Went to the Coupeville Memorial Day Parade today. First pic below is my uncle Jim. Also saw random animals and cute kids. Forgot it gets cold and rainy here, or at least didn't think about it after having a week or two of unseasonably steamy weather in Chicago.

On the Beach

Watching "On the Beach" (1959) with Anthony Perkins, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire and Ava Gardner. I came across it after reading the novel by Nevil Shute, which I'd heard about when reading of people other writers enjoyed.

It's a good book and a good movie. A sad reminder also that Anthony Perkins deserved far better than the "Psycho" typecast.

The premise: Nuclear war has wiped out the northern hemisphere. The only continent left unharmed is Australia, but the nuclear fallout is blowing south. It's just a matter of four or five months before the Australians die from radiation poisoning.

People are still leading their lives despite perfect knowledge they will die soon. Young couples with newborns, bibulous middle-aged fools, farmers continuing to tend land and animals. That's the backdrop. An American nuclear sub that made it to Australia after the war is sent up the American west coast to explore a random radio signal.

It might have resonated with me a little more than it should have due to the the oil nimbi roiling their way toward our southern coasts. It's rendered dispassionately in the book and fairly so in the movie, which was shot is a rough black and white. I can't imagine a movie about rational, comely, normal adults facing death fairing well in today's market. No explosions. No action. Just life ending.

Sunday

Went to Morton Arboretum this evening with Amy and the new camera. Very relaxing. Been a good weekend. Saw Iron Man 2, which wasn't a disaster, saw Joel McHale at the Chicago Theatre, read half a good novel.

Small and Xoco

Amy and I went downtown late this morning to see an exhibit at the Nicole Gallery on Huron and East Illinois. We had seen the artist Willard Wigan showcased on CBS Sunday Morning. He's an Englishman who makes sculpture so small you have to use microscopes to see his work. Far from being a silly novelty, the effect is fantastical. My two favorites were Charlie Chaplin balancing on the end of a human eyelash and the church.

Please stop to consider how the church was constructed. He pulverized a single grain of sand and rebuilt it as a replica of a church near Gloucester on a dare from his girlfriend. He then placed it in the eye of a needle. It's not just a shtick. We both were delighted with his works and with the gallery itself and its operator.

A cynic would probably ask why Wigan makes these tiny pieces that can't be seen with the naked eye. The same cynic would probably ask why Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the Twin Trade towers in 1974. I'm no esoteric artist, but it seems to me that if you have to ask...Anyway, I felt as if I were playfully taken to the edge of a mystery, playfully.

We then went down to Clark and ate at Rick Bayless' new fast food place, Xoco. Two sandwiches, three churros, some chips and guac, two Mexican cocoas later and $43 lighter, we could barely walk. No complaints. There was the expected hour wait to get in and and another 20 minutes to order and sit down, but Xoco's is a well run place, and I'd go back. Though I prefer Frontera Grill.

My life

consists of work, school, wife, dogs, home.

Kindle is still the greatest invention ever.

The wife and I go to Mexico at the end of March!!!

I have written about this before, I think. The steam punk thing leaves me cold, but I do love how they've worked (obsessively) to integrate computers into other fixtures. The transformation of this old music box into a laptop is just astounding to me. My own dream would be to turn a 1930s-1950s portable typewriter into a laptop.

Knut

So there is a whole world of free e-books out there by authors whose copywrites have expired. Most of it, I won't have much to do with, but I stumbled across Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer, the other other night. He wrote from the late 18th centuryh to the mid-19th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil.

I only know of the fellow from reading Henry Miller in my early 20s. I seemed to remember that he had an enormous, perhaps unmatched, respect for Hamsun as an artist. I filed this away but had no time or inclination to read many artists. This would have taken time and mental application, of which I had little of either. Now, though, I have a Kindle. Suddenly, almost as readily as breathing, I can download a classic novel. So yesterday I decided to find out what Miller and these Nobel guys found so interesting. I downloaded Growth of the Soil from the free e-book site, moved it into a folder on my Kindle, and I was off. I assumed I'd read a bit of the dry book, realize there was no way I'd read an entire epic Scandanavian novel, and put it down never to finish. That was around 8 p.m. I went to bed last night at about 4 a.m. having read about a third of it. What tremendous stuff this is. (And I hate, absolutely loathe books about homesteading. I find them boring to the point of deadness.) I don't want to reveal much of it, but we follow a rough man as he builds a farm from the point of breaking virgin ground in the Norwegian Highlands. He takes a wife, has children. His farm slowly bears fruit. He suffers reversals quietly, life continues.

There is not so much a plot as there is an impressionistic tableau unreeling before us like the paper music of a player piano. The book makes me highly uncomfortable because I keep wanting to turn away as Isac patiently endures life. Death of children, encroachment of others, infidelity, being taken advantage of by people who know more than him. But so far, he keeps progressing without complaint. Breaking and tilling his land, moving with the seasons, never showing greed or sloth, enduring foibles of others without hate.

It's this last that makes me so uncomfortable while reading. How Isac is so able to suffer others without lashing out is beyond me. I find myself mentally dancing on the sidelines wishing I could step in as his agent to help him avoid the wrong people who would take advantage of his hard work. I am at once tempted to turn away and to skip ahead to see what happened. I'm no longer as enamoured of Henry Miller, and I think I would now find his fictional self irritating and shallow. Fun but basically a no account. Maybe I will enjoy him again later. I don't know.