"To write is in some way to cut the seemingly
Okay, I know I'm a couple days late on this one, but best wishes to my brother-in-law Dan on passing another year (I don't actually know which birthday it was, but does that even matter?). I hope the kids threw you a big party, and I wish I could've been there to help you celebrate. I was hoping to post a little video of Dan juggling fire, but I couldn't find the clip (darn it)-- maybe next year. Happy birthday Dan!
I love Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead-- where else on the funnies page (or anywhere else in the newspaper for that matter) are you likely to encounter philosophical insight battling it out with the visceral gluttony promoted by pop culture? The answer, of course, is no where.
"The nation that makes a great distinction
I probably shouldn't mention this, for fear of jinxing them (I'm not superstitious about anything but baseball), but my team, the Atlanta Braves, is on a little bit of a roll. Over the weekend they took three out of four games from the Dodgers, who have the best record in the National League. The Braves might be a bit too far back to catch the Phillies in their division, but the wild card is now tantalizingly close, though they still trail four other teams for that playoff slot. After a lackluster first half of the season, the team seems to be playing with some confidence and seem poised to make a big push. Even if they fall short this year, the recent improvement, along with the likely arrival of phenom Jason Heyward next year, makes them look like they could be contenders for the next several years. Here's an interesting point to ponder: even though the Braves enjoyed unprecedented success through the nineties and even the first half of the 2000s, why does a longtime fan like me tend to remember the wilderness years before that? It's certainly gratifying to see them on an upswing, rather than plummeting to the depths they suffered in the late seventies and late eighties after brief periods of contention. It feels good to look forward with some optimism, even if in the grand scheme of things I know its pretty inconsequential.
"Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at
When I was a kid, George McManus' Bringing Up Father occupied the upper half of the first page of the Sunday funnies in the Buffalo Courier-Express; so I would flip the section over to the back, to save the best for last. McManus was a master of the form, with beautifully composed and designed panels and almost always a funny gag to put across.
The main characters, Jiggs and Maggie were nouveau rich, which didn't affect Jiggs in the least-- he still wanted only to hang out with his working class immigrant buddies down at Dinty's. But Maggie was a social climber, and she was determined to elevate her oafish husband to respectibility. Their clashes were interspersed with stories documenting their travels, and the romances involving their glamorous daughter.
One couldn't help but pull for the amiable Jiggs, and in the end, he generally got his corned beef and cabbage, even if it led to a later encounter with Maggie's rolling pin.
Like a lot of strips that originated in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, Bringing Up Father was steeped in the urban immigrant experience, and it's to McManus' credit (and those who later inherited the strip), that they never lost touch with that central element.
They just don't make them like this anymore!
Driving up to Butte yesterday, I enjoyed the stunning vistas of the Big Sky country, as seen in the above photo. Those are the Pioneer Mountains embraced by the swirling clouds. I'm looking forward to getting out soon to see what kind of sunsets I can capture, and may try to shoot the night sky (now that I've honed my night time photo skills at least a little bit).
I think I previously noted that I first started ordering soup regularly in restaurants because it was always brought out quickly, and when you're hungry, that's a big factor. Yesterday I was in Butte and really hungry when I went with friends to the Five Signs diner. This is not the kind of
"We shall not cease from exploration
"Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by 
Don't let the black and white fool you-- this picture of Emma was taken this summer. The question is, where was it taken? Put your answers into the comments section.
Back in the early years of the twentieth century, baseball was already established as the national pastime. But the opportunities to see (or hear) a game was limited to actually going to the stadium since there was no radio or TV coverage yet. One way that out-of-town fans were kept abreast of the action (especially at World Series time) was to have results of play telegraphed to local clients (usually newspapers), who then posted summaries for those who'd gathered to follow the action. In the photo above, you see a crowd "watching" the 1911 World Series outside (I believe) the Chicago Tribune offices. 
Here are a few photos of our semi-annual kickball game, first from the pitcher's vantage (above)... 
... and then from the kicker's perspective.
Natalie is ready to crush this fat pitch...
... she realized Emma was directly in the line of fire.
After the game, we all enjoyed an ice cream cone-- apparently Helen enjoyed hers both as a treat and as make-up!
Here are a few shots from my last day in Buffalo. Sally, Natalie, Ben, Nik, Helen, Emma and I went to the Charles Burchfield Park in West Seneca not to be confused with the Burchfield-Penney Art Center we went to the previous week).
Here are Natalie and Emma taking a little rest before continuing on our hike.
Ben waded across Buffalo Creek and headed upstream (though I don't really know why).
Here's Nicky catching some rays on a beautiful day.
And last, a shot of Natalie pondering her options on the jungle gym (either that or wondering where everyone else went.
"Man is condemned to be free;
Marc Webb's new film (500) Days of Summer is largely a pastiche of a lot of other films. You can find in it various allusions, quotes, swipes, homages (whatever you want to call them) to numerous other films, including very overt references to Mike Nichols' The Graduate and George Lucas' Star Wars. But I also counted nods to Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, Zach Braff's Garden State, George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, works by Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, even Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Mike Judge's Office Space and Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy. I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. All of those films are better (well, Office Space is debatable) than this one, but I don't mean to imply this is a mere rip-off or a bad film; on the contrary, I was totally entertained from beginning to end, partly because of these connections and largely because of the appealing leads, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The point of the movie is, in essence, that we create for ourselves false impressions of the nature of love as a result of our immersion in popular culture (movies, TV, pop music, even greeting cards, all play a role), which defines an incredibly complex set of emotions in simplistic and deterministic ways. If you buy such illusions (and who doesn't, at least to a degree?), Webb suggests we really are only setting ourselves up for disappointment, not "true love." In the service of that message, the structure and all the quotes make a lot of sense as they define the core problem in terms that prove the point. The concern I have is that this is not so much by design but instead a reflection of Webb's tendency to view the world through a Hollywood filter, in which case his next film may not be so charming. I truly hope the level of imagination that went into constructing this movie emerges via different terms of expression in his future work-- which I'll be looking forward to with some optimism based on what he pulled off with this feature.
There's a chain of Mexican restaurants on the West Coast (maybe elsewhere too, though I've only ever seen them in Washington and California) called Baja Fresh that is worth visiting just for their Chicken Tortilla Soup-- a total delight (even if you order it without the chicken). Because of my experience with their triumph, I often order Chicken Tortilla Soup elsewhere, thinking it might come close to the masters. Unfortunately, I'm usually disappointed (an exception was at Taste of Buffalo a couple years ago, but I forgot the name of the serving venue, so don't know where to go and look for the good stuff in my hometown). Anyway, as it happened, I was at Anderon's Custard stand my last night in Buffalo, and because I'd had a large pistachio ice cream cone at Mississippi Mudd's earlier that day, I decided to try a cup of their soup of the day instead of a frosty treat. Big mistake. It was called Chicken Tortilla Soup, but it's relationship to what they serve at Baja Fresh was at best a cousin several times removed. It was way too salty and there were no succulent chunks of onion, no tangy cilantro, and... no tortillas! I know that no one goes to Anderson's for soup (beef on weck is their non-dairy specialty), but sheesh, if you're going to put it on the menu, put a little effort into it.
As my vacation was winding down, I found myself racing to finish several books I'd borrowed from the library, and the one I completed was Mickey McDermott's memoir A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown. Certainly not as weighty (nor was it intended to be) as some of my other summer reading, I was looking for a little insight into the national game as played in the fifties and sixties, and that's pretty much what I got. It seems though that McDermott's career as a carouser was more important to him than his career as a hot-shot pitcher, and so his early promise (memorialized by a rookie picture-- that McDermott hated-- that appeared in Life magazine around 1946) went largely unrealized (hence the ironic title of his book). In some ways, this is an entertaining corrective to the usual iconography of that golden age of baseball (you know, before unions and free agents and the designated hitter led it all to go to pot; which, by the way, I don't believe at all). But of course, the so-called recent ills of the game were really nothing new, nor were the off-the-field shenanigans of the players. McDermott's account is mostly breezy, even when he acknowledges how he wasted his gifts, and there are colorful anecdotes about teammates famous (like Ted Williams) and not-so-famous (most of the others). The stories of his brief stint in Cuba around the time of the revolution was particularly interesting to me, especially given the recent series in the Crankshaft comic strip on the same topic. So all-in-all, a good end of the summer read, but probably only if you are a baseball fan.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a fairly compelling, suspenseful film following the exploits of a team of IED defusers in Iraq, most of whom would rather be anywhere else, and one of whom seems to get off on the danger. All of this is pretty clear within the first half hour or so, so the suspense has little to do with what we might learn about the characters and pretty much everything to do with wondering who, if any of them will not survive. It's extremely well-made, and totally apolitical (at least as far as I can see)-- it's not even particularly clear whether Bigelow sympathises more with the danger junkie or his more tormented comrades. Maybe that's central to her point, namely that the circumstances these individuals find themselves in are worlds away from the particular issues that put them in that spot to begin with. Our sympathy for them is largely a function of proximity, but it's not entirely exclusive to these soldiers, with at least some effort to expand it to the Iraqis themselves, who as often as not are mere spectators to the actions of the protagonists (though obviously, some of them are something more). One also can't help but recognize that the consequences of the terrorist methods fall most harshly and largely indiscriminately on the natives themselves. I suppose that hints at a statement somewhat more sophisticated than what is revealed strictly through the plot, but I'm also not sure that I'm not projecting my own views onto what I saw (probably inevitable anyway). I'm not sure the film quite lives up to the raves some critics have given it, but in comparison a lot of other summer movies I've seen, it definitely deserves praise. I just wish it had engaged me a bit more on the emotional level.
You might've noticed no postings here yesterday. That was because I was trying to cram as much as possible into my last couple of days in Western New York. A good chunk of my time was spent at the Buffalo Zoo with Sally, Natalie, Ben, Nik, Helen, Emma, plus a cast of dozens of animals (not to mention the other zoo-goers). It was a really nice day, if a bit hot, but here are some pictures:
Above is a peacock enamored of his (her?) own reflection in the window. Unfortunately, he didn't get so excited that he strutted his stuff, so no big feather show for us.
The big new exhibit at the zoo is a simulated rainforest. I don't remember what kind of bird that is above, but apparently it's native habitat is the rainforest. 
Emma was particularly taken with a really big dispaly of rabbits. This little guy stood still long enough for me to get a shot.
After leaving the reptile house, Natalie and Ben pressed their case with their mom fo a new pet snake. She was not convinced. I'm not sure where Helen stood on the issue.
A Tale of Two Split Peas: My last trip to Fables provided me one last opportunity to try something new, so I jumped at the chance. The Curry Split Pea was an interesting twist on a familiar standard, much spicier (which you would expect, after all, it is curry), and with crunchy yellow peas. It actually tasted a bit like African Peanut Soup, though that is a bit creamier and not quite so spicy. I wouldn't say it was a great bowl of soup, but definitely an appropriately exotic ending to my summer of soups... or so I thought. 
As it turned out, I had another, last minute chance to try some soup, and because it was on my mind I opted for the more traditional Split Pea Soup. This was at Athena's Diner, a nice Greek place near my Mom's house. I have to say, that despite my summer-long effort to try a wider variety of new soups, this one comes close to topping the list (still can't quite beat out the Sweet Potato Pablano or Creamy Black Bean). It was rich, smokey in flavor, and lush with peas and onions and ham. A first-rate bowl of soup-- and in the end much more satisfying than the curry variation. 
"All difficult things have their origin in that 
Here are three more photos that I wanted to share. The first, above, is I guess technically a dusk and not night photo, but I was pleased with how it turned out. The sun is setting behind a tree over the Niagara River, and I liked the silhouette effect on the guy strolling along the bike path there.
Above is another from Goat Island. If you look closely, you can see the phantom feet of a couple of folks who rushed by when they saw I had the camera trained on the benches. I'm going to have to play around to see if I can replicate that effect on purpose.
Here's one of Sally (who joined me along with Tom and Ben last night at the Falls). She has a nicer camera than mine, so I'm looking forward to seeing her shots the next time we get together. That green-hued swoosh behind and to her left is the Bridal Veil Falls*, the smallest of the three falls that collectively make up the Niagara Falls.
A crowd at the rail overlooking the Horseshoe Falls, bathed in the lights cast from the Canadian side to illuminate the Falls.
Here is a view from the hill above the crowd, with the shimmering Falls sparkling blue in the light (and the Niagara Falls Ontario skyline sparkling beyond that).
And one of the glowing tower, seen through the trees on Goat Island (which sits between the American and Canadian Falls).
"A man who is good for anything ought not to 
"The methods of art are variegated, flexible, abstruse,
