“In America today, what we are seeing is the disappearance of the great middle class,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. At the same time, Mr. Sanders continued, nearly all of the new wealth created is going to the top 1 percent. The rich are getting richer, and the gap between them and everyone else continues to expand. In order for that to change, “we need a political revolution in this country.” 

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon of 2011 may have disintegrated after police, coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security, forcibly cleared “the 99 percent” from Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in Manhattan. Or, perhaps, the protest was only a prelude to that revolution Mr. Sanders both advocates and represents. 

Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, graphic novelist, and author known for his intensely critical view of the American government, has produced several graphic journals bluntly chronicling recent history, among them “The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,” and, with the journalist and author Greg Palast, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in Nine Easy Steps.” Last year, he produced “Snowden,” an account of Edward Snowden, the former C.I.A. employee who revealed numerous global surveillance programs run by the governments of the United States and other countries. 

With “Bernie,” a graphic novel about the presidential candidate that will be released on Tuesday, Mr. Rall issues what he expects to be the second in a trilogy representing a departure from his previous work. He will talk about his new book at the Amagansett Library on Wednesday from 6 to 7 p.m. 

“I’m always criticizing what others are doing wrong, how the system sucks,” Mr. Rall, who lives in East Hampton, said last week. “People always criticize me for not putting up an alternative. Snowden, to me, was real, unvarnished, as pure a hero as you could have: He risked everything for an important principle bigger than himself.” 

The positive reception given “Snowden,” he said, prompted an exploration for another, “someone really admirable who is trying to effect change in a different way. I thought about Bernie. Snowden is a rebel; Bernie is a rebel within the system that’s managed to stay pure. He hasn’t gotten disgustingly corrupted, the way Hillary did.”

Indeed, Mr. Sanders, Mr. Rall suggests, represents a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s establishment candidate and frontrunner for the nomination. “She’s a warmonger,” Mr. Rall said of the former senator, secretary of state, and first lady. “She never met a war she didn’t like, from Bosnia to Libya and Syria. She hasn’t learned any lessons. She supported all these wars that have created all sorts of chaos, and killed hundreds of thousands for no good reason. I can’t look past that.” 

In “Bernie,” Mr. Rall offers both a biography of the self-described Democratic Socialist senator from Vermont and a history of the Democratic Party since the 1972 presidential election, in which Richard Nixon was re-elected in a 49-states-to-1 landslide. Conservative Democrats, most of them from Southern states, seized the party’s reins, and the “New Left” that emerged in the late 1960s was marginalized. Efforts to help the poor were out; reliance on corporate money was in. “Affirming the soon-to-be cliché that given the choice between a fake conservative and a real conservative people will vote for the real one,” President Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, was “humiliatingly broad,” Mr. Rall writes. Reagan won two landslide elections in the 1980s, and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, easily won the next one. 

The two-term presidencies of the Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Mr. Rall argues, represent the triumph of the “centrist counterrevolution” perpetrated by pro-business Democrats. Mr. Obama’s staffing choices and the federal bailout of banks responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, through “out-of-control lending practices and widespread corruption,” are among the evidence he cites. 

Once upon a time, Mr. Rall posits, Occupy Wall Street might have been incorporated into government and influenced policy. “But not in 2011,” he writes. “Liberals were barely tolerated within the Democratic Party. When party bigwigs talked to them at all, it was to tell them to shut up.” 

Enter Mr. Sanders, “long ridiculed and marginalized by the mainstream political class and its allies in the media.” Polls indicate that ideas advocated by the senator, such as government regulation of business and more even income distribution, are popular with voters. 

With Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, on the sidelines, Mr. Sanders announced his candidacy last April. 

“Bernie’s crowds were huge and getting bigger,” Mr. Rall writes. “Meanwhile, support for the ‘inevitable’ Hillary Clinton seemed more dutiful than enthusiastic.” Current polls show Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton neck and neck in the upcoming Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. 

“Bernie” is not a hagiography, Mr. Rall said. The antiwar left’s criticism of Mr. Sanders’s support for Israel and Mr. Obama’s targeted assassination of suspected terrorists aren’t excluded from the narrative. “His finest moment was not during the Gaza war,” Mr. Rall said. “The point is, people need to understand that whether you like Bernie or not, he represents an important moment in American politics.” 

Whatever one’s political persuasion, “Bernie” is quick and thoroughly entertaining, delivering both an incisive read of post-Vietnam War political history and Mr. Rall’s distinct, abstract comic art.

The Met: Live in HD will return to Guild Hall with Bizet’s opera “Les Pecheurs de Perles” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Premiered in Paris in 1863, the opera was last performed at the Met in 1916, with Enrico Caruso, Frieda Hempel, and Giuseppe De Luca in the lead roles.

Set in ancient Ceylon, the opera is the story of Leila, a beautiful Hindu priestess, who is pursued by the rival pearl-divers Nadir and Zurga, whose friendship is threatened by their love of the same woman. Their duet “Au fond du temple saint” is said to be one of the best-known songs in Western opera.

The new two-and-a-half-hour production is directed by Penny Woolcock and stars Diana Damrau, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecien. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The Watermill Center will hold two open rehearsals on Saturday afternoon. Boomerang, a physically nuanced dance and performance group created in 2012 by Matty Davis, Kora Radella, and Adrian Galvin, will show a new work commissioned by Dixon Place on the Lower East Side, where it will premiere in March. The group’s work is based on the idea that the body is a repository for both physical and psychological life, and its performances draw upon the histories of the people with whom they work. The rehearsal will run from 3 to 4 p.m.

An open rehearsal of “Lullaby Movement,” a work by the resident artists Sophia Brous, an interdisciplinary performer from Australia, and the British multi-instrumentalists David Coulter and Leo Abrahams, will take place from 4:30 to 6. The work explores the melodies and multi-layered meanings of lullabies drawn from societies throughout the world.

Both programs are free, but reservations are required.

“Sordid Lives,” a black comedy by the Texas-born writer, director, and producer Del Shores, will open this evening at 7:30 at the Southampton Cultural Center and run through Jan. 31. The play premiered in Los Angeles in 1996 and won 14 Drama-Logue Awards.

The sordid lives of the title belong to three generations of a colorful family from a small Texas town who gather for the funeral of their elderly matriarch, who died during a tryst in a seedy motel room with her much younger, married neighbor. As preparations ensue, comic, sad, and shabby truths about the dysfunctional family emerge. 

According to Michael Disher, who will direct the play with Joan Lyons, “Sometimes you just feel compelled to play a theatrical wild card, a piece with little social relevance but a ton of laughs. And could that be such a bad thing in January?”

Ms. Lyons agreed. “Each new season, behind the scenes, we agonize over which shows to choose that span theatrical genres to appeal to differing audiences. . . . I think the real message to be learned from this production is that sometimes you don’t need to push the deeper meaning of the script or send any message at all, just to let your audience have fun.”

“Sordid Lives” was not only a stage play but also a feature film and a television series featuring Delta Burke, Beau Bridges, and Olivia Newton-John. 

The cast of the Center Stage production includes Tom Gregory, Edward Kassar, John Leonard, Deborah Marshall, Joseph Marshall, JoAnna Mincarelli, Mary Sabo, Frances Sherman, Danielle Shuman, Kristin Whiting, Gerri Wilson, and Scott Wilson. Show times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8, and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Tickets, which can be purchased at the center’s website, are $22, $12 for students under 21 with identification.

The cultural center has also announced open auditions for “South Pacific: In Concert” on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. in its Levitas Center for the Arts. Auditions will begin promptly; late arrivals will be seen at the discretion of the director, Mr. Disher. Readings will be from the script, and actors have been asked to prepare 32 bars of a musical theater standard.

Cast size is variable; various ages and vocal types are needed. The production is non-union and non-paying. More detailed information is available from [email protected].

Ned Smyth doesn’t remember his first visit to the Louvre, since he was 18 months old at the time. Years later, his parents told him that he ran ahead of them as they approached the entrance. Once inside, they found him on his knees, genuflecting.

“I’m not Catholic,” Mr. Smyth said during a recent conversation at his vast Shelter Island studio. “My family never went to church, although I did have an Italian nanny who probably took me to Mass. I realized that my work has always been about reverence. The museum looked to me like a church.” 

Over the past four decades, Mr. Smyth has produced a body of work notable for both the consistency of its vision and the variety of forms it has taken. From his early concrete “paintings” to his recent works, which include massive bronze sculptures inspired by stones, “the line going through it all is kind of the same,” he said.

 While he has in one sense moved away from the Judeo-Christian architectural vocabulary with which his sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s is associated, the stones that have inspired his recent work have a figurative quality. One in particular he likened to “Winged Victory of Samothrace” at the Louvre.

Mr. Smyth’s father, Craig Hugh Smyth, was a scholar of Renaissance and Mannerist art, director of N.Y.U.’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, after retiring from N.Y.U. in 1973, director of Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

“We’d live for a year and a half in Italy, then come back, then go for another year and a half,” he recalled. “I’d be dragged to every museum in Rome.” His father took him along on archeological digs as well. “I really liked climbing on the ruins at that age, and all the drama and fantasy that went on.”

As cosmopolitan as his upbringing was, it was also something he reacted against. “I became a jock. I was all-Midwest soccer in high school and captain of the soccer team at Kenyon College for two years. I learned it in the streets in Rome.” 

During his sophomore year he took a color course taught by a former student of Josef Albers. “There was no art major at Kenyon, but all of a sudden I was spending time in this little farmhouse. There were easels and a table saw, but that was it. If you wanted to cast bronze, you built your own kiln.”

 His last project for a sculpture course was inspired by a slide of Assyrian pyramids. “I cut and made a stepped pyramid that was eight feet long, and then I put sawdust all over it. It was almost like dirt, you could see the contours but not the wood underneath. It was so architectural; it made a big impression on me.”

After graduation Mr. Smyth spent a summer living with his family before taking a studio on Delancey Street, where he created massive wall pieces fromwood, cement, earth, and metal that he tinted with “mud-like” tones. 

While hitchhiking back to the city from a summer framing houses in Aspen, he was picked up by Keith Sonnier and Dickie Landry, both of whom were already established in the downtown New York art world. Through them he got a job at Food, the legendary SoHo restaurant, one of whose artist-founders was Gordon Matta-Clark.

Mr. Smyth worked with Matta-Clark on several of his house-cutting projects, including “Splitting” in New Jersey, where they used Sawzalls to cleave a house scheduled for demolition. “When Gordon wasn’t ready for a show he had coming up at 112 Greene Street, he offered me his spot.”

The cast concrete works he showed in 1973 at 112 Greene, then a vortex of avant-garde activity, consisted of arches, portals, and other components that extended from the walls of the gallery into its unfinished space. A year later at the Holly Solomon Gallery, he showed cast concrete arcades that made reference to the architectural vocabulary of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, arcades figured prominently in Mr. Smyth’s work, which was widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and public spaces. In the late ’70s, a new movement, Pattern and Decoration, took hold in the art world as artists turned away from Minimalism and looked to quilts, wallpaper, glassware, and Byzantine mosaics for inspiration. 

“I was making arcades that repeated, and, yes, that was a pattern, but that work wasn’t about pattern, it was about what that did to a space when you walked into it. But I did get more decorative. If I was going to use color on objects, what I knew were fresco and mosaic. Fresco wouldn’t hold up outside, so I started to use mosaic as color.”

In 1987 he created the “Upper Room” at Battery Park City from cast concrete, bluestone, and mosaic. It had the look and feel of an ancient roofless temple, approached by a wide stairway, with columns, a table lined with chessboards, an altar-like structure at its center, and a view of the Hudson River. The piece recalled the drama that archeological sites held for him as a boy.

Mr. Smyth “dropped out of the gallery world” in 1985. He continued to make art in his studio but never showed it, choosing instead to concentrate on public works for the next 20 years, during which he completed over 30 large-scale projects throughout the United States.

For many years, he resisted coming to the East End. When Holly Solomon invited him to her vacation house, he told her, “I don’t have green pants and I don’t play golf. I’ll never go.”

“But at a certain point I didn’t want to live in New York City anymore.”

With his former wife, Rima Mardoyan, an artist who lives in Sag Harbor, he looked for a permanent residence within a 90-mile radius of the city. They rented in Sagaponack for several years before buying a house in Sag Harbor in 1994.

Six years later, needing a studio, he acquired eight “completely overgrown” acres on Shelter Island. A visit to a riding stable in Mecox provided the architectural model he needed. “It had no columns, just trusses, and I thought it would make a perfect studio.” He called a company in Ohio that built barns and began working with it to develop plans.

“But the town said you can’t build a studio. You can build a house, and if you do, you can build an enormous studio. But a studio by itself would be commercial. So I put in a kitchen, four bedrooms upstairs, and two baths, though I never finished one of them. It was way too much space.”

The family spent several summers on Shelter Island while renting out the Sag Harbor house, but neither his wife nor his sons, Roman and Julian, now 27 and 23, were happy there. “After almost 24 years of marriage, Rima and I separated, and I was lucky to have this. I’ve lived here by myself for eight years or so.”

In addition to the immense studio space, the building has a 2,000-square-foot basement with 10-foot ceilings that enabled Mr. Smyth to consolidate his storage from both Southampton and New York City. “When I moved all that stuff, I found these milk crates filled with rocks. I had no memory of them. What blew me away was that there were so many. And they had sculptural shapes.”

The stones inspired two related bodies of work: massive bronzes and large-scale photographs. His studio is home now to several “big rocks” that are actually the Styrofoam forms from which he makes the molds for casting in bronze. While they vary in shape and size from small to large, some of the bronzes are more than 12 feet tall. 

The C-prints feature the original rocks, shot in black and white and enlarged to 68-by-48 inches. It took a year and a half before the artist was able to capture not only the forms but also the textures of the stones on a scale consistent with the monumental bronzes. 

Next October, Mr. Smyth, who has taught art at the Ross School for the past eight years, will have an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, a sculpture park with high-ceilinged galleries in Hamilton Township, N.J. Exploring how to make the photographs even larger without losing detail, he discovered a 16-foot-wide material that can be stretched over a lightbox. “If you had a colonnade of 10-by-12-foot lightboxes and no other light in the room, all the light would come from the boxes. Which means you’d have these glowing stones.” 

A visitor couldn’t help but remember the story of the toddler who experienced the Louvre as a sacred space.

Laurie Anderson, who has a house in Springs, will be at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, Jan. 8, for a screening of her film “Heart of a Dog.”

Its themes include death, memory, and Buddhist teachings. When Ms. Anderson’s dog Lolabelle died in 2011, she used her mourning process to inspire her creatively, through artwork, music, and a film. “Heart of a Dog” comprises childhood memories, video diaries, philosophical musings, tributes to artists, writers, and musicians, and much more. Serving as narrator, she also animates and scores the film, making it a personal yet accessible vision of her life and art.

The 6 p.m. program costs $10 and is free for members, children, and students.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has welcomed back Nancy Atlas for another winter season of Fireside Sessions, concerts that feature the musician and a special guest. The program begins on Saturday with Randi Fishenfeld, a classically trained violinist who has used her talents as an electric fiddler with artists such as Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, and Foghat.

Ms. Atlas has long been a fixture on the South Fork music scene with her band the Nancy Atlas Project. Other artists she will collaborate with this season are Simon Kirke on drums, Clark Gayton on trombone, Andy Aledort on guitar, and Danny Kean on keyboard.

The concerts take place Saturday evenings at 8, and tickets are $25. Last year’s series sold out, so advance purchase has been recommended through the theater’s website or by calling the box office, which is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

On Saturday and Sunday, Christian Scheider will present a two-day mini-marathon of the cinematic work of Jacques Tati at the Amagansett Library.

The French director, who died in 1982, had a background in music hall and mime performance that he mined to perfect the art of the sight gag. His career spanned 1932 to 1978, and in 2010 a film, “The Illusionist,” was made from his writing. He was known specifically for his recurring character Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling man lost in a modern age.

The free program will be held from noon to 3 p.m. both days.

Daniel Jones, the focus of a show at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor, has been taking pictures on Long Island for most of his life. The Southold photographer varies from literal to abstract renderings of seascapes for the most part, and likes to return to the same vistas over and over again to plot the subtle and dramatic changes in atmosphere.

At sites like Flying Point or Cooper’s Beach in Southampton, he might take a straightforward landscape photo that has an abstract quality or actually move the camera to create a blurry effect. He uses large-format cameras but works digitally. He does not, however, modify them on the computer, preferring the images as they were originally taken.

As much as we witness the same landscapes every day, he reminds us that small changes in cloud cover, different times of day, currents and tides, and wave heights can all alter the vista in seemingly infinite ways. All he has to do is show up with his camera and let his eye and nature do the rest.

The large-format images capture great detail when they are in focus and direct, taking on an almost hyper-real quality.

His abstractions remind us that much of our world is visually organized horizontally. When a photo of vertical bands is presented, it seems like some manipulation, maybe made by the movement of the camera up and down, rather than side to side. Instead it turns out that the image in purples and greens is of tall iris stalks.

A simple old rowboat, painted white and red on the exterior and blue on the interior, is another subject the artist returns to with regularity. In a version called “Fogged In,” the haze that gathers at the horizon makes the setting look abstract, but it is the mist that does the work for him. At the same time, a halo of blue and the faint suggestion of clouds hint at a clearer dawn just past the mooring.

While Mr. Jones’s color photographs are predominantly abstract or abstracted, his black-and-white photos are clear and crisp. In still harbors, he is drawn to the compositional possibilities of ferry pilings and other structures and appurtenances in the water. On the ocean, the focus is waves, big and messy. On the beach itself, the crisscross of storm fences and the patterns they make are a recurring theme. He also is drawn to the way wind and water sculpt sand into various topographical terrains.

Sometimes it is a simple view of a building, like the Cedar Point Lighthouse and its stark presence in the landscape, that attracts his attention. But he photographs views of New York City and architectural studies as well.

Ms. Booth’s gallery has a good mix of all of these genres, and they can be seen through Jan. 30.

For 30 years, Alexis Rockman has rendered the natural world, producing both detailed oil paintings depicting the dystopian consequences of climate change, genetic engineering, and industrial pollution, and more immediate field drawings of plants and animals encountered on his travels.

“East End Field Drawings” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill represents 85 plant and animal species, all made with sand, soil, or organic material collected from 18 sites between Bridgehampton and Montauk. The drawings are not actually created on site but in his studio, in part because birds in flight or schools of fish are unwilling subjects.

“I’ll get images anywhere I can find them,” he said. “Some are things I see, but there are many things not on the Internet or anywhere. For example, it’s very difficult to find a reference for mosquitos in flight.”

Among the places he has visited are Guyana, Antarctica, the Los Angeles tar pits, Tasmania, and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The Los Angeles field drawings were made with tar on gessoed paper, while wombat fecal matter and acrylic polymer were the mediums used in his drawing of a Tasmanian wombat.

Mr. Rockman’s interest in the natural world has its roots in his childhood in New York City. His mother, Diane diZerega Wall, an anthropology professor and historical archeologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, worked early in her career as Margaret Mead’s secretary at the American Museum of Natural History.

“She loved animals and humans, and I was mesmerized and wanted to recreate with living things the types of things I saw at the museum.” He pointed to the wall in the Parrish’s lobby gallery where the field drawings will be on view through Jan. 18. “I was always drawing frogs. That spring peeper over there is very much like a pose in a drawing I made when I was 5 years old.”

His interest waned in the ninth grade, when “I decided girls and basketball were where it was at. After high school I realized I should go to some kind of art school, because there was no other place for me. However, art was very minimal and conceptual at the time and I felt no affinity with that.”

His interest in film and animation led him to the Rhode Island School of Design and then to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “I found my way into the art department because that’s where the smartest people were.” Meanwhile, by the time he entered S.V.A. in 1983, the art world had changed, with a younger generation having moved away from formalism toward work that was political, personal, and expressive.

“Even as a kid, I knew the history of extinction, what had already happened to animals and plants. I felt it was a fascinating moment to bring that to a fine-art context. I knew Barbara Kruger very early on, and since she and other artists were doing political work, I saw a niche for something nobody else was doing.”

While the natural world has been Mr. Rockman’s focus from the outset, he noted that he has deliberately changed his approach in terms of the language of painting. “If you look at a painting from 1986, I’d paint a turtle on the acrylic ground and it would be dripping and oozing. The field drawings involve a type of muscle I used in my paintings when they were less complicated.” Along the way he spent two years making dioramas, one of which, “Golf Course,” includes trash, Astroturf, golf balls, soil, and a cast plastic human femur, among other components.

By the early 1990s he was producing detailed, often panoramic oil paintings on wood, and has continued to do so, combining a scientist’s knowledge of the natural world with a seemingly inexhaustible visual imagination. The result is a fact-based but frightening vision of the myriad horrific ways climate change, genetic mutations, and pollution are likely to alter the landscape, urban spaces, and the plants and animals that inhabit them. “What I’m doing and need to do has a very clear agenda,” he said. “I end up painting very meticulous things.”

Mr. Rockman’s project brings to mind the dystopian fiction of the English writer J.G. Ballard, especially such early novels as “The Drowned World” from 1962, in which solar radiation has caused the polar ice caps to melt and the worldwide temperature to soar.

In 2009, the film director Ang Lee asked Mr. Rockman to help him develop the look of his film "Life of Pi." "My friend Jean Castelli had been working with Ang since the mid-1990s, and I knew he was working on 'Life of Pi.' After I met Ang and read the script, he told me things he needed help with. He had to show the studio his vision. So I developed the island and that underwater sequence, which didn't exist yet, and some other stuff. I made five elaborate watercolors.”

The artist is working on several other projects, including one with Mr. Castelli, that involve film. “Those projects would have been impossible even five years ago, so I would say the awareness of climate change has increased dramatically. But that should have happened 20 years ago. There are so many powerful forces of capitalism that have just destroyed the earth. Not that communism would have done a better job. It’s really human nature. I’m so furious and sad about all that stuff that it’s why I do what I do.”

Mr. Rockman first came to the East End in the late 1980s. Since 2003, he and Dorothy Spears, a writer who contributes regularly to The New York Times, Art in America, and other publications, have been renting in Sag Harbor when not in the city. "The East End project had been gestating in my brain somewhere for a while before I went ahead with it last year," he said.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Parrish selected Mr. Rockman as its second artist-in-residence. He spent the week of Dec. 14 leading over 400 students in hands-on workshops to create original field drawings using materials they gathered from sites of their own choosing -— usually their backyards. A visitor to the museum’s theater that week found the artist with some 75 students from the Riverhead Charter School, answering questions and responding to the drawings they were busy making.

“The reason I did this project,” he said, “was because I’ve gone all over the world and done this kind of thing — the field drawings — so why don’t I do it where I spend most of my time. It was a great opportunity to learn what’s out here. Part of my pitch to the museum was that it would be educational, which it is, and which is really what I care about.”

The field drawings are not only a stylistic alternative to paintings that are densely populated with plants and animals surviving and mutating in a dystopian future, they also take the artist out of the studio. Several weeks ago he went on a field trip with the curator of collections at the Museum of Natural History to go fossil hunting in the five boroughs.

“We found a mastodon in northern Manhattan, a walrus on Rockaway Beach, a phytosaur in the Palisades, and a squirrel in my backyard.”