Good Bye Budd, We'll Miss You

“It’s the writer’s responsibility to stand up against that power,” Mr. Schulberg said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped for posthumous showing on its Web site. “The writers are really almost the only ones, except for very honest politicians, who can make any dent on that system. I tried to do that. And that’s affected me my whole life.”

Hans Silvester - OMO Photos

A neighbor sent a power point presentation of Hans Silvester's OMO photographs this morning. They are incredibly riveting and powerful, photos that were taken over a five year period, of the Surma and Mursi peoples of the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia. Semi-nomadic warriors, they live primarily by keeping large herds of cattle; their only Western accessory seems to be the Kalashnikov rifles they trade with Sudanese tribes.

They paint themselves or one another two or three times a day, using pigment made from earth or ground stone mixed with water. Executed quickly, the abstract, vibrantly patterned motifs reflect a sophisticated vocabulary of mark-making, finger-painting and hand-printing techniques; they extend across faces and sometimes center on a single feature, like a breast. They function as personal decoration, cultural expression and, when ash and cattle urine are added, insect repellent.

You Look like the right Type

mark addison smith

look at his blog

A Serendipitous Discovery: Donald Sultan

My newest and favorite serendipitous discovery is .... Donald Sultan.  He's been an institution for a long time in the New York City art world, though I am sorry to admit I know little about that world or his art.  In real life, he is the most engaging and positive man, someone you would say has "good energy," and whom you might be compelled to hug, on a whim, as the room grows with endless possibilities in his presence.  

Donald started Tuesday night, "Artists' Night" at my local, Edward's, where you can get a burger for five bucks, add a dollar more if you want cheese, and a martini for five bucks as well.  I had always known this about him, but he didn't really come on to my radar, until I ran smack dab into him in the lobby of my Dallas hotel a few weeks ago.  He was in Dallas for a book reading, of his new book, Donald Sultan:  Theatre of the Object, and I was doing a press junket for HBO (No. 1 Ladies, what else?)  I said hello to him, giggling that the person I would run into in Dallas would be the person I often saw across a table, across the street .... 

I ran into him last night and introduced myself as "the woman in Dallas."  I must say, he knows one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE WRITERS, James Salter, so as I flailed my arms and gushed emphatically (something people do over Donald's and his work), I could only get out snippets of how I LOVED that Salter writes about a meal Sultan made in Salter's book that he co-wrote with his wife, Life is Meals.  

The Donald Sultan Dinner is entry August 30th:

The dining room in Donald Sultan's small country house is longer than it is wide, with a worn floor painted in brilliant black-and-white diamond design.  It adjoins a square, far-from-modern kitchen.  A painter, one imagines, possesses a sense of style.  Maybe not Francis Bacon or Jackson Pollack, but definitely Donald Sultan, who has, among other things, designed the decor for a hotel named for him in Budapest and who is a remarkably good cook.  He gave an impromptu dinner one August night that involved, however, not more than ten minutes cooking.

With drinks there were two cheeses.  One, he seemed to remember, was yak cheese, though this seemed unlikely, and the other a Fribourg.  There was also a hard Italian salami on a board with a sharp knife and crackers.  The dining table was covered with a beautiful cloth, and plates and silverware had been set out.  There were many candles, including some in wall sconces.

On a large platter were sliced red and green tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil, and on another, quartered store-roasted capons.  First however, came soft-boiled eggs, decapitated in their shells, with a dollop of caviar on top.  A bit later, a plate of steaming corn-on-the-cob was brought in.

There were five of us.  After the egg, one ate as one pleased.  As always, there was good wine, and for dessert, thin handmade cookies from the best local source.

Pleasurable in every way - the food, the intimacy, ease, and presentation.  The reaction was predictable:  we ought to do this ourselves.

This approach to life and to entertaining is marvelous, though I am not sure where one gets "yak cheese," even in Sag Harbor.  He's such a jovial man, and I can envision spending a night cutting salami off the wooden board, full of style, and good conversation.

It is his humanity that I found so striking, but there should be a few bragging moments for his new book, these lifted off Amazon:  

An immaculately produced volume, Donald Sultan is a detailed examination of the artist’s distinguished thirty-year career and captures the essence of an innovative spirit whose work continues to evolve and inspire.

 

In the electrified atmosphere of New York’s downtown art renaissance of the 1980s, when graffiti and post-modern figuration were filling gallery walls and art magazines, Donald Sultan (b. 1951) developed a strikingly different style using simple iconography and a complex technique. His gouged and spackled paintings of lemons, tulips, and vases were abstract, familiar, erotic, and captured enthusiastic critical attention immediately. Influenced by artists from Sasetta to Warhol, Sultan chose still life as the vehicle for advancing his mission to “haul painting into the 21st century.” Today, Sultan’s work can be found in more than forty-five American museums, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art.

Later this afternoon, I received an e-mail from Donald.  A lovely man.  He had talked about another fun thing last night, movie reviews on You Tube called Reel Geezers.  He wrote two lines, to give me the website address.  This is a classic example of the fact:  discoveries beget discoveries.

A Counterintuitive Dinner with a Counterintuitive Foreign Correspondent

Dinner last night with .... Dan Bilefsky, an interesting New York Times foreign correspondent who has many stories to tell, and was in New York (on his way to Montreal for passover with his Mamma), stopping to delight all and various movie people in this city and to talk about a new project he's working on about Albanian virgins. 

I tagged along with Paradigm agent, Michael Moore (no relation to that one) and found an intelligent, somewhat shy man.  Of course, the only thing he'll remember about me, with his fine journalistic eye, is that I "cured" his hiccups.

Worth noting and reading is....Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, according to Dan, "the best book I've read about Africa."  Ah..... hasn't he read The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency?

Below is an interview by Joanna Kakissis who asks Dan about "Balkan idols" and unlocking cultures.  His journalistic approach is incredibly cinematic.

Almost three years ago, when journalist Dan Bilefsky was working as a financial reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he wrote a head-turning story about Villa Tinto, House of Pleasure. The Antwerp brothel run by a transsexual prostitute named Georges/Joyce billed itself as Europe’s most “high-tech,” thanks in part to the use of biometric scanners to keep track of its city-approved prostitutes. But the strange tale was more than a quirky story about a revamped section of Antwerp’s red light district, which city officials hoped to market as a tourist attraction. It also offered a case study in the benefits and pitfalls of European efforts to legalize prostitution in order to wrest it from the control of organized crime.

Funny, dark and meticulously reported, the story marked the rise of a young journalist who excelled at finding unusual, counterintuitive stories that read like vivid travel narratives and stood apart from newspaper journalism’s pack mentality. Bilefsky soon left the Wall Street Journal to become a Europe correspondent for The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. During his two years based in Brussels for that gig, Bilefsky’s dispatches included explorations of laughing schools in Munich to teach depressed Germans how to giggle; a Eurovision-ruling monster metal band that gave shy Finland an identity crisis; Belgians reliving their long-lost medieval days by re-enacting the Middle Ages; and an exhausted polygamist with five wives in southeast Turkey who became a newfound champion of monogamy.

At the beginning of this year, the 35-year-old Montreal native became the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the IHT and The New York Times. Last week, as media swarmed into Kosovo to cover its independence, he wrote one of the most original and compelling stories in the news deluge.

World Hum: My favorite story of yours is the one on Finland’s freak out over monster-metal stars Lordi representing the country at Eurovision in 2006. The details wove together a vivid and strange tale but also illuminated a surprising problem in the country—its lack of self-esteem.

Dan Bilefsky: I spent a lot of time in rock ‘n rock bars in Helsinki when I was researching that story, and I learned very quickly that you have to have epic tolerance for beer or vodka to commune with Finns. Finns have something of an identity crisis, perhaps derived from their geographic isolation or because of their peculiar language in which one word with three umlauts is not uncommon. People in Finland like to say that when a Finn first meets you, he will stare at his own feet. Then, after ten years of close friendship, he will stare at your feet.

The truth is that the Finns are also intensely proud people, who rightfully appreciate how they have transformed a timber economy into a high-tech center, all the while preserving a social welfare model that is the envy of the world.

Based on your more recent story about the new “Balkan idols”—statues of Rocky, Bruce Lee, Tarzan and Samantha Fox going in the village squares of small Serbian villages—it seems the former Yugoslavia is also going through an identity crisis.

In Serbia, one senses a feeling of angst and despair as it loses Kosovo, the last piece of bedraggled Balkan real estate that it is desperately trying to cling to. Yet the bars and cafes of Belgrade spill over with young hipsters whose oversized Mercedes are parked outside. Monthly wages are tiny, yet the hunger for consumer goods has seldom been stronger.

In Kosovo you can see this identity crisis in the monuments to Kosovo Liberation Army guerillas, who wield AK-47s and stare down at passersby on Pristina’s main boulevards. The glorification of these guerillas is part of the territory’s attempt to forge a new identity on the eve of independence. (Editor’s note: Kosovo declared its independence earlier this week.) The glorifying of America, which played a key role in overthrowing Milosevic, is also abundantly evident. There is even a Bill Clinton statue in the works and a replica of the Statue of Liberty atop the Victory Hotel in Pristina.

How do you look for those telltale details that unlock a culture for your readers?

I like to think of feature stories as documentaries with characters and action scenes. But instead of a video camera, I have to use my eyes and ears. I always try and interview people while they are in their natural surroundings or engaged in what they do—whether that means interviewing a bullfighter while he is bullfighting or a bird-singing trainer while he is finessing a song with his prize-winning finch. In this way, I can try to show—rather than tell—the reader my story.

Journalists and travel writers are often accused of stereotyping. How do you avoid it?

I try not to fall back on easy clichés by seeking out stories that are counterintuitive.

Like what?

For example, when I recently wanted to write about Spain, a Spanish friend of mine mentioned in passing that her boyfriend and father were both taking Viagra. So I called Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, and asked how Spain’s Viagra sales compared to the rest of the continent. They were sky high. Then I traveled to Madrid and discovered the open secret, that millions of men were taking Viagra (or being force-fed it by their wives, girlfriends or mistresses), in part because the country’s record economic growth has diminished the siesta, wreaking havoc with the Spanish male’s libido. Post-Franco sexual liberation also has made Spanish women far more assertive.

Counterintuitive stories are also the hallmark of great travel writing. What travel writers do you admire?

I am a big fan of Calvin Trillin, whose travel writing about food is second to none, whether he is describing a noodle bar in Singapore or a hot dog stand in the Bronx. His eye for detail is so forensic and sensual that he makes you want to eat the page of the magazine you are reading. I also like William Dalrymple’s work, in particular his books on India, which combine great narrative flair with historical exposition. I loved his book City of Djinns, about Delhi. My friend Michela Wrong wrote the best book I have read about Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, which chronicles, with wonderful irony, wit and intelligence, the pillaging of the Congo by Mobutu.

All these writers possess a keen eye for detail, a sense of the absurd and, above all, empathy and humor. And they are original. So much travel writing fails because it falls back on easy clichés.

In your travels, are there stories that still stick with you?

I wrote a story last year about the forced suicides of young Muslim girls in southeast Turkey that left an indelible mark on me. The European Union had been pressing Turkey to take tougher action to prevent honor killings—when a brother or cousin kills a female relative for transgressing sexual norms and bringing shame to her family. As a result of this EU pressure, Turkey introduced life sentences for the young men who committed these crimes. But rather than the tougher sentences stopping these killings, some families responded by forcing the girls to kill themselves instead. An epidemic of suicides broke out in Batman, a dusty and poor city in southeastern Turkey, in which young women were dying nearly every week under mysterious circumstances.

I went there to investigate and met a young Muslim girl of 17 called Derya, whose family had tried to shame her into killing herself because she had started an affair with a boy at school. First, she slashed her wrists. When that didn’t work, she tried to jump into the Tigris River. Then she hung herself. She survived, traded in her veil for a pair of jeans, and sought refuge in a women’s shelter.

Her story illustrated the culture clash between official secularism and conservative Islam in Turkey. But more than anything, Derya’s intelligence, courage and resilience impressed me. It is one story that stayed with me long after I wrote it.

Joanna Kakissis is a freelance writer based in Athens, Greece, and a contributor to the World Hum blog. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and other publications. Her last story for World Hum was The Cost of Kindness.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

In my e-mail today, I received two messages from favorite girlfriends.  One from Caterina Weinek in South Africa, who has just "gone freelance."  We're celebrating!!  Growth and creativity must be on her mind, and she sends Bruce Mau's "manifesto" below to inspire.  The other message comes from designer Alabama Chanin who is in New York.  Here is one of her chairs to the right.

AN INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR GROWTH

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project.

Allow events to change you.

You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Insomnia

Roz Chast

Thumbs up from Cosby!!

There have been many letters pouring in from across the country, regarding HBO's airing of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency this passed Sunday.

My favorite comes from my long-time friend and brilliant screenwriter, Dwayne Johnson-Cochran.

He writes:

Amy,

I have to start by telling you a little story...

Bill Cosby backs a fellowship at USC and I've been a writing professor for seven years teaching in his fellowship. The fellowship is to improve the presence of African-American writers in Hollywood. Needless to say, it's a tough road but that's another story.

So, last night he came to speak to the 15 years of past classes and the current one. It was entertaining, uplifting, full of laughs and tears but right in the middle of his talk he stopped and said..

"and did you look at HBO...they put this show on with Jill Scott. My God, are you surprised? I'm surprised. I love this show. Do you love that show?"

People got up and clapped. Then one speaker after another said they were shocked and completely happy that 'The #1 Ladies Detective Agency" is on HBO and simply can't
believe how it got on.

Black folks are buzzing, Amy and you should be very proud. I'm very proud of you.

much love,
Dwayne

A Long but Very Successful Journey

So the mainly good reviews are mostly in, and the midnight e-mails of congratulations from Harvey Weinstein have flooded to our team, the only thing left now - is for the US audience to weigh in on whether The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, "No Sex, New City" (as coined by the Wall Street Journal), is a hit or not, or whether US audiences will embrace a traditionally built detective from Botswana or not.

My bet is on the sangoma's prediction.  

On Anthony Minghella's second (of three) trips with me to Botswana to prepare for the movie and to finish the screenplay that he was co-writing with Richard Curtis, we took along a few significant members of our future crew.  At one point on this trip, we met a sangoma way up in the North of Botswana, on the edge of the Pans, just out side of Gweta.  I "rolled the bones," the way one asks a traditional healer for a divination.  It was May, 2006 and I had been working on the project for 6 years already.  I had had my ups and downs, and six years already felt too long to have done anything, unless it was walk a young child to his/her first day of class in first grade.  I asked if the project was going to be successful, and tossed away.  Through a translator, the sangoma answered that "it was going to be a very long journey, but a very successful journey."  He spoke in metaphors about trapping our elephant, but added that the journey was going to be longer.  As an occasional New Yorker, I wanted to leap off my haunches and strangle the old grizzled man.  Long?  Longer than six years?  And in fact, another slow year passed, and we still did not have our "green light."  

It has been close to 9 years since I first read a small sparsely published novel entitled, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, on a cold Winter's day in August in Johannesburg, South Africa.  I read the book in one sitting, falling immediately in love with Mma Ramotswe, and knew that I wanted to make a movie of the book when I read and relished page 225, JLB Matekoni's description of Mma Ramotswe (found on page 234 of most editions now.)  (By the way, the photo above is of Lucian, all thumbs up, who plays JLB Matekoni.)  I sent the book to Anthony Minghella in early 2001, contrary to what Alexander McCall-Smith claims, I did not throw the book over his fence and into his yard!  I had met Anthony about a year previous with my friend, Joan Chen, who was in London doing the music for Autumn in New York.

Anthony, his incredible wife Carolyn, and I had one last trip to Botswana together, February 2007, in which Anthony took leaps and bounds with the screenplay, and made it sing.  I had followed and given notes on every draft, but there was a moment that his genius left me, and I did not know where he was channeling these rewrites from.  And so, we started to build up pre-production that Winter in Botswana, around May, 2007, but we still had not found our Mma Ramotswe.  Anthony had scoured the earth to discover the strength and vulnerability of Mma Ramotswe, perfectly rendered by Jill Scott, who at the time, was better known for her feminist poetry and her singing, than her acting yet.  (I sense that will change after this evening.)   

We finally started shooting the movie in July, 2007, the day after Sydney Pollack found out he had cancer.  We had the movie in the can by September, and Anthony had everything completed, the edit, the music, the mix - - everything -- by the time he found out about his health issues in January, 2008.  Anthony died unexpectedly on the morning of our BBC Premiere, March 18, and Sydney followed him shortly thereafter.  My last telephone conversation with Anthony, a two hour bonanza, involved all issues around the series, of life, of the joy of HBO's joining us.  Anthony and I had fought from the get-go about whether this should be made into a movie or a television series.  He insisted tv series, for then audiences could get to know the characters.  I insisted film.  I wanted to see the sweeping beauty of Botswana.  Anthony was right:  it was perfect for a good television series, and he managed to get the beauty in there too.  Now we have a lasting testimony to his vision, to his spirit, to all things African.

To Tim Bricknell's credit, and to everyone's determination, we dug in hard to get the series up and running in 2008.  We took the leap with Botswana again, after promises and encouragement.  We started shooting episodes 2-7 by September, 2008.  And finished barely in time for Christmas, 2008 with our families.  (At one point, there had been a lot of jockeying on set, claims that we would be eating our turkey under the blue craft service awnings ... if we didn't make our days.)

The journey has certainly been long.  And it has been full, and rich, difficult and joyous.  I don't know how US audiences will receive our offering this evening.  I'll be watching with a few jaded New York friends, munching through home-made deviled eggs, and listening to gauge their East Coast reactions.

At this point, I don't worry about whether this will be a "successful journey."  It already has been.  It has changed my life, added new friendships into the mix, forced me to confront demons, called upon me to build patience (that probably will never really ever happen), tested my courage, made me laugh, gave me hope, and taught me many things "Africa."

It could not have happened without my original partners, sadly now ancestors, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack.  To both men, I will always be indebted to their fortitude, beliefs, and genius.

In ending, below is the letter Anthony Minghella wrote to Richard Curtis after our May 2006 trip, where Anthony and Richard faced the challenges of writing the adaptation, and where the sangoma predicted it would be a "very long, but a very successful journey."  It strikes me, after re-reading Anthony's description below, that this single 10-day trip was a "long journey" in and of itself.  Imagine, all nine years of it ..... though, after tonight .... I hope the journey gets even longer than predicted ....

June 1, 2006

Dear Richard,

I’m writing this on the plane flying back from South Africa, after our ten days of scouting and research. If I say too much it is also because I want to keep a record of my thoughts as a kind of aide-memoir, but also because I want to share everything I know right now about the project.

Botswana was disappointing and thrilling in equal measure. Our first days, in Gabarone, were bewildering, even though I’d been there only a couple of years ago. Revisiting the real locations of the books is a pungent reminder of the difference between their fictional characteristics and what Gabarone actually is today. Anything remotely quaint or picturesque is fast being swallowed and overwhelmed by new and assertive skyscrapers, testimony to Botswana’s recent prosperity. It’s like an ugly midlands city with wonderfully exotic aberrations. Clean, westernised, a little grim. Close by, though, there were some excellent areas, where traditional Africa sits on the edge of the town, complete with donkey carts, mud huts, shabeens, and drunken dreadlocked guys in Arsenal shirts. One of them lifted Tim’s Blackberry in about three minutes. Mochudi, currently featured in our first scene (although much too close, I think, to be right) is an interesting place, more African, looser and without the tall buildings of the capital. It’s very small and without the western architecture to use for Gaborone; Gabarone is too big and ugly to easily use for Sandy’s Gabarone (although a week later, looking at our photographs, this might be the opinion of the roving human eye rather than the camera’s selective eye). The physical landscape seemed to state powerfully what a later conversation reinforced –we met a guy who runs a theatre company in Gabarone (this year’s highlight The Pirates of Penzance with Mma Ramotswe!) who said that Sandy had written a book which wasn’t really set in Botswana, but in his mind. In any case, my anxieties grew about being in a chain of middle-aged white men commenting on and presenting black culture through some rose-tinted lens. Disneyland, Africa-style.

Certainly, at the end of our second day I was ready to curtail the trip and hurry to South Africa to see what we could build and invent in Johannesburg.

One thing which struck me forcefully, as I listened to various people we met and engaged with (including, most randomly and rewarding, a guy we took to lunch in Mochudi having asked him directions), was the distance between parts of the book and an interesting reality. I say that because all good works of fiction are different to reality, largely because they slough away a lot of what’s dull or not useful about the daily drudge or what doesn’t feed their narrative imperatives or themes. And, evidently, Sandy is writing about a world that might have as much to do with a Scottish childhood as it does with visiting Botswana as an adult. Similarly, I think that a lot of the reader appreciation of the books says a great deal about their own nostalgia for community, for a clear value system, for a powerful sense of right and wrong; most of us imagine that existed in our childhood and has been eroded. We could call this the David Kelly syndrome. It’s the America that never was, or the Isle of Wight that never was. Sandy has brilliantly achieved a world in which African values, their profound sense of family and responsibility and superstition, coupled with the invention of one and possibly more wonderful characters work in some alchemy of humour and decency and compassion. Things Africa might teach us, rather than what we want to teach Africa [Minghella's emphasis] about their debt, their disease, their taste for rampant dictatorships and bouts of genocide. All good. And I know you agree.

On the other hand, many of the solutions seem more familiar than they need be. In the novels, births, deaths, marriages, the law, all seem strongly western. In actual fact, around these life events, a Botswana exists which seems more complex and more rich for our drama. Most Batswana go to Church, are Protestants or Charismatic Christians. But they are also Animists, with strong and culturally deep relationships with their ancestors and with animals and the land. They go to doctors, to hospitals, but they also all use muti, traditional medicine, dispensed by the medicine men, the Sangoma. They go to lawyers, some of them, but mostly and wonderfully, they go to the kgotla, open-aired meeting areas where the chiefs and elders hang out, smoking and chatting, and hearing grievances in a semi-formal environment, where a problem can be resolved with discussion, a stick, or up to half a dozen years in jail. These powerful ambiguities seem to me to be largely missing from our current screenplay, missing from the books. Our friend, Billy, the direction-giver, who turned out, ironically, to be a satirical cartoonist, and Rusette, our white batswana driver, both very well-informed, told us many things. Funerals, for instance, are currently a big problem in Botswana. They’ve become grander and grander affairs, a kind of status symbol, where the more people who attend the more respect you’re seen to show to the one who has passed. As a result half the village can show up for several days and literally eat the mourners out of house and home. Lomala (sp?), the payment exacted by the father for the marriage of his daughter – a reverse dowry – still exists, particularly in rural areas, and results in what is effectively a purchase. So when I met an actress in South Africa yesterday, who told me a scalding story about how her husband, Note-like, had repeatedly abused her, eventually breaking both her arms and locking her in her house alone for two days, I was also told that when a white friend intervened and got her out of the township and into a safe house, the girl’s mother had told her to keep her nose out of things, that her daughter had been sold to her husband and that he could do what he liked to her.

I’d love to understand these things in our screenplay.

The bush, on the other hand, was extraordinary. We went up country by charter plane to the Delta – reminiscent of the American South - endless serpentine waterways with a tropical feel, stocked with wildlife and, because of the recent rainfall, lushly carpeted with green. Driven in flat bottomed motor boats by our guide Matt, we shot through the area at high speed, negotiating a bewildering labyrinth of corners, left here, right there, arriving at Chief’s Island – a wildlife sanctuary, with birds of all colours, hippos, buffalo, giraffe, crocs. Beautiful and slightly absurd, with a huge animal at every turn. Africa from the documentaries and children’s literature.

Next we flew to Kasane and hooked up with Ralph Bathfield [sic], a real English Patient (you’ve met him, I think, in London) who was to prove, in almost every respect, the hit of the scout. He is so ludicrously well-informed, so native, so much the stuff of legend, son of the famous crocodile hunter Jack (who is credited with having killed over 50, 000 crocodiles and was one of the original White Hunters). Ralph who runs several camps, including Jack’s, San and Planet Baobab (our first port of call) is handsome, rugged, curious, passionate about the land and its creatures, in love with the austere life of paraffin lamps, and cold water, trekking with the bushmen, promoting his own enthusiasm for research, scarred by tragedy, not least a plane accident in which the plane he was piloting crashlanded, caught fire and killed his father, despite Ralph going back into the burning cockpit to pull him out and, as a result, suffering massive and scarring burns of his own. He spent the next few days with us, teaching, guiding, opening our eyes to the mysteries and miracles of the Kalahari.

Baobab, with oversized playful sculptures conjuring The Little Prince, hosts several trees which are thousands of years old, massive and improbable, dwarfing the rest of the vegetation. The biggest in the area, closer to Jack’s, was used as a post office by Livingstone and other explorers, who left letters for each other in the house-sized trunk. We arrived here late, in time to eat, catch the dusk, then sleep in our wonderfully eccentric houses, homage to the Spanish architect Gaudi, all curves of concrete echoing tribal huts, but with modern conveniences.

The next day, described elsewhere, was the best of our trip, enjoyed in two parts. One took us to the local town where, with the guidance of Bones, born and schooled there, we were able to get a taste of the lives lived, with visits to the school, to a sorghum beer bar, to the kgotla, to a retired hunter and wiseman, who threw wooden signs to predict the success of our project (long journey but with a bull elephant as prize) and then to a local cattle post for lunch, where we ate a flyblown meal of traditional fare – beans, greens, sorghum porridge, tripe - with our fingers and some of us tasted worm for the first and only time. This felt like a real insight into a world that Mma Ramotswe might have experienced as a child. Later we flew across to the pans, the salt lakes to the east, vast and lunar. And our experience there was personal, romantic, indelible. And currently not much to do with the Number One Ladies.

In short, scouting was largely dispiriting; exploring the bush was a thrill. What is in our script might be the least interesting part of this country, or so it seemed to me on those days. I wanted to be there with my family and not with a film crew.

But returning to this document some days after returning to London, I have a slightly different perspective. I am still concerned, but also beginning to see that what we love about these stories and characters remains the core reason to make filmed drama from them; the fact that they contain some universal truth is why they might become universal on film. There is no Gabarone like the Gabarone of Sandy’s books. Botswana is a complex modern African country. Our work cannot take on the burden of this complexity or of the complexity of Southern Africa, let alone the continent of Africa. At the same time, I do think we have to nudge the material to make it closer to what seems most distinctive about Botswana now or, rather, when there are aspects of contemporary Botswana which might give us more than we have, or the books know, we should incorporate them. I also want to feel that the cultural map we describe, with all of its contradictions of old and new, should feel familiar to somebody who lives in or knows Botswana, even if we can’t tell the whole story, even though we’re not documentarians. Steal more from what’s there, is my point. Jettison some of the stuff which seems too western. Again, we need to create material where it’s imperative that we shoot in Botswana not in Burbank. Otherwise, why go? Of course, whether Botswana is best placed to represent Botswana is another story and one which needs to be explored more thoroughly with a designer and from more scouting. Right now I need persuading that South Africa has any of the locations we found in Botswana.

For me the next step is to return to the screenplay and see whats needs to change and develop, and what, if anything, we need do to properly locate the Detective Agency, both in a geographical sense, but also in its cultural landscape. And to explore further the casting opportunities. One of the richest experiences I had on the trip was sitting for many hours talking with actresses in Johannesburg. It made me think there are great women’s stories to tell in this project. It also unnerved me in terms of casting. The cruelty of western images of female beauty (starved for fashion and not from famine) is increasingly pervasive in Southern Africa. The heavier actresses I met had all recently lost considerable amounts of weight. If the Big Mama is still alive and sexually alluring in the realities of the townships, the media images are closer to Western silhouettes. Our choices will be limited and, if we’re going to find an African Mma Ramotswe there’s a lot of searching to do.   Hmm.

WSJ - Friday

From Left to write, Jill Scott, Anthony Minghella (director), Amy J. Moore (producer), Alexander McCall-Smith (author)

For the WSJ Article

A Year Ago, A Death

A year after Anthony Minghella's death, we are all mourning his loss and counting the many lessons he taught us.  Some of these lessons for me are good, some I am happy to know but they have not been easy to learn.  But there has not been a single day in the last year, when I have not thought about him, and his far reaching effect on me.  I am grateful.  I perceive him to be, in the African sense, one of my "ancestors."  Yes, Anthony and Sydney Pollack (who died two months later in May, 2008) are certainly my ancestors, our ancestors on the No. 1 Ladies project, and our ancestors in life.

Above are photos taken of Anthony about a six months before we started filming our No. 1 movie, (premiering, coincidentally, tonight in New York City) when I had taken him on his third research trip to Botswana, the trip when he finished a working draft of the screenplay.   At 6 in the morning, the sun already up, the women having brought the water to the village, I snapped these photos (top:  Unity Dow and Anthony;  lower:  Anthony sitting with the village men).  We had gone to Unity Dow's "labola" ceremony.  This is the ceremony when the village decides "bride price," -- the men and the women are separated, as are the couple, to decide how many cows a bride is worth, and to get the acceptance of the marriage from the village.  The groom pays the bride's family, and then the bride becomes a member of the groom's family.  The interesting thing was, this was Unity's third marriage, she's a radical, the first and only High Court (supreme court) female judge in Botswana, she's fought for the rights of women and children, she's changed the Botswana constitution, and yet, she wanted Carl, her German husband to be, to pay for her in ... cows.  I marveled at the time, and I still marvel.  She accused me of accepting a diamond ring as a form of engagement - what was the difference with cows? she asked.

Anthony loved this ceremony, and of course, he was a master of understanding ritual in general, an underpinning of his great work.  He loved investigating all things, and all things Botswana.(Yes, he even ate the Mopani worms, though not very often.)  He wanted to learn, absorb, to know everything.  One of his greatest attributes was his opinion that - to live fully, not only a director but a person, must have a brimming curiosity about life and about all things around him/her.  Anthony was infinitely curious, and at the best of times, playful with his curiosity.

One of the key reasons that Anthony directed the movie was because of Unity.  In her, he met a novelist, a woman, a traditionalist, a radical, a soul.  And he saw and understood a darker side of Botswana.  (See her novel, The Screaming of the Innocents, which on this third trip to Botswana, he would read aloud to me, as I drove our car, lost around the city of Gaborone.)

On this anniversary of his death, I pause, and I think of all the things he brought to me.  The good and the bad, the informed, the marvelous, the difficult.  Every thing -- living and vibrant and above all else -- everything human -- flawed and sublime -- all of those things.

May he rest in peace, and may we rest in peace about him.

Left Bank Book Store, 304 West 4th Street, New York

It's one of my favorite places:  The Left Bank Book Store on West 4th Street.  It's just a single room, bursting with character, and I would imagine boosting that it has one of the finest collections of first editions of any book store in New York City.

A few weeks ago, I lingered in the crowded bookstore, talking to two men who looked very familiar and spoke with an air that suggested I should know who they were.  I barged into their conversation because one of the men said to the other that he had just seen "Mary Louise" on stage.  Since Dollhouse (at the Roundabout) had gotten rotten reviews, and I was dreading going, a very sweet Valentine's Day treat from a friend that had suddenly become what the French call "a poisoned gift," I sought reassurance that this would not be the worse theatrical experience of my lifetime.  "How was it?" I insisted upon knowing.  The one gentleman said, "she's always worth seeing," of Mary Louise Parker and the three of us had a conversation about how the final lines of the Ibsen had been mistranslated, though I was merely listening to their opinions, my Norwegian being a little rusty, and could only add that this was the most poorly reviewed play by the New York Times that I had EVER read (and I had read a lot of Frank Rich's reviews in his day.)  

Well, it being a very small bookstore, and my two new friends being quite erudite and interesting, I proceeded to speak to them for quite a while, wanted to barge in again as one bought Sackville-West, and then rather awkwardly apologized for having interrupted so rudely.  The other gentleman, the epitome of British politeness, encouraged me to join their conversation - if I so desired - they were charming, completely wonderful conversationists.

We said our good-byes.  And just as I went right out of this gem of a store, and they went left, I realized that I had been speaking with Mike Nicols and Tom Stoppard.  Just one of those average New York early afternoons, after a breakfast meeting at Cafe Cluny (another recent favorite - for the large picture windows, that take people-watching to a cinematic level;  one seriously feels as if one is watching a big screen.)  I started to remember all the things I could about Nichols and Stoppard's friendship, how it started in and around The Real Thing which I saw on Broadway in 1981 (when I was six years old) and how Nichols was largely responsible for getting Stoppard to rewrite bits.

Today .... I stopped into my favorite bookstore.  I mentioned how thrilled I was to see these two luminaries a few weeks ago.  The proprietor - very good natured and fun - played a game with me.  He told me .... if I could name the unlikely "movie celebrity" who bought the most books from him, he would give me any book in his bookstore.  He would give me three questions to narrow down the field, and he would give me two guesses.  I eyed Colette's first edition of Claudine at School (my first film company being called Claudine Makes Movies), and took the plunge .... he even gave me additional clues along the way.  As I had exhausted all questions, he gave me one last very big clue, suggesting that he might have to narrow my selection in the store if I won.  I told him that I couldn't accept a book from him anyway, it was too gracious, and he insisted, no I would have to take a book if I guessed correctly ..... alas, Stephen Baldwin was not the right answer.

Questions:  Is the person older than 35?  (In his 30s - a clue!  It's a "he.")  Is the person married to a celebrity?(No.)  Has the person been in a major hit within the last year? (Yes, but the person is not a huge movie star, but he has been in one big movie.)

Clue:  The person has a brother who is a bigger star than he is ....

Submit your guesses.  And if you get it right, I'll buy you a coffee at Café Cluny (Bank and West 4th) and we can watch the cinematic people go by ...... 

Henry Miller in a Paris Review of Books interview in London, September 1961 on film:

What I deplore most is the medium of film has never been properly exploited.  It's a poetic medium with all sorts of possibilities.  Just think of the element of dream and fantasy.  But how often do we get it?  Now and then a little touch of it, and we're agape.  And think of the technical devices at our command.  But my God, we haven't even begun to use them.  We could do incredible marvels, wonders, limitless joy and beauty.  But what do we get?  Sheer crap.  The film is the freest of all media, you can do marvels with it.  In fact, I would welcome the day film would replace literature, when there'd be no more to read.  You remember faces in film, and gestures, as you never do when you read a book.  If film can hold you at all, you give yourself completely to it.  Even when you listen to music, it's not like that.  You go to the concert hall, the atmosphere is bad, people are yawning, or falling asleep, the program is too long, it hasn't got the things you like, and so on.  You know what I mean.  But in the cinema, sitting there in the dark, the images are coming and going, it's like a rain of meteorites hitting you.

The tapestry, by Miller, above is for sale for $50,000 at www.henrymiller.info (from his daughter).  Miller features albeit very remotely in a current Cinechicks' project that has yet to be announced on the website.

Tu Ridi ... Another "Italian" Night

Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello has always been one of my favorite plays.  I've only seen it once, the Richard Jones production in 2001 at the Young Vic.  It was a great production!  

Basically, the play is rather haunting:  six people arrive in a theatre for the rehearsals of a play.  But they are characters for which the play has not been written yet (sound familiar?)  They long to escape but can't until a writer completes their stories.  I've always laughed that this is considered the second greatest play of the 20th Century, after Waiting for Godot.

Last night, I watched the Taviani brothers' movie, "Tu Ridi" (You laugh), well at least the first segment, "Felice" (Happy) that is based on Pirandello's Tu Ridi and Imbecile.  It starts with a sad man, Felice played by Antonio Albanese enraging his wife because he laughs in his sleep all night long.  Nothing is particularly funny in his life, while he is awake, in fact as a failed opera singer who's had to become an accountant, he is rather tragic.  We watch his wife leave him, his best friend commit suicide, his failed attempt to confront one of the chief tormentors in his life.  Towards the end of the film, our man Felice has one last hope at happiness and salvation:  a brilliant and beautiful woman walks (literally) into his life and encourages him to sing again, from a beach stage (hello Fellini), but singing the lyrics about drowning himself in Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri signals a quick end minutes later, when Felice, not very felice in fact, walks into the sea.

Still more depressing was flipping over to watch 27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl.  Give me a full plate of pasta, and let me get sick eating too much of it, any day.

No. 1 Ladies' Men

The death of Tullio Pinelli in Rome last Saturday, reminded me of a documentary that I saw about Enno Flaiano. With Tullio Pinelli, Flaiano co-wrote the screenplays for ten films by Federico Fellini: Variety Lights (1950), The White Sheik (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), La dolce vita (1960), The Temptations of Doctor Antonio episode in Boccaccio '70 (1962), 8 1/2 (1963), and Juliet of the Spirits (1965).

Nino Bizzarri directed the documentary on Flaiano, entitled: L'UOMO SEGRETO (The Secret Man), and says of it and of his subject:

Noi siamo tra coloro che considerano Flaiano uno dei grandi autori italiani del Novecento. Non la figuretta d'ingegno, il fustigatore dei costumi, il giornalista acuto e brillante, che una vulgata insistente continua a tramandare, ma un gigante, uno dei nomi destinati a restare.

Il suo pudore estremo -in un 'epoca in cui vige, nella sfera della cultura, la religione del Pavone -ha fatto sì che la sua vita trascorresse per intero in una sorta di cono d'ombra, che celava ai contemporanei la sua verità, ma il tempo comincia a rendergli giustizia.

L'uomo segreto mostra il suo cuore tragico e il suo essere poeta.
Rischiara il suo lato umano -il rapporto con la madre, la moglie, la figlia malata, e le altre donne -che nessuno ha mai potuto raccontare perché ostinatamente e sistematicamente lui lo nascondeva.
E scava nel rapporto ombroso, eppure viscerale, che lo legava a Pescara, la città dov'era nato e dove un giorno, ancora bambino, era stato messo da solo su un treno, con una piccola valigia, qualche libro, vestiti niente…

In 1947, before turning to screenwriting, Flaiano won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (the English version is called: The Short Cut though the direct translation would be: Time to Kill). The novel, set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935-36), tells the story of an Italian officer who, bothered by a toothache on his way to the base in search of a dentist, takes a short cut through a sinister valley, loses his way, comes upon a native woman bathing in a stream whom he accidentally kills. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness, that the crime is not outside but rather inside of himself. This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa.

Two weeks before his death in an interview with journalist Guilio Villa Santa, Flaiano talked about the anguish and the faith behind his famous humor. Flaiano said: We don’t know who we are, we are just so many passengers without baggage, we are born alone and we die alone. Once a woman writer quoted me in a book of hers, and in the English translation the English writer translated my name as Ennius Flaianus, thinking that this Ennio Flaiano was some Latin author. A few months later we met each other in a restaurant in Rome and were introduced and, naturally, she experienced an awkward moment, for she didn’t think that this ancient writer was still alive. However, we did agree that certain characteristics of my person, a certain style of life, indicated that she was right. I perhaps was not of this age, am not of this age. Perhaps I belong to another world: I feel myself more in harmony when I read Juvenal, Martial, Catullus. It’s probable that I’m an ancient Roman who is still here, forgotten by history, to write about the things that the others wrote about far better than I – namely, let me repeat, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal. (p. 251)

Best Flaiano quote: In Italy, Fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and anti-fascists.

Tullio Pinelli died on Saturday in Rome. He had a prolific screenwriting career including a long partnership with the director Federico Fellini, with whom he wrote many of Fellini’s best-known works, including “I Vitelloni,” “La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita” and “8 ½."

Working as an attorney in his hometown of Torino, Mr. Pinelli's life changed one day in 1946. He was standing in the Piazza Barberini in Rome, reading a newspaper at a kiosk, when he began a conversation with a young man reading the same paper. It was Fellini, then a young screenwriter, and they immediately fell into a discussion of films, each expressing a desire to infuse poetry and lyricism into the political neo-realism then in vogue in Italian cinema.

He told a Fellini biographer, Tullio Kezich. “We spoke the same language from the start. We took a walk and ended up at his house on Via Lutezia.” He went on: “We were fantasizing about a screenplay that would be the exact opposite of what was fashionable then: the story of a very shy and modest office worker, who discovers he can fly, so he flaps his arms and escapes out the window.”

New York City Buses!!

Dallas

What are Artist-Neighbors For?

So the HBO wonder-woman in all things press, Cecile e-mailed this morning, saying that they needed a photo of me.  I paused and thought of the ones I hate in those recent No 1 articles, and in turn sent a note to "John upstairs," as he's called with many of my friends.

John Upstairs has been a resident artist in Tribeca for - too many years -  let's say we stopped counting at 35 when Ernie the Cat, of the Ernie books by Tony Mendoza, was also a resident and the building had not yet been converted nor did anyone but arists want to live in Tribeca.  His original loft (an old paper factory) could outshine anybody's in Architectural Digest's (in fact, if you want to see the building, go to the issue where Michael Imperioli hangs out of his window - he looks over to John's windows, the scrappy one which could use a paint job.)

John's paintings are fantastic - he shows in public rarely, in favor of private viewings.  He works in his studio every day, one half of the loft, the other half is nothing short of a museum of collections - artists friends, things gracing the pages of Christies, amazing finds out of the trash - and it is always fun to "go upstairs" to see what new creations hang on the walls.  His life is inspired - coined once the "recluse about town," - and I'm not sure too many live this "outsider vision" anymore.  Once when I went to see Helen Martin's house in the Karoo in South Africa, it was John who supplied the definition of "outsider art" to me.

He was keen for an impromtu photo shoot, for what else do any of us have to do all day long in Tribeca?  He bragged of owning a tripod (a gift from his sister.)  I asked if we needed a camera, to which he said that some people who were interested in his art, had sent him one, so he could take photos before they choose a painting to buy.  So I took a reluctant shower, and half an hour later, we were dithering about taking cheesecake photos, or the closest thing the subject matter would merit. 

John lives a fully artistic life, and has a fabulous eye.  He took about a dozen photos, and we narrowed it down to two choices for HBO.   The one here, in front of one of John's paintings from the 70s, is NOT the one HBO chose but is the one that looks more like me.  (Of course, we had to send one photo that looked like me - not chosen - and one which did not - chosen.  The chosen one may be on their website.)

Now, here are two photos above on my blog:  one of me, and one of my former resident, Ernie, the Cat.  See if you can decide which is which.

Thank you John.