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I know that Future Shop is The Den of Evil, but damn, their CD prices are persuasive. When I stopped by on Sunday, I picked up the Chicago soundtrack for $14.99 (compare $18.99 at HMV) and the Treasure Planet CD for $9.99 (no matter what the HMV price might be, this is cheaper by a mile!). I checked the price of Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk and found it to be $17.99 as opposed to $23.99, so yes, I know where I’ll be picking it up. If I’m purchasing at a chain, I’d rather purchase at the chain which will take the least amount of my hard-won dollars, thanks.

As good as the Chicago soundtrack is, I’m slightly disappointed. The recording levels are a touch uneven, particularly in the Cell Block Tango. The entire introduction to the song is almost unintelligable, as are some of the monologues, which were loud and clear in the film. And of course, one runs into the problem of lacking visuals, so the songs don’t pack quite the same punch in certain places – We Both Reached for the Gun loses a certain something when you don’t see Richard Gere’s voice issuing from Renee Zellweger’s brightly painted lips in a ventriloquist act. My last regret is that for some reason the soundtrack doesn’t include the tap-dance sequence.

Apart from that, it’s good solid singing of good solid songs, and I’m glad my mother invited me along to see the film with her over the Christmas break.

Speaking of my mother, it’s her birthday! Happy Birthday, Mum!

Reading And Watching Movies

I took this weekend off: no weblogs, no e-mail. It was remarkably refreshing after a week of driving, goal-oriented work at the computer, writing articles and revising text and sending things off all over the place. I used my laptop instead of my desktop this weekend, and only sent one message out (a submission, naturally). I didn’t even sit down and read a book to relax, but you know, I don’t feel as if I spent my weekend racing about and not taking it easy.

I lie. I did read a book. Two, in fact. Both NaNo novels of other local authors. It’s not quite the same kind of relaxing reading that I meant, though; I read these two books with awareness and a critical eye. Drat the writer in me!

Saturday evening I went out with one of my oldest friends for dinner and a movie. We saw Chicago, which was just as good the second time around. I haven’t seen the original All That Jazz, but this version was spectacular. Richard Gere is one of my least favourite actors in Hollywood, but in this film he manages to not only entertain me, but surprise me. Anything that has current stars singing their own songs and dancing their own numbers has my admiration (assuming they’re more than passable at it). We now have a standing date to see any musical that’s released on the big screen; having worked on musicals on and off together for six years or so means we appreciate them in a very particular fashion together.

It was a terrific evening. I forget sometimes why certain friendships persist even if we don’t spend a lot of time with one another, and a night out like this one renews my faith in something. I just can’t put words to it.

(Speaking of stars singing makes me think of Once More With Feeling, a.k.a. the Buffy musical, which reminds me that Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisoff are getting married. If you have to ask who they are, then you won’t care. Really.)

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My luck with books has been so-so for the past few months. Last week I finished the pile of books I got for Christmas, so I sorted through my many shelves of books to see if I could find something that (a) I hadn’t read, (b) I had abandoned, or (c) really wanted to re-read. I pulled out Shadows Over Lyra and said, Woo, a whole three books I haven’t read! I had picked up this three-in-one omnibus edition of some Lyra novels by Patricia C Wrede six years ago and couldn’t get past the second chapter, so I put it away. Perfect, I thought!

Well, I got further than the second chapter, but wow, is it ever boring, and I think it’s about to be re-shelved. I think I might need to find another home for it. Before I do, I might try skipping to the second book in the omnibus, and then the third. Maybe it’s just the first novel that’s bland and derivative and has boring characters. (I can hope, can’t I?) I’m a bit confused, because I love Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, all her short stories that I’ve read, and her epistolary novel co-written with Caroline Stevermer.

Other books I’ve given up on: Carole Nelson Douglas’ Chapel Noir, which is a novel about two women investigating a series of grisly Parisian murders that echo the little Ripper affair in Britain the previous year. When my favourite character (who has narrated the previous four novels in this series) was kidnapped, and I realised that she wasn’t coming back in this book, I really lost interest. Another book to put back on the shelf. It’s been sitting on my bedside table, where books I’m getting tired of sometimes go so that I can fall asleep (I won’t get caught up in the action and read ’till two, you see), but being a grisly murder investigation, it’s really not the type of thing that’s conducive to relaxing, you know?

I’ve been valiantly trying to read Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King for t!, but the writing style really leaves me so completely neutral. It’s a retelling of the Arthurian story in a style that imagines what actual Celtic history might have been like at the time – none of this flowery knights in plate armour stuff. It’s about war chiefs and mud and politics, and while it’s a nice change from the usual, I’m just not interested in reading yet another Matter of Britain right now. Nor have I been for the past five or six months, which is how long I’ve taken to read half the book.

I’ve have a bunch of books on order since the beginning of December – for example, the new Robin Hobb, the Charles de Lint Newford collection that came out in November, and the new Robert Jordan (which claims to be an end, but my sources indicate that the claim is ludicrous). (My view on reading Jordan at this point: I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (Macbeth III.v.) I’m also re-reading Ceri’s novel. And I did another scan through my bookshelves and found Broken Blade, the third book of an Ann Marston trilogy that I put down half-read four years ago, having lost my reading momentum when she decided to change from third-person to first-person narration after the first two novels, which jarred me at the time. And my mother sent me home with a set of mystery novels by Dianne Day which look good, so maybe I’ll tackle those next.

Reading’s just been sort of fnyeh lately. You know?

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In complete contrast to my last post:

It was orchestra last night, and we’ve begun auditioning new conductors. There are two finalists for the position: the temporary conductor who led the orchestra for our last concert (who is one of our violists, and who has guest-conducted with us before); and another prominent West Island musician who has led various choirs, concerts, bands, Savoy productions, etcetera.

The formula? Each auditionee conducts the second movement of the Mendelssohn symphony that we played at the last concert; another movement of the same symphony, which we’ve played through but not worked on; and introduces a new piece of music for the orchestra to sight-read.

Last night, the surprise music our applicant conductor brought in was the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which just happens to be one of my favourite pieces of music ever.

I was bouncing off walls when I got in the car at the end of the evening. I had played Don Giovanni. And it had sounded pretty darned spectacular for sight-reading and a half-hour of working on it. It’s an energetic overture with plenty of drama, challenging in its precision but not overly discouraging in the technical aspect.

I enjoyed the evening immensely. The conductor had charm, great musical sense, and had us sounding terrific by the end of the evening. I wonder how much of that was an unconscious desire on our part to impress him, though, and more focus being given to a new face, familiarity breeding contempt, and all that. From experience, I know that our temporary conductor is just as talented, but in a different way. The entire orchestra grades these applicants and submits recommendations, and it’s going to be a tough choice.

We’ll see what transpires next week, when our temporary conductor officially auditions.