palblog

Ice and art

2012-01-30T06:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Jeannine and I decided to drive up to Williamstown to see the Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists show at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Museum. We had planned to go a couple of days ago, on my birthday, but the weather was not good, unlike yesterday -- bright sunshine and temperatures in the forties.

I took the Mohawk Trail to North Adams, partly because I had not been that way since the repairs to the damage caused by Hurricane Irene last year had been fixed, and I wanted to see if the effects of that storm were still at least partly visible.

They were -- huge stretches along the banks of the river where the surging currents had torn away dirt and rocks and deeply undercut the trees along the riverbanks. At least one road off the Trail was still closed; we took a closer look at it and just a few hundred feet up the road the guardrails disappeared into a yawning abyss where half the paved road has been washed out. It must have been a crazy few days after that storm, when the waters were running high and strong. Scary.

Getting closer to North Adams, in the higher elevations of the Trail, near the "Eastern Summit", we passed through a glittering landscape of ice-encrusted trees, probably from the rain storm a couple of days ago. I stopped and took some photos with my new camera… here are a few.

The Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists show at the Clark was small but interesting. It had mostly to do with Rembrandt's influence on the early work of Degas, both in painting and printmaking. One thing that immediately struck me was an old book of reproductions of Rembrandt's paintings and etchings… but this book was printed before the advent of photoengraving as a technique for reproducing images. All of the illustrations in this book were copies of Rembrandt's works painstakingly etched and/or engraved by other artists so that they could be printed.

I immediately started thinking about what that transition period must have been like, when photoengraving came to be and removed the necessity of all that handwork to get art ready for reproduction… and not only that, removed the interpretation which was part and parcel of that older process, where -- no matter how careful and talented the engraver was -- the end result would never look exactly like the original, especially in those cases where it was a painting being reproduced.

A whole group of people must have been thrown out of work by the introduction of this new process… I wonder what they did? Did their particular skill set translate into some other viable way of making a living?

Next to the Rembrandt/Degas show, in another small gallery, was an interesting exhibit called "Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art", devoted to the history and practice of copying of images, including many examples of just this type of engraving and/or etching of existing images for reproduction. It was interesting to see some of the copies which were mirror-images of the originals, flipped 180 degrees horizontally, because the copier worked from a print directly onto a slab of metal… and as we all know, whatever you create by etching or scratching or engraving into a printing plate always appears in reverse when printed.

(Here's an example -- sorry for the bad photography! I think the original Rembrandt print is on the left, and the copy of it on the right. Notice how everything is reversed.)

And that made a few of the examples sort of mysterious -- some amazingly accurate copies of Albrecht Durer prints. But these were NOT mirror images of the originals, but correctly-oriented copies. How did the person making the copy do it? Were they working from the original printing plate? Did they use some clever mirror arrangement to create the image in reverse on the new plate? I have no idea.

As I walked around the "Copycat" exhibit, I was surprised and alighted to see a copy of one of my favorite paintings -- William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Nymph and Satyr". This incredible, huge painting (I think the original is something like ten feet tall) is in the collection of the Clark, and I have admired it many times. But I'd never before seen this copy of it. I'm not sure if it was an etching or an engraving or a combination of the two techniques, but it was extremely accurate. Here's a photograph of the original painting…

… and here are a few views of the copy. (Sorry about the inferior quality of my photos.)

I find it hard to imagine what it would take to do a copy this accurate with the tools available at the time. Amazing!

I want to mention one other thing about the Rembrandt/Degas show. In one corner of the room, there was a small etching by Rembrandt. (I wish I could include a photograph here, but photography was not allowed in that gallery.) The etching -- which was probably about 8.5 by 11 inches -- included a self-portrait and a few other figures and at least one other face, along with a couple of things I couldn't make out. The images were sort of strewn around the pages in the way that any artist would recognize -- they were doodles, sketches of varying degrees of completion and quality. This is the kind of thing that artists do when working out some ideas. In this case, Rembrandt did his doodling on a metal printing plate, and later printed it out. (Or maybe he didn't… maybe someone who came later found this "doodle" plate and thought it might be cool to print it out. I don't know.) But the thing that bugged me was part of the description of this piece on the card next to it, which talked about its "informal composition".

Huh?

WHAT composition?

It's a group of DOODLES!

You've got this nifty, beautiful little self-portrait (head, hat, hair, neck), and then -- oriented ninety degrees away -- two full figures in period dress, and a face in a hood, all of these out of proportion to the self-portrait, plus a couple of other things which I could not identify. But there's no COMPOSITION there… well, not what I understand as "composition", anyway. Maybe in museum-speak "informal composition" means "doodles". Who knows?

I just thought it was kind of silly. But it's a minor thing, and both shows are cool and worth checking out. -- PL

P.S. The Clark is currently undergoing some renovation and the main galleries are closed. I'm not sure how long they will remain closed.

The Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists show will be up until February 5, and the Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art show will be up until April 1.

Review of "The Artist"

2012-01-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

I just saw the much-praised movie "The Artist" with my wife and daughter, and I am wondering what all the hype was about. It's a movie with a simple story which could have been well-told in half an hour, and its much-ballyhooed "gimmick" -- that it's a silent movie in black and white, made in 2011 -- turns out to be a long-winded setup for an incredibly lame punchline. Want to know what it is?

Okay, here's a big spoiler… don't look if you don't want to know!

(I'll add a bunch of spaces here, to make it easier to avoid.)

The entire movie is in black and white so that at the very end of it, in a short, inexplicably NON-silent sequence, it can be revealed that the male lead…

… has a very thick French accent.

Okay, maybe I should mention what the movie is about. It's set in the period during which silent movies transitioned into "talking movies", with the attendant rise and fall of the careers of those people who blossomed in the new technology, and those whose skill sets didn't translate from silent to sound successfully. It's a fascinating bit of movie history, and it COULD have been the basic for a really interesting movie. I suppose it still could be. Sadly, "The Artist" is not that movie.

The main character is a dashing, extremely popular leading man of the silent movies, who befriends an aspiring young actress. As her star rises in the beginnings of the transition to "talkies", his falls… and he goes through various stages of denial, depression, failed attempts to prove that his silent roles are still viable, and ultimately attempts suicide. All during this time, the viewer wonders -- why is he falling apart? Why doesn't he at least TRY to get on the talkie bandwagon? He's a charismatic actor, handsome, athletic, and -- at least up until that point, when talkies take over -- wildly poplar. What's the problem?

Having seen "Singing in the Rain" (a large part of the plot of which deals with this aspect of film history) many times, I was starting to get the feeling that maybe he, like Lina Lamont in "Singing in the Rain", had some kind of weird, horrible, obnoxious, repulsive voice. And according to the makers of this movie, he does.

He sounds like a French guy.

Now, this movie is not without its charm. There is a wonderful dog. There are some occasional clever bits with the interplay of the visuals with the dialogue and sound effects cards typical of the silent movie genre. (I especially liked the one which was structured around a car crashing and a gun going off… if you see the movie, you'll know what I am referring to.) There are some very good performances, especially the lead actor, and James Cromwell as his chauffeur, though I thought John Goodman stood out like a sore thumb -- he just didn't seem like be belonged in this period piece.

But… the fact that the entire movie is just a setup for a weak audio gag is… well, for my money, pretty pathetic.

And once you've watched the movie to that point, you realize that the only reason it HAS been silent (something VERY unusual in this day and age, and one of the "hooks" this film has used to draw people in) is to serve this silly joke. I found it extremely disappointing.

It would be great if someone took the time and used some creativity to do a story about this key era in the evolution of the movie industry. If that's a subject which interests you, just watch "Singing in the Rain"... and avoid "The Artist". -- PL

Ed

2012-01-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

For the last day or so I have been doing double-takes when I open up my email folder, and see the title of the one from my parents:

"Ed's Funeral"

Even though I know the sad reality, it still jars me. What? ED? There's a funeral for ED???!!

Ed Smith was a friend of ours for many years, the husband of my wife's best friend Pat. Since our daughter was born almost twenty-three years ago, they had spent a lot of time with us, even though they lived about eighty miles away, joining us for birthdays, holidays (they were the first non-family members invited to share Christmas with us), summer vacation excursions to Maine, and so forth. Ed was an important part of one crew who restored our barn and another crew which, a few years later, built our house. He did a lot of work for us over the years, helping with maintenance and upkeep, and kept my motorcycle collection running smoothly.

When I started "Team Mirage", the privateer motorcycle racing team I sponsored, back in the 1990's, Ed was an enthusiastic participant, going to motorcycle races to see the guys we'd sponsored battle it out on dirt and on pavement. I remember riding with him and a small group of other dudes out to Ohio, to the Mid-Ohio race track, to see our racer Dale Quarterley dicing with the best of the AMA Superbike class… and I believe Ed was there the following year when Dale -- against all odds -- actually won that race. (Unfortunately, I missed that one!)

Ed loved motorcycles, and I think that was one of the things which drew us together when Jeannine -- who'd taught at a high school with Pat when we'd lived in Connecticut for two years -- introduced us. We both had Honda Gold Wings, and started riding together occasionally, sometimes as couples. One memorable ride took us up to the Shelburne Museums in Shelburne, Vermont, a fascinating place.

But the trip I remember most was not one that our wives went on (though they DID fly out to our destination to spend a few days with us), a twenty-three day excursion out to California -- San Diego, to be precise -- and back. As I recall, it was originally Jim Lawson's idea, and I think he was considering going out by himself, but for some reason the thought of a cross-country motorcycle trip got me fired up. (This was a couple of years after I had sworn off flying.) It ended up being seven of us -- me, Ed, Jim, Rob, Ken, Jay and Craig. I'd never gone on a trip that long, and I'll be honest -- I was more than a little nervous.

But it was great to have Ed along. He knew so much about taking care of motorcycles that I always felt that if we'd had mechanical problems with any of the bikes, we'd be okay. (We didn't have any breakdowns, fortunately.) But more than that, Ed was just a pleasure to travel with. Always up for the ride, even when he got some bad seafood in a restaurant in Utah. And he dealt with that by lying down on a strip of grass in a parking lot until the worst of the queasiness passed. That was Ed.

(Here's a photo from that trip, taken at the edge of the Grand Canyon. From left to right: Rob, Jay, me, Ken, Craig, Jim, and Ed. Notice that almost all of us are wearing long-sleeved t-shirts with the same design? That's something I did for the trip -- I thought it would be cool to give our group a name, and came up with "Digital Demons". Rob did the design work in consultation with me, and we made the t-shirt, small travel bags, and pencils with the logo and artwork. Kinda goofy, but fun. And Ed was into it... though, the more I look at this photo, I think he must have cut the arms off his t-shirt... probably to get a better tan.)

On our return leg from California, three of our comrades decided they'd rather get home sooner than later, and left the group to head directly back to Massachusetts. But Ed stayed with me, Craig and Ken, as we perambulated north up through the Dakotas, into MIchigan and around the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. I'll never forget that trip.

We had many more good times in the following years with Pat and Ed, who watched our daughter grow up. They loved her, and she loved them.

Pat passed away about three years ago. Ed stayed with her, helping and supporting and loving her through her long illness, and then entered a darker world, one without his beloved Pat. But lately, he had found new happiness with his friend and co-worker Vivian, had lost some weight and started looking less stressed and lonely. These were great signs to those who cared about him.

And then a few days ago, I got a call from Vivian, who was crying. "Ed had a heart attack! He's on his way to the hospital right now!" And no more than thirty minutes later, a second call from her told us that Ed had died.

I -- we -- were stunned. ED?! I always thought the guy -- phlegmatic, strong, low-key and kind -- would outlive us all. I'd just talked to him on the phone the day before about a heating issue in my workshop, something he was planning on dealing with the following day.

Now we're just a few hours away from going down to Connecticut for Ed's memorial service. I still can't believe I am typing those words. It just seems so… wrong.

We'll miss you, Ed.

No -- we already do. -- PL

Cardinal

2012-01-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

Jeannine has the best seat at the kitchen table, at least for birdwatching. She faces south, while I face west, and to the east is her bird feeder, now stocked with seeds for the hungry wintering birds.

So it is that I often miss a lot of the colorful bird action, but occasionally Jeannine lets me know of something particularly interesting, as when this morning a cardinal appeared, briefly, to dine with his less flamboyant brethren.

I managed to snap a few shots through the window before he flew off. I think my goal this winter is to get a shot of one of these brilliantly-plumed birds on the wing, if I can. -- PL

Review of "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark"

2012-01-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

When will I learn?

First I waste time last night with "Cowboys and Aliens", and then I spend a couple of hours tonight with something a little less annoying, but still ultimately incredibly stupid -- "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark".

I guess it's a remake of an old TV movie of the same name, which I kind of think I may have seen years ago… but it did not make much of an impression upon me -- certainly not as much as it apparently did upon Guillermo del Toro, who co-wrote and, I think, produced this remake.

And he usually does such interesting stuff. Too bad he wasted his time -- and ours -- with this ridiculous excuse for a horror film.

It does have a few interesting bits. The creatures -- grotesque, scuttling, rat-sized homunculi infesting an old mansion -- are well-realized. The setting -- the mansion -- is nice to look at.

Um…

Yeah, that's about it. The rest of it is just several different shades of running around screaming-type nonsense.

The plot revolves around a little girl, Sally, and her attempts to convince her distracted father and his girlfriend (played by none other than Mrs. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes) that there are these weird little things bothering her. Eventually, the girlfriend decides to believe the kid, but as you might guess, it's too little, too late.

There are several points in the film where you might think "Aha! NOW she's going to be able to show them that these things are REAL!" The first one is when she takes a Polaroid photo of one of them (not sure why there is a Polaroid camera in this movie, as it takes place in contemporary times), and for some reason, the photo takes WAY longer to develop than any normal Polaroid photo should, so the creatures steal it from her and destroy it before she can show it to anyone.

And then the girl is trapped in the library with a bunch of the creatures, and she manages to squish one between two halves of a set of heavy, sliding book shelves, and we even see one of the squished creature's arms fall off and land on the floor. But do we then see the kid drag her father or his girlfriend over to the spot where the creature is squished, or point to the arm on the floor, and say "Look!"?

No, of course not. That would have required some clever writing and imagination.

Instead, the depredations of the creatures continue, until they tie ropes around the girl's legs and start dragging her down into the basement, where they clearly intend to pull her through the little door into the ash pit from whence they first emerged.

The girlfriend comes home to find this going on and tries to save the girl. She succeeds, but is herself dragged through the ash pit door by the creatures -- at this point in full view of the little girl and her father.

Okay, great, you say -- surely now that the father knows these things are real, and he saw his girlfriend disappear screaming down into this ash pit below the mansion, he will move heaven and earth to rescue her. Surely within minutes, screentime-wise, there will be heavy equipment brought in to dig up the cellar of this cursed mansion and locate the girlfriend, be she dead or alive or transformed into one of the homunculi. Right?

Nope.

The movie ends with the father apparently making ZERO efforts to bring his girlfriend back from the clutches of these spawn of the devil. He does NOTHING except walk away with his daughter.

Sigh…

I hate this crap. -- PL

Review of "Cowboys and Aliens" (the movie)

2012-01-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

I have really got to stop my impulse-buying of new movies on DVD.

I mean, I go into Barnes and Noble, and browsing through the new stuff I notice DVD releases of movies I had maybe a little bit of interest in going to the theater to see some five or six months earlier. The fact that I DIDN'T go to see them at the theater should give me the first warning that maybe it's a good idea to not buy the DVD… but hey, like many of us, I get seduced by packaging.

So it was a few days ago when I picked up the DVD release of "Cowboys and Aliens", which I watched last night. I should not have expected too much, given that two of the people credited with writing the screenplay were Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who were also responsible for writing the execrable "Star Trek" movie (or, as I like to call it, "that sci-fi flick somebody mistakenly titled "Star Trek"") which came out in 2009. But -- it stars Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, and it's directed by John "Iron Man" Favreau… it couldn't be THAT bad, could it?

Yes, it could. And it is.

While looking on amazon.com to confirm the names of the screenwriters, I noticed that there is actually an extended version of the movie, which adds about eighteen minutes to the regular version's running time. Gack! I can't imagine sitting through even a few more minutes of the interminable "action", the infantile character relationships, the parade of "Western" movie stereotypes and cliches, and the just plain ol' stupidity of this movie.

Wait a minute -- maybe I am looking at this the wrong way. Maybe those extra eighteen minutes turn this movie from one that I fast-forwarded through half of into a really good, well-thought-out, exciting science fiction/adventure film with characters I might care about and a story that made sense.

I guess I'll never know… because watching the regular version last night was almost painful, and too unpleasant to even consider wasting another two hours or so sitting through it again. I won't deny that the effects weren't nicely done -- they were -- but these days, it's hard to see a big-budget flick of this type where the effects AREN'T done well.

There is so much that is dopey about this movie that I don't have the time (or energy) to touch on everything, but I will point out perhaps the most ridiculous bit of all -- the rationale for the aliens' coming to Earth: They want our gold.

They want our gold because… umm… because… let's see… because... they want it!

(Now, to be fair, there may have been an logical explanation for a starfaring species' ravenous desire for Earth's gold, one which I missed because of my fast-forwarding, and if somebody knows what that is and wants to inform me, I'm all ears. Maybe it's included in the "extended cut" of the movie.)

It's not quite as idiotic as the aliens coming to Earth because they want our water (as seen in the original "V" television miniseries), but it's pretty close. -- PL

First day

2012-01-02T19:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first day of 2012, and it was marked here -- at least near our house -- by a lot of mist in the morning. The weather was mild, and the sun was shining, and for a while there was a thick mist -- I wouldn't call it a fog, exactly, but it was definitely a lot more moisture in the air than we usually have this time of year.

Maybe if it had been a bit colder, we would have gotten snow.

I'm glad we didn't.

It was cold enough to leave -- for a brief time -- some bits and pieces of frost on the grass and fallen leaves. I noticed one curled-up leaf near my foot and took a closeup shot of it.

I love the patterns in the frost here -- they almost look like a lot of tiny silver-white leaves. It's that whole fractal thing, I think.

Or something.

But what I was really out there in the mist with my camera for was to see if I could get some shots similar to those I took last year after a quick summer shower in late afternoon, when the air was heavy with dampness and mists curled among the trees… and the sun moving towards the horizon, shining through the trees, made for some beautiful light effects in the mist. I lucked out and got a number of shots which I thought were quite beautiful.

Unfortunately, I did not have that much luck yesterday… but I did manage to get the above shot, and that one I liked. -- PL

Sunset

2011-12-30T15:40:00.000-08:00

The ephemeral nature of sunsets is what makes them so achingly beautiful and so frustratingly elusive. I don't think any photograph will ever really capture the natural wonder which one sometimes sees in the skies as the sun is setting.

I took a few photographs of today's sunset after I'd come from a late lunch at Panera Bread in Hadley, MA. Here are several of those arranged into a small panorama.

On my drive home, I called Jeannine and suggested she go out on the small west-facing deck on the back of our house so that she could see what I was seeing. Unfortunately, in the two minutes that it took her to do this, the sky had almost completely changed, and the sunset show of light and color that I had seen was gone.

Like I said, ephemeral. -- PL

"Note gifts"

2011-12-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, my parents started a Christmas tradition for me and my siblings (older brothers, younger sister) which they called "note gifts". Here's the way it worked:

All the presents which once were stacked under the tree had been opened, and the typical "post-present letdown phase" was starting to settle in, when my father would say "Wait… what's this?" and point to small envelopes or folded pieces of paper stuck in the branches of the Christmas tree. Each of these items would be found to bear one of our names, and when opened, would reveal directions such as "Look in the closet at the top of the stairs" or "Look behind the toy box in the playroom".

We'd all rush off to the appropriate locations, and there find one last gift… and it was almost always the biggest, most expensive (within my parents' modest means) and/or most wanted present.

Sometimes the notes themselves were delivered in an unusual fashion -- the one I remember most clearly was when my father handed us each a walnut after all the presents had been opened. We all looked at each other, wondering if note gifts were no more. But then we were directed to crack the walnuts' shells… and inside, tightly folded, we found the notes for the note gifts! My father had painstakingly cracked open the walnuts, scooped out the insides, stuffed the folded notes into the shells, and glued them back together.

It was a great tradition, and when Jeannine and I started hosting our family's Christmas gatherings, sometime about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years ago, I took it over, along with the "making of the Christmas stockings" tradition. For most of those years, I presented the notes in a standard way, but occasionally I have tried to emulate the creativity my father showed when he gave us those walnuts.

One year I created an elaborate crossword puzzle (and this was before crossword puzzle-making software was available) within which certain letters were to be used to spell out where all the note gifts were hidden. And last year, I made small jigsaw puzzles, using those pre-cut jigsaw puzzle blanks one can find at craft stores, each with one person's clue to the whereabouts of their note gift… and to read it, the puzzle would have to be reassembled. That was fun.

This year, I wanted to do that again, but I had eight note gift puzzles to make, but only three small blanks. However, I had plenty of larger blank puzzles, measuring about 8.5 by 11 inches, so I decided to use them. And unlike last year, I only used black marker to write the clues, due to time constraints (last year I included some color elements, as I felt that would help in the reassembly of the puzzles).

Big mistake.

I didn't realize -- until everyone started trying to piece their puzzles back together -- exactly how difficult it would be to put together a hundred-piece black and white puzzle consisting only of black letters written with a broad-tipped marker on a white background. Here's a photo of Emily beginning to work on hers.

After about twenty minutes, it dawned on me that this was going to take HOURS… so, even though some people wanted to keep working on the puzzles, I threw in the towel and printed out simple text directions to the note gifts. That worked much better (and quicker).

So next year, if I try this again, I will either do (a) smaller puzzles, (b) puzzles with colors, or (c) both. -- PL

So this is Christmas...

2011-12-25T06:20:00.000-08:00

... and Emily takes a break from making her delicious Christmas cookies to dress up her little dog Henry in Yuletide finery, while a few stray snowflakes drift past our kitchen windows.

Have a great day, everyone! -- PL

Review of "Micro" by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

2011-12-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

I think I have read almost all of Michael Crichton's "science thriller adventure" novels, and seen most of the movies based on them -- "The Andromeda Strain" (the original) and "Jurassic Park" being the best, or at least most enjoyable, in my opinion.

   It's my great hope that "Micro", Crichton's last book (finished after his death by Richard Preston) never gets adapted into a movie… although in a time when stupid ideas get made into huge, stupid movies, it probably will.

"Micro" begins somewhat promisingly, with the mysterious deaths of several men, killed with a succession of tiny cuts inflicted by unseen forces.

   And then it goes downhill.

   No, that's too mild -- it CAREENS downhill.

   We're introduced to seven graduate students from Massachusetts -- none of them at all memorable as characters -- who are induced to come to Hawaii to work with a new company called Nanigen. Within a short time of their arrival, they are lured into a room where a big machine shrinks them down to roughly one-half an inch tall… and a chapter or so later, they are struggling to survive in the Hawaiian jungle, fighting for their lives against insects and other creatures, as well as natural phenomena which are now potentially fatal at their vastly reduced size.

Now, that's a premise which could have been a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of stories of people being shrunk down and having to deal with life at a tiny size -- "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is one of my favorite movies. It's a scenario filled with opportunities for wonder, excitement and peril.

   Of course, it helps -- no, it's NECESSARY -- to support such a ludicrous premise with consistent logic, and people it with characters you can care about. "Micro" succeeds on neither of these counts.

   The story really begins to fall apart with the hasty exposition explaining the "science" behind the "tensor generator" which shrinks the students down to that one-half inch height. The "science" amounts to this -- very strong magnetic fields causes things to shrink.

   Uh-huh.

This is a great example of the "less is more" approach. If you have to do something which is, essentially, theoretically impossible, DON'T try to explain it in a way which is CLEARLY nonsensical to anyone with half a brain. Just briefly make up something about the technology behind your magic device, and move on.

   So we have these seven people -- eight, actually, because one of the Nanigen technicians is accidentally shrunken down with the group -- now roughly the size of sugar cubes. (The rationale for the evil head of Nanigen doing this has something to do with a lame sublpot about the brother of one of the students learning the shocking truth about Nanigen, and said student finding out something about the complicity of the evil head of Nanigen in the death -- or APPARENT death -- of said brother.) Obviously -- and it is made obvious in the bad dialogue attendant to this scene -- the evil head of Nanigen has shrunken the students to get rid of them.

   And here's his plan: He's going to feed them to one of the many snakes in Nanigen's laboratory. But the first snake the students are offered to doesn't eat them, due to some convenient repellent insect chemicals one of the students is carrying. (But the evil head of Nanigen doesn't realize that, and instead thinks the snake must just not be that hungry.) So then, instead of offering the students to the NEXT snake, and maybe the next one after that, he allows his somewhat reluctant (and obviously somewhat soft-hearted) associate to let the students go… into the jungle. At night. With no supplies or weapons with which to defend themselves from all the predators now extremely dangerous to them at their reduced size. Better than being fed to a snake, I guess, but not by much.

Now, in the hands of a good writer, the following chapters could have been a thrilling series of adventures as these sugar cube-sized students struggle to survive in this now-alien landscape, using their wits and their scientific knowledge to keep themselves alive and somehow get back to their former stature. But Richard Preston is not that kind of writer. Many of his concepts and dialogue choices are simply embarrassingly dopey. Here's one -- it's from the thoughts running through the head of the aforementioned reluctant associate of the evil head of Nanigen, referring to her relationship with same:

   "… (he) had been incredibly good to her, advanced her career, paid her unlimited amounts of money…"

   Really? The evil head of Nanigen has paid her an infinite amount of money? Huh? Was this book even proofread?

   And this howler comes from later on in the book (page 202, to be precise) in one of the many clunky scenes in which everything stops so that some bit of biological science can be tediously explained. This is a character named Rick talking about the ingredient he needs to cook up some curare, a poison he hopes to use to defend them against the creatures who might want to eat them:

"That whiff of bitter almonds… can you smell it? Cyanide -- a universal poison, it'll kill anything, and fast. Cyanide -- a favorite of Cold War spies."

   And here's another bizarre one from page 244, when one of the characters is being attacked by a wasp which is laying eggs in him:

   "The wasp was… burying her stinger in his shoulder. And he felt nothing. His arm had gone dead.

"No!" he screamed, and grabbed the stinger in both hands, and tried to pull it out."

   Now, maybe I'm missing a key element here, but… if one of your arms has "gone dead", how do you then grab something with BOTH hands?

One more -- on page 302, a police detective interviewing the evil head of Nanigen notices the smell of the cigar the evil head of Nanigen is smoking:

"The air had a pleasant aroma of cigar. Given the pleasance of the aroma, Watanabe concluded that the cigar had cost more than ten dollars."

When I first read that second line, I thought "Did the author just invent a word? 'Pleasance'? I've never heard that word before."

I asked my wife -- who had her laptop open -- to do a quick dictionary.com search for the word, and -- to my surprise -- it IS in fact a real word. Here's what dictionary.com had to say about it:

"pleas·ance [plez-uhns]
noun
1. a place laid out as a pleasure garden or promenade.
2. Archaic . pleasure."

So the author has chosen to use the archaic meaning of an uncommon word, for no particularly good reason… the mark of someone who writes with a thesaurus open at his side.

   I came very close to abandoning "Micro" without finishing it… but I am loathe to do that with any book I've started reading, so I toughed it out and made it to the end. It wasn't easy. This is one of those rare books which was almost painful to read, and not because it includes troubling or disturbing concepts. It's just a terrible waste of trees. I wish I'd followed my earlier impulse and dumped it in the recycling bin.

   Michael Crichton had a real knack for taking a premise which was slightly ludicrous and turning it into a compelling story, with just enough real science mixed in to keep up the suspension of disbelief. Richard Preston does not have that ability, if this book is any indication. -- PL

Making wreaths

2011-12-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had our twenty-first (or was it the twenty-second?) consecutive annual wreath making party. I say "our", but even though I help her with it to some degree, it's really been Jeannine's baby. She started it, and has kept it going through all these years.

For a few hours on one December afternoon, our usually quiet house bustles with activity and resounds with the happy noises of people busily crafting wreaths in a wide variety of styles.

We're fortunate that we have on our property plenty of fir trees from which to harvest boughs. This year, Jeannine discovered that one of the trees in our yard -- right behind our garage, in fact -- was laden with the really cute little pine cones which look so nice on a wreath. They were on mostly high branches, so I got a chance to break out my new tree long-handled pruning device, which worked great.

Jeannine made lots of delicious cookies and other treats, and some of the guests added to the spread with their own yummy offerings.

Almost all of the people we invited were able to come, including a few wreath making "newbies". Of course, you couldn't tell that by their finished wreaths, which were gorgeous. And we had a special guest -- our daughter Emily, who worked out a Christmas schedule which allowed her to come to the wreath party (something she hasn't done for four or five years) as well as for Christmas itself. She got a chance to visit with her new cousin (who just turned two), resulting in this desperately cute photo:

We were pretty wiped out after the party, but it was that happy kind of tired. And I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that my good pal Mike Dooney stayed after the party to help clean up. Thanks, MD!

I made my usual wild and ungroomed style wreath, and here it is...

... hanging on our front door. -- PL

"Smallville" and Jack Kirby

2011-12-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

I started watching "Smallville", the TV series about Clark Kent before he became Superman, around the time it debuted… and didn't follow it for long. It's not that I thought it was bad, but I just found it kind of flat. I thought the key role of Lana Lang was horribly miscast, though Tom Welling did a great job as the young and conflicted Clark Kent.

My good friend Rob is a huge fan, though, and has often talked about the show and how much he liked it over the last five or six years. And I have from time to time thought maybe I should ask if I could borrow his DVD season sets, to see if I was missing something. But I never did.

Last week I was in Barnes and Noble checking out the new movie and TV DVD releases, and I noticed that the tenth and final season of "Smallville" had come out. I was immediately drawn to the cover image on the box -- a shot of Clark Kent in his normal civilian clothes, casting a shadow behind him which looked like a man with a cape in a very Supeman-esque pose. I was intrigued, and bought the set, and just tonight finished watching it.

I enjoyed it -- the stories were a little corny in spots, and the relatively low budget of the show kept it from looking as "super" as it could have, and many of the scripts seemed to rehash ideas from one episode to the next… but overall it was fun to watch.

And there was something unexpected, something that really piqued my interest -- the inclusion of characters and concepts from Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" series that he did during his tenure at DC during the 1970's. Darkseid, Granny Goodness (even the "Female Furies" of Granny's orphanage… sort of… at least there were two recognizable ones, Mad Harriet and Lashina… though I confess I kept hoping for Big Barda to show up), Desaad, Glorious Godfrey… even Orion of the "New Gods" comic was name-checked, and correctly identified as the son of Darkseid.

It was pretty cool! And I was tickled that whoever was writing and producing the show MUST have been a big fan of Kirby's work at DC to try to work these characters into the show in that way. They even brought Darkseid's world, Apokolips, into the season finale… and I have to say the special effects artists did an excellent job of realizing it, blazing fire pits and all.

But it made me start thinking how a dedicated "Forth World" movie or miniseries made with an adequate budget could be amazing. I doubt it will ever happen, but one can dream… -- PL

P.S. There was one thing that really bugged me, and it's something I have seen in other shows on DVD. I often watch with subtitles turned on, and I can't tell you how many times they wrote "gonna" when a character was supposed to be saying "going to". Now, it's possible that that's the way it was written in the scripts, and it's also possible that it's the way the actors actually said the lines… but it just looks… well… DUMB.

More cleanup

2011-12-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

I took another chilly bicycle ride yesterday, not too long before sunset, and decided to try to avoid the very likely impassable areas of flooding on one of the dirt roads (we had a LOT of rain the previous day) and take a cool path I discovered this past year. It runs for a short distance atop what I have been told is the bed for the old trolley car line which once connected Northampton to Easthampton. Because it sits atop this old raised path, it allows one to circumvent the lower -- and more easily submerged -- parts of the dirt road I usually ride on.

But I'd forgotten that the last time I took this route a few weeks ago, there was a fairly large fallen tree lying across the path. It wasn't so large that it was impossible -- or even difficult -- to stop and lift my bike over, but it bugged me. Once I get on my bike, I like to just roll. Stopping to hoist it over obstacles, however minor, it not my idea of fun.

So I decided to try cutting it with the saw I had with me last time (and which slides neatly into a small, unused space between my bike's seat back and the bag which hangs on the reverse side of that backrest, so I think I will keep carrying it around with me), even though it was of considerable size and the hour was getting kind of late.

But once again, the saw performed admirably, and within about twenty minutes (with a couple of breaks to catch my breath), I'd cut through it.

The two pieces resulting from this surgery were far too heavy for me to lift, but fortunately gravity worked to help one of them tumble part of the way down the side of the embankment, and I was able to wiggle it a little bit further out of the path. Here's a view of the result, looking down the path towards the center of Northampton…

… and another showing the straightness of the path as it heads towards Easthampton. (Actually, this one was taken when I was about halfway through the process of cutting the log... but I like the way it shows the perspective of the path going off into the distance.)

I enjoy imagining what it might have been like when the trolley was running through this area, filled with people in their antique dress. I wonder what might have been on either side -- was it swampy and flooded as it is now? Or were those cultivated fields… or simply beautiful woods What were those people thinking as they rattled and swayed past this scenery?

And then -- after pausing once more to take the photos I used to stitch together this little panorama…

… I rode on through. -- PL

Cleanup

2011-12-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

As the days wind down towards the end of the year, and hints of snows to come are in the air, I am trying to get in a bicycle ride every day, for as long as is possible. It's getting cold, but still not so much that riding is a pain instead of a pleasure.

I took one of my favorite short rides yesterday on some dirt roads in Northampton, and brought with me a small saw.

Why a saw, you ask? Well, there are still spots around here where the damage from our crazy Hallowe'en snowstorm is still very visible, and one of the dirt roads I ride on is probably the last to get any attention from the cleanup crews. As such, there are a few places where fallen tree and branches are partially blocking the road. It's not impassable -- people in trucks and cars have made alternative routes around the blockages, or in some cases just driven over the thinner limbs and pushed them down into the dirt.

But it is still a mess, and not much fun to ride through, so I thought I might do a little bit of hand-sawing to clear away some of the more egregiously offending branches. As you can see -- if you look closely -- in these photographs, I made some headway (look for the freshly-cut branch ends).

The little saw worked so well that I decided to try something a little more difficult -- this large branch which had broken (but not detached) from a fairly tall tree and was leaning into the road.

I think it was about six inches or so in diameter, but it only took about five minutes to cut through. I did it cautiously, cutting from below as well as from above, as I wasn't sure how it would fall when I finished the cut. But it worked out pretty well, and I was able to drag the cut end out of the road, as you can see here in the "after" photo. -- PL

You Can't Go Home Again

2011-11-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

When I visit the New Hampshire/Maine seacoast, either with Jeannine or by myself, it has always been my ritual -- usually when leaving -- to drive over to Dover, NH, and cruise past the house we rented and lived in for two years. It's a sentimental journey, for many reasons -- among them are the fact that this house was the first place where we lived together, where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created, and where we were married, in the small backyard in the summer of 1983… a ceremony presided over by a local Justice of the Peace, and attended by enough friends and family to almost fill the backyard (like I said, it was small).

Here's the house as it looked back then.

In the last couple of years, the house had not fared well. This past year especially, it has looked somewhat bedraggled, with a few broken windows and an air of abandonment. And there was a notice on the front door, some kind of official town thing that mentioned that it was slated for demolition.

I couldn't understand why. Aside from the broken windows, the house looked as sturdy as when we had lived there. But perhaps there was some underlying structural problem that we were not aware of. I really don't know. I considered calling our former landlady, a very sweet woman, but in case there was some unpleasant story associated with it which would upset her, I decided not to.

So when I drove down Union Street in Dover a couple of days ago, I was heartened to see what looked like a new coat of paint on the house. But… it looked different, somehow… and then, as I got closer, I realized that what I was looking at was the house BEHIND our old house. Our house…

… was gone.

Where it once stood was a rough patch of brown dirt.

Even the lawn in the small backyard, where friends and family had gathered to see us pledge ourselves to each other on our wedding day, was mostly gone. The small garage -- which we never used -- had also vanished.

I had expected that I would be devastated if that house was torn down. I even gave some thought in recent years to buying it to save the old place, but that really made no logical sense, so I abandoned that completely sentimental plan. But when I saw it was gone, I felt very little… a small twinge of sadness, mostly.

I am sad that it's gone. I have many great memories of that house, most having to do with Jeannine and our first couple of years together.

But as she pointed out when I gave her the news, we still have those memories. We still have artifacts from those times, like this drawing I did of the front of the house. I can't remember WHY I did it -- possibly as a card, or perhaps as part of the directions to our wedding.

And we still have the photos from our wedding, and the lovely memories which go with them.

But most of all, we have each other. -- PL

Splitting wood

2011-11-11T16:12:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had the opportunity to use my new electric chainsaw to clear some of the tree limbs which fell in my parents' yard, victims of that crazy Hallowe'en week snowstorm. I brought home a bunch of the sections of the branches which I thought would make good firewood, with a vague plan to split them lengthwise so they would burn better when it came time to toss them in the fireplace.

I wasn't sure exactly HOW I was going to do that, though. I have had some experience splitting wood with an ax, and also with a maul (i think that's what it's called), and neither tool felt particularly safe to use. I always had visions of lopping off random toes, mine or someone else's.

So I was intrigued while shopping online this week when I saw this on the Garrett Wade website:

Relatively small, no fuel or electricity needed… and no wildly-swung cleaving blades! Sounded right up my alley, so I ordered one, and it arrived today. After a few minutes puzzling out the directions, I had it set up, and started splitting some wood.

And I was impressed! It's not, as they say in the advertising, something to do major heavy-duty log splitting with, but the two dozen or so hefty limbs (ranging in diameter from three to six inches) which I managed to fit into the device (it will only accept pieces of wood up to 18 inches) were easily split, with minimal effort. In fact, I even did some using my hand on the lever instead of my foot, and it worked fine. It seemed to work equally well with the fresh-cut wood as with older, more dried-out pieces.

I would definitely recommend this tool for anyone wanting to safely split a modest amount of wood for their fireplace. -- PL

Here's the URL for the catalog page:

http://www.garrettwade.com/fireplace-log-splitter/p/82B01.01/

Jules Feiffer at the Carle

2011-11-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Jeannine and I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art last Saturday to see the opening of the Jule's Feiffer show, "Growing Every Which Way But Up: The Children’s Book Art of Jules Feiffer" and hear Feiffer interviewed on stage.

I've long admired Jules Feiffer's work, at least the stuff that I was most familiar with, his social/political commentary cartoon strips in "The Village Voice". Although his "controlled chaos" style of drawing is far from the style of cartooning to which I am usually attracted, I always liked the energy in the gestures of his drawing, as well as the wealth of emotion he could get into what appeared to be some simple wiggly lines -- something that appears to be easy, but in truth is very difficult. I didn't really know much about his children's book work, so this was a good chance to rectify that oversight.

The show had many of Feiffer's illustrations on display, but I have to confess that while most of it was his color children's book work, I was most intrigued by what was at the beginning of the show. These were two stapled-together penciled homemade comic books which Feiffer had done in his youth, aping the style of the "Golden Age" superhero/adventure comics he read as a boy, right down to the style of the cover layouts. (I wish it had been possible to see what was INSIDE the comics, but sadly that was not part of the exhibit.)

Jeannine and I were introduced to Feiffer by Alexandra Kennedy, the museum's Executive Director, and I was fortunate enough to get a chance to chat with him alone for about five minutes. Having noticed a Will Eisner "Spirit" page as part of the exhibit (right next to those childhood comics I mentioned earlier), I asked him what part he had in that -- had he done some inking on it?

It turned out that on that particular page in the exhibit, he had not done anything -- it was just included to illustrate his time apprenticing in the Eisner studio. (Actually, my memory might be failing me here -- I am pretty sure he said that the page in question was not one he had anything to do with, but it's possible that he said he had nothing to do with the ART, but he did have something to do with the WRITING.) He told me that he had done some drawing work when he was employed by Eisner, but mostly he wrote stuff, including some "Spirit" stories.

Of course, knowing that my hero Jack Kirby had also once worked for Eisner, I had to ask if Feiffer had ever met Kirby. He replied that he had met him once, but offered no cool stories about that meeting. Oh, well…

Feiffer was most interested in talking about his upcoming graphic novel, which he described to me as something like a hard-boiled noir detective tale. And he said he's drawing it in a style which is very different from his usual stuff, which sounded intriguing. I will have to keep an eye out for that one.

Following that, I perused the gallery display of his children's book illustrations. I have to be honest here and say that, while they were all quite colorful (except for the black and white ones, of course) and showed his typically energetic (yet, curiously, simultaneously laid-back) line, there was nothing particularly mind-blowing about them -- nothing at all as captivating (to me, at least) as the exhibit in the gallery in the next room, where the work of Barbara McClintock was displayed.

In my opinion, his work is far bettered suited to pithy observations about modern life and mores, as exemplified in his work for "The Village Voice". But that's just me. Apparently, there are a lot of people who really like his children's book work.

And as part of the talk later, one particular such book was in the spotlight: "The Phantom Tollbooth", written and illustrated fifty years ago by Norton Juster and Feiffer, respectively.

I've heard about this book for years, and had never read it, but decided after hearing Jules Feiffer speak about it that I probably should. So yesterday, while at Barnes and Noble, I picked up a copy and started reading it last night. I'm up to page fifty-two as of this writing.

Hmmm…

I've got roughly another two hundred pages to go, so it is possible that by the time I've read those pages, I may see what some people say elevates this book to the level of classics such as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Alice in Wonderland". But so far, I'm not seeing it. What I've read so far has an air of forced whimsy to it, which is never terribly appealing.

But I am keeping an open mind, and maybe the whole will turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts. -- PL

Snowlowe'en

2011-11-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

One reason -- the main reason, really -- I haven't posted anything since last Saturday is that I, like many people in the Northeast, suffered an "infrastructure crash" due to the crazy October snowstorm which hit last Saturday. I can't remember ever seeing snow, and CERTAINLY not the volume that we received, at Hallowe'en.

This is a photo I took as I was driving home on Route 91 as the storm started to intensify…

… and by the time I got home about twenty minutes later, this was what our driveway looked like.

It began in mid-afternoon, and piled up quickly -- I think where we live there was an accumulation of about eight inches, though other areas got more (or less).

And then things started breaking.

So much heavy, wet snow, coming so quickly, was too much for a lot of trees, most of which had not yet fully shed their foliage. Without the leaves to catch the falling snow and build up unsustainable weight on their branches, a lot of the trees probably would not have gotten as damaged as they were.

(I took a few shots of the damage -- but these are a TINY fraction of the actual number of trees that were mangled by this storm. I was tempted to stop and get out of my truck to take shots of even more dramatic downed trees, with their torn-off branches and splintered wood and loops of downed cables, but it felt a little ghoulish. Suffice it to say, it was hard to travel down any street or road in this are without running into scenes like this.)

Sorry this next one is so blurry, but I am including it because this is right in downtown Northampton, in front of the courthouse. Those green lumps you can see behind the black metal fence are all branches which came down from that huge old tree on the courthouse lawn.

It was pretty surreal, seeing bright fall foliage-colored leaves -- and a lot of green leaves, which had not yet turned their autumnal hues -- peeking out from lumps of bright white snow. But appreciation for the unusual visuals quickly turned to dismay as thousands of branches -- and in some cases whole trees -- started bending or snapping or getting uprooted, very often falling on power lines, cable lines, and phone lines.

Our generator -- which we'd installed almost twenty years ago when we built our house, after going through power outages every year since we'd moved to this town -- kicked on as it is designed to do, providing us electric power, so we had lights and heat.

I say "us", but in actual fact it was just me -- Jeannine was missing all the fun, being out in California visiting with our daughter Emily. No snowstorms out there, but she had to deal with it when she got home on Monday. I drove down to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut to pick her up, and it was a little eerie to see all the lights -- including all of the traffic lights -- out around the airport. And cell phone coverage was spotty, so we weren't able to do our usual thing of exchanging text messages to coordinate the pick-up.

There were literally millions of people in New England who were without power, some getting it back within a couple of days, others still waiting. We joined the "no power" brigade when -- for reasons I am not sure of -- our generator stopped running yesterday morning at 4AM. Fortunately, I was able to get it going again later in the afternoon, and then main power was restored a few hours later. What a relief!

As bad as it was, it could have been a lot worse -- at least it was relatively early in the year and temperatures were not, generally, below freezing. In fact, most days during this crisis (at least in this area) it was in the mid-forties, so freezing pipes (one MAJOR hassle of power outages in this area) or simply freezing to death were not as big a worry as they otherwise might have been.)

It is sobering to see, once again, the relative vulnerability of as infrastructure which we take for granted and use every day without thinking much about it. Maybe my father has the right idea, one he brings up to me every time something like this happens -- bury all the exposed power lines and such instead of having them strung up high, just waiting for to be smashed down by overhanging limbs weakened by a storm. It would be be an enormous undertaking, involving lots of planning and digging and so forth… but if it could keep millions of people from suffering the effects of losing such a vital resource, even if temporarily, it would be worth it. -- PL

On this morning of first snow

2011-10-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

Frost on the car window

like delicate wings pressed

in frozen sheets

fossilized exhalations

of ancient breath. -- PL

Cap versus Thor...?

2011-10-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I am looking forward to the "Avengers" movie scheduled to be released next May. And I am enjoying the little teasers and such that are emerging from the production, including the official teaser trailer which was released a few weeks ago.

There has been a lot of speculation about one particular quick bit in that trailer, a glimpse at a scene which shows the mighty Thor leaping through the air and bringing his hammer down on Captain America's shield (as shown here in two screen grabs I made from the trailer).

I have read some speculation that this could be indicative of some sort of dissension or conflict in the ranks of the Avengers.

But while thinking about this the other day, it occurred to me that another possibility might be tied into another speculation about the possible plot of the movie, one which says that the Skrulls might be involved.

The Skrulls, as fans of Marvel comics are surely aware, are a race of shape-changing aliens, first encountered, I believe, in the pages of some early issues of "Fantastic Four". If the Avengers are in fact battling shapeshifters in the new movie, could one of the characters in this scene actually not be the real deal… but a Skrull impostor?

I don't read a lot of the fan sites online, so it is entirely possible that this idea has been bruited about already. But I thought it was an intriguing possibility. -- PL

P.S. Of course, it's also intriguing to consider what the result would be if that is the real Thor with the real Mjolnir… and that's the real Captain America with his real shield made of Vibranium. Would the force of Thor's hammer blow be absorbed and dispersed by the unique qualities of that rare metal found only in Wakanda, the jungle kingdom of T'Challa, the Black Panther?

Guess we'll have to wait and see...

Eureka

2011-10-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

"Record the fleeting thoughts as they arise;
A line, once lost, may ne'er again be seen,
A thought, once flown, perhaps for ever flies."

For some years -- ever since I discovered a copy of it on the shelf at the first Barnes and Noble store to appear in our area -- I have enjoyed reading "Fortean Times", the British magazine based on -- or inspired by -- the life and works of Charles Fort, and which has the subtitle of "The World of Strange Phenomena", which just about sums up its publishing mission.

While reading the latest issue in bed a few nights ago, I came across an article entitled "Eureka!" No connection to Archimedes and his fabled bathtub realization, but a story about a Victorian era mechanical computer of sorts which composed verse in Latin with the crank of a handle. I haven't read the entire article yet, but I was struck by the paragraph containing the three lines at the beginning of this post.

Apparently, there was a tablet attached to the front of the machine which bore twelve lines of verse, of which these were the last three. The entire poem dealt with the ephemeral nature of thought and creativity.

But I thought those last three lines represented a perfect bit of advice to those who think of interesting ideas or turns of phrase or simply intriguing words… and then forget them, having not bothered to jot them down on a scrap of paper or a small notebook carried in a shirt pocket.

That's something that I have been trying to do these last few years, in part having been inspired by seeing my wife do it. I can't say that anything so inscribed in my pocket notebook has been of any great significance, creatively, but at the very least, it's helped me to remember those fleeting thoughts. And who knows? Maybe someday… -- PL

P.S. While reading those three lines to Jeannine, I was struck by how similar they were in some ways to one of my favorite bits of H.P. Lovecraft's verse:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange Aeons, even death may die."

"reax"

2011-10-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

When I opened up my computer today and started up my web browser (Apple's "Safari", if you must know), I began as I usually do by scanning the headlines on cnn.com, which is my home page. There were, as you might expect, a number of stories about the death of Libya's former dictator Gadhafi. But I was not expecting to discover a strange new spelling for a common word, as you can see in these screen captures.

The first one is from the CNN home page. To find the others, I did a Google search, and it seems that this weird spelling of "reacts" might have originated with CNN. It's bizarre.

How did this survive the editing process and end up on the website of a major international news organization? I mean, it isn't even like it could make it through a basic computer spell check.

(It reminds me of the early days of Marvel Comics, when Stan Lee and other writers would use "thru" instead of "through". I remember thinking that "thru" might be some acceptable variant of "through" (it's not), but later on it occurred to me that it might have been something the letterer had done to be able to fit all of the words in cramped word balloons. Who knows?)

But… "reax"? That's just plain stupid. -- PL

Review of the new "Green Lantern" movie

2011-10-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid reading DC comics, Green Lantern was -- after Superman -- my favorite DC hero. I thought his costume was cool, the power ring an amazing weapon/tool, and I liked the green theme.

So I was pretty excited when I heard a few years ago that there was a big-budget "Green Lantern" movie in the works. I never got to catch it in the theatre when it came out this year… possibly due to a diminishment of that excitement due to the almost universally horrible reviews.

But I still wanted to see it, and I picked up the DVD when I saw it at Barnes and Noble a few days ago. Jeannine, who'd said she would go with me to see it in a theatre, sat down to watch it with me at home.

She left about ten minutes into the movie. I probably should have too, but I wanted to give it a chance. And I did… but it never got better.

Awful writing. Awful story. Awful pacing. Occasionally great effects. A good character well-played in Mark Strong's Sinestro. Ryan Reynolds desperately trying to make the best of the crap he was given to say and do, sometimes succeeding, most times not. Occasionally atrocious design (the ridiculous "throne towers" for the Guardians, for example). Bad choices at almost every turn.

Did I say awful writing? This movie had some of the WORST dialogue I've ever heard in a film.

I could actually sense Jeannine's attention and interest slipping away during the beginning of the movie, which was so off-putting in it's "let's talk down to the stupid audience" exposition and just dreadfully tiresome videogame-like special effects that even I barely got through it.

And I have to ask -- is Hal Jordan (at least the Hal Jordan as portrayed in the movie) REALLY the sole person on Earth most worthy of the power ring, which supposedly has the ability to seek out the best candidate? Really? He's the BEST of all the billions of people on Earth? Please.

What an atrocious waste of a great character. -- PL

(P.S. I couldn't bear to use an image from the movie to illustrate this review, so instead I found one from the comics of my childhood, on Wikipedia.)

Salley Mavor at the Brattleboro Literary Festival

2011-10-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, Jeannine and I drove up to Brattleboro, VT to attend two talks being held, as part of the Brattleboro Literary Festival, at the Brattleboro Museum of Art. The two speakers we were looking forward to hearing were Salley Mavor, the illustrator about whom I have written before in this blog, and Ken Burns, the noted creator of "The Civl War" and other documentaries.

To tell the truth, I was more interested in hearing Salley speak and watching her give her slideshow presentation, and as it turned out (due to what can only be seen as abysmal planning on the part of the event organizers) that was a good thing, because the venue chosen for the Ken Burns talk was WAY too small for someone that well-known. To illustrate that point -- ten minutes before the talk was to begin, it was already "standing room only", and I watched from the outside of the building as dozens of people were turned away. Just ridiculous.

Jeannine ended up staying for the Burns talk, but given that it required standing in one spot in a stuffy room for an hour and some minutes, I declined the opportunity. As I told Jeannine later, there are some people (she being one of them) for whom I would do that, but Ken Burns is not one of them (no offense to Mr. Burns). And from what Jeannine told me of the talk later, it sounds like I didn't miss much.

But it was hardly a wasted trip -- and not just because I was able to go to the Vermont Deli (one of our favorite food joints in Brattleboro) during the time the Burns event was going on and pick up some yummy stuff for supper -- but because before the fiasco of the Burns thing, we were both able to attend Salley Mavor's delightful presentation about the development of what she has come to call her "fabric reliefs". I came away from it with even MORE admiration and appreciation of her artistry.

One interesting thing is that she was thinking in this way of combining real stuff with flat artwork from an early age, as you can see in this slide of pages from a little storybook she made when she was eight.

I was especially interested to see the slides showing the thumbnail sketches which she does to work out the layouts for her illustrations, before she begins the arduous work of meticulously crafting the three-dimensional pieces which she will later assemble into the finished work.

Salley had many slides of work from various points in her career, all of them fascinating and beautiful, but I must say that these bugs she made some years ago simply blew my mind. I think they are absolutely gorgeous.

She told a funny story about the spider she'd made (which is, sadly, not in the photograph) that she used to decorate the inside of the refrigerator in the house she was sharing with other people at the time.

And many of the last group of slides had to do with the development process for the cover she did recently for "The Horn Book", which is a periodical about the world of children's literature. Here's one slide with a view of the work in progress, with Salley's sketch for the layout on the right hand side…

… another with a closeup view of one of the figures she made for the cover…

…. and the finished cover.

Wow! Just incredible. -- PL

Review of "Robopocalypse", a novel by Daniel H. Wilson

2011-10-12T05:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "Robopocalypse" by Daniel H. Wilson. I was originally sucked into buying the book by the title (which seemed cleverer then than it does now) and the cover (what appears to be a photograph of a shiny white robot face -- almost a glazed ceramic look).

I don't believe I have ever read anything by Wilson, but I found his writing to be compelling and exciting, and the concepts he came up with the war of the robots on humanity pretty intriguing. It's safe to say that I enjoyed reading this book.

There's only one problem with it, and it's a big one -- he gives away the ending on the first page. Not in explicit detail, but it is clear and certain that one side has won the war.

It's a credit to his writing skills that even with that unfortunate reveal, I wanted to continue to read the remaining 346 pages. But… I can't shake the feeling that this could have been a spectacular tale of suspense if the author had not telegraphed the denouement on the first page.

And the obvious -- TOO obvious, in my opinion -- set up for a sequel is unfortunate. It's pretty blatant, and really unnecessary.

One other thing that bugged me was the structure of the novel, where each chapter is presented as a reconstruction of events based on date taken from various sources -- security cameras, robot memory cores, and so forth. It is a clever conceit, at first… but about a third of the way into the book I started to realize that -- given the way the author actually writes each chapter -- it's no better than a standard "omniscient" point of view. (There's probably another term for that in the world of literature.)

I can recommend this book -- just don't start with the first chapter, which is titled "Briefing". Instead, jump ahead to page 13 and begin with "Part One: Isolated Incidents".

It might work better that way. But maybe not. -- PL

"Picket Line" by Breena Wiederhoeft... and a very nice "Thank you!"

2011-10-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, I will get a note from a recipient of a Xeric Foundation comic book self-publishing grant, usually thanking the Foundation for the grant. But a few days ago I got a REALLY cool one.

There was a large -- about 11" by 15" -- envelope leaning up against my office door at Mirage, and when I opened it, there was this:

Breena Wiederhoeft, writer and artist of a graphic novel titled "Picket Line", a copy of which was also at my office door (here's the cover)...

... had created this incredible, elaborate "Thank You!" in the form of a full-color page of comics, featuring the TMNT and her character "Rex" from "Picket Line". And not only did she send a nice color copy of the art, she sent the ORIGINAL! Wow. Thanks, Breena! -- PL

To find out more about Breena's work and her graphic novel "Picket Line", you can go to her website, "Easel Ain't Easy" at this URL:

http://www.easelainteasy.com/

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

2011-10-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

I saw the news last night that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple, had died after struggling with pancreatic cancer for years. Like many people whose lives have been greatly changed by the products he helped innovate and bring to market, I was saddened to hear of this… even though, with the reports of his health issues over the last couple of years, it didn't come as a complete surprise.

I think I became a "Mac Guy" sometime back around 1989 or so. I had been using an Atari ST computer for several years, and was pretty happy with it. Then my friend Rob, who was doing graphic arts work at a small design company across the parking lot from the new Mirage offices, showed me this thing called "Photoshop" -- I think it was version 1.5 or something, still only handling black and white and greyscale images -- running on the Mac IIfx (at that time the "hot rod" Mac) he was using.

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I knew I had to get with the program (literally!) and become a Mac user. It wasn't long -- probably a couple of weeks -- before I had my own Mac, a IIfx model with a gigantic 250 megabyte hard drive, running Macintosh operating system version 6, I believe. I still have it, though it hasn't sounded its happy start-up chime for many years. It sits on a table in my barn, beige case slowly yellowing with time.

But it was the start of a love affair with the Mac platform which is still going strong. I'm typing this blog entry right now on a MacBook Pro laptop, which is so much more powerful and capable and compact than that first Mac IIfx that comparisons such as horse and carriage to automobile come to mind. But the key elements that made the Mac so appealing to me from the day I tried one -- and these are elements which, I think, can be directly attributed to Steve Jobs' influence -- are still there: the ease of use, the directness of the interface, the sense that this was a computer made for people to use for work and play without getting in their way.

I remember being somewhat flabbergasted when, after Jobs had come back to Apple after going off and starting his own computer company called NeXT (yes, I bought one of those too, and the less said about that the better), and one of the first new versions of the Mac that came out after he'd returned was the first iMac, a kind of cool-looking all-in-one gizmo which -- SHOCK!!! -- did away with the floppy disk drive, and -- perhaps even more profoundly influential, eventually -- got rid of the SCSI and Appletalk and ADB connectors in favor of a relatively new connection technology called "USB". I wondered how I would cope without floppy disks… and discovered pretty rapidly that life without them was not so bad. Better, in fact. And USB became well-loved, especially for those of us who had fretted and fumed while dealing with SCSI and its frustrating quirks over the years. Now, it's hard to find a computer or electronic device which doesn't use some form of USB.

It's been said the the iMac was the computer that saved Apple, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. It was certainly a huge hit, and led directly to the models which we enjoy today.

Obviously, Steve Jobs didn't do it all. There were a lot of talented people working at Apple who helped to bring these amazing products to market. But it is telling to remember what Apple products were like during the time when Jobs was not at the company, and what they were like after he returned. It was really night and day. Without him, and his innovative ways of thinking about these things, life with Macs would have been greatly different.

I hope the people who now run Apple have learned enough over the years from Jobs that the company will continue to surprise and delight us with amazing things like the MacBook Air, the iPhone and the iPad, to name a few. I guess we'll have to wait and see. -- PL

(The image I used at the top of this entry is one I found at

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13485403#post13485403

this morning when I was reading various testimonials about Steve Jobs. There were a lot of different photos of him and graphic tributes to him, but this one seemed the most poignant, for some reason. I don't know who created it. -- PL)

UPDATE 10-07-11: Now I know who created that moving visual -- a gent by the name of Ben Hughes. He left a comment on this post, as follows:

"Hey there!

It looks as if you didn't know where the original image in your post came from. FYI, I created it and originally posted it to my Tumblr. Feel free to link back to the original posting! http://obh.me/pmz6QT

Thanks for including my work in your memory of Steve."

Thanks, Ben... great work! -- PL

Even more turkeys

2011-10-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

Coming home yesterday, I rounded a corner and saw this...

Unfortunately, (a) it was raining, and (b) I didn't have my camera with the good zoom lens with me, so I had to snap these shots hurriedly with my little pocket camera from the front seat of my truck. But I think they came out okay, nonetheless.

They crossed the road at their usual stately pace, hopped up on the guardrail...

... and then flew off. I wish I had been able to capture some images of them on the wing.

Love those turkeys! -- PL

Burlington Book Festival

2011-09-27T19:23:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a few days in Vermont -- mostly at the Burlington Book Festival in the town of that name on the shores of Lake Champlain. Jeannine had been invited to take part in "Youthaplooza!", which was the part of the festival devoted to children's books.

On the drive up to Vermont, we stopped in my home town of North Adams for a lunch break, and walked over to Mass MoCA, the huge modern art museum in the old Sprague Electric factory complex, to see if their cafe might serve that purpose. The menu didn't thrill me, so we decided to seek nourishment elsewhere, but there was something pretty nifty in the courtyard outside the main entrance to the museum -- an abstract sculpture made up of what must have been thousands of small, shiny spheres made of black plastic.

The plaque on one corner of the sculpture's base identified it...

... but regardless of what obscure name was given to it by the artist, the sculpture was very impressive as a presence. And I have this personal predilection for things made up of many smaller things, so I found this very appealing.

Here's a panoramic view of the entire piece, with Jeannine giving it the once-over.

Although we did not eat at Mass MoCA's cafe, we did find a nice place across the street. It was called "Brew Ha Ha", and they had very good sandwiches, salads, and coffee. I tried to convince Jeannine to buy one or more of their delicious-looking muffins, but she declined. What willpower!

Our original plan was to just spend two nights in Burlington, but as it worked out, we were able to squeeze in another night in Manchester, VT -- just about halfway to Burlington, and site of one of our favorite bookstores, the Northshire. I found us an inn just a quarter-mile up the street from the Northshire, so we were able to walk there with ease. Except for a little bit of rain on that first day, the weather was pretty nice for the whole trip.

When we left Manchester to head on up to Burlington, we took Route 30 instead of Route 7, which turned out to be not only more scenic but took us past the old marble quarry I'd stumbled upon during our last visit to the area. I thought Jeannine might like to see it, and she did. Here's a shot of Jeannine posing with one of the several piles of huge marble blocks.

Traveling through this area of Vermont gave us a small hint of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Irene, although we did not run into any closed roads. Impressively, repairs seem to have progressed at a pretty rapid clip -- it was clear that some of the roads we drove on HAD been closed until just recently, where normally placid brooks and streams had earlier turned into devouring torrents and torn through earth and pavement alike. Virtually every glimpse I got of river banks along the way showed gouged-out banks and large, tangled piles of debris, mostly trees and branches.

We stopped in MIddlebury and found a nice deli with outdoor seating for lunch, then pressed on to Burlington. There was one more stop, though, in Shelburne -- Elizabeth Bluemle, a friend of Jeannine's and a fellow writer, as well as proprietor of a very cool bookstore in Shelburne called "The Flying Pig", had expressed interest in trying out my Elliptigo (the stand up, elliptical machine-like bicycle I bought last year), so I had put it in the back of the truck along with our two bicycles (which I hoped we would use on the bike path along the lake in Burlington).

Elizabeth got a kick out of trying the Elliptigo, but I think she was somewhat more smitten with the RANS Fusion "crank forward" bicycle. She found it comfortable and easy to ride, and said she suspected it would be more practical than the Elliptigo… and I concurred. (I think she may be ordering one right about now.)

Here's a slightly silly "mash up" photograph I created in Photoshop from two shots of Elizabeth with the bikes, the RANS Fusion on the left and the Elliptigo on the right. Thanks for posing, Elizabeth! (And for letting me put this on my blog...!)

While in Shelburne, I thought I would see if the shop just around the corner from "The Flying Pig" might still have some of the cool bamboo salad bowls like the one I bought for Jeannine there last year… and they did! So now I have my own beautiful bamboo bowl from which to dine on salad. (And I did just that tonight.)

Our hotel room in the Hilton in Burlington had a great view of the lake...

... and turned out to be just across the street from the Main Street Landing building where Jeannine was going to be appearing in the three events she was scheduled for.

But the first night in Burlington featured a dinner at a noisy restaurant called the Farmhouse Tap and Grill (with good food, I have to add), with five other writers and one other tagalong husband (like me) named Scott, who is married to author Kara LaReau, who sat across from Jeannine. He and I were the only guys in the group, and sat opposite each other. We had an interesting conversation (when we could hear each other over the din), and he turned out to be a really nice guy, a former car racer and a Mac user, among other things.

Jeannine didn't have to do anything at the Festival until well after breakfast the next day, so we took our time getting up and walking over to a breakfast place called Magnolias, which I'd found on a tourist map. Jeannine had found another breakfast place called August First, so we figuratively flipped a coin and decided to go to Magnolia's on Sunday, then August First on Monday.
Magnolia's turned out to be a somewhat funky place in a basement, but with good food. I wish I'd ordered something different, though… I was taken in by this intriguing-sounding item on the specials menu: "Carrot Cake Bread French Toast". I'd never heard of such a thing, and I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out how they had managed to combine carrot cake and bread.

Well, it turned out they really hadn't… and what I got was a HUGE pile of what was, essentially, crumbly carrot cake fried up French Toast-style. It was okay, but way too much for me to eat, and to be honest a little disappointing. I should have gotten the traditional eggs and homefries.
(We did end up going to August First the following morning, and found it somewhat less satisfying than we thought it would be, given what we'd read about it online. I had a decent "breakfast sandwich" (eggs, cheese, bacon), but Jeannine's order of peanut butter on toast was a big let-down -- given the kind of home-made, earthy vibe the place had, she expected some kind of robust, fresh-ground peanut butter with an interesting texture... and what she got looked (and tasted) suspiciously like Skippy peanut butter out of a jar from the supermarket.)

While Jeannine headed off to the Book Festival for her first appearance (during which she read one of her picture books), I got my bike out of the truck and pedaled across the street to see what the bike path by the lake was like. It had turned out to be a beautiful day, and there were some views along the path of the lake and the mountains beyond which were quite spectacular. But other than that, it was your basic paved rail trail, with some slightly sketchy sections. Still, it was nice to be out and bicycling, seeing a few new sights. I did stop at a few places to take some photos, including one on a little beach. I liked the look of this gnarly little tree against the expanse of water.

I made it back in time to catch the last part of Jeannine's first panel discussion, which was about teen literature. Here's a shot of the three panelists -- Jo Knowles, Tanya Lee Stone, and Jeannine -- during that discussion.

That was pretty interesting, as was the next event she was part of, the "Super Panel" featuring about ten children's book writers.

Probably the most interesting (to me, anyway) question asked during that panel was something like this: "How long was it between the time you realized you wanted to write children's books and the time you actually sold one?" The answers ranged from a few months to a decade -- a good illustration of the vicissitudes of publishing, and also how timing and luck are almost as important as talent in this field. Come to think of it, in a LOT of fields.

After that panel, Jeannine signed a bunch of her books which were on sale in the lobby, and mingled with other authors and readers for a while.

We had discussed going for a bike ride together after her part in the Book Festival was over -- Jeannine was curious about the bike path -- but we ended up just taking a walk uptown, to Church Street.

Church Street is one of the neatest things about downtown Burlington -- a stretch of about four or five blocks on one avenue which have been closed off to car traffic and converted into a pedestrian mall, with lots of shops and eateries along the way. We happened upon a restaurant with some outdoor seating and took a chance on it for dinner… and it turned out to have really good food. I cannot, at this time, remember then name of the place, sadly.

We followed that up with a nice stroll back down Church Street and down the hill to the lake, where we discovered that the little ice cream and frozen treat shack near the aquarium was still open, and treated ourselves to a couple of small soft-serve cones before heading back to our hotel room to enjoy a sunset lake view.

On the drive back home the next day, we couldn't help but stop at the Northshire in Manchester again, this time so Jeannine could get in some of her morning writing time while enjoying a latte and one of the Northshire's cafe's baked goods. While she was doing that, I went off on a mission to find more Abe Lincoln stovepipe hats.

Let me back up for a minute -- the previous year, we had visited the Hildene estate, the former home of President Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln, which is not far from the center of Manchester. It's a very cool place, and in the gift shop there, Jeannine found something she'd been looking for -- an inexpensive version of Lincoln's famed stovepipe hat. She has since used it as a prop when she does talks about her book "Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon", about the young girl in Lyme Regis, England, who discovered some of the earliest and best specimens of prehistoric ocean life… and while prospecting for these fossils in and around the cliffs of Lyme Regis, would wear a stovepipe hat to protect her head from falling rocks.

The hat Jeannine got last year has held up well, but she has been concerned that it might suffer some kind of damage or get lost, and she has not seen these types of props for sale anywhere else. So I figured, why not look where she'd found the first one?

So, while Jeannine was writing, I did… and sure enough, they had five of the hats in the gift shop at Hildene. Success! I ended up buying all of them… and some maple-flavored popcorn for the rest of the ride home, as well. -- PL

More underwater images

2011-09-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

I got another chance this past weekend to play with my underwater digital camera, and I think I am learning a bit more about how to use it. I'm still not completely on top of all its bells and whistles, but one thing I did learn was that I have to be extra careful about holding the camera steady as I am taking the shot. It seems that the "mode" setting for taking photos underwater is more sensitive to movement that the regular "Best Picture" setting.

In any event, it's still a lot of fun, and there is something slightly "otherworldly" about the colors and lighting in these photos -- even the ones of common seaweed and rocks and snails -- that really appeals to me. Here's a sampling:

I was excited to find a small living starfish in one tidal pool, though I couldn't quite get the shots of it I wanted. I do like the texture of the starfish's "arm" as seen in this one, however.

There is something cool about getting in the water and pointing the camera slightly up so as to capture the underwater reflection of the water's surface.

I even used that technique to take this "self portrait" shot -- not too exciting, but it's kind of neat to see those few random bubbles floating mysteriously across what might seem like an ordinary photo.

While we were at the ocean, Jeannine braved the cold water and repeatedly dove into the waves, doing the body-surfing thing. I like this image I caught just as a big wave broke over her.

It was pretty nifty to be able to stand in the ocean up to my stomach, with a camera in the pocket of my swim trunks that I could pull out at any moment to take a shot. Thank you to the clever camera engineers who made such a thing possible! -- PL

P.S. For anyone interested in knowing more about the camera with which I took these photos, here's the link to the amazon.com page for it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004MKNJEI/ref=wms_ohs_product_T2

and a photo of the camera itself:

Wooden birds

2011-09-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

Last week, on the spur of the moment, Jeannine and I -- along with our friends Dan and Jess Berger -- took a trip down to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. Jeannine and I had been to this museum once before, to see a show of M. C. Escher's work, but Dan and Jess had not been to it... nor had they eaten at Arugula in West Hartford (our dinner destination after checking out the museum). There were a couple of new exhibits, one featuring a realist painter named Sarah Lamb and another titled "One Man’s Passion: The Art of Carved Birds" which included over sixty objects from the collection of J. Kemler “Kem” Appell, one of the leading collectors of miniature decorative bird carvings.

I expected to be more interested in the former, and the paintings were very nice (especially the still life with olives), but I was blown away by the exhibit of bird carvings.

The sculpting -- and painting -- talent displayed in these pieces was just astonishing. Not only were the birds accurately rendered in form and color, but the bits of environment in which they were displayed as well.

And although may of the carved birds appeared to be perched on real branches, those perches were actually carved and painted would made to APPEAR to be real branches.

But the thing that really impressed me the most was this display.

When I first saw it, I thought it was interesting that the sculptor had found some common objects on which to pose the carved birds. However, when I looked closer and read the display card, I was flabbergasted to find out that ALL of these objects were carved and painted to look like the real things. And they surely did! Check out this detail from the above photo to see what I mean:

After wandering around the museum for a while more, we headed off to Arugula, the Mediterranean restaurant in West Hartford, where Jeannine once again got one of their amazing flatbread "pizzas", this time featuring asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes.

And yes, it was as yummy as it looked! -- PL

Review of "Another Earth"

2011-08-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

Jeannine and I were mulling over which of two movies to see yesterday -- "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" or "Another Earth". They're both, to varying degrees, in the science fiction genre, which is typically not Jeannine's favorite, but she chose "Another Earth" because what she'd read about its more intimate, human story appealed to her.

So off we went to Amherst CInema, found seats in an uncrowded theater, and settled down to watch something which boasted at least an intriguing premise -- what looks to be a duplicate of Earth is discovered in our solar system, and this planet parks itself seemingly in Earth Orbit, so that it appears to be roughly as far away as the moon.

Note that I said intriguing -- not logical or scientifically sound.

No matter… on with the show! Caution -- spoilers ahead!

A bright young woman is accepted to MIT, and gets drunk at a party. Driving home, she is drunk and distracted by the other Earth, and plows into a car (which, for some odd reason, is parked in the road… I could not figure that one out -- I don't remember seeing any traffic lights to indicate that they were stopped for that purpose… it just seemed like on a relatively straight stretch of road, this car was stopped for no apparent reason), killing a pregnant mother, her young son, and putting the husband into a coma. The young woman is subsequently sent to jail for four years, and when she gets out, she discovers that the husband has come out of his coma and gone back to his career as a brilliant musician. She decides to go to his house and apologize to him for killing his wife and child (and unborn child, too), but chickens out at the last minute, making up a cover story on the spot about her being the representative of a house cleaning business which is offering a free initial cleaning. After a bit of hesitation, the guy (whose name is John) takes her up on the offer, and thus begins what one other reviewer described as a "dour melodrama".

I wish I'd thought of that description, because that's just what it is. As the young woman -- who is named Rhoda -- comes back again and again to clean the guy's house (he's paying her by this time, even though she doesn't cash the checks), they start to establish a relationship, which eventually becomes physically intimate. She still hasn't told him that she was the one who killed his wife and kid(s), though.

No, she waits until she has gotten her seat on a spaceship to Earth 2 to do that.

That's right -- through a "Why I Should Get A Seat On A Spaceship To Earth2" essay-writing contest, this ex-felon house cleaner (she also has a job cleaning a high school) somehow wins over all other entrants on the planet the coveted ONE available seat on the "United Space Adventures" ship heading to Earth2.

I should point out that before this happens, the nature of Earth2 is revealed on a TV show in which we see and hear a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher trying to contact Earth2 by radio… and she does, and the person she contacts is -- wait for it! -- HERSELF. Or, I guess, a more-or-less exact duplicate of herself on the other world.

So now we know that Earth2 is basically Earth1, with possibly -- as we learn through a convenient TV interview with a theorist of some nature -- some variations.

And this gives Rhoda her inspiration -- and the "big idea" at the heart of the movie -- to offer her ticket up to John, because -- as she says to him after he gets wicked pissed at her when she reveals she's the drunk driver who killed his family -- maybe, on Earth2, "they're still alive" (or words to that effect).

Subsequently, he takes the ticket, gets on the ship, and blasts off to Earth2. We never find out what happens there, because the movie ends a few minutes later, after what I suspect the film's director thought would be a "twist ending" worthy of comparison to that of "The Sixth Sense". I won't say what that is, just in case anyone reading this decides to go to see this movie.

Jeannine turned to me after that final scene with a "Is that IT?" look on her face. In fact, I think she SAID exactly that.

This is one of those movies which starts from an intriguing premise with considerable possibilities, and goes exactly nowhere. There are logic holes aplenty, and they eventually make the whole shaky edifice of the story collapse under its own ludicrous weight. I'll just point out two of the biggies.

We're told that this second Earth in our solar system has been known about for at least four years, and for some part of that time has been huge and visible in the sky, apparently no further away than our moon. And yet, in all that time, there have been no manned or robotic NASA (or private) missions to it, no concerted effort to make radio or laser contact with it, no study of it with the Hubble Space Telescope… in short, NOTHING has been done to establish the true nature of Earth2 until this TV show with the SETI researcher talking on a radio somehow makes contact.

But probably more ridiculous is Rhoda's grand idea when she gives up her spaceship ticket to John, that "maybe your wife and kids are alive on that other Earth, so that's why YOU should go instead of ME". The idea, obviously, is that this could be a way of miraculously restoring him to the bosom of his family.

Well, okay… but what if HE is alive on the other Earth as well? What is John1 supposed to do when he gets there -- kill John2 so he can have his family?

(Let's not even get into the absurdity of Rhoda being able to casually GIVE her ticket to someone else, like it's a freakin' subway token.)

I wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has things I like in stories -- parallel worlds, redemption through sacrifice, the possibility of changing fate -- but it makes a mushy mess of these concepts.

I will say this, though -- for a low-budget movie, the compositing of the image of Earth2 in the sky of Earth1 was very well done, and probably the best and most evocative visual in the whole movie. Oh, and I am grateful that the self-consciously "arty" shaky camera and blurred images in the first few minutes of the film seemed to give way to more conventional, clearer imagery for the rest of the film. My eyes appreciated that. -- PL

Hurricane day ride

2011-08-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day Hurricane Irene hit, and we certainly saw some effects of it here -- a lot of rain and some gusts of wind at the house. But nothing like the various scenes of devastation I saw when I opened up my computer this morning. It seems like Vermont was harder hit than we were, with a lot of river flooding, historic covered bridges washed away, and so forth. A friend sent Jeannine a photo via email today, a shot which her son took of a place in Greenfield, MA at which Jeannine and I swam a few weeks ago -- the concession stand was almost completely under water.

The storm effects were so relatively mild at our house yesterday, though, that I decided to see if I could get in my daily bicycle ride during one particular lull in the rain in the early afternoon. Driving into Northampton, I didn't see much in the way of damage, although in a couple of spots, medium-sized trees had come down across the road, but someone had already cut them up and cleared the way.

When I got to Mirage (where I keep my bicycle) I put on my raincoat, and decided to switch to shorts and sandals (with no socks), as I suspected I might get a little wet. And I did, but not in the way that I was thinking, exactly.

The streets in Northampton were almost deserted -- very few people out and about, and almost no cars.

It was a little eerie, but it made for easy riding. I'd settled on my favorite route, the dirt roads behind the bowling alley, as my path on this hurricane day. The rain was light, almost just a sprinkle, and the air was surprisingly warm. Well, warm-ish.

As I expected, I encountered some large puddles on Dike Road, the first part of the dirt road loop, but no real flooding or impassable areas. It was actually kind of nice, though I was a little concerned that the storm effects could kick up at any moment and I would get hammered. But that didn't happen.

I had gotten almost to the end of Dike Road when I came across a small car stuck in a deep puddle, and there was a guy behind it trying to push it out. I offered to try to help him with it, an offer he gladly accepted, so I jumped off my bike and waded into the thigh-deep water. Unfortunately, one of the reasons the car was stuck was that the engine had died and wouldn't restart, so all that we had was muscle power. After about five minutes of struggling, we realized that we were not going to get the car out of there. (It might have worked if his wife and two kids had gotten out of the car while we were trying to push it, but that suggestion of mine fell on deaf ears.) I left them to wait for someone they knew who lived nearby and owned a Jeep which could pull them out.

By now, my lower half was pretty well soaked, but at least it was just my shorts and sandals, which wasn't so bad. I went about another half mile before deciding to turn around. I had started thinking that maybe I should head back to the site of that stuck car and offer those people some help in case their friend was unavailable (I'd driven my truck down to Northampton, and could have been back with it in about twenty or thirty minutes). But just as I reached them, their rescuer in the Jeep arrived, so all was well (or so I assumed -- I didn't stick around to see the actual rescue). As I was biking away, I took this shot with my pocket camera over my shoulder -- you can see the car stuck in the puddle in the distance.

And today, as I write this, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and you would be hard pressed to imagine that there was a hurricane yesterday. Here, anyway -- I guess we were luckier this time than some other parts of New England. -- PL

Gloucester

2011-08-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

It's a curious thing that only later in my life have I become interested in exploring the eastern reaches of my home state. Jeannine and I just got back from staying two nights in Gloucester, MA, a place I think I may have passed through once, many years ago. It's a famous sea town north of Boston, in a little protruding bump of the coastline to which I have never really paid much attention before.

But this trip was not just to put our tourist hats on, though we did do that also. Jeannine has a friend who lives in the area, Pat Lowery Collins, a poet/novelist/painter, and Pat had invited us to see her home and studio and join her for lunch. And she had a show of some of her landscape work hanging at the library in Gloucester, so we wanted to see that, too.

Jeannine found what looked to be a nice inn near a section of the shoreline called "Bass Rocks" -- NOT named after the fish, as I first supposed, but by the sounds made by the waves as they pound against and rush under some of the rock formations. We managed to experience this auditory marvel on our last day -- here's a shot of Jeannine standing on those selfsame Bass Rocks...

... and it was quite thrilling to hear the powerful low rumbling notes which sounded like subterranean thunder.

One place we wanted to check out was a spot called Halibut Point -- curiously, it came up in conversation with our friends Jesse and Megan at their baby shower a day earlier, and also on that same day while Jeannine was reminiscing with her sister Margaret, who, with her daughter Cathy, was visiting us for a few days.
Halibut Point is an area on the coast near Rockport, the next town north of Gloucester, and features a huge granite quarry, just a little bit inland from the shore, now half-filled with water, with chunks of quarried granite randomly strewn about. It is quite impressive, and a bit eerie.

Jeannine and I walked about halfway around the quarry, then decided to head down to the shore and see some waves. We found a likely-looking path and wandered down to an area with some beautiful rock formations.

Off to the left, there was this gigantic pile of what looked like cast-off or undesirable pieces of granite. I was hoping to find out more about this titanic heap when we went to the visitors' center at Halibut Point, but sadly that was closed. I suppose I could probably do some online research to discover the whole story behind it.

After walking on the beach rocks for a bit, we decided to head back up to the quarry to complete our perambulation of its circumference, but -- due to the fact that almost all of the little paths through the scrubby bushes looked very similar to each other, and there was almost no useful signage -- we got lost, and it took us another twenty minutes or so to wander our way back to the path around the quarry. But it was worth it, because it is quite a beautiful place.

(There were a few moments when I found myself thinking about the lake into which Charlton Heston's spaceship crashes in beginning of the first "Planet of the Apes" movie, because parts of this quarry had similar coloration. Or so I remember it, anyway.)

The following day we went to see Pat's paintings at the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library. I say "paintings", and that is how Pat refers to them, but they were all (except for one) not rendered in paint, but instead with pastels. Here's a shot of some of the pieces on display:

No matter the medium, they were all beautiful, capturing the essence of that shore zone where the rocks meet the sand and the surf. (I'm happy to say that one of them will be hanging in our house in the near future.)

After that, we tried to go to the Cape Ann Museum, which was right around the corner from the library, but they were closed on Mondays. So we decided to walk around Gloucester a bit, do the tourist thing for a while, and found ourselves shortly thereafter admiring the famous statue of the Gloucester fisherman…

… and nearby, the more recent companion piece dedicated to the wives and families of those same fishermen.

Then it was time to wend our way to Pat's house by the ocean (thank you, Honda GPS navigation system!), where we were greeted warmly and given a great lunch, as well as a tour of her studio and writing room, both of which (especially her studio) seemed to me to be fantastic work spaces. After hanging out and chatting with Pat for a while, we took a walk down to the beautiful beach which is no more than a few hundred feet from her place.

Walking around for a few hours in the extremely bright sun had tired us out somewhat, so we headed back to the hotel to take a break for a bit, before trying to find an appropriate place for dinner. And I lucked out in a quick online search, because I came up with "My Place by the Sea" in Rockport, which turned out to be a wonderful restaurant right on the water with great views, food and service.

(I should mention that before going to dinner, we took a quick dip in the hotel pool -- we were feeling too beat to walk the mile and a half to the beach down the road -- and while still wet from that swim, I walked across the road to the ocean, and tested out a new camera which allows for taking pictures underwater. It was fun, and a few of them looked pretty good, but I can tell I need to practice some more to get the best shots.)

(I had to take a photo of this seaweed I saw while doing that -- it was so incredibly green and bright.)

After dinner, while wandering around downtown Rockport, looking into various small shops, I happened across the following view down an alleyway -- what I think of as the quintessentially small town New England harbor scene.

And on another street, we ran across this odd but cute sculpture titled "Baby and Frog" by Richard Recchia.

On our last day in Gloucester, we did make it to the Cape Ann Museum, and while not a huge place, it was still fascinating to look through. They had lots of stuff about the fishing industry in Gloucester, including a cool diorama representing the docks and boats of Gloucester, which Jeannine pointed out to me had been shown at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

(I have been fascinated by that World's Fair since reading Erik Larson's book "The Devil in the White City" a few years ago, and it was fun to imagine this diorama having been part of that historic event.)

Another interesting piece that Jeannine pointed out to me was a plaster model made by Leonard Craske, the sculptor of the "Gloucester Fisherman's Memorial" statue we'd visited the previous day. Apparently, he'd had the idea to do a companion piece honoring the fishermen's families, but had not been able to secure the funding to produce it. It's interesting to consider this piece's similarities to -- and differences from -- the statue that was eventually created and installed to commemorate the families of the fishermen.

The visit to the museum marked the end of our stay in Gloucester, but we had one more stop on the way home that promised to be fun -- we had seen the signs for this place on our drive out to Gloucester, and on the way back, I suggested to Jeannine that we stop there for lunch. It's a restaurant called "The Old Mill" in Westminster, MA, and Jeannine remembered going there with her grandparents when she was young. She recalled with fondness that there was a waterfall, and a wooden bridge, and a pond with ducks that a little girl could feed.

And so there were, still. -- PL

A quick trip to the seacoast, and seeing the last "Frost Place"

2011-08-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally did it -- the "Robert Frost House Trifecta".

Yes, Jeannine and I just visited the third and last of the historic Robert Frost homesteads in New England, the first two being the Stone House in South Shaftsbury, Vermont and the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. The third and last was actually the first, chronologically, in Frost's life, and is in Derry, New Hampshire.

We had decided on the spur of the moment to take a quick trip to the New Hampshire seacoast this past weekend, and had a devil of a time finding lodging. We were hoping to get a room in some hotel with an ocean view, but there were none to be had (none that we could find, anyway), and even some of the usual places in Portsmouth which don't have ocean views were completely booked up.

(We later discovered that part of the reason for that was the fact that Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth was hosting an air show.. and throughout the time we were there, we would often hear the thunderous shrieks of fighter jets and other aircraft overhead. Unfortunately for the fans who attended, the overcast skies cut down on the visibility of the planes... though at one point during a break in the clouds I thought I saw a cool WWII-vintage plane which I think was a P-51 Mustang.)

Finally, Jeannine tracked down a room at a Holiday Inn, and we threw our stuff in the truck and took off. It was later than we usually get on the road for these types of trips, so we didn't get to the seacoast until dark. Part of the reason for that is the fact that we made two stops on the way, one for supper at the High Tide Takeout in Hillsborough, NH (one of my favorite places to eat on the road, and always satisfying), and again a little later for dessert at a place called (I think) Johnson's Dairy Bar, situated not too far east of Concord, NH on Route 4. I'd wanted to stop at this place for years, as I would often drive past it on my way to or from the seacoast, but never had.

And if you like your ice cream cones big -- I mean HUGE -- this is definitely the place to go. I ordered a kiddie-sized vanilla soft serve for Jeannine and a small twist soft serve for me. The "kiddie" sized cone was what would be a "large' at any dairy bar I'd ever been to, and the "small" was even larger. Crazy! And the hard ice cream cones they were serving were no different.

It was tough, but we both managed to finish off our cones, and continued on to the coast, where we had a nice walk on the sands of Jenness Beach in New Hampshire, enjoying the full moon's light on the waves and the beach.

The following day, while discussing where to go for breakfast and doing some web searching for suggestions, I stumbled upon a restaurant that Jeannine and I used to go to when we lived in Dover, on those occasions when we felt we had enough money to treat ourselves to a breakfast that we didn't make ourselves. It was called "The Wooden Spoon", and back then it was situated right in the middle of downtown Dover, about a fifteen minute walk from our house. Jeannine used to love the muffins they made there, and I have to agree -- they were very good (though not, I must hasten to add, as good as the ones Jeannine bakes). Apparently, over the twenty-seven (yikes!) years since we lived in Dover, the "Spoon" had moved (to Somersworth, NH, the next town north of Dover) and aquired new owners.

We tracked it down to its new location in the Tri-City Plaza in Somersworth, and although the ambiance was different from the old location (and a little lacking, if you must know, though the people working there were perfectly nice) and sadly, that day they had no muffins! But I did see this thing on the menu that I wanted to try along with my eggs and taters breakfast -- a grilled cinnamon roll.

It was yummy!

We followed this breakfast adventure down memory lane with a trip out to New Castle, NH on our bicycles, which I'd brought with us in the back of the truck. We parked in Portsmouth, and had a great ride out to New Castle. Here's a photo of my right ear and Jeannine following me -- one of my one-handed over-the-shoulder shots, which sometimes work -- as we pedaled over one of the several bridges to New Castle.

(I do want to mention one thing about that bicycle ride -- Jeannine was a little nervous about bicycling on that somewhat-narrow road, with all the cars that pass by on it, but I have to say that every car that went by gave us a wide berth. The drivers seemed to be, without exception, very respectful of bicyclists, which is, sadly, not always the case. But it certainly made this ride a lot less harrowing than it could have been.)

We stopped at a beautiful small park right next to the ocean and enjoyed looking at the water and the rocks and sea grass…

… and smelling the salt air while sitting on the bench under this tree.

After soaking up the ocean ambiance for a while, we decided to continue on another quarter of a mile or so to Fort Stark, the ruined fort I wrote about on this blog several entries ago. I took some more shots from a slightly different perspective, and stitched them together into this small panorama.

The following day was not so pleasant, weather-wise -- it was raining hard from the time we awoke and didn't really let up for the rest of the day, which made our drive to Derry, NH, to see the Robert Frost farm not that much fun. But once there, and fortified with raincoat and umbrella, we enjoyed walking around the property on a short trail through the field and woods. Here's Jeannine posing for me on a little bridge over a stream on the trail…

… and a view from the far end of the field looking back toward the house.

The young man we'd talked to in the gift shop at the farm before going out on our walk -- Alex, I think his name was -- told us that before the house was bought and restored as a Robert Frost museum, it -- and the property around it -- had been owned by the "Frosty Acres Automobile Graveyard". ("Frosty Acres"… get it?) Here's a photo Alex showed us from those days -- you can make out the Frost house in the background.

Unlike the other two Frost houses, where you could wander around as you liked inside, here a guided tour was required to see the inside of the house. We weren't really into being part of a big group, but as it turned out, Alex offered to give us a "lightning tour" of the house, which worked out great.

The first thing he showed us was probably my favorite part of the tour -- the "privy" in what I guess would be called a "mudroom" today. It's interesting in that it is a "two-seater" and the seats are side-by-side with nothing in between them.

I mentioned to Alex that it reminded me of one of those old "Saturday Night Live" faux commercials -- this one for a product called "The Love Toilet", which was a two-person toilet in the shape of the classic love seat. He remembered it right away, even reciting the ad slogan they'd made up.

Moving on from the mudroom, we went into the kitchen, where we were told that it is thought that Frost wrote a considerable amount of his poetry at the table in this photo.

The rest of the house was somewhat unremarkable, but still interesting to see and imagine what it was like when Frost lived there. I should also point out that, like when we visited the Frost place in Franconia on another rainy day, I was impressed that so many people would show up on a bad weather day to see the place -- I think there were probably about a dozen or so other visitors to the Derry house during the short time we were there.

But now that we've seen all three Frost places, what next? I guess we need to find another series of poet's or writer's house to visit. I should ask Jeannine if she has any ideas. -- PL

Review of "Captain America: The First Avenger"

2011-08-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Jeannine and I went to see the "Captain America" movie yesterday, and we both really liked it (as our daughter, who has so far seen it three times, predicted we would). And we liked the first half, with its quieter moments and character development, more than the second half, with its nearly relentless action and explosions.

But it all came together pretty well, making for a satisfying movie experience.

Chris Evans (who, as TMNT fans know, voiced Casey Jones in the CGI Turtles movie in 2007 and also played Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch, in the last two "Fantastic Four" movies) does a fantastic job playing Steve Rogers, the scrawny but scrappy kid from Brooklyn who becomes Captain America through a "super soldier" experiment conducted by the US Army. The movie magic via which we see Steve Rogers first in his short, skinny form and then later as the fully bulked-up, muscular version is very impressive, and I couldn't see any visible seams. It was completely convincing.

On the way to the theatre, I attempted to provide Jeannine -- who I am pretty certain has never read a "Captain America" comic book in her life -- a rough overview of the character and where he sits in the Marvel universe. I tried to integrate into that description the various tidbits I'd picked up from reading about the movie and how certain details had been changed to fit this new film version of Captain America. It was kind of fun to do that, allowing me to reminisce about some of the great issues of the comics I'd read over the years.

And then we saw the movie, and a lot of the concepts and characters from those comics were up there on the screen, some subtly changed, others almost completely different. But it was a "Captain America" that I think would have made its creators, Joe SImon and Jack Kirby, proud. (Actually, I believe Joe Simon is still alive -- I wonder if he has seen the film and if so, what he thought of it.)

I had fun picking out various references, subtle and otherwise, to bits and pieces of Marvel lore. The scientist who assists the evil Red Skull? He is none other than Arnim Zola, a character created by Jack Kirby during his last run on the Captain America comics in the 1980's (though Zola in those issues was a much weirder sight than Zola as played by Toby Jones in the film). The Red Skull himself, played by Hugo Weaving, is perfectly realized in very convincing makeup which is revealed at a key dramatic moment. The artifact the Red Skull is searching for, and finds, in Norway? It's none other than the "Cosmic Cube" from the comics… and the filmmakers very cleverly put in a line which ties this object of gigantic power into the Norse gods mythology underpinning the movie version of Marvel's "The Mighty Thor", setting up what I suspect will -- or at least could -- be a major plot point in the "Avengers" movie due out next year.

And there's Dum Dum Dugan! Yep, the bowler-hatted brawler from the 1960's Marvel Comics begun by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby appears in a number of scenes along with some less-easily-recognizable members of that famed squad of World War 2 Allied fighters… and he even gives the classic "Howling Commandoes" war cry of "Yahoo!" as he blasts away with one of Hydra's super weapons.

Hydra (or should it be "H.Y.D.R.A."?) was one of Captain America's recurring foes in the comics, and they are here in the film in full force, even down to the infamous "Hail Hydra! Cut off one head, and another will take its place!" oath and two-armed salute familiar to readers of the comics.

A nice touch to further add to the continuity of the growing Marvel movie universe is to have Howard Stark (father of Tony Stark, later known to the world as "Iron Man") appear as an engineer working with scientist Abraham Erskine on the "super soldier" project. (I hope there is at least one moment in the upcoming "Avengers" movie where Tony Stark/Iron Man meets Captain America for the first time and mentions something about how his father helped him to become what he is… maybe in the form of a line like "My dad used to talk about you…!")

The action scenes are very well done -- Cap's shield-slinging is particularly effective -- though I found some of the later non-stop action a bit tedious, albeit necessary, I guess. What REALLY sets this movie apart from the herd is the character stuff in the first half, especially in an absolutely brilliant scene which shows exactly why, without dwelling on it or relying on exposition, Steve Rogers is the right choice for the "super soldier" experiment. (Yes, I'm talking about the hand grenade scene shown in the trailers.) It's one of those scenes which makes you feel good about the fact that the people who wrote the script actually THOUGHT long and hard about what they were doing. Jeannine grabbed my hand at the conclusion of this scene -- not because it was really scary or unsettling, but because it was such a perfect character moment, and as a writer, she lives for those.

"Captain America" is a movie I think I am going to have to see again, as I am sure there were a number of things I missed. It will be fun to see if I can pick up on those details in a second or third viewing. And it would almost be worth it just to stay for the very brief glimpse of shots from the upcoming "Avengers" movie which appear after the end credits. -- PL

Dance, flowers, and food

2011-08-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Jeannine and I had a very pleasant summer Saturday. We'd made plans to go to Jacob's Pillow, the famous dance venue in the Berkshires. Jeannine had been there once many years before, but we'd never gone together, and I'd never been at all, although I could recall seeing the sign for Jacob's Pillow on my many motorcycle rides down that scenic stretch of Route 20 in Massachusetts.

When Jeannine suggested we might go to see a dance event there, she left it up to me to pick one. Not knowing much about dance, I chose one which looked to be at the very least interesting in a technical way, because from the image in the advertising, the dancers would be performing on a stage littered with hundreds of ping-pong balls. I found myself wondering how they would avoid slipping on them.

So we set out on a pretty nice, partly sunny day, and found our way via, one of my favorite scenic routes, to Jacob's Pillow, which is not too far off of Route 20. It's a lovely place, lots of rustic-looking barns and outbuildings which house studios and theaters set among beautiful trees and gardens, with many benches and picnic tables here and there. The event we were going to see involved two performances by choreographer and dancer Jonah Bokaer in the Doris Duke Theatre.

And it turned out to be… interesting. In fact, it turned out to be almost exactly what I had imagined it to be -- mostly concept and very little actual dancing. Jeannine was more disappointed than I was, because she likes to see more athletic dance movement and prefers lively music to go along with it (neither was on hand for these performances).

Actually -- and I almost hate to mention this because it reveals, perhaps, exactly what a nerd I am -- both performances made me think of moments from the original "Star Trek" TV series. In the first one, which I think was titled "Recess", part of the "dance" involved a dancer hidden under a huge sheet of white paper which was crumpled up into a heap… and the dancer moved round underneath it, crawling and lurching across the stage. I immediately thought of the way the Horta (the silicon-based cavern dweller in the episode "Devil in the Dark") , moved. It was eerily similar.

And in the next performance, titled "Recess" (this was the one with all the ping-pong balls), at one point hundreds of balls were poured from a chute on the left side of the stage, reminding me of the way the tribbles poured down on Captain Kirk when he opened the grain storage locker on Space Station K-1 in "The Trouble with Tribbles".

Yes, I am a geek.

After the show, we debated if we should try to get in a swim (the weather report said possible thunderstorms, and the sky WAS getting a bit dark) or drive a little further west and check out a place Jeannine has been wanting to go to for years, the Berkshire Botanical Gardens in Stockbridge, MA. We chose the latter, and although it did start sprinkling on the way there, it didn't rain enough to dampen (literally AND figuratively) our enjoyment of this beautiful place. I think the herb garden, with its beautiful design and WONDERFUL aromas, was our favorite spot. Here's a small panoramic image of Jeannine wandering among the sage and cumin and dill.

I had to stop to take a photo of this bench -- not just for its beauty, but for the fact that my daughter and her roommate would likely appreciate the sign next to it.

There were a number of interesting tree houses on the grounds, and Jeannine snapped this shot of me enjoying the view from the top level of one of them.

There were so many beautiful flowers at this place that I could fill up multiple blog pages with images of them. In lieu of that, here are a few of my favorites from what I shot.

Near the end of our perambulations through the gardens, we came upon the "Children's Garden"...

...which was very cute and featured a "Wishing Tree".

Here are a couple of close-ups of some of the "wish tags" attached to the tree.

(I love the spelling of "unicorn" on this one.)

Nearby, there was this lovely mailbox decorated with living plants…

… and this sign:

After getting our fill of gorgeous colors and shapes and inviting scents, Jeannine suggested we have dinner at a place in Great Barrington. I had eaten there once with my friends Rick and Rob, and had raved to Jeanine about the food. It's called "Xicohtencatl", and it serves what is described at authentic Mexican food.

(Here''s their website: http://www.xicohmexican.com/)

We got great seats on the porch, just as it started raining more heavily. Jeannine had a large plate of scallops which she said were the best she'd ever had, and I had a whole Tilapia on a bed of greens. And it WAS a whole fish, head and all. I had never had fish served that way, and it had also been a while since I'd had to carefully extract the bones from a meal so I didn't swallow any. But it was GREAT. I would heartily recommend this place to anyone.

We didn't get the swim that we had hoped for -- it poured pretty much the entire drive home -- but it was a wonderful day nonetheless. -- PL

Blast from the Past #380: "Iceworms"

2011-07-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

This is one of those drawings that I like a lot, because I feel it was almost completely successful in its execution... but like many of my drawings from the period of the late 1970's and early 1980's, I don't remember exactly what it was done for.

It is likely a drawing done to illustrate a story or column in "Hampshire Life", but it also just weird enough (worms in ice...?) to have been one of the drawings I produced for various horror/science fiction fanzines back then. Maybe someday I will stumble across the printed version and know for sure.

This was one more example of using the shading film which had opaque WHITE dots instead of BLACK dots. I found it a nice way to produce a muted effect when laid over black line work -- here it works to sell the idea that the worms are inside the ice cubes. -- PL

Salley Mavor

2011-07-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

I wanted to blog about this extraordinary artist -- someone whose work my wife turned me on to -- last December, after my friends Rick and Rob accompanied me to her "Pocketful of Posies" show (here's a not-so-great photo I took of the cover illustration for her "Pocketful of Posies" picture book):

… at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA and we were all just blown away by the quality of her work... but I couldn't.

Well, I guess I COULD have, but it might have ruined the surprise Christmas gift I managed to procure for Jeannine through an email contact with with the artist -- several of Salley's original three-dimensional illustrations. Here's a photo of one of them, from a series of works illustrating the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle", I believe. (Photo by Salley Mavor.)

The cliche phrase "photos don't do these justice" was never more apropos than for the work of Salley Mavor. These things are simply amazing to look at, and benefit from standing in front of with your face a few inches away so that you can see more clearly all of the detailed stitching and nuanced color and careful design choices. Although it is completely reasonable -- for the sake of preservation -- that these pieces are behind glass (in beautiful wood frames made by Salley's husband Ron), it is also a shame, because if you are anything like me, you just want to TOUCH them, and tactilely experience Salley's amazing melange of textures. Her use of found objects is extremely clever -- in one piece, a baby is swinging in a cradle hung from a tree branch… and the cradle is a quarter of a walnut shell. Absolutely perfect!

I don't think the show at the Danforth is still up, but Salley has a new show -- a slightly smaller number of pieces, but also several new ones which were not in the Danforth show -- at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Brattleboro, VT. The show is titled "Sewn Stories", and Jeannine and I were very happy to get an email invitation to the opening, which was last night. And it was even more fun because we got to meet and talk briefly with Salley (and Ron).

Here's a photo from the opening last night of Salley posing with one of her more recent pieces, a large and gorgeous one titled "Rabbitat".

I highly recommend checking out this show, as well as the books which Salley has illustrated. A good place to start is Salley's website:

http://www.weefolkstudio.com/

And you can go here:

http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=2039

... for an excellent interview with Salley. -- PL

----------------------------------------------

SALLEY MAVOR: SEWN STORIES

July 15, 2011–February 5, 2012

Textile artist and children’s book illustrator Salley Mavor’s original fabric reliefs are created from hand-dyed wool felt, embroidery thread, found objects, and manufactured trinkets and beads. Included in this exhibit are several works from Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, which won the 2011 Boston Globe Book Award and the 2011 Golden Kite Award.

http://www.brattleboromuseum.org/2011/06/29/salley-mavor-sewn-stories/

"X-Men: FIrst Class"

2011-07-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the first two "X-Men" movies -- I thought Bryan Singer did a great job of bringing the characters to life on screen. The casting was excellent, the effects were well-done, and the stories held together.

Things started to fall apart with the third "X-Men" movie, which had a few good scenes but really started to devolve into an embarrassing mess about halfway through… and the big battle between the mutants had some really bad fight staging. And the less said about Hugh Jackman's solo "Wolverine" outing, the better.

So when I heard there was going to be another "X-Men" movie, I did not hold out great hope that it would turn out well, especially when I heard it was going to feature all young mutants, in a prequel of sorts to the other three films. There would be no Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen, sadly.

However, as time went on and I started seeing trailers for the upcoming film (titled "X-Men: First Class"), I began to feel somewhat hopeful. It actually looked interesting.

And on a recent short visit by our daughter Emily to this side of the country, I got to see it with her and Jeannine. Em had already seen it, but was willing to go again (she wasn't so willing to see "Green Lantern" again, but that's another story).

We all liked it, quite a bit. I especially liked seeing Hank McCoy realized much like he was in the original "X-Men" comics, although I do feel the actor they chose to portray him should have been a bit shorter and stockier, But it was still cool to see the bespectacled, slightly nerdy "Beast" in his pre-blue furred state. I would have liked to have seen the complete original team from those first comics -- Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel, and Iceman -- but I guess that wasn't possible if this film was to fit into the established continuity of the first two.

And as far as I could tell (from that single viewing), it did fit -- I did not detect any glaring errors. Maybe when I see it a second or third time, something will jump out at me, but it appeared pretty seamless.

I did feel that January Jones was not terribly impressive in her part of Emma Frost -- she seemed for the most part required to stand around and look sexy, which I guess she did, but her energy level seemed far below that of the other actors. Not so much as to ruin the film, but it was a little distracting.

There was one great cameo appearance which lasted all of about ten seconds -- I won't spoil it by revealing who it was, but it made me laugh.

I would definitely recommend this movie, especially for fans of the "X-Men" movie franchise who thought it was all over after "Wolverine". -- PL

Sunset (sort of) from Mount Sugarloaf

2011-07-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I was out on the DN-01 and admiring the cloud colors as the sun was setting. I was thinking that if the road to the top of Mount Sugarloaf in South Deerfield was open, I might be able to catch some truly spectacular scenes from that high vantage point.

The road was, in fact, open, but I didn't time my arrival all that well -- the most colorful clouds had already faded by the time I reached the top of the mountain. However, I did get a few shots looking out towards the west and southwest, and used PanoramaMaker5 to put them together in this image.

When I looked at it the first time after the program had done its thing and stitched all the shots together, I was disappointed, as it seemed there was a flaw about a third of the way from the left hand side, where the fence rail looks split and offset. Sometimes this happens when the photos being used to make a panorama aren't just right.

However, upon closer examination, I realized that it was not an artifact of the software -- that chain link fence rail was, in fact, separated at that point.

Hopefully, when I next ride up Mount Sugarloaf to take some sunset photos, I will time it better. But I still like this image. -- PL

More turkeys in the yard

2011-07-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged much lately -- I think it's mostly been from a bit of "blog fatigue". (Hopefully, that's not just a rationalization for laziness.)

I suppose part of it too may be due to the fact that it is summer, and we're finally having some stretches of good weather after all of the rain in the spring.

Anyway, at the risk of inducing "turkey fatigue" in the readers of this blog, I have to share at least one photo from yesterday. When I came home, I spotted our flock of turkeys nonchalantly strolling past the front of our house, and I managed to quickly roll down the window of my vehicle and get my camera out in time to capture some images. This was my favorite.

I kind of like the fact that this group of birds feels comfortable enough in our yard to make it part of their weekly perambulations. -- PL

Turkeys in the yard

2011-06-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

Not quite as dramatic as a moose, but still…

Yesterday, I was relaxing in the hammock on our back porch, reading a book, when Jeannine alerted me to the presence of some creatures crossing our lawn.

TURKEYS!!!

Unfortunately, I did not have my good camera handy, so I was only able to get a few shots with my pocket camera, and those were through the screened porch windows.

Nonetheless, you can still see that not only are there two adult birds, but either six or seven young ones with them. I'd never seen a "family flock" like this before.

They crossed the yard in silence and then were gone into the woods. -- PL

MOOSE!!!

2011-06-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I have been wanting to see a moose.

Not in a zoo, but in the wild… or what passes for "wild" in this area. I have heard other people's stories about seeing mooses -- Steve Lavigne says they are fairly regular visitors to his neighborhood in Maine. I've seen many a deer, but never a moose.

One of Emily's favorite children's books when she was young was Jan Brett's "Annie and the Wild Animals", and in it a girl makes corn muffins and feeds them to various animals, including a moose. Em was, for some reason, really into the moose thing, and I think it may have influenced me. I recall that when we would drive around in the more rural areas out here, we would look at every pond and marsh and swamp to see it there might be one of these majestic creatures lurking within.

Well, a couple of days ago Jeannine and I decided to take a day trip up to Williamstown to see the Camille Pissarro show at the Clark Art Museum, and also do a bicycle ride on the Ashuwillticook Rail Trail which stretches from Adams to Pittsfield. We weren't sure which to do first, so, to give us more time to ponder the options as well as optimally situate ourselves so we could go either way at the last minute, I decided to take Route 116 up to Adams instead of going the usual way to Williamstown, which would be to head up to the Mohawk Trail and go through North Adams.

And I'm REALLY glad I did.

Because as we were driving through Plainfield, past a small swamp which extended on both sides of the road, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye on the north side. Could it be…?

I slowed down, looked back, and sure enough -- it was a moose!

As quickly as I could, trying not to lock up my brakes and noisily SCREECH to a moose-frightening stop, I did a three point turn in the middle of the road, and eased the car onto the verge of the road as close to the moose as I dared, about thirty feet away. I fumbled with my camera, trying to get it out before the beast got spooked and left. Fortunately, not much fumbling was required, and rolling down my window, I got several decent shots.

The moose did not appear to be overly nervous about us being there… it just kept dipping its large head into the water of the swamp and pulling up various dripping water plants, which it casually munched on.

It wasn't until another driver also stopped to peer at the moose that it apparently decided it was time to seek another place to eat, and ambled off into the woods, doing that amazing thing that large wild beasts can often do -- within a few seconds it was lost to sight in the dappled shade of the trees.

As Jeannine put it later, "That's one more thing you can cross off on your "bucket list"!" -- PL