TWO MOVIES AND A PLAY

August Rush: This is the best movie I've seen in ages. August Rush has it all, and it's a movie for everyone. It's about this boy who hears the music. That's all I'll tell. Just see it and you won't be sorry. It's all there...good story, watchable actors and performances, music, all the emotions down and up. I give it my highest recommendation.

Atonement: With a title like "Atonement", this movie could have been about almost anything. It won some awards at the Oscars a few years ago, so I was excited to finally fire up the DVR and watch the show. All I knew going in was the blurb I read just before it started. Something along the lines of "a 13 year old accuses her sister's lover of a crime". OK, so that doesn't sound too promising, but in light of the awards, etc, I gave it a chance and watched the whole thing. It's very average, not the best story and I never came to care about the characters, although the accused lover seemed to be a great guy.
Save your time and watch August Rush instead!

Grey Gardens: I'd seen the documentary, and was fascinated in a voyeuristic way by the two Edies. Which I guess is how everyone is fascinated if they like and want to get this story. What could it possibly be like as a musical performed on the stage? If you like the story, then it could be great! The musical is in two acts, and act l takes us back to the hey days of Grey Gardens, and provides the background for what we eventually see in the documentary and Act II. Most of the audience was not familiar with this obscure bit of popular culture, but it didn't seem to matter. I think everyone enjoyed it.
Marvelous. I thought I'd type in Grey, just to honor Grey Gardens.

READING ALWAYS READING

Evidence of Things Unseen - By Marianne Wiggins. A love story about Fos and Opal, a couple who lived in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Books set in the 1920s have always been my favorite, and this one does not disappoint. Fos and Opal would be the ages of my grandparents, but they were born in this country, so it's not an immigrant story, but a story about a period in histsory in North Carolina and Kentucky. Like Shadowcatcher, the craft and art of photography is woven loosely and tightly through the story. In Shadowcatcher, we see the pictures, and although I would love to see even one picture of the characters in this book, they come so alive that they'll be locked in my imagination for a very long time. This was so good, that the other night I was up until almost 3 AM unable to stop reading, until I was finally so tired and so near the end of the book, that I finally had to sleep. When I awoke, all I could think about was the story until I came home from dropping off at school and finished it. So now it's done, and there is the inevitable letdown that comes after reading such an intense and amazing book. Day one after the book was very creative. Today is day two; I started another book this morning, by a familiar
author, so reading should be OK as soon as I get into it, but I know that my heart will be in Evidence of Things Unseen for awhile.

GETTING IT ALL DONE

So I've been sewing! I took a class in pattern drafting, which is where you learn how to make your own pattern fit to your body's measurements...this is the basis for making custom clothing. My grandmother knew how to do this, and made beautiful clothes, although by the time I was ready to learn her skills, she had lost most of her vision, and was no longer able to sew. She would crochet afghans using thick yarn and large crochet hooks. She created for as long as she was able.
The class proceeded very very slowly for someone who already knew how to sew. (me). In that class, by the time I had a complete muslin skirt pattern, it would have cost more than $1000!. Yes, I said $1000. I had taken the class with a friend, and she and I decided to teach our selves the rest of what we needed to know in order to draft our custom patterns. I'm pleased to say that after just a few more weeks of getting together and measuring, cutting, fitting and sewing, today we will each have a gorgeous skirt that fits like a dream!

Here's a little pop of color. These flowers were centerpieces at a lovely and fun wedding we recently attended. Don't they make you smile?
The Crowd Sounds Happy A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball by Nicholas Dawidoff - This is the memior of Nick, who grew up in the 1970s in New Haven, Connecticut. It's a great title, and the book honors that title with his story of life as the child of a single mom and somewhat functional mentally ill father. His love of baseball saw him through.

FORGOT A BOOK - OH NO!

I've forgotten many books, I'm sure!
Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen by Ira B. Nadel - The final installment of my Leonard Cohen reading, I read and finished it last August, but forgot to mention it here. This is all you ever wanted to know about Leonard's life and times. At times maybe MORE than you wanted to know, but mostly complete, and possibly accurate. Because how can someone really really write about someone else. All you have is the outside of the subject. The inside would have to come from an autobiography or memior. I liked the parts about Leonard's life on Hydra.

MORE BOOKS -

The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide - Margaret Ajemian Anhert wrote this book to honor her mother and record her story. Every one of these stories is remarkable, and as long as writers keep writing them, I will keep reading them. In 1915, the first Genocide of the 20th centure took place in what is now Turkey. The turks accomplished this under the confusion of the first world war which was occupying the attention of the world powers. "Turkey for the Turks" was the political expression of the day, and under this umbrella, Armenian and some Greek Christians from the inland of the contry were told to leave their homes. They had already
lost the men between the ages of 16 and 60 - they were arrested under false pretenses and then taken outside the villages, made to dig their own graves, and shot to death. So the death marches consisted of women, children and the elderly.
Margaret's mother Ester spent a lifetime telling her daughter these stories, weaving a tale of a childhood interrupted. The stories of life in the village before the Genocide are my favorites, because they tell me what my own grandmother's life might have been like in her village. In my grandmother's case, the catastrophe of 1922 was when the turks came to the coastal areas of Turkey to eradicate the Christian population and literally pushed them into the sea. Today in Smyrna (Izmir) there is a statue of Attaturk on a horse pointing to the sea showing that he wanted all the Christians gone.
To this day, Armenian and Greek Asia-Minor descendants are actively keeping this history alive, and continuning to put pressure on the Turkish government to acknowledge their actions in 1915 and 1922. So far, the Turks say nothing happened.

The Sixteen Pleasures - by Robert Hellenga. A book about a book is usually a good story, and this is no exception. It takes place in the mid 1960s, told in the first person by a young woman who goes to Florence, Italy to help recover and restore books that were damaged by a major flood. The Sixteen Pleasures is the name of a book within a book that she finds in a convent, and may be the only copy in existance. It's a good little read.


I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Essays by Sloane Crosley. The best thing about this book is the title. Unfortunately, I really wanted to read the essay with that title, but there isn't one! The essays are about funny situations in the life of 20-somethings. Honest and clever, these stories are a little too long, but leave me wanting more. Cake, probably. Sloane, when you're up for reprint, put a slice of chocolate cake on the cover.