Word Clouds

This is a "Word Cloud" I created at Wordle Fun and easy and great results!

Workshop Musings — Collective Joy

It is great to have work in the shop during this time of winter weather extremes. CBC Radio One is my only companion during these gray days making wood chips. An interview with author Barbara Ehrenreich about her book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. To quote the Wikipedia entry:

"The author coins the term "collective joy" to describe group events which involve music, synchronized movement, costumes, and a feeling of loss of self. There is no precise word in English to describe the phenomenon."

So it is doing the "Wave" at a sporting event, dancing in the aisles at a rock concert, whirling with the Dervishes, shaking a rattle at a drum circle, singing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus with a thousand others in a great cathedral. Collective joy is something I need more of in my life, it is something that we all need more of!

Word of the Week

I came across this word while reading the book Widdershins.

maudlin |ˈmôdlin|
adjective
self-pityingly or tearfully sentimental, often through drunkenness : the drink made her maudlin | a maudlin ballad. See note at sentimental .
ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun denoting Mary Magdalen): from Old French Madeleine, from ecclesiastical Latin Magdalena (see magdalene ). The sense of the adjective derives from allusion to pictures of Mary Magdalen weeping.

Xmas 2008 — Stories

Movies I am enjoying over this Holiday season:

It's a Wonderful Life
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Fanny and Alexander
A Christmas Story
The Dead
Love, Actually


And the film clip on You Tube of the Apollo 8 orbit of the moon 40 years ago this Christmas Eve.

The radio drama "The Shepherd" on CBC Radio One.

Found on the Internet, Dylan Thomas's reading of his great story "A Child's Christmas in Wales".

Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

Cooking at the Movies

My love of cooking and feeding people lead me to looking for cooking scenes in the movies. Once you start looking for things they seem to crop up everywhere especially if you are looking on NetFlix or Amazon! My comments are italic and NetFlix are in quotation marks.


Girl With The Pearl Earring
"Sometimes, inspiration is found in the most surprising places ... or people. In this cinematic adaptation of the best-selling novel of the same name, Scarlett Johansson stars as Griet, the young housemaid with a hidden appreciation for art who becomes the muse of Dutch master painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth), famous for capturing the luminosity and grace of women in their domestic setting."

Great scenes of cooking cooking and food prep.


Gosford Park
"When Sir William (Michael Gambon) is found dead soon after his guests arrive at his English estate, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), Constance (Maggie Smith), Ivor (Jeremy Notham) and his other guests try to make sense of it. Meanwhile, gossip flies among the household help, including Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), Henry (Ryan Philippe) and Parks (Clive Owen). Director Robert Altman's witty murder mystery won an Oscar for its screenplay."

A huge English estate preparing for a banquet.


Chocolat
"An iconoclastic single mother (Oscar-nominee Juliette Binoche) and her young daughter move to a village in France and open a chocolate shop -- that's open Sundays -- across the street from a church. At first, Binoche's rich, sensuous desserts scandalize the town, but soon the villagers welcome the newcomers with open arms. Judi Dench, Lena Olin and Johnny Depp co-star in this 2000 Best Picture nominee."

The ultimate Food is Love story!


Like Water For Chocolate
"A feast for the senses, this magical romance from director Alfonso Arau was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Globe. The passionate Tita (Lumi Cavazos) is in love with Pedro (Marco Leonardi), but her controlling mother (Regina Torne) forbids her from marrying him. When Pedro instead marries her sister, Tita throws herself into her cooking -- and discovers she can transfer her emotions through the food she prepares."

… or maybe this is the ultimate Food is Love story!


Eat Drink Man Woman
"Widower Tao Chu, Taiwan's most famous chef, struggles with accepting his three daughters' newfound appetite for boys, an interest that begins to break the family apart with hilarious and often touching results."

Amazing cooking skills displayed.


Mostly Martha & No Reservations
"German director Sandra Nettelbeck whips up this tragicomic tale about an uptight professional chef who finds her world turned upside down when she takes in her newly orphaned niece, Lina (Maxime Foerste). Martina Gedeck stars as Martha, whose obsession with precision gourmet cooking extends to discussing recipes with her bewildered therapist (August Zirner) and verbally attacking anyone at the restaurant who attempts to send her food back."

The same story, one filmed in Germany and the other in the US. Nice happy ending story with coking scenes and looking into what it means to cook for people. You decide which is the better version.


Waitress
"Written by director and co-star Adrienne Shelly (who was murdered shortly before the film's selection for the Sundance Film Festival), Waitress is a frank and funny examination of the fears brought on by impending motherhood. Keri Russell plays Jenna, a waitress whose fabulous pies are about the only sweet ingredient in an otherwise dreary existence. An unwanted pregnancy, however, brings unexpected romance in this film co-starring Cheryl Hines."


The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
"Tired of his boorish lifestyle and increasingly difficult attitude, the wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secret romance with a bookish patron between meals at her husband's restaurant, sneaking into the kitchen for liaisons while he and his thugs dine. Food, color-coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable."

Very dark … does not enhance the appetite!

Current Music Fixations

The Book of Love & I Don't Want to Get Over You — The Magnetic Fields
LaLaLa & In a Manner of Speaking — Nouvelle Vague
Zombie — The Cranberries
Vampire — Antsy Pants
Starálfur — Sigur Rós

Gone Astray—Adrift—Asleep At the Wheel

This is an edited excerpt of a letter to a friend that I wrote a few years ago. I have recycled it here to come up with some blog copy to help avoid my blog atrophying.


I remember so well walking along San Pedro’s 7th street and stopping in awe at the window of S.W. Instruments, an old fashioned shop brimming with nautical lore and navigational apparatus. It was a very real place, a place where true seafarers brought their sextons and compasses for repair, bought their charts, and updated their coastal pilots. Plaster rather then drywall, wainscoting and compasses with bubbles in them (who has ever seen a GPS with a bubble?). Long shelves lined with classic tomes like Bowdages Practical Navigator & Ashley's Book of Knots & Masting & Rigging by Underhill. A few blocks down hill towards the harbor Marine Supply & Hardware was to be found. The uninspiring modern warehouse belied its history as a true Ships Chandlery. One of the staff at that time remembered selling the last of their inventory of cast iron try pots used in the shore based whaling industry. This was a world of mariners who had lives afloat the only boaters around were straw hats. Heady stuff that!

My first passion was large sailing ships. But sadly it didn’t take me long to realize that in the world of large sailing ships I would always be just a grunt, not a major player. That meant that no matter how much I loved a vessel I would always be vulnerable to being a castaway, left on the beach, abandoned.

Then I thought that small craft was the way of the future. Try as I may I was never able to make a living at that. Too expensive, too little a market. Or maybe I just blew it!

One day I found myself trying t o get a piece of teak to stick to fiberglass and realized my life had come to naught. Spending most of my day endeavoring to make rich peoples lives more comfortable.

Then I started to diversify. Finding new and interesting ways to make a living (computer graphics & cartography, and cooking) to add to my traditional skills. Now I am faced with finding a way to make these skills—both old and new—a positive force in the world.

Routes

One of the best things about travel for me is finding my way around places, the to and from.

As a child I lived in a community composed of many islands bunched closely together and perched on the edge of Lake Erie. By land you could only enter the town by three roads; North, Middle, & South Gibraltar.

During the Detroit Riots in 1967 (I was 15 at the time) the police blocked these three roads. I over heard an adult describing the road blocks and had an instant mental map of our little town. The North, Middle, and South suddenly made geographical sense to me and I had, after 15 years of living there could see my little world from a bird's eye view! Before then I had always traveled from landmark to landmark.

That was the beginning of my love for and obsession with maps. While traveling I always have a map near by, even if I know the route by heart. Part of it is the patterns the routes create, the other part is really knowing were I am, where I've been, and where I see myself going. It could be argued that all those things are really an illusion but even if they are they are a comfort and joy to me. It gives me a sense of value to be the "Navigator"

Paper Scraps

I love those little scraps of paper found, short vignettes of someone's life. No telling how many dramas can be read between the lines of a "To Do" list. Birth and death and the errands you run in between. I am a compulsive list maker, it helps me put my life in perspective. But I am not a compulsive list doer, list are something to measure you day from, a bench mark from which to vary rather then a ruler to measure your value by.

Bad Splelnig

This is really interesting.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg 
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at 
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod 
are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the 
rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit 
a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by 
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought 
slpeling was ipmorantt!

The Great Cities of Cascadia

My island home of Guemes Island, Washington, USA is half way between Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is great to be living in such idilic setting as the fringes of the San Juan Islands yet accessible to so many great cities! Two hours drive North is Vancouver, the epicenter of cool for Western Canada. One hour North, the home of Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. If I had to live in a city Bellingham would be near tho top of the list for me. The salt water at your doorstep is home to the San Juan Archipelago, only one hour drive to real wilderness, mountains and the creatures that belong there.

Heading South from Guemes two hours brings you to Seattle the birthplace of Grunge and the home of the University of Washington an icon of learning in the Pacific Northwest. Salt water on one flank and fresh water on the other, parks and green spaces abound.

To the West and North from Seattle is the ever cool Port Townsend, a haven for wooden boats and people who eather lived through the "60s & "70s or wish they had. PT is a warm, diverse, artistic and stimulating town.

Further South from Seattle and just across the border of Oregon State is the best city of them all… Portland. Portland abounds with parks and green spaces, the best bookstore on earth—Powells. Public art everywhere, and great food! The freeways and public transit work great. Go there if ever you have a chance!

My Wooden Frog

He spends most of his existence sitting atop my computer tower. Not really a frog but a percussion instrument given to me by a dear friend hoping to promote what small musical talents that might be lurking within.

I have played him (her, it?) a few times since seeing the movie Touch The Sound the story of a deaf solo percussionist who hears the drums through her body.

The day after, I listened to CBC Radio while preparing breakfast and heard a story about two artists who are colorists (really into the fine points of color). Finely in tune with the small differences in color.

This started me along a line of thought which brought me to one of my favorite artists Andy Goldsworthy. The three of them have in common that they look (feel, hear, taste or whatever) very closely their worlds... their environments. How many of us in our daily lives can say we do much of that? How much smelling of the flowers have you done this week?

I think many would agree that we should be more sensitive to the world around us, if you have a nose... smell, if your eyes work... see, if you can taste… lick, if you still hear… listen, absorb, pay attention, anticipate. I am all for this and try in my own way to achieve this state. But I have to wonder that if you stop to smell all the flowers… would you ever get beyond the garden gate?

Our society values accomplishments, I do too. My day seems better if I have done things, built something, cooked a meal, checked things off my list but is the world… our society any better off for it? One strategy is to put some of the flower smelling and taking the time to greet old friends when you see them as line items on our lists.

I always know that Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of balance) is happening when I see an old friend or acquaintansce in the food store and first think of how to avoid them rather then how to engage them! Does this ever happen to you?

Changing Seasons

Yep... Autumn is a great time of transition, weather changing, daylight shorter, busy days of summer behind and many long dark evenings ahead. Change is good, especially when you know that it ultimately brings you back to summer!

"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."  ~Stanley Horowitz

Post Crossed X

This is an example of something that the existence of the internet has made possible. PostCrossing is a web site that after registration allows you to request addresses of other members who want to receive post cards. You get an address, send a card and when the receiver logs it as received your address goes to the top of the list and is sent to the next person who requests an address. It is really great to check your mail box and know that odds are good that you have a post card from some distant and exotic sounding place like Budapest or Istanbul! Some people are real picky about what kind of card you send them (along with their address you get their profile and comments) but mostly they seem like great people like you that like learning a little about different cultures and finding surprises in their mail boxes.

Island Bound

I was not born on an island but when Mom and I arrived home from the hospital it was to an island. I grew up on nearby Horse Island jutting out into Lake Erie. I lived aboard boats moored at Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor. Now I call
Guemes Island my home.

There is something about island living... people ether feel trapped or sheltered by the surrounding waters. I for one feel sheltered, embraced... safe.

Although I love going to "Town" and the "Mainland" it is often difficult leaving the "Island", tearing myself away from the tranquility of island life. There are times when I am in a far place with dear friends or out in the wilderness that I could be gone a long, long time and miss little... funny how the mind and heart work!

Digital Tunes

I am soo stoked about the advent of digital music for the unwashed masses like myself. So much choice and control! I really love it!!

Summer Reading

I do recycle my writing quite a bit so some of you may have seen this in an email already.

Summer here has been extremely busy! Lots of out of town guests which I really enjoy! Sun and hot weather day after day. Cooking outside often. Yet there is something nice about having the days shorten, the pace of life slow. There is a part of me that really enjoys the early mornings of winter, just after the grey rainy dawn, looking down the main street of our town (Anacortes, WA), seeing few people and the traffic signals blinking their lonely vigils.

I have not really ment for this blog to become a book review but that does seem to be what I write a lot about. Hmm... book recommendations there are soo many! Here are a few, each in a different genre, all the quoted text I copied from Amazon.com:



The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
My latest read, really moved me!

"Steve Martin's second novel, The Pleasure of My Company, will discover much greater riches. While the book has a sense of humor, Martin moves everywhere with a gentler, lighter touch in this elegant little fiction that verges on the profound and poetic.
Daniel Pecan Cambridge is the narrator and central consciousness of the novel (actually a novella). Daniel, an ex-Hewlett-Packard communiqué encoder, is a savant whose closely proscribed world is bounded on every side by neuroses and obsessions. He cannot cross the street except at driveways symmetrically opposed to each, and he cannot sleep unless the wattage of the active light bulbs in his apartment sums to 1,125. Daniel's starved social life is punctuated by twice-weekly visits from a young therapist in training, Clarissa; by his prescription pick-ups from a Rite Aid pharmacist, Zandy; and by his "casual" meetings with the bleach-blond real estate agent, Elizabeth, who is struggling to sell apartments across the street. But Daniel's dysfunctional routines are shattered one day when he becomes entangled in the chaos of Clarissa's life as a single mother. Taking care of Clarissa's tiny son, Teddy, Daniel begins to emerge from the safety of logic, magic squares, and obsessive counting."


The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The first in a series of 4... lots of fun

"Imagine this. Great Britain in 1985 is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. The only recognizable thing about this England is her citizens' enduring love of literature. And the Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades, is stealing characters from England's cherished literary heritage and holding them for ransom.
Bibliophiles will be enchanted, but not surprised, to learn that stealing a character from a book only changes that one book, but Hades has escalated his thievery. He has begun attacking the original manuscripts, thus changing all copies in print and enraging the reading public. That's why Special Operations Network has a Literary Division, and it is why one of its operatives, Thursday Next, is on the case.
Thursday is utterly delightful. She is vulnerable, smart, and, above all, literate. She has been trying to trace Hades ever since he stole Mr. Quaverley from the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and killed him. You will only remember Mr. Quaverley if you read Martin Chuzzlewit prior to 1985. But now Hades has set his sights on one of the plums of literature, Jane Eyre, and he must be stopped.
How Thursday achieves this and manages to preserve one of the great books of the Western canon makes for delightfully hilarious reading. You do not have to be an English major to be pulled into this story. You'll be rooting for Thursday, Jane, Mr. Rochester--and a familiar ending"


Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
This book really painted pictures in my mind!

"With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist."



The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Farber
Huge, complex book! It took years of research to complete in such detail!

"Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler"



The Shadow of the Wind By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Books, mystery & romance... what else could you ask for?

"Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel."

Good Idea!

Good Idea Rose... thanks for the comment and the encouragement. So here is what I have been audio-booking lately. Any thing Terry Pratchett, Memoirs of a Geisha & have just loaded the latest Steve Martin book - The Pleasure of My Company. I really liked Shop Girl and look forward to this one.

Is It Reading?

Is it reading... listening to an audio book on my iPod that is. Can I say "I am in the middle of reading Terry Pratchetts book The Truth" when actually I am listening to it. I have decided that yes I can. No need for excuses... saying "read" is so much easier, so much cleaner than saying "listening to the unabridged audio book on my iPod".

No, I haven't given up printed book by any means, this technique allows me to "read" books at times when I am doing solitary, monotonous pursuits like working in the wood shop or doing the dishes or cooking dinner. Never fear I will keep time open for pondering great thoughts with only the music of the spheres, but when I get the life lessons, world events and daily schedule sorted out it is really nice to get lost in a good book while earning the daily bread!

So suffice to say that between audio books and having my whole music collection at my fingertips I am really happy with my new iPod!!

Deja vu

Well one explanation I heard is that Deja vu is (as I remember) a mix up between your long and short term memories. When it happens your long term memory kicks in before your short term does and it then seems to you like you have been here before. I am not totally sold on that explanation 'cause back in the 70s I had a Deja vu that afterwards I was convinced that I experienced it months before in a dream. But as they say, "if you can remember the 70s you didn't live through them) ;- }