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Quote of the Day: Today was pretty much a disaster. - Brian Rose after two mental errors that cost him 4 runs |
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July 3, 1999 |
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weekend |
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July 3, 1999 70 mallards
Today's Starting Pitcher: Brian Rose Today's Reading: The Feather Quest by Pete Dunne
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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There were little piles of sand on my pillow this morning. I assume it came from my ears. I'm supposed to be selling catnip fishies at the MRFRS booth at the Plum Island craft fair today and walking with Priscilla and going to the movies with Nancy and who knows what all else today. Considering that I have no life, that seems like a lot of schedule conflicts :-) Since I'd already told Priscilla I wasn't going to walk, and it's too darn hot anyway, and I realized I hadn't signed up for catnip fishy shifts for today, the movie won out. Buena Vista Social Club, which we'd tried to see in Harvard Square last weekend, is playing at the Avon in Providence. To pick up Nancy in time to be a half hour early for a 3:30 show I had to leave at 1:00, which is a challenge if the air conditioner has kept one awake all night and one is not a morning person anyway. But I managed to do some number of Saturday chores and have breakfast and coffee while still getting out the door by 1:00. I listened to the Red Sox game on the radio on the way. They got behind quickly in the first inning when the pitcher failed to cover first, costing them 3 runs. And it got worse after that, with the poor pitcher forgetting there were already two out and thinking the play was at the plate instead of at first. The Red Sox were down 6 to nothing pretty quickly. When I got there, Nancy asked how the game was going and all I could say was: "I had to shut it off, Brian Rose is decompensating!" After discussing possible psychotherapeutic interventions for Brian Rose's pitching, we zipped over the Avon and marveled that there was no huge line like at Harvard Square. The ticket guy pointed out that it was the 4th of July weekend and very hot so probably everybody was at the beach. We bought our tickets and went over to College Hill Bookstore to browse until closer to the movie time. We had no trouble getting good seats from which Nancy could see the subtitles. Nancy's really into Cuban music so Buena Vista Social Club was a chance for her to see on film all these old geezers whose CDs she has. I got into the visuals. The camera just loved the streets of Havana and all the old cars that are still on the road since before the revolution. My favorite scene was the trumpet player practicing in a huge room with fading blue paint. It was just so blue, so visually evocative. I think this is the first Wim Wenders film I've seen, so I don't know how to compare it but I was impressed with some of the transitional shots - like a vase with one yellow flower against a bright orange tablecloth as they entered Ibrahim Ferrer's house, or some of the traveling down darkening streets shots. Any of them would have made good still photos. The only thing we both found sort of unsettling about the movie was its emphasis on Ry Cooder. It makes him out to be the sole force that brought these old guys back onto the world stage, which isn't exactly how it went. But that's forgivable. It did kind of almost make Cuba seem like a theme park instead of a real country, but then again in one of the scenes where the old dudes do a concert in Carnegie Hall it makes New York seem like a theme park too. When one guy is repeating over and over "Lovely, lovely" as he walks through the streets of Manhattan all I could think of was Disneyworld. But maybe that's just my innate Bostonian prejudice against New York. After the movie we went to the Brown Bookstore. Really, I wasn't going to buy any books. I just wanted to use the restroom there. But I had to browse and browsing led to buying. I picked up The Feather Quest (which has apparently just been reissued in paperback) off the shelf and started leafing through it. I liked Pete Dunne's description of the Merrimack River so much I kept reading almost the whole Newburyport chapter in the store. So I had to buy it. I read the entire Newburyport chapter to Nancy while we waited for our salads at Cafe Paragon, and then some of the Florida and New Jersey stuff to her over ice cream at Maximillian's and at her place after dinner. Basically, The Feather Quest is a birding travelogue. Dunne, inspired by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher's journey described in Wild America, hits the road for a year long quest to see as many species as possible in all of North America's hot spots. His style is breezy and humorous as well as exciting. He carefully avoids naming the bird in his sights until he's got the reader all worked up about it, just like it would be if you were spotting it yourself. He does that whole tension and releasing thing really well. |
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