Author: stenaros

Gas Station

I love the look of this building, run down though it may be.  For the five-plus years I’ve lived in North Portland, this has been a rough-around-the-edges car repair place.  From the looks of the RV parked on the lot, I surmised that the owner lived on site.  The whole lot was always full of rusted out cars.
 
So imagine my surprise one day when I noticed that everything was gone.  What happened?  Did the owner die?  Run out of money?  Decide to see the world?  Retire?  Also, what happened to all those non-working cars?

There’s a for-rent sign, so maybe something new will appear there.  I doubt it though.  I see a tear-down in the cards for this lot.

Books Read in March 2013

Only one “grown-up” book this month and the rest of reading was full-up with books for children and teenagers.  But some good stuff there.

Read
Vivian Maier Out of the Shadows
Cahan & Williams
I found out about Vivan Maier because I downloaded the Fathom Events movie theater show of This American Life.  I paid five dollars to watch that show and I had an amazing two hours.  Vivian Maier was one of the discoveries.  This book publishes a retrospective of Maier’s work and short essays tell the photographer’s story.  Maier’s work is stunning–her portraits of people she encountered are moving.  Her body of work is even more amazing when a page of her negatives are viewed.  She mostly just took one shot of each subject.  But what a shot.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Benjamin Alire Saenz
Read for Librarian Book Group
Wonderful story of two friends in high school, chock-full of poetic details.  This deserves a longer review, because I really liked it, but it isn’t going to get one.

In Darkness
Nick Lake
Read for Librarian Book Group
This was dark and disturbing, but the good kind of dark and disturbing  where I’m happy the book has won major awards.  Good insight into 19th century slave rebellion and present-day Haitian ghetto (or so I assume, having not experience either time or place.)

Love and Other Perishable Items
Laura Buzo
Read for Librarian Book Group
I love this book and not just because I’ve written an essay on a similar topic. Here is why this book has a place in my heart.  Our female lead is Amelia,  a 15-year-old in typical adolescent transition.  Her parents seem unhappy; it’s that time when the boys are starting to notice the girls at school and she’s not sure what to do with that.  She works in a supermarket and is hopelessly in love with her 21-year-old coworker, though she knows nothing can ever come of it. “I’m not even sure what ‘getting’ Chris would involve; all I know is I want him” she says early on in the book.

Meanwhile, our male lead is Chris, the 21-year-old coworker at the grocery store.  He’s in his last gasps of college, his friends are moving on to other things and he’s paralyzed by both the looming future and a broken heart.  I love that this book details the post-college transition, which for me was horrible and made more horrible by the fact that no one told me it was coming.  I read a lot of novels and nothing ever addressed the transition to full-on adulthood.  This does.

It also captures the hierarchies of the supermarket.  If the author didn’t put in some hours working as a grocery clerk at some point in her life, she sure knows how to do her research.  The story is told in alternating voices, first Ameila’s, and then the journal of Chris.  In the beginning he has no idea Amelia feels anything for him.  What will happen when he figures it out?  Therein lies the dramatic tension.

This book is also funny, taking the ache of what one can’t have (for Ameilia, Chris; for Chris, his departed girlfriend) and finding the humor in the pathos.  Take this (rather long) excerpt from Chris’ journals:

“Last night was just a temporary setback, a stumble, a blip in the getting-over-it process.  I really was doing a bit better.  I was dealing with the pain.  Or at least successfully medicating it with ever-increasing amounts of alcohol and caffeine.  When I read back over what I’d written, I seriously thought about ripping out all the pages. It was a pretty poor showing all the way through, but when I got to the bit where I was writing out the lyrics from the Dire Straits “Romeo and Juliet” song, I had to rip that out.

“But then, I really want to be more honest in this dairy than I have been in past ones, so everything else stays in.  It’s bad enough that I present such a heavily edited version of myself to my friends and family; if I start editing my diary, it will reinforce my already overwhelming tendency to be gutless.  But let us never speak of it.

“For the record, she really did cry when we made love and said she loved me like the stars above and would love until she died.  But, you know, people say shit in the moment.”

I laughed, my heartstrings were tugged, I think you should read this.

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Thom Hartman
Read for Kenton Book Group
The first third of this book outlines all the problems we’ve got going on, on this planet.  Since this book was published originally in 1998, it covered ground I was pretty familiar with.  No solutions were offered, though.  Then, there was a section about culture and then a third section.  Hartman is fond of “Old Way” thinking, characterizing modern society as “Young Way” thinking.  According to him, primitive cultures had it going on. But what to do about the fact that we don’t live in primitive cultures anymore?  There are no solutions in this book!  Near the end, I hit this paragraph which made things clear:

“Missing the point of a book like this is quite easy to do, because the book makes a radical departure from the normal fare of self-help and environmentalism.  It presents the problems, delves into the causes of them, and then presents as a solution something that many may think couldn’t possibly be a solution because it seems unfathomably difficult:  change our culture, beginning with yourself.”

Okay then.  I’m off to change the culture, beginning with myself.

Nelson Mandela
Kadir Nelson
Read for Librarian Book Group
Very pretty picture book.  Had one hitch in the narrative early on where I had to flip backwards to regain equilibrium.

Penny and Her Marble
Kevin Henkes
Read for Librarian Book Group
I found this to be so-so in that the values seemed rather traditional in a stagnated type of way.

Community Sing-Along

It’s the last Saturday of Spring Break, I’ve got a dress to finish ASAP, food to make for Easter tomorrow, and potatoes to plant today.  I also need a nap.  I have no time to sing along with Pink Martini in Pioneer Square.  
But guess what I did?  I didn’t work on the dress.  I didn’t get all the food made.  But I did plant potatoes, nap and sing along with Pink Martini in Pioneer Square.
The first 300 people got songbooks.  And very nice songbooks they were, too.  They had words AND piano music.

We had the bonus of having both China Forbes AND Storm Large lead us in song.  Also, the Von Trapps were there (four fresh-faced, college-looking members).  And former Governor Barbara Roberts was up on stage too, singing her heart out.  Members of the Oregon Symphony were there too.  It was a very full stage.

In my haste to leave, I forgot my camera, so these photos are taken with the cell phone.  I was delighted at the earnestness with which this deadlocked-haired youth sang along with the lyrics.  I was simultaneously disturbed because the song we were singing at the time was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” which apparently he’d never been exposed to?

In case of rain, local umbrella makers ShedRain gave away free umbrellas.  It was not at all rainy, but at one point everyone put up their umbrella for a photo op.
And we sang!  We sang nearly every song in the songbook.  The songs ranged from classic sing-along songs:  “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Home on the Range,” “On Top of Old Smoky.”  There were also songs from musicals:  “Edelweiss,” “Summertime,” “A Spoon Full of Sugar.”  And there were great surprises that were incredible sing-alongs:  “The Theme from All in the Family,” “Copacabana,” “The Gambler,” “Nine to Five.” Aside from all that singing we did, we got performances of Pink Martini songs, as well as Sound of Music songs performed by the Von Trapp singers.
At one point, Thomas Lauderdale referred to Edelweiss as one of five songs that everyone knows.  I emailed him, curious to see what he thinks the other four are, but he has not responded.  What five songs do you think everyone knows?

Back is done. New material is bought.

My email update to my friend:

I hit a tragic point in my sewing.  Actually, cutting.   I decided the directions for what to do with the contrast fabric on the front were dumb, essentially they wanted me to fold it over at 5/8″ sew along that line and finish that edge.  But I thought the fabric wasn’t heavy enough and I would have to spend a lot of time ironing everything back into place and I hate to iron.  So I had the grand idea to just double those pattern pieces, fold them over and make a nice finishing stitch along the edge with that perfectly matched thread.  And my idea would have worked too, except I didn’t have enough fabric to double everything, a fact I realized after I had cut out one of each of four pieces, when I needed 2 of each of four pieces. 

So back to Fabric Depot I went yesterday.  And let me tell you, traffic is much worse on Friday at 2:00 than on Saturday at 10:30.  And guess what?  No more of the material in that color.  A nice lady who worked there took my sample and looked all over the place for it, but it was gone, gone, gone.  So I found another piece of material, but it wasn’t the perfect match the last piece had been.  Alas.

I’ve done the whole back of the dress and am quite excited as to how it turned out.  I didn’t work on it today because there was potato planting in the morning and then Pink Martini had a sing-along in Pioneer Square and I couldn’t rightly not go to that, now could I? And then I had to make food for Easter and for the staff meeting.  And I didn’t even get all the food made because I needed 1 cup of coffee for the cupcakes and by the time I realized that, all the coffee shops near me were closed.  So I will get up and make the cupcakes tomorrow.

It’s a good thing I don’t have yoga this next week.  I’m going to need the time to finish my dress.
Here’s the back.  I’ve cleverly pinned it to the muslin so it will hang and make me feel all accomplished.

 

Here’s the replacement material.  It’s shiner than the other material and not the perfect match the other material was, but it will do.
 

Postcard from Germany


This is from Astrid and I was thrilled to receive it because it’s the first postcard I’ve gotten with a quote on it. Astrid translates Kafka’s words as “ways arised because someone goes there” and then says, “I hope you understand, I cannot translate it correct.”  I did a bit of googling and found that it’s most often translated in English as “Paths are made by walking.”  Interesting, eh?

Three sentence movie reviews: Paper Heart

This is a quasi-documentary, in that it’s filmed in a documentary style, but you can’t believe anything you see presented as fact. However, that does not make it one whit less delightful as we travel the country with Charlyne Yi hearing people talk about love and watch her own views on love undergo a metamorphosis when one charming gentleman by the name of Michael Cera enters the picture. Overall, this is 88 minutes of delight (possibly propelled by the fact I love Michael Cera, but also due to the general whimsical nature of the movie) and I recommend it heartily.

Cost:  free from library (yet another, “why not?” that turned out well)
Where watched: at home with Kelly, my “I’m on break, big salad and a movie” companion.