Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Expanse Of Poetry

We now have a new refrigerator. “New” in this case means “new to us”; it’s actually about eight to ten years old, possibly older. It’s huge! Being used to a five-foot high fridge with a single door that opens up to reveal a freezer unit inside, I was highly unprepared for the reality of a grown-up fridge. It has room to stand pop bottles and wine upright! And it has two freezer doors on the left – the upper one has six ice trays and boxes, the lower one has room for lots of ground beef and chicken and frozen juice. Best of all, though, is the fact that it has seperate temperature controls – I can turn the freezer temperature up high enough to keep ice cream solid while not freezing lettuce and celery in the crisper. Woo-hoo! We hosted our book club last night, and it even fit the drinks and food that guests brought over without having to take out things like salad dressings and jams (foods that don’t spoil during a single evening without refrigeration). It’s glorious!

So with this new expanse of fridge door, I’ve just spent half an hour moving around my magnetic poetry and discovering all sorts of potential hidden messages within the seemingly random mess. I adore magnetic poetry, but I think I miss the point most of the time: I see a couple of words and a whole line of poetry leaps to mind, so I search for the other words to make up the phrase and I don’t have them. I think other people use the words which are there to create unique sentences – sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with the English language. I have two poetry sets – the original set I got for my birthday last year, and an out-of-print Hallowe’en set that I found on eBay last fall. It glows in the dark. That’s a lot of words already, but I want one more – the Shakespearean set. Maybe the Cat set too, because it has words like “purr” and “whiskers”. Just think – I could have poems like “believe and summon arms / of sweet spring / call forsooth thy knavish gods / and purr o calico creature / in worship of raw steel”. Or something equally outlandish.

Spring!

Whoa! Somewhere along the past day and a half, this page received its three hundredth hit.

I’m stunned. In just under one month, people have stopped by by three hundred times to see what I’m rambling about. (And yes, I set my counter to ignore my own hits on the page.)

Wow.

In other news, damn it, it’s SPRING! We’ve thrown open all the windows, I’ve gone for a walk to buy orange juice and a paper, and now I’m sitting at the computer in a patch of cosy sunlight, breathing in the warm spring smells, listening to Mozart arias on the radio. Apparently it’s going up to 16 C today. Life is pretty good.

Tonight I’m leading a class on ethics, then I’m off to a good old-fashioned sleepover with four other women. There will be much chocolate in various forms, as all good sleepovers must have. The added bonus of adulthood means daiquiries too. Woo-hoo! Tomorrow morning we shall dawdle over silver dollar pancakes and waffles, then I’ve got a Star Wars game in the afternoon, and a book club soiree in the evening. Needless to say, this does not allow for seeing Men With Brooms, so we have plans to see it next Saturday that shall not be overturned!

CURRENT READING:

Typically, I’ve begun half a dozen things at once:

Witches & Neighbours by Robin Briggs is a socio-politico-cultural examination of the witch hunts in Europe, creating a historical context of the changing face of society in order to further understand the phenomenon of the hunts. Interesting.

Pilgrims of the Night by Lars B. Lindholm is a fun look at the ancestry of modern magical belief, Western mystery schools and esoteric practice. After looking at people like Thomas “Chip” Aquinas (you had to be there) and Agrippa, I’ve learned about John Dee (who had more money than sense, most of it apparently originating with the Philosopher’s Stone and his alchemical experiments) and Albertus Magnus (whose name means “Big Al”, and who was below average height).

Mutts Six: A Little Look-See and Mutts: Sunday Mornings by Patrick McDonnell. No one told me there was a new Mutts collection out!!

Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML. Yep. I’m trying to figure out how to create another table in this template so I can format it to have different fonts and colours so you can actually read it.

And, yes; I found Perdido Street Station, so that’s next…

IN THE DISC DRIVE:

Affairs of the Heart: Music of Marjan Mozetich (and if you don’t recognise it, it’s probably because it’s Canadian and modern).
Classic Yo-Yo: a collection of nifty bits of Ma’s recordings, about half of which I don’t have. The other half is good enough to have twice.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams: no, it’s not Star Wars on the cello. I never knew Williams had written a cello concerto, let alone an Elegy (expanded from a musical theme used in Seven Years in Tibet) or Three Pieces for Solo Cello.

Shinies

Hat trick! My Roll Up The Rim To Lose score is now three for three!

I feel sluggish. It’s the typical post-show sloth that descends upon me. Hey, run in high-performance mode after dark on top of your regular weekly activities with little sleep for over a fortnight and then see what happens to you. I’ve now overslept my alarm for three days in a row. Today is my eleven-hour shift from hell day, too. I don’t have high hopes for it: yesterday was The Day That Would Never End, and that was only nine hours. Two hours more makes all the difference when you’re in retail, working at a counselling intensive job. All I want to do is order books. Why don’t the customers just let me order books? I foresee much Coca-Cola in my immediate future. And a serious chocolate run.

I have, however, managed to see friends in the evenings for two nights running. Wait – wait, there’s a name for this… oh, right: a social life.

Nutrious And Educational

On my lunch break I went over to Provigo (never again — it’s as insane at lunch hour as it is around five in the afternoon!) and I picked up a bag of five-grain alphabet pretzels to share with everyone. Significant other’s comment when informed of the event: “Wow! A snack food that’s nutritious and educational!”

Everyone’s a comedian.

Happily Ever After

In my opinion, Beauty & The Beast is without question the finest film of the Disney oeuvre.

My husband and I gave ourselves a much-needed treat and travelled to the Paramount Sunday night. This in itself is rare; the flashy, loud atmosphere doesn’t turn us on. Nor does the flashy, inflated price of entry. This was a special occasion, however: the tenth anniversary IMAX version of the first animated movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. It�s been cleaned up a bit, and a cut sequence has been restored.

Breathtaking! From the opening truck in past the bushes and trees, we were gasping. Nothing like seeing your favourite Disney story on a screen three times the size of the one you saw it on originally; or like hearing the score you know backwards and forwards on a sound system like the one the IMAX theatre has. Woo! There is also something rather special about re-living the story at that proportion. I know IMAX is designed to overwhelm the viewer to a certain extent, and I’m usually not able to take all of an IMAX show in, but this one was really quite well done.

The restored “Human Again” sequence was terrific. I own the Broadway recording so I know the song, and I was eager to see what Disney had originally conceived for it. The inclusion makes a lot of sense. If you’ve ever wondered how the castle goes from grimy and gloomy to bright and shiny, here’s your answer. The enchanted objects decide to facilitate the romance (and thus their restoration to original form) by creating appropriate atmosphere. The sequence also includes Belle and the Beast in the library reading books, a scene in the Broadway recording that always touched my heart. Both characters are ciphers with a polishing of personality, but Belle’s love of storybooks is the trait that makes her, well, human. What was eliminated from the Beast’s character along with the “Human Again’ sequence is the fact that he is virtually illiterate. I had no idea that his shameful revelation was a part of the original Disney script, seeing as how there was so much other new material created for the Broadway version, so the scene was a delightful and exciting surprise! In the Broadway show, Belle is reading a King Arthur story to him. In the original animated version, she’s just finishing up Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, an interesting difference.

What they didn’t restore for the IMAX version (which irritates me no end) is the pause at the end of LeFou’s song for Gaston where he tries to spell Gaston’s name. I’ve heard that it was cut from the movie because they didn’t want to make fun of people who couldn’t spell. It was a really amusing snippet of (again) character action, and I would have appreciated seeing the entire movie in its original form.

It was a truly special evening. My husband and I love Beauty & The Beast for several reasons, but the ones uppermost in our minds Sunday night were that in the end it’s a terribly romantic love story, and romance is something that’s been quite absent from our lives these past few difficult months; and the associated fact that, physically, we embody the pair. In fact, it’s a comment a lot of people make when they see us, and especially when looking at our wedding pictures. (I would like to take this opportunity to state that my husband looked fantastic on our wedding day, and the Beast could never pull off a kilt the way my husband does! It’s the size ratio that tips most people off. Okay, and our colouring, and the length of hair on both of us, and my love of literature, and his slow warming to the idea of reading books�) A few Hallowe’ens ago we did the Belle and Beast costumes and pulled it off quite nicely, thank you. There are pictures somewhere, but I am scanner-less. My costume (the blue dress) is still intact, and I think we’ll repeat it some Hallowe’en in the future. This time, though, instead of the scruffy cloak, we’ll find a nice blue jacket and a white shirt with a jabot for my beau!

So, to my shaggy Beast of a husband, from your very own Beauty: may we have a happily ever after, as well.

CURRENT READING:

Spells of Enchantment, a well-loved collection of fairy tales. I’m big on the “happily ever after follows trials and hardship” thing these days.
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
Actually, I lie. I finished The Eyre Affair (criminal that the second book remains yet to be published! How can I wait until July?), and I know I said I’d pick up Perdido Street Station (“[r]eminiscent of Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and Neal Stephenson”), but, um, I can’t find it. So I picked up…
An Exultation of Larks instead. Turns out that the collective noun (or “term of venery”) for a collection of rooks is a building. I wasn’t far off by guessing that they were called a house of rooks. I adore English; it’s such an illogical language. A book like An Exultation of Larks is just the kind of etymologial feast that I love to sink my beak into.

Now, if I could just find Perdido Street Station…

ALSO READ:
I’ve been polishing off books like After Eights. Books I’ve swallowed recently which didn’t get Current Reading mentions all their own were Light-Bearer’s Daughter by O.R. Melling, Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, and Element of Fire by Martha Wells.