This Sunday morning outside my front door I listened to the cardinals sing and watched them feed and play or maybe they were fighting for territory, I'm not sure.
Every year about this time the cardinals come through in their pairs, they are always in pairs or couples, and they sing, feed and nest in the cedar trees. I enjoy the cardinals.
The cardinal was the favorite bird of my late grandfather on my mother's side of the family. He had bird feeders and enjoyed watching the birds. I like the cardinal too for it is red and that's a rebellious color in nature's color palette.
The cardinal is a common bird in the eastern half of the United States and what I find most interesting about them is that the male is more red and brightly colored than the female. The female cardinal is a more subdued red and has brown feathers too. I suppose the male is more red so that he might attract more potential mates but that's only a guess on my part.
Last week I watched The Death of Stalin. The film is a comedy set around the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the power struggle that ensues. It was mediocre. There was so much absurdity around the real death of Stalin and the characters that surrounded him that there was plenty of comedic material to work with yet this film never takes full advantage of it. The pacing is glacial at times and the film drags along in several scenes and you must wait forever to find any humor. The film is banned in Russia which isn't surprising. I wish the film was more absurd because to portray Stalin and his absurdity you need go full throttle absurd to even reflect an ounce of how crazy his reign truly was.
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| Tom Boring. Photo by Eggleston. |
On Saturday I read and thoroughly enjoyed this essay in Oxford American about famous photographer William Eggleston and his friend Tom Boring. The essay is a story of chaos, decadence and debauchery that only true Southerners can achieve. I love tales like this.
I am well familiar with the photography of Eggleston as he may be the most famous living American photographer at the moment and his wonderfully crazy life but I was not familiar with Tom Boring.
Tom Boring it seems was just as colorful and outlandish if not more so than Eggleston. You would expect Eggleston to have crazy friends especially in his younger days and so the essay introduced me to what might have been his closest friend. Tom was a fellow southerner living in Greenwood, Mississippi from a good background, served in the navy and became a dentist. I could never do justice to Tom's story like the linked essay does but I certainly want to know more about him now after reading it.
There's also a mystery about Tom's death in 1980. It seems Tom may have had enemies and his burned and beaten body was found in the ruins of his burned down house in Greenwood. The local police didn't seem to give a damn about the murder and now claim the records from that time were also lost in another fire. Sure...
I want to know more about Tom Boring, someone should write a book.
And finally...
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| Photo by me, March 2018. |
I couldn't get enough of the shadows this morning on my dining room floor. I stood and admired them for several minutes and finally took a photo. The sun on the wood floor and the shadows of my palm plants made me think of a hot summer day in Florida. The chair legs at the top of the photo make me wonder what has taken place in this room. Of course I know what takes place there because I eat there but if I weren't familiar with the room and chairs I would wonder about the people that have sat there in those spots.
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