On trying to maintain a language...

I am taking Italian at school. Unlike my Spanish-speaking compatriots, I cannot go to a nearby city and chat in Italian with the locals. This presents a challenge for a summer in which all mental stimulation is self-administered, and a summer away from normal modes of studying a language. Sure, I have my textbook, but that gets old fairly quickly, despite the awesome illustrations inside. So, instead, I read:


With the help of my trusty dictionary, I can manage to decipher a decent portion of these books. The one on top is I Segreti di New York, a book devoted to various stories of New York. I just started it, but it's very interesting to see how an Italian would view New York, a place I've always considered a second home. The Statue of Liberty, for instance, is more remote to them than the Eiffel Tower. A strange reversal to be sure. The second book, a mystery by Andrea Camillieri, is called La Scomparsa di Patò. In italian, mysteries are known as "i gialli," because the original publisher used yellow bookbindings for them. I always thought this was pretty cool. La Scomparsa is much slower going, for me. I'm convinced this is because this book has a slight Sicilian dialect going on in it, but I could be wrong; it could just be that I'm not at a level where literature is really accessible to me.

In addition to reading, I also spend my waking hours glued to RAI, the Italian television network. Italian TV is fascinating; not like Telemundo in its portrayal of characters (especially women), and it spends a fair amount of its time focused on news/politics and also cultural things. I caught an action show the other day, and I was tickled to see how many action movie stereotypes they managed to fit in. In addition, the main inspector (who managed to remain immaculate throughout the film, despite escapades in air ducts) wore a Yale shirt, which was entirely random.

My one worry, however, is that on the other side of this summer I won't be able to speak very well. Hopefully my listening will still be good.

Speaking of windows...

The windowboxes in my bedroom contain a beautiful thing: a bird's nest. Purple finches, they are, and still fuzzy with their baby feathers. Five chicks, all serene and heavy lidded, and extremely cute. Also, nigh impossible to take a picture of. Unfortunately, they also get up at obscene hours of the morning, so I can't open my windows anymore.

I wonder when they will fly away.

The Perils of Insanity

I finished off Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar this morning. An excellent book, beautifully written, and disturbingly easy to identify with at times. But then, as you read the book and become more involved in the plot, Esther's slip into insanity seems effortless, which is decisively unsettling at times. Her logic never loses its air of sureness, never loses its intrinsic logic. Which, all in all, made the book decisively depressing, especially after I found out Sylvia Plath had committed suicide to prevent her own "bell jar" from returning.

Next up: continued Nietzsche, and perhaps some Sun Tzu.

Haiku

Kafka writes quite well
I liked "Metamorphosis"
Poor Gregor Samsa.

Welcome to Friday's, the End of the Rainbow

Unlikely Combinations

Seen today:

A dead deer on the side of the road, right next to a boot.

An "Asian Fusion" restaurant offering pad thai, canton noodles, and black forest cake.

Putting these things together doesn't come easily to my mind.

Musings on Hollywood

So, this past week I was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to film a major motion picture with genuine Movie Stars (tm). This was a fascinating experience, but one of the more exhausting in my life.

The first day, I met the band at our holding area, which was a curious little building that must have held apartments at some point. Now it was basically condemned, with holes in the floors and dust everywhere. Fun features: a great old piano, and a sign over a bucket that said, "Please Use Butt Can." Sadly, I failed to get a picture of either. We got to know this building quite well as we went back and forth to the set. In addition, in our holding room itself, there was another fun feature: in the women's bathroom (a generic bathroom labeled as such) there was an old man's face in a mosaic on the floor. Creepy? Absolutely.

There isn't much else I can legally say about the picture itself, so instead I shall muse on Hollywood.

Filmmaking is wildly inefficient. While I understand that many scenes take many, many takes to get the way the director desires, the process one goes through while shooting these is, as many told me in the last few days, "hurry up and wait." We, as musicians, were expecting the music industry's version of events: show up, perform, go home, with no wait. Intense, but efficient. Meanwhile, for movies, it was more like show up, wait, rehearse, wait, perform, wait, try again, wait, wait, break for lunch, wait, perform, wait, wait, leave. To us, who had monopoly games waiting for us in the holding room, this was exasperating at the very least.

Filmmaking is also entirely unglamorous. If I didn't understand tabloids now, I understand them even less. Just because movie stars are prettier than the rest of us doesn't justify airing every mundane detail of their lives. But I digress. Where I might have expected a bit more kid-glove treatment of our glorious star, he actually was a bit more connected to the rest of the film than I expected-- he had no problem walking through us, and I hardly every saw his bodyguard. And I must say, there is nothing glamorous about standing in a street for hours on end.

And finally, I have decided that perhaps I might do this again, but for a greater fee than last time. When one breaks down my wages and the hours I worked....I made less than minimum wage an hour. Ah well.

But in any case, I'll be Coming Soon to theaters Near You!

Haiku

Gerard Butler speaks
cannot remember "come here"
movies are tiring.

Haiku

Precipitation
Rain falls nonstop many days
Where has the sun gone?

Bully Beautiful

Sunday I went to Sagamore Hill on Long Island, the home of the most bamf president of them all: Teddy Roosevelt. It was a beautiful day, great to take pictures of the scrubby hills around, with overgrown trees and such all around. The inside of the house was beautiful, packed to the gills with dead animals, mostly bagged by TR himself, though possibly also given to him by royalty of countries around the world. Only in Teddy Roosevelt's house will an elephant's foot be a wastebasket and a gigantic polar bear pelt be in the parlor. Additionally, his kids' rooms were tiny but amazingly quiet with the air of a room that hasn't really been disturbed or lived in. Interestingly enough, he had a lot of Japanese things, especially katana and other sharp objects, a result of him settling the conflict 'twixt the Russians and the Japanese. Sadly I could not take pictures of the interior, but the rest is well covered. I will say in general the house was not quite as big as I expected, but it was still plenty of room for the seven or so people living there at a time.

After we finished the tour, we went to the museum and walked a "nature" trail. By nature, apparently they mean "mosquito" trail, as we got eaten alive. Happily, at the end of the trail was a little stretch of shore, and it was quite pretty. Bully beautiful, indeed.

Kane is Able

This is a moving company in NJ. I chuckle every time I see it.

In other news, notebooks that are both 100% recycled and also have a "Spot the Sasquatch" game on the front a la Where's Waldo are extremely excellent.

And yes, I spotted the sasquatch.

It is Pretty to think about, isn't it?

I finished The Sun also Rises today, outside amidst shade, breeze, and goldfinches. Typical Hemingway style, making me want to go to Europe but feeling horrible at my life full of relative happiness. I don't have problems with bankruptcy and PTSD, after all. I enjoyed it, especially the section in Spain, and appreciated the descriptions.

I also went for a jog today, running around the block for 15 minutes; I would have gone longer, but I live on a hill. A big hill. And jogged to another hill. Which means I felt like I had emphysema 5 minutes into it. Shall I continue to jog this summer? Only my resolve can tell.

Ray Smith and I should be Friends

I finished The Dharma Bums today, sipping some tea and enjoying the quiet of my living room. It's an excellent book, and thought provoking too. The narrator, Ray Smith, is a bum who practices Buddhism in the '50s, and is a beat poet to boot. Classic Kerouac style, all flurries of words and sensations and little time to slow down. And yet this was much slower than On the Road, due to its more contemplative nature, and long expanses of solitude in the wilderness.

Reading this makes me want to hike mountains, or at least walk around outside more often. I realize how much I miss the greenery; New Haven was nice, but sometimes it's nice to have a forest in my backyard.

Dharma bums, what a curious turn of phrase. One whose calling is to be a bum and wander and live simply. I'd say I'd want to be that, but honestly I prefer the chaos and clutter of life over totally tuning it out.

I also started La Scomparsa di Patò today, which will be slow going and difficult, but, I hope, worth it.