I’ve read that blogs should include a photograph of the blogger. This is a picture of my wife and me taken at our old house a few years ago.

This is for I and the Bird…

Birds have always been a source of endless fascination for me. I had parakeets when I was in high school and spent hours photographing them and watching them fly in circles around my bedroom.

For awhile my dad was breeding canaries and finches and so no matter where I went in the house, there were birds. I suppose my love of watching birds was inherited from him.

Every place I’ve lived I set up a bird feeder and have spent hours happily watching the birds come to the feeder and doing what they do. We had a purple martin house at our old home, and I used to love sitting on the porch watching the flying lessons every spring. I always felt a little sad each July when they left.

So what’s so interesting about birds? I think it’s the wildness. There’s something about seeing wild animals that makes me just stop and stare, that reminds me that as far away from nature as I sometimes feel, it’s still there. Birds - beautiful, funny, graceful - are the wild animals that most of us see most frequently and so watching birds is something of a way to reconnect with nature without leaving our cities or even, for that matter, our homes.

Whenever I see birds while I have my camera on me as I did on our recent trip to Lake Tahoe, I always try to photograph them simply because they’re so hard to shoot. A good bird picture is an accomplishment. I don’t know how good these are, but I’m happy to have shared a space with these birds for a few moments as our separate journeys brought us all together for a few fleeting moments.

A seagull flying over Lake Tahoe (taken in Tahoe City, CA):

Canadian Geese at the Tahoe City Commons:

A Stellar’s Jay at Sugar Pine Point State Park on Lake Tahoe in California:

Birds are transitory creatures. They’re here for a while and then they move on. Whenever I see a bird, I wonder where it’s been, what it’s seen.

I get jealous.

A couple of years ago I brought my then-new electric guitar with me when we went to visit my wife’s family in the swamps of southeast Texas. It was early in my relationship with Stella (that’s the guitar) and so I couldn’t bear to part with her for a few days.

One day I was sitting on the hardwood floors of my wife’s grandmother’s house, playing without an amp and stumbling through some blues progressions. The house is a dark and cool southern home full of antiques and memories that go back almost a century and really not a bad place to be.

Sitting next to me was a young kid - my wife’s cousin’s son - who was about four or five. He was listening, and watching my fingers work the strings, bobbing his head up and down, and basically doing his young kid’s version of grooving. Finally, he said, “That’s a very pretty violin.”

I smiled. “It’s actually a guitar.”

He nodded and said, “I know. I just don’t know how to say that yet.”

Smart kid. I did help him figure it out, though.

Note: In our effort to read new books while hopefully gaining insight into the various mysteries on ABC’s Lost, my wife and I are reading the books that appear on the show. We are, of course proceeding on the assumption that the books referenced and shown are included because of the way they interact with the show’s themes and not just because any given book was what the propmaster had on the truck when an actor needed something to do with his hands.

Walker Percy’s Lancelot is no knight in shining armor. He is a southern liberal lawyer, but a better drunk, and a member of New Orleans’ faded aristocracy. In 1976 he discovers his wife’s infidelity and sets out to launch a sort of new revolution in which chivalry will return to replace the amoral and permissive culture that surrounds him. He seeks a holy grail, but this Lancelot’s grail is evil itself. He wants to know that evil truly exists. His curiosity sends him on a grisly quest for revenge.

Lancelot’s story is told in the first person as he relates his inward journey towards violence and revenge to a friend and former classmate, who is either a priest or a psychologist, or perhaps both. The friend is visiting Lancelot in a mental hospital were he has been for the past year. Lancelot describes the events surrounding his discovery of his wife’s affair, but he also recounts the older, more romantic years of their early relationship. All of this is threaded through with his musings on the state of moral decay in the United States.

It’s an interesting journey into the mind of a man whose sanity is questionable at best, whose calm manner makes him all the more frightening. At times humorous, at times unsettling, always interesting, Lancelot explores the cultural fabric of late twentieth century America from the viewpoint of a dark knight. It also has the best last two lines of any book I’ve read in a long time. I won’t give it away; just read it yourself.

In terms of ABC’s Lost, Lancelot fits in with several of the other books we’ve read in terms of presenting the reader with a very unrealiable narrator (h/t to Jessica for getting me thinking about unreliable narration, a characteristic of many of the Lost books we’ve read so far). He’s in a mental institution and though he speaks rationally, his talk of starting a new world, and a third revolution is rather delusional at best.

Lancelot appears in the episode “Maternity Leave.” Sawyer is reading the book when Kate comes to ask him for a gun. She is about to go one her own quest along with Claire to try to discover what happened to Claire when she was kidnapped by the Others while pregnant so that the Others could take her baby.

The most general connection between Lancelot and Lost I found was Lancelot’s idea of starting some kind of new world order in which he will be something of an Adam in search of his Eve. Now, we don’t yet know much about the Hanso Foundation on Lost, but I do wonder if their research is aimed at something similar. Is this why the Others want to take the children from the survivors as well as collecting the survivors whom they claim are “the good ones?” Of course, I’m assuming that the Hanso Foundation and the Others are the same or at least related.

The other connection lies in Lancelot’s incarceration in a mental hospital. Lost’s Hurley, as we see in flashback a few episodes later in “Dave,” spent time in a mental hospital, though at this point we don’t know why. One thing we do know, though, is that he had an imaginary friend, someone that the viewers of Lost did not realize was imaginary until the end of the episode. My wife questions whether or not Lancelot’s friend to whom he relates the story is really there. I wonder about that as well.

Monday? Tuesday? What’s the difference, really?

U Turn (Oliver Stone, 1997)

I’ve never been a huge fan of Oliver Stone. Watching his film is too much like getting beaten over the head with a blunt object. The exception being The Doors, though that film did open the door to an era of Stone(d) filmmaking in which the style became the message as seen in such movies as the tedious Natural Born Killers (memorable only for the use of the Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Sweet Jane”) and U Turn, which I only just saw. Now all things considered, U Turn wasn’t bad. It just felt like a stylistic exercise rather than a movie.

The story concerns a guy (Sean Penn) who owes a bunch of money to a dangerous man. He’s bringing the cash when his car breaks down in a small desert town where everyone wants to take him for a ride including a young woman (Jennifer Lopez). The woman’s husband (Nick Nolte) wants her dead, she wants him dead, Penn loses his money but can get it back by doing a bit of murder, but who to kill and for whom. Botched crime ensues.

It’s a good story, vaguely reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, but in execution becomes more a vehicle for Stone’s stylistic obsessions of the late ’90s: grainy spaghetti western shots interspersed with more standard footage, switches to black and white, unmotivated slo-mo, weird/wise old Indian men, attempted Tarantino dialogue.

In the end, U Turn was entertaining and I’m glad I watched it, but as with most Oliver Stone films I finished feeling a bit unfulfilled.

How’s Your News? (Arthur Bradford, 1999)

How’s Your News is a documentary about five peope who travel the United States from Maine to California in order tro create their own documentary about the US comprised of man-on-the-street interviews. The thing is all five members of the How’s Your News? team suffer from severe mental and/or physical disabilities.

The most remarkable thing about this movie is the way in which it succeeds at being funny and sweet without ever once becoming exploitive or mean. The earnestness with which each team member approaches his interview subjects is touching, and the reactions of the interviewees are wonderful, most of whom don’t have a clue as to why they are being filmed and interviewed. Amazingly most of the people who are interviewed are patient and kind and willing to work with the interviewers after they recognize that they aren’t being played and that the How’s Your News interviewers are serious in their efforts.

This film was made by a guy who was in one of my writing classes at UT. He never seemed to have anything to write about, but clearly he didn’t need to make anything up as his quirky, original and fun documentary shows. Check it out.

There’s nothing like the sound of controlled chaos, screaming guitars that somehow manage to sound mellow, and a laid-back approach to making intense music out of sounds and noise rather than traditional chords and notes coupled with a musical style that exudes freedom and energy and life. It’s perfect really. It’s why I never miss a Sonic Youth show.

Friday was a very strange day for us. I won’t elaborate, but you can take my word for it. That’s why seeing Sonic Youth play Stubb’s was such a great thing. I’ve loved their music and most of their albums ever since I discovered them back in the eighties. I’ve been to many SY shows from back in the days when you went to mosh to these later years where you go to listen to the music of a wickedly creative and innovative band that just keeps getting better if somewhat mellower.

Friday’s set was mostly comprised material from their latest album, Rather Ripped. I like the album, though not quite as much as the previous three. Still, they sounded great and the songs, quieter than usual, still seemed to please the crowd. Of course, when a band has been around as long as Sonic Youth, everyone likes to hear which of their old classics will be broken out and transformed.

In a way, hearing the older tunes is the best part of a Sonic Youth set. For me, this is because they constantly reinvent their old songs so that rather than playing them the way they sounded back in the eighties or nineties, they sound fresh, as if they could fit comfortably on the newest album. This musical exploration and experimentation is at the heart of what Sonic Youth is about.

They played “Catholic Block” and “Schizophrenia” from Sister, “Eric’s Trip” from Daydream Nation (my favorite album ever), and dug way back to Confusion is Sex for “Shaking Hell.” Great stuff that managed to be both a nod to SY’s punk/hardcore roots as well as being thoroughly of the present. This timeless yet futuristicly experimental quality to their shows reminds me of more than anything else of Phish or Grateful Dead shows.

Not exactly punk, really, but I’ll keep on truckin’ along and seeing their shows as long as they keep doing them. It’s been since 1981 and they don’t seem to be growing bored or more importantly boring.

While we were on vacation, Morrison and Phoebe stayed at a “resort.” Morrison enjoyed a large room in the cat suite, and Phoebe lived it up with the other dogs. Daphne stayed with my sister’s family as she has ever since we tried to board her back in 2003.

On that occasion, Daphne hid and panted and shivered so badly that the staff upgraded her and our other dog (Zephyr) to a deluxe suite, which looked like a small apartment and cost $70/day. They were kind enough not to charge us the difference, but they also said that Daphne is unboardable.

From then on, Daphne and Zephyr would stay with my sister, but since Phoebe is still in her terrible twos, we thought it best to board her. She seemed to like the experience, but we wondered how they would react when they saw each other again after a week.

Neither dog was especially excited to see us (we had, after all abandoned them) but they were thrilled to see one another. They threw aside their usual greyhound stoicism and jumped around, spinning, dancing, popping wheelies, and dropping into play-bow position. Phoebe even executed a few ollies off the couch.

Morrison, an old hand at being boarded and coming home, was more concerned that his cat box was where he left it, but I think he was happy in his own mellow feline way to once again see his stooges goons friends.

***

Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.

If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.

This Friday we enjoy (I hope) a glimpse of Austin, or at least a corner of it, back in the early ’90s…

This picture of the GM Steak House, which had been searing steers for thirty years, was taken in 1990 or 1991 while I was waiting for the bus on the Drag between MLK and 21st.

I set the picture up and waited for a car to come along. While doing that, one of the employees at the GM got on a PA system and started serving up some of the attitude and commentary for which they were famous.

Fortunately, I did not have to endure the insults for long as the bus came to whisk me away shortly after the picture was taken.

I think there’s only one GM Steak House left now, and I think it’s only open for breakfast and lunch.

Friday was our last day in the Tahoe area. I spent the early morning drinking coffee and staring out at the mountains around Squaw Valley, trying to drink in as much of it as possible before returning to Texas:

We had to check into the airport in Reno at 12:30 so we had time to drive down to Tahoe City one more time to look at that beautiful lake:

On our way to the airport we stopped to get a shot of the Truckee River, which is the only river that flows out of Lake Tahoe:

And finally we arrived in Reno to find that our flight was cancelled. We became accidental tourists, and American Airlines put us up at the Reno Hilton:

Spending an extra night wasn’t bad even if it was in Reno. We ate good food at the Hilton, which is a really a gigantic Vegas-style casino complex. We’re not gamblers, but we did go bowling. I hadn’t bowled in probably fifteen years, but my first shot was a strike. I forsee more bowling in our future.

The trip was fantastic, and I’m sure we’ll find a way to go back sometime. Hopefully soon.

On Thursday, we hiked at Sugar Pine Point State Park on the west shore of Lake Tahoe:

We only did one hike while we were there and so we took this one because it would get us close to the water:

The trail was pretty easy, but we were in it more for scenery than exercise. We hiked along a beach that we had to ourselves:

After walking along the beach the trail veered back into the woods and led to what one guidebook described as the highest altitude lighthouse in the world. The park’s literature described it as the highest navigational aid. It was a gigantic yield sign with a light on top set in place to warn boaters of some rocks near shore. I don’t know why I was expecting a more traditional lighthouse, but we had a few good laughs about it and continued our hike:

As we were heading back to the trailhead, something black moved quickly across the trail about forty yards ahead. Our first thought was ‘bear’ but then we decided it must’ve been a bird. When we got around the bend we saw to other hikers who had had a clear view of our bear/bird. Turns out it was a bear, and they were trying to decide if they really did in fact want to go hiking, but seeing that we were alive, they soldiered on.

I’ve always been fascinated by bears and was hoping to see one (preferable from the car) but I feel lucky to have gotten even the most fleeting glipmpse of a bear. Especially one that didn’t have an apetite for Texan.

After hiking, we went back to Tahoe City for lunch and then paid a visit to Truckee. From there we drove up to Donner Summit to stand around in some snow since we don’t ever see any around here.

This picture was taken at the trailhead for the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico all the way up to Canada: