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.

Kindle

My dear wife gave me a Kindle 2 for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and it's stone cold awesome. I had assumed that I wouldn't want one of these readers, that it would be just reading a computer screen, which I do most of the day. But this thing is great. It has 19 shades of gray in the screen and uses some kind of "ink font" that comes across more like charcoal on paper than computer font. And I can take and save notes right in the book.

Further, I downloaded the Kindle application for my iPhone, and can now read a book for a while on my iPhone, close it and then open it again on the Kindle itself , where it "whispersyncs" to the page I'd left off. My only complaint is the "experimental section." It supposedly plays music, but it only plays MP3s, not MP4s. I don't want to bother trying to figure out how to convert music just to put it on another device. Better to just listen to an iPod while reading.

The danger of course is that books, just about any new book, are not only a severely reduced prices, but they download in roughly 60 seconds or less.

So far I've picked up seven books. Most recently, I bought Paul Auster's "Invisible." Deceptively elegant book. The only other thing I've read by Auster is New York Trilogy. I finished "Invisible" on the train downtown this morning. Tremendous book.

Blacksad

What's not to love here? He's a 1950s private eye in a harsh, commie witch hunt world. He's a World War II Vet. And he's a cat. Blacksad is a Spanish graphic novel series that is first written in French, then Spanish and then translated into other languages , one of them English. I've never heard of it before, but I saw that Dark Horse is publishing one of their books. I will have to check this out.

Bite the Bullet

I had recorded several Gene Hackman movies on DVR a few weeks ago and never bothered to watch them. Last night I finally played Bite the Bullet with Hackman, Candace Bergen and James Coburn. Ninety-five percent of this movie was exciting and genuinely moving. Great for the new flatscreen. It's about a 700-mile horse race sponsored by the press around the turn of the last century in the southwest.

Above all, it's a good story about some very likable people, but they do make quiet allusions to aspects of the year it came out (1970). Hackman's character is gently chided for being "un-American" for not really caring who wins. It's mentioned about half way through that Hackman and Coburn are both former Rough Riders, and neither seem particularly impressed by Roosevelt's bombastic call through the papers for them to remember San Juan Hill.

This has to be one of the first and best movies that both addresses and depicts how cruel people can be to dumb animals. Some of the scenes of overworking horses will wreck you if you're not prepared for them.

It goes briefly zany near the end with Candace Bergen's subplot (her hair and the scenes with her boyfriend break the era in that Bo Derek/Tarzn kind of way). The movie would have been better without it but is too good to be derailed.

What struck me though was that this forgotten movie (forgotten only in the sense I'd never heard of it) might speak better to our times right now than it did then. I had caught myself thinking how odd it was that Hollywood continued making all of these great movies, and people kept flocking to them, while Vietnam raged and our people were dying in a losing war. And just this morning I read that we lost eight soldiers in a surprise attack by militia in Afghanistan.

Beyond Vietnam, what resonated even more for me was that the race is sponsored by a newspaper, which meets with the contestants every night and telegraphs the events to the rest of the avidly watching world. I don't know how that part of this movie might have resonated in 1970, but it seems only more pertinent now with our country's sad addiction to reality television--the chance for anyone, no matter their quality, to feel fame.