It is, officially, crazy hot in Seattle this weekend. It’s
weeks before the official start of summer and I’ve already been shifting a
sprinkler about from corner to corner of the backyard, “accidentally” becoming
quite soaked while moving it out to the front-40 half an hour ago. Not only are
there raspberries at the Farmers Market, there are also ripe raspberries in the
backyard. Not enough to satisfy my gluttony but still, it’s crazy to have
raspberries the first week of June. It’s not clear what Gradka thinks of it all; she may
think it’s a little much. Or maybe she thinks it’s nice to have the proper
conditions for lounging on her lounger.
None of which is so
much “the arts.” No, last week, when it was not quite so hot, we biked to Queen
Anne to see
Kedi which was playing as
part of the Seattle International Film Festival.
Kedi, for those too wrapped up in this narrative to click the link,
is a Turkish documentary about the street cats of Istanbul. It seems there
are—and have been for some centuries—a
lot
of street cats in Istanbul. It was ever so slightly political since rampant
development means less space for cats, but for the most part the film
celebrates the cats and the people who care for them—and there seem to be a
lot of people who care for the street
cats. One person, a baker, casually mentions that “we all have accounts with the vets in the neighborhood.” He mentions this as he’s applying an egg
wash to some delicious-looking pastries while a cat minds its own business
under a nearby counter. Possibly it was the lack of worry about health
regulations that charmed me most about this film.
That’s not true. What
truly moved and charmed me, possibly beyond the cats themselves, was the
attitude of the people interviewed. A fisherman connects the cats to God’s love
and where you would expect him to say that he cares for the cats because that’s
what God would want he instead says that the fact that he gets to know these
cats is a demonstration of God’s love for him. Or something like that. Trust me
when I say it’s better in the film. And trust me also when I say that if you
like cats, you should make an effort to see this documentary. It was fabulous.
Also fabulous was
Book-It Theatre’s production of
The
Brothers K (Strike Zones). We went to see the doubleheader performance (in
which you get Part I, aka “Strike Zones” in the afternoon and Part II,
The Left Stuff, in the evening). We’d
never been to a Book-It production before and the narration, which I assume is
part of all their shows though that is just an assumption, took some getting
used to. Once you accept it, however, it works brilliantly—at least if you are
me and really love the way Mr Duncan writes. And Part 1, which takes you up
until Irwin is drafted, is truly a thing of beauty. Oh, Scott was not as
enraptured as I was, but even he thought it was pretty darned fine. The acting
is excellent and the adaptation, while very episodic, was pretty darned
flawless. I cried more than once and laughed a lot more than I cried. It was
excellent, from start to finish, though I admit I left the theatre saying, “I
need a drink.”
So we spent the long
interval having that drink, and also dinner, at
Solo and then coffee at
Caffé Ladro and
then browsed briefly at
Mercer Street Books before settling back into our seats at the
theatre. Part II was, unfortunately, not nearly so fine. It’s the same actors
so it wasn’t the acting—though I think there were more fumbled lines in the
second half and I’ll just bet that acting in five hours of theatre is more
challenging than watching it—and I know that the story of the second half of the
book is plenty compelling so I’m not sure what exactly was the issue. Scott,
who thinks about these things differently—and more intelligently—than I do,
suggested that it was too plot-driven, that character development completely
disappeared in the second half. I’d add that some plot threads—the mother’s
backstory, mostly—were so threadbare in this telling that it would make a lot
more sense to jettison them entirely. Some bits were so hacked that the story
as presented on stage made no sense unless you could fill in the holes with
what you remember from the
book. Sadly, the horror and tragedy of the second
half of the book just wasn’t present in the second play which, after the expectations
built up from Part I, was particularly disappointing.
That first part, however, was amazing. Get
your tickets and go see it!
Reading, after
finally finishing the tedious
I Am A Cat,
has mostly been
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn which turned out to be a completely different book than I expected. I’d always
assumed it was sort of a 20
th century
Little Women in the City sort
of book written for twelve-year-old girls. It turned out to have more adult
themes and some pretty darned clever humor and observations. Maybe people were just
more clever in those olden times of the mid-twentieth century--and, having looked for links, I see that people
do consider this appropriate for twelve-year-olds. I must have been a more sheltered child. Up next, most likely, a one-off Trollope, the title of which entirely escapes me as I sit typing this up in the shade of the magnolia out back. A challenge of outdoors blogging is spiders; I've had them crawling across my camera, my screen, and my person. But no sacrifice is too great for blahdeblahblah. And there are compensations.
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| Cucumber martinis |
