All I ever wanted to learn about competitive birding

I met my first birders on a trip around the world by ship.  Many of them haunted the top decks of the ship watching for sea birds with their 20x binoculars. I learned about petrels and boobies and shearwaters and gulls...always the gulls.  In particular, there was a young man, a teenager, who was particularly smitten with birds.  Seeing a gull or a masked boobie, produced a look on this young man's face that lit up the ship. I have never known anyone quite like him, and though I never got into birding myself, he produced in me a lifelong affinity for birders. 

This book appeared on the shelves at Borders a few years ago, and I admired it and considered buying it, but opted not to.  I forgot about it until last week when I accidentally happened upon a movie of the same name starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson.

The Big Year is about competitive bird watching (I know--seems like an oxymoron).  People compete to see who can see the most birds in the US in a single calendar year. The book features three men who vie for the title and shows what hardships, deprivation, discomfort and money they will spend in order to catch a rare species and beat the competition.  The book was a journalistic account--written after the year was over and based on extensive interviews with the top three birders.

The movie, written by the journalist who wrote the book, Mark Obmascik, changed some basic details to make the storylines more compelling, but followed the general arc of the competition that was presented in the book.  Believe it or not you do cheer for a winner, you do become intersted in birding, and how to find the rarest of the rare species.  I don't think either book or movie really delved into what makes these people do what they do. Is it the thrill of the chase? The beauty of the birds?  The love of nature? I was never really sure, but it all made for lively story telling.

I think now of my old friend on the ship.  He'd be in his late thirties by now. I assume that once you are a birder you are always a birder, and I hope he read this book and continues with his life list. Perhaps he has even completed a big year. 

It is hard to choose which is better, the book or the movie, especially since the movie has Steve Martin and who doesn't love Steve Martin?  I'd check them both out and then grab your binoculars. 

Bill Cunningham's New York

He who seeks beauty will find it.  --Bill Cunningham

I read about this documentary last summer.   I was not able to make a screening of it at the IU Cinema, so I put it on my netflix queue and finally had the opportunity to watch it over the holidays. Bill Cunningham is the long time fashion/style photographer for the New York Times. He has been taking pictures of life on the streets of New York for over 40 years.  His life of photography, fashion, culture and ultimately kindness makes for a fascinating study.

I think in all places and in every line of work there is always someone who does what they do forever, and with a singular love and fascination. These people always become mini-icons in your work place or town.  Bill Cunningham is this for fashion and New York City.

I am not particularly interested in fashion for myself and am always kind of amused by the idea of couture and fashion shows but I love this man.  I especially love that he is really just an honest man trying to do what he loves best--introduce the world to the beauty of the people of New York.   He has done it so well and so consistently and for so long that he has become a celebrity in his own right. He is incredibly modest about it and also very old fashioned--still using real film and having to scan his weekly photos to that the graphic designer can lay out his pages for the style section on Sunday. This documentary made a number of best lists for 2011.

It is a simple story of a life lived happily and very well.  I guarantee if you see this you will fall in love with this man.  It makes me want to do everything I do simply and well and with joy.

Next time I go to new York, I will certainly watch for him on his bicycle with his trademark working man's blue blazer.

A book and a movie

Several years ago I read a fabulous travel memoir by Tim Moore, humorist and traveler. He wrote Travels with My Donkey, an account of his trek with a donkey named Shinto along the pilgrimage path from St. Jean Pied de Port in France through the Spanish Pyrenees to Santiago do Compostela near the coast of Spain.  I loved the tale and I became fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage. What do modern day pilgrims seek? Why do they walk 500 miles just to reach a church that is purported to hold the remains of one of Jesus's apostles?  It has been awhile since I read this, so the details are cloudy but I know he met fellow travelers, ruminated about the history of the pilgrimage and wrote about Spain and being companionable with a donkey for a few months.  I always wondered if it was something I could do.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see a fabulous new movie, The Way, that just came out which follows a man as he journeys on the camino to Santiago.  A fictitious story about Tom Avery (played by Martin Sheen) who travels to St Jean Pied de Port to retrieve his only child's body after he is killed on the trail in a freak accident.  Avery is filled with grief. He has an empty, lonely life and was far from understanding his now deceased son (played by Martin Sheen's real life son Emilio Estevez, who also made the movie).

In a bold move, Avery decides to pick up his son's backpack and gear and take the trek himself, in an attempt to honor his son and try to understand what he was trying to do with his life.  He takes along his son's remains and begins to scatter them along the path.  Of course Tom is sad, angry and alone, but he begins to meet other travelers, all who have their own path and their own reasons for trekking the camino.

Some might call it predictable and the movie might be a little long, but it was beautiful and gave me a chance to see what the pilgrimage might really look like. I did love watching crusty Tom Avery begin to melt away, dig through his layers of grief, and connect with his travel companions.  I love how travel thrusts unlike people together. You never choose your travel companions; they choose you. All the shots are filmed in Spain along the trail with a musical score that made me want to sing: a gorgeous and thought provoking film.

I began to wonder, would I ever have the opportunity to walk this trail?  I told my theater companion that when we retired we were going to take this walk together.  Perhaps get our kids to come and carry our packs?  Will you join me?

Girl Interrupted: The book vs the movie

Had some fun this week reading the 1993 classic Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.  Ms. Kaysen wrote a really thought provoking series of non-fiction pieces about her life in a mental institution over about 18 months in the late 60's.  The essays are roughly chronological and in between chapters she shows artifacts from her patient file:  doctors notes, official admitting papers and discharge papers.  I liked that it was a very nuanced look about a teenagers life in a mental hospital: was she crazy or was she just a typical teenager?  Sometimes I felt genuine madness was afoot and sometimes she seemed to be the only sane one on the ward.  I liked that she played with my perceptions and that life in the hospital was neither all good or all bad.
This book came out early in the memoir writing craze and is probably one of the better ones to take a look at mental health.  

Winona Ryder played Susanna Kaysen in the 1999 movie of the same name.  Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her portrayal of Lisa, Susanna's crazy best friend in the asylum.  What is most interesting about the book to movie is how much the producers had to add to Kaysen's fairly simple story in order to make it an interesting movie. 

While Kaysen simply mentions the existence of underground tunnels in her memoir, in the movie they become part of illicit rituals in which the women on the ward participate in order to gain a little control over their lives.   A woman who leaves the ward and goes to live on her own commits suicide.  It is a sad mark in the book; in the movie it becomes a major plot point. And the most fantastic part is the homoerotic/lesbian overtones between Susanna and Lisa. This was so far from the book it was almost laughable, but it really works in the movie and in some ways makes a lot of sense.

The movie managed to portray the character's ambivalence about her situation fairly well. I loved seeing how the script writers wove together the author's voice and minor plot points to make an interesting narrative arc.  It had a great cast including Elizabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men) and Whoopi Goldberg.  I suddenly feel like I am stepping out of my comfort zone reviewing a movie here--but I did enjoy reading the book and seeing the movie together. It is easily a weekend project with time out for soup and a walk in the woods.

Book Versus Movie?

I work for an academic department that studies film, so I am attuned to the prejudice that book readers have against the movie version of their favorite book. Woe be the director who changes any part of a beloved book when adapting it for the screen! Academics who study film denounce that prejudice and believe, as I have come to believe, that you must rate a film on its own merits. To compare the two texts is inevitable, but you begin to wonder if people who do these comparisons understand that films and books are different mediums and are capable of very different forms of expression. Better to rate all the Harry Potter films against one another, rather than compare them all to their respective books.

Since I have so many books to read on my bedside table, and it is hard to find a good novel, I tend to leave the big blockbuster novels like My Sisters Keeper for the big screen, and so last Wednesday, I went with three good friends to take in this summer "tear jerker".

Apparently, according to my companions, the book My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picault had a very different ending than the movie did. What's worse, they would not tell me the ending and said I had to read the book! Huh? Read the book.

I won't bother with a review of the book. Jodi Picault has written dozens of books which have sold a million copies, no one hardly cares what I think at this point, but I will say this, the movie is much much better and is a good case about why and how movies can be better that books.



A movie does not have to be 100 % loyal to its source material. A script writer, director, and producer can feel free to experiment with different endings and add and subtract different scenes. This is helpful, mostly because to adopt a 300 page novel to a feature film, out of necessity you will need to cut some parts. If you want to have a reasonable length for a book you need to cut some of the subplots. In this case, I found a few of the subplots of the book to be trite, and they happily did not appear in the movie.

So, say what you will about the movie version of the book, they ain't all bad. I would love to hear reader comments on this topic. And your favorite book to movie adaptation...