This morning: mourning doves...If you've read 'A Moveable Feast'...

...I thought this was too late in the year for doves to be nesting--? I was in the backyard this morning, watering plants and then looked up to notice a mourning dove and her two babies, perched under the eave, but on the outer side of the patio roof. How they've survived the neighborhood hawks, I don't know...

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If you've ever read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, or any of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or seen any Dali or Picasso, and/or been to/ lived in/ dreamed about Paris...then, whether you are a Woody Allen fan or not (I am not so much), GO SEE Midnight in Paris. You don't have to like every moment of it, but the film is a love-letter to Paris and a series of well-intentioned caricatures of the literary and artistic giants of Paris-in-the-1920's.

Few places in Tucson are cooler on a summer mid-day (already at the century-mark outside) than a popcorn-scented movie theater. First-showings-of-the-day are even cooler--five and change versus almost ten bucks...And so S. and I  have spent a couple of recent mornings, enduring loud previews and forgetting that 'pretzel-bites' at the movies are always a bad idea.

A week or so before 'Midnight in Paris,' we went and saw 'Tree of Life.' There is a thin line between sublime visual poetry and overly-long self-indulgent cinematographic silliness. Brad Pitt acts well, indeed, in it...and Jessica Chastain looks like a Boticelli painting come-to-life... It has its moments... At the end of the 2hr+ film, I was glad to not have paid full price, but also glad to have seen it on the large screen. Really, there were moments of 'sublime visual poetry.' And how often does a Hollywood-released film allude, seriously, to the book of Job? But...

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The monsoon is back. After a hiatus of almost a week (the 'gone-soon,' the local press has dubbed the dry weather), afternoon thunderstorms have returned. Driving home from an errand this afternoon, the wind kicked up and as the drops began falling, the temperature dropped from 105 to 75 in less than ten minutes. Gonna go see, now, how the mourning dove family fared...

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...and an essay from our local paper's editorial cartoonist on "The sunburned pains of growing up too pale in Tucson."--a bit of local color...or lack thereof.

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(...and I've had to deal with some administrative changes--

so, the little photo-blog I started a while back

has had to change addresses: 

exoculis.blogspot.com no longer exists;

just add a dash--it is now:

 http://ex-oculis.blogspot.com.)