Aurelio Zen

Bob and I have been enjoying the latest Masterpiece Mystery series starring Rufus Sewell as the Italian detective Aurelio Zen. As an American, I find it difficult to understand his British accent, especially as he tends to mumble his lines in a low husky voice. It's sexy, but I find myself translating his speech as he speaks even though we supposedly share a common tongue. It's also hard to understand the Italian accent of Caterina Murino, his romantic interest -- but I intend to overcome this obstacle as I like the series a lot.

The stories move fast with many interesting twists and turns. Their theme is corruption: everything turns on who (including Zen) is trustworthy and what the reality is behind the facade. There are layers of facade and shifting realities, which is always fun, at least in fiction. I enjoy the complexity of the plot twists and I enjoy Zen's dark sense of humor as he plays a game of wits with the forces attempting to defeat him.

Michael Dibdin wrote the original Aurelio Zen novels. I never really got into them though I enjoyed his earlier books. He was one of the rare writers of detective fiction who didn't settle immediately into a series featuring one detective. His earlier books were very different from each other in terms of setting, characters and plot. I found them strikingly original. Eventually he settled into the Aurelio Zen series, which became hugely successful. I don't know why I never followed the series since I really enjoyed Dibdin's earlier books. I think the Zen books were a bit too convoluted for me, which, paradoxically, is just what I do enjoy about the Masterpiece Mystery adaptations.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Bob and I met our friends Deb and Joan for a lazy afternoon in Dimond Park. (That name is spelled correctly, by the way. The park is called "Dimond," not "Diamond" as you might suppose.) We unfolded our lounge chairs under a shade tree to watch Woman's Will's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Woman's Will is an all-female troupe that mostly performs Shakespeare (hence the pun.) It's a small group without much money, but they've been around for a few years. They did a spirited rendition of The Dream, updating it to the seventies and substituting some Bay Area references for Elizabethan ones. They sang a lot of well-known golden oldies. Fortunately, they all had marvelous voices. The play ended with a rousing chorus of "Let the Sun Shine In."

At first it seems strange to watch women play male roles, but after a while it seems entirely natural. After all, men used to perform all the female roles back in Shakespeare's day. The troupe did a good job. They were lively and funny with a lot of horseplay though the poetry of Shakespeare's language didn't really come through. Since they're not professionally trained Shakespearian actors, I was willing to forgive them for that. Besides, they were competing with loud picnics on either side of the stage filled with screaming kids and water balloon fights.

Iridescent Wings

Bob and I drove up to Inverness to visit our friend Barbara, which is always a treat. Barbara lives in a gorgeous house at the top of a steep hill "at the end of nowhere" as one of her grandchildren put it. The house is surrounded by wooden decks that look out over a spectacular view of forest and gardens. The forests are provided by nature, the gardens by Barbara. On one side of the house, she's planted her vegetable garden and what she calls her "Latino garden," a bright array of scarlet and orange flowers. On the other side of the house, she has her more demure English garden filled with old-fashioned roses and flowers in hues of lavender, blue and white.

Surrounded by this blaze of color, Barbara herself dresses quietly, but well. "Casual elegance" is the appropriate term. When I first met her, she was a wardrobe consultant and I was a Tarot-tossing bohemian. She endeared herself to me by telling me that "Clothes are luminescent with memory, like Tarot cards." Sadly, I have no fashion sense, as most of you know. My daily uniform consists of a Tee shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate clothes. I haven't the knack for dressing well, but I admire those who do and I love costumes so I loved hearing about Barbara's latest project, which was to design the costumes for a community theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

"It's full of fairies, you know," she told us over a salad she'd picked from her garden, "But the director didn't want wings and I agreed. So I came up with the idea of feathers. I found an easy way to attach them so I put them in the fairies' hair and adorned their costumes with feathers. We had feathers everywhere. The men were dressed soberly in suits and ties as businessmen. At the end of the play, the fairies marry the businessmen so we had them fasten feathers on the men to symbolize the union. It was lots of fun, feathers flying everywhere, in their hair and on their suit lapels."

Later, when we were sitting out on the deck, she demonstrated the effect with a tuft of brightly colored feathers in her blonde-brown hair. The talk of theatrical costumes made me think of Ellen Terry's famous costume for Macbeth. John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of her in it: "a green gown shimmering with the iridescent wings of 1,000 beetles."

Les Mots

It was a hot day two days ago. Fortunately, I spent it at Christina's house doing artwork at her dining room table. It was an ideal place to work. The air conditioner hummed comfortingly on one side of us and Nina and Gigi, her two dogs, stretched out on the other side of us taking an afternoon snooze.

We worked on our art journals. She has more than one going at a time, but the one she worked on is called "Les Mots." Appropriately, it is full of cutup words and phrases that sometimes fall accidentally or not so accidentally into poems. She made a page of pictures this time, though, with cool translucent blues to sooth our overheated souls. I made a page of cool greens, which I later altered with an upside down woman kneeling on a beach.

It's soothing to work with another person, each of us sorting and pasting our images onto the page or sometimes tossing them across the table to each other. I gave her a glowing brown seashell and she gave me a deep green page that I used later as a background for the image you see above.

Horoscopes for the Dead

I got out the latest book of Billy Collins' poems from the library yesterday, Horoscopes for the Dead. Happily, it more than lived up to my expectations. He is one my favorite living poets. I liked the poem he wrote about a dead poet's poem:

Memorizing "The Sun Rising" by John Donne


Every reader likes the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth century morning.


And it's a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.


But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress's eyes,
I can feel the first one begin to fade
like sky-written letters on a windy day.


And by the time I have taken in the third,
the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now, 
a wavering line of acrid smoke.


So it's not until I leave the house
and walk three times around this hidden lake
that the poem begins to show
any interest in walking by my side.


Then, after my circling,
better than courteous dominion
of her being all the states and him all princes,


better than love's power to shrink
the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,


and better even than the compression
of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas


is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,
testing the plank of every line,
it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

According to Type

I hesitate to get into national stereotypes, but it's hard not to after you watch enough International Mystery series. The Nordic ones are by far the bloodiest. They usually feature rape, child kidnapping, sexual abuse, religious fanaticism or various violent crimes against women involving all of the above. There is often some psychological component to the criminal's make-up that explains his gruesome behavior. The plots tend to revolve around societal problems or else are based on passion and revenge. I don't know about those Norsemen. Too many long alcoholic winters, I guess, combined with their Viking heritage.

The British are into cleverness, charm and eccentricity. They've got two types of mysteries going: the quaint village murder or big city crime. In the quaint village programs, you never see anyone who isn't white. The characters bicycle around town, sing in church choirs or potter about in their gardens. The bad guys invariably turn out to be members of the upper class: ruthless aristocratic bitches with family secrets or weak-willed nobility involved in mercenary real estate deals that will ruin the rustic scene. In the big city crime stories urban grime, immigrants, political scandals and the corrupt police force abound. (Not so different from what's happening in London now, apparently).

The Germans solve their murders in teams. The plots are often about immigration problems (actually, this is a recurring plot line in all European countries) or else they're about about Neo-Nazi groups: secret societies, duelling scars, and Swaztikas. The stories are dark, but they're not as dark as the Swedish ones and there's some humor in them.

I have to judge the French by Maigret because that's the only French series I've seen, but it runs true to form in that it's a vintage brand with Maigret as the most famous detective of them all, excepting Sherlock Holmes. Set in the past, the stories are straightforward police procedurals: setting, suspects, clues and alibis all methodically in place. The characters are studies in "types"; the themes are usually adultery or greed.

Italian mysteries are more light-hearted except for the ones written by Brits or Americans about Italians, which tend to be moralistic. But the Italians themselves produce amusing, fast-paced mysteries centered on love, romance and flirtation. Since Family reigns supreme in Italy (either as a sacred institution or in its opposite form as the satanic Mafia), there is usually some sentimental reference to motherhood in the story or a scene of a happy family gathering.

A Sinking Ship

I've been working on my art journal. I've only got a few more pages to go until I'm finished. Well, more than a few, actually, but at least the end is in sight.  I like to think that my book is tastefully morbid in tone, somewhat like the art of Edward Gorey, though I'm not nearly as morbid as Gorey. But then I'm not as talented as he is, either, nor as funny. In fact, I'm not funny at all, at least not on purpose. Sigh.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Etc.

We went to the nursery and bought plants: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme plus lavender, marigolds, rosemary, jade and ruby chard. Bob planted half of them in the vegetable garden. We're going to plant the other half in front of our house.

Our neighbors have already planted lettuce, peppers, cherry tomatoes, squash and zinnias in the communal garden. The lettuce will be ready to pick in a week. The zinnias are blooming and the peppers are pick-able so I picked a few. Our oregano has been there for over a year. Bob cut it back, but there are new shoots already growing up and we've got mint growing wild in the backyard. Next I'll put in some French tarragon and chives. I want sunflowers alongside the back fence and some miniature Meyer lemon bushes in container pots on the slab of cement by the rose bushes. Arugula would be nice, too, but the last time we tried that, it didn't really thrive.

The thing is, we're not dedicated gardeners; in fact, we're terrible at it. I have the vision, but not the knees. Bob ends up doing a lot of the physical labor, but his legs are giving out, too. Between the two of us, it's a miracle that anything grows -- but somehow it does.

Shop Local

I really enjoyed my visit to Berkeley Bowl this morning. Practically everything is in season. The tomatoes aren't quite there yet, but the berries, peaches, cherries, nectarines,  figs,  plums and mangoes are ripe. It was hard to choose among all this glorious profusion. I settled for a bag of cherries and a bag of figs. I'm about to put a foccacia in the oven fresh from a Berkeley bakery, smeared with lemon olive oil from St. Helena, covered with Black Mission figs and topped with Point Reyes blue cheese.

Summer Days

After the hot spell a couple of weeks ago, cooler weather moved in. The temperature is in the low sixties and skies are gray. Maybe that's why I continue to make pages in my art journal in pewter or silver tones. The grocery stores are overflowing with summer foods: artichokes, corn on the cob, ripe peaches, bright nectarines and dark burnished plums, but it's cool enough that I put on a sweater before I go out to shop. At night, I sleep under a comforter and blanket. In spite of the cool weather, it still feels like summer. The days are growing shorter, but imperceptibly. The idyll has not yet ended.

A Mind of Its Own

I've been working on my art journal. When I first started it, I was worried that it wouldn't turn out well. I've been making collage series for years, but the stakes don't seem as high if I mess up one card in the series. After all, I can always throw it away and make another. Working in a book format is another matter. If I mess up a page, there's more at stake -- or so it seems to me. Christina, my art journal mentor, has another view: just go on to the next page; then return to your flawed page when you're in the mood to work on it some more. She claims that eventually you will transform it into something you like. So far, that hasn't been my experience.

When I messed up the pages in my first art journal, I just tore them out. After a while, there wasn't much left. This time round, I've made it a policy not to tear out my pages no matter how much I dislike them. OK, I confess, I have torn out two, but all in all, I'm learning to relax and enjoy the process. Christina claims "The book will be what it wants to be." Yes, it definitely seems to have a mind of its own.

Marple Syrup

I watched the latest BBC production of "Miss Marple" last night. It wasn't great, but when International Mystery shows something I've already seen, I'll switch over to Masterpiece Theater. 

My introduction to Miss Marple on screen was the movies made in the early sixties starring Margaret Rutherford. I loved those movies, not so much because they were accurate portrayals of the Agatha Christie books, but because they seemed so "veddy British" and because Margaret Rutherford was wonderful in the part. Her Miss Marple was a hardy and stalwart figure played for broad comedy. I'd never been exposed to that sort of absurd English humor before and I loved it. I remember sitting in the almost empty theater loudly cracking up at her antics.

The quintessential Miss Marple was Joan Hickson from the 1984-1992 BBC series. She didn't look the way I pictured Miss Marple when I was reading the books (so far none of the actresses do), but she acted like Miss Marple: demurely meek on the outside, but intelligent and shrewd underneath her little old lady exterior.

There have been two BBC Miss Marples since then: Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie (see above photo). Neither of them are as good as Joan Hickson. Geraldine McEwan was growing on me, but then she disappeared from the series and Julia McKenzie took over. She's entirely too saccharine for the role. The original Miss Marple had an edge to her; this latest incarnation is insipidly sweet.

Bill Cunningham New York

On Saturday I went to an afternoon matinee of Bill Cunningham New York at the Elmwood Theater on College Avenue. It's a nice little theater that shows second run and low budget films. I went alone and sat happily in the back row to enjoy the show.

The film is a documentary about Bill Cunningham who is a street and fashion photographer for The New York Times. I recommend the film whether you are interested in fashion or not. Cunningham is an 80 year old man who has been documenting fashion for decades and who is passionate about his work. He lives a spartan life and bicycles all over the city snapping spontaneous pictures of people on the street whose sense of style appeals to him. He also attends gala events where he photographs high society with an equal amount of spontaneity and non-pretension. As he says in the film, he doesn't care about "celebrities and their free dresses"; it's only the clothes that matter.

He seems to be a kind man who loves his work and doesn't care about money or being famous -- though he's become famous throughout the years. He has moral principles about the do's and don'ts of his profession and has high standards about his work. I find this refreshingly old-fashioned in our Rupert Murdoch age.

Dutch Baby

One of my sins is buying cookbooks. I'm trying to restrain myself by checking them out of the library instead. Last week I checked out The Best American Recipes 2005-2006 from the Alameda Library. When I found an easy-looking recipe for a pancake baked in a skillet, I decided to try it. It was easy, besides being rich, delicious and decadent, especially when covered with strawberries, maple syrup, and Brown Cow yogurt. The recipe was supposed to serve four, but Bob and I had two helpings so it's all gone. Bye, Bye, Dutch Baby.

Hanging in There

I've been trying to hang in here with the blog, but lately my allergies have been so bad that it's hard to concentrate. Most of my day was an allergy-ridden blur. I drifted through a bookstore and the library, but I didn't buy or borrow any books. I felt too out of it. Still, if I'm going to be out of it, it's nice to be surrounded by books.

Puzzle Art

Our monthly collage party was as fun and boisterous as usual. Chris constructed small sculptures of fantasy animals in athletic poses while Katherine and Bob worked on collages. They both made two. Katherine finished hers (see above).  Bob's is still in process. I handed everyone jigsaw puzzles made of blank white pieces. (I bought them at Artist Craftsman and Supply in Berkeley.) There were only twenty pieces to a puzzle so they were easy to take apart and work on. Christina took hers home, muttering something about trying to print on it. Chris quickly painted a picture on his while I deconstructed mine and carefully painted each piece in green and purple hues. As simple as the puzzle was, I had a hard time putting it back together. Bob and Chris did that for me. It was fun to see the end result since I hadn't planned the color scheme beforehand. I like working in that way, ordered yet open-ended.

Coffee Ice Cream

Christina has almost finished painting our dining room. I'm pleased to say that it looks great: serene and formal yet warm and friendly. It was difficult to pick a neutral color that wouldn't be blah yet didn't clash with the living room (pale yellow) and my study (light green). We ended up with something that we both thought was flat beige, but turned out to be creamier than that. In fact, once the paint was on the walls, it reminded us of coffee ice cream -- which is a good thing. Coffee is her favorite flavor and I'm very fond of it, too. There's only a little more left for her to do: some white trim and a few touch-ups; then the inevitable coffee ice cream celebration.

An Independence Day of Many Colors

We skipped the traditional Fourth of July stuff to visit our friends Chris, Ingrid and Joy-Lily in San Francisco. Ingrid was feeling poorly so she stayed in her room while Chris and I went out for sushi and Joy-Lily and Bob dyed T shirts. Joy is a fabric artist who had just finished teaching a workshop so she had leftover dye to share. She and Bob used a technique she calls "jar dyeing" which is kind of like tie-die without the tying. Basically, you stuff the T shirts in glass bottles or anything big enough to hold them and then squirt dye in the bottles. The dye falls randomly on whatever parts of the fabric are accessible. Later, there are some follow-up steps involving putting the jars out in the sun for hours and then rinsing them out in the washing machine -- and voila, you end up with T Shirt Surprise!

I say T shirts, but while they were at it, Joy also dyed a tablecloth and various other items. The bathrooms in their house feature multi-colored wash clothes and towels, Joy's bedroom curtains are printed in marbled swirls and huge silk paintings stretched on canvas adorn her walls. Some of room-mates' pants and even tennis shoes are dyed with bright splashes of color. I hesitate to speculate about their underwear.

Mysteries without Borders

Bob and I watched International Mystery last night. International Mystery features made-for-television mysteries produced in European countries. Needless to say, the programs have subtitles. They used to be hard to read or dubiously translated, but lately their quality has improved; however, the policy of blurring out ALL nudity -- even classical statues -- is still there to annoy the viewer. Other than that, I have no gripes; in fact, International Mystery is my favorite program. I happily watch Swedish, Norwegian, French, German and Italian detectives solve crimes in their various countries.

Recently, they've introduced two new series that transcend borders in rather peculiar ways. One is the Van Veeteran programs, based on books by the Swedish author Hakan Nesser. These mysteries take place in a mythical unnamed country that is a pastiche of Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. The detective seems slow-paced and folksy, a perfect Dutch stereotype, but the stories are bloody and melodramatic in true Nordic fashion. I must confess that they don't really do it for me. I like my mysteries to be rooted in an actual time and place.

The other series is Italian, at least on the face of it. The books feature Guido Brunnetti, a Venetian police inspector, but they're written by Donna Leon, who is American though she's lived in Italy for years. The television series, however, is a German production -- so we see the characters living in Venice, but talking in guttural German. Leon chose to sell her series to the Germans because she wanted to preserve her anonymity in Italy; however, the characters look and act German rather than Italian, which detracts from the credibility of the locale. Still, it's a good series.

Summer in the City

It's the third night of fireworks and barking dogs (especially the non-stop one next door), but it's also the third night of hot weather so it's necessary to keep all our windows open. And it's not even officially the Fourth yet. Our next door neighbors like to party in the summer. Unfortunately, their house is so close to ours that it's like they're having their party in our house and our yard, only we're not invited.

Loud voices, loud music, shrill barking dog, fireworks going off in the night, basketballs banging against the fence -- also the delicious smell of barbecue. Bob thinks my complaints stem from jealousy. Well, maybe he's right, at least as far as the barbecue goes. Good barbecue is one thing I miss from my home state of Kentucky. None of the restaurants here know how to make it properly.

After the party is long over and the neighbors' lights are out -- and when all is still at last (which is about 4:30 in the morning) suddenly a loud low-pitched bang explodes outside -- or a volley of them, followed by the sharp anxious barking of the dog. This being Oakland, it's hard to tell whether it's fireworks or gunfire, but the follow-up sound of a police siren or an ambulance usually clarifies that.

Besides the police, perhaps the dog and I are the only listeners since we seem to be the only ones awake at that hour. I've been awake for the last three nights, as you can probably tell.

A Leisurely Lunch

Chris, Bob and I went to Champa Gardens for lunch. Champa Gardens is a Laotian restaurant in our neighborhood. Though it's nearby, Bob and I never think of eating there unless we're taking a guest. For some reason, I always think of it as a summer place. Well, it's certainly summer. Our warm weather is back. Usually we have a day or two of high temperatures followed by cooler weather, but this time there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

I associate Champa Gardens with hot weather because it's a small corner restaurant at the end of a non-commercial street. Its door is usually wide open and inside is a bar where Laotians hang out drinking beer. It has a friendly, local feel even though the spot has been 'discovered' so there are usually a lot of people there from all parts of Oakland. The summer feel is intensified by the hot food they serve, but this time I tried to avoid the spicier stuff. We shared shrimp and avocado rolls and I had a grilled salmon salad with a green sauce -- cilantro, probably. Bob had Pad Thai and Chris ordered Larb with Tofu.

It was fun to eat and talk at a leisurely pace. We started off with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, circled around Greek philosophers and Aesop's Fables, took a dip into ancient Briton, hung out for quite a while in the early Christian/late Roman Empire and ended up at Gobekli Tepe.