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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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11:39 pm - A Knight in Harman Hall
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( Ian McKellen at the Shakespeare Theatre )
The only thing that comes close to this in my memories of McKellen-adoration is when I saw him at the stage door of the Lyric Theatre in London over 6 years ago after watching him in Strindberg's Dance of Death, and when he asked my name to sign my program, I apparently did my small-mouse-with-laryngitis routine, and next thing I knew, his face was right up in mine (British people apparently having the same attitude toward American ideas of personal space as do the Germans) and all I could see were those bright blue eyes, like car headlights. Which I probably looked like a deer caught in. Of course, that experience was exaggerated for me by the excessive amounts of Vicks cough syrup wheeling through my bloodstream so that I barely knew which way was up.
Watching him when not off my head is much better :) Of course, in these instances, adrenaline can have the same effect as cough syrup. Having a glass of wine now so I'll be able to sleep.
current mood:  giddy
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| Saturday, October 24th, 2009
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11:53 pm - having tons of Flanders & Swann fun
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"Very well," he said, "'tis a passing melodious roundelay, but I doubt me an it be commercial. Who wrote this Greenfleeves thing, anyway?"
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| Sunday, October 18th, 2009
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3:42 am
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Ruskin: When I am at Paddington I feel I am in hell.
Jowett: You must not go about telling everyone, Dr. Ruskin. It will not do for the moral education of Oxford undergraduates that the wages of sin may be no more than the sense of being stranded at one of the larger railway stations.
-Tom Stoppard, "The Invention of Love"
current mood:  amused
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| Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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1:15 pm
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12:01 am
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Is it just me, or is it really, really hard to put an accent down in writing even when you can hear it clear as day in your head? I've seen a good number of programs from the north of England (All Creatures Great and Small, Last of the Summer Wine, and so on), and I know Yorkshire when I hear it, but I can't seem to decide how it should look when I'm trying to write it. Anyone help?
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| Friday, October 9th, 2009
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9:34 pm - sorry, just had to
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"Lewis" quotes of the day:
Lewis: This is Oxford, not ancient Rome!
Hathaway: They're easily confused, sir.
-1x02 "Old School Ties"
Lewis: We... promise not to do it again?
Innocent: Good. You see, the principle behind a partnership such as yours is that the junior officer matures to the level of the senior, rather than that the senior officer should regress.
-2x01 "And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea"
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| Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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3:39 pm
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Yes, I am definitely hooked on Inspector Lewis.
Hathaway: I'm not smug, ma'am. That's just the unfortunate shape of my face.
- 1x03 "Expiation"
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| Monday, October 5th, 2009
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8:41 am
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"Theology and mind-altering substances don't really go hand in hand, do they?"
"You wouldn't think so, would you?"
I think I got myself a new show to watch. Inspector Lewis is so cool. First it's "no more flipping elves!" and then he's "sick of bloody Shakespeare" :) Fortunately, he has his Cambridge-educated boy wonder sidekick to fill in the blanks.
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| Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
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12:04 am - Hell does not relinquish its prey
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So. Phèdre. The French interpretation of a Greek myth, by Jean Racine, in English translation.
It all started out a bit overdramatic, a bit too active. Hippolytus was constantly striding around the stage, his tutor was banging his feet up and down sitting in his chair. Phèdre was a howling, hysterical madwoman, suffering for the illicit love she feels for her stepson, whom she has taken care to alienate over the years in order to protect herself. When her husband, Theseus, King of Athens, is declared dead, she is convinced by her maid that she is free, and she bursts out with her confession to the young man, who is absolutely disgusted, to say nothing of his secret love for a girl whom his father has held prisoner for fear of her rebellious and warlike bloodline coming out to threaten his rule. Theseus comes home, returned, so they say, from the Underworld, and Phèdre panics. Her maid, to calm her and keep her from suicide, implores her to "strike first" and accuse Hippolytus of rape before he can denounce her. In the finest tradition of Greek tragedy, the shit hits the fan.
I'll start with general impressions and leave the literary analysis for the end, so that people can skip it if they want to. Helen Mirren impressed and disappointed me. The bad stuff first: many of her cries of pain and lamenting her "unnatural" love were given in that old, grand manner of English theater, sort of like Olivier used to slip into when he was doing Shakespeare, with the clear, precise pronunciation of consonants and the soaring vowels. It always gives me the feeling that the sound of the words, the lyric quality of the poetry, is more important than what is being said, which is not necessarily the case. Also, it detracted from the sobbing and wailing when she was speaking so carefully.
What I loved were the real moments. The times when her voice would deepen into the basement of her chest and she would deliver a line, like the one I've used as the subject for this post, her eyes would fog over (even from way back where I was sitting) and the stinging, bitter truth of Phèdre's hopelessness would hit me smack in the face. Some of the lines got a laugh because of the irony in them, but that irony is so sharp that it has to either be funny on the face of it or achingly sad underneath, and what audience doesn't choose laughter in that situation?
The rest of the cast was an interesting mix of characters: Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper, lately of The History Boys) with a kind of Cambridge accent, I guess; Theseus from Yorkshire, maybe, or Lancashire; Aricia from Ireland. They all did well, but their performances tended to hinge on moments of directorial genius. When Theseus realizes that all is not quite as it seems and that Hippolytus is probably innocent, he rushes to the sandpit where he poured blood in his appeal to Neptune and stammeringly begs to take back the wish, scooping up armfuls of the sand, which he is holding like a baby in his arms when the tutor/servant enters, covered in blood, to tell him that Hippolytus is dead.
(Sidenote: the account that the servant gives of Hippolytus' death was fierce in its imagery, too; I saw that monster rise out of the towering waves and crash down on Hippolytus' chariot, horses going mad, bolting and dragging him over the rocks a la Hector.)
The water fountain off to the side was a good choice, too; after Phèdre exits post-rejection, Hippolytus rushes for the faucet and viciously scrubs his neck and torso where she tried to embrace him.
The coolest part, though, was the last scene, in which Aricia enters, dragging in a bloody sack (Hippolytus' remains), her dress and face splattered with blood, and smears a bloody trail down the middle of the stage, until she collapses next to the sack downstage. Theseus and the tutor speak from one side of the line, Phèdre from the other. Hippolytus' death has drawn a bloody barrier between husband and wife, cleaving the household in two, separating condemner and condemned, until Phèdre reveals she has poisoned herself and only then is able to cross the line and collapse in the sand pit where the gods' curse was conceived. It was disgusting and beautiful at the same time.
( Overthinking, the Curse of the English Major )
Most of this I thought out afterwards, so it's the hindsight that's better than the experience at the time. Sort of :)
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| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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11:14 pm
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Note to self (and anyone else who might have been thinking of trying it): only descend polished, shiny steps in shoes or bare feet. Socks are slippery and can easily lead to bruised asses and elbows. Fuckowwwww.
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| Sunday, August 16th, 2009
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5:52 pm
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First day in about five years that I've lived on my own, with no parents anywhere around. They're off to Mexico, not to return for about 2 years. Well, ok, I'll see them on Friday in Vail, CO for my cousin's wedding. But I am here, and they're gone.
Oddly more depressing than when I went off to college and left them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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| Friday, June 26th, 2009
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7:54 pm - All hail
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We just had a really hard rain shower complete with big chunks of hail. It was about 89 degrees today. I am glad not to be a meteorologist.
I've been taking a writing course for the last few weeks, once a week. We read each other's stuff and comment. I just submitted mine this week and they ripped it up one side and down the other. The main problem as I see it is that I don't like to explain things in my writing. They were confused by a jump in place and time without extensive exposition, and I like stream-of-consciousness angst and snappy dialogue, with only minimal setting. I had a first part (which I posted here earlier but made a couple changes afterwards) and a second part that was a real chapter. The first is set in a dorm room and the second in the family home, but apparently people can't deduce that from the clues I dropped, they need to be told.
*sigh*
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| Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
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1:29 pm
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Jamie looked unconvinced. "These sociopaths," he said. "What do they feel like? Inside?"
Isabel smiled. "Unmoved," she said. "They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It's their natural state."
--Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club
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| Saturday, February 14th, 2009
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7:44 pm - When I bury that hatchet, I'll be under the ground next to it
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I love Mrs. Rachel Lynde. She's so much more interesting in Road to Avonlea than she ever was from Anne Shirley's point of view.
I bought a new digital camera today for my trip to New Zealand. A memory card for my dad's old camera I was thinking about using, big enough for this purpose, was more than half the price of a new camera (a very basic one, of course; I'm not a photographer). So I got a new one. I'm having fun playing with it.
Planning the trip is a lot of work, but it's pretty fun too. I can't wait to go. Although I should probably be thinking about starting my new job on Tuesday, instead.
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| Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
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11:30 pm
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I confess. Yes, I am one of the people who actually lives in the damn city and still stayed home to watch the whole thing on TV. And yes, it was colder than the hind end of Neptune, and yes, the Metro and the whole downtown were packed and you couldn't see anything except by Jumbo-Tron (sounds like a lame sort of Transformer), but there is a part of me that is sad not to have been there. No, I won't be able to say I Was There. But I was here. I watched every word, saw the passion and the joy and the tinge of disbelief in the eyes of so many in that crowd who had come to honor a mother or grandfather or someone who hadn't lived to see a black man take the highest and most precious oath our country has to offer. I saw him stand there, the new face of America, and tell us that the future will be hard, and it will be terrifying in its complexity, that the danger is real and we have more work to do to save this planet of ours and the terrific mess of people on it than we could possibly have imagined the last time that oath was taken, eight years ago. And he said we can do it. We can haul ourselves up by the collar and we can make this country great again. And that's something I'll never forget, even sitting in my warm living room. More room for others that way, too, the ones who traveled hours by car or bus or plane just to stand outside in the cold, cheering and surrounding themselves with that mad press of bodies crowding the Mall and surrounding streets, to be a part of history.
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| Sunday, January 4th, 2009
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10:15 pm - the urge to write Criminal Minds fanfic strikes again
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I was inspired by the scene at the end of "Normal" when Rossi tries to comfort Jordan outside the house.
Title: For I Have Sinned (1/?)
Rating: FRT, rated highly for Criminal Minds themes, just to be safe
Pairing: None - main characters: Jordan Todd, David Rossi
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Friendship
Summary: Norman Hill's empty home is still haunting Jordan, but when her own family history rears its head, can Dave Rossi help her put both nightmares behind her? Spoilers for "Normal."
( For I Have Sinned, Chapter 1 )
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| Monday, December 29th, 2008
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10:09 pm - Whew, done
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Ok, so I finally updated my entire list of movies that I own with links to either the imdb or amazon page for each one (whichever I happened to like better). This way, if you wish to browse, and a title interests you, you don't have to find it yourself to figure out what it is, you can just hold your mouse over the title and a little blurb with picture will appear so you can get an idea of what the film is about or who's in it.
http://olivia-cochrane.livejournal.com/86497.html
This is, of course, an elaborate plot to lure visitors. I don't know, it would work on me :)
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| Saturday, December 13th, 2008
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11:20 am - All revelled out
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So, this was the week of the Christmas celebration. Thursday night was my office's Christmas party, which we had at Maggiano's. I don't know if it's a chain or not, so I will explain that a Maggiano's meal is like a dinner plate of gnocchi or ravioli or what have you TIMES TEN. I've been on an eat-less-junk-and-work-out-like-a-fiend kick lately, and then Maggiano's goes hi-YAH and kicks it to pieces. I try to work out every day, but I haven't for the past two days because of evening places-to-be. I got a nice little Christmas bonus and my mom was my date to the party, so she got to meet a bunch of my colleagues, and it was very nice.
Last night...guess what? I went to the Washington Christmas Revels. It was a Quebec revels, which meant the scenes acted out were Quebecois Christmas folk tales and songs and dances. Some of the dancing was off the chain; it was a lot like Riverdance, only in frocks and stockings and little white ruffled caps. There was one guy in particular who was completely awesome; he could have given Fred Astaire a run for his money. And there was audience-participation singing, too; I won't be able to stop singing Alouette in my head for a week. Also, Dona Nobis Pacem in a round, and Lord of the Dance, and a little bit of French chorus here and there. There was also a funny story about voyageurs (traveling fur traders) who make a deal with the Devil to get back home in time for the fetes (in a flying canoe) and the aforementioned awesome little dancer guy ends up in a dance-off with the Devil in which all of their souls are at stake. It would have been even more fun if my mom and I hadn't been totally exhausted from a week of work and the Christmas party the night before.
I have all my Christmas shopping done, including my extended-family-name-drawing gift and my office Secret Santa gift. My dad's present is a beautiful framed photograph of the sunlight reflecting off the Chicago river, and it will be waiting for him when he gets home in February. Don't know if I mentioned here, my Dad went to Afghanistan for a two-month assignment. Yeah, Mom and I are not so thrilled, but I think his feet were getting a little itchy, professionally. And my brother's in Australia, bumming around and I think working as a bartender, but we're not sure because he has no phone, so we have to wait for him to Skype us. It's weird to think that he's already had his Saturday and is now asleep. Or at least I hope he is, because it's about twenty after 3 AM his time.
Heading off to Indy in 8 days. Excited! I love family Christmases, even though this year will be the first one without my dad or my brother.
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| Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
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10:23 pm
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Ok, that was definitely a good episode. Lots of braniac-losing-it. And I'll French the writer who added that Yale was Reid's safety school :D I almost choked on my own spit. Sorry, TMI.
In other news. I don't know if you've seen this, but if you haven't, watch it. Now. Cookie Monster on NPR, don't know, a while ago. COWABUNGA!
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9:05 pm
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Profilers watching cheesy TV. Drink!
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