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.