Yesterday morning, driving down Davie Boulevard, I saw a man sitting in a lawn chair in front of his house. He wore nothing but shorts and a hat; his hands clasped a beer bottle on his lap. He looked completely out of his time – no smartphone, no iPad – and perfectly at home in the world.
I'm celebrating Presidents' Day with the idea that it's for those who are no longer in office.
The Academy Awards are like the State of the Union Address: Something I feel I need to suffer through. We saw Parasite Friday evening, in the nick of time, and I found it a little disappointing; the sensationalism seemed more of an easy than an artistic way out. And my shock at the winner of the live action shorts owed much to the fact that it was the least political of the group (which is to say, not political at all). So there was victory in that.
The In Memoriam segment, which I always look forward to, paired some (lesser known) people, while the more famous who got single billing were pictured twice, a head shot next to an action shot, which was confusing. And, to conclude the puzzling evening, the night's most political speech was not delivered by Jane Fonda.
Yesterday we were without power till midafternoon, which was too late to write a blog. So today you get two.
One: Last weekend we went to Savor Cinema to watch the five action shorts nominated for Academy Awards. Last year they were uniformly depressing, beginning with the first, which featured a phone call to a mother in Spain from her son in France who had been abandoned on a beach by his father and was now being pursued by a strange man. The first of this year’s batch featured a phone call to 911 from a young woman who was being driven against her will down a dark road by a volatile man. Oh no, I thought, here we go again.
But the shorts that followed got progressively better. Two were set in Tunisia – how often do you get slices of life from the Maghreb? – the second of which, NEFTA Football Club, had a wonderfully droll ending. The one that should win, however, was Saria, an American production based on a true story about the tragic deaths of girls in a Guatemalan prison. I will be watching the category closely on Sunday, the only one of which I will have seen every nominee.
Two: Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, Reyna Grande complained that publishers are not interested in immigrant stories. There are many things publishers are not interested in. In travel, it’s most countries not named Italy or France.
Over the weekend I drove up to Indian River County and visited my friend Sean. He said that before Thanksgiving his wife sent him to Walmart to pick up some crackers for the cheese she was serving before the big dinner. Unused to shopping there, he had trouble locating them, and finally stopped an African-American man and asked him if he knew where the crackers were. He gave Sean an incredulous look before telling him, “They’re all over the place!”
More dispiriting than the stuff people put on social media is the amount of time I spend reading it.