Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Downs and Ups

Yesterday was good and bad for many reasons, most of which I will not go into. I will summarise it all by mentioning the following highlights:

~ I work with the best gang of people any woman could work with. Anyone who gives me loonies to put into a parking meter so that I can keep hanging around on my day off, simply because I slept horribly and felt cranky but didn’t want to be alone, is automatically nominated to demi-deity status in my world. Brenda, Tamu: you rock. And Dimitri, thanks for the tissues.

~ My husband finally got paid for the freelance work he did at Easter, which came right after I learned that my own little source of freelance income has indefinitely been put on hold, right on the verge of a nice new project to which I was looking forward to devoting ten to twenty hours a week. The gods taketh away, and the gods giveth.

~ I had chocolate mousse cake for dessert last night. Mmm.

~ And finally, at orchestra, I pulled off the Haydn with some sort of semi-capable style, and then proceeded to sight-read the Mozart with panache and 98% accuracy. Go me. For someone who hates Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and refuses to listen to it, I knew it pretty well. Then again, Mozart is so annoyingly perfect that I could have closed my eyes and played the cello line by prediction alone and still hit it dead on.

Looking at the writing I’ve been posting over at Owldaughter – Read, I’ve realised that I haven’t written short fiction in about eight years. As I’ll have more free time on my hands, I’ve decided to challenge myself to write one short story per week. I need to work on my ability to tell a story in 1,200 to 1,800 words alone. Besides, when I’ve finished a short story, it can be mailed off in submission somewhere, and maybe someday someone will even accept one.

At Tamu’s direction, I’ll also be working up a proposal for both my non-fiction work on alternative spirituality, as well as And By Many Other Names. I received a lecture on the necessity of selling oneself, a topic about which I’ve expressed my dismal and ineffectual flounderings before. She made it sound easier. Baby steps.

I see that I forgot to mention that I’m convinced the designs for the seagulls in Finding Nemo were lifted straight from Nick Park’s brain. Consider it done.

Phrase of the day about which to chortle: The obligation to tell long stories is more terrible than you might imagine. Even Scheherazade might stumble. And she was a far better word whore than I. From Caitlin R. Kiernan, of course.

Today

By the end of the afternoon I was in a full-out Mood: irritable, on the verge of angry tears for no reason, and the attention span of a cat I won’t mention out of respect to Catdom. So when my husband got home I told him that I wanted to go out, right now. I could see him try to sort through our options: it was five-thirty on a Monday night. Then I made an executive decision and told him that we were going to see Finding Nemo. And off we went.

Before we did, though, I stopped by the bank, put in the thirty-dollar cheque Champlain College had sent me for my guest lecturing services, and bought highlighters and a new blank notebook for research, because I’m two pages away from finishing the one I’ve got. That plus the definitely suspicious lack of highlighters in this house had certainly contributed to my Mood. So — a little bit of disposable income, plus new toys. Much better already.

Finding Nemo is a brilliant film. It’s a laugh-out-loud sort of movie, and laugh is what the adults in the audience — who outnumbered the kids — did with great frequency. I loved the designs, and I loved all the characters, although my favourites were the turtles (which should come as no surprise to those who have known me forever; I adore turtles. They just make me laugh, for some reason. These turtles in particular were designed to make people laugh, so I laughed twice as hard.). And I have come to a conclusion: Roman is a seagull with fur.

We also saw trailers for the next three upcoming animated films: Sinbad (which, of course, my husband is already swooning about), Brother Bear (which had our interest right away for its use of totems and shamanism — Disney, who’d’ve thunk it? and please don’t let them mess it up, but they probably will); and, of course, The Incredibles. Pixar does superheroes. Can it get any better?

Today

My husband wrenched his back somehow, so his plans for the day fell apart. To cheer him up, I told him he could take me out to the West Island to dig through second-hand bookstores. He countered with getting home-made ice cream. It was a deal.

I didn’t find any of the out-of-print books that I’m looking for – I’d rather find them around here than buy them second-hand over the Internet – but I did find three mysteries I’ve been reluctant to buy new that are on my to-read list. That plus the peanut butter-chocolate ice cream made it all worthwhile.

Orchestra Musings

Last night’s rehearsal couldn’t have been more different from last week’s train wreck. We were relaxed, precise, and we sounded like we knew what we were doing. I was particularly impressed with our rendition of Overture for an Unwritten Comedy; for a piece that’s remarkably obscure, we sounded as if we’d heard it all our lives.

Last night I was in the cello zone – you know, that state of mind/body where the hands instinctively go where the correct sound will be produced without any conscious thought or deliberate movement. It’s where most musicians want to be when they perform. That little corner of my mind which observes what I’m doing and provides a running commentary was stunned by my hands flying over the fingerboard, playing notes in places which if I’d stopped to think about I’d guess entirely wrong.

We also played the Carmen suite. I’ve seen Carmen and was thoroughly unimpressed; I cannot understand its popularity. I keep forgetting, though, how much I like the suite’s music. Each time I think, “Oh, we’re playing the Bizet,” I experience a negative response… until we actually begin playing. I think I’ve been conditioned by last year’s dreadful struggle with Bizet’s L’Arlesienne suite. Bizet = oh no. I’m trying to break that.

For some reason, the piece I’m having the most trouble preparing for the July concert is Haydn’s Military symphony. I adore Haydn; I always have. I’ve played a couple of his symphonies now, and I’ve enjoyed every one. This one, however, is nicknamed “Military” for a reason: it’s written (and hence ought to be played) in very strict time. The rhythms are very staccatto. I have discovered that I prefer playing expressivo singing lines. Subdivision in strict time is my arch-nemesis. (That and tenor clef, but we won’t go there.)

All in all, it was a wonderful night, and even though there was a graduation ceremony going on at the high school which meant I had to park six blocks away, it was a beautiful evening to walk in the dark with my cello on my back, gazing at the sliver of the crescent moon riding low in the western sky on a faint veil of cloud.

Life’s pretty good.

Geekery

Last night we were flipping through TV channels, and we came across My Stepmother Is An Alien, which I’ve never seen before and which I probably could have continued living quite serenely without, but for one interesting little fact.

“Hold on,” I said before my husband could change the channel. “That’s Alyson Hannigan.”

“Willow?” he said. “No, it’s not.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “Listen to her. Look at her eyes and her chin.”

“Good gods, it is Alyson Hannigan,” he said.

And a moment later, we had another shock.

“That’s Seth Green playing her first date,” my husband said in disbelief.

“No, it’s not – yes, it is,” I said. “This is unreal. They’re so young!”

“I wonder what it was like on the Buffy set when they said, Hey Alyson, this is Seth, he’s going to play Oz, your first boyfriend,” he chortled.

Completely random, or a casting director with a sense of humour? You decide.

Spontaneous

When my husband got home last night he was restless, so when he suggested going over to the Angrignon mall I was all for it. When we got there, we walked past the Famous Players marquee and lo and behold, Matrix Reloaded was playing in five theatres.

“I suppose this wasn’t planned,” I said.

“No!” he said. (And I believe him, because he’s not very good at spontaneously checking out movie listings just for kicks.) “But look, there’s one starting in half an hour. And since we’re here…”

So we saw Matrix Reloaded again last night. All but the first ten minutes, that is, because the theatre where we were supposed to see it was all dark, and they’d relocated the viewing to another theatre without putting up a sign or a note or anything. What is customer service coming to these days?

Happy Friday to those whose work week ends today!

Words And Music Etc

Orchestra last night was like a train wreck. We all should have just stayed home; I mean, for goodness’ sake, we played the Grieg better the very first time when we were sight-reading it. Collectively, we appear to be at the stage where we know a bit, but not enough, so it’s falling apart. The only thing more dangerous than not knowing anything about a subject is knowing a bit about it.

And, on a completely different topic, here’s an example of why I love the English language:

Verse feet in the romances are predominantly iambic, but anapests and trochees that appear should often be taken as welcome prosodic variations.
–from the introduction to Middle English Verse Romances by Donald B Sands

And this morning I found this in the writing diary of Virginia Woolf:

Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither.

And that’s it, really; when you think about it, and conceive of the finished product, it seems a piece of cake. Actually doing it, though; wrestling the language into some semblance of gawky order… now, that’s anything but cake. More like cement and traffic-light brownies or something. Or whatever you can think of that describes hard and heavy and not what you were expecting when you put it in the oven at all.

Oh, and I saw the four Animatrix shorts plus Final Flight of the Osiris last night; a colleague of my husband’s recorded them for us. I enjoyed them all for different reasons. I already had every intention to pick up the compilation DVD next week, but now I have even more motivation to do so.