Gipsy Kings

Have you ever heard of Wolf Trap in the Washington, DC area? I have and it seemed like a magical place. All kinds of performers work there, sort of like the Hollywood Bowl or Greek Theater in LA. One of the nice feature of it is a huge lawn area where people who can get up after sitting down on the lawn can watch the show at a reduced rate. That is not me or my brother. In the picture above you can see the masses of people on the lawn. We were in the amphitheater seating area with the roof over it. There are no box seats that take up a lot of room (like the Bowl.) At the Hollywood Bowl they have boxes and benches. At Wolf Trap, they have real theater type seats. Nice

Cindy got us tickets to the Gipsy Kings. I love them. I'd sometimes play the CD at work and sing along. I sing horribly. And I knew none of the words. None. But their amazing Rumba Flamenco rhythms would get me bouncing in my seat. How patient were those guys who worked with me? Do you think they would have told me to shut up if I wasn't their boss? (Actually one did ask me to talk more softly. Fat chance.)

The Gipsy Kings were great. They sang a few of my favorites and a lot I'd never heard before, but it was all good. Eric said they were mariachi. I said that would be difficult because they are from Spain. Both of us were wrong. I learned that night when we got home that they are from Arles, France! Who knew? Their parent fled Franco's Spain before WWII. These guys grew up in the Camargue, the region that we took the canal boat through a couple of years ago. So interesting. Knowing all this does not make their music any better or worse. It just means that I don't know the words to the songs in a different language. I still believe that they speak Spanish, because the song titles seem to be pretty Spanish to me.

Whatever. Great music, great night. Thanks for getting me out to Wolf Trap, Cindy

Lower Gas Prices

Why didn't I think of this sooner? I started my traveling mid-March, when my nephew was married in

San Francisco. Gas prices were a little higher, but not enough to get all paranoid about. How bad could it get? My brother arrived at the end of May and I didn't stop driving until the end of July.

Karen and I have been laughing about the coincidence, but really. It is just too obvious. If I leave my car parked on the street for a week, how low will crude prices fall? We still have a long way to go. I haven't had to put gas in the car for a couple of weeks, but I'm at half a tank.

What do you think? Should I fill it up while the prices are down? Do you think that will mean crude prices will go up. No, I haven't gotten paranoid, but it's like wearing the same socks until your team's hitting streak has ended. I'm not naming names, but it was pretty obvious, guys.

the Shadow Catcher

Reading a really good book is like dipping your hand into warm chocolate. You want the experience to last for a long time; you want to lick carefully so that you don't miss a spot. That is how I felt with this book. I can't believe that it did not win The Times' Book Prize for fiction this year. How good must that winning book be?


This is a fictional account of an author's life after completing a biography of Edward Curtis (seen to the left.) He is a famous photographer who took pictures of American Indians during the time when they were being moved to reservations; he felt they were moving toward extinction.

Remember the analogy about chocolate? This is a chocolate with many layers. Can you imagine the joy of licking away a layer and finding a layer that tastes even better. And it continues to do that until your hand is completely clean and the book is done. That's this book.

Here's a little layer for you; a personal reference, of course. The book starts in Los Angeles and has references to traffic and people in Los Angeles that were extremely amusing to me. Do you have to experience these things to get the joke? Let me know, once you've read this. Then it moves to Minnesota. That is becoming a trend in my reading, isn't it? Montana is involved at one point. Just briefly, but Wiggins captures the vastness of that space better than I've read before. Then we move to Washington. Give me a break! Did she have my itinerary? I've said it before, travel makes reading more interesting.

One of the moving forces in this book is how different elements connect. A nurse calls about the author's dead father being in a hospital, near death. You can't imagine where that plot goes. And if an intriguing plot is not enough, the language is beautiful. Ms. Wiggins can write. Forget everything I've ever said about the University of Southern California, where she is a professor. I guess they have good professors. At least one.

Finally, this book is on DEEP discount through Amazon. Don't ask me why. You should really pay extra for it because it has pictures in it that actually move the story along. But by all means, read the book.

20th Century Classic and Intrigue

You could say that Main Street is a classic. Written in 1920 it was the book noted when Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize. He also won the Pulitzer Price at a later date. Main Street is about life in a little Minnesota town, based on Lewis' home town of Sauk City. Karen and I visited his boyhood home and the Sinclair Lewis Interprative Center when we were in Minnesota.

What I've learned from reading about him since is that he had an unhappy childhood, adult hood and later life. He took out his displeasure in life on the people of Sauk City. At least, that's what's always said. It's true that the people in Lewis' imaginary town of Gopher Prairie have very narrow minds and limited lives. When the heroine comes to town she wants to move the people from these narrow views, open them up and enlighten them. Two things struck me about this.

First, it reminded me a lot of a series I read some time ago about Miss Mapp and Lucia. Lucia moves to a small English village and wants to raise the cultural level of all around her. Carol Kennicott of Gopher Prairie doesn't hold a candle to dear Lucia in pretentiousness. What's interesting is that both Main Street and Queen Lucia (the first in the series) were written at the same time. Maybe this dissatisfaction with parochialism was beginning to fester after the first world war.

The second thing is Mrs. Kennicott moves to Washington, D.C. for a time and learns that the behaviors she doesn't like in Gopher Prairie are to be found everywhere. Not that the world isn't a much more exciting place in D.C., but people is people wherever you go. I will keep that in mind as I take time to experience D.C. up close.

I have also read The Defection of A.J. Lewinter. I read Robert Littell's book, Legends, and like very much how he writes. This book is pretty amusing. A scientist defects to Russia during the cold war. Littell writes about the Russians who have received this unexpected "gift" and the Americans who are trying to figure out if they have lost a great deal when Lewinter left the country. It is interesting in showing both sides pondering what the other side may be thinking, how they are analyzing the other's reaction.

It is also good in showing life in Moscow and Washington at that time. I like the Russian's attempt to explain the facts of life in this communist city to a person who hasn't done the proper research before making this leap. I liked Legends better, but this is a good book.