I took all these
pictures yesterday, and hoped to go back this morning to
get a better one of Jack, but he was all withered. So it’s
good I got it yesterday even if it’s a bit out of focus.
Category: diary
Garden Pictures from May 27, 2011
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
I’ve been nursing a geriatric German shepherd through some
intestinal problems, so I haven’t had lots of energy for
gardening. For instance, I didn’t prune the rosebush at all. The
one on the corner of the front yard that was growing into the walk
to the back yard got pruned accidentally by the Newfoundland
downstairs, but the one in my plot has some branches that are
really in my way. But at this point, I’ll wait and cut them off
when they have flowers on them.
As you can see, the alliums are in full bloom. The sedge is
blooming, less spectacularly. The rhubarb is more enthusiastic
than it’s been in the past, and less chewed on. And we have an
unusual number of snails this year.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
I actually went to see this
movie in a theater yesterday. Mostly because it’s the first
3D movie I’ve heard of that I really cared about seeing. I did
watch Avatar,
because it was on the Hugo awards ballot, but I
certainly didn’t expect to like it $15 worth.
Since the incremental cost of most of the movies I see is $0,
since I get them on my Netflix subscription, I’m
usually just telling you whether I think the movie is interesting
enough to be worth the
time you spend watching it. In this case, however, I will also address
whether it’s worth the time, money, and trouble to go to the movie
theater and see it in 3-D, instead of just getting it on Netflix
when it comes out.
Well, first, if you’re interested in any of archeology,
anthropology, film-making, or Werner Herzog, you do want to see
the movie. It isn’t as tightly put together as the best of the
Herzog documentaries (e.g., Grizzly
Man), but you aren’t going to be able to actually see that
cave, and you do want to.
I went with a bunch of friends, and one of the first things we
talked about after the movie was all the topics that could have
been covered in more detail. For instance, one of the friends is an
anthropology professor, and he had been hoping to use the film in
his class about the origins of religion. The people who have been
researching the cave are in fact working on the light these
discoveries shed on that topic, but the movie has only a 5 or 10
minute segment about it. Another friend wanted to know more about
the actual process of making the paintings than we saw.
Of course, there’s only so much you can cover in 90 minutes,
but it surprised me how random the topics covered seemed to be.
Another of the friends, a rock musician who has made movies, said
that he was sure the sequence with the albino crocodiles at the
end only happened because there was this film crew that could only
spend four hours a day in the cave, so they had time to see the
tourist attractions in the area, and they saw the crocodiles and
said, “Wow! We have to put these in the movie.”
That was probably the most gratuitous insertion, but there was
a lot of stuff about German archeologists working on similar
periods that didn’t really relate to this particular cave at all.
It was fun to hear the bone flute played, though.
Now for the 3-D. I’m glad I saw it. There were some
absolutely spectacular shots, which would still be beautiful in
2-D, but not as impressive. On the other hand, when you’re
interviewing a talking head in front of a window onto a scene of
snow-covered trees, it’s a little distracting to be able to see
the trees that well. And although the camera lingered lovingly on
the cave paintings, there were still times when you wanted the
coffee table book so that you could look at what you wanted to see
in the lighting you wanted to use.
On the whole, you can probably get a lot of what I got out of
the movie without the 3-D, but if it’s not a terrible
inconvenience or a major expense, it’s worth seeing.
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Howl
This
movie, about the poem Howl and it’s
connections to the life of its author and the still-ongoing debate
over free speech, was better than I expected. Mostly because the parts I
liked best weren’t discussed in any of the reviews I read or
heard.
There are three intertwined threads:
- James Franco reading a transcript of an interview Ginsberg
gave during the obscenity trial. - An all-star cast performing the transcript of the obscenity
trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl and
other poems. - James Franco reading Howl as voiceover to an
often marvelous animation of the poem.
It’s the last of those I really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the
DVD extra film of Ginsberg himself reading Howl and
a few other poems. He wasn’t a professional actor, and he
couldn’t get through something as long as Howl
without making mistakes. (Franco probably needed retakes, too.)
But he had the rhythms of the poem in his head in a way that
Franco wasn’t even trying to. If you like the poem at all, I
think you’ll want to hear both versions.
Lemon Pizza
I can’t find the recipe for this I ran into on the internet,
but I think all they did was sautée the lemons (sliced very thin)
and garlic in olive oil and use it as topping.
I haven’t been quite that minimalist either of the times I’ve
made this — both times I added some thinly sliced onions and put
parmesan cheese on top.
The one I liked better, I added a teaspoon or so of honey to
the sautée and cooked it long enough that the onions were starting
to caramelize.
That time, I had a Portuguese vinho verde in the
refrigerator, which was exactly the right level of sweet, tart,
and lemony to go with the pizza.
I got Cooking
for Geeks for Christmas, and one of its recommendations for
pizza in a home oven is to cook the crust for 5 minutes before
adding the topping. I’ve been doing that, and it does indeed make
for a better baked crust.
Tooth and Claw
This
book by Jo Walton is a Victorian novel set on a world where
the biology actually supports the assumptions about gender
roles embodied in the Victorian novel. The characters are all
dragons, and dragons have a sexual dimorphism such that
females have hands and males have claws.
Walton acknowledges that she took the plot from Anthony
Trollope’s Framley
Parsonage. In both books, the plot is a bit contrived —
the antagonist goes on fighting the protagonist until the
right number of pages has happened, and then gives in. This
makes the 300 page twentyfirst century book more readable than
the 400 page nineteenth century one, but they both describe
societies pretty alien to the modern reader.
If you enjoy both nineteenth century novels and world-building
science fiction, you will love this book. The electronic
version is on sale for $2.99 for a limited time.
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Another knitted chair seat
![[chair seat]](https://i0.wp.com/serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/chair.jpg)
Chair seat
The pattern for this one is St. Brigid from Aran
Knitting by Alice Starmore. The yarn is the Camilla
Valley Farms 8/8 (worsted weight) cranberry. (They got the
color better than my photography of the piece.) A chair cover
uses most of a one pound spool.
![[central motif]](https://i0.wp.com/serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/center.jpg)
Central motif
Speaking of color, does anyone know why when you take a picture
of a person wearing a sweater, the color of the sweater is usually
pretty close to the real color, but when you try to take a closeup
of a piece of knitting, it’s always a different color from the
real thing?
![[rope cable]](https://i0.wp.com/serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/cable-after.jpg)
Rope Cable
The yarn has a pleasant feel. Like most cotton yarns, it
doesn’t have the same stretch as wool, which I think is an
advantage in this application. You have to get used to not
splitting it as you knit, but I did OK after the first pattern
repeat. I was worried about the cost of shipping from Canada, but it’s
quite reasonable if you order enough at once.
A Tale Dark and Grimm
I’m glad Adam Gidwitz wrote this
book, because I’m sure lots of people have thought about
writing something like it. It’s one of the natural reactions
to a body of work, like the pre-bowdlerized Grimm fairy tales,
that comes from a point of view that’s foreign yet completely
recognizable.
He strings nine or so of the original tales together so that
they happen to one family, and form a story arc about two
children who leave home, have adventures, and return older and
wiser. The actual text of the tales is pretty much a
translation, but the interstitial matter is in several
completely different voices, some of which (like the one that
keeps saying how awesome everything is) are pretty
irritating.
So one is tempted to say that for good writing, you should get
yourself a good translation of the original brothers Grimm,
except that then you would start fantasizing about writing a
book like this, and you very likely wouldn’t do any better
than Adam Gidwitz. Except that maybe you would clarify the
sense in which you were using “awsome”.
And some of the modern writing is actually pretty good, and
does illuminate what speaks to the modern sensibility about
the primeval tale. For instance, here’s the commentary on how
Hansel and Gretel feel when they get home and the parents
apologize for cutting off their heads:
It will happen to you, dear reader, at some point in your
life. You will face a moment very much like the one Hansel and
Gretel are facing right now.In this moment, you will look at your parents and realize
that — no matter what it sounds like they are saying — they
are actually asking you for forgiveness. This is a very painful
moment. You see, all of your life you’ve been asking for
forgiveness from them. From the age you can talk you are
apologizing for breaking this, forgetting that, hitting him,
locking her in the garage, and so on. So, having them ask
you for forgiveness probably sounds pretty good.But when this moment comes, you will probably be in a
lot of pain. And you probably will not want to forgive
them.In which case, what, you might ask, should you do?
Well, you could yell at them, and tell them about all the
ways they’ve hurt you. This is a good thing to do once, because
— believe me — they need to know. But this is the first step
on the road to forgiveness. What if you’re not even ready for
that?You could pretend to forgive them. This I would not
recommend. It’s sort of like sweeping broken glass under the
carpet; the floor still isn’t clean, and somebody’s going to end
up with a bloody sock.Finally, if you don’t want to forgive them, and you don’t
want to fake it, you can always go with Ol’ Reliable: Changing
the subject.
Micmacs
Moliere would have liked this
movie.
There isn’t really anything nicer than that to say about a
French farce. If you’re thinking that it’s virtuous to watch it
because of what it says about the international arms trade, you
are mistaken. What it says about the international arms trade is
that enough people find it distasteful that you can make the arms
traders the butt of the farce without making the audience
unsympathetic to the “good guys”.
Moliere used old men who are forcing themselves on young women
in that role; in this century we can use arms traders. But you
wouldn’t watch Moliere to learn about sexuality in the elderly,
and you shouldn’t watch this to learn about arms trading.
The Messenger
This
movie was the standard Hollywood movie on my Netflix Watch Now
list that I was up to watching after spending the afternoon at the
Pub Carol Sing.
It’s about two officers on the Army’s Casualty Notification Team,
whose job is to tell the next of kin that their loved one has been
killed in action.
One interesting thing about it was watching Woody Harrelson
play the jaded older officer, after all those years of watching
him on Cheers as the dewy-eyed young kid.
Another highlight was an actual explanation of why you might
knock
instead of ringing: Woody Harrelson is explaining how they go
about doing their job and he says something like, “I always knock — there are a
lot of those doorbells that play some silly tune and if it’s going
‘Yankee Doodle went to town…’ and I start saying ‘The Secretary
of the Army wants me to extend his deepest sympathy…’, it just
doesn’t flow.”
Definitely worth watching if you’re tired, and maybe a bit
better than that.
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