was the Havana-born photographer Alberto Korda, son of a railway worker, and Cuba's first fashion photographer.  Korda and a group of other photographers followed Castro on his trip to the U.S. in 1959 and took many shots of the future dictator around the nation's capital.  Korda began accompanying Castro everywhere over the next ten years, becoming his personal photographer, along with his golf and fishing partner.  Korda was introduced by Castro to spear fishing, and this led to a burgeoning, lifelong interest in underwater photography.  Korda is well-known for his photographs of Che Guevara, a close friend and ally of Castro, including the one below (Guerrillero Heroico) a famous one, of Guevara at a funeral (also attended by Castro) for 136 Cubans who were killed during a counterrevolutionary attack.  This is an iconic image of the public's idea of the Guevara personality - impassioned, handsome, angry, avenging, even mysterious.  It's one of the most acclaimed, recognizable photos of an individual in the last 100 years.   

Tuesday...

Word of the day :  swivet : a state of extreme agitation

Just checking in with my readers.  Today is family update day.  
A nice two days in Charleston with Julia, Gabriel, and David.  Can't wait to get back to the city - and maybe visit one of the plantations and beaches.
Now David's here for two weeks and we're going to entertain him for a while.  Glad to have him!

Gabriel is doing well, progressing nicely in his speech therapy classes.  He starts school after he turns three on January 29.  Julia and I are going to get him some matchbox cars and a train set for Christmas.  Grandpa Ed is going to get him a trampoline.  Should be a blast.   

Julia is finishing up the semester at Georgia Southern.  We're going to enjoy the holidays.  Our anniversary will be spent in beautiful Beaufort, and we'll take David to Savannah a few times.  My parents will arrive on the 27th of this month for probably a few days.  

Random thoughts, Tuesday.
- I'm glad Fear Factor is back.  I used to be a fan of it, then I thought it was tiresome and same-y, and I wasn't at all sad that it went off the air in 2006.  Now I find it's re-appearance refreshing.
- The best movies I've seen this year are The Descendants, Sarah's Key, Midnight in Paris, and The Lincoln Lawyer.  I haven't seen as much as I usually do, but Julia am I keep pace via Redbox.  End-of-year releases that look delectable include the new Sherlock Holmes, War Horse, The Iron Lady, Carnage, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, We Bought a Zoo, The Adventures of Tintin.
- The best TV shows I've seen this year are the final season of Friday Night Lights and Showtime's Homeland.
- TNT's Mystery Movie series is proving to me a modest pleasure, and it's nice to watch actors not seen enough: Carla Gugino, Dermot Mulroney, Bill Pullman.

Today's bird?  I found the Georgia Rare Bird Alert website, a site that allows bird watchers, guides, rangers, etc. to call in and report sightings of hard-to-spot birds in the state.  I saw that a long-billed dowitcher was spotted in Canton, Georgia.  This is a medium-sized shorebird, a brownish gray bird with a scaly appearance.  This bird tends to live and breed in Siberia, Alaska, Washington and Canada in the summers, migrating to the western U.S. and eastern U.S. and wintering in Mexico.  It nests in deep depressions in the grass and moss, feasts in aquatic invertebrates and insects.  It can be seen along lake shores and small pools of saltwater.      




   

See Sarah's Key!

Word of the day: compendious : concise, comprehensive; marked by brief expression of a comprehensive matter

Sarah's Key, adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Tatiana de Rosnay, is one of the year's best films.  Kristin Scott Thomas plays a journalist writing a piece on the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, in which French police in German-occupied Paris herded up over 13,000 Jewish emigres in the city, along with their French-born children, and shipped them off to Auschwitz.  It turns out that Thomas's husband's family moved in to one of the apartments in the Jewish ghetto not longer after the previous Jewish tenants were forced out.  Thomas (a spellbinding actress, conveying translucent preoccupation) wants to know what happened to the daughter of the Jewish couple who lived there in 1942, the titular character who hid her brother from the authorities the fateful day of the round-up and never came back for him.

The film glides back and forth, seamlessly, from the scenes of young Sarah's escape from the detention camp and finding shelter with an older couple in a nearby village, to present-day Paris.  It's always a risky proposition, to give equal weight to modern goings-on as to the Holocaust, assuming or believing that a modern woman's troubles (a well-off woman, no less) are equally as compelling as of those who experienced bottomless sorrows during World War II, but the filmmakers pulled it off.  The film manages to be moving without handwringing, well-shot, and vivid - a wrenching window into a perhaps forgotten bit of history too.

Mark Childress' 2011 novel Georgia Bottoms is one of those novels that you forget four days after reading it.  I am a fan of the author - I got a kick out of 2007's One Mississippi and Crazy in Alabama is one of my favorite books - but I found him kind of stuck in blah territory here.  A lot of the humor seems recycled from earlier works - the casual racism, the small-town busybodies, the ways in which flighty but headstrong types find themselves questioning themselves within larger social goings-on (in this case, 9-11).  He's so easy to read, with such a charming, appealing style, but the plot is underwhelming here.  In short, the story centers on the title character, her no-good brother, her African-American son, and her mother, a cranky old racist slipping into senility.  I think it might be time for Childress to leave Alabama behind.  (Even the African-American dialogue, all the day-ums -instead of damn- was kind of annoying)

The book I'm reading now, Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer-Prize winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, is fantastic - a lush, sexy, intoxicating, knowing look at two Cuban brothers who move to New York in the late 1940s and start a mambo band.  What is mambo?

It is an Afro-Cuban mixture, originating in Cuba, inspired by Haitian culture, African folk music, English and French ballroom dancing, and American jazz. 

Mambo music is, of course, rhythmic, danceable music, meant for the dance.  The mambo dance (nowadays more or less synonymous with the salsa dance) is similar to the rumba dance, maybe a little faster and less sensual.  Mambo music made its way from Latin America to the states toward the end of World War II and was popular in Puerto Rican and Cuban communities within large cities like New York.  By the 50s, it was hugely popular, almost a craze.  Most mambo bands feature a Spanish-singing frontman, and the pitch is almost always feverish and fast.  Bands tend to use an amalgamation of Big Band instruments and those found in traditional Latin music forms:
Piano
Aggressive Horn section: saxophones, trombones, trumpets (if no horn section, then there will definitely be a guitar)
Rhythm section: bass, conga drum, timbales 

The most famous mambo artist of the 40s and 50s was Perez Prado (above), the Mambo King, a bandleader credited with bringing both the dance and the music to America, commercializing it.  Machito was another one, along with Tito Puente, Xavier Cugat, and Chico O'Farrill.  Eventually, the mambo craze kind of faded out, morphed into other Latin American dances (cha-cha-cha, etc.).  It can still be heard every once in a while today.

Today's bird: Craveri's murrelet.  A murrelet is a chunky, diving seabird of the auk family.  A Craveri's, like most murrelets, roams the Pacific;  it is threatened by tanker traffic and tourism.  The murrelet breeds along the southern Califronia coasts, down to Baja.  It can be found along rocky cliffs and coastlines.  It has black upperparts, white underparts; small and plump like a flying penguin, the Craveri's is a crustacean eater.  A terrific flier, the murrelet gives birth to spunky, eager chicks, who race to the water two days after hatching.   

   

But why no Marvelletes?

Word of the day:  cupidity : strong desire, lust; avarice, greed

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced "his" 2012 inductees: The Small Faces/Faces, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N' Roses, The Beastie Boys, Laura Nyro (A woman?  What?), and Donovan.  I can't disagree with any of these artists, although I only really like half of them (and hate, HATE the Beasties!).  I'm sure there are blogs out there with authors screaming about the non-inclusion of just as, if not more, deserving artists.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The RRHOF is more of a marketing museum anyway, and besides, eventually everyone gets in.  But looking over the list of artists in the Hall, I've come to conclude that there is some general nuttiness in the air.  Something is rotten in Denmark indeed if the following artists have yet to be enshrined.  (And, okay, I do think it's a little screwy that hip-hop and jazz artists are in a museum dedicated to rock and roll.)

- Okay, first, how are the Marvelletes not in?  They didn't have as many hits as the Supremes, but they were just as catchy and smooth, with a barrel of great songs, eight years' worth, including the first ever hit on the Motown label, "Please Mr. Postman."  "Don't Mess With Bill," "Too Many Fish in the Sea," and the eternal "Beechwood 4-45789" are all great.   
- I would posit that Mary Wells, of "My Guy" fame, was the greatest female singer housed within Motown.  "Bye Bye Baby" has such a raw, churning power, and "Two Lovers" might be the most stirring, casually enchanting tune ever about having multiple 'friends with benefits.'
- The Cure.  Okay, come on!  Who grew up in the 80s or 90s and didn't at least like one or two Cure songs?  They practically invented the whole goth/emo thing and made it seem cool.  "Lovesong," "Just Like Heaven?"  No?  "Pictures of You," "Fast Car?"  Still no?  "Let's Go to Bed?" Okay, then I don't like you.   (You can make a similar case, I guess, for Depeche Mode)
- The Cars.  Way too many hits, way too singularly angular a sound.  Catchier New Wave than Blondie, in my opinion.
- Duran Duran.  Does anybody really sound like them?  A lot of popular and critical appeal, still able to sell out big arenas.
- Donna Summer.  If ABBA and the Bee Gees are in, then how can the Disco Queen not be?  She was disco, had a zillion hits and an immediately recognizable voice.
- Todd Rundgren.  Unexplainable.  One of the greatest rock albums ever: Something?/Anything?  "I Saw the Light," "Can We Still Be Friends?" Producer of classic albums by Badfinger, Meat Loaf, The New York Dolls, XTC, The Patti Smith Group.
- solo Peter Gabriel.  "Solsbury Hill," So, "Biko," "Games Without Frontiers."  If Genesis is in, why no Gabriel?   
- War.  An appealing stew, War was - a little funk, rock, border blues, Latin, reggae.  "Slippin' into Darkness" is one of those actually good nine-minute-plus laidback stomps, and don't forget about "Why Can't We Be Friends," "The Cisco Kid."  And does any song drop you into 1975 more thoroughly than "Low Rider?"
There are others that deserve to be in (Warren Zevon, Pat Benatar, Janet Jackson, The Replacements, Ben E. King), but like I said earlier, it's just a matter of time.

Today, I'll inaugurate a weekly look at a renowned work of art by a famous American painter.  The selection today is The Gross Clinic, an 1875 work by Thomas Eakins.  Eakins was known as the American Rembrandt, and it's certainly easy to see that because this work especially brings to mind Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.  Gross was a real person, one of the country's most renowned physicians/surgeons, and Eakins took one of Gross's anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.  In the work, we see Gross in a moment of clinical instruction within a surgical ampitheater.  Around him sits students, the patient, and the patient's mother.  Gross is explaining the procedure taking place - the removal a diseased bone from a patient suffering osteomyelitis.  Everyone but the mother, looking away in grief or agony, is watching the procedure.  The light source in the painting seems to emit from the blood source.  The painting was met with critical diffidence, for it was viewed as medical painting with unappetizing subject matter, too realistic, but it caught on with the general public and is today viewed as a classic of immediacy and verisimilitude.  Gross himself exhibits deep thoughtfulness, as much a thinker as a doer.  A little more about the piece:
http://www.pafa.org/Museum/Research-Archives/Thomas-Eakins/The-Gross-Clinic/80/      

Today's Bird: the gray partridge, a non-native species found in the brush, open farmlands and grasslands of the northern plains states and Canada.  It resembles a chicken, with its gray neck and chest feathers and with a head the color of rusted red.  It is a short-winged, small-billed bird, a grain muncher, only aggressive during mating season; the babies can fly within two weeks of birth!  It was introduced to this continent as a gaming bird from Eurasia.

On one final note, I'll add that the TNT Mystery Movie Series is 2-for-2 so far; Scott Turow's Innocent, check; Lisa Gardner's Hide, check. 

And, also, that Laura Nyro-Labelle album above, mostly a collection of Motown/R&B covers, is one of my favorite albums ever.

Miscellany

Word of the day: wallaroo : a large, reddish-grey kangaroo

The Change-Up was a really funny movie, despite its only getting  24% positive reviews on RottenTomatoes.  Maybe critics found it too juvenile and crude, though that has certainly been the trend in American comedy (along with the whole awkward-uncomfortable The Office-type cringing).  I was really amused watching Jason Bateman (normally the straight man) adopt Ryan Reynolds' horndog, foul-mouthed persona and vice versa. 
In Bateman-related news, I see that there is finally, after years of rumors, going to be an Arrested Development movie.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, regardless of the personnel involved.  Honestly, what's the point? 

After reading Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell last spring and a collection by Carson McCullers a few weeks back, I was curious to see what other Georgia writers were out there.  I found the website of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and here's some of the other inductees, in addition to McCullers and Caldwell:
- Conrad Aiken, a name still heard in Savannah (buried in Bonaventure Cemetery), the first Georgian to win a Pulitzer, for his poetry
- Jimmy Carter
- Pat Conroy (he was born in Atlanta)
- James Dickey, Deliverance!  (The 'squeal like a pig' section wasn't even in the book, but Dickey, who wrote the screenplay, put it in the movie)
- the great W.E.B. DuBois, of The Souls of Black Folk fame, among his myriad of accomplishments, including co-creating the NAACP
- Johnny Mercer
- Margaret Mitchell (pictured)
- Flannery O'Connor 
- Jean Toomer (author of Cane, one of the first major novels of African-American life)
- Alice Walker

Today's artist?  Why not a quick mention of the botanical artist William Prestele, a man from a family of botanical/agricultural artists.  Prestele worked with chromo lithography and watercolors.  In 1887, he was elected as the first artist on staff at the newly created Pomological Division of the Department of Agriculture, a division that had its artists using watercolors and lithographs to technically re-create the varieties of fruits and nuts developed by U.S. breeders and growers, using painstaking detail for the twigs, leaves, insides etc.  The purpose of this Division (aside from helping with patent claims, so many of the growers arguing that other farmers stole their innovation for so-and-so type of raspberry) was to disseminate information and bulletins on new varieties to  growers and fruit men all over the country; the illustrations done by these painters helped give specific visual clarity to the new types of fruits grown, so that there could be dispute over who created what - there are over 7,700 watercolors, almost half of which are of apples.   (Above are, clockwise from top left, an Auburn apple, Zengi persimmon, Bourgeat quince, and Tucker plum.)
 

Today's bird?  The eared quetzal, you say, formerly known as the eared trogon?  You got it.  The northernmost variety of quetzals (Wildlife Adventure board game, I miss you...), its ears are hard to see, but it has splendid emerald plumage ("quetzal" is translated from the Aztec as "feather" and "precious"), iridescent wing coverts (sets of feathers); it's a noisy bird, able to pump out only one brood a year.  They're about a foot long, the females a little bigger.  They mostly can be found in canyons and tend to nest in sycamores.  Where to see them?  Mexico almost year-round, but sometimes even in Arizona.   

Best Books of the Year

Word of the day:  ocellus  : the eye-like spot in a peacock feather (thanks, wife!)

Though the year is still three and a half weeks from extirpation, it's a good time to trot out my list of the twenty books this year that I enjoyed the most, that I would re-read again in a heartbeat.

- Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmith.  Ripley in a deep mess again, entangled in art fraud.  You never quite know how he's going to get out of it, but Highmith, with her slippery, supple guidance, has you rooting for him to.

- Everyman, Philip Roth.  The author really nails these novellas; it's amazing how much vituperative, coiled anger and rawness he can summon it up in so few pages.

- Mr. Bridge, Evan Connell.   A perfect novel.  A (mostly) chronological series of incidents (130+) in the life of a buttoned-up, tight-lipped businessman over the course of three or four decades in mid-century Kansas City.

- Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow.  The early 1900s as kaleidoscope.  A ton of very specific characters, some of them real-life figures.  A tour-de-force.

- The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton.  Lush and mysterious, an intriguing mystery, a great setting.  Would make a first-rate movie.

- Under the Net, Iris Murdoch.  The funniest book I read all year, a hilarious tale about a useless but opinionated man wandering around London, somehow involved with a famous dog of the silver screen; great writing, deceptive depth.

- The Privileges, Jonathan Dee.   I found Dee's writing so perceptive, acute, and funny. And this book is sort of a miracle, really, in the sense that, as Jonathan Franzen (whose work Dee's reminds me of) said in his blurb, Dee gets us to empathize with a class of people it's almost impossible not to envy and hate: the filthy nouveau riche New Yorkers. Each character is well-drawn and very interesting, the dialogue superb, the details spot-on. 

- A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.  Unimprovable.

- Easter Parade, Richard Yates.  A master class in elegant unraveling.  Yates' tale about two sisters and the decisions they make in this country from the their time as girls to grown-ups has dialogue so real it's almost tactile.

- The Cry of the Owl, Patricia Highsmith.  Creepy, finding horror and mounting, agonizing tension in the mundane.  A peeping tom finds that the young, disturbed woman he's watching turns out to be needier and more deranged than he is. 

- Tigerlily's Orchids, Ruth Rendell.  The English master with the "alien touch in the dark" up to her old tricks, taking you right inside the squeamish skins of various Londoners caught in moral crossroads.

- Back When We Were Grownups, Anne Tyler.  Exceptionally well-written, with ridiculously acute observations of human behavior.  It's impossible to read Tyler and not relate to at least half the characters.  It's breathtaking how much we recognize.   

- This Sweet Sickness, Patricia Highsmith.  Maybe the best Highsmith ever.  A man builds a house for the woman of his dreams but must then deal with the blobby husband she's married to.

- The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides.  I read one reviewer who was let down by the "weightless" subject matter of this follow-up to Middlesex, but when the writing is this good, with sentences as good as orgasms, who cares?  I thought it was funny and true.

- A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler.  Tyler knows the idiosyncracies and nuances of human behavior alarmingly well, even though she never seems to write about anything other than flawed, everyday Baltimore-ians.

- The Big Year, Mark Obmascik.  Did what all great non-fiction does.  Made me interested in the subject (birding), gave me a glimpse into the personalities involved in a way that allowed me to understand, appreciate, even respect them, entertained the bejesus out of me. 

- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy.  The more I think about it, despite all the pyschobabble, I really do love Conroy's big, flavorful, luscious descriptions, his affection for the south, the moral complexity, his gift for making even the minorest of characters come to rich life.

- Rodin's Debutante, Ward Just.  I thought it was going to be about Rodin or his debutante.  When it wasn't, I thought it was going to be about the rich, tough-as-nails husband of the woman who wanted to have Rodin do a bust of her.  When it wasn't, I stopped caring.  I just let let Just's sinuous, intelligent prose take me wherever, knowing I would be wiser, better informed, and moved if I did.

- A Death in Summer, Benjamin Black.  Dublin noir, tough and stylish, with sentences that it would take decent or good writers years to come up with.  Poetic and nasty, the hero Quirke (in his fourth mystery) achieving a sluggish dignity. 

- Disturbing the Peace, Richard Yates.  Modern life as nightmare.  A NYC man can't stop drinking and can't explain why.  He can't love his wife and he can't explain why.

What a list! 


Today's bird?  Ready for this name?

The dickcissel.  A small songbird similar to a sparrow, with a stout, pointed bill, a short tail, and a rusty patch on it shoulders, the 'cissel is found in the midwest grasslands and hayfields in the summer, but one needs to travel to Florida, Mexico, or Central America to see it in the winter.  The male has a black 'V' on its yellow chest.  It can fly in migrating flocks of millions.  The male is lazy, doing little more than eating and trying to show off for the ladies; the female builds the nest, incubates, feeds the young.  Venezuelan farmers consider it an agricultural pest, as this bird feeds on stores of rice and sorghum.  Don't poison them, Venezuelan farmers!

Monday, Monday....

Ah, Monday, Monday.  (Not my favorite Mamas and the Papas song, but it's apra-poe... Give me "Dedicated to the One I Love" or "California Dreamin' or whatever the name of that one with the lyric "And no one's gettin' fat 'cept Mama Cass"...)

Word of the day: bimensal : occurring every two months

Julia and I just watched a preview for a new Nicholas Sparks adaptation with Zac Efron.  Sparks is dreck through and through, but he's undoubtedly my hero.  Need you hear about my Inverse Theory of Deserved Success?  Okay, here it is anyway.  We all have some degree, some longitude of talent.  Imagine that talent plotted somewhere on a horizontal talent line.  Most of us are west on the talent line; most of us have average, slightly below average, or slightly above average talent.
 
Now imagine another line beneath that talent line.  This horizontal line is a Wealth line; you know, how much money cheddar you have.

Okay, in a fair world, the people farthest to the right on the talent line, those easternly souls with tons of talent, tons of appreciated and rewarded talent, would find themselves also on the right of the Wealth Scale.  If you're good at lots of things, especially things people appreciate and pay to witness or view, you probably should be financially in-line for more than those less gifted than you.

Well, that lame hunk of a duck Sparks  is behind even most village simpletons in talent, but, somehow  he has kazillions of dollars. 

And that is why I love and respect him.

If only people would love Tom Perrotta just as much.  Wait, I think he is pretty well-liked.  Never mind.  Two of his excellent novels have been made into excellent movies (Election, Little Children) and director Lisa Cholodenko of The Kids Are All Right is in line to film Perrotta's 2007 The Abstinence Teacher.  His new novel, The Leftovers, was compelling for about two-thirds of the story, but somewhere along the way my interest kind of dried up.  It is an intriguing premise: a Rapture occurs and millions of people just vanish, de-materializing right on their own homes, while driving, going to the bathroom, eating.  The survivors, the titular refuse, are forced to carry on their lives despite the absence of family members, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, Shaq.  As ever, Perrotta sets his sights on a particular enclave of Anywhere, Suburbia, specifically a family who is left reeling from the Event: Dad is the Mayor; his wife leaves the family to join the Guilty Remnants, a vigilant cult whose members take a vow of silence and stalk the streets, their ghost-like visages a fragile, frightening reminder to the everyday people around them to not forget; his daughter, whose friend disappeared right before her eyes on the night of the Rapture, has grown surly and wild, neglecting her studies, smoking pot; his son has left to join the entourage of a shady, promiscuous Joel Osteen type.  Perrotta hits all the bases here - the town council meetings, the men's softball leagues, spin-the-bottle parties - and he writes clear and accessibly.  Some of the humor and observations are a little stale by now, though, and the book just became bland towards the end, and the denouement was unsatisfying.  Worth reading, but wasn't the knockout I kept hoping it would be.

The Big Year... well, I was gonna review it, but you probably by now have a suspicion that I really liked it.  True!  I learned a lot and was immensely entertained.  I had no idea that birding was such a diehard, zany, almost insane sport - and expensive as hell too.       

Today's bird?  Why not give props (have people 'given props' since 2002?) to the smallest bird in North America, the 3-inch calliope hummingbird?  Shy and brilliantly-colored, this is a must-see bird for birders.  Its colors are magenta, green, white, black, and buff (a funny color, buff, as if was the color of free weights).  It's a dimorphic species, meaning there are clear color differentiations between the genders, the specifics of which I won't get into.  It munches on insects, nectar, and sap.  They tend to be inconspicuous birds, often scared and muscled out by larger, louder species of hummingbirds.  In the summer, the calliope can be seen in the western U.S. and Canada, high up in the mountain ranges near water sources; in winter, it hangs out in south Mexico.     

(I'm pretty sure the above bird is female)

Sunday

Word of the day: extirpation : to pull up by the roots; totally do away with, destroy

Good day in Savannah yesterday, which got me thinking about other U.S. cities I need to get to sometime over the next decade:
1. New Orleans. Why: Bourbon Street, the French Quarter, too many highlights to mention.
2. Birmingham. Why: the zoo, the monuments and centers for African American heritage, Vulcan Park, McWane Center.
3. San Francisco. Why: Golden Gate Bridge, the hills, art museum, Berkeley, Alcatraz.
4. Phoenix. Why: Desert Botanical Garden/Arboretum, the Zoo, the Apache trail, the Art Walk in Scottsdale, South Mountain Park.
5. Portland. Why: why not?
6. Anchorage. Why: Tony Knowles coastal trail, Flattop Mountain, Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, Cook Inlet.
7. Santa Fe. Why: Native American ruins, Randall Avery Audobon Center, San Miguel mission, the pueblos, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
8. Houston. Why: to see Dan and Sally and the kids, of course! Also, for the historic district, the aquarium, the zoo, maybe see a Texans or Rockets game.
9. Boston. Why: self-explanatory.
10. Boulder. Why: the shopping, the canyon falls, the mountain parks, the museums.

I was reading an article in Smithsonian that mentioned a few famous Native American names and I was a bit ashamed that all I really knew about them were the names. I had forgotten (if I ever knew to begin with) the tribes they were in and why they were famous. So, in a crow-eating act, I have put down the name of famous Indian chiefs and other household Native Americans and why exactly they are well-known.

- Sitting Bull. Sioux. The Sioux were constantly scooted and ran off their land - even after they had been given the Black Hills - but fought back, killing Custer at Little Big Horn. Eventually, the Sioux came back form Canada, where they had fled, and Sitting Bull was a prisoner of the government for two years. Was in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Led Indian dances that scared the white men. Killed by white men in 1890.

- Squanto. Patuxet. When he was a teenager, Squanto traveled to England with white men. He met up with Captain John Smith, who wanted Squanto to accompany him to the New World to help him in his dealings with Indians. Squanto was taken by the cruel Captain Hunt, who hauled Squanto back to Spain, where he worked for a few years. Eventually, Squanto made his back to New England, where he discovered his entire tribe was destroyed and his place of birth was no longer, now a new village, Plymouth. He, of course, met up with the Pilgrims and shared a Thanksgiving feast with them.

- Tecumseh. Shawnee. A warrior chief who dreamed of uniting all the Indians from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, Tecumseh was continually at odds with future president William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indian Territory, about land disputes. Tecumseh and his men fought with the English during the War of 1812. Tecumseh was ultimately killed by Harrison.

- Seqouyah. Cherokee. He fought with the U.S. under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. He created a writing system for the illiterate Cherokees, introducing syllabary. Within months, many Cherokee were literate; this led to bi-lingual newspapers, translated documents and pamphlets.

- Geronimo. Apache. A military and spiritual leader who constantly led raids against both Mexicans (Spanish troops from south of the border killed his wife and three children) and white settlers, he constantly fought against encroached-upon tribal lands. In fact, he was the undisputed leader of the last serious fighting force against the U.S., always eluding capture; many thought he had magical powers. He was finally caught and died as a prisoner-of-war, unable to return to his homeland.

Today's bird? The Bahama mockingbird. A little bit larger than the northern mockingbird, with two mustache-like stripes, it is found in Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas - in palm trees and coastal vegetation. It's not a mimic-er like the northern hummingbird; the Bahama is mostly grey all over, with white tips to its tail. This bird can be seen in Florida too, deep along the southeast coast, munching on spiders, small reptiles, and fruit.

Coming tomorrow: a book review or two...

Weekend's Appetizer...

Word of the day: tramontane : foreign, barbarous; being from the boondocks, the other side of
the mountains

It's safe to say Friday's the weekend's appetizer, no? Especially if Friday's enjoyable and Saturday will provide a chance to get outta town and head to Savannah to see the botanical garden and, maybe, Fort Pulaski, along with a stop at Five Guys. Good games tomorrow, too. Football wise, there's the LSU-Georgia matchup; in basketball, Kentucky pits its top ranking against pres-season #1 N.C.

The Clyfford Still Museum has just opened in Denver. The Museum houses about 2,400 works of art over a 60-year period of the Abstract Expressionist. From the Museum's website, here's a description of the works on display at the museum:

COLLECTION

In the early 1950s, Clyfford Still ended his relationship with the prestigious Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York, and from that time forward, represented himself. Very few paintings entered the art market and subsequently the museum will house over 94% of the artist’s total output. The Clyfford Still Estate contains approximately 825 paintings and 1575 works on paper including:

100 paintings dating from 1920 - 1943: Still's student years, Depression-era works, Surrealist-inspired works, and first forays into abstraction.

350 paintings dating from 1944 - 1960: Still's "breakthrough period" and the years of "high" Abstract Expressionism. Many canvases span over ten-by-fourteen feet.

375 paintings dating from 1961 - 1979: later works, most of which have never been exhibited.

1575 works on paper spanning all aspects of Still's career in such media as pastel, crayon, charcoal, gouache, tempera, graphite, and pen and ink. Few of these have ever been exhibited.

In addition to the artworks, the museum will also house the artist’s archives of letters, sketchbooks, manuscripts, photo albums and personal effects, most of which has never been seen by the public. The Still Museum’s rotating exhibition program, drawn exclusively from the museum’s extensive collection, will illuminate this important period of American art history. The Still Museum also plans to work with the Denver Art Museum and neighboring institutions in the development of joint programming that will further contextualize and complement the collection.

-----

I don't know much about Still. He was a color field painter, but he didn't arrange his colors regularly like, say, Rothko, but, rather, in a more jagged, 'torn' way. The above painting, Untitled 1946-H, highlights some of his characteristic use of the same colors (red, white, black, yellow) and thick impasto. He was introduced to the art world on a grand scale in 1946 by, of course, Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition. He taught for a few years in San Francisco and, later in life, retired to his family farm in Maryland, the state he would die in in 1980. The museum is getting some rave reviews and has, as expected, been much visited in the two weeks it has been open to the public.

(Incidentally, Denver seems like it's a good art city. The Denver Art Museum has a renowned Pre-Colombian collection and is at the forefront of attributing as many of its American Art pieces done by Native Americans to the name of the artist rather than the tribe, making them less like artifacts - and, hence, ethnographic pieces - and more like singular works of art.)

I'm still reading and loving The Big Year. Today's bird: the harlequin duck.

It has a body of deep slate blue, with white stripes, crescents, and spots on its head. They prefer turbulent water, breeding in fast-moving mountain streams. They winter along rocky coastlines. Though they have a limited ecological niche, they function extremely well in harsh conditions and can just as often be found diving in the water for their food as they can walking along the bottom of stream beds, jabbing at their meals with their bills. Their nests are usually close to streams. These ducks live in large flocks, sociable as they are, and are the prey of wolves and foxes, and have a low-reproductive capability. Incidentally, they get their name because of the male's resemblance (especially its chestnut-red flanks and brownish-black wing tips) to the costumes worn by European clowns in comedy theater.

Where to see them? Naturally, along the northwest Pacific coast, Maine, Montana, New Brunswick, Newfoundland. They aren't endangered in this country but are in Canada, though in Maine they're listed as "threatened" and "of special concern" in the western states.

Here's a picture of this beautiful duck(s). Wouldn't it be a blast to see one in nature?

http://www.ducks.org/media/hunting/waterfowlIDGallery/_images/fullSize/harlequinDuck1.jpg

Until next time!

November 30

Hello. Julia and I watched Crazy Stupid Love last night and we both enjoyed it. Of all the cast members, it was really Ryan Gosling who stood out. Perhaps that's unsurprising considering how consistently terrific he is, but I'm not sure I had ever seen him in a romantic comedy before, and I was really floored by his great timing. Check out his effortlessly perplexed, amused expressions when Steve Carell tells him that he's only ever been with one woman. I've seen nine Gosling performances to date and am impressed by the way he continues to grow. The guy simply doesn't throw performances away, and he has the gift of making thinking look magnetic.

Speaking of actors, having just seen Beginners, I think it's reasonable to argue that Ewan McGregor just might be one of the most underrated actors out there. It's a moving, if occasionally cutesy, film with predictably marvelous turns by Christopher Plummer (as a widower who comes out of the closet) and the impossibly charming Melanie Laurent, but it's McGregor, poised and calmly assured, who grounds the film's whimsy. If you were to ask anyone you knew who the the best or who their favorite five or ten actors were, I doubt McGregor would make anyone's list. Nor would he make a list of the sexiest. He's someone you don't even think about. If you see a preview of a movie he's in, chances are you wouldn't want to see it any more or less because of his presence. But he's too remarkable, too rangy, to pass so anonymously. In the last decade alone, he's been nothing but superb: quietly, inexorably befuddled in Roman Polanski's masterful The Ghost Writer; charming in the otherwise unremarkable Big Fish; adorable in Down With Love; brooding and rawly charismatic in the Scottish noir Young Adam; he's even been worth watching in otherwise forgettable films like Cassandra's Dream, Miss Potter, and Moulin Rouge!

I'm reading a really interesting book right now - no, not the Tom Perrotta book I bragged about yesterday, which I in fact haven't even started yet - but Mark Obmascik's The Big Year, about a particular "Big Year," in which three men set out on a cross-country race in 1998 to see as many species of birds as they possibly could. Obmascik has great affection for these people and he dug up great information on the history of birding and Big Years in this country - from Audobon to Peterson's field guides, to the various types who have spent thousands of dollars crisscrossing the continent, some of them alerted by tips and sightings by various rare-bird ornithological groups and societies. Fascinating stuff. And I'll be damned if reading about these people, who claim their obsession is a genuine sport, doesn't make doing a Big Year at some point leapfrog to the top of my bucket list.

As a show of appreciation to the book, I have decided to post a little information about one species of bird a day that Obmascik mentions in the book. (And I'll never refer to Wikipedia either!)
Today's bird is a black-legged kittiwake. A kittiwake, which can be red-legged also, is medium-sized to small, with pale grey back and upper wings. It's a type of gull that breeds in the north Pacific, the Arctic, and the north Atlantic. It nests in colonies on cliffs on offshore islands, impossible-to-reach spots along the coastal mainland. It's rare amongst gulls in that it dives underwater for its food; a kittiwake spends its entire winter at sea. They are remarkably tolerant and relaxed when approached by humans. The best place to see them in this country is off the coast of Washington on boat trips.

Oh, yeah...
Word of the day: turpitude : inherent baseness, depravity

Still Here

Word of the day: prolix: drawn out, too long; marked by an excess of words

Forget most of what I wrote yesterday. I have decided to finish my first novel. I want to do it in short story-as-novel form, ala Olive Kitteridge. No rush to get it done, but I will finish it. The second novel, I'll reshape that as a long short story too.

So, soon I'll start re-shaping, re-configurating the first novel as a short story and I'll begin a new short story soon too. Then I'll work on the second novel, start to re-shape that too.

It would be nice, satisfying, to have several short story collections by the time I'm thirty-three. So no more gloom there.

It is the time of the year when film critics start handing out their awards. There is a surplus, an onslaught of these things, almost every city or region in the country with its own prizes. The only ones that really matter, in my mind, are the New York critics (a circle composed of critics I read - NY Times, Salon, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, among others) and L.A., along, of course, with the SAGs and the Oscars. The New York critics, getting a head start on their colleagues, announced their winners today:
Film - The Artist, its director, Michel Hazanavicius, also winning
Actor - Brad Pitt, for Moneyball and Tree of Life
Actress - the indomitable Meryl Streep for her portrayal, of course, of Margaret Thatcher in the upcoming The Iron Lady
Supporting Actor - Albert Brooks, atypically cast against type as a terrifying villain in the cool, well-received Drive, with Ryan Gosling, Christina Hendricks, and Carey Mulligan
Supporting Actress - Jessica Chantain, the out-of-nowhere actress who came on like a torrid, insanely-talented storm this year, for her turns in Take Shelter, The Debt, The Help, and Tree of Life
Maybe we have some legitimate Oscar contenders here.

- Today has been the Winter-iest day in Georgia so far this season, with temperatures in the high-forties, overcast. But I can live with this.
- Hart of Dixie, which Julia and I watch every week on the C-Dubs, may not be the most original show but it is extremely easy to watch, light as a souffle, and Rachel Bilson's stuffed-nose, yeah-huh gurgly voice has its appeal.
- Speaking of voices, I heard Alan Rickman interviewed on NPR today. That voice! Haughty and erudite, crisp and phlegmy. Favorite Rickman performance: Hmmm... Galaxy Quest?

- I read the teensiest of articles about artist Blinky Palermo in Smithsonian magazine and I wanted to learn a little more about him because he seemed to be on the cusp of being a well-known name in the art world until his death at the age of 33 in 1977. A modern abstractionist who painted on canvas, wood, and metal, Palermo was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, Malevich, and the Beats. Born in Leipzig, fleeing Germany with his family, he studied in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys, but eventually made his way to New York. He is arguably most famous for his Cloth Pictures, in which he took sewn, horizontal strips of department store-bought dyed monochrome cloth. He would then stitch several of the cloths together and then mount them on stretchers. The works, hung low on gallery walls, brought to mind consumer culture (notwithstanding the fact that the fabric itself was readily available in consumer stores) in the sense that they had a decorative aspect, with simple shapes and clean, clear demarcation resembling ads. (I don't want to get too over-my-head here, so I'll let this be). Suffice to say, from what I've read, Palermo recognized that feeling, the universal act of it, was hard, if not impossible, to portray objectively in terms of visual representation. Above is 1964's Composition with 8 Red Rectangles (oil and graphite on canvas). Late in life he worked extensively with metal

- Is it time to start thinking back on the seventy-plus books I've read this year? Why not? I've delved deep into the ouevres of Patricia Highsmith and Anne Tyler, but I don't know if I found an author I like more, I appreciate more, than the late, great Richard Yates. Of the five works of his I've read, I haven't been disappointed by any of them. Clean, pinpoint insights, dialogue hard to improve upon, characters so accessible and relatable, great swaths of earned, raw sadness, and that hovering, encroaching, fatalistic, choking doom - Hell as Modern Life.

- Fantasy Football for the week? Huge games last night by Drew Bress, Jimmy Graham, and Victor Cruz carried me to a 3-3 finish. 46-26 for the year.

- I'm off to start a new Tom Perrotta book. Until tomorrow.

I'm Back

Word of the day: inveterate - stubbornly established by habit; habitual; unlikely to change.

Hello, all!

Long time, no talk. We're ensconced in Georgia now, obviously, and we love it! Though Statesboro kinda stinks!

I'll stop there. Sometimes the best way to catch up after a long absence is to just not even bother with it, just resume business as usual, which is what I opt to do here. I've been thinking about the blog and what I want to do with it, what I want to say on it. I've decided that I will continue to post fun bits about art, but I want to include more information about nature (animals, birds, endangered species) and anything else I can think of - this "anything else I can think of" including but not limited to authors, places I want to go, movies, news and stories that strike me as refreshing, strange, or comment-able.

In April 2009, I decided to try and get creative. I had written screenplays before (none of them worthy of representation, natch) and maintained a blog for about a year to 16 months. I wanted to try something new. Ever since my senior year in high school (where I wrote a few short stories my white-haired, corvine-visaged, all-knowing teacher commended me on), I've had a bit of a jones for writing. So two-and-a-half years ago, I tried to write a young adult novel. I completed the book - and then went on to write two more YA novels and two YA horror story collections. Try as I might, I just couldn't find any representation for them. A few agents I queried asked to read a few pages of this or that, but no one was interested. Needless to say, I was a bit disillusioned, though I don't know why I should have been. I just can't get over how tough and discombobulating it is to spend a substantial amount of time on works that might sell.

So I next decided to try out an adult novel and for the last year-and-a-half, I've here and there worked on a novel that I'll probably never finish or have any clue as to how to finish. This is slightly depressing. More wasted time. I've tried writing another adult novel too and by my accounts I'm maybe 2/5 of the way through that one. If I finish, I finish. I know no one in the industry, I have no "ins", I have no in-the-know guide or resource to even give me feedback. It just seems like vanished time. The numbers are staggering: 100,000 books out there all seeking agents... It didn't help that I worked in a used book store and saw with my own eyes the life cycle of most books: Bought at discount somewhere or given as a gift, maybe read, abandoned and discarded and forgotten about.

There are a million other things I can do with my free time. Eventually I'm sure I'll finish these novels, but I never really saw myself, at any point in my life, as an artist, and so I'm relieved that I won't feel disappointed, like a letdown, if I can't wrap these novel attempts up. It's been fun working and tinkering on them, and that'll have to do.

This is a hard resignation, but liberating too. No pressure, no urgency to express myself. I need to continue to write, create, but I have no illusions, no aspirations. Writing outside of this blog will just be a hobby, just a way to get a few original ideas down.

That said, I'm excited to get back into the blog. My maintenance of this site will be vigilant and thorough.

Let's see... Wow, there's so much to write about I don't even know where to begin. Here's some thoughts I'll just spit out:
- I was glad I took note of what Barack Obama was reading this past summer. I've read two of his selections - Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy and Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante - and they were both eye-opening and masterfully written.
- I'm kinda diggin' Fantasy Football. This is my first year of really participating in it and it's quite addictive. Through eleven weeks, my six teams have amassed a cumulative record of 43-23 (though I'm afraid that when the final totals come in from yesterday's action, I'll have put up a dismal 0-6 goose egg for the weekend).
- The Descendants, with George Clooney, just might be a perfect movie.
- If I never get to see the Great Bear Rainforest in western British Columbia (and what are the odds that I will, honestly?), I'll be the worse off for it.
- I think that when Julia gets me a subscription to National Geographic, it will be one of the best gifts I'll ever receive.
- Homeland rocks. Claire Danes rocks. Dexter is still entertaining as hell, but news that there will be two additional seasons after this diminishing-goods Season 6 makes me feel a tad sour. You know, that, they should have ended it after... feeling.

One thing most of us will never see is a tropical pocket gopher, not unless something magical and unexpected happens. A rodent of the family geomyidae, the gopher is endemic to Tamaulipas in coastal Mexico. They spend most of their lives beneath the ground in wooded areas and shrublands, mostly eating underground vegetation. They live solitary lives and are active year round. Because their range of habitat is so narrow, the gophers are inevitably doomed when confronted, as they are, by agricultural encroachment and industrialization, along with residential development. They are on the IUCN's (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List, a designation that immediate action is required to protect this critically-endangered species.

One of the most famous Art Deco painters, Erte, is man I know nothing about. While working thousands of crossword puzzles as a kid, I found old Erte to be a regular companion. "17-Across: Art Deco painter." Who is Erte? Dozens and dozens of times. Art Deco always equaled Erte. Was it just the handy way his name supplied the valuable, intangible building blocks of 'r' and 't' and two 'e's? Or was he generally worth knowing about?

Well, he was Russian-born, a painter and designer, and he didn't die until 1990 at the ripe old age of 98. So what about Erte, born Romain de Tirtoff? His accomplishments:
- worked for Harper's Bazaar for over two decades
- designed costumes and stage sets for the renowned Folies-Bergeres music hall in Paris
- created sculpture, gouache paintings
- costumer and set designer for MGM in mid-1920s
- dress designer for famous French couturier Paul Poiret
- designed outfits for famous showgirl, Mata Hari
- designed costumes for Radio City Rockettes

He did a little bit of everything, having his hand in signature costumes, stage and set design, sculpture, painting, lithographs, and drawing, among others. He was an emblem of both the Jazz Age and Broadway, the birth of fashion magazines and turn-of-the-century Paris. He was well-known and much sought after in his lifetime. A particularly iconic work of his is Symphony in Black, above. There is much, much more to write about him - his relationship with William Randolph Hearst, his pioneering use of sheet metal sculpture with pigments, etc. - but at least I have an idea about his work.